"Out for Delivery"

I probably became enamored of the UPS truck waiting for some skateboard or another to arrive from Skates on Haight in San Francisco. I wasn't alone. We would have a crew sitting on Farmar's front porch or skating in the street, waiting for the brown truck to turn the corner from High Street to South. Christmas morning had nothing on the UPS truck, pregnant with a skateboard we would tag-team and help put together for whoever the luck recipient was.

Back then it was a best guess, when the truck would show up. That feeling really hasn't gone away. I've talked with some other "grown ups" (though I'd bet most of us still feel like kids most of the time), who are equally excited when they click on "track package" and see the phrase "Out for delivery." That's the day. Whatever it is will either be there when you get home or shortly after.

I'm not overly materialistic, but I do dig new toys (as a generic term). It was skateboards for a time, has been new running gear or shoes, and books. Ah yes, books. What got me thinking about the UPS truck this particular time was waiting for Franz Wright's new book, "Kindertotenwald," which was published earlier this week. Seeing that it was "out for delivery" yesterday stirred up the same feelings that my Powell Peralta Steve Caballero or Tony Hawk, the Dogtown Micke Alba, Zorlac John Gibson, or Alva Street Fire did in the teenage years (to be honest, I'd be just as tickled to have any of those show up now).

I've been waiting for Wright's book through the summer, when he mentioned that it would be coming out. A new book from him is cause for excitement and celebration. Reading this morning, he has made the morning more alive, my soul more expansive and the coffee more electric.

I'm not sure when or what I'll be waiting for next from the UPS truck. And whether it will be loaded with goodness from Skates on Haight or Amazon or where, but I know the brown truck and the phrase "out for delivery" will have me sitting on Farmar's porch with a couple socket wrenches, 3/8 and 1/2 if I recall correctly.

My grandfather slept in his truck

It's an allusive world. Or maybe only if you have an allusive mind. And mine cross-references like a one-armed bandit, pulling cherries or bars at random depending on who or what pulled the lever.

And if that doesn't turn a straight road, linear worldview into a greased go-cart slick track, my attention span is a shuttlecock smacked around by writers, friends, music, media. If someone whose take I jibe with points me at something cool, I'm off and after it.

This is a good thing, as long as I give myself a chance to catch up. Example: between The Rumpus, Twitter and TWM, over the course of a week my reading list has expanded to include Saul Williams's Dead Emcee Scrolls, Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries, and John Fowles's The Tree, let alone just learning about and wanting to read everything Benjamin Percy has written. It's f-ing hard to keep pace...

Twitter is a dangerous thing for me in its ability to reflect like a prism at the hands of writers and poets and thinkers and cool people. Sometimes I'm too plugged in--restless leg syndrome for the brain.

Sometimes I've got to meditate or run--detatch from it all to cultivate silence and stillness.

My grandfather used to sleep in his truck. Nothing unusual. He drove a truck pre-Bay Bridge when you took a ferry across the Chesapeake Bay. If you didn't time it right, you sat. And waited. And slept if you were tired.

That's a lesson learned, there. A message he left me, without knowing--just by living and working. He wouldn't have meant it as an example.

But that's where the allusive mind kicks in, as I sit in my truck, with the radio off, listening to cars cruise by, waiting.