The House Fly Effect

Now that it is getting colder, and the days are getting shorter, it's harder to motivate myself to get out of the house. Even yesterday, though the sun was out and it was a beautiful autumn day, I almost didn't make it. At about four o'clock, the sun was coming in through my living room window, hitting the couch at just such an angle as to make it look like a particularly good spot for reading/napping. But I mastered my desire, put on a sweater, and headed out the door with my skateboard.

I can always tell when the winter is coming because all of my joints seem to age about fifty years: my knee, back, wrist, ankles (and these days, because of all the typing I've been doing for school, even my fingers) get achy and sore. This contributes to what I call the "house fly effect" which can be observed in common houseflies in the fall and spring, when they start to act "drowsy", buzzing against the window pane in the last vestiges of the summer sunlight. It is odd how humans, insects, trees and the plants in my garden all seem to be on the same circuit in this regards. Even my cat stays inside more, complaining when I accidentally lock him out of the bedroom, where he likes to curl up all the live-long day now that the weather has turned.

I feel that it is important to fight this slow slide into winter hibernation: the sleet and snow will come soon enough, making it that much harder to motivate oneself to venture forth. While the adversity of winter can have a bracing effect, inspiring one to rally greater courage to meet the season, it's the fleeting beauty of the transitional months that offer the most threat of slipping into complacence. But to allow the housefly effect to triumph is to miss all the things that make autumn great: the sharper, fresher air, the changing colours in the trees, the smell of wood fires from yards and chimneys, scraping one's feet through the piles of dried leaves by the curbside, and skateboarding at Beasley park, peeling off layer after layer of outerwear as one's body warms from the exertion.

I only spent about half an hour at the Bease yesterday, but Matt and another fellow whose name I forgot were there, ripping it up in the last of the summer sun. Matt is a powerhouse, able to blast crazy air out of the bowl, and this year particularly he has mastered many difficult tech tricks (like backside and frontside 180 heelflips, for example). Yesterday he was floating giant heelfilp variations over the hump, landing them seemingly effortlessly. His flips are so crisp that they seem to proceed in slow motion, and his feet meet up with the board at the nadir of its flight as if the rendezvous had been scheduled since the dawn of time in some kind of crazy and meticulous cosmic train schedule: "at precisely 4:31 BLT (Beasley Local Time) Matt's feet will connect with his board after it having completed a 360-degree flip-rotation, two-a-half feet off the slope of the hump, and he will ride that plank to the ground as if the line he just traced through the air had been prepared for him since the dawn of time". That's how it's written in the eternal Book of Raddishness, and that's how Matt delivered the goods yesterday as I sat around trying to convince my knee and ankles to cooperate.

Well, tomorrow I'm off to Brantford to deliver a guest-lecture about skateboarding at a course on Youth Culture. I've got slides and video clips and photos of the Bease renovation. Then the whole class will walk to Branford's downtown skate plaza to make some field observations, and the instructor and anyone else who is so inclined might even roll around a little, after we've signed a waiver of course.