art by neil blender “Cramped leg room on major international flights unlikely to change course of famous river.” The line above is a nonsensical riddle, kind of like a Zen koan. Zen koans, being the ultimate nonsensical riddle, are not meant to be solved rationally. Instead, they are meant to bewilder and confuse the intellect with the goal of pushing it out of its analytical way of thinking so it can drop into a more intuitive level. “I have fond memories of events that have never happened.” “Neil, I’ve mailed you a void. You won’t know when it arrives, but please call me when you receive it.” Nonsensical riddles have the ability to twist the analytical mind into knots, the part of our mind that is desperate to make sense of things. This twisting can create more opportunities for non-linear and intuitive ways of operating. “I recently joined a knife club. Once a month one of the members agrees to a group stabbing and then we eat cupcakes.” — In 1984, I was in North San Diego County attending a meeting with seven others. We were there to discuss the creation of a new skateboard magazine. As with most meetings, this one dragged on to the point where I became very bored. I looked across the table at Neil Blender, one of skateboarding’s most celebrated non-conformists and artists. I could see that he was as bored as I was. I picked up a scrap piece of paper, scribbled a nonsensical line on it and passed it across the No. 149 table to him. He looked at it and laughed out loud. He then wrote his own nonsensical line and passed it back to me and I laughed out loud. Thus began a writing practice that has endured over 42 years. “Very early this morning a foreign adversary hacked into my oatmeal.” “I’m crowd-funding my next cup of coffee.” What began as writing actual physical letters to each other filled with absurd lines and riddles morphed into emails and is now done through texts. I haven’t physically seen or spoken to Neil in over 10 years. Prior to that, I hadn’t seen him for 15 years. So I’ve seen him once in 25 years. Though we don’t verbally speak to each other and don’t physically visit each other, we communicate frequently through the texting of these mutually appreciated nonsensical absurdities. Stacy Peralta: “This is official confirmation that you’ve been selected for nothing.” Neil Blender: “You’ve been pre-approved to eat lasagna.” The exercise we developed was not intentional, it happened as a result of attending a boring meeting. But as we began to develop our practice, we knew we were onto something. We began to recognize how the practice of writing these lines loosened up our minds, helping to propel us out of our own literal way of thinking, and dropping us into a more free form and intuitive way of operating. Sometimes the things we write to each other arrive as questions: NB: “I told a friend I was starting a new job on Friday. He said, ‘Do you have all your ducks in a row?’” I said, ‘No, they’re staggered, will that change the outcome?’” SP: “You have any interest in selling your soul? If not, how bout trading it for scrap?” Other times we write lines that come off as statements: by stacy peralta
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