Okinawa | EaT~aLL~YouR~FisH™

I’ll give anyone $1000 who knows what the title “Salad Days” alludes to? Of course, if you do know, that $1000 will be an I-O-U, but nonetheless, most people wouldn’t even come close to guessing an answer. It’s a Shakespearian idiom, & it refers to that shining time of one’s youth, when you’re full of vigor & innocence & life seemed impossibly possible. For yours truly, it was skating the city streets on an island in the South Pacific, all night long, all alone, just riding my board below the all-night neon lights, hair blowing in the wind, the industrial smell of the city stuck in my big Grecian nose. Oh that smell, that savory stink, of concrete & underground sewers & shops that were only open at night, with wafting fragrances of 24-hour food joints occasionally mixing in, I loved it. It’s a smell you can only smell in a city, & if I close my eyes, I can recall it all, particularly the feeling, oh that sweet sweet feeling, that free-falling feeling of freedom. No thoughts of money, or work, or payments past due. No anxieties about the responsibility of life, no God-damned stress, no nothing, but the bliss of being not only young, but young at heart.

Yeah, those were my salad days, or rather, my salad nights, & as hard as I try, I can’t think of a time when I was happier. Just me, my skateboard, my empty pockets, the night, the city, the salt in the air, before my blood became salty with the wicked ways of this savage world. Sure, I had troubles, deep-rooted troubles from disturbing events that plagued me in my earliest years, but those were buried, buried deep, & as long as my wheels rolled, & my axles ground, & my board slid, none of it mattered. Those dark events wouldn’t resurface until much later in life, & as far as was concerned, all I had was the night, & it was all I ever needed. I wish I could ride those streets for an eternity, the same streets, and/or some dreamscaped sculpted version of streets similar, just riding & riding, dopamine flowing through my pumping legs, all night through the long night with the full moon high, an endless night in an unending race to nowhere. I had such skills then too, good enough to never fall unless I was trying something new, but if I was just cruising, I could stay on my board like I was glued to it.

Nowadays, I’d bust my ass just getting on one. Surprisingly, the muscle memories are still there, STILL there, but the body & the brain just don’t add up anymore. Had I kept up with it, as is with most, I’d be as good as I was, & I could still ride through the city at night, but again, as is with most, the crushing reality of real life landed on my face like a jumbo jet, & all the everyday struggles of these unescapable responsibilities that come with growing up, overtook my trip. I still have a skateboard, but the dust on the grip tape sticks to it better than I can, & I look at it sometimes, with a motley crew of cursing inner voices, beckoning me, laughing at me, tormenting me, as I cannot go back, ever, back to that time, that magical time, except in my mind. I’ve even had a dream now & again of being back on that skateboard, back in that sweetly stinking city, back in the twilight, as if it COULD be forever, & then the alarm goes off, & I wake up to go back to the timecard, punching that proverbial clock, like the elevator drones in the movie Metropolis, on the slow march to a slow death. The only salad left in these days is the soggy one that you take to your lunch break, the one you’re barely even able to finish before the prison bell clang clang clangs to get back to work.

It’s so surreal to remember your past; it’s almost as if you weren’t even there in a way, just watching. Your entire life, from this fleeting moment right now, back to your youth, just a memory, like a film reel, & it’s just gone, gone forever. Of course these days, we can record everything, record the past, to relive it on our phones & computers, which makes it that much bittersweet when you look on those times, doesn’t it? Quite a remarkable process, isn’t it?…capturing the past, on a little box that you can carry around, all summed up in gigabytes. The amount of said gigabytes, is how much of the past you can store, & most people don’t think twice about how God damn remarkable that is, just to be able to do that. Capturing time, trapping time in a box, to relive whenever you want, with the flick of a wrinkling finger, what a world, what a strange & fascinating world, this world of technology. It’s a shame that the powers-that-be use it against us, isn’t it? If only the human race could all share in the relatively unlimited abundance we all deserve, how far we could go. What a shame, & until next time dear readers, be sure to live, LIVE your time, instead of putting it all into a box for later. So sayeth FisH™…🎏