#24 - falling
I woke up quite sleep deprived on Friday morning and spontaneously decided to run to campus to catch a call before a doctor’s appointment and my breath was noticeably okay. I’d been waking up with quite intense coughing fits and chest congestion, sending me in pain and tears to the Emergency Room last weekend, and to lesser degrees every day since. Feeling just healthy enough to push, I skated the short walk/ride to the train, rolled off the sidewalk onto a street, and thought: I can’t believe this is still so fun. I’ve been commuting on my board for the majority of my last 4 years in NYC, and embarrassingly, can’t really do much else on it with very much proficiency, and yet somehow it continues to fill my most mundane moments - a sleep-deprived commute on a Friday morning, for example - with a little fun to keep me rolling.
In the evening I made a very last-minute decision to pass by my dear friends’ Nowruz iftar on my way home. I skated from the subway station to my friend’s apartment, listening to the gorgeous new Tamino record as the sun set ahead of me. I was looking forward to seeing my friends and breaking my fast and eating good food but I wouldn’t have minded it had that distance been a little longer. My friends were lovely and the food delicious but I felt sick and exhausted and chose to go home shortly after. On the stairwell outside my friend’s apartment, I sat down to put on my shoes, and I cried, and I didn’t feel strong enough to get up until a resident needed to walk up the stairs I was blocking.
Back on the street, I resumed the Tamino album and got back on my board. As I approached my apartment, I passed by the walk-thru McDonalds near me, which has made my stomach churn on a regular basis for the past year and a half, as I walked by and looked through, wondering if these people heard about the boycott, wondering if they’d seen the severed limbs in plastic bags. For the first time in a while, I skated into its large, mostly empty parking lot and put my backpack down. I realized that I had barely actually intentionally skated - beyond my commutes - for nearly two months, since January 26. I remember the date because I remember texting my skater friend the day before that I was starting to feel sick, but would come hang anyway. And I remember that I started feeling sick the day Porridge Radio was in town for their last tour before breaking up. And I remember a month prior, wondering if I should see Porridge Radio on January 25, the anniversary of my revolution.
I remember insincerely typing into the DuckDuckGo search bar: can your body remember an anniversary? I woke up with a cold on January 25th, and I joked on February 10th that surely I would recover tomorrow as the 18 days of the revolution’s anniversary pass, but I’ve felt sick for much of the two months since. In truth, 2025 has so far felt like a descending spiral of defeat, physically, mentally. A void in my gut, congestion in my chest.
My back to McDonalds, I did a few of what my supportive friend ironically calls “legal ollies”; where you need to pause the video recording, VAR style, to prove that the back wheel did, in fact, get off the ground. I know I’d land much better ollies if I wasn’t in my head all the time. Bend, pop, jump, slide, land, bend, pop, jump, slide, land. My friend jokes that my inability to commit to a skate trick is a mental illness. I laugh and ask, aren’t you literally a therapist? I promise to stop looking at my feet all the time, to trust that the board will stay under me. I break my promise.
In that empty parking lot, I found solace in the knowledge that I was going to keep skating anyway. I used to think I was bad at failing, but I’ve never fallen on a skateboard and questioned whether I’d get back on it, even if encumbered by my inability to commit. I found solace in the fact that it is still fun, even for a couple minutes on the morning ride to the train. I found solace in the repetitiveness of it all, of my writing, of the mundanity of it all. Life is rough and I get on a board and put on a good song and watch the sunset and let the joy in. Hasn’t that been the essence of every other newsletter on here? I hope it is of many more.
I picked up my backpack and, once again, told myself I’ll jump higher next time, knowing I have failed many times before, not sure I believed it. I stepped back on the sidewalk and an older woman’s eyes found mine, and my board, and her eyes grew a little wider as she called out: “that was you?!”, then excitedly, as she walked past, “oh shit! that’s badass!”
I smiled and let myself believe her this time.
–
This round’s playlist is of songs about falling, in all its different manifestations, implications, associations. I made it in January 2022, but switched out most of the tracks today. The opening track, fall by SOPHIETHEHOMIE, is by another musician I met through SLOB, a football community in my neighborhood that has gifted me an abundance of fun, joy, and friendship in the last two years.
I’ve been quite in love with I Hope I Don’t Fall In Love With You, and have unsolicitedly sent it to friends once or twice as they complain about their crushes, now sending it to you all. Yo La Tengo’s Our Way To Fall follows, another beautiful song about falling in love, with intention, with direction, with surrender.
Maverick Sabre played three shows in New York last week, one of them free and quite close to campus, and I somehow didn’t make it to any, but am sure those vocals would’ve been beautiful to hear live.
Augustine was, somewhat unexpectedly, my top streamed artist of 2024, so I had to include a track on here eventually, even if tangentially related. I spent quite a lot of time listening to this album at the new skatepark at Broadway Junction this past August, actually. And so of course, I had to end with AJJ’s Skate Park. Pretty self explanatory, I think. Here’s to falling.
10 songs
fall - SOPHIETHEHOMIE
Falling with the Rain - Claud ft. Shelly
Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan
I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You - Tom Waits
Our Way to Fall - Yo La Tengo
Fall Flood - Little Wings
Falling - Maverick Sabre
Falling for the Wrong One - Dreamer Boy
Coast - Augustine
Skate Park - AJJ