Category: R.C.’s notebook

There are dozens of signs
that things are going down the bin.
Hundreds. Thousands. Millions of small indications.

There’s little debate about whether it’s going to happen — only when.

I knew it the moment I saw a fully grown man riding an electric scooter.

I’d call myself a fairly open-minded and tolerant person.
I have zero interest in interfering in your life or — God forbid — telling you how to live it.

But riding that deviant, ugly monster?
That’s next-level shit.
A complete surrender of the last tiny bit of self-esteem.

There are many words for it.
I just call it The Stoke.

You either have it, or you don’t.
But if you have it, you can’t get rid of it. You have it for life.

You might “forget” about it for a while.
And after a while, you forget about yourself.

You make bad decisions.
You struggle.
You go crazy.
You fall.

And then? You get up again. Because, as you remember, you still have it.
Man, life’s too short. Too beautiful.
Take one step after another, and believe in two things:

Yourself and The Stoke.

It was the early noughties.
I remember buying Pump up the Valium by NOFX in Italy during a school holiday in autumn.

Later, back home, we blasted the record while hanging out in an old trailer under a bridge – smoking pot, wearing leather jackets and mohawks. So cliché.

Life was not so serious back then. We just laughed a lot and took every day without prejudice. It was magical.