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Life is a constant struggle. One day things seem to be looking up and you appreciate that you're lucky enough to be alive. The next day I'm losing my shit and wondering "What happened?"
I skated for a couple of hours on Thursday, schmoozed with the pros and had fun. Everyone was like "Dude, you got to enter!". I was like "Yeah, see you there." I went back to the lodging to get some chow. I had a room to myself and that may have been my downfall.
The night before qualifying runs I didn't drink, tried not to jack it, and went to bed early. I awoke at 8:15 the next morning, had some cheerios, some ibuprofen, and a Red Bull. Ready to go. I skated down to practice and checked in with Ryan Clements, a hell of a nice guy. He asked me if I was going to enter. I thought about it for like four seconds and said 'no'. He gave me a wristband and said not to skate the street course while people were trying to practice. I went to watch and the course was empty except for a bunch of team managers. I watched people skate for about three minutes, checked out an AM hottie, then skated back to the hotel.
I got back to the hotel at 9:20AM. I had brought my flask from home, so I cracked that baby and concocted some Tanqueray and Red Bulls. It was 6:20am at home. Halfway through the first drink, a form of euphoria washed over me. I turned on the TV and giggled excitedly. Two red bulls and a flask of Tanq by 10:15: I was flying high and blind, ready to crash and burn.
There was a knock at my door, I saw the homie Ronnie Goodnow (Evos- Origin T.M.) through the peephole and opened the door. About 5 dudes filed in after him and I decided not to open the door anymore. They said they were off to the contest. I said I'd been there already and I'd meet them down there. They looked at me a little weird and hesitated before they left. I think they smelled the gin on me.
By 11:14 I was blown out. I decided I was too faded to go to the contest. I didn't want to be the guy who shows up faded in the morning. I know that guy and people look at you different when you are that guy. I was gacked out from multiple Bulls and Tanq on top of a light breakfast, so I mixed a Tanueray and Thera-Flu and smoked some weed to tone it back down.
I kept the lights off and the 'Do not disturb' sign on my door. Whenever I heard voices or someone skating down the hall, I'd turn the T.V. down and stay still. I began to contemplate my madness.
Sac got beat by the Suns by, like, 30 points the night before and I had been writing myself notes to explain to my girlfriend why she shouldn't go out with me anymore. A meltdown was inevitable.
I never made it to the contest that day, in fact I never left the room at all after that. I ordered all my meals delivery and stocked my fridge. I find cabin fever to be not only frustrating but addictive, so after that I only left twice to checkout the finals and all the little girls creeping around. The contest is so packed that I could tell anyone who asked that I was there, in the crowd, when I was really back in the hotel, masturbating to the new Bewitched.
La Quinta movie/TV log for 4 days.
-Alan Quatermain and the lost city of gold.
-Cujo
-Ace Ventura
-Boys in the Hood
-Contact
-Lord of the Rings (PPV)
-Saving Silverman
-Soldier
-Maximum Overdrive
-Real Genius
-Curdled
-Ghosts of Mars
-Making of Ghosts of Mars- twice.
-Thriller with Farrah Fawcet and Jeff Bridges -Movie with Eric Stoltz as an air traffic controller -Movie with chickmunk lesbian from Chasing Amy with James Caan.
-Movie where Sandra Bullock loses her identity -Millenium -HBO sex show that was like America's Funniest Home Videos with naked people.
-Sacramento loses to Dallas. Fuckin' Nash. That guy's good.
-Blacks in Basketball
-Making of the Pyramids
-Mysteries of the Pyramids
-Buffy the Vampire Slayer-the Movie
I forgot to write the rest down or was afraid to turn on the light.
By GUY TREBAY
Published: August 12, 2009
THIS summer the unvarying male uniform in the precincts of Brooklyn cool has been a pair of shorts cut at knickers length, a V-neck Hanes T-shirt, a pair of generic slip-on sneakers and a straw fedora. Add a leather cuff bracelet if the coolster is gay.
In truth this get-up was pretty much the unvarying male uniform last summer also, but this year an unexpected element has been added to the look, and that is a burgeoning potbelly one might term the Ralph Kramden.
Too pronounced to be blamed on the slouchy cut of a T-shirt, too modest in size to be termed a proper beer gut, developed too young to come under the heading of a paunch, the Ralph Kramden is everywhere to be seen lately, or at least it is in the vicinity of the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, the McCarren Park Greenmarket and pretty much any place one is apt to encounter fans of Grizzly Bear.
What the trucker cap and wallet chain were to hipsters of a moment ago, the Kramden is to what my colleague Mike Albo refers to as the “coolios” of now. Leading with a belly is a male privilege of long standing, of course, a symbol of prosperity in most cultures and of freedom from anxieties about body image that have plagued women since Eve.
Until recently, men were under no particular obligation to exhibit bulging deltoids and shredded abdominals; that all changed, said David Zinczenko, the editor of Men’s Health, when women moved into the work force in numbers. “The only ripples Ralph Kramden” and successors like Mike Brady of “The Brady Bunch” had to demonstrate were in their billfolds, said Mr. Zinczenko, himself a dogged crusader in the battle of the muffin top. “But that traditional male role has changed.”
As women have come to outnumber men in the workplace, it becomes more important than ever for guys to armor themselves, Mr. Zinczenko said, with the “complete package of financial and physical,” to billboard their abilities as survivors of the cultural and economic wilds.
This makes sense, in a way, but how does one account for the new prevalence of Ralph Kramdens? Have men given in or given up? Are they finished with asserting the privileges that have always accrued to men. Or is the Ralph Kramden Barack Obama’s fault?
Hipsters, by nature contrarian, according to Dan Peres, the editor of Details, may be reacting in opposition to a president who is not only, as the press relentlessly reminds us, So Darn Smart, but also hits the gym every morning, has a conspicuously flat belly and, when not rescuing the economy or sparring with Kim Jong-il, shoots hoops.
“If we had a slob in the White House, all the hipsters would turn into some walking Chippendales calendar,” Mr. Peres said. Instead, the streets of Williamsburg are crowded with men who are, as he noted, “proudly rocking a gut.” Mr. Peres’s magazine has a term for these people: the new “poor-geoisie.” But the people lining up for $13 lobster rolls at the Brooklyn Flea last weekend hardly looked as if they were worried about making the rent.
“I sort of think the six-pack abs obsession got so prissy it stopped being masculine,” is how Aaron Hicklin, the editor of Out, explains the emergence of the Ralph Kramden. What once seemed young and hot, for gay and straight men alike, now seems passé. Like manscaping, spray-on tans and other metrosexual affectations, having a belly one can bounce quarters off suggests that you may have too much time on your hands.
“It’s not cool to be seen spending so much time fussing around about your body,” Mr. Hicklin said.
And so guys can happily and guiltlessly go to seed.
Women have almost never gotten a pass on the need to maintain their bodies, while men always have, said Robert Morea, a personal fitness trainer. (Full disclosure: my own.) It would be too much, he added, to suggest that “potbellies are suddenly O.K.,” but as lean muscle and functionality become the new gym mantras, hypertrophied He-Men with grapefruit biceps and blister-pack abs have come to resemble specimens from a diorama of “A Vanished World.”
“When do you ever see that guy, anyway?” Mr. Morea asked, referring to those legendary Men’s Health cover models, with their rippling torsos and famished smiles. “The only time you really see that guy, he’s standing in front of an Abercrombie & Fitch store.” Perhaps, he suggested, there is really only one of them. “It’s the same guy. They just move him around.”