Two decades ago, I overheard someone ask a famous pro skater "what tricks can you do?" and he said "I don't know yet, for today." The reason it sounds like this ancient skater didn't speak english very is because I'm making up the story and I've lived here for too long. I never met any pros until I came to Tiawan. It rained tonight and I didn't leave the house until 2 am, and that was due to cabin fever. I went to the 24 hour sushi place, but I couldn't find it, adn then I went to the 24 hour night market, but I couldnt find that either, and all they have after 2 am is pork grease on rice (which i did sort of mean to be insulting when i typed it, but then also realized I want ot eat it) so instead I ate 7's microwave food (which used to be a miracle but now makes me hate myself for eating it) and walked around the streets for a few hours. The asphalt got patchy like that one super model's face, as it dried. By 2 am, it was dry enough to skate, but I flipflopped around between 7 and fami clerks, buying beer, chatting about what kind of annoying things are happening in their lives, and never, ever complaining myself.
I sat down in a park nearby the house, which isn't a stoop, but could be referred to as the cat stoop, because it's full of cats that spend their time fighting and fucking. Anyway, when I have insomnia, I walk around Taipei and think about skateboarding. I thought about this: the ability of doing a trick is a wave function. Even if you can do a trick most of the time, it doesn't mean you will do next try. There are two waves: one is the probability you will land a given trick next try, the other is variety of tricks you can land next try, which presumably has some sort of familywise error. Probably not though, I'm not actually sure what that means. Anyway, I made a check list, in case you need to know if you can ethically tell your friend that you know how to do a trick:
You landed it, but not clean No
You landed it once, clean No
You landed it today Probably no, unless it was first try
You landed it three times today Maybe, but only if you're feeling cocky
You can do it 10% of the time No
You can do it 50% of the time Depends how humiliated you can stand being on the next try
You can do it 90% of the time How cocky do you feel?
You can do it 99% of the time If you fuck up the next try, you suck at it and you definitely have no right to say you know this trick
You can do it 99.9% of the time See above
You did it 1000 times in a row I'm not sure this have ever been done. Even if it had been, it still doesn't count if you fuck up the next one. Has anyone e ver done 1000 ******** in a row? It's hard to imagine. that would mean doing one every 15 seconds for 250 minutes, without missing. I can't believe it's possible.
What we are working into (this is not a phrase we say in english) is a sort of quantum state of being able or not being able to do a trick. Before the event, you can both do it and not do it. When you try it, the wave function collapses.
Discussion section: when you get older, you are going to lose tricks. If you actually did 1000 ********s in a row, what is hte time delay after which point can you can no longer say you know how to do ********? Immediatley. Because the past and present and future are the same thing, we always could do, and can do, and did do a ********. But if we never could do a ********, then we always couldn't do it. WHich is the opposite of what I meant to say in all of this, which was, the only trick you can claim to be able to do is the one you land next.
No comments:
Post a Comment