Started therapy last night.

My therapist is a middle aged woman with a sophisticated accent and a real clinical disposition. She could play a Freudian on TV and really that’s all it takes to win me over, if you’re believable in your role.

I was trying to explain the importance of skateboarding to her, not in the general sense which is easy to explain (“Tony Hawk!” “Fun!”) but the importance of skateboarding to a man in his 30s as a coping mechanism to avoid more extreme forms of self destruction; that’s a tougher needle to thread. So here’s the story, I play the protagonist, the scene is the outer rings of Boston. Picture it, Sicily 1922…

Really it’s like 2017 or something but who gives a shit. The point is this. I was in a relationship for 11 years and it really wasn’t good towards the end (you don’t want the juicy details). Eventually it felt to me, like this haunted carnival ride of extreme emotions, gaslighting, manipulation and abandonment. Psychic shipwreck. I found myself completely isolated, juggling work and my kids on my own.

It was a lot. My depression is like a radio station that’s always on the air waves but the strength of the signal varies. When my broken relationship mutated into a broken home the guilt surrounding putting that pain on others was overwhelming. It was like there was this room inside me, filled well beyond capacity, with guilt and pain. It would seep out from under the door and round the hinges and the only goal was to keep it shut. A personal Room 237 .

I was in Hyde Park (near where I was living at this time) visiting a client. It was late March. I left that meeting and decided to drive past the old skatepark. It was a crusty old thing, tucked away between some industrial patchwork and snuggled up to the train tracks. Two slabs of manny pads, stairs and railing, a curved bench and some big ledges. Two quarter pipes that framed either side complete with large cracks of dirt right below them. Those deepening chasms always making you wonder if today was the day you die.

Tucked into the ground beneath the street (with Parthenon style seating) was a half-pipe that was caught in an ongoing custody battle between the city’s novice graffiti “artists” and the Parks Dept. The tags so spastic and random it would look like a living monument to turrets syndrome until eventually a city employee roller’d it over. It was dangerously slick beneath countless coats of paint and was eventually the first to deal me a broken wrist.

The crown jewel though, was supposed to be a big, C shaped bowl, but it wasn’t so much a bowl as just transition surrounding a flat bottom. The angles and spacing were such that it was pretty difficult to really “flow”. The concrete was cracked and breaking out in chunks along the bottom and around the coping. Dubbed the Deathbox.

If you just read all that, thank you and I’ll try and overshare some emotional and mental health shit to make it worth your while. I was a wreck, I thought a lot about fucking myself up. I thought about smoking again and drinking heavily not because I thought it would make things better but the self abuse was really appealing. I couldn’t listen to a lot of music that was relating to that sort of mindstate. I had no attention or ability to handle TV or movies, any fiction involving kids whether in a happy or sad family, just wrecked me. I would get my kids off to school, try and lay low when it came to work, and begin to desire forms of obliteration.

So I stopped by the park in late March, and I saw all those features and something was lit inside me. I remembered years before, takingthe bus out there from Jamaica Plain. I walked around the park, looked at the snow covering the inclines and all I could think about was how bad I wanted to be there. A few days later I watched the short doc about Brian Anderson coming out and seeing the world of skateboarding again, the voices, the attitudes and the ease of it, helped me get a foothold in the current and recall a big part of an identity I’d lost. In that identity I found some strength, autonomy and freedom. A belonging.

Soon all I wanted to watch, talk and read about was skateboarding. It was the only thing I could stand and I was desperate to catch up with what I’d missed after something like 9 years away. It was all I thought about when I could let my mind wander. Obsession is a fragrance by Calvin Klein, this was possession ( a more manic scent).

Some days it was all I could do just to get there. Once I did though I could relax, just focus on skating and get a break from it all. It was somewhere I felt safe and could lose myself while at the same time I was try to rebuild. I really needed that at that time. Even when I ate shit and got hurt it felt reaffirming and right. A fall was a reminder to get out of your head and pay attention to what’s occurring. Physical pain like the release of a pressure valve. There was a healthy power in it, getting hurt and getting up. Bearing pain and taking risks. That power is an important part of what draws certain types to these kinds of activities.

Let me give context to “power.” When In my late teens, I was freshly dropped out of high school and working earnestly toward my life long goal of becoming a depression-era hobo. I was told by a mystical woman that she’d received a message for me from the spirit realm, the extent of which was that as I’m out there“I must remember my power item.” This I immediately understood. It’s not power in the “wealth and control” model, it’s a kind of personal autonomy you cultivate yourself through places, experience and actions. I would think about land or objects holding power on the days I laid sweaty on the concrete beneath the sun or shivering in the early darkness of winter. Things I’d done, decisions I’d made that had made me a defined “someone” a character. Endorphins bubbling beneath the skin.

Honestly, nowadays writing this or trying to explain it to a therapist, the whole period is a blur. I can’t honestly remember how many days, how much time I spent there. It was a lot and it wasn’t wasted. I broke each of my wrists and separated my shoulder during this period and would still be skating in casts and slings. It got so I was on a first name/texting basis with my orthopedist and the urgent care doctors would ask me if I was “safe at home.” It wasn’t some tough guy bullshit it was just the only way I was able to metabolize my grief, guilt and worry along with the new happiness and freedom. Which also kinda explains why now, I’m finally in therapy.

After I moved out of that neighborhood the old park was torn down and new, modern beautiful one was put up. I’m certainly not going to say some cliche shit about the old one being better cause it wasn't but that doesn’t diminish the connection I have to the old one, to what that refuge meant to me personally. It was just concrete but I have projected so much magic on it that now it’s sacred. I’m going to share some picture of the old park, the demolition and the new one below and maybe in a companion post because ultimately it matters.

When they tore it up a year ago, I drove over to the construction site because I was in the area again seeing a client. After the workers had left the site for the day, I slipped through the temporary fence and walked around. I imagined where everything had been before and tried to picture it.

I thought a little bit about those times and how overwhelmed I had been and how it’s still hard to think about. How it’s impossible to explain this to a therapist or a normie without feeling a little dismissive. We leave our meanings and stories everywhere we go. Trying to give things a clear arc and a solid purpose. We want to feel like what happened matters, was a part of something. Like what I’m doing tonight writing this. Embarrassed by how much I’ve just waxed on about a tiny swath of Boston but also aware I’m still holding back. Still haven’t opened the door to that room.

I ran my hands along the bent, serpentine pieces of re-bar and stood on the rubble piles that had been a world. I imagined there were sounds trapped within all that broken earth. After a little while, I pocketed a few pieces of concrete to keep for myself, said a silent “thanks” and got back on the highway.

Hyde Park & Heartbreaks

A Long December Playlist

Slip into the Quiet & Wait