Talking Gear Doesn't Make You A Poseur, And Not Giving A Crap Doesn't Make You A Jock

If you are familiar with the work I've done with The Ride Channel or even hung around the Parking Block Diaries Facebook page, you probably know I put a fair amount of thought into the gear I ride. In modern skateboarding, thinking critically about what you are riding is usually a point of controversy, not for the opinions you might form, but for the fact that you have an opinion at all.

I see it all the time on my pages or in the comment sections of my articles: Someone will ask some advice about how a deck rides or ask for suggestions on what kind of wheels to get, and, soon afterwards, the snarky and even hostile comments come rolling in. For many, even asking about gear is "over-thinking" and considering the specs of different products"Doesn't matter".  Before long they always end up twisting the good ole' Zorlac "Shut up and skate" slogan into their ultimate justification.

Jimmy Wallace's Driveway (Part 1)

(Mine had neon green zigzags)

“Wait! I’m locked up again.”

Monty’s bike skidded to a halt in the gravel at the end of the driveway. He glanced back at me from the seat of his hot pink GT, a familiar look of exasperation on his face.  “The WD-40 is on the workbench. Hurry up. Jimmy Wallace built a ramp in his driveway.”

I ran into the garage and fetched the can. It was time to roll the boulder up the hill one more time...whatever leaning, ramshackle wedge of lumber remnants Jimmy Wallace had crammed together in his driveway would have to wait.

By summer 1988 I had been skating the same $50 Variflex for three years. At that point, the application of lubricant to bearings was more of a neurotic tic than any sort of real remedy for my board’s eternal lock-ups. The scrap metal spheres rattling around the grooves of my cheap wheels had degraded to the point that they could be considered a real locomotive force only by the broadest and most forgiving mechanical definitions. Nothing ever stopped the seize-ups, especially not wd-40, and deep down I knew it, but I would stick that little red straw in to the wheel and spray away anyway, the cut-rate lubricant pooling so deep that I could have lifted up my wheel and knocked back the ounces of WD 40 like Jack Daniels from a neon shot glass.

Sometimes the WD-40 helped a little. Sometimes

Talking Popsicles And Pachyderms With Mike Vallely

In 27 years as a working pro, Mike Vallely’s impact on skateboarding has been nothing less than comprehensive. In pursuing his craft, Vallely has not only helped shape what people can do on their skateboards, but also the shape of the skateboards they do it on. Through his relentless touring, vocal advocacy, and plain old trucks-to-the-grindstone ethos, Vallely’s influence goes well beyond the tricks and video parts and deep into the mind state of skateboarding. As famous for speaking his mind, burning bridges, and busting security guards as he is for busting bonelesses, Vallely has always seemed fearless, militant even, in his passion for and pursuit of skateboarding.

But standing on the decks at the Skatepark of Tampa during the Tampa pro contest in 2012, He’s nervous.

These Are The Days, They Always Were: Why Now Is The Best Time To Be A Skateboarder.

When I was a kid my dad used to tell lots of stories about growing up as one of 13 children on an Indiana farm. He’d usually trot these stories out when my brothers and I were bitching about something...which was a lot. I think what really pissed me off was that I always thought there was a bit of smug superiority in those stories. I always automatically thought he was going on about enduring farm life as a way to belittle my own lack of grit and to extoll the superiority of his own hard scrabble childhood; a childhood of waking at the crack of dawn, only wearing hand me down clothes and, yes, walking 3 miles to school uphill both ways. What pissed me off most of all though, was that, despite all of this supposed nostalgia for a life of rural poverty, my dad spent his whole life working his ass off to make sure none of his kids would ever have to live that sort of life themselves. It seemed hypocritical to me. If growing up that way was so much better, why weren’t we doing it? It was an easy way to intellectually negate the lesson he was really trying to teach me. I didn’t see what was really going on when dad would trot out the stories of 5 AM milkings and once-a-year mass family shoe shopping trips. Sure, there was a bit of of superiority and scolding in those bits of nostalgic musing, but the real reason those stories got repeated over and over again was to show us that things could be worse, and even if they were worse, we could survive them. Most of all, they were meant to make us appreciate what we had. Of course I was a sly, spoiled, little shit, so all this was lost on me when I needed to learn it most.

So what the hell does this have to do with skateboarding?

Any Deck, Any Truck, Any Wheel Part 1: Freestyle Foolishness, Dungeons, Dragons, Dorks and Desires.

1988 was the year I made the transition from being a kid with a skateboard to being a “skateboarder”. The distinction between the two things may seem like a fine hair to split, but as a 14 year old who had never had a girlfriend, never made it onto any sports team and had a big brother who did his best to make sure I didn’t have the confidence to ever dream of doing either, it was like throwing down the fucking gauntlet.

Outsiders can scoff. It’s easy to think that all I was doing was falling into a fad, but if skateboarding was a fad it was the hardest fad in the history pop culture to actually participate in. Fads are supposed to be easy. Sometimes all you have to do to be in the thick of one is buy some doohickey or scrap of clothing, but with skateboarding, it was a major commitment of time and discipline just to buy your way in. By ’87 Skateboarding was rapidly gaining popularity, sure, but the return wasn’t so much a subcultural rags-to-riches story as it was a rags-to-new-outfit-from-the-goodwill story. Even in throes of Bones Brigade mania, in the midwest becoming a skater was not something that happened unless you really wanted it to. It took a daunting amount of work just to be a poseur. That’s why, even for the trendies who only skitched their way on the thrash bandwagon for a few months, the decision to dabble in skating was a lot more involved than going to the five and dime to buy a hula hoop or a pogo stick, and the effects of that decision had broader impacts. Skaters wax poetic about their first real board. It’s seen as a rite of passage. To an outsider, that’s a corny sentiment at best and a sad overidentification with crass consumerism at worst, but in a time when skateboard shops, sometimes even skateboard magazines, only existed in the major metropolitan areas in the midwest, the simple act of getting your hands on a board was more than an act of consumption, it was a true initiation: a baptism of plywood, urethane and cast aluminum. Here’s your Hosoi hammerhead, welcome to the cult.

Skatesploitation or Die (Part 1of 2) "REACH FOR THE TOP!"

Learning about skating via the pre-digested, commodified versions of it we saw in pop culture was not ideal, but skateboarding’s flirtations with the mainstream in ’86-’87 turned out to be vital for me and my valterrorizing friends anyway. By ’86 I had been cruising my department store Variflex for two years and me and the pre-pubescent driveway gangs haunting the subdivisions had pretty much reached the limits of what we thought carving, kickturns and coffins could do for us. We knew there was another level of skating somewhere, but we had no idea what it looked like or how to take the first step to get to it. We didn’t even have directions to the stairwell. We were desperate for any bit of information we could digest.

Skateboarding's Critical Mass: The masonite/Boneite Revolution

For me 1986 and 1987 were the years of a sort subliminal indoctrination into skateboarding. By the end of ’87 I had reached the turning point where I realized skateboarding was not going to be just a diversion for me, but a passion. These were the years when my friends and I slowly and painfully began to realize that those Nashes and Valterras we were riding weren’t going to be enough.

These were the years before Thrasher showed up in the bookstores but Thrashin' and Police Academy 4 were on movie screens. 720 appeared in the mall arcade promising answers to the tao of skating that, alas, remained elusive no matter how many quarters we pumped into it. At home, my friend Monty and I were ignoring the hackey sack and volleyball stages of California Games on the commodore 64 so we could go straight to shredding the 8-bit half pipe in the skateboarding stage. Skate Or Die came later, and we would find ourselves taking pixelized advice on equipment and skate spots from a double-chinned, purple mohawked skateshop owner named Rodney Recloose in the hopes of taking down aggro eddie. Of course when the screen went blank, no matter how well we scored head to head against Bionic Lester, we had to go back out to our driveways with our Valterras and Nashes and be Poseur Pete.

 In the living rooms of our suburban ranch houses there were sporadic commercials with tiny snippets of skating flash cut in between pitches for cola or hair gel. Each split second of shredding between money shots of Swatch watches or perspiring cans of Mountain Dew would have me putting my face right up to the screen, searching for information. In the mid 80’s, if skateboarding was the bright center of the universe, I was on the planet farthest from, but like a radio telescope operator with an open line to alien world, I was poring through the pop culture static and aggregating a transmission of skateboarding whose signal to noise ratio was slowly getting better.