Tuesday, March 29, 2011

falling asleep over the new yorker

it's like a switch gets turned off, and i'm down for the night. might be because i'm aging [ain't we all] or i just run myself too hard. whatever the case i was reading an article about the catastrophes in japan last night and then it was as if an anaesthesiologist hooked me up and flipped the switch.

i'm aware of the passage of time, of time passing. how long an hour takes is no longer an hour. to say time flies is to miss the cliche. time moves at light speed. a moment ago i was 20. now i'm staring into middle age. it's not a complaint. or regret. what i want to do is get a few scientists at m.i.t. to work on a new calendar, one where the work week is collapsed and the weekend expands.

i'm serious too about getting a skateboard. oh i know. i've been jawing about skating for years. i haven't been on a board in over 20 years. i may just kill myself. but if i'm gonna have a mid-life crisis then let it be a matter of rediscovery and i so loved skating. when i turn 45, which is a little less than 2 years from now, that's when i will found my own street skating gang. THE SKEEZERS. skating geezers. why 45? because that's when i think i'll admit to myself that i'm right in the middle of my life.

i also want to slow down. read more. write more. correspond more. tell those whom i love that i love them. what else. i don't know. i'm getting old. i forget. not get stuck in my ways? that's for certain. this evening i stopped at the library. i was looking for a particular anthology. what i did was what i have loved doing since i was a kid. pulling a book from the stacks and lean against the aisle and read. i read a batch of poems by kit robinson in an anthology edited by douglas messerli. i can't recall the title. robinson's poems make me happy. combing the stacks is a pleasure i'd forgotten. it is a lesson in going slow. life is too short to be in such a hurry. that's a lesson i'm always learning.

2 Comments:

At 10:15 AM, Anonymous Vaguely Quotable said...

I always though skaters were an important part of the cityscape. They take the functional and make it expressive, joyous. I guess my theorizing is to compensate form my lack of ability on a plank. Anyway, I was speaking with an artist here last week and he took that idea one step futrther. He made sculptures, lean minimalist pieces, and invited skaters in Letna (a park above Prague) to use them.

 
At 11:56 PM, Blogger richard lopez said...

that's very cool, ryan. i'm terrible on a board too. that doesn't stop my admiration of skaters who make of the cityscape a creative endevour of sorts. i recall an interview with a skater turned surfer i saw on tv a few years back. the now surfer described skating, because it is usually done on concrete in the midst of the urban and often-times blighted areas, as degenerative, while surfing, done on the waves of the ocean, as regenerative, and thus, for him, vivifying. i don't know, perhaps this former skater is right, but i do like his description of skating on urban scores as rather accurate. since i live in a city, as most of us, i reckon, do, skating its surfaces seem to me a great form of art.

 

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