Joy Machines

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.

MOUNTAIN TIME

The post office will be harder to get to over the winter. I’ll ship orders on Thursdays, weather permitting.

Thank you—Nathan

Old Chaos

My favorite translation of my favorite poem by Charles Baudelaire.

-Translator Unknown.
But, possibly a reworking of a translation by South African poet and English literary establishment outcast, Roy Campbell.

**De Profundis Clamavi**

*(From the Depths I Cried)*

Have pity, you alone whom I adore

From down this black pit where my heart is sped,

A sombre universe ringed round with lead

Where fear and curses the long night explore.

Six months a cold sun hovers overhead;

The other six is night upon this land.

No beast; no stream; no wood; no leaves expand.

The desert pole is not a waste so dead.

Now in the whole world there's no horror quite

So cold and cruel as this glacial sun,

So like old Chaos as this boundless night;

I envy the least animals that run,

Which can find respite in brute slumber drowned,

So slowly is the skein of time unwound.

We’re all latecomers treading on the bones of everything before us

From a conversation with Brandon about the palimpsest reality of being alive.

Brandon by Jackson Allen

A passage from Robert Harrison’s book, Dominion of the Dead.

“…Arrowheads everywhere in the soil. We are all latecomers. To be human means to come after those who came before. Just as we are always preceded by our forebears, so too the ground in which we lay them to rest has always already received the bones of others—‘others’ in the most radical sense of the term, including that of other species, many of whom have died on our behalf.”

—Robert Harrison, Dominion of the Dead

Smoke in the Wenatchee

Do See the Candied Dawn

Do wake in the dark.

Do see the candied dawn.

A few photos. Westbound in South Dakota.

Devour Heaven

“We fly, we dream in darkness, we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured”

// Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost