Failure is an opportunity to reevaluate
This is why I quit. This is why I quit. This is why I quit skateboarding. The blinding pain in my hip pushed me up off the ground, gotta move, can’t let this stiffen up. This is why I fucking quit. I hobbled out of the sun and into the backyard clutching my wrist and side like I’d been hit by a truck. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I still feel like I got hit by a truck. Just keep moving keep it all moving.
My initial impulse was to deal with it myself but in the end I brought my wife in. I need help. I fell REALLY hard. I tried to take stock of my injuries. The hip wasn’t broken or at least didn’t seem to be after the initial shock let go. My knee was bleeding badly but for some reason I couldn’t feel it even when Emily applied an alcohol pad directly to it. My wrist was swelling badly and my elbow. Something was definitely not right there.
Don’t get hurt. Can’t afford to. Not worth it. This isn’t worth everything I’m going to have to give up and deal with if I can’t walk away from this. I’ve been playing risk assessment games with myself as long as I can remember. Perhaps it comes from the crossroads of having an overly cautious parent during my childhood - meeting the recklessness of the later teenage years and early adulthood. I got hurt a lot. I felt incredible guilt and shame sometimes adjusted my approach but seemed unable to escape the clutches of injury.
In my thirties the urgent care and er visits ticked upwards. Broken ribs, smashed teeth, torn rotator, AC joint strain, pillon fracture of the tibia (broken leg), broken hand, Rabies vaccine(s), corneal abrasions. With each visit my anxiety and blood pressure a lot higher, the shame of fucking up and getting hurt a bit greater and the sense that maybe I was a little bit cursed.
My wife applied some sort of herbal poultice, we wrapped the elbow, put on an ice pack and I downed a handful of ibuprofen. Taking stock for the umpteenth time everything seemed to be working. Id taken a fall on my other elbow 8 or so years prior and I remember that pain, the stiffening, my arm hanging uselessly for at least a week while I tried to carry on with life. This felt similar.
An hour later my right arm was almost completely locked up with inflammation and I was feeling a pain that told me this needs to get seen asap. Sunday, which urgent care is open (I won’t go to the er unless I’m bleeding out anymore, want to talk about strong feelings). My dad offered to drive me across the valley and wait with me. Painful x rays. Waiting. The NP came in the room with a CD in her hand I knew what that meant. Fuck. Fuck me. A fucking fracture. Splint, sling, ice cream on the way home.
Being self employed has some perks. If I remember what they are I’ll share them with you. I’ve been self employed as a builder/carpenter for 20 years full time. Paid sick time and a boss to manage the void while you’re out is not one of the benefits of self employment. Filling in my partner, making calls to other friends who might be able to help out, trying to explain to my customers what happened and why their job will be taking a short hiatus all the while feeling that nagging shame, you fucked up Ben. How can you expect people to accept this. You’re letting them down. You’re letting yourself down as you won’t be able to do most of what keeps you sane for the next month plus. Won’t get that much needed solo trip to the Maine Northwoods mid summer to recoup from the insanity of being self employed and a step parent and a human in 2026. This is the cost of injury. This is the cost of a botched rock and roll on a 2.5’ quarter pipe at age 42. Mid life crisis tour over.
Shit ain’t like this anymore
Enoughness
What is enough? “A little bit more” as the infamous billionaire said right? Why? Why is that the answer we accept in western society today? Why is that the life I have lived for myself these past many years? Work harder, push harder, buy more, have more, maintain more, sell stuff, sell myself, try something else. Try someone else. Try a different version of yourself. Put this food in. Take that drink and then another. Smoke this. Take that. Shit and piss it out. Run this many miles. Then do more. Climb that route then do one harder. Kick yourself when you aren’t as good as you used to be. Hike all those trails then do them faster. Carry more weight. Carry as much as you can until your joints start failing. Never enough. Break bones and and tear ligaments and then get back up and do whatever it was again. Aways a little more.
Is it possible that it all stems from our inability to be truly present? Present and truly grateful? Satisfied? The myth of “if we can just get to that point over there then…” is so insanely pervasive and honestly insane. Sure, perhaps, on the one hand it’s driven the greatest gains humanity has made. But are not all those same gains undoing us at the very same time and further separating us from the planet that sustains our life in the first place?
I sit in my office surrounded by stuff. Stuff that helps me do my job well. Stuff that helps me have fun find adventure and to some extent enjoy life. Stuff that makes me feel like, well, me. But it really isn’t me and it actually has very little to do with who I really am. I used to have a friend who said “whoever dies with the most toys wins”. But really whoever dies with the most toys just dies and leaves a huge mess for someone else to clean up. And for my part at least I think of the time I have given to the pursuit of more. And I wonder how much of who I really am and how much of what life really is I have missed through the haze of my own creation. I wonder what real “enoughness” looks like.
Musings
Sometime this summer will be 30 years from when I first stepped on a skateboard. I was 13, I had a cardboard-like piece of shit Nash board from Walmart or maybe Kmart with plastic trucks and I liked a girl named Kelci. I fell a lot. I got hurt a lot. These are the snippets of memory I still carry. I was starting to find the anger that had been simmering inside and was coming to boil. Someone gave me a mix tape with a couple Rancid songs on it and I was off. Skateboarding and punk rock gave me an avenue of expression, a creative outlet, a sense of belonging and a community. A channel for the pain and anger. For the next ten plus years I vacillated between worlds, the good Christian kid in tension with the angry wounded kid who wanted to burn down the whole system that he felt held him captive. Somewhere in my 20’s I abandoned the church (or maybe it abandoned me?) and I disappeared fully into an alcohol and stress induced haze as I attempted to do “what I thought I was supposed to do”. I still skated occasionally through my late 20’s and into my 30’s but mostly it become a piece of history. The music never left my side, an ever faithful companion and soundtrack to my life. I found climbing and reattached to the natural world. This combined with my dear dogs Lexi and Basil probably saved my life.
I thought I was done with skateboarding. Too dangerous. I never could find a way to balance the love of speed with the self destructive love of pain and at the same time swing a hammer, run a business, pay a mortgage, climb ice and show up as an adult in the world.
43 next month. Midlife crisis? Reliving the glory days? I’m sure of it. The kids showed an interest in learning to skate and I dug a couple old boards out of the garage. I took mine to the park. A part of me lit up that has been dead for a long time. The muscle memory is still there. The body is stiffer, heavier and much less flexible. But. For some reason. It feels right.
Invasive Species
I spent a not-insignificant-portion of my weekend wandering the woods musing about dying trees and pulling invasive plants from the ground where I found them.
Hemlock wooly adelgid, beech leaf disease, emerald ash borer, red pine scale, American chestnut blight…oriental bittersweet, garlic mustard and my personal favorite. Black swallow-wort. The forest here is changing. Fast. Maybe it’s been changing longer than I’ve been paying attention. I’m sure it has. But the outlook for the native species affected by invasives feels bleak. I pull swallow-wort and it laughs at me. For every mature plant I can sort of release from the ground a half dozen shoots are poking up at me from the ever spreading rhizomes. I think back to when the woods above my house were cool and dark in the shade of tall old hemlocks, where now only snags stand tall like sentries in a graveyard.
I want to restore this landscape. I can not. I want to see Atlantic Salmon and Shad swimming freely up the cold fast running rills of the Manhan, the Deerfield and the Millers uninhibited by dams made to power the lives of man. I want to know the name these rivers had before they were appropriated into revenue streams and bastions of “progress”. I want to sit on the banks with the people who knew this valley as home, as provider, as sacred.
As I rip another swallow-wort from the ground, I am overwhelmed. The sea of plants is never ending. More this year than last year. I cannot possibly turn this tide. I think only of the original peoples of this land I walk, as they faced the waves of colonial incursion by my ancestors. Invasive species indeed.
Late Spring
Juni!
Lyme disease, impossibly beautiful green colors in the woods and all the warblers (and others!) migrating. Spring is amazing.
Still Clunky
I’ll figure it out eventually. No Mow May sure is great for the bees but damn the ticks are killing us.
Back (Online)
Back in January I decided to give social media a break. Turns out it was a great decision and has given me just a little more space in my head. I also noticed a bit of a void without a place to “be creative”. I’ve been taking pictures but not editing. I’ve been toying around with songs but not recording. I’ve been writing on paper but those words will never go out to the world. Bit of a dead spell. My intent moving forward is to use this blog as a replacement for social media and my hope is to populate it regularly. I don’t care if anyone reads it. It gives me a centralized location to compile my creative energies when they arise. If someone does read it, cool, I hope you get inspired to do your own project or to engage with me about mine.
Maine Summer 2025
