Sept 1 - Jan 1. My favorite time of year. Autumn colors. Cooler days. Beautiful sunsets. Pumpkins. Holidays with family and friends. Despite sorrow for kids going back to school, I like that many of the outdoor places I frequent (skate parks, local and state forests / parks, abandoned places, etc.), are far less…populated. A nice change after the busy summers.
I’m back to Micro-Land.
I haven’t been writing much of recent. Hell, my last post was in late April. Here are some random updates / thoughts on a rainy afternoon. Injury Status I pulled a groin muscle (tendon?) in the middle of December 2022. I am just now finally getting over it and/or back to normal. It took six months to heal. Six months. Why did it take so long? Because I couldn’t stay off my board for more than 10 days at a time, at which point I would aggravate it again (or shortly thereafter).
It’s a rainy Sunday. I was just scrolling through some skate stuff on Instagram. So much of modern ledge tech, big gap, rail, etc. skating doesn’t resonate with me, at all. The opposite, actually. It repels. For a long time I thought this was simply because I am now a washed-up old guy, who is out of touch with “The Kids these days.” But then I remembered that my good friend Felix and I used to complain about the same type of thing in 1989, when I was just 15-years-old, about some of the stuff in Speed Freaks and Hokus Pokus.
I’ll be writing more about this photo in the future, but for now, I’ll say that this one of the best skate photos I’ve ever seen. No pros. No fancy skate parks. No gnarly tricks. It captures something so pure. The ‘YEAH” face of the kid on the platform, for “just” a simple kickturn grind. In its most elemental form, this is the magic of skateboarding, that any skater can relate to and/or knew at one point in their life.
This clip is one example of how/why I have really grown to love knee pads, even for “simple” low-impact street skating. youtu.be/Twygi0pRS… This was a Half-Cab Boardslide to Fakie gone wrong. While it’s a very easy trick, nothing is fool-proof (and even the “easy” stuff gets more precarious as you approach 50-years-old). Here, I turned in to the boardslide too forcefully. The result was that my front toe-side wheel came around too far (because I rotated too hard), and it clipped the side of the slide bar.
It’s time for something drastic. I’ve been dealing with a pulled groin muscle since the middle of December 2022. That is now over three months. The reason (I hope) that I’m still dealing with it? Despite my claims to do otherwise, I have not been able to stay off the board for more than 10 days since it happened. So, it’s never fully healed-up. Once I start skating again, it regresses a bit.
But most importantly, and this goes back to Mark Gonzales and Julien Stranger, we wanted to show that skateboarding is fun. That was the main thing. Fun, creative and loose. Not too overthought. Not too heavy on making it all the best skateboarding known to mankind. Just a fun and creative project. -Jason Lee
All the warnings of the 1980’s have come true. Out of control consumerism. Addiction to mindless screen viewing. Politicians pandering to the lowest common denominator. Corporations owning everything while brainwashing everyone. Compare today’s media messages vs. those of the 1980s. Free Guy. Cute movie. The end message is to sit in front of your screen and watch AI live virtual lives. Then there is Running Man (Arnold Schwarzenegger). All the art of the 80’s (and 90’s) has been turned upside down, and co-opted by “the Man”.
Quote of the Day:
“Skateboarding is, and will always be my political standpoint. The act itself is a statement of freedom and defiance, possibly the most revolutionary form of expression, which constantly rejuvenates with each generation.”
-Fangs
Retired this today. Cracked it on a nose blunt to disaster over a spine. This was a special deck for me. I normally ride an 8.25/14.38, but I’ve occasionally dabbled with bigger decks (and usually not liked them). This one, however, is a standout from the “Madness” episodes awhile back. The deck is an 8.75/14.62. I’ve had a few of these before, but this time around…I really, really liked this thing.
“Today’s skateboarding is a highly refined version of everything that came before.”
-Some dude on SLAP. Good observation.
Sometimes you just need a change of pace, or scenery. That happened to me about three weeks ago. I’ve been wearing Vans more or less since I started skating in 1985. The last few years I have been wearing the exact same two models. The old-school blue colored SK8-HIs, and the low-top Old Schools, in black/gum. Well, I got kind of sick of looking down at my feet, and always seeing the same thing.
I saw a post on the SLAP fourms that sent me down an intorspective rabbit hole: What are (skate-related) things you were too cool for as a kid, that you now appreciate and/or love? A few of mine: Tony Hawk. Skating transition. Watching vert. Side rails. Pads. “Basic” tricks. Non-traditional forms of skating. Shitty ramps. The joy of just rolling. The irony here, is those are all things I really liked/loved as a very young kid, and then “lost interest” in as I got a bit older.
My pulled groin muscle is not 100% healed, but it is doing better. Against better judgment, I went skating today for a bit. Just a bit. And it was glorious. I kept it pretty mellow. No ollies. Just did some casual transition skating, and some roll-on boardslides on a slider bar, but mostly kept it to transition. I haven’t really skated much since mid-December (weather, Covid, and injury). I’ve also not been in the best of moods over the last month—there is direct correlation between my disposition, and my ability to do outdoor physical activity.
A few random things… The Vast January Desert In my phone I keep short-hand notes of things going on in my life during a given month. At the end of the year, I can look back at what happened during the past 12 months. After the year is over, I save all in the info into a word doc. I’ve been doing this since 2015. It’s a very quick/easy way to look back at my life, and see what was going on during any given period.
If you are lucky, you will have one teacher in life who changes everything, and you end-up carrying their influences with you until your last days. I was lucky enough to have two. One was Mary Donovan, my high school English teacher. The other was Prof. Kerry Dugan at Northeastern. He died on January 12, 2023. I was a philosophy major in college, and Prof. Dugan was one of my philosophy professors.
Yesterday I had the first session on the Nuke Baby deck (see previous posts). It was raining out, so I took my grind bar to a parking garage. I have a lingering pulled groin muscle, so I kept it pretty mellow. The first 10 min or so, the board was feeling a little awkward, but then I got used to it…and started to have a lot of fun. The squared-off tail was really nice for tail slides (lots of board to get on there with).
I mentioned the Blind Danny Way reissue I was setting-up a few posts ago. Below are two photos of the fresh set-up. I went a little “old school” with the griptape, too. Trucks: Currently has Indy 149s. Might bump up to 159s. Have to skate it a bit first, and see how the 149s are feel. What’s weird about tapered-shaped decks is that you either have (a) serious “magic carpet” up front, or (b) wheels sticking out in the back.
Well, there are two other residual “gear madness” things kicking off 2023…but I don’t really put these in the same category as the “acute madness” I wrote about in later 2022. What’s “different” about these? Well, let’s just jump in and you’ll see. The two items are: (1) An “old school” set up (circa 1990) (2) Killer 187 Fly Knee Pads 187 Fly Knee Pads Let’s start with the Fly knee pads.