Here I go again with the skateboarding stuff. I lurked around Slap Magazine Forums today and god is it hard to get out of my mental hole.
Before I pitch my brain dump, I got some iced water, really got my brain to chill. Anyways, back to skateboard stuff.
How do I even process the word skateboarder today?
Well, in Entry 16 I tried to lay out how I felt about the label. I treat it as a descriptor, yet it finds usage as a job description, a crime, or a posse. Depending on who you ask, the image mutates to represent the stereotype that they know of, and that knowledge may not be the greatest. To a squeaky clean cool guy that can do it for the little guy to one kid, to the spawn of hell that crawled out of a trailer park portal, it has weight.
To me, it's like getting the cheese touch, it's there, but I do not want to be the one that has the curse. Nobody would get uppity and ask me to do a flip or something, but I want to feel like I got something to show when I unfurl my accomplishments.
Also, to me it's going out to skate for the thrill of itself, which is harder for me to appreciate when the temperature is almost at 100 degrees in non-standard units. I fail to hydrate myself and I like to wear long pants because I pretend that it'll be better than getting full contact road rash. That's primarily why I wrote this, I got mixed feelings about wanting to skate but whatever motive I had evaporated from getting warm off an overcast day.
Honestly I wish that I could stand 10 toes up on 'Who cares, pick up a skateboard' but my adult brain clarifies that these things are happening for a reason. People go hard on a board because they have dreams of becoming the hottest hollywood super thing, or because going out in a non-chalant manner is becoming more mainstream.
Also lemme chip in with some of the skate shop lore that I stumbled into, that I didn't realize until like a thread on page 3. 303 boards went chapter 11 bust, which tracks, because unless you got rent dialed up in like the top 3 places worth even breathing in Colorado, you're on the chopping block. Nice peeps, thought there was beef with Colfax boards until one of the newer local skateshops corrected me with how they're the same company. I thought that because I got some nice Dickies shorts that had Calvin Pissing on 303 boards. Weather's getting bad, the economy is sucking for skateland (what else is new?), and my typical skate life crisis is how I can't for the life of me talk with the people in the same generation as me. At least Satellite is still there, they got 9 Inch popsicles and I didn't even buy them, I thrifted my Satellite deck. Maybe once my deck finally snaps...
Trust me, that second to last one matters, because I'm like really adverse to signing up on social media, and even then I tend to go on the defense. Skateboarding on social media seems to be the norm, but I'll hurl at the 10 second clips, or the 3 hour raw footy file. "Have you seen X skater do Y on Z?" No foo, I was busy trying to get my ollie game up to snuff at a skatepark. On top of that is also trying to get my rear in gear and get varial 180's on top of the practice list.
Not everything ends in rain and gloom though. I had some cool moments with some other skaters, like how one handed me some Nikes SBs and said David Reyes handed him his pair that he did for a demo. He was a grom for sure (young skaters are groms, right?), and fibbing or not, having another pair of skate shoes was nice for me still wearing my messed up Etnies. Another night he cooked up a mean Charcoal Burger that became my Dinner (Cool), and he also was smoking a ciggie that he asked and got from another (not as cool), but also I overheard that he was trying to be all photographer with a camera and everything. Skating is another planet, man.
My ollie game is also looking up, there's this one tilted rhombus pad that I use for practice, and after a guy in a skate class told me to land with my feet/arch rather than on my toes, it made the difference. That was also the day that my car's engine light came on, but at least I skated on Go Skateboarding day.
More times I hit the park, and the more dudes that I vibe out with. There's no horror story about some snot-nosed ego jerker getting all uppity, since I live in the Beaver Valley Suburbia part of Colorado. No, not the mountains, like a basement and a cul-de-sac level neighborhood. It feels good to just strike up a short convo before he tries to stick his Nollie kickflip Noseblunt, which he gets on like the 7th try. People try to pinpoint the culture as this and that, but it's more about being an excuse to talk to others that would normally just fade into the background.
Like taking a trip, it's more about the Journey that's taken to get there, less about the destination, whatever that may be. Maybe I do become a pro skater that I wanted to set out to be. Maybe I get a shoe and have my career pinball into a disillusioned mess, but I know half the enjoyment was getting to that point. Never have I ever heard of a skate brand, or star, or local, that did it solo until something conspired to put them on the map. You can't have something come out of nothing, yet you can have nothing come out of something. Can't let that scare you into not trying anything. So while I may not be able to do tricks switch, or do much from how I insist on riding on my 9 inch board, I am simply a dude that skates on a board.
If you want to really watch some skate content, may I humbly point you to the direction of Milk Meista, A channel that I have no part of but I enjoy simply because the focus of the videos are more skate stuff with a small group of friends (or accomplices), so it becomes a real parasocial fest. Let's make an excuse for the viewer to watch by implementing a kind of low-effort but still kinda goofy gimmick.