Memo 4: Cruisin’
Say goodbye to the last draining week of August that 2020 will ever have. Can’t tell yet if that is a depressing or hope-bringing statement, as I’m still mentally in the foamy-coffee stage of quarantine. One thing that has been making the time pass are projects that force me to be present (example: literally Jouissance) and one of the projects I’ve been starting on focus on is skateboarding. It’s so much better in person than via text, but I’ll see what I can do.
I’ve been surrounded by skateboard culture for a while — it’s hard to miss in the Bay — but the tipping point for me was when my younger twin brothers started skating.¹ Seeing my brothers go from little noobs to pretty adept skaters was inspiring and, well, embarrassing for me as their MUCH better older sister. So I took up the challenge and have been skating since May.²
I first started to realize that there is more than meets the eye with skating when I started to put together my board. I didn’t really have to do any of the heavy lifting, as my brothers gave me the whole set-up: a deck, wheels, trucks, bearings and grip. I fell in love with the deck fairly quickly, as it’s from a skate shop in my hometown and has a simple drawing of a person skating through the redwood trees. It’s so very cute.
So, being little ol’ overthinking and future-preparing me, I thought it would be a shame to wreck it. Why not get some deck rails and keep the drawing intact, so that the board stretches out its lifespan? This prompted my brothers and me to check out a local shop for rails. While we were waiting in line outside, my brothers talked to the shop owner — who they knew³ — and he spoke very candidly:
Who even uses those things? Don’t be so attached to the board, man. Let it go.
Skating offers a blatant form of personal freedom, one that focuses on the present and nothing outside of it. It leans into the now, away from the overthinking of the past and preparedness of the future, but you gotta have a tiny smidge of past and future in ya to think a trick through. Forcing myself to learn this way of presentness, while having straight-up fun too, creates a kind of mental cruising that is addictive.
In contrast, the less personal form of cruising for me is a literal cruise as I have never been on a cruise in my life. My parents aren’t the biggest fans of it, which was consciously or subconsciously passed down to me. Cruises terrify me slightly because you cannot leave whenever you desire once you are on it⁴ and that is a lot to think about. However, not everyone thinks this way and bam. The cruise industry.
Sea travel pre-19th century was a necessary luxury, a grueling life-or-death throw of the dice that didn’t have much enjoyment to it unless you survived and got off the damn boat.⁵ However, true luxury sea travel began in the 1830s first as a way of making transportation bearable. Now, cruises are a way of making transportation entertaining. Throw money and you move, you see, you hear, you meet — what more can you want? The world inside and outside of the cruise is constantly changing and exciting, which feels freeing and limitless.
With the cruise industry marked for hardship at the beginning of the pandemic — but clearly not giving up the good fight — it will be interesting to see how this industry is approached. Cruises offer a form of freedom, one unlike most others but not without asterisks. Money is one, but manipulation of time is another. You exist in the past, present and future simultaneously on a boat. You are constantly playing mental catch-up for what just happened (seems like you are at a lot of buffets?), what you are doing presently (eating at a buffet) and what you are about to do (eat your next meal at a buffet). The boat moves far and wide, but you have stayed put the whole time.
How do we find freedom? This could easily be its own conversation, as many economic and political things going on right now are complex. The short answer is that freedom is outside the system, but how realistic is that (and if it is, how do we move towards that reality)? To me, I feel free in personal and group acts outside of capitalistic spheres and towards activities that cannot be contained by money. How realistic this is in terms of attainability for everyone, I am not sure. At the minimum, freedom as a state of mind is in a relationship with freedom as a state of physical being and both benefit when you give selflessly in the present, by land or sea.
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
Why it’s so hard to find dumbbell sets in the US is something I never expected to think about or read but hey, it happened.
New York Is Gone Forever (According to Me, a Baby With No Object Permanence). Better than Jerry’s piece.
Why BOA Steakhouse is the eatery of choice for LA’s TikTok famous. I first read about it in this article, but The Face’s article has a lot more snark which I enjoy. Mainly, because a topic like this deserves snark. The menu looks awful (all meat / seafood and the only thing I would consider eating is a $28 Impossible burger), I’m confused how anyone could get good lighting in there with how dark the whole goddamn color palette is, and TikTok celebs have worms for brains if they eat out and party now (hint: some of them are eating out and partying now)!
What Waking Up in a Friend’s Body Does to Your Mind if you want to look at “Freaky Friday” realistically…
…and related to that, Consciousness is not a thing, but a process of inference, if you want your whole day to be absolutely wrecked.
Anybody who has spent more than a couple hours with me knows that my twin brothers are, by far and wide, the coolest people ever.
This includes primarily cruising and going over curbs. Baby steps, people!
Because, like I said, they are the coolest.
Same thing with planes.
Or, you ended up in a worse place than before and the boat brought you there. In either case, boat = bad vibes.