Oh man do I know how to crash. You should see all the ways. I've got the scars to prove it. An old friend even got it on video once. Back in high school when everything was just starting to go digital. We had our mountain bikes over at the firestation where my grandpa used to work. There is a nice diagonal dozen step stair drop with a railing to clear. We both nailed it a few times. I was feeling bold. On my last run I came in hot but mistimed it a tad, catching the front wheel on the rail. It was an ass over elbows affair, several feet in the air.
That feeling… the switch that gets thrown when shit goes down. And it all slows down. The raw survival instincts kick in - eyes go wide, butt clenched and braced for impact.
I swear, sometimes that sensation can last for years. Perpetual crashes. Contorted. Limbs askew. Smacked around. Bikes, bank accounts, broken hearts, gigabytes of burnouts… you name it, I've either crashed it or it's crashed me.
But who hasn't, right? It's in our nature, isn't it? Isn't that how we learn? To see how far we can take something before it falls to pieces. Then we scratch our heads and try to figure out how to put it back together better. Bonus points for learning from our mistakes. Let's hope right?
Oh the crashes of life…
Anyway, I lucked out that day and walked away with just scrapes. It could have been so much worse. I brushed myself off and felt like a bit of a badass. And with the pixels to prove it! That is until he recorded over it with boobs a few hours later. Storage was at a premium. And so were boobs I guess. My street cred lost in the technological ether. Overwritten by teenage hormones. Deleted and never to be recovered.
Such is life. Sometimes things get lost forever and we have to start again from scratch. Sometimes scratch is just what we need.
So I continued to crash, repair, repeat. When I was younger that meant time in the basement workshop, learning the tools to keep the wheels I love running sweet. I crashed so much they had to fix my broken face. But I was hungry for more. So I crashed through classes, curriculums, careers, even a few countries. Patching jeans and snapping pics along the way.
But I'll say, all that crashing adds up. Over time it coagulates into creaks, cracks, and aches. Slowly eroding my confidence for surviving any more crashes. It gets scary. So I'd crash on the couch instead, and cram food in my face for comfort. Which only crashed my poor tummy. Then the universe was done with metaphors and sent a bus crashing through me. My poor back. Where are the tools for fixing all that?
Yet miraculously I emerge, from a thick hazy cloud of damp farts and dust, and crash into love, community, and parenthood. A magical place where 1 plus 1 can make 3. Where all my dreams are somehow coming to be. Crash by lovely crash.
After years upside down and spun around, eventually I crash to land. It feels good to be on solid ground. I've cultivated a curious kind of resilience, a craftsman of sorts. I get fixated on fixing things. How to build something to last through the crashes of life. Both without and within. Learning how to slow down, crash less, and unclench. Build up instead of break down, and leave myself something a little softer to land on when I fall.
It's a whole new set of tools.
I'm slowly put it back together. Lubing out the squeaks. In the grand scheme of dreams the crashes are punctuation marks ~ weaving my jumbled words and ideas into some kind of coherent narrative that keeps me in motion. It may be chaotic and clumsy, but I'm recognizing the rhythm. There's a tap in my toes and I'm letting everybody know.
But what do we build?!?! How is it suppose to come together? It's easy to crash apart. But couldn't we also crash together?
Those are the pedals I want to be pushing. Sure, it's a climb. You'll have to pump, but god damn that view! So worth it. Have you seen what's on the horizon? It's starting to come into focus.
And then my computer crashes and it all disappears. Swallowed into the void of a blank screen of death and digital despair. Ffffffaaaacccccchhhhhh….
The only crashes I'm contending with these days are on my devices. Been pushing old tech for way too long. I can be stubborn like that. My 9 year old MacBook finally shit the bed. They say it's the logic board. But I can't see it. It's too tiny and complex. Nobody around here will repair it. But I rubbed the chassis just right a couple weeks back and it ran like a champ for a whole week. Man was it sweet. Still chugging along, more than capable of doing what I need when it stays booted up for more than 15 seconds. But I couldn't trust it. My notes, code, images, work, all my tools of the digital trade… Gone. But not lost. No. Not this time. I've got backups bitches.
Ugh. Tech can be so tantalizing. Powerful if you know how to use it. But also sticky and tricky. Hard to pull one's gaze from that glorious sparkly interweb haze. And the bytes being all itty bitty, so easy to misplace. When shit goes wrong, as it often does, it can be a real pain in the ass to diagnose. The hardware grows ever tinier and more complex. It's impossible to fix what you can't see. Most of it just isn't built to be repaired or to last. I've tried. I've cracked them open many times. Repairing batteries, keyboards, trackpads. I love seeing what's inside. How it all comes together. I've been one crafty mofo fixing what I can and jerry rigging software work arounds. But at a certain point it becomes a huge time/energy sink. It's disappointing.
It doesn't have to be that way.
But we're not there yet. And that's alright. End of life is a universal truth. I must accept it. I can't rely on janky tech in my line of work. I've been getting by on Rachel's OG Chromebook from 2013 with hickety hack Linux instance rendering me mostly functional for the past couple months. I'm proud of the work around, but it hasn't been pleasant.
It's time for an upgrade.
And my oh my would you look at that. It's Apple season. There's fruit on the trees and on the keys. Mere minutes away from the announcement of new hardware. And daddy's been saving up. Yay.
Man it brings me back. 2012. The last time I bought a new computer. All these dreams of what might be with my startup. Setting off on this grand adventure. Didn't go as planned… But looking back at all the crashes, I've gotta say, in many ways it went better.
Alright. Time to hit the pedals. Got wheels? Wanna go for a ride?