In times of craziness and change it’s nice to have a mirror to look into to see what is truly happening, to see how things are going and where things are headed, to be able to pull back and get a glimpse of the big picture, take the temperature, metaphor metaphor etc.
My local skatepark has been a great bellwhether while I’ve lived in Seattle. You want to get a sense of the vibe, the beliefs, the attitude of the area, go down to the skatepark and take a good look. There you’ll find kids, disaffected adults, the rabble that make up antifa (I say rabble with fondness, as much of that rabble is also the people who back in the day were building the Mt. Baker gap and playing in bands and also my high school classmates), scooter kids, artists, and graffiti. More than anything else, the graffiti tells the story of the place– it’s a mural that gives you a glimpse into the soul of the town. What are people writing? Who is crossing out what is written and writing over it? How does it feel to stand and read it all?
For a long time when I first moved here the graffiti was whimsical and funny and often beautiful. It felt a lot like the northwest I grew up in and I enjoyed coming and seeing the jokes and goofiness and weird shit people had to share.
The more I skated and the more I played in this space, the more I saw the skatepark as a stage, and skating like a movement piece, to quote Gerald, an art form all its own, and the graffiti was just another offer, it was all sort of a dance, a celebration of living and moving and pleasure and skill and joy.
I often left the park saying man, all I want to do is build more places like this. I saw over time I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Skaters showed up with garbage bags, with rakes, with boom boxes, with food sometimes. For them it was something special, too.
The pinnacle of this aesthetic is found at Marginal Way. Skaters built it themselves and they are absolutely rigid about what goes on its walls. Marginal Way was born under a bridge frequented by hookers and drug addicts. Skaters showed up and said, hey, I think we could make something here. The finished product speaks to their creativity, their ingenuity, their love, their imagination, their passion — their souls. It is very much for skaters in the nw as close to hallowed ground as it gets, which they wouldn’t say because shut up we are here to skate — right!
And so that’s how things have been in the northwest. For quite awhile it was pretty goddamn good.
And then last year things changed.
2020 hit, with it came the pandemic and civil unrest and, well…you know. The writing on the walls began to look like this.
But that wasn’t all. 2020 also holds the distinction for being the year that the very first political message adorned the skatepark walls. For years, all through Trump’s presidency, I never saw a single political thing on the walls. 2020 changed that. Sort of like seeing political slogans gracing the marquees of theaters. Oh wait. Yeah that’s happened too, hasn’t it?
Later, new graffiti came. “KILL COPS” showed up, written in ugly, black, militant block letters. Then ACAB. Anarchy symbols. Antifa stickers. And that’s just the shit you can make sense of, that isn’t written over all the other shit, near where the trash is piled up. Look, I’m not trying to be political here. All I am saying is that no matter what your politics are, you have to admit what has been has all been a far cry from this:
This change in the skatepark sadly matches the changes I see happening in the arts. Gone are the sacred places, or the idea that some places are sacred, and instead it is all being replaced by propaganda, politics, conformity, censorship, and ideology. And that’s just the shit you can make sense of.
If I could put the arts today in a picture, it would look a lot like this:
To see good places turned into vitriolic, chaotic, senseless trash heaps is just sad.
It wasn’t that long ago that these walls held drawings of cartoon characters and the all important words “dick sauce”. It wasn’t that long ago that people actually stepped onto a blank stage and realized they were there to play, not spout and preach and and like so many parrots shouting bromides.
How much has been lost?
Well. Let’s think about it for a moment. Seriously, stop for a moment and put yourself in the state of mind where you choose to go down to a skatepark with spray paint to write Dick Sauce with an exclamation point on a wall. This is what you do with your time. Let yourself really sink into it, and then try to tell me that isn’t kind of fun. It’s just fun. It’s dumb, for sure, but it’s also fun. Like improv! And it’s also gone.
I wasn’t skating this last year as I had many things to take care of. 2020 brought new things for me too.
But the other day while walking by the park, I just couldn’t stand seeing it defiled in this way. This isn’t about politics. It’s about chaos. It’s about senseless anger and rage. It’s about a despoiling, destructive impulse that looks only to spread itself and consume everything it can. It was sad to remember what had been, the spirit that had been there, and to see what it had become.
As much as I take issue with the shit on the walls (and have spent several paragraphs talking about it) because it is sad and gross and I believe a just mirror for the minds, the souls, the arts, the world of Seattle these days, sitting and talking about this, thinking about this, is annoying because even now, as I write this, I can’t help but feel that it is all so empty. After all, if you are sitting focusing on what is on the walls, you are not doing what the walls are there for — you are not skating, you are not playing.
This bothers me.
So here is the conundrum — what do we do with this crap that is now in the world, this angry, controlling, overriding force, doing all it can to demand our attention? Do we give in? Do we just decide not to join in, do we just let things slip away? Do we go, man this is gross, no thanks.
It’s spring now. I walk by the park again and see what an absolute shithole it has become. This is the chaotic mindset that you now feel in Seattle. It’s absurd, it’s self-destructive. It’s gross and mean.
Well, how do you fight that?
How do you continue on? Do I go and paint over all the ugly bullshit with things that feel right and good and sum up what I remember and value about this place? Do I spread some other message on the walls? Do I draw hearts? Recite lyrics? What?
Maybe, I think, I can just get some flat white paint and paint over all the ugly bullshit. I look for paint online and see it would cost me thousands of dollars to paint it over, then realize that the minute I did paint it over it would be filled again.
I could just not skate. I could plug my nose and say poo poo Seattle and all you losers, no.
One morning a few days ago I wake up and I say fuck it. I get my deck, I go to the pool, and I skate. For the first time in over a year, I just skate. I say I don’t care what the world is doing, or what people are saying, that this place is legitimately becoming dangerous, that goosesteppers are everywhere and nobody seems to have a sense of humor, I don’t care, in this place where I have played, where I have edited my first series, where I have raised my daughter who says going for walks here smells like memories– and good memories at that — I am skating.
Here is what happened (and if you’re wondering where this is all going and why I’m writing this post, well here you go, this is kind of the point):
The moment I started skating everything disappeared. All the noise. All the shit on the walls. All of it it was gone. Because I wasn’t standing and looking at the walls and sitting in that gross place, sitting in that mindfuck place we all sit in when we stare at shit on our phones — I was doing what the walls and myself were made to do — to play. To skate.
And when I was doing this, it all disappeared. I didn’t see anything. I just skated.
It was liberating. I let out a shout. Yes. This is it. Yes. I remember.
I also collapsed heaving on the ground after maybe a minute of riding, because I hadn’t skated in a year and half and was sucking wind and drank a few hot chocolates this winter and am hooked on coffee and you know, not a kid…
Then I saw something else on the wall that really summed it all up. An old sticker put on the coping years ago, before all of this, that captured all of it perfectly.
Right.
Skate, and it all goes away. Skate and you destroy all of it. Skate and there is only play, skate and guess what, you are skating, so who gives a shit, because skating is the same. When you skate there is only all the memories of all the days moving through you and out onto the walls again, with each ounce of energy spent skating, skating is all that remains.
Skate and Destroy.
Okay.
Now, guess what happened next?
A week or so after my morning skate of skate and destroy (okay!), the parks people came and blew all the graffiti off the walls. The park looks perfect now. Clean and brand new. It also looks bland. It looks boring.
How much I would have missed, I told myself when I saw it, if I had waited for this moment, when everything was nice and peachy. How much I would have missed feeling the depth of skate and destroy, of realizing that none of it mattered, not if YOU ARE A SKATER anyway. When you’re skating, if you let yourself enjoy it, you don’t even have the energy or the desire to pay attention to anything else. You don’t even want to because you realize it’s just another color to human nature is all, another part of the story being told where you are doing what you are supposed to do, which is to carry on, which is to skate, which is to find a way to play with it all.
If I had sat and waited for the perfect park again, I would have missed that.
You can write shit on the walls. You can do that. You can stop skating and stop playing and get pissed and grab your marker and just write over everything because you’re pissed and mad goddamit. You can sit and read the shit that’s written on the walls, you can get mad and pissed goddamit, you can write your own shit over the shit someone else wrote, and all of you can then point at the walls and yell about who wrote what or said what, and tweet pictures of the walls, start a war over what’s written on the walls, crap on each other for writing one thing or thinking one thing, build a camp for people who wrote one thing or something else, and eventually then sit surrounded by walls of a different sort you don’t even realize you have built, walls from which, if you are not careful, there will be no escape. Or, like others, you can go poo poo look at these walls, yep, time to move to the country and learn to build an outhouse. I’m off the grid, baby. Fuck you stupid people, you say, as you learn about how to keep chickens and stay far far away. Maybe one day you’ll wake up bored smelling like shit and chicken feed and have just a whiff of a memory of how much fun it was to grind coping back when you were young and still had balls.
Or you can do something else entirely different. You can. It’s an option. It’s there. It’s real. Just look.
Maybe they thought it just sounded cool.
Maybe it just beat the crap out of the bullshit being spewed in their own times.
Maybe, after skating, they stopped and thought for a moment about what was true and what was good. They asked themselves sincerely what sort of message they would like to send and have live on in the world after they had taken their last kickturn.
It is true. I mean it’s there.
That certainly could have happened.
After all, despite faults and failures and shortcomings and so on and so forth…
People are rad.