My friend Ben Hiltzheimer once said that riding a motorcycle was a such head-clearing experience because while riding all you could think about was not dying. Riding a fixed-gear bicycle is similarly head-clearing. It’s chess not checkers. Being connected to the bike and its motion feels right in a way that riding bikes with freewheels and brakes never did, but you have to think several moves ahead. Continue reading “Gone With the Schwinn”
Go Skateboarding Day!
June 21st is Go Skateboarding Day, so after a month off of my board due to a bum foot, I went skateboarding. It rained all kinds of fierce as it is wont to do in the evenings in the summer in southeast Alabama, but I skated anyway. Continue reading “Go Skateboarding Day!”
Spiral Bound (Workbooks Part Two)
In my quest for better notebooks, I bought a spiral-binding machine so that I could make my own. Here are a few of my creations so far. Continue reading “Spiral Bound (Workbooks Part Two)”
Security Cam Footage
Quick clip of me skateboarding in the Nemo Design studio. Continue reading “Security Cam Footage”
An Inconvenient Youth
It seems that youth is no longer wasted on the young. In recent years, many social scientists (as well as Jay-Z) have claimed that thirty is the new twenty. Whereas one at twenty used to be considered an adult, now one at twenty is relatively still a child. So, what makes an adult these days? Are there any rites of passage in Western culture in the twenty-first century?
You can make your very own poisonous, despicable man.
Begin by keeping him a boy for as long as you can,
And when the voice in his head says that everything’s wrong,
Let him think we’d be convinced but only with the right song.
— Cex, “The Wayback Machine”
I first heard it expressed that forty was the new thirty a few years ago just after two of my colleagues had broken the forty-mark. The further encroachment of youth on adulthood (or vice versa, depending on which way you want to view it) is seemingly evident everywhere. From movies, to videogames, to music, we are not aging — culturally — the way our parents have. “Adults” in their thirties unashamedly play and discuss videogames, obsessively. The theme itself is apparent in pop culture (See recent cinematic hits like The Forty-Year-Old Virgin or The Last Kiss, for examples). As the main character in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club so directly put it, “I’m a thirty-year-old boy.”
I am often asked if I am comfortable with my age, and I must say that I am more comfortable at thirty-six than I was at twenty-six, but if thirty is the new twenty, then Jay-Z and I are both twenty-six. He claimed last album to have graduated from throwback jerseys to button-ups (because he was “thirty-plus”), but I don’t even own a pair of dress shoes, much less a suit. We might not know what makes the man, but it sure ain’t the clothes.
Sure, all of my friends (most of whom, it must be noted, are younger than I am) are getting married, buying houses, having kids (or at least talking about it), etc., but the old rites of passage (e.g., marriage, childbirth, etc.) do not adults make. Perhaps they never did, but the illusion was strong, and now there seems to be no one consciously interested in maintaining that illusion. We need new rules or no rules. Right now there’s a rupture in our cultural development that begins in the late-teens and continues often into the early forties.
Sometimes I feel like adult. Sometimes I don’t.
From Pixels to Pencils
I was going to wait until I had more of these done, but I have too much other stuff going on at the moment. I started drawing again, and here are a few of the results. Continue reading “From Pixels to Pencils”
Woozy BMX Entry
I have a tiny blurb in an article on Woozy BMX called “What Motivates You to Ride.” Check it out about halfway down the page here. Continue reading “Woozy BMX Entry”
One-Word Description
Dres: “Yo, you found some wealth?”
Posdnous: “More in my mind than in my pocket.”
— De La Soul, “En Focus”
One morning at the bus stop several years ago, an old woman walked up to me with a copy of The Adventures of Sally by P.G. Wodehouse. She said, “Excuse me, sir, do you know what that word means?” Her finger was on page six, pointing to the word “impecunious.” I had to admit to her that I did not know the meaning of this word, and that I was unable to ascertain its meaning from the context of the sentence: Continue reading “One-Word Description”
Workbooks
I am finding more and more of my thinking gets worked out in notebooks and journals. Recently having access to a scanner, I thought I’d share some pages. Continue reading “Workbooks”
Flatland Footage, 2001
I was taking a break from web work in Kirkland, Washington, and my coworker Ben Damron spotted me outside goofing around on my bike. He grabbed his camera and filmed me fumbling about. So, here’s footage of me riding some mediocre flatland from the summer of 2001. Continue reading “Flatland Footage, 2001”