Twenty-sk8, twenty-nine

What's that line? "I did a thing?"

It had to start somewhere. It had to start sometime.

In 2003, I was going to shred it up. Between Rocket Power on TV and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 on PS1, I was ready to be the next Tony (or Rodney, or Spider-Man). On my 6th birthday I hit the motherlode: a skate-themed cake and a Mongoose deck from Toys "R" Us. It was enough to round out kindergarten and get me to the summer, which I spent burning a hole in the "Ollie" segment of the Foothills Branch Library's copy of Tony Hawk's Trick Tips Vol 1.

That didn't go so well. I spend hours kicking-and-sliding to no avail: the board would just not fly when I did the slidey part. I relegated myself to going up and down the rounded curbs of the cul-de-sac and wondering if the secret trick was skate shoes.

By the next summer, I was back with a vengeance. I had used my new first-grader school library privileges to exhaust every skate-mentioning book in the joint (two). I had discovered "old school tricks" via Trick Tips Vol. 3 (which, to me, just meant you could pick up the board with your hands and flip it around—it still counted as long as you called it "old school"). I had upgraded my bike helmet to a skate helmet.

The ollie remained elusive, but maybe I just wasn't cut out to be a "street" skater. Maybe I was destined for vert (a.k.a. riding my board down the plastic slide at the playground in sheer terror—there's no way I was getting into a bowl). Despite the change in career trajectory, I got my mom to take pictures of my pretending to be about to be doing a drop-in and kinda-sorta looking like I was grinding a ledge for good measure. It was close enough.

It turned out, skateboarding was kinda hard, and I was a lot better at printing off THPS3 guides from Cheat Code Central and somehow reading the PlayStation 2 Network Adapter manual and procuring ethernet cords to get online multiplayer running. The last skate venture I remember was my first visit to the skate park with my dad after getting new wheels from the local Cowtown. I was so intimidated by the older kids smoking and swearing (and actually skating) that I don't know if I even set foot on my board.

I eventually did get skate shoes—which I wore incessantly from like 5th grade til starting high school—but they didn't touch a board much, and they were getting paired with my signature striped polos and plaid cargo shorts. Life went on!

What better place than here? What better time than now?

It's 2026, and things are shredded up. On top of the general state of the world—and more specifically the U.S.—I also had a bit of a depressive spiral late last year, which was followed up by getting sick and a weird 3-month bout of fatigue, plus some career-induced existentialism mixed in for good measure. Self, society, authoritarianism, "AI", genocide(s), morality, mortality, loss of shared realities: there's been a lot to sit with recently.

For most of my life, I've had a pretty disembodied, intellectualist self-image. I've prided myself on my "smarts", my grades, my purported cognitive and educational attainment. I've felt very clever, imagining people as brains-in-a-jar and thinking that, since I have been an easy brainiac, that makes me effortlessly superior in the things that really matter.

I imagine this is a similar mindset that many tech bros (used here advisedly) adopt. They are better than the others, they are smarter than the others, righter and correcter and more deserving than the others. More human than the others. I haven't literally thought these things about myself or ever been intentionally chauvinistic. But in retrospect I can see glints and shadows of them echoing in beliefs I've held.

My jar brain has been pickling in our balmy sociopolitical climate these last several years. I've tried to flavor it with humanist and egalitarian and pro-social things, as you do. But over the last few months I came to recognize that many elements of my little intellectualist value set were inextricable from the ideals and machinations of the same technofascists that want to kill us all in the name of feeling smart. And I didn't want to be that kind of preserved snack anymore.

In the midst of all that, I found myself drip-fed some pertinent media:

• The Skate Story demo, wherin "you are a demon made of glass and pain" finally clicked.
• GDQ, where people perform exacting feats of physical dexterity, thinking, reaction speed, endurance, and community for the dorkiest clout imaginable.
• Morok's bare, unflinching physicality.
• The continuing onslaught of fascinating thinking-about-playing from Brennan Lee Mulligan et al. that goes on in Dropout's Adventuring Academy.
• Posts from imp3tuz and Dave Alvarado pointing me to Andy Anderson and Mitchie Brusco's infectious bromance/nerdery/ideology-of-skating.
• Remembering that Homo Ludens was a thing, and actually getting around to reading (most of) it.

Long story short, I was targeted by a cosmic psyop to convince me to live in a body. Be in the world. Suck at stuff. Feel some friction. Shuv self-seriousness. Skate or die.

So, with my 28th year wrapping up—and a solid decade or two with nary a board on the brain—I got myself a skateboard for my birthday.

It's the (non-fancy) Andy Anderson custom-shaped deck—plus his entire hardware setup—because I'm a sucker for gear sickos and couldn't resist Andy's rationalizations. Everything but the trucks and wheels came from local shop Cowtown—the same ones who sold me the wheels on my school bus themed-Mongoose board 20 years ago.

All hell can't stop us now

So far, it's been a lot of fun. Which is good news, I guess, because that was the point!

I haven't managed to skate every day, but I find myself wishing I was skating pretty much every day.

It took about two weeks to get my first ever ollie (there is no sliding, Tony Hawk! I am now earnestly convinced of this!), and then a week after that to realize how little I knew about ollies. Every little thing you figure out teaches you more things about all the stuff you thought you knew—it's like the ultimate catnip for my silly little mind, with the added bonus of having to intuit and muscle-memorize things by just trying them out 300 times and getting a feel for it.

There's absolutely a community aspect to skating that I intended to lean in to, but I haven't done much on that front so far. I've been pretty asocial and have mostly stuck to the garage/back porch/very nearby sidewalks, but do have aspirations to get to the skate park one of these days.

So…yeah. Here's to racking up some scrapes and bruises, putting wood to pavement, and living a little.