Timbre #12

Sorry, Our Mistake

We’re swimming in an accidental lake, drinking in the cool liquid as we carelessly tread water.

Wow, that’s corny.

I mean, how the body of water even got there is corny, too, not to mention about as vague as it gets: did surfers spill something into a giant hole, or did the wagon riders and roller skaters of our post-war whitey-ness turn on a spigot, and accidentally run a green vinyl hose into an enormous empty space that would eventually fill up and say of itself, “I am skateboarding.”?

I have no idea. But surely, it couldn’t have been on purpose.

Anyway, the damn thing was already there when I stumbled upon it. As I kneeslid down a grassy hill on a discarded piece of cardboard, my friend, who lived across the street, saw me came over to talk and showed me the gray plastic mistake that his mom had bought for he and his brother to share.

“It’s a skateboard,” said he, splashing about enthusiastically.

The accidents have come hard and fast ever since then, amounting to a very impressive collection, if we do say so ourselves.

For example: the way you and I first stepped on a skateboard — right foot forward or left foot forward, as well as front foot on the board or back foot on the board — was totally accidental and, nine times out of ten, the way we still step on a skateboard today.

How’d that happen? What was it that made us take that inadvertent first step? A roll of the dice, maybe? A feeling? Mirroring your actions after a friend’s or sibling’s (have you ever noticed how many brothers are opposite-footed?) as you made those first pushes down the sidewalk?

And after all the “coming distractions” — Little League, midget football, track and field, music, soccer, bikes, sex, cars, recreational chemistry — wasn’t it an unplanned event that got you back to the board? A corner-of-the-eye glance at someone’s dusty garage set-up, meeting a new friend who skated, too, seeing a demo from the window of the car as your mom drove you to buy back-to-school supplies?

“Oh, yeah!” you coincidentally remembered. “Skateboarding!”

But today, looking at it all, the surface of skating’s drippy lake presents itself as a deliberate, well-fashioned, and highly tensioned seascape — an activity as common and coached as swinging a bat or batting an eyelash. Sure, we’re just kickflipping down the streets meeting hot Swedish teens on our way to purchase Happy Meals. Isn’t everybody?

I don’t need to tell you, though … all that is someone else’s purpose.

For the uninitiated, the way to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s premeditated, floaty flotsam, is its spur-of-the-moment moisture content. This bright, shiny, and determined mass-hysteria version of skateboarding is relatively dry — crumbling and blowing away as we observe it from down here, twenty thousand leagues under, accidentally submerged, pruned, and soggy from our big, unintended soak. The depth’s fine, though. Thanks for asking.

As this flakey, snake-oil manifestation is carried off with the winds of trend, skateboarding will continue to soak in its own instinctive juices, polluting the very waterways that these used-dream salesmen cruised in on, leaving no stone left unturned (or is it, no turn left un-stoned?) as we accidentally find spots, learn tricks, take trips, make friends, snap decks, turn necks, and get wrecked.

But contrary to our accidental history, today we’re consciously trying to get ready for what is to come. And as we plan, coordinate, and prepare for our own contests, our own organization, our own predetermination, we’re deliberately setting the stage. Not for the sake of reaching a demographic, not profiting for the sake of profits, and not to “grow” any “sport.”

Nope.

We’re sinking pylons, we’re dredging, we’re studying the currents of this evolutionary and revolutionary lake of accidents, so that when tomorrow becomes today — the good times and the bad — it’ll be our very own “today” and we’ll still be free to thrash about, displace plenty of fluid, and accidentally move forward under our own power.

Whoa.

Let me grab this towel real quick and dry my eye.

I think got some corn juice in it.