activities from the archives...

I was having a conversation with someone the other day on a topic very similar to the below. The below is one of the very many things I have forgotten writing. I guess it's maybe five years old.


If you try any new activity, you’ll quickly discover that your new hobby is someone else’s entire life.
Don’t believe me? Go buy a kite. I don’t mean a cheap-o kite. Don’t go into a convenience store and buy a three-dollar job made out of an old dry cleaning bag, supported with taped together toothpicks and decorated with a picture of a 1970’s cartoon character no one knows. Someone like Godzooki Doo.
Go into a hobby store or an actual kite store and buy a decent one. Something made out of nylar or something. Some indestructible mad-made fabric. It should have two control handles and a collapsible support structure. Go crazy. Spend fifty bucks. This is a valuable learning experience I’m offering you. You have to expect to make some kind of investment.
Then take your new kite out to a park where other people are flying comparable kites and have yourself a ball. Say to yourself, “Hey. I’m glad I read that article about kites! This kite flying thing is okay!”
If you’re anything like me, and how could you not be, you’ll get some real enjoyment out of the kite. You’ll learn some loopy-loop things and might even invest in a neato tail deal.
But then, at about the thirty-day point in the relationship with your kite, one of two things will happen. You might find yourself out at the park or the field or wherever saying, “Hey. Here I am. Flying my kite again. Huh. I wonder if there’s anything else I could be doing right now. Like eating a pickle. I can always go fly my kite another day.” Then you’ll put the kite away for a while. Just long enough to move through two apartments until you get sick of packing it and huck it out a window.
Or, you’ll slip into the entry stages of the kite lifestyle.
Now, while I’m sure you’ve seen other people flying their kites, I bet you didn’t know there was a kite lifestyle. Trust me, there is. There’s a kite lifestyle, a mountain bike lifestyle, a road bike lifestyle (Never make the mistake of confusing a mountain biker with a road biker. They hate each other and will hate you as well.), a pottery lifestyle, 3D rendering, soccer, volleyball, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, popsicle stick house building, log cabin building, model car racing, matzo ball preparing, running, jogging, WALKING… There’s a magazine called Walking. I’m waiting for the one about respiring. “Breathing. Everybody’s doing it!”
The point is, if you’ve done it, odds are there’s someone else, very likely a large group of someones else, who only get out of bed every day so they can do that thing. Or they only get out of bed to go to work so they can afford the various stuffs they need to do that thing. Or think about how they’d like to be doing that thing. Or talk to their friends about the last time they did it and when they might do it again.
But let’s get back to the kite. You have a kite and you really enjoy it and you’re wondering about the kite lifestyle. How can I, you ask yourself, be a kite enthusiast? What you need is a kite buddy. A kite adviser. Someone to take you under his wing and teach you about two-leg brindles, angles of attack and spars and spines and stuff. Someone who can tell you what to do when your kite luffs at the zenith. Which of us can truly say they’ve never pondered that dilemma?
Go to a place where lots of people are loopy-looping fluorescent kites with absurdly long tails. Ideally, this place will kind of smell like patchouli. Look for an overweight man with a long white beard wearing rainbow stretch pants. Or, alternatively, look for a skinny man with a handlebar mustache twice as big as his head, wearing rainbow stretch pants. Odds are, the thin guy got to the park riding a recumbent bicycle. Because he’s eccentric. The overweight guy took the minivan he’s decorated with glued on macaroni. Because he’s, you know, eccentric.
Whichever guy it is, here are some other ways to identify him. He’ll be the guy who has tethered himself to the ground with what looks like a stake from a circus tent. His arms will be crisscrossed with straps. These straps will help him keep hold of the massive control handles, which will be connected, via a cable that you won’t even be able to see, to a scale model DC10.
He’ll be sweating and grunting and there will be, in the ground below his feet, a crescent shaped groove dug because the kite keeps pulling him to the end of his circus stake tether and slewing him back and forth. If this tether were to let go, he’d either be dragged across the field cutting a channel out of the earth with his face, or he’d be lifted into the stratosphere.
Which one of these things would happen depends on whether you found the overweight bearded man or the skinny giant handlebar mustache man. I leave it to you to figure out which would happen to whom.
This is the man you want to talk to.
Presupposing the tether does not come loose, wait for the man to tire or for the wind to die or for four o’clock when Guess My Palindrome comes on NPR. He’ll land the kite then. Do not attempt to talk to him before he lands the kite. If you do so, you will be shunned as a doltish kite newbie, and who wants that?
Watch as he skillfully lands what you had thought of as a scale model DC10. What you didn’t guess was that it was a FULL-scale model DC10.
Get comfortable. It’s going to take a while for him to disassemble the fuselage and the cockpit and what have you. He’ll have to reel his arms back up into their sockets so his fingers stop dragging on the ground and re-spool the invisible cable. You could pay for the fuel a DC10 needs in a year of service with what this cable costs, by the way.
When this is all done, gawk in awe at the small package he manages to fit everything into. While he’ll have enough material to tarp the QE2, his resulting parcel of put away kite will be the same size as yours. This is a good trick. As an aside, you may want to practice gawking in awe at home as it’s very tricky.
If, after witnessing all this, you find yourself wondering if you really want to be part of a lifestyle that involves bizarre facial hair, rainbow stretch pants and what has to be degenerative stretching of the arms, not to mention the recumbent bikes, run. Run away and never look back. This is not the new lifestyle for you as all of the above are required by law. Skip the packing stages and just huck your kite out the window
If, however, you are not scared, but enthralled, go up and talk to the man. If it’s the skinny man, go to him bearing mustache wax. If it’s the overweight man, some Little Debbie’s will do. Maybe a couple of boxes of pasta and some Elmer’s.
Go to him, acknowledging your doltish, kite newbie standing. He’ll respect you more for knowing your place. Go to him and learn the way of the Lark’s head.
That tingling you feel is your bizarre facial hair coming in.