Meet Me at the Turnstile

 What do you think about dreams?

I think about the dreams I have a fair amount. It's one of my more hippie-ish qualities. I think that I used to be a more vivid dreamer than I currently am. I would wake up and the feelings of what I had just experienced would be so real. I knew that what happened wasn't real, but there would be about 10 minutes where my body still believed it was. Crazy and intense feelings that felt lived in. That led to me learning a bit about lucid dreaming, which I thought would be an amazing skill to master.

One of the things recommended to get better at lucid dreaming was to keep a dream journal, which I guess helps you to realize the things that recur in your dreams. That worked a bit, and I've lucid dreamed (dreamed lucidly?) a few times, but it's never been something that I've really worked at or something that I coveted. A result of this though, is that I've kept a dream journal, with varying degrees of upkeep, since my early twenties. I started this journal with the goal of working towards lucid dreaming, but what I found much more rewarding about it was being able to revisit dreams I've had and getting, what seems to me to be, a window into my subconscious.

I took an intro psych class in my undergrad and I didn't retain all that much from it. The two things I do remember was my weird hippie teacher explaining Pavlov with a story about béarnaise sauce (and that he said it as sauce béarnaise) and a tutorial discussion about dream interpretation. The TA explained that ultimately dreams don't really mean anything and you can't draw any serious conclusions from them. At first that didn't make sense to me, as to me my dreams felt significant, but in hindsight I understand what she was saying. You can't draw any serious conclusions about a person or their situation from the content of their dreams. If someone was a suspect in a murder case and confessed to having a dream about being guilt-ridden and hiding a secret, it wouldn't mean shit. It would be suspicious, but it wouldn't mean anything concrete in regards to the case.

I still find them interesting to myself though. I find that small occurrences or worries tend to show up in a central way in my dreams. In that way, what happens in my dreams does two things. 1. It helps me to see what I'm worried or anxious about, because that tends to pop up regularly. 2. It can be reassuring to see events from my life re-happen in the dream.

I don't really speak with people about dreams, at least aside from Rebecca sometimes, but I think it's a nice idiosyncrasy of mine that helps in making my personality unique, even if I don't share that with other people. My interest in my own dreams, which I guess is an interest in introspection and self-awareness, has to bleed over into other parts of my personality and existence, right?

Duff recommended Horses by Patti Smith this week. It's great.

That's Rad Yo, She's Gonna Get Naked

Note: I wrote the following this afternoon so that I would be sure to finish the blog later, before going outside and enjoying a bike in warm Montreal:

"I think that it is safe to say that summer 2020 is now over. Temperatures in the mid teens have set in in Montreal and it seems unlikely that they'll leave for more than a day."

Still rings true! Today was like the good episodes from the later seasons of Cheers. With the chill autumn weather and the start of the school year coming in, every day feels the same and too filled with things that distract me from what I need to do. Then a warm day blows through and it feels just like when Woody perfectly sets up a opening joke about Norm drinking too much and you're reminded that there is beauty in the world.

Weird paragraph, right? Cold fall weather : warm fall day :: generic later Cheers episodes : good later Cheers episodes.

It's been strange to think about what this summer has been like, now that it's over. Everyone has been repeating the same thing over and over since the pandemic started, but I guess I have to lean on that too and say that it was a summer unlike any other I've had in my life. What I was doing every day didn't change that much in the grand scheme of things, but the pandemic limiting where we can and what we can do did end up taking a toll by September. No eating out, no drinks at bars, no shows, no baseball games, no seeing friends.

Those are a lot of my favourite things.

Still, I guess it's important to try and maintain some levity in the face of this insane virus and that world it has brought with it, so here are the things I appreciated about Coronavirus Summer 2020.

Even though we couldn't "go out" the way we normally did, it was nice to see friends in the park. Let's all look at the sky and think about how nice it is to sit with friends and have a cold one.

I learned to ride a bike. It's nice to ride your bike through Montreal, especially at 5 PM.

This summer, I skated more than I have in like 6 years. Popping off a good ollie still feels amazing.

The NBA season was pushed back, so teams ended up playing early in the afternoon on summer weekdays. I wish that's when all sports happened.

Frig off virus. Getting pretty tired of this shit already.

There's Only One Hubba

 Yesterday I started to watch an episode of the skateboarding podcast The Nine Club, before realizing that if I was going to watch TV focused telling the stories of skateboarders, and casting YouTube videos does seem to count as TV now, that I should just watch Epicly Later'd, the pinnacle of the form, rather than a sometimes boring meandering conversation taped in a studio.

I watched the multi-part edition of the show on Guy Mariano, focused on him conquering an intense drug problem and re-emerging as one of history's all-time great street skaters with the release of Fully Flared, and that promptly went into another episode of the show as soon as it ended, since I've been watching them in a huge YouTube playlist.

The thing is, every skateboarder knows Guy Mariano. He's headlined several landmark videos, Video Days, Fully Flared, Pretty Sweet, and is up there as one of the strongest influence on tech street skating that exists today (how Guy still manages to do tech with an extreme amount of style is a topic for another time). After his series on Epicly Later'd ended, the autoplay led me to watch one on someone who I had never heard of before, James Kelch.

I find that these episodes, which tell the stories of skaters who fell through the cracks and weren't in the limelight, are often my favourite ones. It's fun to get the stories of the people you know, of course I want to hear Eric Koston's lifestory, but really those episodes just serve to fill in the areas in between what you've already seen. With episodes like this one on Kelch, Epicly Later'd gives you a much fuller picture of the world of skateboarding. There's so many small moments in this that equally hilarious, due to Kelch's natural charisma, and heartbreaking. We learn about what happens around the pros. 

Much like the rest of the world, everything in skateboarding isn't ideal. For every Nyjah making tonnes of money from Street League and Nike, there are those who could never make it happen, despite devoting themselves to it fully. They were still in the right place at the right time, but it didn't matter. Of course, those stories still deserve to be told.