Landry's Column

"The Existential Pondering of an Elder Skatesman"

I haven’t been working lately and it’s been tough on my mental state. I keep trying to get things done but just get bogged down with this need to feel content and complete. While I don’t want to go on an existential rant, I would like to note that I often wonder about meaning in a chaotic world gone wild. This of course always leads me to wonder as to where the fun lies in skateboarding. Is it in the satisfaction of learning a trick or is it something in the movement. If it is the satisfaction then how can we account for those who have given up learning new tricks but who continue to skate on the regular and if it is the latter, then which part of the movement or physical activity is pleasurable?

Now we can go on forever and ponder these questions, we can even go so far as to ponder the point of skateboarding itself, but I’m a narcissist and I insist on keeping the topic, in some sense, directed towards myself. This is not to say that I want to reveal details of the minutia of everyday existence in order to understand the human condition, as did Heidegger with his phenomenology of existence, but I would like to find some direction so that I can endure the Fall and Winter months when I am not teaching.


This may seem easy for most of you as you probably can think of a million things you could do when you are not working. Unfortunately for me, I’m required to direct my non-working life towards a household and cannot simply unfold on the couch and watch the View. I’m not above all this or beyond the lure of television, video games or drunkenness, but if I did fall into this world, I would most certainly hear about it from a number of people and may never return from the depths of the basement.

You see, this is where my life becomes difficult because I’m a slave to routine and structure. I need to have commitments in my life in order to keep me grounded and keep me moving. Without them, I falter and become sad. While skateboarding can help with the trials of everyday life, I’m unable to do this all the time. In fact, even if I had the freedom to do this all the time, I wouldn’t be able to justify the freedom to myself. I would be stricken with guilt and really beat myself up over the fact that I am not contributing to the overall wellness of the world. Not that teaching is the end all and be all of creation but even as a barrista at Starbucks I felt as though I was contributing to society through federal and provincial taxes.

As you can see, this is where my narcissism really ends. While I like to talk about what is going on in my life and whatnot, I don’t think I deserve anything. By this I mean, I don’t think I’m important enough or love myself enough to aim for an extravagant lifestyle with cars, a nice pad, video game systems and blu ray players. I just don’t have the ego for the “nice” items which are meant to distract me from all these existential questions. For this reason, I will never find the contentment or satisfaction I find in skateboarding that I look for on television. There will always be a discrepancy between the act of watching and being a player (albeit a minor one) in the grand scheme of things.

- Marc Landry