Went skating last night. Broke a kingpin 5 minutes into session. Too stupid to have a backup board with me.
Back at it tonight, because fuck winter.
Category: skateboarding
Luchaskate
A while back I discovered this website and podcast, Luchaskate, run and produced by skater David Thornton.
David is three episodes in on his podcast, with a three part interview of Lew Ross, of Fickle Skateboards. Lew makes small, high-quality batches of boards. He is also quite a character. Dude can talk.
Anyway, if you like listening to people talk about skateboarding, you might wanna give this a listen.
Happy Birthday Tony Gale!
A very happy birthday to a person who, as a teen, amused and sometimes annoyed me, but has grown into a great friend.
Tony Gale? Top bloke, that one.
EZ-7
If the weather on Saturday, November 28 is good (or at least not wet) in Houston, I will be going to the EZ-7 Turkey Jam ditch skating contest and jam.
It has been many years since I’ve been. Probably 11 or 12. Seems like the last couple of times I went it got rained out, which is always a bummer. But I’m going to give it a shot this year.
EZ-7 is one of the oldest and most classic of Texas skate spots. It’s a drainage ditch in a public park that empties into one of those massive flood control ditches that runs through Houston. It is surrounded by grassy berms, on which skaters and families hang out and have a good time. It’s about as grass-roots as you get, and reminds me a lot of the atmosphere of the Paderborn, Germany freestyle contest. The City of Houston, or the County, or some entity of authority has actually decreed EZ-7 an official skatepark, which is bloody amazing. Yep – it’s all legal and good.
I really need this. I need to bath in the reviving waters of Texas skateboarding. I need to skate with friends, take my runs, not care who “wins” because it is all such a blast that no one cares and everybody leaves fully stoked and powered up for more skating!
I’m planning a trip to Belton to skate Chuck’s ditch and other spots with my friend Mike, the week before the Turkey Jam.
For me, ditches and banks are really the best form of skating other than freestyle. I love freestyle – it is really what I prefer to skate – but let’s face it, sometimes one needs to carve, and grind, and ride walls. Flat-walled ditches and banks offer the best variety of moves. You can adapt vert, street, or freestyle tricks to them, and there are some tricks that are really best done on banks. I have more fun at places like EZ-7, the little bitty Glenville ditch where I usually skate, or even a simple banked wall or driveway, than I ever have at a modern skatepark.
Skating
Went skating last night. Fun. My friend Dale moved back here, so we’ll be skating together a lot now, which is great! Early sundowns now forced us to the skatepark in McKinney. It has a little “ditch” style run, which is fun to carve around in, though for some reason I find the walls mostly too low to really do any tricks. I guess I need to start riding the lower end a bit more, where the walls are of a reasonable height. Nice thing — at least he walls are mostly flat.
Rode a board I bought last year for the first time. A Cockfight Skateboards Dave “Shaggy” Palmer model. 8.75″ wide, but with the nice curved sides you can run some 149 trucks on it and they fit perfectly. I like to use 149s when I can, as they are more responsive than wider trucks.
Of course, half the fun of the evening was just talking with Dale as we drove and skated. Always fun. Lots of plans for skating and projects.