Speed Wobble

There's a parable here, or at least I hope there will be a parable here by the time I'm done, so bear with me.
I've fallen in love with longboarding. As it was with poker it's the meditative, zen quality of longboarding that really does it for me. The moves required to maintain any sort of fluid and experience enhancing flow are extraordinarily simple, yet any variation from the norm and you are eating shit in a manner most painful and quick.
Speed wobble is a phenomenon that occurs in most wheeled vehicles when they hit higher speeds. It is just what it sounds like. A terrifying incongruency between the oscillation of the wheels, resulting in a destabilizing wobble, also known as 'death wobbles' at very high speeds.
This is what I find absolutely beautiful and zen and jedi about speed wobbles on a longboard. When you're flying down a hill and the board begins to shake, the first instinct you have is to somehow correct your balance to fight the wobble. Generally this is a bad idea, and the parable should become evident here pretty quick.
Like the universe, a longboard's natural state is one of balance. The design of the trucks (the things that the wheels are on) is such that they are self correcting. If you apply force to turn them in one direction, the simple removal of that force will return them to center. If, while experiencing speed wobble, you attempt to steer your way out of it, you're keeping your wheels from correcting themselves. The best action to take, is nearly impossible to explain until you experience it. The best action to take, is to just relax. When it begins to feel that the board is going to lose all contact with the road and throw you down at 40 or 50 kms per hour, your best course of action is just to go loose and have faith that everything is going to be okay. The moment you do this, your calm translates immediately to the board and the wobbles cease. I used to get speed wobbles at around 15 miles per hour, then 20...now I'm up to about 40 without a problem.
As with so many things in life; fear, stress, anger, frustration, anxiety, they all seem to vanish into a smooth state-of-grace kind of calmness when you realize that trying to control it all is sometimes 90% of the problem. And in case you missed it, that was the parable.

The Strange Alluring Opiate of Freedom and The Nature of Elephants

Last night I fell asleep watching videos of longboarding in warm climes. My hope was that I would then have beautiful dreams of carving down sunlit streets with a warm breeze barely sufficient to vaporize the sweat on my skin. That didn't happen. All I remember about my dreams is that a taxi company was opening a new dispatch on Idylwyld. Hardly the escapist alternate reality I was going for.

Today I woke up to a sick boy, and girls that needed to be at school for 8:30.
I stepped outside to start the car and my breath came in crystalline incandescent blue clouds, and ice cracked like a whip cracking as I opened the door to my vehicle in the crisp quiet of cold winter morning. I spent my first hour of the day shivering, much as I have done for the last 4 months.

5 days a week, sometimes more, I go to work. As far as work goes, I've got it pretty good. Decent pay, a high degree of personal autonomy. Yet I am dissatisfied. Discontent. I have no higher ambition in life than to longboard MOST of the time. It's getting to be an obsession. I'm considering a flight to Vancouver or Vegas or Phoenix or Albuquerque maybe even Juarez just to get it out of my system.

It's a sickness right now people. I can feel it 24/7. I KNOW that living in the snow and ice and darkness is not normal. I've been to places where winter consists of 1 or 2 snowfalls a year and a little rain now and again. I've been to places where it never snows, where it rains for half an hour at night, and half an hour in the morning, and within half an hour more the tropic sun has dried the streets. I know that there are beaches, where in the words of a good friend, all you need to survive is a guitar and a sad song.

I've worked at home before. Less money, but no schedule.
I read a thing lately, a metaphor for the bondage we all find ourselves in as we're consumed by work and responsibilities and 'life' in the 'real world'. The jist of it was this:
A traveller in South East Asia noticed that the massive elephants people used for work, elephants that transported entire forests with their trunks, capable of destroying homes and bridges,were secured against any attempts at escape by a frail little rope tied around one foot. Any one of them could easily have snapped said ropes in an instant.
The traveller asked a trainer why they didn't break the ropes.
"We tie them with that size of rope when they are babies. The nature of an elephant is to roam free. Throughout their childhood they are too weak to break the ties. They try and they fail, they try and they fail until eventually they give up. When they become adults, they have come to accept that they're bound, and they don't bother trying to free themselves."
The problem with me, is that I know this whole way of life is a fabrication, and it chafes at me more than any rope ever could.