Joy Machines
The good is waiting and 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 since 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 in stark contrast to our own, and plenty of bizarre, shreddable, infrastructure monoliths call to a rider and act as beacons, portals, and corridors to an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts, many of which became pilgrimage sites for following generations.
In that context the bike is just the vessel ferrying us, and our friends, through our experience.
How rad we get, or how much fun we have along the way is up to us, and if we make these experiences entirely about the bike and 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 from the inevitable storm of entropy.
26 years into my own riding, I still wake up with this electrostatic feeling in my skin, 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
Shipping for winter is going down to once per week.
The post office will be harder to get to over the winter. I’ll ship orders on Thursdays, weather permitting.
Thank you—Nathan
LATECOMERS
We are all latecomers, standing 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
