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| It's the obligatory Happy Thanksgiving post.... haha. Really though, I hope everyone has a great day. My Thanksgiving has turned out slightly different than usual. My grandmother got sick with a stomach virus, and was told that she should not be around anyone because it is so contagious. We were supposed to go to their house with the family, but if we went there we probably would have gotten sick too, so we canceled it. One of my sisters has to work today and tomorrow, so she could not come to any of the festivities. We decided that since we were not going to my grandparent's house, we would go up to UNC Greensboro to visit her at school and go out to eat. It's going to be a couple hour trip each way..... so at least I'll have time to write at least 2,000 words for my novel in the car.
Anyway, have a great Thanksgiving, and get off Xanga and go hang out with family and friends!
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| I don't know if this piece of my life has ever come out here on Xanga before. I used to be a skater. Not a very good skater, but a skater nonetheless. I'll be honest, I mainly started because my best friends were doing it, but once I started, I found that I liked it a lot. I couldn't do much more than ollie, pop shove it, 50-50 grind low rails and ledges, and boardstall and kickturn on vert ramps like quarter-pipes. (Yes I just used skater language, look it all up if you really want to know how little I could do back then.) I was a big guy, and it was hard for me to do much else because I had bad balance and could never really get the board much further than a foot off the ground. I would watch a lot of my friends skate and do impressive tricks, and try them, usually failing epically. Despite the fact that I sucked, I consider those the best years of my life so far.
"But why?" you might ask. I'm glad you did. I liked the culture. Today we have a sort of warped view of skaters as a whole. Shows like Viva La Bam depict skaters like the overgrown brat Bam Margera going around doing whatever they want and generally putting a negative connotation on the whole scene. I can tell you right now that skateboarding and the related culture is generally not the way those guys have it depicted. It almost offends me to see them do that sort of thing.... ok... it does offend me because it offends my sensibility.
Anyway, I liked skating for the culture. What I mean by that is the fact that I like the way skaters bond as a community. For us back in the day, it didn't matter where we were, we were skating with friends, and that was what we liked about it. It didn't matter how good you were, we all understood that people were in the process of learning, and practicing was the best way to become better. You watched the good guys pull off a trick, then you dropped in on a ramp and tried it yourself. You talked with others, listened to music, stayed up late at night, and were just able to be yourself as a skater. Wherever we were, we were thinking about places that would make sweet new skate spots, or what sort of things could be done on a stair set or railing. When we hung out at friend's houses, there were skate videos on the TV, and we would pause in conversation to watch some pro pull off something new and awesome.
I think for true skaters that is what it's really about. It's about having a community of friends that support freedom of expression and acceptance. At its heart, skating is not about trashing buildings or getting in trouble with the law. Why would skaters want to do that? If they got in trouble or trashed places, they got kicked out, and then what fun was that anymore? The point was to just get out and skate.
There is a certain aspect of disrespect in the community for law enforcement, but usually it was fueled by the fact that cops or security guards viewed all skaters as punks who were there to vandalize property or disrupt the peace. It's a vicious circle that leads the law to hate skaters, and skaters to hate the law. Most skaters, however, just want to be able to hang out and skate with their friends, so they will usually take it somewhere else if told to leave.
Back to my own experience. Sure some of the people I knew did some things they shouldn't have, but as a whole, I enjoyed the community of skaters that I hung out with. We skated anywhere we could. The youth leader at church turned a warehouse in the back of the youth building into a small skate park where we could skate indoors. We had a couple of quarter pipes, some kicker ramps, and a few rails set up in there. It was the only indoor place to skate at in Laurinburg. It was also a safe place to come because it was at a church, and it was a good way to bring in people to hear about Christ. I have so many memories of that place. I saw a lot of good tricks, fell a lot, and once watched a guy fly off a ramp and put his whole leg through a wall. They eventually shut the place down because of several factors like insurance, and the fact that some of the bad skaters got high and broke into the building to skate at 4:00 in the morning. I'll always have memories of that place though. After they shut it down, I sort of stopped skating, aside from going to friend's houses or skating downtown.
What I hated about the culture was the way big companies tried to break in and tell skaters that they weren't cool unless they were wearing their certain brand of hoodies or jeans, or skated on their types of boards. The posers would walk around in expensive skate clothes, like $50 jeans from Pac Sun, and ride $200 board setups. The real skaters realized that if you wore $50 jeans and a $30 t-shirt, you were eventually going to have an $80 outfit with holes all in it, because skaters do a lot more falling than landing. They also realized that if you rode a board that cost you $60, that was $60 down the drain because you were probably going to break the board in less than a month. The real skaters were the ones in the ratty clothing riding no-name boards that cost $10. It's not the clothing or board brand that makes the skater, contrary to what the labels will try to tell you. It's the heart and attitude of the skater. (I will admit, I did ride one of those expensive board setups, but I was so bad at skating that I never broke it. I also wore a lot of the skater clothing, but only the clearance stuff that I could afford, and not wen I was skating. The brands I wore back in the day were cheap, but now if you go into a place like Pac Sun, you're going to pay an arm and a leg to get the same stuff.)
I eventually dropped skateboarding in favor of video gaming. I became sort of a computer geek and gamer as I hit my mid-teens. (I'd been working with computers since I was 11 or so, but I skated a lot more than I played with PCs.) I was no longer interested in building boards, I was interested in building my own gaming PC to take over to friend's houses to game all night. In a way, I found a new community in gamers, but it doesn't quite fit with the skater community. Today, I can see myself moving on from that gaming community to the airsoft community, but I still cling to my love of computers and gaming, just like I cling to my love of skating.
That's what I miss. I miss the community. I miss the way we all just hung out, without a care, and just skated. It shaped me for sure. I still wear skater shoes and clothes, and I love watching skate videos. I still look at some places on a sidewalk or a set of stairs and think of what types of tricks could be done there. No matter how much my parents or professors or bosses may try to change me from that culture, I don't think I ever will. I think this is one of the main reasons that I despise the culture of the working world. I detest the thought of having to go to work every day, sitting at a desk, and dealing with a boss, all to make someone else money. I want to do my own thing, be free to be myself and make my own way. I guess that's all I have to say about it.... I'll end my long rant here.
P.S. Actually I have one more thing to say. I want to say that I think I had the sweetest board ever. It was made by Zero, and was designed by Christian skater Jamie Thomas (He was my favorite skater back then.). It was the Jamie Thomas Cross deck. It had a huge cross on the bottom, with the words to John 3:16 written in the black background. I'm trying my best to find a picture of what it looked like before I scratched it all up, but it's so old that you can't really find it online. I did find someone selling one here. It was his best selling design at the time, and I think God used him as a witness to other skaters through his faith. Here is a picture of what my board looks like now. (It's really beat up)
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| I just got an email about this from some Christians at the school I used to go to. It was drafted by Chuck Colson and announced on the 20th of this month. Since it has a lot of prominent backing, I guess it will be presented somehow to government officials and all that, but I'm never quite sure when I sign things like this. Sometimes those things hit the government and just get overlooked and ignored. Anyway, I just thought I'd let anyone else know who may want to sign this if you believe in:
- The sanctity of human life
- The dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife
- The rights of conscience and religious liberty
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| Yeah, because I want to post something normal, here are a couple of my thoughts. I will say that I have 36,000 words written in my NaNoWriMo novel. Right on track.
Anyway... what was I going to say? Oh yeah. What is up with all of the reality shows like there are on TLC? Especially shows about little people. I'm sitting here watching a show called "Little People, Big Pregnancy" with my sister. It's about a couple who both have dwarfism, and who are having a baby. There are a few other shows like it, like "The Little Couple" and "Little People, Big World." My family likes watching them. I was just sitting here thinking, "Why do I watch these shows?" (Aside from the fact that we only have one TV hooked up to the satellite, so I just watch whatever they watch.) Anyway, so I'm watching this, and I realize that I'm watching people's lives. Nothing more. I'm watching them go to work, make dinner, and do the most mundane things that nobody would normally care about seeing any of us doing. I wonder what makes it interesting? The only difference between them and me is the fact that they are little people. I'm not in the least bit interested, so it makes no difference to me. I just wonder how in the world we as a society have gotten so detached from our own lives, that we find the need to watch others live their lives. If it seems like those people have more of a life than us it's because we need to get away from the dang TV and live our own lives.
I found a great quote that sort of goes with the spirit of Thanksgiving. I'll end with this:
“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”- Thornton Wilder
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True
