Memoirs - Why do I love skateboarding?
Why do I love skateboarding? It's probably a never-ending question that skateboarders ask themselves but doesn't need answering. It's as if we rush into skateboarding as fools rush into love. Yet maybe it's precisely that - we are all fools caught up in our endless love affair with skateboarding, but joyous fools nonetheless. I found myself retracing my steps before I actually "met" my first love, and fell head over heels (in most cases literally) for skateboarding. To explain why I love skateboarding, carving out creative lines under cloudless skies, screaming in stoke at new skate vids, marvelling at the mad trickery the pros master, would take forever and my mind would be warped from unparallelled ecstacy as I relay all the times I've spent in absolute awe of skateboarding. But I'll try, here are my memoirs -
When I first started skateboarding it enveloped me completely, it was a giant force swallowing me whole and I couldn't escape, or at least I didn't want to. Reminiscing, I often wonder how such a simple act could give me such happiness but as I was initiated into its lifestyle I realised it was far from simple, and that's excluding the skateboarding part. It was a completely new, almost esoteric, culture that contained so many new facets and constituents it was truly eye-opening. I found myself opening new doors everyday, music that drove me and shaped my love for music today, magazines with artistic elements and literature (hmm..?) that sparked a creative fervour inside me, it was too good to be true, and inevitably it was. I picked up a susceptibility to idiotic injuries that was startling (how do you bust your elbow doing a harmless switch tic-tac, well I can comfort myself with the fact that it was switch.) I tried to come up with agonising explanations, maybe skateboarding wasn't meant for me (excuse me?) , maybe I was just clumsy, or perhaps that same force that had swallowed me was experiencing a little indigestion and wanted me out. Whatever it was out of the five years I've been "skateboarding" I've only been on a skateboard for about three. And it would always be the dumbest shit. Instead of cracking my knee on a 10 stair half cab, I cracked it on a ten brick ollie drop, instead of concussing myself on a helicopter acid drop, I concussed myself on my first mini-ramp drop in. Yet still I had developed a religous zeal for skateboarding that would have frightened even the early missionaries back to England. Whatever I did, whatever I didn't, revolved around skateboarding. I would rope it into all my conversations I had whatsoever, I would talk about skateboarding whilst others were talking about soccer, I would talk about skateboarding while others were talking about geology, I would even talk about skateboarding whilst others discussed the socio-economic progress of Argentina post-Evita, damn it was crazy. "Oh does your new car have four wheels? You know my skateboard also has..." It took over my somewhat academic tendencies at school, "So does thirty squared equal nine-hundred? You know Tony Hawk once..."
But it changed me into what I am today, shrugging my timid nature to scream at my parents when I couldn't go to the park (or maybe it was those teenage hormones) and creating a critical, discerning mindset in today's age of baa, baa, black sheep. Physically skateboarding has done my body far more harm than it has good, but mentally the pleasure it has given me is uncomparable. When I'm not skateboarding I long to go back, skateboarding is my drug, and I'm completely addicted.
(D)
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