Ripping out your jeans is part of it, I guess.  

I am so rusty on backwards skating, but I can do it in a rink, including transitions.  This weekend I realized it's a whole different game outside, on sidewalks, but only after I went ass over teakettle shocking a little knot of tourists on the boardwalk.

I have to regain my skill at falling.

You simply can't learn to skate or do tricks without cuts, bruises and falls. That's why you learn to fall and fall well.  There's an art to falling and the old saying, "Fall ten times, get up eleven," only really is inspiring if you know how to fall without breaking your contract.  For me, I've taken years and years of judo and still do from time to time.  I've always had a strange sense of joy and power that I can be hit and actually sent flying and still land decently.  That said, it's nothing until you practice it.

Falling leads to cuts and bruises, even if you fall well.

I'm at the point where I remember why pants and skating have never quite felt like they are a good pairing.  It's somehow easier and more forgiving to wear tights, leggings, skirts, shorts, just about anything than pants - which bind up in the crotch and have rivets in the pockets that dig firmly into your ass like little teeth when you land leaving the oddest peppering of bruises on one's (in my case, ample) rear end.   I'm a minimalist, and so what I own  tends to be limited.. and expensive.  I don't fancy ruining any jeans that were carefully hand stitched in the USA that I've had for many years, but nor do I buy poorly traded goods new.  So I spent part of the weekend thrift store crawling with a specific slant to find good skating clothes with some success.  I know the traditional look, which is fantastic: short booty shorts, knee high socks, cute t shirt.  But where I live, even on a sunny day, it's chilly this time of year.  I do warm up skating but I need more coverage and yet I feel a pre-emptive slump of defeat when I think of wearing plain old work out clothing to skate as skating just ignites my joy in ways that the treadmill, despite it's... charms (I suppose?  It must be someone's bliss, somewhere) has never.   My work out clothes are pleasant, but they don't celebrate my joy. 

It's another meandering side step, as I wash dishes at night and watch skate videos, with some mild form of obssesion.  I'm in a new world, of Chicks in Bowls - it's entirely tempting - and I still must remind you that I was falling down skating backwards outside this weekend so my dreams are quite heavily laced with idealism and optimism at this point, probably from an outside perspective at least.  But I'm quite confident that with time, perhaps a lot of time, I'll get there. 

What's interesting is... I am an unusually determined person.  I have in the last year or so, felt I've lost my touch for it.  I've suffered some disappointments, no worse than others, I suppose, but sometimes it is hard to hold to my narrative that I tell myself of what I am doing as a creative person and why.  There valleys...and mountains...but what we are least equipped to deal with I think are the plateaus.  The long, steady pace that goes on and on for miles, days or even a year and you wonder... without those valleys or hills, how will I find the low or the high to use to push, to make something happen?  For anyone that sees the arts from the outside, this is almost always what it takes to get anything going, much less stustain it.  A few good pushes from inside, a strong donkey kick and you sit down, you write the damn thing, you sit down, you make the asking phone call, you take the chance, you show up.

I easily put more effort into my skating  last weekend than I have my own work this year.  I work hard for others, but for my own creative work, I haven't, not yet this year.   

Part of this writing is to trace that vein, that vein that connects what I love to what I create.  

So I stopped mid entry, and as late as it is, sent something I'd thought about doing but...hadn't...because... but now it's done.

And I'll keep skating and thiknin about these things. Maybe it will carry me somewhere.  Maybe it won't, and in another year I'll see be on this same plateau.

But the difference is, I have something I love to do now, helping me along.