Waking up, I felt stale, gray.
It was like that most mornings those days, five months and a year since moving there, living in lower Alabama.
The feeling met its match. Looking out my room’s crucified panes, it could just as well’ve been a dull midday in winter. The sky was an unceasing alabaster vault, sagging pewter here and there. But new leaves had already uncurled on the inverted bronchia of trees. It was a May morning in 1986.
Pullouts and clippings from Transworld Skateboarding Magazine and Thrasher Magazine had replaced Iron Maiden and Judas Priest posters. Dead Kennedys and Sex Pistols album covers were also tacked to the walls. There were some stabs at original artwork, too — skateboarding and surfing scenes, mushroom clouds, mostly in pen and pencil.
I slipped a mixtape a girl named Michelle had lent me into my knockoff Walkman. Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Minor Threat met me where I was.
I decided to study the photos, in Xerox black and white, from a pro-am skating competition across the bay, in Mobile proper. It happened in some old airplane hangars a few weeks before. I hadn’t been able to go. Grounded for poor grades — that was the purported reason. A local low-budget skate zine’s coverage of the event, what I was studying, was better than Thrasher’s. Most everyone around thought so. Mainly because its writers didn’t treat us and where we lived like a joke — dueling banjo skate rats in America’s armpit.
I kept returning to the silhouette of someone — Lester Kasai? Eric Nash? Jeff Phillips? — balled up and attached to a skateboard in midair. The form frozen in a white sky framed by hangar doors open wide.
I needed to cut out.
I needed to skate.
I, left alone, my mind was blank.
I needed time to think, to get the memories from my mind.
— Iron Maiden, “The Number of the Beast”
To get out of others’ grips, to get out from under the past’s shadow, to get out of your own way, to get a hold of yourself — it’s best to forget.
Break free to reach your full potential.
Wipe the board clean. So you can create your real story. All by yourself. Out of nothing but your free will.
I can almost hear Mark “Rent Boy” Renton from Trainspotting.
“Choose life.”
Like Renton, I’m a creature of the Reagan and Thatcher years. With society dead and the glorious End of History just around the corner, I and everyone else were totally unfettered at the end of the second millennium anno domini. We could reinvent ourselves to our hearts’ content.
Forget. Part ways with the past.
That’s all it would take.
Wait.
I think I actually do hear someone’s voice this time.
“Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.”
Yep. There’s Fred Nietzsche’s ghost in the corner, thumping a spectral copy of On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say it, but Nietzsche’s got a serious practical streak.
It really shows in his work when he addresses the topic of history, a major form of memory. According to him, there’s too much of it.
Recollecting, bringing the past into the present, can too often translate into gravedigging.
If the past is weighing you down, like Jacob Marley’s rattling chains, then it’s doing you no favors.
It can reach the point where memory turns against the creative — generative — “powers of life.” It can starve us and paralyze us.
Because Nietzsche’s the one saying it, we should reject it.
But then we’ve got Hank Bergson on record, such as in The Creative Mind, saying similar things. Things like there’s “a constant effort of the mind to limit its horizon, to turn away from what it has a material interest in not seeing. . . . Life demands that we put on blinders, that we look neither to the right, nor to the left nor behind us, but straight ahead in the direction we have to go.”
Okay. Okay. Not a lot of people have ever even heard the name “Henri Bergson.” Never mind him once being a pioneer in psychology and what we now know as neuroscience. Never mind him being a big-name philosopher and Nobel laureate a century ago.
Well, during his heyday, Bergson had some landmark things to say about the brain, perception, memory, time, and evolution. Judging from early reactions to his magnum opus Matter and Memory, what he said wasn’t just landmark but earth-shattering. It might still be.
Cut and terms associated with cutting crop up fairly often throughout his work.
For good reason.
Our perception of the world and ourselves — body and mind — is an ongoing process of separation. We put distance between ourselves and the material world so that we can then act on it. We cut a human world “out of a wider canvas,” he explains in The Creative Mind. We do it “for the purposes of practical existence.”
We’re not the only ones. All living things do it. On the less complex band of the evolutionary spectrum, the amoeba does it. The cicada, on a more complex band, also does it. We humans, though, happen to have had our sensory channels so divided and subdivided that there’s more time between a stimulus and our action or inaction in relation to it.
Sure, if a wasp dive bombs our necks, there’s going to be no shortage of almost instantaneous howling and waving of arms. But reacting to stinging insects isn’t what occupies most people most of the time.
Sensorial complexity, which is a product of the separation process, has opened things up.
So there are sensations beyond visceral pain. There’s perception with layers and duration. There’s consciousness.
There’s time to form thoughts.
Now, when it comes to what we do with those thoughts, not to mention what we do with all those memories we’re going to clear from our minds, well . . .
You annihilated this week.
Now it's Sunday and you weep.
A future of fun?
Or a guilt-loaded run?
— Black Flag, “Annihilate This Week”
He threw me a block of ice cream from deep within a refrigerated truck. Nearly two quarts of Barber’s chocolate wrapped in thin cardboard.
I was pretty sure his name was Tom. That’s what the other guys kept calling him during this spur-of-the-moment heist on a bright and green late morning in April of ’85.
I struggled to get my feet onto the peddles of my bike. Dinged my shins. Kept wobbling. Gradually got my footing and balance. Right hand clenching handlebar, left arm cradling cold treasure like a football, I finally made my way from the grocery store loading bay to the abandoned school bus behind the skating rink and bowling alley.
Three other grocery truck bandits were already there.
I ripped off a corner of the sweating box. Sank my teeth in. The frozen milk steamed and then began to stream sugary mud over my fingers and down my arms.
Three more bandits clambered in.
Hot blood pulsed up my neck, into my scalp. Like it was trying to unite with the already warm April morning. Middle-parted hair slimed my face and neck, the scent of Prell soaked into the shoulders of my Powerslave t-shirt.
In a couple of months, I’d be giving away all my heavy metal vinyl, cassettes, and shirts.
The suffering . . . scour the entrails of their past and present for obscure and questionable occurrences that offer them the opportunity to revel in tormenting suspicions and to intoxicate themselves with the poison of their own malice: they tear open their oldest wounds, they bleed from long-healed scars, they make evildoers of their friends, wives, children, and whoever else stands closest to them.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Oh, come on!
How did Fred get back in here?!
But he does make a point. It’s a bad knack of his.
Just because we’ve got time to think doesn’t guarantee that the thinking we do is going to be healthy.
Especially when much of that thinking is overloaded with the past.
The past, which for most of us includes some amount of suffering, isn’t so easy to get past.
Let’s say a teenage kid in an abandoned school bus, gnawing and slurping pilfered ice cream, thinks he wants to break free. Break free from his parents and their hypocrisy. Break free from shadows still cast on him by his old home and friends. Break free from being the perennial victim of bullies. Break free from childhood in order to make a break for the horizon.
Instead of overcoming what really holds him back, instead of actually lighting out for the unknown, he’ll probably settle for much less while tricking himself into believing he’s flown with the sun into the horizon.
He won’t admit he really wants to settle scores and cast blame on others for his own choices and desires. He wants to launder his own act of theft by contrasting it with his father’s inveterate conmanship and thievery, his mother’s duplicity. He wants to somehow consign his former town and friends to the void because of the hurt he feels from being ripped away. He wants to bring pain to the kids who, since he was a toddler, made a soccer ball of his crotch. He wants to return the favor to all the people who treated his emotions like a dead frog hooked up to a 6-volt battery in biology class. He wants to be an adult who metes out what he’ll call justice, retribution for a life he believes he’s been — still being — robbed of.
To top it off, take these teenagers now on the bus with him, new and potential friends. He’s already cooking up excuses for rejecting them, holding them accountable for whatever shame or misfortune might come his way.
He’s failed to hear what Maiden, his current favorite band, has been telling him for a year and a half, since he bought The Number of the Beast for around five dollars at Kmart. Hell, even when he hasn’t been listening to the title track, the band’s practically been hitting him over the head with the message through the 32x24-inch poster of the album’s cover art hanging on his bedroom wall.
The guy in the track, who wants time to think and clear memories from his mind, is obviously distressed.
Given he’s the main character in a song written in the early ’80s, it’s no big surprise that he’d be a bit stressed out.
Let’s see. There was the manufactured collapse of both industrial capitalism and the public welfare state. The embrace of post-industrial finance capitalism, privatization, public austerity, and the corporate welfare state — aka neoliberalism. Hm. What else? Mass unemployment. Housing crises. Skyrocketing drug and alcohol dependency. Acute homelessness. The first Cold War hanging heavily over every thought, frosting the edges of every breath. Perpetual threats of terrorism attributed to a revolving cast of perpetrators. That’s just scratching the surface.
And we can assume the guy’s home life and experiences at school and work, or the unemployment line, haven’t been all sweetness and light.
Can’t blame the song’s protagonist for wanting a break.
But what does he do?
Only a few beats after complaining about needing time to think, he . . . uh . . . loses it.
Apparently hopped up on what he recalls from the horror show in the Book of Revelation, he lets his imagination run wild, enhancing the helter-skelter that he just said he wanted to release himself from.
All these other people dealing with the same shit he’s dealing with — he twists them into a demon-possessed horde, chanting and dancing around bonfires erected for black sabbaths.
For a brief moment, our hero senses that this can’t be right, that he’s not thinking clearly, that he might be fantasizing, that he’s painting the world with his inner torment.
There has to be another way to deal with the pandemonium.
Maybe call the cops. As if the so-called law hasn’t been contributing to the mess.
Turning off that fruitless road, he drives to the corner of Acacia Avenue and Wits End, where he’s struck by a brilliant plan.
He’ll give in to his delusions, then double down on them. Like something out of Paradise Lost — the brilliant but overproduced Protestant spinoff of Revelation — he decides the best way to rectify the situation is to become the grand master of the apocalypse. He’ll feed off its energy until he has all “the fire” and “the force.” Then he’ll make his “evil take its course.”
Dumbass.
I say this as a dumbass myself.
He’s not pulling himself out from under the past, definitely not away from all the pain and confusion it’s been causing him. No. He’s amplifying it, waging war with it, seeking vengeance, casting blame, tearing open old wounds, cutting open new ones.
He’s turned all his energies — bent all his will — toward embracing his warped image of the past and present, after having convinced himself that he can lord over it.
Despite his fantasies and rationalizations, though, he’s not going to be the master of anything. Except a master of being a slave.
He’s managed to get himself sucked even further into that old truth-untruth-good-evil-master-slave vortex. Yeah, the one Nietzsche spent most of his life warning everyone about, including himself. That is, until depression and a tumor behind his eye — not syphilis — pushed him into submission.
If only the teenager who madly tripped over his bike to escape with a block of Barber’s had really paid attention to that song.
Nope. I can’t do that to him. I can’t make an evildoer of him.
Have I learned nothing?
When the young soul, tortured by all kinds of disappointments, finally turns suspiciously against itself, still hot and wild, even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience — how wroth it is with itself now! how it tears itself to pieces, impatiently! how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, just as if it had been a deliberate blindness! In this transition one punishes oneself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
I had seen Tom before. Tâm Vịnh, I would learn. During the three months since I moved from just outside of Birmingham to the bayside of Baldwin County, we nodded in the middle school breezeways every once in a while, sometimes crossed paths at the convenience store his family lived behind. I was the new kid, so suspicion would creep across his face, harden his eyes. It didn’t help that I was a headbanger, which automatically threw me into a particular box of lower middle-class, working-class, and rural kids. He was friends with some of them, it being a small town. But like most thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, he was becoming more aware of things like socioeconomic hierarchies and how affiliations could determine prospects. He was making decisions. I wasn’t quite ready, as the new kid, to be so conscious and decisive. Part of me was still two-hundred and sixty-odd miles up I-65. The part of me on Mobile Bay’s eastern shore was navigating sketchy social ground, posing as if I wasn’t mourning and scared and lonesome.
Lethal, deadly, hung, drawn and quartered,
he slaughtered and faltered and altered the world.
— Judas Priest, "Stained Class"
Well, lookee here.
I’ve pulled out the scissors.
And some tape.
And a world-wise narrator’s voiceover recording.
When I started writing whatever this is, it was supposed to be a matter of jotting down what I could as I glimpsed a little current rising to the surface that, for almost four decades, had been meandering deep.
Along with many people, I’ve been conditioned to think in terms of gathering and managing information, which these days often translates into producing narratives.
Novels and movies — whether they come out of major or indie studios, major or minor publishing houses. Bingeable streaming TV series and subscription podcasts. Most modern news and documentaries and histories and biographies and memoirs and Instagrams and Xs. All “timelines” geared for performance and consumption, bundled and funneled into a data Jet Stream.
Must download. Must make narratives. Must upload. Must download. Must . . .
So, without a second thought, I conformed.
It’s not enough that I zeroed in on one facet of one current within a broad, deep ocean. Not enough that I froze it, diced it up, rearranged it.
No. At the expense of the memory, I had to go and splice it with a sneaky editorial. So fake. So full of half-truths.
To think, for instance, I believed I could get away with claiming that I wasn’t making some heavy social decisions immediately after I moved to lower Alabama. I might not’ve wanted to make them, but I did. A teenager not being judgmental every second of every day? For real?!
It’s not enough I did that, either.
No. I had to go and use Tâm as a proxy, as some sort of human shield.
What scares me is I did all that more or less instinctively.
Making it no less a betrayal — more than one betrayal, in fact.
It’s not that I told anything patently untrue about Tâm, but I reduced him to a narrative function.
While depicting myself as some sort of refugee, when I was really an average member of the American mobile-but-not-so-upwardly-mobile lower middle class, Tâm was the fifth of eight children in a literal refugee family. He was a toddler when his parents and siblings piled into small boats at night, fleeing from a burning coastal town in central Vietnam.
Formerly a member of Vietnam’s military aristocracy, Tâm’s father would spend the rest of his working days in America as a cook. So would Tâm’s mother, until poor health made it impossible.
Tâm was brought up Catholic, his father’s religion by way of French colonialism. But he didn’t always feel at home in the church. His mother had converted from Buddhism in order to marry his father. Of his siblings, he was the only one, so far as I know, who harbored some resentment over that.
He wrestled with being Vietnamese, an identity chock full of contention. He struggled with being an American, an identity shot through with maddening contradictions. He was, though, the one in his family the most adept at fitting in. Not so much in a patriotic sense — all of his brothers and sisters surpassed him in the “Stars and Stripes Forever” department — but socially and culturally. He was embarrassed by his otherness most of the time, but he was also the most critical of American arrogance, American ignorance, American inequality, American hypocrisy.
Okay. I need to stop.
Despite my intentions, I’m betraying him even more, not to mention his family, Vietnamese Americans, and Vietnamese people in general. I’m giving too much away about his life. Even so, I’m still failing to give a decent picture of him.
I’m still using him as a cutout. Whether two- or three-dimensional, it doesn’t matter.
For what purpose?
Well, for one, I’m using his life to anchor and frame a narrative imposed on a memory derived from my life.
But why him?
Likely because he was one of the few people friendly to me soon after I moved to the Mobile area. I respected — admired — him for that. He really didn’t have anything much to gain by opening the door of friendship to me at the time, but he opened it anyway.
I admired him as well because, to my thirteen-year-old mind, he was just plain cool. He was sort of an amalgam of Soda and Darry Curtis from The Outsiders.
It didn’t hurt that Tâm and I had a lot in common.
Admiration and affinity, though, can pose an unexpected problem. I guess not all that unexpected when dealing with an especially insecure person who’s playing hide and seek with himself.
And here I am, forty years later, still imposing myself on Tâm, casting my anemic self-image onto him. I’m still stealing from him. And if I’m being honest, I’ve been doing it to so many others.
I guess I’ve done it in order to enhance or maybe even recreate myself — make an ideal self. At least that’s what Nietzsche, who can’t help butting in, says in Human, All Too Human. I’ve been using Tâm to forge my “ego’s new image,” even though I may “call it by the other person’s name.” And because I supposedly admired and shared affinities with him and the others I’ve done this to — friends, loved ones, anyone who showed me kindness — I’ve hidden my thievery from myself. Deception on top of deception.
To simply throw this into boxes labeled “Projection” and “Narcissism” doesn’t suffice. It doesn’t help. But it sure would make things simpler, wouldn’t it?
Well, Nietzsche’s not the kind of guy to let people off so easy.
But it’s Nietzsche, so we can ignore him and whatever he’s coughed up.
Oh, great.
Here comes Hank Bergson to put in his two cents again — to explain that something in the neighborhood of self-deception has indeed been going on.
During the practical process of getting through the day, I and most people form a “second self,” he says in Time and Free Will. This second self “obscures the first.” The first self doesn’t exist clearly set apart from everything else yet, and it doesn’t exist primarily in the realm of divisible time. The second self, though, is an existence “made up of distinct moments, whose states are separated from one another and easily expressed in words.”
Carving oneself out of the broader world is in many ways practical. It can also prove helpful to dice up the broader world into manageable bits, such as things and concepts and causes and effects and chronologies. Life is transformed into quantities, exchangeable values, interchangeable parts, extractable resources. But something often happens in all this practicality. Life — as in vitality, vibrancy, fecundity, creativity, indeterminacy — has been sent packing or shoved down a manhole, if it’s not already been strangled and left in a sludge pit.
Betraying life by micromanaging it. Betraying life by siphoning off what makes it live. Betraying life by pasting my thin, fragmentary image on it and calling that living.
Rocks crumble, streams run dry — the silkworm, dead,
still clings onto the string of silk it’s spun.
— Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kiểu
I would, a couple of weeks after the ice cream heist, run into Tâm outside our daily norm again.
I had a head full of bike tricks brewing as I pedaled out of the garage of the single-story house I lived in. I was heading to the bend in the street three houses down.
I would find him where concrete swelled up from the asphalt street’s elbow. The embankment stood near four feet at its highest and was six feet wide. It retained earth where rainwater would flow into a steep ravine.
As the petrified wave came into view, Tâm scaled its sharp incline on his modded red Schwinn Scrambler. He used the momentum to pop onto the back wheel. He stood on posts extending from the back axle, and the bike became a pogo stick. After a few bounces, he brought the front wheel slowly down, balanced on the crest without a teeter for a couple of breaths, moved feet back to pedals, descended, and glided across the street to where I was. I had one foot on the ground, the other on a pedal of my Diamondback. I did my best to look cool, to hide my amazement. And I did what I could to squash the envy slithering behind it.
It would be only a couple of weeks afterwards when spiders and dust in the garage would begin staking their claims on my bike.
From an infinite horizon he then retreats into himself, into the smallest egoistic region, and there must wither and dry up. . . .
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life
Cutting seriously concerns a somewhat popular but not quite mainstream philosopher writing these days.
And by cutting, I mean someone physically taking sharp objects and incising their own skin.
Byung-Chul Han isn’t being a Chicken Little. According to a report by the American Psychological Association, around fifteen percent of teens and twenty-somethings engage in “non-suicidal self-harm,” the more clinical term for the phenomenon. A little over one percent of pre-adolescent kids do it, and around five percent of adults on the other side of their twenties do.
I never got into cutting myself in that way.
I was a chronic nail biter from childhood until my late twenties. From fourth grade through seventh grade, I pulled hair out of my head, to the point of patchy baldness. I got a bunch of tattoos in my thirties, but I’m not sure that’s in the same ballpark.
In elementary school, though, I did begin to develop a talent for cutting off interests, experiences, relationships, and, yes, memories. It became compulsive.
And wouldn’t you know it, B-C Han says that cutting is a compulsion driven by an “imperative of authenticity.” This imperative, he explains in Capitalism and the Death Drive, is something I didn’t even realize I’d signed up for, absorbed. That’s how ideology works. But like most people these days, I was and still am a “performance-oriented subject . . . compelled to achieve ever more,” living with a “permanent lack, and with feelings of guilt.” Life in such a high-performance framework — always striving to be my best, authentic self — isn’t just a matter of competing against others. It’s “primarily” a matter of getting ahead of myself.
So, since childhood, what have I done obligingly?
Focus on myself. Constantly question myself. Listen to myself. Lay siege on myself. And “not least,” Han would stress, accuse myself.
And here I was thinking I was setting things up for fresh starts, clearing the way for the true me.
I mean, growing up, I was surrounded by people in the Deep South going on and on about being Born Again. Even though I wasn’t Baptist or evangelical, I grew up knee deep in notions like the New Covenant and the Resurrection.
If there was a dogma in the shaky household I spent my childhood in, it was this: Improve, adapt, change, find, justify, redefine, explain, never explain, deal with, take charge of, apologize for, never apologize for, stand up for, account for, live for yourself.
And topping things off, my so-called formative years unrolled in the ’80s. I, along with practically everyone else in America, was hounded constantly by advertisements for diets and exercise regimens and gym memberships and medical breakthroughs. New must-have clothes and hair styles and accessories and pastimes and music were dropping every five minutes. Anyway, if you didn’t keep up with the times and keep updating your skill sets, you’d end up owning nothing but a lonely heart. So the story goes.
No doubt, to one degree or another, the story had been going that way for some time. Centuries even. Yet it kicked into overdrive around the end of the Vietnam War.
There are a few people, probably more, who aren’t so adept at managing the demands of the kind of world they’re presented with these days.
Cutting is one way of coping.
Han points out that, to some people, cutting “provides a deep sense of relief.” Those who do this sort of thing have become numb because of nonstop bombardment by performative demands and the “persistent inner emptiness” that ensues. Cutting is the only way to feel something again.
Han, though, throws a bucket of cold water onto cutting.
It’s ultimately “a vain attempt to produce oneself.” It’s still trying to mean something — be of value — in the existing framework. As on the fringes as cutting might be, it’s still playing by the rules of the game the cutter supposedly wants to opt out of.
I don’t discount Han or the research he’s done.
But he comes at cutting from an angle that slides past another rationale for the compulsion. Judging from his other stuff, it’s a rationale he’d probably agree with.
I’m thinking of excision, cutting to remove.
There are at least two degrees of it.
Cutting can be an attempt to remove feeling. Numbness is the objective — as in becoming inured, building up a protective barrier of literal or figurative scar tissue.
At the extreme, in the desperate hope that agony can be escaped or banished, some will attempt to cut out or lob off parts of themselves that they believe house the perceived sources of pain. And just to be sure, they’ll often remove surrounding healthy tissue.
Not physically, but psychically, I’ve spent much of my life in the excision camp of cutters.
Thinking now of just all the memories I’ve taken a Ginsu to, things haven’t gone the way I thought they would.
“The stump remaining bleeds enormous amounts of possible continuations.” I’m snaking and repurposing this metaphor from Raymond Geuss.
I’d just add — memories aren’t so much like the limb that’s been hacked off or its flesh and bone remainder; they’re more like what flows inside and outside the body.
Wherever memories go and whatever forms they take, they’re always there.
I thought I had left it behind,
in another fucking time,
when boys were boys, girls were girls,
and faces were hard to find.
It followed me!
It followed me!
It followed me!
It followed me!
— Minor Threat, “It Follows”
“Check you later.”
That’s how I left things in Bayside Bikes one day after school in mid-May of ’85.
Pat had talked me into meeting him at the bike shop.
We’d become fast friends after I was recruited to sing in the heavy metal band he played guitar for. He was a musical savant, like someone you’d see on That’s Incredible or 20/20. Even though a year behind me, a seventh grader, he seemed older. That included older than me. He also seemed to have stepped out of the mid-’70s, off some California beach. Blond hair to his shoulder blades. Raggedy, threadbare t-shirts. Either cut-off blue jeans or mid-thigh red running shorts. Chronically barefoot.
Pat was, as far as I knew at the time, the only headbanger in our small town who skated. His insane metal guitar chops kept him from getting beat up by other headbangers. His gnarly freestyle skating skills earned him a bit of leeway from local skaters. Being best friends with the bike shop owner’s son didn’t hurt either.
“Hey, man,” I said as I sheepishly stepped near him on the sidewalk by the shop. I had walked the mile from my house.
“Hey, man,” Pat said back. He was balanced on a motionless skateboard, a board literally out of the mid-’70s. Narrow, not so long, beat up, suspended over translucent-red conical wheels. Without his calloused feet touching the ground, he brought the board vertical, onto its tail’s edge. He had somehow slipped his right foot on the back truck and wheels, the toes of his left curled around the board’s pointed nose. Arms spread for balance, he froze. A quick jump, and he was back to how I first found him.
We went inside.
Hanging from the ceiling and walls of the main room of the former corner gas station and garage were vibrantly colored planks of wood. I counted around twenty. Most of them measured in the neighborhood of 30x10 inches. The only area where skateboards weren’t was a small showroom off to the right for bicycles. Six or seven of them were on a rack, mainly ten-speeds.
To say I was overwhelmed doesn’t quite cut it.
I hid my amazement as much as I could. I reminded myself that I was a headbanger who, until recently, rode a BMX bike.
I am not a skate punk. I am not a skate punk. Not a skate punk!
Pat introduced me to Dũng Vịnh.
I’d seen him around but had never officially met him. He was Tâm’s younger-by-nine-minutes brother, his fraternal twin. I figured that since I was kind of on speaking terms with Tâm, I was with Dũng.
I sat down on one of the stools at the shop’s counter, the one to the left of his, and I ran my mouth.
I practically gave him my resumé, as much of one as a guy a couple of weeks shy of his fourteenth birthday could give. And like most resumés, it was composed of one-third facts to two-thirds delusional garbage.
He sat stiffly, keeping his stony face forward. The only way I knew he was registering me was a periodic glance from the corner of his left eye.
My head was like a spinning top as I ran my mouth, taking in all the decks and wheels and trucks and rails and skid plates and stickers and skate magazines and . . .
There was a constant stream of guys with choppy haircuts wearing graphic t-shirts I couldn’t decode. Flooding in, flooding out. Outside, flowing past the picture window.
Excited. Excited voices. Excited eyes. Excited movements. Just excited.
My eyes kept landing on two decks.
A large splatter of fluorescent paint on a gridwork of cubes, with a big G&S in the middle, covered the bottom side of one. The other one was painted all red except for Kryptonics silkscreened across the middle of the top side. In the expanse between the truck holes on the bottom side was a cavernous mouth with mucousy saliva dripping from its tongue and jagged teeth.
The Gordon and Smith deck, despite having no mouth, screamed ’80s. I happened to like the aesthetic of the era. But I kept hearing the guys in the shop mock the deck, coining it the “Q*bert board,” after the popular arcade game. Even though I really liked the deck, not to mention the game, that nixed that.
Anyway, I wasn’t ready to tear myself from my metal life. Not quite yet. With its rictus maw, the Kryptonics deck reminded me of Iron Maiden’s nemesis-slash-mascot, Eddie. The sticky green slime came close to satisfying my Gen X affection for fluorescence. So that settled that. It would be, in a couple of weeks, what I blew my life savings on.
I tired myself out taking it all in, and I’d run out of resumé material.
I patted Dũng on the shoulder as I slid off the stool. I felt him wince more than saw it. “Check you later,” I said. He turned slightly. A quick expression, somewhere between embarrassed and intrigued, crossed his face. A terse nod followed.
I drifted out of the shop, back into the spring afternoon.
Unchain the colours before my eyes.
Yesterday's sorrows, tomorrow's white lies. Scan the horizon.
The clouds take me higher. I shall return from out of the . . .
— Iron Maiden, “Remember Tomorrow”
I prefer overcast days now. Fall and winter ones in particular.
One of the first things to hit me when this memory from the mid-’80s resurfaced was that my favorite days were once mostly bright green, gilded by pollen and infused with Gulf Coast heat.
Before I could put too much thought into this minor detail, I felt bemused and a little pleased. Regret and nostalgia, surprisingly, didn’t spring up.
Then, barely another breath later, the compulsion stepped in: Pinpoint when the shift occurred and establish why it did. Record and submit all your findings in a detailed, illustrated, well-documented report for review. After which, expect to revise and resubmit.
That’s how it goes with most of my memories. And I’ve been in the middle of a very busy intersection of them for as long as I can remember. All the way back to infancy.
This memory. This memory that I initially thought I was going to observe passively. This memory that I turned around and vivisected. This memory whose entrails I spread out for divination.
It’s not a particularly good one or bad one. Not even a major one. Or so I assume.
Regardless, it’s been way back in the background until recently. Or as I prefer to say, it’s been meandering deep in a broad ocean.
This memory has brought to my attention other memories intermingled with it. Ones I believed I had moved far away from.
Memories aren’t all I thought I’d successfully kept at a safe distance or expediently sliced and diced.
Enter, once again, poor Nietzsche.
I haven’t been completely upfront when it comes to his take on the past.
The past. History. Memory. It’s not all bad. It comes in different forms.
The forms Nietzsche warns about are heavy with “a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which injures every living thing and finally destroys it.” These forms of the past are produced more abundantly than others.
The other forms, though, are what potentially enable people to grow out of themselves, transform and assimilate “everything past and alien, to heal wounds, replace what is lost and reshape broken forms” out of themselves. This is a crucial motif that runs throughout On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. And it crops up elsewhere in Nietzsche’s writing.
When Nietzsche talks about “forgetting,” shrugging off the “excess of history,” living “unhistorically,” he’s talking about life no longer being dominated by forms of the past that make “the past as hearty nourishment” unavailable. He’s talking about clearing blockages between the past and present that have, at best, reduced living to a trickle.
He’s not talking about a whole-hog purge of the past. Not talking about erasing painful memories of suffering and terrible events. Nietzsche knows that life depends greatly on the past, warts and all, in order to flourish. Living beings need a vantage from which to see “an infinite horizon” and from which to tilt toward that horizon.
And I can’t help returning to the fact that it’s Nietzsche who says everything past can be turned into something that nourishes and heals life instead of something that paralyzes it or worse.
So credit where it’s due.
But still, what’s to be made of the sorts of remembering, recollecting, recalling, reminiscing, documenting, confessing, testifying, and memorializing that saturate the world today?
So much of it emits the odor “of insomnia and of rumination.”
So much is geared toward merely putting things in their places.
So much is obsessed with litigating and relitigating grievances for their own sake.
So much of remembering entails being a tormented super sleuth. Like a Kurt Wallander or an Evangeline Navarro piecing together evidence and scrutinizing suspects to zero in on what amounts to an original sin.
It’s mostly come to corralling information into a set of various but standard formats. Then revising and editing things into digestible — possibly enjoyable, hopefully monetizable — scripts.
Most of these sorts of remembrance look like games a stifled life would play on itself, imagining that existence boils down to an “arrangement and rearrangement of parts which supposedly merely shift from one place to another.” That’s what Bergson claims in The Creative Mind. I tend to agree with him.
Maybe there are other ways to live with memories and engage with the past — ways that don’t work against people, against living.
Maybe.
I need to skate.
To work through.