As I watch a new Toy Machine skater i've never heard of go on a kickflip-into-handrail barrage akin to Jon Allie in Dying To Live twenty years ago, i reflect on how little it moves me, and stare into the endless abyss of my mortality - having now exhausted myself of floppy haired t-shirt people skateboarding handrails among quirky text overlays, was it my time to die? Each song, each animation, a simulacrum of a an actual childhood, rhyming roughly with the well-trod path that was laid for it long ago, and yet hollow, a pale reflection of a poem now forgotten, saddled with favors past.
The aesthetic presents itself as if it does not care, in the way a rebellious child doesn't, but it's clear that it does. God, it so, so, does. It has settled into its lot, and settled for the long haul, like the friend we all have who married early and soldiers on, a husk of a person turning their hamster wheel all day every day, not daring to stop for fear of losing what little inertia they have
Some relief washes over me as I accept that I have squeezed all the joy I can out of this format, the "toy machine video", and now I can move on to the next plane of existence, as my ancestors have for time immemorial. I give thanks for the thing that it was, and set both it and myself aflame.