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.

EDITORIAL INTERLUDE: Skateboarding Is Not Sexy

There are a lot more women skating today than there were when I took up a board way back in the pleistocene era of the late 80’s. Of course, by that metric “a lot more” could actually mean “any”, but I digress. The more random distribution of y chromosomes at the skate park nowadays is a net positive all around. When I’m Jumping through the social media hoops and browsing skate related pages and blogs, shots of women absolutely killing it are more common than ever. I find that pretty inspiring...until I scroll down to the photo captions or, even worse, the comment sections. Cliched double entendres using the word “grind”, and well-meaning but knuckleheaded captions about how “sexy” or “hot” a woman who can skate is, are mingled with fawning but nevertheless condescending marriage proposals and lamentations regarding the lack of skateboarding skills of peoples’ various girlfriends. Its all very predictable and very pathetic. I know people say riding a skateboard means never having to grow up, but this isn’t really what they mean.