This Is My Blog on Holiday
I still refuse to believe that Labor Day is an actual, legitimate holiday. Its pretense, for one, is completely backwards (and thereby perfectly American): in order to celebrate our hard-working laborers, let's recognize them by giving them...one day off. Only one. Conveniently, right around the time students start to head back to school and you could use that day to run around, get their shit together, prepare them to transition back into the school year, et cetera. You know, all that labor you don't have time to do because you're laboring at work, remember?
I can't complain all that much, though, because Labor Day for me = no need to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn and drag myself to campus for the 50-minute class I teach on Mondays. This day is like a godsend because instead of totally derailing the nice long break between my Friday seminar (which ends at 3:20pm) and my next class (Tuesday at 6:30pm), the class just doesn't happen. So it actually feels like the quasi-four-day weekend I'd imagined it would kinda sorta be.
Not that the extra time has gone towards any particularly productive use. Sure, I've been catching up on my work and my reading, especially, but there's always more to do that I haven't yet done, so no self-congratulations are in order. I also haven't written any more of the story that was begging to pour out of my soul just days ago -- that well hath run a bit dry, and I'm waiting for the appropriate inspiration to renew my creative passions once more.
However, what I did accomplish this weekend was a bit of a personal realization, one that I feel will help me with my writing from both a creative and a technical standpoint. The road to this realization, naturally, was unpaved, unmarked, and unintentionally trodden upon, but it also consists of two additional elements that inevitably crop up as important themes in my writing and thinking: an adventure, and a nostalgic self-reflective trip into the past.
It happened Saturday, as Danielle and I were attempting to find ways to fill our day after we finished watching a monumental afternoon of college football. The Hokies had, despite several suggestions to the contrary, kept it together and taken a relatively unimpressive but emotionally triumphant 17-7 victory over a tenacious East Carolina team; the Nittany Lions had, despite the suggestions that there was a game being played, instead treated the arrival of Florida International as an occasion for devastation, leveling them without prejudice by the punishing score of 59-0; and the Michigan Wolverines had, despite the assumption that the #5 team in the nation didn't need to take their home opener against an FCS/I-AA team all that seriously in order to win by a healthy margin, went down faster than a Thai hooker and saw their hopes, dreams, and AP ranking plummet as quickly as the last-second field goal that Corey Lynch blocked, sealing Appalachian State's shocking 34-32 upset -- an upset, as it were, for the ages.
What to do after such a draining, historical sports day? Why, go roller skating, of course!
There is, off in yonder distance, a roller skating rink that holds public skating sessions on Saturdays from 4:30pm until 7:00pm, and then again from 7:00pm until 10:30pm. "Yonder distance" being the operative phrase here, though at 4:00pm, when we had yet to complete our necessary run to Target and Wegman's--
By the time we returned to the apartment after Wegmaning, it was well after 5:00pm, and we presumed that we wouldn't make it to the rink before 6:00pm, making the first session less than worth it. We'd wait until after 7:00pm and then head out, it was decided, although we didn't leave until after 8:30pm, on account of reasons that are clearly not important enough for either of us to remember right now. (Did we go somewhere? Sit around the apartment watching Clean House...again? Were we waiting on th--fuck, that's it! We were waiting on the laundry to finish! Success!)
It didn't take long for a tinge of regret to set in. I had looked at a trusty Mapquest map which told me that, in order to get to the roller rink, you needed to make a left onto Fox Hollow Road right across from Beaver Stadium, then follow the signs to the University Park Airport, at which point you make a left onto High Tech Road and the rink should make itself clear within seconds. All of this was true (except, perhaps, for that last part) but the descent of twilight on the land made this a much more challenging and creepy venture. There was no one to help guide us if we suspected we were lost: the people were like spirits, going about their lives unaware of their state of bei--oops, sorry, got a little carried away there.
Once we turned and drove away from Beaver Stadium, the whole scene became more and more unnerving. This was a backwoods Pennsylvania road, with no lighting and piss-poor signage, and all I had to go on were tiny green signs with a plane and an arrow. By the time we saw the airport, a little confidence had been restored, but the undulating hills of rural PA and the lack of natural or artificial light play a cruel trick of perspective: it always seems so close, but falls so quickly away that it's like a horrible tease. And when you're on a very small, two-lane road with a 55 mph speed limit and very little sense of what falls outside the range of your headlights, you want that airport right fucking there as soon as possible.
We eventually reached the airport, and made the turn onto High Tech, but found ourselves not in the Penn Skates parking lot, but a long, unadorned road filled with nondescript warehouse-type buildings on either side and no inviting street lights in the distance. I was trying to be the tough, manly man, but I was definitely afraid some creepo was gonna launch himself at the car at that point. Eventually, through some miracle of vision that evaded me, Danielle noted a small, hanging-from-one-screw sign for Penn Skates next to -- you guessed it -- a nondescript warehouse-type building.
Did somebody say sketchy?
The drive there was, but once we entered the building, it was like a blast from the past, and by the past, I mean middle school. A huge cartoon mural spread along the wall on the long end of the rink, covering the history of cartoons from Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner to the cast of Futurama. The man who took our money -- and gave us a discount because there was only about an hour left of skating; what a deal! -- didn't even flinch when I dropped a very Jersey but decidedly not rural PA bit of vulgarity into our discussion, and suddenly the place felt a little more like home.
One stroll around was enough to take me back to the old days of Skater's World, before it became just another big box office store. It was lit far more brightly than Skater's World ever was, but it had the assortment of old school video games (I mean, seriously, the place had a working arcade machine, circa 1980s, that let you choose between Pac-Man, Galaga, and Donkey Kong); the orange bench-style seats screwed into the floor on either side of a flat formica-top table; short seats that were covered in carpeting of the same pattern as that on the ground, making them seem like pimples emerging from the floor; an old-school skate rental desk with both standard and inline skates; and enough pastel colors to make the place feel like a time warped holdover from the early '90s.
We skated around to crappy pop tunes for a while -- I on appropriately orange and black rollerblades, Danielle in canvas-colored standard skates -- when I lamented aloud the lack of consistently good music. It was in saying this that I realized that much of the appeal of the old Skater's World was not necessarily the skating: it was the atmosphere. It was the crazy neon lights and the soundtrack (which, at the time, was pumping pop tunes as well, but pop in my day was good alternative, and not crap), the groups of people you went with. For Danielle, it was the punk shows. For me, it was my first experience, at the tender age of nine, with heartbreak. There was so much I associated with Skater's World -- and now associated with this place, since the environs conjured up so many memories -- that were hallmarks of my childhood.
And with each new experience we discussed, I began to realize, like Billy Joel did 24 years previous, that the good old days weren't always good. Granted, nothing I experienced in Skater's World or in 17 years of growing up in Wayne ever really damaged me too badly, but I started suspecting it should have. And it was here that the conversation became much more introspective. I began doing what I, as an English major, am supposed to do: overanalyze everything. It started bothering Danielle to the point where she asked me why I was doing it.
But then it hit me. Of course it has to do with English, and with reading, and with writing. Of course I need to overanalyze all these things: it's what I do. It's how I come up with all the creative ideas I develop and then let smolder in the corner while I figure out how to finish them. Most of them languish because I feel I don't have enough complexity (in my opinion) to see them through to a lengthy completion. I want to prove to myself that I can do things like that, so I need to keep on digging deeper. Not because I'll ever really figure them out, but because, in identifying myself as a writer, I've ascribed myself to the task of joining the pantheon of writers before me. And English has taught me that the pantheon exists as a window not only into the author's soul, but into the souls of a generation, of a time and a place, and, sometimes, if you're really lucky, for all time. That's why we still read the classics, and why we search constantly for the next great author: not only because it's a lucrative business, but because that next voice could be the spokesperson for a time, a generation, an experience, the experience.
What I ultimately learned from skating on Saturday night is that my whole purpose for writing, and essentially for being, is to have those conversations and try to be an active part of that experience. I'm savvy enough to know that I will never completely understand the kinds of topics that I address when I talk or write, but being part of that conversation clarifies things just a little bit more. It keeps things interesting, keeps things moving, and keeps me and everyone around me (so sorry to you all) on our respective toes. It's the same reason I litter my work with obscure references to Snakes on a Plane and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (please, please, please tell me you caught them...): partly because it brings more of our cultural experience into the conversation, but also because it's fun to see who gets it. If there's nothing to be gleaned as a lesson from this post, let it be that every part of our individual experiences become an inextricable fiber in the fabric of our lives, and that in appreciating them, and only in appreciating them, do we too become fibers in the grand quilt of the human experience.
That, and Applebee's new Ultimate Trios are fucking tasty. Yum yum yum.
I can't complain all that much, though, because Labor Day for me = no need to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn and drag myself to campus for the 50-minute class I teach on Mondays. This day is like a godsend because instead of totally derailing the nice long break between my Friday seminar (which ends at 3:20pm) and my next class (Tuesday at 6:30pm), the class just doesn't happen. So it actually feels like the quasi-four-day weekend I'd imagined it would kinda sorta be.
Not that the extra time has gone towards any particularly productive use. Sure, I've been catching up on my work and my reading, especially, but there's always more to do that I haven't yet done, so no self-congratulations are in order. I also haven't written any more of the story that was begging to pour out of my soul just days ago -- that well hath run a bit dry, and I'm waiting for the appropriate inspiration to renew my creative passions once more.
However, what I did accomplish this weekend was a bit of a personal realization, one that I feel will help me with my writing from both a creative and a technical standpoint. The road to this realization, naturally, was unpaved, unmarked, and unintentionally trodden upon, but it also consists of two additional elements that inevitably crop up as important themes in my writing and thinking: an adventure, and a nostalgic self-reflective trip into the past.
It happened Saturday, as Danielle and I were attempting to find ways to fill our day after we finished watching a monumental afternoon of college football. The Hokies had, despite several suggestions to the contrary, kept it together and taken a relatively unimpressive but emotionally triumphant 17-7 victory over a tenacious East Carolina team; the Nittany Lions had, despite the suggestions that there was a game being played, instead treated the arrival of Florida International as an occasion for devastation, leveling them without prejudice by the punishing score of 59-0; and the Michigan Wolverines had, despite the assumption that the #5 team in the nation didn't need to take their home opener against an FCS/I-AA team all that seriously in order to win by a healthy margin, went down faster than a Thai hooker and saw their hopes, dreams, and AP ranking plummet as quickly as the last-second field goal that Corey Lynch blocked, sealing Appalachian State's shocking 34-32 upset -- an upset, as it were, for the ages.
What to do after such a draining, historical sports day? Why, go roller skating, of course!
There is, off in yonder distance, a roller skating rink that holds public skating sessions on Saturdays from 4:30pm until 7:00pm, and then again from 7:00pm until 10:30pm. "Yonder distance" being the operative phrase here, though at 4:00pm, when we had yet to complete our necessary run to Target and Wegman's--
note to self: sometime in the near future, you must write a glowing acclamation of the Wegman's, preferably adopting the style of Jen Lancaster, if not in its cynicism and humor then definitely in its bordering-on-religious praise--we could not have predicted that the drive there would have resembled something out of a Texas Chain Saw Massacre rip-off.
By the time we returned to the apartment after Wegmaning, it was well after 5:00pm, and we presumed that we wouldn't make it to the rink before 6:00pm, making the first session less than worth it. We'd wait until after 7:00pm and then head out, it was decided, although we didn't leave until after 8:30pm, on account of reasons that are clearly not important enough for either of us to remember right now. (Did we go somewhere? Sit around the apartment watching Clean House...again? Were we waiting on th--fuck, that's it! We were waiting on the laundry to finish! Success!)
It didn't take long for a tinge of regret to set in. I had looked at a trusty Mapquest map which told me that, in order to get to the roller rink, you needed to make a left onto Fox Hollow Road right across from Beaver Stadium, then follow the signs to the University Park Airport, at which point you make a left onto High Tech Road and the rink should make itself clear within seconds. All of this was true (except, perhaps, for that last part) but the descent of twilight on the land made this a much more challenging and creepy venture. There was no one to help guide us if we suspected we were lost: the people were like spirits, going about their lives unaware of their state of bei--oops, sorry, got a little carried away there.
Once we turned and drove away from Beaver Stadium, the whole scene became more and more unnerving. This was a backwoods Pennsylvania road, with no lighting and piss-poor signage, and all I had to go on were tiny green signs with a plane and an arrow. By the time we saw the airport, a little confidence had been restored, but the undulating hills of rural PA and the lack of natural or artificial light play a cruel trick of perspective: it always seems so close, but falls so quickly away that it's like a horrible tease. And when you're on a very small, two-lane road with a 55 mph speed limit and very little sense of what falls outside the range of your headlights, you want that airport right fucking there as soon as possible.
We eventually reached the airport, and made the turn onto High Tech, but found ourselves not in the Penn Skates parking lot, but a long, unadorned road filled with nondescript warehouse-type buildings on either side and no inviting street lights in the distance. I was trying to be the tough, manly man, but I was definitely afraid some creepo was gonna launch himself at the car at that point. Eventually, through some miracle of vision that evaded me, Danielle noted a small, hanging-from-one-screw sign for Penn Skates next to -- you guessed it -- a nondescript warehouse-type building.
Did somebody say sketchy?
The drive there was, but once we entered the building, it was like a blast from the past, and by the past, I mean middle school. A huge cartoon mural spread along the wall on the long end of the rink, covering the history of cartoons from Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner to the cast of Futurama. The man who took our money -- and gave us a discount because there was only about an hour left of skating; what a deal! -- didn't even flinch when I dropped a very Jersey but decidedly not rural PA bit of vulgarity into our discussion, and suddenly the place felt a little more like home.
One stroll around was enough to take me back to the old days of Skater's World, before it became just another big box office store. It was lit far more brightly than Skater's World ever was, but it had the assortment of old school video games (I mean, seriously, the place had a working arcade machine, circa 1980s, that let you choose between Pac-Man, Galaga, and Donkey Kong); the orange bench-style seats screwed into the floor on either side of a flat formica-top table; short seats that were covered in carpeting of the same pattern as that on the ground, making them seem like pimples emerging from the floor; an old-school skate rental desk with both standard and inline skates; and enough pastel colors to make the place feel like a time warped holdover from the early '90s.
We skated around to crappy pop tunes for a while -- I on appropriately orange and black rollerblades, Danielle in canvas-colored standard skates -- when I lamented aloud the lack of consistently good music. It was in saying this that I realized that much of the appeal of the old Skater's World was not necessarily the skating: it was the atmosphere. It was the crazy neon lights and the soundtrack (which, at the time, was pumping pop tunes as well, but pop in my day was good alternative, and not crap), the groups of people you went with. For Danielle, it was the punk shows. For me, it was my first experience, at the tender age of nine, with heartbreak. There was so much I associated with Skater's World -- and now associated with this place, since the environs conjured up so many memories -- that were hallmarks of my childhood.
And with each new experience we discussed, I began to realize, like Billy Joel did 24 years previous, that the good old days weren't always good. Granted, nothing I experienced in Skater's World or in 17 years of growing up in Wayne ever really damaged me too badly, but I started suspecting it should have. And it was here that the conversation became much more introspective. I began doing what I, as an English major, am supposed to do: overanalyze everything. It started bothering Danielle to the point where she asked me why I was doing it.
But then it hit me. Of course it has to do with English, and with reading, and with writing. Of course I need to overanalyze all these things: it's what I do. It's how I come up with all the creative ideas I develop and then let smolder in the corner while I figure out how to finish them. Most of them languish because I feel I don't have enough complexity (in my opinion) to see them through to a lengthy completion. I want to prove to myself that I can do things like that, so I need to keep on digging deeper. Not because I'll ever really figure them out, but because, in identifying myself as a writer, I've ascribed myself to the task of joining the pantheon of writers before me. And English has taught me that the pantheon exists as a window not only into the author's soul, but into the souls of a generation, of a time and a place, and, sometimes, if you're really lucky, for all time. That's why we still read the classics, and why we search constantly for the next great author: not only because it's a lucrative business, but because that next voice could be the spokesperson for a time, a generation, an experience, the experience.
What I ultimately learned from skating on Saturday night is that my whole purpose for writing, and essentially for being, is to have those conversations and try to be an active part of that experience. I'm savvy enough to know that I will never completely understand the kinds of topics that I address when I talk or write, but being part of that conversation clarifies things just a little bit more. It keeps things interesting, keeps things moving, and keeps me and everyone around me (so sorry to you all) on our respective toes. It's the same reason I litter my work with obscure references to Snakes on a Plane and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (please, please, please tell me you caught them...): partly because it brings more of our cultural experience into the conversation, but also because it's fun to see who gets it. If there's nothing to be gleaned as a lesson from this post, let it be that every part of our individual experiences become an inextricable fiber in the fabric of our lives, and that in appreciating them, and only in appreciating them, do we too become fibers in the grand quilt of the human experience.
That, and Applebee's new Ultimate Trios are fucking tasty. Yum yum yum.
posted by Dave at 9/03/2007 08:41:00 PM
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