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 is me a couple of years ago. I’m not this fat now. This was before I went back to Aikido, after at least two years of pandemic life. I wonder what damage that period of time actually did to me. Being out of shape like that for a couple of years plus all the stress of the pandemic and cancer in the family must have some lasting effect.
Anyway, this simple trick is one of my favorite things to do. Sometimes I’ll do a 180 shove-it out. It’s simple but you can flow into and out of it nicely. This is the kind of thing I like to do now.
Some people would not even call this a “trick.” I would say they are wrong.
The World Freestyle Skateboarding Championships were in Germany over the weekend. A lot of my friends from all over were there. Do I have anything left that is worth sharing? I need to think about this.
I made this video from yesterday’s clips. I told Chadwick, from Super 8 Skateboards, that next time I rode one of his boards I’d shoot some footage, knowing that 60 year old slightly overweight freestylers are highly influential on the social medias. Seriously, everyone looks to see what we’re doing and models their behavior after us, but they can’t keep up at all. Pitiful.
Anyway, here is the clip. I generally hate “portrait orientation” videos, but again, as this was for potential social media use in case he was insane enough to use it, I had my friends shoot it this way.
Today I went out to Fort Worth my friend Mark (white shirt) to meet up with our friend Carter (yellow shirt) at a killer ditch to skate.
I am the old guy in the black shirt.
It was hot. Mark and I skated hard for about 1.5 hours before we gave out. Carter just kept hammering at a trick he wanted to get, and he got it.
I haven’t been skating much lately and it felt really great to get my legs back under me. Severely out of practice, but the legs feel good again and I feel the desire to skate, which is great.
This place, where I spent dozens if not hundreds of hours skating during and after the pandemic, has been destroyed as they totally rebuild the city hall complex. Yes, this was the south parking lot of our municipality’s city hall. It joins my freestyle practice spot, which was on the other side of the city hall, on the east side of the public library. They even destroyed the brick banks that ran along this sidewalk (yeah – the sidewalk is gone too),
Here is a picture of my poor old parking lot today…
Click for larger view of this fucking devastation.
To say I am unhappy about this does not capture the depth of my loss. I have no idea if any of the new shit will be OK to skate when it is done about 2 years from now. This place was about 5 minutes from my house. It was peaceful in the evenings and weekends. Both the freestyle spot and Pandemic Parking Lot gave me the solitude I really love for skating.
Yes, I’m being kind of childish about this. I don’t care. Fuck progress. Progress is bad. Change is bad. When things are good they should stay good.
I’m a 60-year old skateboarder and I am not – fucking – happy.
Now I have to find some other places nearby to skate. Places with some shade. Places with no damned kids running around. Places I can play my music loud through my bluetooth speaker and not disturb anyone. I will likely be forced to go up to Allen to the skatepark, which is annoying. It is a 20 minute drive under best conditions and there are people there.
One would think that finding a simple parking lot would be easy, but as my friends Chris and Brian have noted, a good skate spot is more than the concrete. It’s the energy of the place. The vibe. The way it makes you feel. It’s not that easy.
So, we shall see. Like I said, it will be at least two years until this complex reopens. I suspect it will be longer. Due to a bad fire in a server room a few years ago the entire city hall building was torn down and it is being moved to a different position on the land. The public library, which opened the year I moved here as a child, has been gutted and all the surrounding area has been ripped up. I can’t imagine the library will be done in two years. There’s just too much to do. And to totally build a new city hall? Longer. It has to be.
It’s silly to place too much value on a skate spot. We skateboarders know this, but we always do it anyway. It’s like getting a dog or a cat and saying “I’m not going to get so attached this time” and then of course you get more attached. This parking lot was my getaway. When the pandemic started I could go there and skate. When my wife got cancer a couple of months later it was a place close to home where I could skate and feed my soul, but get home quickly if needed. That semi-shitty concrete meant a lot to me. At this spot I reinvented the way I skate. A new way to skate for a time when I couldn’t end up in an ER full of Covid patients. A way I loved so much I still prefer it to how I skated before. Honestly, sometimes I would go there, skate, sit on the curb and cry, and then keep skating.
There’s lots of footage of this spot in my Vimeo library. This, however, is my favorite video I made from my time skating there. Simple, beautiful Fall sky. I think it captures everything.
I’ve been having a conversation with some of the guys on NeverWas Skateboarding about freestyle skateboarding and how back in the mid-late 70s and even early 80s skaters were more prone to being all-around skaters. By all around, I don’t mean “I skate transition AND street”. I mean skater who did vert, banks freestyle, slalom, downhill, as well as just skating in the street.
You’d have guys like Doug “Pineapple” Saladino show up at a pro pool event and place in it, then the next weekend he’d win the Oceanside pro freestyle contest. My friend Paul was on the local Wizard Skatepark team. I used to see them practicing. They all practiced everything. The legendary Jeff Phillips was on the team, and I remember vividly being at the park on a Friday night and the team was all in the freestyle area doing their routines one after the other, and I saw Jeff doing his.
In 1978-79 Skateboarder Magazine published a series of “Quivers” articles, showing the board setups of a number of current pros like Stacy Peralta, Gregg Ayres, Mike Weed, etc. They all had a range of boards for different purposes, including freestyle.
That’s how it was. I suppose as each form of skating became more difficult and more advanced specialization came more to the forefront.
The all-around era was really the formative era for me. As I could only go to the skatepark for 2 hours a week, freestyle and bank skating (at local spots near my house) were most accessible for me. It was easy to practice freestyle at the nearby school parking lot. The banked driveways in our alleys were my bank skating training ground. Occasionally one of us neighborhood skaters would build some shitty little ramp. But all-around skating was always my goal.
