Welcome to Litsy!

In the tradition of Barbarian Days, a memoir in essays of Kyle Beachy's decade-long quest to uncover the hidden meaning of skateboarding, and how this search led unexpectedly to insights on marriage, love, loss, American invention, and growing old. In August of 2011, writing professor and aspiring novelist Kyle Beachy published his first essay on skate culture, a brutal takedown of Nike's scorched-earth tactics which had gutted the once-mighty independent skate shoe market. It would not be his last. For a decade and counting, Beachy has been skate culture's freshest, most illuminating, at times most controversial voice, writing candidly about the increasingly popular and fast-changing pastime Beachy first picked up as a young boy and has continued to practice well into adulthood. What is skateboarding? What does it mean to still skate at forty, four decades after the kickflip was first invented? How does one live like an adult while engaging in an activity and lifestyle that are fundamentally childish? How does having a passion like skateboarding, which breaks bones, abrades skin, and takes as much as it gives, shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Of growing old and getting married? In the tradition of William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, THE MOST FUN THING approaches universal truths though a deep exploration of a specific subject. It is a rich account of Beachy's struggle to pin down the meaning of the pastime that became his life's greatest obsession, and to find a place for it in an increasingly complicated life as an adult, a professor, and a husband.