Practice/ Mall Security (1999)

Practice.

Ev R0ck
5 min readSep 23, 2024

I read an interview with Phil Lesh, from 1999 when he was first beginning to work with members of Phish. He was talking about how Phish would put in 40 hour weeks of band practice before hitting the road and playing gigs. He compared it to his band The Grateful Dead, who he said just practiced on stage, in front of the 50 thousand people they were playing to.

Now, I know there aren’t 50 thousand of you out there, but there is something to be said for the approach that Lesh described, to me, anyway. I want to be creative, simply because when I am that’s the best I have ever found myself feeling inside of my skin. If I want to be creative, I look at the ways that creative people operate, which is why a 1999 interview with Phil Lesh is of some importance to me. So, I practice where it can be seen.

The shows that were played by Phil (and friends) around the time of that interview are remarkable, and a recording of one them reached me at around the age of 14, through a mislabeled MP3 on one of those Napster era p2p file sharing platforms that would just infect a windows computer with malware beyond repair. This recording completely upended my conceptual understanding of music irrevocably. I’ll link a stream of it:

So, practice.

A few years ago, I became aware of some kind of autopilot state in which creativity could manifest itself without much thought or effort. I’ve never been particularly fond of either thought or effort, so I quite enjoyed discovering this mind state. I had a counselor named Andrew at one point, maybe a year ago, who wasn’t a writer or artist but a marathon runner. He described a flow state that he gets into when he runs, and the concept was directly transferable to what I do, or at least what i’d like to do.

It takes practice to get to that place more frequently.

Usually, when I can’t get there it’s because I’m in my own way. I’m stuck on the outcome, and how it will be perceived by those who are kind enough to read it.

Anyway, it’s 1:30 PM on a Monday, and this is practice.

Mall Security

I was walking down liberty avenue, as I do every day to go get smokes. I was listening to music, as usual, and thinking, always thinking. If you read what I wrote and posted yesterday, it was about a 40 minute phone conversation that I had with my friend Pat who I’ve known since I was 12 or 13.

Pat reminded me of a story I had forgotten, and it makes me laugh out loud to the point where I look insane in public, which Is OK because I live in New York, so looking insane in public isn’t anything of note.

This story predates my introduction to psychoactive chemicals, I should note.

When I was maybe 13 between 7th and 8th grade, the place I wanted to be was the Independence Mall. I’m not unique in this, I don’t know why but it was just a thing for teenagers to be at the mall in 1999. I’m not interested in really understanding what that’s about right now, perhaps the mall was a cultural center of some sort to small town teenagers. I know the Sega arcade game Crazy Taxi was a big part of what would get Patrick and I to take a bus and then ride our bikes to the mall, which was a considerable distance away from our our homes. It was just a given every day “what are we doing, today?” Obviously we’re going to the mall.

I would wake up every day, to find Pat playing the demo for Tony Hawks Pro Skater on the playstation in my parents basement, because he knew better than to wake me up early (as i was a real bear about that, and still am). Our mission, every day, was to get to the mall.

I wrote something else about that period of time, for context i’ll link it:

Anyway, the story that has me laughing in public is from one of our countless days at the mall.

For some reason, he and I went into Kay-Bee toys and got these “police officer” play sets.

We started walking around with the badges on, and Billy clubs in hand and approaching people who were shopping, especially fellow kids and just saying “you gonna pay for that?”

Eventually, the mall security got hip to it, and they asked us to leave. The fake cops, didn’t like us fake cops, and they fake copped us right out of there.

on our way off the out of the parking lot, we actually acted as if we were beating the hell out of a shopping cart with our Billy clubs, in some weird version of the Rodney King tape that everyone who grew up in the 90’s had seen countless times. There are certain things ingrained in the minds of someone my age, and that tape is one of them.

I don’t know what kind of meaning this story has (if any) , or how it’s connected to my understanding of police brutality 25 years later. It’s not like we were doing it for Tik Tok, I think a video camera itself was well over a thousand dollars at the time. We were just doing it.

We were odd, suburban, white teenagers at the mall. We perceived the mall security as authoritarian, and we were sticking it to them, I suppose. We weren’t even getting stoned yet, so that’s not even a viable excuse for this behavior.

I just wanted to write, i’m trying not to doom scroll as much, and writing seems like a much better way to occupy my mind . The whole doom scrolling bed rot thing sucks. I woke up, and instead of rolling over and beginning my usual endless scrolling, I started a meditation practice with the Insight Timer app. We’ll just see if I stick to it.

The other benefit of practicing here, is that it’s all here in case I ever need it. I’ve had this idea that there’s eventually some larger piece of work that I can put all of the incomplete puzzle pieces into. We’ll just see if I stick to it.

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Ev R0ck

Embracing the unconventional path, empowering others to create, connect, and thrive. https://linktr.ee/EvR0cK17