Greetings, writers—
One of my favorite things to do in the summer is jump into the Willamette River halfway through a long run. The Fire and Rescue Station 21 floating dock is just north of the Hawthorne Bridge, and if you can ignore the signs about shock danger due to underwater electric currents and are generally blasé about waterborne bacteria, it’s a fantastic place to take a plunge.
You’re not supposed to jump from the ramp connecting the dock to the East Bank Esplanade, but of course people do it all the time. I was down on the dock, getting ready to dive in, when four teenagers who’d clambered over the ramp railing and were psyching themselves up to jump yelled, “Are you gonna send it?”
“What?” I called back.
“Are you gonna send it?”
“What?”
“Are you gonna send it?”
I know, I’m so old, but finally I heard what they were saying, guessed at its meaning, and called, “Yeah, eventually!”
A few seconds later, I did indeed send it from the whopping height of two feet. And a few seconds after that, they sent it, too, plunging 20 feet down into the murky green water and coming up splashing and whooping.
I got out, put my socks and shoes on, ran home, and, like the dumb old nerd that I am, immediately googled “are you going to send it.” Apparently the phrase originated in a YouTube stunt video in 2017, which makes it ancient in internet years. (“Are you guys silly? I’m still gonna send it,” says Larry Enticer, right before he tries and fails to land a jump on a snowmobile.)
Language, our greatest technology, is obviously always changing, but I’m certain it’s never changed as rapidly does now, with new slang terms being coined daily and going viral on all the platforms that I’m not on. For real for real, no cap, bro.1
Later that day Jon laughed at me because I kept snickering about “Are you gonna send it.” Why did I get such a kick out of the phrase? It’s no “fork your bronc and fan wind.” It was partly the charm of those teenagers, I told him, but really it was a moment of realization—definitely not my first one, but a sharp one—about my own growing ignorance of, and irrelevance to, contemporary pop culture. I’m decades older than those kids; we don’t read or watch or think or care about the same things; we barely even understand what each other are saying.
Sometimes when my children and I take walks around the neighborhood, I ask them about what kids are saying these days2, but I can’t pretend they’re on the cutting edge of anything either.
Maybe it was the runner’s high, but I loved those jumping teens. I was glad they asked me if I was gonna send it. I was glad I figured out what it meant.
A couple options for a writing prompt today:
—a scene/poem/freewrite about a generation gap
—a scene/poem/freewrite with the theme of “irrelevance”
—a scene/poem/freewrite about a river
Happy writing—
Emily
This is something my 13-year-old says—ironically, I think. It’s spoken very quickly and definitely without commas. “No cap” = “for real.”
🙄, seriously