the age of one's being is determined by how they play
for those of you who don't know, i work at wild oats, an all natural food store, in the deli, and get to see all the streamy-eyed mystics of boulder come through and attempt to order silced turkey. astronomy, nakedness, and male lactation always seems to come up in conversation while the turkey chest smooths its way across the whirlybladed slicer or mayonnaise smothered bread. the end of each night consists of cleaning out the many saladed deli case, and taking the risers out from under the risen plates. in my haste to get done, i overthrew some risers and they frisbeed out over the counter to scuttle on the floor most spectacularly.
now, we have a code at work, a kind of secret language to communicate the ins and outs of watching lots of lovely college people buy things. while working, one cannot say, "cute guy" or "hot girl" with customers around, so we say, "dr. pepper" and "ginger ale," respectively. now, an extremly fizzy ginger ale had just past by, and i pointed said nose-snerking soft drink out to one of my co-patriots in sandwhich making. when the ginger ale walked by again, i asked her to pick up the formerly-flung risers and throw them to me. she picked them up, and handed them to me. this immediately told me one of two things about her, and subsiquently lessened her ginger ale status to tonic water.
number one, she is amazingly self conscious, to not even toss little plastic cups 10 feet.
number two, and the scary one, and which i pointed out to her, is she had lost her sense of play.
playfulness is highly underrated in american society.* we don't spend enough time on our imaginations as children anymore. there are too many video games, tv shows, movies, books, and other stuff to distract us. we are taught that to play, we need toys. toys that move, shoot, grow, shrink, and bend backwards to make our lives fun. i think that the more fun whoopbangs that are put into toys, the less room there is for your imagination to roam, everything is already thought out for you and you can get to the easy part of playing, instead of doing all that hard thinking. to shamelessly quote brandon joyce: "The more uses I can jerryrig into my cassette-player, electric toothbrush, or the family toaster, the more quantifiable Liberty I've manufactured."
is there a set age when one is supposed to stop playing? is it 13? is it when you get your first job? when you graduate from college? the answer is: you never get too old to stop playing. you simply repress it after a while, start getting the self conciousness that "respectable" people have, start getting the mannerisms and "maturity" of one who doesn't do "childish" things. you should never get too old to stop playing, but you should get too playful to stop aging. why says it isn't possible? why can't i act my shoe size? what age would you be if you didn't know what age you were?
playing has been restricted to playgrounds and converted closetplayrooms in the back of yards, churches, and parks. there are places where one plays, and places where one doesn't play. there has been several attempts to break out of the place-to-play mentality of the present day. one that comes to mind is skateboarding, but even now, skateboarding has parks to skate, and restrict movement by putting grind blockers on rails and benches. that is where le parkour comes in. just today, i was doing jumps from one curb to another in the middle or pearl street, vaulting rails at mackie auditorium on campus, jumping over and onto things at the cu carpark. and how can they restrict le parkour? can they stop you from walking? they can put up more rails, and walls, but tracuers get a hell of a kick out of rails and walls and the like. i have an away message that says, "learn to move: urbanfreeflow" but, it isn't just moving, it is playing. given, serious play, but no one would do it if it wasn't fun. we are expanding the boarders of the playgrounds farther than ever before, to the edges of the park where a fence surrounds it, to the curbs of the park's parking lot, to the very sidewalk you used to get there, to your front porch, to the whole world. learn to play.
*note: not leisure. leisure costs money, like watching tv, or fishing. i am talking about straight up i am going to use my imagination to play with a piece of string, juggle apples, play g.i. joes with avocadoes and my left shoe, etc...
now, we have a code at work, a kind of secret language to communicate the ins and outs of watching lots of lovely college people buy things. while working, one cannot say, "cute guy" or "hot girl" with customers around, so we say, "dr. pepper" and "ginger ale," respectively. now, an extremly fizzy ginger ale had just past by, and i pointed said nose-snerking soft drink out to one of my co-patriots in sandwhich making. when the ginger ale walked by again, i asked her to pick up the formerly-flung risers and throw them to me. she picked them up, and handed them to me. this immediately told me one of two things about her, and subsiquently lessened her ginger ale status to tonic water.
number one, she is amazingly self conscious, to not even toss little plastic cups 10 feet.
number two, and the scary one, and which i pointed out to her, is she had lost her sense of play.
playfulness is highly underrated in american society.* we don't spend enough time on our imaginations as children anymore. there are too many video games, tv shows, movies, books, and other stuff to distract us. we are taught that to play, we need toys. toys that move, shoot, grow, shrink, and bend backwards to make our lives fun. i think that the more fun whoopbangs that are put into toys, the less room there is for your imagination to roam, everything is already thought out for you and you can get to the easy part of playing, instead of doing all that hard thinking. to shamelessly quote brandon joyce: "The more uses I can jerryrig into my cassette-player, electric toothbrush, or the family toaster, the more quantifiable Liberty I've manufactured."
is there a set age when one is supposed to stop playing? is it 13? is it when you get your first job? when you graduate from college? the answer is: you never get too old to stop playing. you simply repress it after a while, start getting the self conciousness that "respectable" people have, start getting the mannerisms and "maturity" of one who doesn't do "childish" things. you should never get too old to stop playing, but you should get too playful to stop aging. why says it isn't possible? why can't i act my shoe size? what age would you be if you didn't know what age you were?
playing has been restricted to playgrounds and converted closetplayrooms in the back of yards, churches, and parks. there are places where one plays, and places where one doesn't play. there has been several attempts to break out of the place-to-play mentality of the present day. one that comes to mind is skateboarding, but even now, skateboarding has parks to skate, and restrict movement by putting grind blockers on rails and benches. that is where le parkour comes in. just today, i was doing jumps from one curb to another in the middle or pearl street, vaulting rails at mackie auditorium on campus, jumping over and onto things at the cu carpark. and how can they restrict le parkour? can they stop you from walking? they can put up more rails, and walls, but tracuers get a hell of a kick out of rails and walls and the like. i have an away message that says, "learn to move: urbanfreeflow" but, it isn't just moving, it is playing. given, serious play, but no one would do it if it wasn't fun. we are expanding the boarders of the playgrounds farther than ever before, to the edges of the park where a fence surrounds it, to the curbs of the park's parking lot, to the very sidewalk you used to get there, to your front porch, to the whole world. learn to play.
*note: not leisure. leisure costs money, like watching tv, or fishing. i am talking about straight up i am going to use my imagination to play with a piece of string, juggle apples, play g.i. joes with avocadoes and my left shoe, etc...