When I say “sick,” I mean it in the sense of the word used in the game Tony Hawk: Pro Skater. For you fortunate/unfortunate few who haven’t played it, living the Hegelian dialectic as you do, let me explain briefly: in each level of play, one faces various tasks to complete, and among them are reaching certain benchmark scores: 50,000 points, 100,000 points, 150,000 points. These scores are designated by titles: 50,000 is a “high score,” 100,000 is a “pro score,” and 150,000, whose attainment means you have spent more time staring at a television screen or handheld console than is meet and fitting for an adult but if there’s no Tony Hawk in your adult world then I ain’t comin’, is a “sick score.” This is skater talk, and was probably surfer talk before that: the old trope of substituting bad-for-good. Was Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s album so fast & frenzied that you started having amphetamine flashbacks? Sick. Was that wave, like, twenty feet high? Sick. And did I wake up Saturday morning, sit down at the computer, and get a half-formed idea of hearing Shriekback’s “Nemesis”? Yes, I did. And had I, not a couple of minutes later, spent a paltry ninety-nine cents to have a better-than-MP3-quality file of it delivered directly to my computer, which was shortly blasting from my li’l Bose speakers and causing me to have a great big spaz? Dude. Sick.
