Right, Down + Circle by Cole Nowicki

Author:Cole Nowicki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2023-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

13 Each channel can play one audio signal at a time, e.g., one for melody, one for bass, one for percussion.

6

The Personal, the Playable

The space between knowing and not knowing is a labyrinth. Some labyrinths are simple and can be navigated without too much effort or danger; others are winding and full of dead ends and minotaurs of varying size and ferocity. These mazes materialize when you discover a thing you want to know more about. Getting to the core of that curiosity — or solving the labyrinth — requires a process called learning.

Maybe you want to make a spicy chicken and couscous dish for dinner. That meal is at the labyrinth’s center. You must find your way to it. You Google a recipe, go to the grocery store, trudge home, prep the marinade, and start the vegetable broth on medium-high, taking each turn in the labyrinth with varying levels of confidence until the meat in the pan is no longer pink and squishy, the couscous is fluffed, and you’re scrambling for a garnish. But, even if you do make your way to the labyrinth’s center, that doesn’t always mean you’ll get out unscathed. The minotaur can still take a pound of flesh. Your chicken breast could end up dry and flavorless. But it’s a start. Repetition is key. Practice until you remember which of the labyrinth’s hallways have the loose cobblestones that keep tripping you up, where you’ll need to duck to avoid the poison dart booby traps. Eventually, the beast won’t be able to catch you; finally, the chicken breast is spicy and tender.

Conversely, the educational labyrinth that is skateboarding cannot and will not ever end. Every pathway contains a minotaur. Sometimes you can tame them (learning kickflips), but they will never all truly be defeated (I still regularly eat shit on kickflips after 23 years of doing them). That’s part of what makes skateboarding so exciting — its potential and unpredictability. The unknown becomes known in a swift, sometimes brutal manner.

When I first witnessed skateboarding, it was confounding. Then my older brother took it up, and it became something I needed to figure out immediately. I poured through what limited magazines and videos I could find, as if they were an operating manual. For a while, Pro Skater filled that void. Child-me could do the tricks in-game that I couldn’t execute or even understand in real life. Then I began to recognize the names of maneuvers from the game in the pages of Transworld Skateboarding that covered the walls of my brother’s and, later, my rooms. What were once abstract images began to take on definition.

When prolonged Northern Albertan winters finally retreated, I’d push my much-too-large-for-me skateboard down our street, riding up and down the rounded sidewalk curbs, pretending they were a personal half-pipe outside our home. I’d imagine myself doing the 540 tailgrabs I’d just spent the morning making my Chad Muska avatar do — a trick the IRL Muska couldn’t land either. The heelflips that would eventually skewer me in the driveway were possible on the screen.

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