“Yes,” the man thought. “The answer is probably yes. But then again …”
He’d been doing this for weeks. A thought would pop into his head and it would seem so concrete, so true. But then he’d dwell on it, he’d give it some time, he’d mull it over. And eventually the thought became soft and meaningless, tripped up by dissenting opinion, by the experiences of others, and weighted down with a lack of confidence.
Getting street tubed would be a good idea. Lance Mountain concurs. Photo: Jon Humphries
“Music would be good now,” popped into his head. Then his second voice said, “Are you sure? Might be a distraction.” And that day, the music died. Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. Later, though, he’d realize his choice was a poor one and go about resurrecting the dead, happily shuffling through his soundproof catalog.
Just the other day, he thought he should get a burrito from one of the many fine burrito establishments that had recently popped up in his neighborhood. “A burrito would be good right about now,” was his exact thought. Then he thought differently. “Or maybe a slice of pizza, or a gyro.” Turned out the pizza place and the gyro place were closed, leaving only five burrito places to choose from. He walked into the first one he encountered and happily sucked down his lunch. “Shoulda just gone with my first thought,” he reflected.
Looking back, his first impressions, near as he could tell, were the sufficient ones.
So he changed it all.
“I’ll go with all my initial notions from now on,” he told himself, and almost immediately noticed that everything was extremely quiet. Very, very quiet.
Making eye contact would be a good idea. Tony Hawk concurs. Photo: Matt Price
“Okay!” he happily deduced, “I know what this is. I’m deaf now.” But upon celebrating the full-frontal embrace of this first impression, he screamed, “Woooooo!” and the shock of hearing his own voice—let alone anything, now that he was deaf—nearly knocked him over. “Oh,” he said out loud, clearly hearing himself, “maybe I’m not deaf.”
“Wait, wait. I think the UPS man just drove up,” he said, happy for his newfound sense of hearing, and he ran giddily to the front door only to see the sleeveless-yet-gloved form of a garbage man literally and figuratively denting the shit out of a garbage can. “Huh,” he said to himself. “Sure sounded like the UPS man. They must get their whips tuned at the same place.”
So now, after all that, he just tries to think of nothing. Like the paranoid germ freak who wears gloves to wipe his own ass but sleeps on a bed of pulled out hair and chewed off fingernails, life has become an impossible-to-maintain equilibrium of contradictions and inconsistencies—not that there’s anything wrong with that.
You know, some of my best friends are germ freaks.
Anyway, he’s hurt now. Skating was the case they gave him. A simple yet hip-displacing slam took him out. At least a month, if not longer. He only sleeps on one side, which hurts other parts of his manly self. His shoulder, his neck, his other hip, his feelings.
Ouch, feelings.
Skating’s obviously out, and lucky for him, that thought didn’t even have to enter his thinking-about-nothing head. Situational oblivion still allows room for understanding of pain. Man hurt; hurt bad; bad man; etcetera. But through his pain, he’s unknowingly set the stage for his world to be rocked just a little bit more.
You can get better at something by not doing it, he’ll discover.
Rest is a very effective helper, but thought—which the man will soon find impossible to avoid—is like having one of those chairs from The Matrix where Keanu gets plugged in and learns how to keep a bus going above 50 miles per hour even though he’s a surfing FBI agent and his friend killed a girl and left her down by the river. You know?
Yeah (high five)! You do know, dude!
So, our man is hurt, he constantly thinks about skateboarding, watches skateboarding videos, reads skateboarding magazines, talks to his friends about skateboarding, makes a skate ’zine, shoots skate photos, draws skateboarders, and now it’s three or four or five weeks later …
First kickflip … bolts.
Tre flip he’s always struggled with … caught clean.
Backside Smith … locked in.
“Hmm,” the man thought.
Back Smithing an empty water park would be a good idea. Remy Stratton concurs. Photo: Anthony Acosta
Just like the corny gym teacher told you in PE class. If you want to do something you’ve never done before—win a race, sink a free throw, do five chin-ups, take a shower—you must first VISUALIZE IT. The gym teacher might not have even known what that meant, but now the man knew. And as a skateboarder, one who’s gotten hurt and done nothing but occupy his mind with curbs and ledges and bars and the tricks that should be going down on them under your guidance, you too know what the man now knows, what the gym teacher couldn’t teach.
“Yes,” you now think, “the answer is probably yes.”