Tag Archives: Skateboarding

Now for Different

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Are you familiar with how one day can follow another? Have you noticed how a high can be given its cruddy yang at what you would call an unseemly moment? I have lived this life and am here to report from my position doing the backstroke in a mud puddle.

Perhaps you read the entry before this and know that Saturday was a boon of:

embarrassment at my half-pipe skills (which really culminated when I dropped in in front of one of the people who had never seen me skate and she said, in the most surprised way: YAY!!! the same way you would say it if a tiny child stood up and then landed back on its diapered butt)

Cats plus skunks

WOMEN RIDING SKATEBOARDS

Lining my interior with Vietnamese spring rolls as though I were an empty duffel bag headed for window display.

I awoke Sunday morning with my daily desire to get my house together. I distilled that feeling into a single mission, which was delivering a small box of Indy trucks to a dude in Fullerton. I drove them down from San Francisco for a friend, along with a Honda-load of my personal items, to my new home in Highland Park, Los Angeles. I have no idea what is near or far in the greater Los Angeles area so I will drive anywhere and not think much of it. If you were like “Let’s go to Long Beach and then later can you drop me in Ojai?” I would say, “NO PROBLEM.”

So I trot on down to Fullerton, which seems like a model home for the rest of L.A. I didn’t see anything that distinguished it from every other town down here which is hot, full of palm trees, kids on razor scooters, a billion plastic bags on the wind, broken styrofoam cups in tree planters (seriously, a message to anyone with eco-panic in San Francisco or Portland: maybe take your hand off the Serial Mom button and know what you are doing is good, but not yet widespread. I knew this girl who never wanted to drive when we were all headed for a destination that required driving because it made her feel eco-better to not burn her personal gas. So someone else always drove and she felt exonerated. It made me feel like STOP BEING SUCH A DUMB HONKY.) (Are you ready, white people? Are you ready to become a boutique race of artisans with tiny fingers that raises exquisite heirloom cucumbers?) (This vision excludes the working class and a few others).

I arrive at a small warehouse space where I hand over the trucks. There is no thank you or other gesture indicating gratitude, so I assume we are already communicating psychically. Cool, I wish there was more of that. I indicate that I would like to go skate and it turns out the two dudes with whom I am in this space intend to do the same. I say, “I would very much like to skate bowls as I spent yesterday on a swing set and having no flow.” They say, “Yeah we can do that.” Me: “Cool.”

We get in the van of one of them. We drive to the Fullerton skatepark. It is like if the ladybug ride at Disneyland got old and laid on a flat rock in the direct sun for a decade then sort of popped up as a skatepark. There are some fun hips and pockets and it is just a flow bowl with sticks and cigarette butts in it. Plus exclusively dudes skating. I am accustomed to this scenario and in my three years have skated with the most fun, awesome dudes a person could ever skate with. So okay. I skate the park for 45 minutes while my associates do the same. I find out we are waiting for some people then we are going to skate another place which has bowls. The people arrive. We are instead going to a backyarder in the local hills.

The reason I know we’re leaving the Fullerton skatepark is everyone I’m with climbs over the fence and starts walking to the car. No one told me, but that’s cool. Why do people need to talk so much anyway? I get to the van and sit in the front passenger seat. I have that feeling of disconnect that happens when hanging out with people who I don’t really know and who don’t really talk to me but I’m invited to be there. I don’t know how to talk to them either because I don’t know our common ground and I feel really female in an environment that is very much not. If I may be so bold as to go Mars and Venus in my description.

Guy in back of van: You guys gotta see a picture of this hot chick Steve is banging. She has giant tits.

Other guy: Is that why he hasn’t been hanging out?

Guy: Totally dude, they’re like fucking all the time. Dude if I were going to open a strip club I would have the hallway on the way to the bathroom lined with girls behind glass like in Amsterdam. There would be red lights and they would dance.

I think: But how would you monetize that? They can’t just work for free.

No one says anything. I suspect this is because I am there.

Guy: Dude why are you guys letting me talk, I’m so fucking stoned. Hey can we stop for beer?

But his ID does not match the name on his debit card so we have to go to one bodega for the ATM and then go to a different one for booze. You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it. They achieve beer.

We drive up a winding road lined with hot pink Bougainvillea, Agaves attenuata and scrubbly California plants. It looks like we are driving through a documentary about a skater from the 80’s. We get up to a house where some guy has been building an alleged backyard bowl. He’s in his 40’s, lives with his grandparents, and they let him do this marvelous thing (or they don’t hear well and never walk to a window). We park in a nest of Hondas and trucks and walk around to the back of the house. There is a 3-sided concrete area with steep tranny, banks, walls, gaps, tile and noping. It looks like the kind of thing I would have to play around with to get used to it, but there is already a bunch of dudes shredding it while a couple guys photo and video. There is no way I’m getting in there. I would have to huff so much paint to feel at one with my environment. The sun is blazing and browning, and there is a small tent to which a truck has backed up. The gate to the truck bed is open and it’s filled with bags of concrete. A couple guys sit on the back. Another guy grills a meat of indeterminate origin. Other guys crowd under the tent in lawn chairs, watching the guys skate. I smile at a couple people and say hi and no one says a word, which feels freakish. All the chairs are taken. I stand in the sun and feel my cells quiver and shrink with heat. After 40 minutes a guy gets up and I take his seat.

I ask to be driven to my car three times. I use my telephone to assess that my car is nine miles away. Super long walk and quick drive. My ride, an adult man over forty, does not want to take me because one of his riders is trying to land an insane backside air over a gap and he needs to drive him home. I suspect the kid can get a ride from someone else but I don’t feel like I have any negotiating power here. I sit in the sun for another hour. Finally the trick is landed and we get ready to go. The rider doesn’t need a ride, he’s getting one from someone else.

The ride back to my car is awkward and quiet and I feel so gross and annoyed that I didn’t bring my own car and enable myself to leave when I wanted. I wish I had been able to skate many more hours that day and am bummed I sat in that uncomfortable environment and I wish I had the skills to jump in a session like that and feel awesome. But I do not. I have always felt super welcome at any session, regardless if the riders are way more skilled than me. This is the first time I’ve felt genuinely alienated. I kind of don’t want to blame the people there, because I feel like if I had chosen to get in and skate, it would have been fine and I would have been treated fine and the guys would have interacted with me more. I like that skate culture is so full of socially bizarre humans who don’t conduct themselves in a particularly user-friendly way. No one was hostile to me. There are certain strains of decorum that conduct human respect and dignity, and other strains that seem to simply facilitate a sort of babysitting of presumed emotional experience. This experience felt gross for a lot of reasons but at this moment I don’t feel like anything about it was unjust or wrong. The shit I brought to the table is my own. It was shaped by sexism in some capacities for sure, but I am an adult woman and I feel like I get to use that however I want.

Things that Contrast

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Do you enjoy contradictions? So do a lot of people. For example, that commercial in which the young black men are listening to rap music then when no one is watching they get out of the car and are great ballerinas. It is a curveball just like if they received Sunset magazine in the mail. It just doesn’t seem likely! Another example is I was talking to an amazing depressed and violent youth the other day and she said she loves when baskets of fruit are carved to look like flowers. She doesn’t just love knives and punching people. She likes a thing that looks like this but is really that. It turns out we might not know everything about a person by the way they are depicted in the cartoons of the 1980’s. Right now in front of my face on TV: Ken Jeong singing Jim Croce in The Hangover 2? The hell! Why would he sing that???

My life this weekend has been a giant bowling trophy dedicated to incongruities. Saturday I drove to Encinitas to ride skateboards with a bunch of women, including CB Burnside, Lisa Whitaker, Mimi Knoop, Amy Caron, Michelle Steilen, Sara Taylor, Hayley Gordon and Van Nguyen. I list them here with links because maybe you don’t know who they are and you would love to be inspired. They are all spectacularly inspiring people. I generally and also specifically loathe skating mini ramps because I carve more than kick turn and also skatelite is so slippery. So when it was announced we’d be skating at CB’s mini ramp my feelings were the opposite of when I imagine baby turtles making their first voyage to the ocean.

We rolled up to a home surrounded by a tall, wooden fence. The front gate was wide open. The irrigation went on in the garden and I noticed a leak, then tried to find its source and fix it. The line was too deeply buried, then I remembered I didn’t know the people who lived there and I came to skate. So I stepped up to the half pipe, where Amy and I swept like human nature zambonis. I enrobed my knees in my giant Scabs pads, dropped in one side, rolled out the other and was sure I had executed all the moves I would have to offer that day. One of the pieces in the ramp was rotten and sagging so there was an area to avoid about two feet in from one side of the ramp. Mimi was throwing out some flawless rock and rolls, Van was setting up disasters, CB was doing heel flips into disasters, Sarah Taylor was trying EVERYTHING, including some long 50-50 grinds, rocks, whatever, Amy was doing everything ever with the casual ease I attribute to catalog models, and Michelle set aside her roller skates to ride a skateboard with her intense natural athleticism. We fakie-d next to each other. She did kick turns in that way of making the full 180 degrees. I usually hammer out a solid 80 degrees. Life! Nothing turns out like you think it will! I walked into my backyard to find a stray chicken tonight!

Later that afternoon CB, who has eight cats (which to me makes her a wonderful woman and guardian of an important population on this crazy blue marble), showed us how she picks up the adolescent skunks who wander around her property. She has a garden bed that runs the length of her driveway which has tall shrubs along the edge and behind the shrubs about five feet of earth which leads to a fence. There is a long line of cat huts and cat scratchers in this shady little strip. The whole vibe is very Guerneville. I told a couple people this and because none of them are from Northern California, no one thought it was HILARIOUS. I have been Not Understood A LOT since moving here. It is a weird experience, and a wonderful companion piece to how when I walk in a room here, no one is like YEAH!!!!! Here the response to me is more like, “Now there is a person standing where once there was just a door.” Perhaps one day I will dazzle, but so far it’s just the hum of desk fans when I walk in to any given room.

Van and I eventually left and went for spring rolls at Favori’s in Fountain Valley. We had a small fish and crammed our tired bodies full of spring rolls, soda xi muoi and mum nem. Then we had to drive 45 minutes to Echo Park which took the same strength as lifting and throwing boulders (because we carried the car).

Stay tuned for the following day, which was opposite day!

Driver to Skater

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Today I drove home from the Mission in my wonderful Honda Element. I was driving up Illinois Street toward the little bridge (the one that still so horribly has a skunk mashed into the octagonal holes of the grate) to Cargo Street. I saw an elderly gentleman, probably late sixties, riding a skateboard in the bike lane. He pushed like a 15-year-old boy, sinking his torso down to load up his push foot. He had a long white beard, white hair, jeans, a tie-dye shirt with a heart on his chest, and a backpack with what looked like a badminton racket sticking out. He was wearing huge hiking boots, and he rode a popsicle board with giant white soft wheels. I passed him and I thought PASSIONS FOR SKATEBOARDING, PASSIONS FOR ELDERLY SKATEBOARDERS!! I kept driving and I felt like it was wrong to not at least say hello so I turned around and drove up next to him. I said hi. He said hi. I said, “You’re a skateboarder.” He said, “Yeah kinda. I’m still trying to figure it out. I just got these wheels.” Who is this wonderful man who would decide to get on a fucking skateboard in his late fucking sixties? I DIDN’T ASK! I didn’t take his picture! I just lived a life and had him in it for a second! I salute anyone who is taking chances like this at points in their lives where most people wouldn’t even consider it. He was a celebrity to my soul in that moment. I don’t want to set arbitrary limits on what my life could be, and what my body can do, ever. I don’t want to succumb to the relentless psychic bulldozer shoving me to seek only comfort. I want to challenge my heart, mind, and cells daily to negotiate this living experience so if I make it to the end of the world I and I die it will be at the paws of angry bears and not because I couldn’t get my arms out of my Snuggie and my eyes off a holographic teddy bear.

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Good Evening, Friends of Life.

Last Saturday I skated in my first contest. I felt very ambivalent about skating it, which is to say I felt terrified and curious. I actively avoid competition (besides a good, abusive dose of competition with MYSELF) in most realms, including my adult swim team. I never go to meets or other bro-downs in which those super-alpha swim beasts toss their shoulders into the drink to win medals. It’s too nerve-wracking and I am a simple beast who thrives in the absence of pressure, not with its embarrassment (do you get it I mean I don’t thrive under pressure. Good one!). When I stopped at the entrance to the park the lady working the contest implored me to enter, despite my being a relatively new skater (just shy of three years) and somewhat elderly (39 years old). She reminded me that the more people who entered the contest, the more important women’s skate events would appear to the city/people with money. ENOUGH SAID. I am desperate to see skating further proliferate the world of gals in sports.

I entered both the mini-bowl competition and the skull bowl competition. I knew I would not skate the skull. I hadn’t dropped into that bowl in over a year, and last time was at the end of a long skate day and I beefed in the deep end about ten times, effectively rearranging my bones and perhaps leading to this relentless fatigue. I know I can skate it, but I don’t want to reacquaint myself in front of a giant audience and the pressure of competition. Horrible.

I entered the park and saw my deeply great friends Patty and Ray. We rode the mini-bowls. I focused on the amoeba because most people wouldn’t skate that and it’s the most fun bowl to me. I didn’t think there was any way I could be great in the contest; this isn’t false humility, I just don’t have the skills or tricks. While warming up I hit a sweet frontside double axle grind. I was very excited, especially because the grinds I hit are almost always backside. Doors open in a woman’s life.

I ran into a guy I often see at the park. He is nice.

Him: You skating in the contest?
Me: Yeah, I’m gonna slaughter some 8-year-olds in the mini-bowl.
Him: You’re funny.

I love that approach of observation rather than participation in humor. It feels so wonderfully flat. Most people want to jump on-board and power-josh the night away. Not this guy. He wanted to leave me alone on my little joke island to laugh at my own farts. As with many things, I don’t relate to it at all, but I appreciate it in others.

A couple hours and tacos later, we gathered for photos in the first mini-bowl. There were a couple lines of us. A couple people made cracks about getting manicures and pedicures later. That bummed me out. I wanted to just gather and be skaters, not make fun of the fact that we were female skaters. It’s frustrating that the female-ness needs to be highlighted so vigorously. I get why that’s necessary, but I feel like by the time we’re at the contest and everyone who is going to come is there and everyone who is going to compete is there, let’s let it be what it is: a contest. The world won’t let us just be seen as skaters (yet), so when we create our own environment (this competition), let’s enjoy our power to define it as a skate contest, the end.

Then the contest began. First was the mini-bowl competition, and first up were the under-18 girls. It was a pink explosion, which was a bummer bomb for me. Hot pink shirts, hot pink helmets, hot pink grip tape, hot pink decks. WHY. You know that I carry no truck with pink in and of itself. But it barfs me out that skateboarding for little girls means aligning the sport with dolls and flowers. I know a lot of little girls (AND WOMEN) love to nest in pink everything. But when it crops up as a group, particularly a group aligned with a skate brand called Silly Girl (a dismissive label if there ever was one), I think it blows. I just can’t get excited about skating as a wholesome sport, or as something with too much structure and hand-holding. I loathe seeing parents in a skatepark who are taking up a lot of space and being entitled about their kid’s learning process. If parents are going to participate in a child’s encounter with skateboarding, I think they should learn how people use a skatepark and learn to operate cooperatively with the people already there. More ideally, I think kids should get into the park and the parents should sit on a bench outside while they learn (unless their parents also skate, in which case all these rigid rules are null and void in reverence for the great institution of Skate Families). Things should not be easy for kids or anyone all the time. Whatever happened to BUILDING CHARACTER?

So anyway. Just my opinion. I’m sure you guys are all happy and agree to it. One of the girls eschewed the pink and accented with purple. I appreciated that. Also she was an incredible skater. Naturally I don’t remember anyone’s name. Although there was a super cute 8-year-old named Bryce who was KILLING IT in the mini-bowls, festooned in pink, including a couple hot pink stripes under her eyes. She had a fabulous scowl that made it all okay. Cranky girls of the world, I salute you. I salute every non-user-friendly moment you can muster. Every time you don’t know how to look like a dumb model in a picture, every time you’re not ready with a super sweet comment and every time you decide not to take care of the world, my helmet is off to you. A little less nurturing, a little more Fuck You. The general vibe of men’s skating is super playful, irreverent, gross, corporeal, and deeply devoted to the sport. I want to see more of that in girls and women. I don’t know if it will ever happen in a sport that so greatly risks bodily harm. But I dream of the day when lady jackasses will rise.

So the girls skated and then the over-18 division started. I was first. I skated conservatively. But I DID IT. That was a miracle. I somehow created a physical and mental state that blocked out most of the pressure. What little I felt translated into not hitting my grinds like I should have. I didn’t hit any frontside and only hit one backside. I wish I had done more but still, I can’t believe I participated at all. My friend Patty hit all the bowls and threw in a backside rock and some sweet frontside grinds. I don’t remember what else because what the hell is anything called? We each took two runs, and in my second run I jumped in the middle bowl too. No tricks there, just carving around. Oh well. I found out later I placed 7th out of 10 and Patty placed 3rd. It was truly thrilling. Although one of those people in the ten was this woman who seemed like maybe she had been on a skateboard twice in life and was maybe more of a ham than a skater. Her bravado was delightful and unnerving.

After the mini-bowl competition there was a big break in which a couple bands played. One was a sort of punk band called Medusa. It seemed like a band that would be on a TV show. Then a young lady with a name sang three songs. They were very tender and emotional. It made me extremely uncomfortable. I couldn’t help but think how such a thing would never happen at a contest that wasn’t all-female. It was music suitable for an intimate setting. Outside at a skatepark truly blew my mind. I wish this person and any decent human the best. Maybe I even wish the best for the world’s shitheads because then maybe they will feel better and be less of a shithead. Am I being nurturing? Forget it.

The skull bowl competition started and I felt nervous about getting pressure to compete. Then I felt completely and hugely inspired watching everyone skate. I didn’t ride it myself, and they let me off easy enough. Blackheart was one of the judges, and he heckled and hassled like a true skater. I’m very glad I went and proud that I participated. I was the oldest person in the contest!!

What a Trip

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Hello and welcome home. To me. Because I was not home and now I am!

Last Tuesday night I packed up in a VW van with four gentleman friends to go on a skate trip of Oregon. I’ve been on tour several times so in general I can handle being in a van close-quarters style with many people, though in the past it’s been in a hen house mostly- or all-female situation. Is everyone eating too much soy? No, I am just partly gay and in the 90s that meant hanging out in a gender panoply under the umbrella term of “dykes.” CHANGES.

We shoved off around 9:00 on Tuesday night and drove to Shasta where we camped. Anyone who knows me knows I do not camp and it’s just because I like modern conveniences such as bathrooms and cable television. But you also know I am somewhat adaptable. The dudes were kind enough to let me sleep in the van while they availed themselves of the outdoors and serious magic that is Mount Shasta. The van transforms like a…thing that becomes another thing…so that the interior can have a downstairs and upstairs bed. It was insanely comfortable, absolutely no less comfortable than my home bed except for when I peed I opened a sliding metal door and leaned my bunz against the van and did it on the ground. Other than that my lodging very much resembled my home life. Except no gunshots. But do you know what I mean.

In the morning we skated the Mount Shasta skatepark. It was heaven. Nestled in trees, clean air, and boulders left in the skatepark. It integrated so smoothly with the park where it was built. We stayed there for 3-4 hours. Check out Bob after a sweet backside grind over one of the boulders!

Bob backside grind over boulder shoulder holderSo from there we went to Weed. The shops along the highway have all taken the time to make t-shirts, lighters, and various other items which speak to the name of the town as also the name of a drug. A drug that can lead to writing amazing songs and also songs which capture immature descriptions of adult situations. Or maybe it’s not the drug it’s life. I don’t know. Who is the mother who is the daughter. I DON’T KNOW.

There were a couple kids at Weed who were straight out of Paradise Lost the documentary except not dead or in jail. They were nice. One kid had a board the other had an injury. The park was old but really fun, it was easy to try new lines every time I got in the whatever, flow bowl I guess you would call it.  We rode for a while then got back on the road with most people in the van drinking a SNICKERS-themed coffee drink from a drive-in coffee hut. Five dollars for the high of your life.

We drove to Myrtle Creek skatepark which was HUGE. They are not interested in new people getting into skateboarding, they just want people with no fear hormones and great athleticism (i.e. 14-year-old boys) to blow their face off airing over the giant tunnels in this place. Either that or they think skaters are twelve feet tall with size 35 feet and this park is then just regular or a little small for them. We met this kid who was probably about fifteen years old and he was shredding the joint to pieces on a super beat-up board wearing a sorta deeply crappy necklace employing rasta colors. It looked like he ripped the collars out of many t-shirts and tied them together and said NECKLACE! At some point a lady who looked like she was wearing her Ford Aerostar as pants rolled up and handed him something. He came back over and tried to give us those Jesus chapbooks which I refused. He totally didn’t care. The lady, whom I assumed was his mom, watched the whole time. And by the way, I’ll say again, this kid was an incredible skater. I don’t tend to think of religious people as being good at sports but we all know that’s bullshit because aren’t all football players total Jesus time all the time? And they’re total jocks. So the mom left in her van. We went over to have a beer in our van and a few minutes later this grizzled-looking older dude with a car that looked somewhere between a steam punk burning man vehicle and a cardboard collector rolled up and claimed the skater kid. I assume that whatever big, angry personality was being toted around in that truck would drive any woman who felt her destiny was to live in terror of her husband to become devoutly afraid of God.

That night we hauled our tired bods up to Portland and stayed with my friend Tara. I was happy to shower the next day. It was the first and last time on that trip. We went to New Cascadia for gluten-free treats but so much of their stuff has milk and butter in it oh my god I’m boring myself who cares. We went to Junior’s for breakfast. It was vigorously okay.

Our crew with Tara in front of Junior's!

Our crew with Tara in front of Junior's!

I don’t know why my chin is tilted up but it raises questions about having a square jaw and the aging process overall.

I have to do this in installments because there is too much to say. Thank you for reading! More to come!

More Living

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God I really lost steam with that rote recitation of my skateboard history timeline. When I feel bored writing, I can never figure out if it’s because I’m not being patient enough or if I should trust my instinct that it’s fucking boring. Well anyway.

Highlights of this past week spent with my skateboard include!! I skated the bowl at Potrero for the first time! That was awesome. My excellent friend Bob Lake talked me into it. Bob in the Travelodge at Cunningham He is up first in the yellow helmet, then you see the also deeply great Roger.

My notable adjectives so far: awesome, excellent, great. WOW.

I have stayed away from skating Potrero because the bowl always seemed too deep and too impacted by drunk 10-year-olds who suffocated their younger siblings then came to skate. I realized that those li’l drunkards are actually busy rolling the flow bowl and stuffing their friends in garbage cans to bother with the bowl, and it’s easy to get plenty of runs even in the middle of the day. I think I went three times last week and hit the bowl with Bob. The tight pockets and pool coping are especially fun. I stuck my first backside grinds. Now I can think of little else except maybe food and love. Everyone I’ve run into at Potrero is sweet and chatty, especially the older (OLDER. Probably about my age.) dudes who ride by on their bicycles which invariably have fifty mirrors and reflectors attached, and their outfits are black and tight and resist moisture. Their helmets have rearview mirrors. They stop by the fence around the bowl and always they were skaters in the eighties who want to get back into it but don’t know how and fear the pain. They SHOULD fear the pain for it is REAL.  The mix of totally hardened teens dressed in black plus nerdball mountain bike men in neoprene is a blessing and a pleasure. Mike Giant walked in as we were leaving one of the days last week. He had an old school Dogtown board that was so flat and wide it looked like a freaking boogie board. Wheel wells and everything. I love this town.

On Saturday a bunch of friends and I went up to skate the Dish in Bayview. Possibly one of the oldest skateparks in the USA?? Owing to a very hard slam I took on Friday at Pacifica I didn’t skate much. I hit my head (but was wearing a helmet) and have felt tired and headache-y since. I’m going to the doctor today. Pray I am not going dumb. When I woke up this morning I thought, “God I should pull all my non-fiction off the shelf and start reading so I form new brain synapses and stay reasonably intelligent even if I have brain damage. Maybe I can just make a different part of my brain really strong so it won’t matter that I have one intellectual flat tire.” Then I started tripping out on people who don’t get new experiences every day or get out in the world and mingle, and how your life can become safe and boring and you lose your resilience and can’t cope with normal daily stresses. Which is why I think everyone who works in isolation should get a volunteer gig.

Do you admire my great ideas!!!

Thank you for reading.

This Is It

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I am a 38-year-old woman in skateboarding. I just passed my 2-year bowl-iversary on February 20th, 2011. I first stepped on a skateboard in December of 2008 when I was 36. A nurse friend of mine had been pushing around with another nurse in the parking lot of Kaiser in Oakland, California. That alone sounded amazing. Imagine rolling up for your ultrasound and seeing two nurses in scrubs on their breaks riding skateboards. California living! So my nurse friend, Shoshana, called me up (and she didn’t really call that often) and told me she had started skating, and that she thought I would really like it.

I met Shosh on the top of Bernal Heights, on a relatively flat street. She showed me how to step on the board and we rolled up and down the sidewalk, me on the board and she on foot. My hands dented her arms with an iron grip. I liked how it felt and decided I needed my own board to follow her and a few other women down the wide sidewalks of the Embarcadero in San Francisco. We drove to FTC in the Haight and Andy helped me pick out a board with a drawing of one of San Francisco’s old trolleys on the bottom. He gripped it. I picked out some Indy trucks and red soft wheels. I had four friends with me and I felt more supported than I have in very difficult times of my life.

After two months of pushing around my friend Holly was coming to visit from Seattle. She offered to meet about ten of us at the Novato skatepark and teach us about tranny. Novato was her home park growing up. She invited her friend Kenna Gallagher, a ripper from Santa Cruz, to teach us as well. They got in the bowl, told people to clear out for twenty minutes while she taught and surprisingly, everyone was cool about it. We rolled around, tried turning and carving, did a little falling. I felt obsessed.

I ended up dating a guy I met that day for a year. We skated as often as possible, and he pushed me to learn more, try new things, and he constantly told me I was good at it. He teased me when I looked like a dork, which was nearly always. I really appreciated that. Style is as much a part of the game as technicality. Almost. Totally?

I also started skating with an all-girl skate organization. I thought that was going to be a lot more awesome than it was. I met a bunch of women who were good skaters, and I met a bunch who were awesome. Van Nguyen was super sweet. Elyssa Steamer introduced herself to me at Novato one time and she was LOVELY. But most women I met in skating were not interested in talking to me about how to step up my game. There is no way I am going to be popular for saying that, but it’s true. I don’t know if it’s me, if it’s because women can be so competitive with each other, or if it was because I was 36 when I started. I strongly felt that the organization I was skating with only cared about young girls getting into skating, and that they were trying to be a family-friendly, very accessible entity (JUST MY OPINION, HOLD YOUR ANGRY LETTERS). I have no desire for skating to wander away from being the freak culture that I know and love. I think more young girls could stand to get bruised and cut and live with it. I think more parents would do well to detach and teach their daughters to be robust humans, even if they want to festoon themselves in pink from head to toe. I have been talking with my writing partner Beth about how we notice all these (usually wealthy) women who are so groomed, so ready to smile and have their picture taken (chin down, don’t smile too big, turn to one side, all the shit that makes you look like a very beautiful model woman in pictures), ready to speak articulately about everything. How the fabrics they wear drape nicely and flatteringly. I want the inclusion of more ill-prepared, awkward voices. I don’t think we should be able to rely on any human to say the right thing all the time. Up with intuition, down with symbols. I listened to Marc Maron’s interview with Greg Fitzsimmons (Maron’s WTF podcast is the best, and entirely supports the idea that un-groomed speech is so much more nuanced, meaningful and specific than scripted stuff) in which Fitzsimmons says he thinks people should punch each other more. It’s a sentiment entirely captured by Fight Club. Part of the beauty of skateboarding, to me, is the extremity of every part of it. Flying, bruising, yelling, exhaustion.

I started skating with a bunch of people I met at the Pacifica skatepark, mostly men, and got a ton of help and guidance that I wanted and asked for. I hear about girls and women having a hard time with male skaters but that has never been an issue for me. My skating started improving dramatically when I met these guys (and two women) and they have been my crew ever since.

TO BE CONTINUED.

A Life is Happening

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It’s been a long time since I hit ye olde blogge! Sorry for the interruption in service. I blame it on having full cable now. My intellectual self is taking a dive and my Mike & Ike-eating, popcorn-bloating, coconut water-drinking self is really unbuttoning ‘er pants and bloating the zipper down.

What is notable in life? Hmmmm. Skateboarding is relentlessly great as a thing to do with every spare minute. I still think cats are excellent pets. I still think making fun of hipsters is a job solely undertaken by hipsters, and that somehow the whole thing, despite its circle game, feels xenophobic or, if I may downgrade, feels like junior high bananagans. That really is the last time I remember people so aggressively making fun of one group of people based on their clothing and bicycles.

Here is a question to ask about myself: How can one woman who is for the most part exceedingly robust have so many health troubles all the time? Is it because I am out in the world living and traveling and falling down? I had two sports injuries (I like saying “sports injuries” b/c my friend used to use that phrase as a euphemism for “period” referring to not punctuation) of note last week, a cut on my ankle from my skateboard (for sure I was doing something incredible when that happened) and a cut on the arch of my foot from my swim fin. So before the story even really gets going you know I am awesome. I noticed my right ankle with the skate cut wasn’t healing, then that it was itching a bunch, and next thing you know I have my second case of cellulitis in the last year. Which I think is both gross and weird. Which leads to my true darling, DISGUST. I’ve been on antibiotics for a week and one thing I now know is that they are not mood enhancers and no sixteen-year-old musician who rocketed to fame too quickly would throw a few in her face before performing. They make me feel loosely sad and held down at all times. When I skated Cunningham last weekend I was in an antibiotic dope haze and fell about twenty times, mostly in the skull bowl where I could not for the life of me carve the bowl. Drop in, skate the shallow, down the waterfall to the deep and SLAM. Over and over. It was the end of the day so I was exhausted and internally fighting disease so my skills were not in fact at their zenith. I fell every which way but loose, with a robust audience of four guys, all of whom skated the bowl with ease. Including a nine-year-old. I finally stopped after my billionth beef and dragged my carcass over to my girlfriend who had to leave because watching me jostle my bones around was too upsetting. We packed our totes and headed out for pho.

SPEAKING OF TOTES, that is a great gift to have on hand if someone in your office is having a birthday and you don’t know them or don’t care but feel you must give a gift. Other big items are ugly stationery, heart-shaped keychains (extra great if you leave a sticker on the packaging that says it was free with another purchase), dish towels and radio silence. These also work for relatives. They constitute the best way of saying to someone (me) you’ve known their whole life, “I’m sorry, you are…?” except without the “I’m sorry.”

Anyway I am now going to sit in my fatigue and bruised knee and stare at the wall. Once I gather enough energy I’m going to close the curtains and make popcorn. I think those statements are the very reason blogs and twitter can be dumb (I like both). I mean, WHO CARES.