Joy Machines
The good’s waiting, it doesn't care how you get there.
J O Y M A C H I N E S
Various vessels to find the good out there.
“There is always so much good out there for us, waiting.” my friend Joe wrote in response to some travel photos I shared in our intermittent, but years long email thread. I agree, but I would, and he helped shape my opinion nearly two decades earlier.
In 2004, Terrible One, the BMX company he co-founded, put out their one DVD. It was unlike anything I’d seen in BMX.
The riding in the video was powerful, and nice to look at, but the context of the riding was the belle of the ball.
It was a world tour seeking out ruined ramps in vast, desolate landscapes, immaculate architecture calling for a carve among esoteric sculptures in ancient cities, improbable skateparks lacquered in vibrant graffiti embedded in equally vivid cultures that were in stark contrast to our own. The video was a beacon and the places they traveled became pilgrimage sites for generations of riders afterward, acting as corridors to an way of life that is greater than the sum of its parts.
It was obvious that the bike was just a vessel, ferrying them, all of us through our experience.
How rad we get, or how much fun we have along the way is up to us. If we make the experience entirely about the bike, or how we're riding it, we risk making our vessel into a cardboard boat, permeable, soggy with time, and easily sunk by the waves and rain rolling in with the inevitable storm of entropy.
26 years into my own riding, I still wake up with this electrostatic feeling in my skin, excitement, a hunger for a carve on the edge of traction, the cresting arc of a good air, wall rides, and the buzz of discovering new shapes to ride.
But, I know the bike is just a vessel, an avatar, and it could easily look like a skateboard, a pair of shoes, a guitar, a pen, a camera, anything, any activity. It can take any form because the power isn't in the vessel, it's in the understanding that the good is out there waiting, and it doesn’t care how you get there.
When you know that, the vessel appears in a form just for you.
