South Bound
I’m waiting on a sudden change of heart,
For that left turn stab,
Cutting gravel, hard throttle-
Change of heart.
I’m waiting,
For a screaming voice
Echoing through the station
Above the deisel moaning
Wait! Please! Stop!
I’m praying for a frantic,
Nick of time motion,
in my direction.
I am praying … and… the moment is passing
And even though i am
the last one on
she’s not coming
she’s not coming
She’s Not coming.
I’m already gone.
D
I am sitting in the bed of a pickup truck on a warm summer evening as the sun slips below the horizon
I am perched upon a rooftop, with stars above, lightning flashes in the distance in all directions, the thunder too far away to be heard
I am hiking above the tree-line, meteors burn in the atmosphere, and the only sound above my breathing is footsteps
I am diving in the ocean, twenty feet below the surface, lungs aching as I scoop a sand dollar from the bottom
I am hanging from my fingertips, air beneath my feet, stone above me, nowhere to go but up
I am laying beside a campfire, clothing permeated with pine and soil and smoke
I am kissing the face of the only one I love.
I am dust, and to dust I will return.
- z -
In all this ample time I’ve had lately, I’ve been reading through anything I can get my hands on. I even went to the library to get a library card so that I could really delve into books that I’ve never read before, but the whole scene was too overwhelming. I came home and started to go through the back-rows of the book case in the house, brimming with books I’ve read a dozen times each. Wedged between all those well-worn book bindings were a few books that I had never read. Nick Hornby’s SLAM was one of them. I had tried to read it after I first got it, but it didn’t call to me. Perhaps I counted myself as too busy, perhaps too high on my life’s horse to lower myself to reading a book written from the perspective of a 15-year old kid who loves his skateboard. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t get into it the first time. Now, after having read the whole book, I can see that perhaps the reason I didn’t get all the way through it the first time was simply because I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t realate yet.
Here’s what Nick Hornby, (er, Sam?) has to say about staying out of trouble:
“What’s incredible to me is that you can keep out of trouble pretty much every minute of your life apart from maybe five seconds, and that five seconds can get you into the worst trouble of all, just about. It’s amazing, when you think about it. I don’t smoke weed, don’t cuss out teachers, I don’t get into fights, I try to do my homework. But I took a risk, for a few seconds, and that turns out to be worse than any of the rest put together. I once read an interview with a skater, I forget who, and he said that the thing he couldn’t ever believe about sport was how much concentration it took. You could be doing the best skating of your life, and the moment you started to realize that you were doing the best skating of your life, you were eating concrete. Skating well for nine minutes and fifty-five seconds wasn’t good enough, because five seconds was plenty of time to make a complete jerk of yourself. Yeah, well, life’s like that too. It doesn’t seem right to me, but there you go. And how bad is it, what I did? Not so bad, right? It’s a mistake, that’s all. You hear about boys who refuse to wear condoms, and you hear about girls who think it’s cool to have a baby at fifteen. . . . Well, those aren’t mistakes. That’s just stupidity. I don’t want to spend the whole time moaning about life being unfair, but how comes their punishment is the same as mine? That can’t be right, can it? It seems to me that if you never wear a condom, then you should get triplets, or quintuplets. But it doesn’t work like that, does it?” — Nick Hornby, Slam, Chapter 3
That’s me. I’m Sam, and I paid attention, CLOSE ATTENTION, every goddamn second of every minute of my life except for one. For almost two years, every single move that I made was towards a solitary, obtainable goal. But I stopped paying attention for 1 minute. For one fucking minute, I stood in my house and said, “Look at how awesome I’m doing. I am, in a manner of speaking, doing the best skating of my life.” And while I was there, gloating over the progress made, the goals obtained, the greatness that I had at last achieved, I got slammed. And when you get slammed, when you quit paying attention, all those other minutes–the minutes where you were working your ass off, doing everything right–those minutes don’t count for anything anymore. The punishment for not paying attention for one minute, if it’s the wrong minute, can be just as bad as the dues for not paying attention for ALL the minutes. And like Sam, I’m sitting around, scratching my head, wondering, “that can’t be right, can it?”
*note: I’m not pregnant. Sam’s trouble had to do with babies and condoms, my trouble doesn’t. But the same principles still apply.
