On 'On Flips'
Meditating on the belief that if you talk about doing something for long enough, you need to finish it, no matter if it's a good idea.
At the top, before you read any ramblings, a reminder that people pay me to do this:
I was lucky enough to write the March cover story for SPIN Magazine on Ratboys. Ratboys are truly one of the best bands around, and this was a real treat. Interviewing Julia and Dave for this was one of those “oh yeah, this is a great job” instances, and as a fun bonus I even got to talk to producer/former Death Cabber Chris Walla, who was also very nice. We got into their new album, Singin’ to an Empty Chair, therapy, grief, being a band that fits into all sorts of different scenes, Chicago, the current political climate, being a working band in 2026, and a lot more.
Click the pic below to read it (later).
Guns n’ Roses started the album Chinese Democracy in 1998. It was going to be this big magnum opus of an album that they teased for years. It became a running joke in music that it would never actually come out, to the point that The Offspring joked in 2003 that their next album would be called Chinese Democracy (You Snooze, You Lose), which Axl Rose took so seriously that he hit them with a cease-and-desist over it.
The album eventually came out in 2008, but I’ve never heard it. I haven’t heard most GnR songs to be fair, but that’s not the point.
It always struck me as funny to telegraph an album title this far out. It’s probably because Axl thought the name Chinese Democracy hit really fuckin’ hard so he was excited to tell people about this album well in advance.
Because then the natural course of a creative endeavor takes over, where things take longer than planned and you get lost pursuing every possible route you could take. You get distracted, find a different course, get distracted again by a new possibility while the other one is half-finished, and eventually you end up with 50 sort of OK songs and no closer to anything ready to release. You start to question whether this is worth pursuing anymore at all, but you sunk-cost-fallacy yourself into staying with it because you’ve already spent so much time on it and, more importantly, you’ve told so many people it will happen, so you need to put something out.
Thankfully, I have never done anything like this in my entire life.
Which reminds me—Hey, did you know you could just get a trampoline if you wanted to?
I wasn’t aware of that for a long time. For most of my childhood, trampolines were things that only existed in a select few backyards or dangling from the rafters of BJ’s Wholesale Club seemingly by magic. This is basically how I felt until I realized that you could just buy a trampoline if you wanted to. Armed with a part-time job bussing tables at the Texas Roadhouse or being Clifford the Big Red Dog for children’s events, and with the freedom of a driver’s license, there wasn’t much stopping me from buying a trampoline, so I bought one.
For months—years, at this point, I have had this lede written in a Google Doc titled “On Flips.”
“On Flips” was this story idea I had been kicking around, doing initial “research” on, sending feelers out to do bona fide interviews with people, about the cultural significance of flips. In short: Why do we as human beings place so much importance on doing a flip? Our greatest sporting event, which serves as the closest thing we can get to global peace and friendship has many events centered around who can do flips the best and most. Flips serve as international diplomacy. A common language like physical Esperanto.
Those flippers, the ones we deem the ones who do flips the best and highest and fastest and most admirable and tasteful are given high cultural status and lucrative brand deals where they sell us fast food that might be designed to look healthy, or supplements that will help us live forever or at the very least sweatpants that will make us look and feel how we want to feel.
All because of flips.
On the smaller scale, meaning childhood, flips still carry weight. Anymore, trampoline parks that pop up all over the country and promise broken ankles for every child are now hubs for in-real-life socialization for kids. For Gen Alpha, they’re one of the places where natural school-age hierarchies are formed and enforced. And we all know those childhood hierarchies are just stone age hierarchies in their hearts: Who is biggest, whose family has money and therefore stuff, and who has the most “useful” “skills” to get attention, like flips.
Why do kids like me want a trampoline so badly? To do flips. Why do we do flips? That is the question I seek to answer.
I had been seeking to answer this question for so long that even a project as dumb as this began to nag at me. I’d get ready for bed and do my little mental inventory of what I did today, what I hoped to do tomorrow, and what I can do each day to make progress in every aspect of my life, and honest to god “On Flips” made an appearance in those thoughts. I’d lie there in bed and with my last moments of consciousness think “I really should try to get some work done on that” with the same sincerity and determination as “I should reach out to friends I haven’t talked to in a little while” or “I need to do xyz for my job that pays me real money and provides health insurance.”
When you tell anyone, even yourself, that you are going to do something for long enough, no matter how hacky or juvenile or stupid like a Guns N’ Roses album or a heavily reported story for your blog about the history and significance of doing a flip in human history, you feel like you need to do it and it will eat at you every day.
For the first, and hopefully last time in my life, I began to sympathize with and felt spiritually connected to Axl Rose. I do not want to feel that way.
Did you know flips are a big part of Mormon culture? Benson Boone is probably the biggest Mormon star out there right now, and backflips are a huge part of his whole deal. You might not have even known he was Mormon. I didn’t know he was Mormon until I saw a discussion online about how prevalent backflips are to Mormon youth culture and how Benson Boone just sort of happened to be the one who also got famous and incorporated that into his act.
Basically, a backflip is the most rebellious thing you can do in Mormon culture. It’s the closest you can come to an affront to God. God put our feet on the ground and our heads up top. To switch it up is to spit in the face of Heavenly Father, even if, and maybe especially if, you end up back on your feet as if nothing had happened. It was only a second. It was the illusion of universal disorder but with the promise of re-stabilization.
These are the sort of notes I’d write down in my Notes app in moments both public and private. Maybe you thought I was just jotting a quick email or texting a friend back while we were at the bar or riding on the bus or playing a game. Nope, I had to write down the thoughts on the philosophical side of flips and how they play a role in a particular religious sect’s culture and serve as a proxy for more forbidden vices and practices. I was thinking about this while you were talking. I was waiting for you to turn around so I could write it down, to make sure I would not forget a precious thought like this.
“I grew up in the church, and I can confirm that doing a backflip is one of the classic ways for a Mormon boy to attract a mate and to simultaneously dunk on his less athletic friends,” the original poster of the Mormon Backflip Theory, Alyssa Grenfell, posted. “This, put simply, is Mormon peacocking, and for me, this is the athletic version of the Mormon boy that brings a guitar to every single function he attends. [...] Keep in mind mormon boys can’t look cool by drinking or smoking or swearing. They can’t even invite you to get a cup of coffee. And so flipping is basically the most family-friendly, while still being hardcore, thing you can do.”
We all just want to be special. We all just want to have a skill that no one else has, or at least something they can’t do as well as we can. Like taking seemingly mundane aspects of human culture and excruciatingly examining it and blowing it out of proportion to draw insightful, clever and ideally profitable content from it. I am not the first to overthink for the sake of content, but damn it I can be the Benson Boone of it all.
It got to a point, though, where I really started thinking about whether this was worth continuing.
How journalistic did I want to be? I sent out actual emails to people. For example, the comedian Demi Adejuyigbe’s one-hour comedy special is called “Demi Adejuyigbe: Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip.” The entire hour is predicated on him doing one (1) backflip. The joke, but reality, is that you will wait an hour with the promise of this guy doing one (1) backflip, because a backflip is worth it.
He didn’t answer, and that’s fine.
How poetic did I want to get with this for the sake of humor? I went back to the old draft and lines like this about professional flippers realizing it’s time to hang it up and the emotional gravity of that situation (no pun intended).
Some people choose the moment they’ve done their final flip. They wave tearfully to an applauding crowd, knowing in their heart that their flipping days are behind them, but acknowledging the ride that doing flips afforded them. Others have their flipping ability taken out from under them in an instant. Sometimes while and because of doing a flip.
How academic did I want to get here? How hard would I search for the first recorded instance of a human flip, or the first time a flip was celebrated and appreciated? I remember at one point looking at pottery from antiquity to see if there were any depictions of Greeks, Romans or Egyptians or whatever doing a flip and the guy in the next “panel” cheering and freaking out about it. Did they think the flips would anger the gods or please them? Witchcraft or wizardry?
It doesn’t matter. None of it really matters, if you want to be nihilistic about it. I don’t. Axl Rose didn’t get nihilistic about it, and maybe that was the problem. He believed in this idea until he had an album called Chinese Democracy whether anyone liked it or not.
That sort of tenacity and stick-to-itiveness is necessary for learning a backflip. I would know. I could do one on a trampoline at least. The hard part is committing to throwing your legs back over yourself on a straight axis. If you turn your head, you go sideways. You just have to get a good jump, throw those legs forward and your neck back, look at the sky for a second and believe that in a moment you’ll be looking at the ground once again, and spot that landing while you trust that the momentum from before will carry your legs the rest of the way around. Your feet will touch the ground and your friends will cheer. Or, maybe you’re alone and you’ll still have the feeling of accomplishment that comes with rotating a full 360 degrees against the wishes of any god or natural order.
I’ve landed countless backflips in my life. I had a trampoline, after all. My friends and I could all do them. Once one person was brave enough to commit to one, we knew it could be done and, more importantly, we knew it had to be done. No one wants to be the one who can’t do a backflip when there are backflips being done around you. We didn’t just do backflips. Front flips, side flips, front flips with spins. We did them all. We spent hours doing flips together, bonding, laughing, hurting ourselves in the ways that teenagers did before injuries were real. It didn’t matter if they were real—we’d go to school with a bruise or a limp or maybe even crutches and proudly say that we hurt ourselves doing a flip. We didn’t, though, because we could do flips well and land them. We were so cool. Not because of that, but we could do flips because we were cool.
I knew how to stick a landing. I know how to stick a landing.
I’m now 2,000 words into a personal essay on not only the importance of flips, but now the importance of writing about the importance of flips and its very real effect on my self-esteem and confidence as a writer. I believe that I am now free. There’s a weight that’s been lifted and, as you’re reading this, a Google doc that has been deleted, which will please Google because they tell me I’m running out of storage. Too many half-baked ideas will weigh a man down.
You look at the ground while your feet are above you and trust that everything will fall into place. The thing you’ve worked on so long comes out because you spent so much time saying it would, even to yourself. It’s there, whether anyone likes it or not. Do we do things to be appreciated or for our self-fulfillment?
Who cares?
I do. We do. We’re all just doing backflips for something. We all have that one thing we’ve been telling ourselves, and maybe others, that we were going to do. Like a flip maybe. Are we going to finish it? Are we going to land on our feet? I don’t know. Depends on how cool we want to be.
Today’s Snakes & Sparklers musical guest is American Football.