For this experiment, I decided to go the fasting route, to starve myself of digitalization.
It started more or less by accident, when my phone died, taking my music with it as well. I was left without ties to my friends, it being around midnight, and I was in the middle of manhattan, not yet heading home. I just walked around, listening to the silence of a city that supposedly never sleeps. I eventually got cold and decided to head away home, deciding to take the bus so that I could see the city on my way back. I made change and got on the M4.
On the bus, i found myself with less distraction in the form of music, which normally lifts me away from my surroundings and deeper into myself by shutting off the outside and the other people around me. Without this, I was very much aware of the people on the bus, and I was doing my self-assigned task of depicting their lives based off of what they presented. I came to several conclusions, which I will expand out to sort of generalize.
1.) Based on the lines in people's faces, particularly older people, you might see who has lived a certain life. I noticed one woman who had very deep scowl lines, a woman who seemed very bitter and scornful of the others. I decided that she must have had some issues in her life to get her to the point where she views most things with hate or misery, or that her life was sheltered and she was raised under the guise that the world owed her something, and that she alone rides the high horse while the rest of us are lowly peasants.
2.) When you leave the country with your friends on a trip or vacation, you leave whatever worries at home. Like with the new land, sights, sounds, and people, you can lose sight of whatever it was that brought you down originally. You have a breath of fresh, new foreign air, and it refills your tank, getting some physical distance between you and your issues. Plus you might be able to make fun of people in your native tongue, because of the language barrier. and you can pretend you don't know how to tip. Pricks.
3.) Black people are happier than white people.
After my interpersonal bus ride, I got home, where my mother and sister were still awake, albeit my mother only to greet me. I said my hellos and decided to head downstairs to the workshop in the handyman's room to build my skateboard. I have collected all the components individually, deck, trucks, grip tape, wheels, bearings, and hardware, and I was pretty excited to put it all together. First, you should know that I am entirely ham-handed. I just don't have the natural ease with tools and construction that my father and brother have. That being said, I headed downstairs with the components to put together my board. I started by putting the grip tape on, sticking the large sheet against the deck and cutting away the extra. I'm not sure what it was about it, maybe the isolation and the simplicity of the task, but i was genuinely happy to do it, to stand there by myself and carve away any extra material from the grip. From there, I assembled the rest of the board, finding, to my dismay, that my screws are too short for me to put on riser pads which would make it easier to have bigger wheels. All the same, the board came out looking pretty good, and more importantly, mine. My work (and a little blood) went into making that board, and I am proud to have done it. I finished at around 2 am, feeling damn good about myself, then went out for a quick jaunt to try it out. Yeah, the trucks are still a little loose for my taste, and I'll need to take a ratchet to it when I can find one, but I felt a special connection to it, that it was something I made, and I felt free.
I felt free.
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Nice work.
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