Isolation by Joy Division

I'm guest hosting a radio program with a friend in a few weeks. Notes from my playlist have taken on a life of their own...

(The author, Frigid Air - Winona, MN June 1987 - photographer unknown)

It is no exaggeration to say that skateboarding, and everything that came along with it, was a salvation during my teenage years.

I was physically undersized, a runt, and was thus unsuited for the traditional team sports that usually provided a place of belonging for most pubescent boys in Ronald Reagan’s middle America. As much as I enjoyed the endeavors, I was terrible at hunting and fishing (the outdoor core of my family’s lifestyle) and had to deal with more ridicule than companionship and accomplishment when I engaged in it. Until skateboarding came along, I was left with little else than playgrounds and forests and riding my bike to the downtown public library, my safest place, to lose myself in its grand temple of human imagination.

When my friends and I discovered skateboarding around the age of twelve, it allowed us to sign on to a subculture that made sense to us and provided us with an analog network of inspirational material.

We ran our mouths non-stop while we skated - sharing music and magazine articles, directions to curbs, slopes, handrails and ramps that only we knew how to find, which music videos to watch, which skateboarding videos to rent… the constant barking of encouragement, the ribbing and teasing and one-upsmanship. The unspoken agreements that ostracized anyone arrogant or comfortable with cruelty. Combine all of that with the near constant physical exertion, timing, balance, gymnastics, repetition, inspiration, imagination, and the daily negotiations with fear and bodily harm we all knew were just part of the game. Skateboarding had no coaches, no scheduled workouts, no points tallied, no timelines. We were accountable only to ourselves and the culture we were crafting every time we stepped out our front door and kick/pushed down our streets… and most people - adults and classmates - really didn’t like that.

Skateboarders didn’t look or sound or act like basketball players or metal-heads or the church youth group (even though some of us were all three at the same time) - and we didn’t want to. Without the rules everyone else seemed so eager to follow, we thrived - and for that we were ostracized as vandals and criminals. Armies of the ordinary constantly kept us in their crosshairs. For all of the insouciant indignation we carried as outcasts, to some of us the pain of being vilified and marginalized for having found self-celebration in something constructive and communal - however unconventional - was a low-level dose of anguish on the daily.

We did, however, have each other. In quiet, tense moments of rest, we’d share stories about how often our parents and older siblings let us know us how disappointing we were. We were chased and threatened and sometimes physically assaulted by everyone from parents and the police to voting-age dudes in pickup trucks and rusted-out sedans.

That is why bands like Joy Division and Minor Threat and Ministry and Public Enemy and Slayer seemed to understand us and speak for us. The soundtrack to our lives, the maps and codes we looked for to help us decipher our place in life and where we were going, was not being provided by Dokken and Richard Marx.

I loved the beat of “Isolation” - Peter Hook’s grimy bass line layered into the whip crack of the snare - when I first listened to Joy Division’s Closer album all the way through. I lay on my bed with my eyes closed, not really crazy about the keyboard melody, but feeling an energy rise in my chest, hanging on Ian’s every line, the second verse placing the light of language on the ache and hurt and guilt that had become part of every waking hour of my life. The shame and embarrassment and frustration of the constant bullying - especially by those who were supposed to protect me and my friends - the supplication in the third verse, imploring not only our families, but the world at large, to understand that we had found indescribable beauty - a constructive physical release - in skateboarding and it was quite literally keeping some of us alive. Even if we were being constantly reminded that our loved ones weren’t proud of us, we had found a way to be proud of ourselves.

I am still here because of skateboarding and everything that came along with it - the music of Joy Division included. The fact that Ian Curtis, the poet who sang those lyrics to me over and over again, had been dead by his own hand nearly a decade by the time I first heard them, is a cruel irony that has never been lost on me.

I’ve come to a point in my life where I have finally decided to confront and examine the dark places my heart lived for so long. I’m allowing myself to stand in the times where I really didn’t think anyone wanted me around anymore, when I was barely strong enough to ask myself whether another day’s or long night’s effort was going to be worth it. In a perverse way, it’s possible that knowing someone like Ian Curtis, someone whose art I admired and relied upon so much, had (for myriad reasons I was unaware of at the time) taken himself out when he was at his best allowed me a choice - even in my own ‘Isolation’ - that I could turn away from for at least one more day.

Here’s to nigh on four decades of at least one more day…

Thank you, Joy Division.

Thank you, skateboarding…