Transpose

I used to skateboard every single day. My best friends lived a street over.  They were both brothers separated by two years.  They were almost identical except Wills had a rounder face and Jon had a nose that resembled a pig.  We went to the same bus stop which was a street over from their’s right outside a park that only had two rusty swings and a weight, obtuse jungle gym that was compressed to a five foot area and the rest of the park which was the size of a football field was just grass and one oak tree with a picnic table underneath.  Across from our bus stop was the Waites grandparents house which they stayed at before and after school because their mom was a third grade teacher.  I would usually head over to the bus stop 20 minutes before I had to so we could just hang out.  I would bring my skateboard and leave it at his grandparent’s house because I would just walk over there right after school.  They only had an asphalt driveway but we would just practice flat land tricks or we would set up a piece of wood no longer than a foot and grind it off into the grass.  We would do these activities for an hour after school until his mother came and picked them up.
Then they went over to the next street where there yellow, single story home was and then we skated till dinner time.  He had an asphalt driveway that was two times the length of there grandparents.  They had I beams from a railroad track that we used to grind down.  We were use there garden stones, purple bricks, to prop the rail so we could grind up it at heightening speeds and fly off doing spins or flip tricks out.  Then his step dad made him a little ramp out of scrap wood that we would fly off of.  Wills and I would skate off of it, trying to do tricks that we would catch in skate videos but usually they were far off. Professionals made it look to easy and when we would try them, they would take us hours to even get close and days to finally land and ride away, cheering in the process with the biggest smile on your face.  We would then put those same bricks underneath the ramp so it was at jaw dropping heights.  Jon would ride his K-2 roller blades and jump ten feet into the sky.  Some days we would put everything they had at their house, bikes, scooters, the I beam, another rail and our bodies and Jon would gap it all, grabbing and spinning over our heads.  It was a spectacle and sometimes our friends from other neighborhoods would come over and either skate or just watch.  I felt on top of the world.
    Then my dad built us a ramp and his moms boyfriend Pat built us a quarter pipe.  If we didn’t skate all the time already, now we did.  We started to get better and do tricks over things instead of just Jon.  Even though the quarter pipe was out of our league of expertise we still tried to use it to his potential until holes starting showing up at the bottom of the lip.  My dad had a video camera from the 80’s.  You had to prop it on your shoulder to level it out and instead of digital or little tapes you actually just put a VHS tape into it and you could edit it which is a loose term because the editing was just titles with block print.  We would start taping ourselves and we called them “Amateur videos” and we each had our own parts in it.  It felt like we were actually paving our way into the skateboarding industry one step at a time.   When we made these videos, usually in one days time on the weekends, we would film our whole part which consisted of three to four minutes.  We had runs where we would skate around for a minute and try to bust out as many tricks on an obstacle course as we could.  We would have just us doing bangers, which are just one trick that we thought were impressive, and then we would have the end which was our special trick.  Mine was a rocket-air, which was when you touched both your hands to the top of the board, 180.  The only thing was, because of our little knowledge into filming or editing, or even being necessarily good at skateboarding was if we screwed up we would have to rewind the tape every time and re-film it.  Doing this sometimes lead us into cutting off tricks short but I guess that is why we covered ourselves and called them amateur. 
    It was so much fun making these and re-watching them.  We never really got to many impressive tricks on tape because we would try and do it all in one day and by the end of it we would be so tired that we would practically pass out.  When it was just about to be sunset we would then make a blooper real which consisted of skits of us getting hurt for the sanctity of America’s Funniest Home videos.  The funny thing is we would try and make it so we didn’t get hurt but just fall but something always happened that would end up in extravagance tragedy and we would actually get hurt like the time a skateboard hit Wills in the back.  Then when it was finally to dark to film anymore we would then go inside and watch our creation.  We would obviously laugh because something always funny happened like Wills would get upset at Jon for being to good or Jon would get upset with Wills picking on him or one time Jon’s mom was in the background yelling at her boys to go get the mail.  We would eventually step it up and get a better camcorder that was more compact and easier to actually edit.  We didn’t need to film it all in one session but we could just get a tapes and tapes of film and actually make a real edit.  It took the spontaneity out of the videos but it made us look better and we could travel to other spots since it was my camcorder such as skate parks and street spots. 
    But all this skateboarding meant I was never home and I rarely did homework.  I was too busy doing something that I consistently loved and my only other passion was video games.  I really wanted to be a professional because I felt like I was obviously getting better even though I hardly ever skated outside of my town.  Probably the most impressive trick I ever have done, still to this day was when we took a piece of wood and stacked it up by putting milk crates underneath it until it was at least four feet high and then a pvc pipe that we used as a rail.  We were taping and I went up the ramp, ollied to boardslide the rail and then did a shuv it out which consisted of moving the board underneath your feet without you spinning.  I learned that trick from watching Shorty’s video “Fulfill the Dream” where Steve Olson would do that on handrails. 
    Doing these tricks meant that I would scrape up my knees really bad, hurt my arms, break my wrist, smack my head until I was barely conscious and most importantly to my parents, bruise my shins.  In my families heritage, we had a poor medical record.  Blood clotting was a big problem and my grandmother had her legs amputated because they were so bad and she was left in a wheel chair for 15 years of her life.  My mother worried that all this skateboarding would do the same.  One day I came home after school which was odd and my mother was home and I went and sat next to her.  She just got done making dinner which was steak and mashed potatoes and decided that we needed to have a talk.  I was in soccer too so she wanted me to wear shin guards when I went skating which I never did.  She always nagged me to be careful but one thing about skateboarding is that it’s hard to be careful and to be gnarly at the same time.  If I wanted to sacrifice my flip tricks then the only way I could is by just riding around like some street lurchen pretending that skateboarding was cool even though it is cool.  But I could tell by my moms posture that she wasn’t just going to tell me to be careful.
    She let me sit next to her while we watched my favorite game show which was “Wheel of Fortune” right after dinner before she had to go to work.  No one was home but her and I.  She put one arm around me which was not usual in my household especially at my age.  She started the conversation.
    “So what do you want to be when you grow up?”
    Even though a year before I wanted to be a science teacher because it was the only subject in school besides art, which my father taught, that you could be hands on.  I liked reading and being analytical but I was only 12 so I liked to actually do things rather then hear about other people doing important things like in history or in math. 
    “I want to be a professional skateboarder.”
    It came out of my mouth like I knew it was for sure.  How could it be that hard?  There was a lot of skateboarders that were professional and I never really thought that skateboarding was that big.  I didn’t know about anyone else who really did it but I did not know anyone outside of my town.  I was the one of the only skateboarders out of possibly eight and I felt like I was either better then them or had the wreck less attitude to be known.  My mother took a breath and let me have it.
    “You are never going to be a professional skateboarder.  You are just hurting yourself and you are going to have leg surgery when you are older.”
    I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  The words came at me like snowflakes on a open patch of skin.  It stung and I was at a loss of words.  My face started to sink into her chest but either she wasn’t having it and nudged me away or I voluntarily flung myself inwards to form a ball.  It was turning red and it felt weightless like I couldn’t control it’s path.  My eyes began to water and I mustered out.
    “But Tony Hawk is.”
    She looked at me long and hard and repeated herself practically.
    “Yeah but you aren’t Tony Hawk, you will never be a professional skateboarder.”
    But she was right on those remarks.  Tony Hawk started skating at a different time then I did and he grew up in California which was a haven for professionals because skating was a year round activity.  Tony, unlike myself, was a contest skater too which were really big early on in skateboarding history.  It was the first time that I actually thought about what I was going to do in my life.  I remember wanting to spite her for it and to prove her wrong but the upcoming years showed that she was correct.  I started to be self conscious when I skated more and more through the years until I broke my wrist on that same I Beam.  This was the first time my mom had a real conversation with me and I hardly gave any real dialogue back except some bogus remarks about how other people were what I wanted to be.  It’s not easy being a professional at anything and just like any sport, skateboarding had a lot of competition and also a lot of connections.  I really just wanted to keep coasting on the things that I loved but sometimes you have to look outside your comfort zone.  Everything that I enjoyed was already done and it felt like that was true with everything.  I was already an out of the box thinker but it’s hard to think outside reality when everything is streaming to you from the news to history lectures to word of mouth.  It’s one big game, trying to find out who you are in life and what you will become.  Some people like to call it destiny, that they have a true calling but it’s none of that.  Destiny in itself, shows that you believe in the randomness of luck but it’s not that either.  Life is all what you make of it.  It might be selfish but all you have in the end, right before you die, is your story, first person, and it doesn’t matter if your normal, weird, dissolved or diluted it just means that you have to write it yourself. 
    After all of this my dream jobs changed drastically.  After skateboarding which faded fast after my depression starting talk with my parents, then it changed to high school teacher because my oldest brother Kane wanted to be a college professor and my older brother Sean wanted to teach elementary school.  But I never even reached high school when I had such impervious dreams.  Then it was a computer scientist because of my knowledge towards computers, my passion for video games and my ingenuity that persisted in my head.  I wanted to make my own programs like video games that would tether the world.  But then I was accepted to UIC for it, one of the top fifty schools for the major but it was to expensive and I familiarized myself with community college.  But what you want to do in life never has meant to me what you actually good at.  In a world where subjectivity is under sovereignty, being good at something means being a professional.  Being in the status of a professional means that you have thin boundaries to resign too.  But life isn’t continuous building upon itself in continuity but it’s how you perceive it.  I found out that I was good at writing not by teachers telling me, not by friends raving over my work, not by being published but by my own eyes not only enjoying what I read but my eyes searching for these stories.  Then my mind raced for the words to fit the atmospherical dubiance of this life we all live differently in parallel.  I used to think being professional meant that you made money in it but I was wrong.   Since life isn’t luck, I never wanted to mix my passion with my job.  They could blur one day, the definitions might become foggy, maybe I’ll change my mind like I have over the last decade but, just like those tapes, I’ve always wanted to stick to being amateur.