Counting up the memories

advanced tricking humor

1. How many of all the 540 kicks that I've ever done have actually mattered? All of them.

2. I forgot to take 3 grams of creatine with my post workout drink one afternoon in 2006. By virtue of the butterfly effect this one slip will result in my reduction to tricking ruins nine years from that time. If only I had taken that one dose of creatine years ago. I've just been spiraling down ever since.

3. How important will last weekend's tricking session be nine years from now? How important will the weekend session I had two months ago be nine years from now? How important will some random weekend session I forgot that I had in 2003, be nine years from now? How important will ALL of the sessions I had during 2003, be nine years from now? Oh wait. The creatine thing. I forgot I won't be tricking nine years from now because I missed that dose of creatine!

4. I skipped a gathering last month. It was an opportunity of a lifetime I'll never get again. It's the kind of thing memories are made of and I missed out on that memory. What else are memories made out of? 540 kicks. I remember every single 540 kick I've ever done. All 4000 of them. Quantity over Quality! Yeah, I didn't need that gathering anyway, I'll just do another 4000 540 kicks. 4001. 4002.. 4003... 4004....

5. I skipped another gathering this month. I feel like I should have gone. *sigh* There will never be another gathering exactly like it ever again. And there will never be another 540 kick exactly like the one I'm going to do right now. 4044....

6. While engaging the non-verbal level described in Korzybski's general semantics theorems, without interruption for quite some time, I began to see my tricking history as a blur that can adequately be described by what I would see on my drive to work. Wow. That's encouraging.

7. I couldn't take time off tricking that September four years ago to let that knee injury heal. I simply refused to work around that injury. And I was much too lazy to work on improving the condition of my injury. I'm glad I made it worse by trying to tough it out and trick through it those weeks. Those tricks I did while injured really mattered too. They really did. And that final, fateful afternoon session ended up impacting my tricking future permanently... For the better. Because the surgery I could have avoided ended up being an opportunity of a lifetime: the physician adapted a prototypical bionic mechanism to serve as a knee replacement, and now I'm a tricking cyborg. You should see my 540 kicks now, they're heavy metal in the true sense of the word. 4441. 4442.. 4443... 4444....

8. I would like to believe the things I've tried and done during my time tricking would have some sort of lasting effect on the world... But I just can't stop thinking about that dose of creatine I missed.

9. Tomorrow, I'd like to trick outside, but the weather forecast is calling for hard rain and flooding in certain regions. The temperatures have dropped below freezing, but I'm all rested up and ready to go. I don't think I'll trick tomorrow in that treacherous weather though, because the reps I do will simply not be effective when training in those conditions. I should keep saving up my energy for this weekend when I visit the plyo gym. Because a nice, comfortable, productive weekend session is so much more memorable than being a lunatic and tricking in disastrous weather.

10. I have threads saved on my computer from the old trickstutorials.com forums from 2004, and I can only recognize 1/5th of the user names contributing to some of these saved threads. And of that 1/5th, only 1/5th of those people are still active tricksters. And of that 1/5th that are active, I only care about 1/5th of those. Following this reasoning, it would appear I only give a damn about 1% of the contributors to those threads. What will that statistic look like 9 years from now? I think you know.

11. My Gosh... How much money have I spent on open gym fees in my lifetime? Could someone quote me the price to build a plyo floor? Could I have built my own plyo floor with the amount of money I've spent? I want my own plyo floor. I want my own plyo floor so I can experience the joy of 540 kicking on marshmallows anytime of the week I want! 4840. 4841.. 4842...

12. If the memorability of an event plays a role in determining our choices, and the memorability of something is proportional to the importance of an event, then how could I have possibly forgotten that dose of creatine?

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  • Tor Erik on

    All that creatine I didn’t take. My life is ruined.

  • Connor Dykstra on

    Man I love reading these old posts and trickstutorials.com gives me some good memories. I’m glad I emailed you on how to start tricking in 2013. You’re the man Jon!

  • Roninflyer on

    As sarcastic, humorous and simple as it is , this article is one of the bests. Makes me wonder about a lot of things.

  • Jon Call on

    The most important thing is to keep throwing big tricks into that sand pit of yours with the other Ronin flyers! ;-)


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