It’s kind of funny how you can go from
walking around with nothing but lint in you pocket and being totally
stoked, to walking around with a pocket full of keys and being totally
bummed.
It starts out simply and seductively.
I’ll just get this car so I can snowboard more. Wrong. Anything that
let’s you snowboard more is a scam. It won’t let you snowboard more
because you ride every day and a car can’t add days to the week.
“I’ll just get this little night job
so I can buy gas,” you hear yourself saying. There’s another key. Then
your job starts making you miss sleep, so you can’t snowboard as hard
or as long as you used to. And you need stuff to wear to work. You need
a place to change and store your stuff. Now you have an address, that’s
another key. Soon you have to get a day job because you’re not making
enough money at night. The keys start adding up.
Now that you have a job, girls know
you’re not a total loss and you end up with a girlfriend. She wants you
to hang with her once in a while instead of going boarding all the
time. First, she gives you the key to her heart, and then the key to
her apartment. That’s two more. You can’t give her the key to your
heart because snowboarding put a combination lock on it and only your
snowboard knows the number.
Now you have a bunch of keys in your
pocket. They’re high-maintenance items. You have to take care of them.
They’re weighing you down. Snowboarding is slowly slipping away, and
you don’t even notice.
One day, cruising to your full-time
office job that you had to get a few years back to make payments on all
your keys, you drive past a guy on the corner with his thumb out and a
snowboard under his arm. While speeding by you start thinking about the
guy you just passed. He looked like you used to—snowboard and nothing
else. As you pull into the parking lot at work, you can’t get the
hitchhiker out of your head. Your mind keeps wandering back. Pulling
all the keys out of you pocket and jingling them, you think about what
you really want from life.
Running back to your car, you reverse
out of the parking lot and squeal a Rockford in the middle of the
four-lane highway. You’ve got to get away from your keys. You begin
throwing them out the window as you blow down the highway. First to go
is the key to the door at work. Then you backhand your girlfriend’s
apartment key out the passenger window. Flick, there goes the key to
the storage unit, then the key to her car. Flick, flick, flick. You
feel better each time a key flies out the window and goes bouncing down
the pavement at 100 mph. You don’t even slow down for the tollbooth,
paying instead with the tossed key to your office and the executive
washroom.
You only have two keys left. You unlock your house, run in, grab your snowboard, and dash out of the house. You leave the key to your house sitting in the lock to the front door. Whoever finds the house open can take it, and all your stuff. You don’t need it anymore. You jump back into the car and start burning rubber through all four gears back to the highway where you saw the hitcher.
You only have two keys left. You unlock your house, run in, grab your snowboard, and dash out of the house. You leave the key to your house sitting in the lock to the front door. Whoever finds the house open can take it, and all your stuff. You don’t need it anymore. You jump back into the car and start burning rubber through all four gears back to the highway where you saw the hitcher.
He’s still there. You slam on the
brakes. When he opens the car door, you look into his eyes. It’s you.
It’s the life you left behind when you sold out.
