Four to Five Flavours of Ick

I am conflicted this afternoon.

One of my favorite skate companies is apparently now doing a collaboration with Nike. Why is this an issue, or at least, an issue for me? There are few reasons.

 

First, ever since I was a teenager, I am always balked at big corporations. Or rather, I have always balked at openly representing them (I realize it is hard, if not impossible, to fully escape them). I have never owned a single product made by Nike. As a kid, teenager, and young adult, the Nike swoosh was always the “gang symbol” of the people who tried to do me physical and mental harm. It was always seen associated with those big team sports I hated. It was seen on “normal” people who I always tried to distance myself from. Maybe I should just let-go of old notions, and “grow-up”…but that’s just not who I am, or who I’ve ever been. I just can’t bring myself to “advertise” for big corporations. Like, I own a North Face windbreaker. It’s great, I love it. But the second I got home with it, I put a band patch over the North Face logo to obscure/erase the “corporate presence.” To this end, when a skate company aligns with Big Corporation X (let alone Nike), it bums me out.

 

Second, the skate company in question had a long history of openly mocking and satirizing big corporations (inc. Nike). The owner even once said, “Please let’s not let skateboarding become just another selfish capitalism cheerleader product etc.…It isn’t. It’s a bastion of skepticism and stoke. For us, by Us. Believe and defend that.” Thinking of those words, as we see assorted Nike/Anti-Hero branded swag paraded around is rather, well…disquieting. I never thought I’d see an a "product line" with those two logos together…but here we are.  

 

I’ve always subscribed to the idea of “vote with your dollar.” And I’ve always been a fan of Anti-Hero because they frequently ridiculed vapid consumer culture. So much for actual counter-culture ethics. So, now what? Is this “discretion” so acute that I now cast a different “vote” with my dollar? Part of me says yes. And another part of me is under no illusions---what I am writing about here has absolutely ZERO impact on skating a curb by myself, or a ditch in Texas with 40 friends. This is to say it has NO impact on my actual day-to-day skateboarding. This is a "problem" of theory, and not so much one of "reality." So, what am I getting all flustered and fussy about then? Principle, I suppose.

 

Where do I go from here? 

Unknown.  

What is known?

This pic is just four to five flavors of icky. 

 

 

Three Things on a Saturday Afternoon

A few recent self-observations:

1.  I’ve been messing around with set-up tweaks and variations the last few weeks. I’m finding myself gravitating more and more toward my wider set-up (8.75/159s). My usual 8.25/144s is feeling a little too tight-rope to me at the moment. The 8.75 feels a lot more solid and stable under my feet.  

 

2.     I recently watched some video clips of me skating from late 2020/early 2021. I was kind of shocked. This is when I was re-learning everything from the broken leg. I was skating better then than I am now. I’ve “lost” a lot of tricks, esp. on transition. More on this in a future post. 

 

3.   I went street skating today, or at least intended to. When I got to the spot, it was waaaay hotter out than I had expected it to be, and I wasn’t really feeling it. No shade in the area either, and that makes a big difference (for those cool-down breaks). So, just kind of putzed around on a curb for a bit, and then left. After that, I went over to a nearby parking garage, because it was cooler in there. For some reason, I was already feeling defeated, and knew I wasn’t going to really be skating today, at all. This is kind of unlike me, and I took mental note of it. There is a parking block in the garage, and a small two-sided ledge (about 12” tall, 4’ long…sort of like a BIG parking block). I was looking at the parking block, and thinking about how magical simple boardslides were as a kid, and I how I kind of take them for granted now. This made me want to do some. I grabbed my board, and started rolling around. It felt good. I did a few boardslides on the curb, and thought, “Yeah, those feel good.” But I was also cognizant of how low the curb was, and how that actually made them a little more precarious than if I had to do a slight ollie into one. So, I went over to the large, taller, parking block. I did two boardslides, and they felt really good. I then thought, “I am going to film one of these, and make some blog post about unearthing the deeply buried magic inherent in simple skateboarding.” But then something else happened. 

 

I slammed. On a simple a boardslide. There was a lot of dust on the ground, and I landed ever-so-slightly off-center when coming out the trick. No dust, and probably no problem. But there was some dust. The back wheels slid a bit on me, making me now way more off center, and then the game was over. Down I went. Here is the video of it. 

 

I landed kind of hard on my rear elbow, as can be seen in the clip (it's quick, but towards bottom right corner of the screen). It hurts as I type this, and it's a bit swollen. This bail actually really freaked me out. A friend of mine shattered his elbow a few months ago on a curb. His orthopedic surgeon said, (a) this was the worst break he’s ever seen, and, (b) an elbow pad would have prevented or greatly mitigated the injury. It was a fall very similar to mine. I’ve written a lot about pads over the years. I am huge fan of them. I frequently tell myself, especially at this age, that I shouldn’t skate, at all, without them. But then I get lazy, and I do. And then some kind of “reminder” happens. Today it was a simple boardslide. Something “I kind of take for granted now.” Irony can be a great teacher. 

 

Post-Script / Next Day: Real hard time sleeping last night, too. Any time I rolled over on my elbow, it really hurt. 

 

Returning to the Source

 

[Rough draft of something I will edit and suss-out a bit more in near future]

 

I started skateboarding in 1985. I was 11-years-old. It is now 2024. I turned 50 last month. That means I’ve been skating for…39 years. 39 fucking years. After all that time, and so-called “experience,” I sit here still trying to figure out how I “relate” to skateboarding. “Relate” is such an inaccurate word. I don’t know what word I am really looking for here, or if the proper one even exists. All things that come close: Resonate. Integrate. Inter-relate. Experience. Personify. Allow-to-Flourish. Associate. Bring Forth. Present. All of these are somewhat appropriate, but none of them individually, or collectively, really hit the mark. Skateboarding, like life, is this big abstract phenomena, and things of that nature often fall outside the scope of language. I suppose that’s why two of my favorite philosophers (Lao Tzu and Heidegger) often dwelled on the limits of language. If this written blog is to focus on my relationship to skateboarding (in my “twilight years”), I’m off to a bad start if I freely admit the words utterly fail. So, let’s cast words aside for the moment, and move to something else: emotion(s).

 

Various forms of social media now suggest “reels” to people (thanks, insipid algorithms). Of no surprise, my “suggestions” are often modern skate clips. I occasionally look at them. Why, I don’t know. They always fill me emotion, and not good ones. Remorse. Sadness. Contempt. Alienation. Disgust. Indifference. Disdain. Despondency. Heartache. Mournfulness. And that’s just to name a few.

 

If you understand why I have those feelings, no further explanation is needed. If you don’t understand it, I am not sure any explanation is possible.

 

Well, a few days ago I saw something that was the opposite of all that. Navs (Darren Navarrette, the renowned vert skater) has been posting something totally out of the norm: Him riding a very old-school “pig” deck, doing some very “old-school” skating on some mellow banks, ditches, and other assorted street stuff. It was some of the most refreshing and fun-looking skateboarding I’ve seen in quite some time. And of course, me being me, I have been perseverating over the question “why?” Why was this refreshing? Why did I like it? Why was it magical? Why did it give me the emotional reaction it did? After a few days, I think I have a few answers.

 

·      There is no pageantry of difficulty or daredevil-ness.

·      It’s an overt counter-narrative to accepted (skate) norms (what I always liked about skateboard in re to larger society).

·      It’s clearly being done for pure, unadulterated, fun.

·      It’s “beginners mind.”

·      There is no cool-guy element.

·      It’s accessible and relatable.

·      It’s full-circle, return-to-the-source-energy.

 

All of these things hit somewhere very deep, at least to me. They are elements of the skateboarding I knew and loved. elements that have seemed to been lost to time…and mainstream normalization of the “sport.”

 

[Yes. That is it. That is what I am really trying to do now, at this stage of my skate life, and with this blog…is re-kindle, re-ignite, dis-cover, etc. those elements of skateboarding I knew as kid. To be clear, I do not wish to “relive the old days.” But rather, I want to better tap an old, ancient, and timeless Stoke that has been somewhat obscured with time. Hah. I think Heidegger basically had the same objective with the original concepts of Being and ontology, but he didn’t skate, so what does he know? Lao Tzu says it well in Chapter 16 of the Tao The Ching, “Returning to the source is serenity.”

 

I think, if anything, this blog will serve to be a chronical of my attempts to return to that source. Navs has pointed the moon. It is currently 11:52pm. Time to go roll for a bit under the star light.]   

 

 

 

The Chasm Between

It’s my day off from work. It’s raining out. I was just laying on my bed, wasting time while waiting for the laundry to be done, scrolling through Instagram (e.g. looking at skate clips). Yes, this is the 50-year-old, 2024 version, of flipping through Thrasher back issues after school on a rainy afternoon. Not much has changed. Everything has changed. 

 These days when I look at skate clips, I am both quickly bored and disenfranchised. It’s amazing how little skate content there is these days that gets me “stoked” or inspired to go skating. Well, strike that. I should say how little “modern” footage there is. I mean once you’ve seen Jaws kickflip melon-grab 25 stairs, Daewon skate a ledge or mini ramp, Jamie Foy skate a handrail, or Burnquist/Way skate a mega ramp….what's left? Beyond that, everything just feels like watching someone play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. It’s just so…bland, despite astronomical difficulty. I forget who said it, but, “It’s disheartening to have a culture you loved become something you find contemptuous and alienated from.” 

 “The skateboarding I see in Thrasher has very little in common with the activity I enjoy. I don't have any sort of hate in my heart for either of those things, it just doesn't apply to me.” -Chris Castle   

It’s about time to go take the laundry out, so my time here is short. But suffice to say, much of what I anticipate sussing out in this blog is how this dinosaur (e.g. me) relates to both the modern (and historical) world (and experience), of skateboarding…and scrolling through Instagram a few minutes ago reminded me of the gap between what currently is, and what personally resonates. The chasm between those two could not be wider. 

Anyway, time to go fold shirts.

 

Here is a photo of my friend Ben, that resonates...

 

Welcome to the Twilight Sessions

Last month was my 50th birthday. That 16-year-old skate rat I used to see in the bathroom mirror...somehow turned into an old man. Yet, here I am...still alive, and more miraculously, still skateboarding. I've started several blogs over the years, and here is yet another one. Why another one? My other main skate blog (Concrete Existence) started as one thing, and evolved into something else (much like everything in life). Over the last year or so, I knew I wanted to start writing more about skateboarding, and life, from the decidedly other side youth. Moreover, I wanted to write in a different tone, and on different subjects than I've been dealing with over at Concrete Existence. I had actually stopped updating my other blogs that often because I was sort of looking for a new "voice," if you will. I think I have found it (at least for now). So, with all those considerations, it just seemed making a clean break / starting a new blog was the best way forward. So, here we are...welcome to The Twilight Sessions.     

What subject matter will be covered here? I will mostly focus on the cultural, historical, philosophical, and existential musing of being an "older" skater. I will certainly still keep posting more general skate stuff (product reviews, DIY stuff, etc.) over at Concrete Existence, but the more personal stuff will be here in The Twilight Sessions.

The pic below is me doing a 5-0 on my 50th (4/17/2027).