Good evening. I know I am behind in adding more interviews with those who choose to keep our relationship sexless. I have been riding the ladybug of my interior landscape so it has not sounded good to conduct interviews (which really says something considering I LOVE interviews), though I suspect this will be rectified in the near future.
Last Sunday I went on a skate trip with two gentlemen, one my age (Jomby) and the other a few years older (Bram). I met them in the Bayview at our first destination, The Dish, possibly California’s oldest skatepark. It is what it sounds like: round. Not too deep, gradual decline, rough concrete, and a pill bug-shaped hump in the middle. I guess I could just say it’s shaped like a tylenol. Jomby brought his 12-year-old son Cieran and his friend, Madison. They are very pasty young white dudes with one pair of glasses between them. We piled in Jomby’s VW van, adult males in the front, adolescent males in the back, and me in the jump seat facing backwards. I had one mug of coffee which feels precarious anytime. It would have to be one of those unwieldy tureens from 7-11 to not give me scarcity issues but then there would be other issues like it getting cold and can I taste plastic.
We decided to head East. First stop, Moraga skatepark. The adolescents played those little things that they hold in their hands and have games in them and there is a stylus too. Cieran was very performative about everything that was happening in the game, a lot of WHOA and HOLY COW. It would appear that Jomby’s four kids are on a very tight leash in the realm of their conduct. For whatever reason, they completely toe the line, at least for now. Although I heard that Cieran was being teased at school and after much harassing he finally lost it and yelled FUCK YOU!! at the kids tormenting him. From me: kudos. From his family: great consternation regarding his language.
We had an amazing session at Moraga. It is not an amazing skatepark. But we were full of energy. There is a small bowl in the middle of the park shaped like a rectangular pool that someone kicked in the side. Or like if someone shoved spongebob squarepants. So there is a hip and also a little waterfall at one end. We adults all found a billion lines in the bowl and some kid came who got Bram (I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to keep it up with these stupid names) going, trying to air out of the bowl over a ledge and onto a bank. It was hilarious and fun. The two kids pushed around the perimeter and took it all in. They are newer skaters so finding their balance is still a project.
We drove to Pleasant Hill next. The skatepark is placed in a hard-to-reach spot, is horribly designed and the concrete is shit. It’s covered in graffiti and has one bowl shaped like a number 8 in the middle. That said, we had a lot of fun rolling around the flow bowl, connecting long lines across banks, mini-twinkies and the bowl in the middle. We left after an hour or so. At the end of the quarter-mile driveway that leads from the park to the parking lot, Madison hit a crack and flew off his board, landing on the gravel palms-down. He cried out in a high-pitched whine and started crying very hard. I felt for him. Skating is so much more brutal than anything a bookish kid with a video game thing, fantasy novel and sketchbook in the van usually does. It’s a tough adjustment to accept that kind of pain as normal, but it happens eventually. Or so I’m told.
The kids started complaining about being STARVING which was entirely fair because it was 2:00 or something. Just the day before this I took a bunch of kids to San Jose to skate a contest and basically never fed them then wondered why they were damp, dark and brooding by the time we were driving home at 5:00 (we had been there since 9:00). I took them to 7-11 because it was close to the freeway entrance. Any fears I have about being too mothering are mitigated by this experience. I am exactly the checked-out good-time Zeppelin-obsessed teen dream boozer I want to be.
We went to a taco joint in a strip mall in Pleasant Hill. Give me ONE REASON why this paragraph should be any longer.
Our last skate destination was Brentwood. It is a fenced in park that requires full pads, and has a pad nanny to be sure that happens. I don’t mind too much, but for a career skate genius like Bram it’s annoying. We had to gird our refried beans to get in here and skate, aided by large coffees from that coffee chain monster with the lady on the cup. I know Kirk Read would have my head, but out in the towns with nothing but huh-yooj strip malls, it is my preferred choice. We hit the bowls and chatted with some fourteen-year-old kid who was very confident in his skills and possibly is an only child. After about forty-five minutes I noticed the adolescents were bickering, with Cieran earnestly trying to give Madison advice about skating and Madison annoyed with him for doing so. They spent half their time sitting on a bench in the park and quickly started complaining that we were wearing them out. It reminded me of that moment in the movie Greenberg when Ben Stiller says to the kids he’s hanging out with who are in their early twenties and therefore half his age (I UNDERSTAND, good sir.), “I’m glad I grew up when I did cos your parents were too perfect at parenting- all that baby Mozart and Dan Zane songs; you’re just so sincere and interested in things! There’s a confidence in you guys that’s horrifying. You’re all ADD and carpal tunnel. You wouldn’t know Agoraphobia if it bit you in the ass…” Looking at these kids I just felt like they had gone soft. Like their existence in this anxiety-motivated, electronics-shaped world of ectomorphs-rising made them unable to keep up with people over three times their age. There’s no reason we should be skating circles around them. But they are a sedentary people built for cogitating and while I love that they read a lot of books I think their characters are lacking. They have full personalities and complexity and will surely live rich and varied lives, but they are not tomorrow’s stevedores. I rue the recession of robustness.
Madison fell again and we left. There was an ice cream truck outside so they all got ice cream and piled in the van. We started driving then realized it was time for beer, so we found a BevMo, where they actually have gluten-free beer. We cracked a few open and drove home under gorgeous clouds and big sky. We watched a BART train climb up a stretch of the 580 and talked about photography. The kids slept.