Practicing Plain Text

We eat bananas.

No, we don't just eat bananas, we Eat Bananas. En masse foodstuffs travel traceur-fast through our kitchen-space--lucky to keep a tub of yogurt twelve hours after it was bought in the first place! Goodbye pears, apples, granola, and cheese; you have no chance with hungry monkeys such as these. Dairy? We really should own a farm, for the milk spilling uninturrupted into our muzzles--(Do monkeys have muzzles?)--and so much sausage comes and goes that dinner is sausage--don't laugh! It's true:

Him: I'm still so hungry tonight...
Me: It's because you didn't have sausage yet, did you?

Rumpled packages from sweet-and-spicy tea, onion skins, cheese dust, and frozen berry drippings all spot the countertops during neccessary food-frenzies. [Monkee House living comes complete with empty jars, tubs, and milk jugs galore!] Oh the yougurt--the yogurt!--it's something we just can't store. Four-five-or-more hungry bodies to feed--feuling catleaps and wallpasses, dips, pushes, lifts, and swings. Jumping, juggling, running, fighting--that's play-fighting, 'cause we're peacable, even being raw--and whatever else catches fancy that may prove acceptably challenging to take on--Rraaahhh! Bring us beefy-beef-beef soup and broccoli; carrots and avacados and eggs and honey...

We're so hungry we feast on our fears--and have, and will, for the rest of our years.

We feed for late nights and busy days, building boxes and community, discovering new ways--of living together and working for fun, supporting each other training alone together as one. Who ever thought a home could be grown of adults who are children with a serious need to play, so much that it permeates each moment, each day? Each flop onto furniture when too tired to want to move--but only because the opposite of that was, just earlier, so true. And tomorrow it will be just as true all again, so we'll buy more bananas, because it's not going to end.

Exsistence of the Humanest

This isn't the first time I've not tried to stop myself from ranting, carried away in the righteous cadence of my thoughts. It is not for me to declare annoyance with that which is different--beyond my understanding--as I've ignorance just as that which irks me so.

But, I'm so not better than anyone else. Not elite, superior, nor besting any of my race.
--This isn't a race!

Parkour is to be trained to help others, not to lord our fitness and abilities over them. Comments about sheeple, "the weaker", our fellows as prey...This mindset does not advance our spirits, but sets us morally backwards. Imagine, being dismissed for a different way of life, for following practices that you'd never chosen, but had shoved into your mind and physical existence through endless medias of misinformation. Shame to utter survival of the fittest as if only we know the truth, when it just isn't true any more. Rather, I'd see leading by the fittest, protection by the fittest. Yes, I would that every person in a protect and serve position was an active athlete. That I could be sure if I were running, I would be caught. But because this isn't true, I don't give up on them, muttering, "Oh, they're behind on their bodies and would just never survive, (if it really came down to it, in this distant supposition in my brain.)" A cop-out on society if ever there was one. What good training the 'strong' to be stronger and leave the 'weak' to waste away when what makes us humane is the vast diversity in which we come? What good is knowing ourselves while refusing to acknowledge all types? If the 'fittest' were the only to 'survive', I'd be well and truly dead as an infant, suffocated by my own treacherous lungs. Instead, because some brains were mightier than brawn, I had a chance, to pit myself against an upbringing of fast-food and seated entertainment, the temptations of inhibiting substances, the arrogances of those who seemed to appear without struggle to succeed in everything physical. Yes, hard work is done by all those mighty bodies, I discredit none for their perseverance, willpower, and self motivation, but if I believed that only the self-motivated are meant to succeed, I'd be forgetting myself years ago and do no justice to so many I meet today. When creating ourselves as strong, capable bodies comes so naturally, it is difficult to imagine not being this way. Easy to dismiss bad habits as laziness, or unwillingness, to change. But what people who 'aren't there yet' need isn't disgust from anyone else, but full support in the immensely difficult journey it may be to change. Is it so crazy to think that, sometimes, people don't know where or how to start? Ignorance is no crime, is not a disease, is not exclusive but inclusive to everyone, somehow. This is about choices, knowing that they're there, how to make them, and how to find the strength to follow through.

I want humans to be active, fit, and playful. I proceed as if that day of survival-of-the-most-prepared/adaptable/knowledgeable/fit will come within my lifetime, but I also acknowledge what is going on right now. Guess what? Every tenth of those obesity statistics is derived from some individual--a thinking, feeling, human. I should hope compassion is beyond no-one.

Parkour is a word. We are people. And practicing our movement alone doesn't make us better if we're unwilling to apply it to the most difficult task; helping others--really helping, not telling nor preaching to them--to find themselves as we have, as striving, vibrant bodies and minds. Supporting mankind as a whole is not beyond traceurs; nothing is.

/rant

-MonkEE

Middle Ground

Between traveling to San Antonio in March for a week of training, returning home wrecked and happy to have gone, re-spraining my ankle, sitting around while it fixes itself, and wondering what to write about outside my personal journal, I've found very little to say here.

Jumping logs on the beach yesterday felt wonderful--though the distance was short, and the duration shorter. Before, while step-slipping down the path to the rocks, I'd chosen the steeps to be hiked with all-fours on return. Trudging up through the sand and stones, hauling backpack and determination, I took the most difficult pieces of the trail quadrupedally--not so much in distance when looked back at, but enough to forget myself in each grabbing hand step, and every push of my forefoot and toes. And today I remember that I'm to go slow, build back proper, take my time. In my excitement to be healed I imagine all the challenges to attack, some so close to home. I prepare for my return, stretch, rotate, test and prod, and try to be steady and strong.

Time from movement--usually healing--brings me deep into quiet self-reflection. As the spring wears on-- such a chilly spring, though the flowers seem not to notice or care--I've started daydreaming of commercial fishing again. Southeast Alaska, salmon for the win, twenty hour days and rocking on wave nights...The sting of jellies from five a.m. to whenever I'm cleaner, waking to the roar of the diesel engine, groggy and cold, slipping into my sweats while still in my bunk, layering, groaning, boottops folded down until the very last moments before I don my raingear. I'll scratch at my head and yawn all morning, wishing for a shower and warm rooms, and breathing deep like I can take the air back with me.












I'm not a cook, but'll make a pre-breakfast pot of oatmeal, brew coffee and stretch myself warmer, hit the head, and set the gear, and wait until it's bright enough to see the jumpers splashing. We'll find the fish, close around them, and I'll haul gear at regular intervals all day, jellyfish water burning all exposed skin, blown around by the wind whipping net. Working quickly and methodically, I'll wonder daily why the hell I'm here. Between sets I'll write in notebooks, or juggle kelp balls, or stare out into the living crystal water, thinking about that time with that person that I'll go home to and enjoy. I'll be alone and working until the sun sets, with the crew, yes, but so in my head; if I go out to fish again, it isn't for the money, but to try myself internally, forcefully, and in full.

I want to go back to remember why I'm me, to face again the challenge of alone among men, to miss my home and friends, and the life I've so carefully built for myself. I can't know what I have until I step far away, peering back to see, discovering newness within, adapting training to 48ft., getting minimal sleep, and having dozens of quiet projects to complete. It's like running away to be myself, enjoying the vastness of the north but-not-that-north, preparing the entire time to return--better, stronger, and reassured of the life I pursue. If I choose to go again, it's to change myself, refine and redefine, like I'm spell-checking me, reviewing punctuations, switching terms, tossing paragraphs, and simplifying content completely...

I life my life with the intent to write it down; that doesn't mean I will, but if I do, I'd better have things to say. --Beyond lamenting this middle ground of not quite somewhere; I want more than this always place of in-between, where I'm almost comfortable enough, but missing something. I take my story seriously, building the plotline carefully, observing flaws to remove, the ones to tweak, loving the lucky phrase placements that come unexpectedly, and wondering--always--what's to happen next. I'm like an obsessive saga, conscious of myself--enough that I want to test--thoroughly--the reality of my epic authenticity, and give myself real reasons to exist so vividly.