Skate of the Union

I love to read skateboarding magazines because I love skating. Juice, Thrasher, and even the trendsetting Transworld SKATEboarding all occupy a spot in my reading stack. I dig Juice because it is raw punk rock coverage of the skateboarding world. Same goes for Thrasher which was always a little edgier than TWS. In the October 2007 issue of Transworld, Mackenzie Eisenhour penned an interesting piece titled "FASHION, FUNCTION, AND FORGET ABOUT IT". The article states that "We've entered a stage in skateboarding where everybody and anybody can pretty much rock and do whatever they want, whenever they want." I couldn't have said it better. The proverbial door to the world of skateboarding is wide open. I won't say that I feel fully accepted when I show up at the park pushing 60mm wheels on an old school big board but I never skated to be accepted. Skateboarding was and is for me a borderline outlaw punk rock activity. In 1985 there was no public skatepark in my hometown. We skated street which then meant curbs, benches, ledges, banks, and even flat. Some kids had backyard half pipes and we built the hell of jump ramps, or kickers, if you will. Most of this was pre ollie as Mark Gonzales had yet to unleash the ollie on street skating. If you wanted to get up on a bench you did a boneless. If you wanted to blast a method air you had to grab your board before going off of the ramp. We skated what we had to skate and Cheese and I even snuck into our first pool together by climbing the fence. Skaters were often subjected to ridicule by the participants of organized sports. I think the whole jocks vs. skaters debate is as old as skating itself. But, to get back to the point, we now skate and live in a world where you can show up at the park and bust your bert slides while the kids pushing the 52mm's tre flip the stair set. The one's who have watched Lords of Dogtown kind of it get while others are going "Why did he just put his hand on the ground?" I have lived and skated through some really weird times in skateboarding. I witnessed the slow and painful demise of vert skating during the late 1980's and the rise of street skating in the 1990's along with trends such as ridiculously oversized pants and even more ridiculously UNDERsized wheels. I do not miss walking into the shop only to find that the biggest wheel I can buy is 39mm. However, that is not to say that I didn't ride a set of those damned things at one time or another back then. Today truly is a Golden Age for skating. Differing and various aspects of skating are being explored. For example, vert is back finally and so are some of my favorite skaters like Chris Miller, Hosoi, Sergie Ventura, Ben Schroeder, et al... Slalom is in and pool skating is HUGE. Check out two of my favorite websites like Skate and Annoy or Mark Conahan's AntigravityPress and you can see for yourself how lucky skaters in the Pacific NorthWest United States truly are. There is a skatepark boom occurring right now in Oregon and Washington State. It always has been a truly good time to be a skater and now the times are better. My only wish is that the younger generations of skaters will learn something from the older generations. And not just tricks either, but that skateboardings is life and skateboarding is for life.