Die Coast Bye Cecilia is a serious, but non-academic contribution to literature and philosophy, and I have my own opinion of what that means. The strength of academic research is in comprehensiveness and systematic study. It relies on high capital and lifelong, subject-specific careers to comprehensively survey hypotheses from the perspective of someone who knows all the important hypotheses, past and present, in a specific area. The strength of the non-academic, in my mind, comes from serendipity. Rather then systematically reading all that is written on a subject, our next reads often come from wandering the aisles of a library waiting for a book to jump out at us. Rather then engaging in field work with a plan and the oversight of a PhD supervisor, our most teaching experiences are often embedded in such a chaotic chain of events that it’s impossible to remember exactly how they came about. The value of systematic study is well understood, but the value of serendipity is too easily buried in images of flakiness and ignorance. This series I hope in part demonstrates the value of non-academic, serendipitous experience to literature, philosophy, and the evolution of human knowledge. These photos are from a larger series taken on a journalistic mission, but I’m not going to talk about that here; instead, I simply leave you to ponder the connection between serendipitous experience and skateboard hockey.