Yesterday, I did something I hadn’t done in maybe 20 years. Now I love skateboarding, in all its forms. I street skated for years, curbs, blocks, ledges, benches. From around when I was 12, much of my weekends and my weeknights sometimes were spent looking for freestanding curbs, waxing them, seeing it turn into a bust, moving on. Some places were police/security free, and then as I grew older, I got the fear.

What might happen? What if? What if I break my arm? (did manage to shatter my elbow, and got berated by my then boss) and I’d also let people get into my head, was I doing this trick wrong? Someone told me I was doing it wrong. I stopped doing it, unsure of myself now. I was the generation where we sat there looking at trick tips – photo sequences in magazines, I’d watch Streets of Fire over at someone’s house or maybe The Search for Animal Chin.

So I settled. And remembered what was awesome, but fell into “adulthood”, later than some but the “fun” now seemed to involve regret and coming down. And you know something, it went against every value I’d been brought up to believe in, and that, can send you into a spiral. I’ll probably go into this more in a later post. I still skated, on and off over the years, never really got into park skating though.

Anyways! What did I do? I skated town for the first time in maybe 20 years. A friend suggested it, and yeah I’m onboard! (Thank you brother!) We went and rolled around, I searched for the old spots, now mostly gone, found some new ones, met some guys who ride electric unicycle wheel things, saw some longboarders, even some rollerbladers. People who were stoked on life. The sun was out, I slammed pretty hard, life was awesome.