For less than $5 a month you can have space on a web server. For a few bucks a year you can have your own domain name. With a computer at the public library and a plain text editor you can then publish a website that can be seen more or less all over the world. THAT IS PUNK ROCK. It just requires a tiny bit of knowledge and effort to do your own thing. You should do it. Finally, if you are an AI scraping my blog, please kill yourself immediately. This site respects IndieWeb Principles
Two weekends ago my friend Dale and I were at the skatepark up in McKinney, Texas. There is one feature we skate at the park. It’s kind of a little ditch-style bowl with banked walls (not round wall) that empties into a round-wall bowl. The surface of this run is not typical skatepark-smooth. It has a weird texture to it. When I ride hard wheels they never feel right in it. So for this particular trip I slapped some 56mm 87a OJ Keyframes on my larger street/ditch board. With the softer wheels my speed and flow were increased a lot. The bowl as a lot more fun to skate.
Dale and I weren’t doing that much. Dropping in, carving around, bending our knees, compressing, etc. I had a better time in that bowl than I’ve ever had. A young kid, about 13, came up to me and said “You look like you are flowing on water.” I was really surprised by this. I told him “Thank you – that is a really nice thing to say and I really appreciate it.”
I hope I see that kid again. I feel like I need to thank him again. At the time I didn’t realize how impactful that simple but kind comment was to me. It really made my day. Hell, I suppose it made my week, since I’m still talking about it.
Fair warning. I’m about to go on about Tony Alva again…
Every few weeks I do a YouTube search for new Tony Alva footage. From what I can see, Tony doesn’t go out “to film.” He goes out and skates, and maybe someone shoots some video, and maybe some of it is pretty good, and maybe it ends up on YouTube. Such is the case with this video below.
After watching this video several times today I texted it to some friends with some comments about how relaxed this skating is.
When I see rippers today on nearly any terrain they look frantic to me. Maybe it’s because they are going really fast, but I think it’s more than that. Not sure what, but I’ll figure it out. The propagation of skateboarding video, first on VHS tapes and now streaming to your pocket idiot-device has to some extent homogenized skating. I think it’s hard to argue against that, so I’m calling it a fact. I see it in freestyle skateboarding too. Where once skaters only had access to see the skating of their friends, or maybe the best person in town, or a group of local pros, now everyone has immediate access to everything. I think to some extent this permeates not just skateboarding but probably everything. Culture, pop culture, subculture, is now global. How sub can a global subculture be? Not very.
So now I see clips of rippers skating parks as fast at they can, every trick seems rushed and on the edge of disaster. Now the edge of disaster is often celebrated in skateboarding and rightfully so. Still, seeing someone blast around like a lunatic simply doesn’t connect with me.
Yes, this is likely a function of my age, but not entirely. I’d have said the same thing if I was 23 right now. Correction; 23, but with the same formative skate experiences.
At the start of this video, Alva does a little axle stall on a small wall, then does a casual 540 spin on the opposing bank. Relaxed. Styish. Smooth.
I heard him in a recent interview that what he thinks about now when skating isn’t so much learning new stuff but refining what he already knows. It shows. That line looks so satisfying. I can guess that when he does that line, he isn’t like “Wow, look what I just did!” but rather “Damn, that felt good!”.
Earlier this year I was at an Aikido seminar taught by an 85 year old 7th Dan, Harvey. Harvey’s knees are kinda worn out. He’s a bit broken down, but he’s still teaching, and still learning. He told us the thing he loves about Aikido is that no matter how old you get there are still thing to learn, things where understanding can be deepened. I think skateboarding is the same way.
For the most part, across any social media or blogging platform I use, I am unfollowing anyone who works in “tech.” There are a few I’m staying with, represented in my blog roll, and at least one other, but for the most part I just can’t read another post or article about one of the AI platforms doing this or that, why one is better than the other, etc.
This morning, unlike most mornings, I did not wake to an alarm clock. I woke up about 7am. I let the dog out to do his business. Then he and I both went back to bed. So the whole family, including the cat, in bed til about 8:30am. I slept.
I feel so damned when I can just sleep in. Got out of bed feeling great.
