Skateboarding
JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUL 2022
Written by Alex Sparks
8,900 Words - 45 Minute Read Time
Tony Hawk is too big a part of the Zeitgeist for me to ever remember not remembering. He has always been floating up there, a few feet from the pipe’s lip, spinning. A subcultural baby mobile. A flying love letter to all things rad and gnarly, cut open and filleted to be reread when needed. Tony Hawk is a god to a certain type of person born between 1985 and 2003. Honestly, he may be a god regardless of your birthdate. To a small boy in Texas, he is no different than any of the other American folk legends. He is Paul Bunyan in elbow pads and Davy Crocket in a ball cap. Giants of men who roamed the West dropping into valleys and jumping from peaks.
Before we continue this love letter to Tony Hawk and his merry band of Pro Skaters, we should get more acquainted with what this is and why we’re doing it. Theoretically, it’s an essay on the ripple effect Skateboarding culture and the Tony Hawk video games had on me as a sheltered suburban kid. It is an exploration of self and how we come to be the people we become. It is a reflection on art and language and culture and how by the time we notice their shape, it is often too late. This project started with me trying to teach myself how to draw by tracing an old photo of Eric Koston jumping a curb. After accidentally spending 60 hours in Procreate, I had a digital painting of some sort. I still didn’t really know how to draw, but I kinda liked this drawing. The amount of time I spent on it, seemed like it deserved to hang in a better gallery than my Instagram Story, so I started writing and drawing and thinking. I kept making skateboarding art and seeking little bytes of wisdom in the school of cool known as Tony Hawk Pro Skater.
I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but I found so much of my adult self in these decades old video games from my youth. There I am in 1999 bobbing along to the first punk and rap music I’ve ever heard. In 2001, drag-and-drop designing digital graffiti tags and skate tees. It’s 2003 and there I am again, dressing my arcade avatar in clothes my parents don’t know where to buy, listening to music my parents don’t know I’m learning the lyrics to, throwing Mardi Gras beads and spray painting churches, blowing up cop cars and learning to swear from Bam Margera. I found god and art and music and fashion and that feeble fuck you energy I have been holding so closely to all these years. I didn’t realize how much influence these games had on me. I don’t skateboard. I don’t work at Zumiez. I don’t really do anything radical or gnarly or sick. I thought this was just like any other video game from my childhood. I loved Halo 2 too, but I’m not reconstructing my understanding of self in the light of Master Chief’s shadow. Though don’t tempt me. I’m sure there is plenty of yin and yang to be found in Energy Swords and Plasma Grenades.
I still don’t really know what I’m making here. So I plan to just keep making it, in hopes I can make enough to make up for quality with quantity. This approach doesn’t always lead to enlightening work, but if you put enough of anything in one room it eventually starts looking like art. So welcome to that room I made full of all the things I like to make, made only about the things I like to think about. This is Only_Only, an online amateur art studio, a living memoir, a poetic deconstruction of self, and as always a bunch of unnecessary Woo.
A LOVE LETTER TO TONY HAWK PRO SKATER AND HOW IT MIGHT HAVE MADE ME NORMAL
I don’t really remember the first time I played Tony Hawk, but I do have a soft memory of playing at somebody else’s house, on somebody else’s console. Maybe my cousin Tyler or it might’ve been the kids up the street with the kicker gap. This memory feels like the first time I ever got to play Tony Hawk. It is the distinct feeling of playing a game that is not mine, that I am not good at yet, but I am taken by all the same. That embodied hopelessness when playing a game you know you will have to leave behind before you are better. That early stage anxious, but mid trip sober, so hopefully late night enlightened. How do I savor all of this righteous air right now? I will need to swallow this controller, the game, the console, and this whole house to hold this moment long enough to digest all this new universe I just fell into. Because I know I will go home and play Sonic Adventures 2 on the Sega Dreamcast and it will not hit the same. I will tire of chasing my Shadow and long for the light, for the Christ Air and the Dark Slide, for the gravity and gravitas, for the blood splatter and soundtrack to waking up, be it Tibetan Bowls or Bad Religion, this was a moment of conscious expanding. A choosing of what it meant and what it would mean to be me.
I can still see that old box tv screen glow, the graphics remastered in my memory to look as real as it felt. I’m playing as Tony Hawk, skating a halfpipe I can almost recognize. So I do what we do and I google it, I watch youtube playthroughs until I see that halfpipe. My faint memory becomes clear but re-pixelated, put back into its N64 body, in all its new millennium glory, digital ghost reincarnate. Funny how part of me lives in the internet now. And when I want to remember what that part of me looks or sounds or thinks like, I just pull it up and reprogram myself. I reupholster the old memory good as new, call it better because it is closer, and truth because it is comfortable. What a bizarre superpower we all wield, to rewrite our minds, to trade-in the past for convenience sake.
My favorite installment of the Tony Hawk franchise has always been THUG, more formally known as “Tony Hawk’s Underground.” This game came out in 2003 and did a lot to push the series forward. It featured a semi-open world map that finally let you get off your board and explore on foot. This made it a lot easier to find secret spots, complete missions, or just skate and practice lines without getting stuck on some ledge or staircase.
THUG also introduced a Story Mode and Create-a-Skater that let you live the life of an up-and-comer in New Jersey. This was rather novel in video games at the time and I remember a clear feeling of awe when seeing the trailer and again when loading the game for the first time.
Making a digital playable version of myself is still one of my favorite aspects of video games. Building a new model to project myself into, a fresh and bigger shell to stretch out in. I think this is especially powerful as a kid, when you are still too small to shape your real reality.
To practice shaping yourself in a virtual one,
to make yourself taller like you will be,
to let your digital hair grow long because the private school keeps it off your ears,
to get bad tattoos you can remove with a click,
to try on cargo shorts or girl’s jeans,
or maybe you just get to wear sunglasses, cause you don’t have a virtual astigmatism.
I find this process to be a subtle art of collage, a self portrait made of available face shapes and nose width sliders and forever disappointing hair selections. THUG is the first time I got to do this, to make a character that looked like me, or at least what I might want to look like when I could. I can still see myself clearly in the opening scenes of THUG - “me” skating on the halfpipe outside of “my house” in “my neighborhood” looking like The Sims got drug through a Warped Tour.
Seeing myself in a video game cutscene felt haunted and futuristic, it didn’t feel possible to fake, so it felt real. I didn’t know what to make of the present with all this future already being here. I had a very similar feeling the first time playing the Oculus Quest. Looking into a virtual reality mirror, seeing some knockoff Playmobil version of myself waving back to me, it felt uncanny and uncomfortable and familiarly foreign. I felt that THUG feeling again, that poor grammar there is me but me is me, that how did the future get here so quick? What am I supposed to do with this body if I can just live inside my head?
Playing Tony Hawk has that distinct and thick memory of being a kid and being fully absorbed into a video game, to exist in this other world without real life anxiety, that ability to turn hours into lifetimes and lifetimes into hours. This is a place of youthful peace I often long for, a peak I can no longer climb without the help of drugs and even that is no match to a consciousness without context.
No psychedelic trip can ever take us closer to oneness than birth did or death will. The further we walk in this life, the further we get from oneness until eventually we trip over the peak of this mountain we call being alive and begin our descent back to the oneness we forgot. Some of us will come in blazing, reach that peak with enough momentum to launch back into the void, erect and ready to burn out again. Some of us will crawl to the top and crawl to the bottom, we will hardly lift our heads, we will hardly know we ever left. Regardless of how you leave the circle or how you re-enter it, there is nowhere to go but back home.
Like much of what man makes, video games are an escape from this body, a place our minds can go when being here is too much or too little. Overwhelming or a total bore. Playing Tony Hawk is one of my earliest memories of this experience. The feeling of weightlessness the body takes when our awareness is transported inside of the screen. It was my first blind step into the pre-Meta metaverse, it was my first projection, my first expansion of self, my first peak to climb before I forgot where I was going. Or at least the first that I can recall and attribute to a video game about skateboarding.
Part 2
AN ESSAY ONLY ABOUT VIDEO GAMES AND SKATEBOARDING
I have had a lot of mixed feelings about video games as an adult. When I first left for college and no longer had a system, I stopped playing video games cold turkey. I kinda felt like it was time to grow up or at least time to focus on my ever important “creative work.” I was moving to California to study film at a Christian college that charged more than they deserved to. It was an unreasonable financial stretch for my family and I still carry a deep sense of guilt and the weight of a debt that I did not have to pay. This vague burden has loomed over me most of my adult life like some personal Tulpa, the cloaked banker still drooling over the dotted line, the bounty hunter dressed in Polo and fine print, or the muffled shuffling of my father’s half-cocked checkbook. This eulogy to money I did not write, but still recite like Hail Mary’s, prayers and promises, to get rich quick enough to pay everyone back who ever believed in me. This is definitely a different essay for a different time, but it is important to note the things we leave behind in pursuit of the future - and how often that future turns out to be an apology to the past. Today is usually just yesterday in drag.
I didn’t mean to let go of playing video games forever, or to stop writing poetry or painting. I didn’t even notice it happening. I thought this was just growing up and that part of getting older was letting go of the things you love now to pursue the things you will love then, in the ever fleeting someday. To trade the present for the future, to forever barter paper clips for jet skis, to borrow from the Bardo until we break or barf. I thought being a man meant shaving off all that boyish fluff, all that Big Heart’s Day rust, that too grown up for boyhood bullshit. I’m still talking about video games, but I also left my then-girlfriend, now-wife in Texas. Back home with Djarum Blacks, slam poetry, and cool Jesus. All of which chased me to California in their own ways, but Kelly is the only one I could never shake. Still with me, still the light, still built of nothing but love and patience.
On the other side of half a film degree, a decade of debt and two businesses, I count only dollars and seconds. It has been 12 years and I am neither quick nor rich. I’m not a filmmaker or even a businessman at this point. I spent my 20s trying to make enough money to opt-out of Capitalism and just make art for fun. I thought I could work hard enough to get happy, to sell my soul high and buy it back later, lower and sober, to pocket the difference, to play both sides and rob myself blind. I thought I was young enough to afford the time, but it cost me much more than I budgeted, more than art supplies or cameras ever could. It cost me, me, or at least big parts of me. It cost me good friends, bad health, my mind, and my 20s. Plus all this damn time I’ve spent writing in circles, trying to find the breadcrumbs back to the me I left in 2013. Trying to ditch this Business Boy costume I’ve been stuck in, to wear less layers, to lie naked in the moment and let it simmer.
I’m trying so hard to be happy now
and that is finally
almost
enough.
After I moved back to Texas, I would play my brother’s PS4 whenever I was over at my parent’s house. I’d kill a few hours in Grand Theft Auto or NBA2K and other than that didn’t really think much of it. I’d crave the occasional Halo LAN Party when reminiscing with friends, but never got serious enough to buy a new system. There were years when this was a financial restriction and years when it was purely psychological. Oddly it took, 2020, a year of both extreme psychological and financial distress for me to get over myself and start playing video games again. I felt like the whole world said “fuck it” and picked up a bad habit or two. Honestly, I’m here for it. We aren’t emotionally healthy enough as a culture to talk proper about all this mess, so the least we could all do is wear our scarlet letters proudly: the Vape Pen, the Pinot, the Cheeto Puffs. Video games, at least in my universe, are seen as a kind of vice. Like all vices, a perfectly good and holy delight when enjoyed in consensual moderation. But video games get a pretty bad rap in the misterceo-girlboss echo chamber I lived in for most of my 20s. It is an easy thing to dismiss as a distraction or “waste of time” - as if we could even waste eternal entropy from this dimension. What has surprised me the most about getting back into gaming is how much pure fun it has been. I was afraid I’d feel bad and I don’t. I put off playing video games for years, because I was afraid that I’d chase the pixelated dragon into some void and never come back. But I just play and struggle and laugh and die and cheer and turn it off when I’m done. I waste Saturday afternoons the way you are supposed to, suspended and out there, not tied down by this world or this body, but floating in the digital nether, on earth as it is in heaven.
Video games made a slow creep back into my daily life when my brother with the PS4 gave me his old Xbox 360, a stack of scratched games, and a handful of sticky controllers played rubberless over the years. Kelly and I made a part-time habit of picking out old used games and reliving the nostalgia of the 2000s. We played a lot of Xbox 360 in the early years of our relationship. Halo, Tony Hawk, Big Game Hunter. Good christian kids don’t have premarital sex, so we had to put all that pent-up-tension somewhere, and I was well-trained in bottling emotions, digitized and transcribed for long term storage, blue light offerings to the cloud, holiness dressed in a little red riding hood, the wolf wearing abstinence in grandma’s bed.
What luck to have found a gamer girl, before that was something I knew to look for.
What luck to waste one fantasy holding onto another.
What luck to learn love staring at a screen.
Eventually, the charm of the 360 wore off, the nostalgia not thick enough to hold us there in 2009 forever. With enough time, even nostalgia starts looking older, pixels wrinkle, become un-mastered and non-compatible, sent back to the mental landfill of yesteryear’s digital entertainment. Like all art, video games eventually stop looking far enough into the future, become less crystal ball than artifact, more mental clutter than clarity. No matter how far you throw your future, the present will always catch up. The present always here now, always holding a mirror, always too honest. In this presence, it can be difficult to know what to do with the recent past. So often off-putting, off-color or cruel, co-opted or cringe. So often traumatic or exhausting or in poor taste. Yesterday is dirty laundry we have not found the wisdom to wash in yet. It is still too near the present to look beautiful in candle light, so it looks creepy when we lean too close. It is hard to romanticize stains we’re still scrubbing, so we won’t bother.
No longer new, but not yet vintage is such an awkward place to rest in. It happens with fashion, with video games, and culture. It happens with love, with family, and spirit. What are we supposed to make of last year’s progress? Where are we supposed to put tomorrow if we keep swaddling yesterday? Video games are mini time machines we build for ourselves; tiny telescopes pointed back at the void. We looked long as we could at that Xbox 360 without getting horny. We played for hours, eyes forward, hands to ourself, digital bodies dancing disemboweled by the byte, offering plate still too hot to touch.
At the beginning of Covid, Kelly got a Nintendo Switch to play Animal Crossing and kill time, while I killed myself trying to keep a gnome-themed-snow-cone-stand afloat during what turned out to be a pretty long and pretty shitty global pandemic. Now that we had a “current gen” system, we slowly acquired more games and I slowly got comfortable with the idea of being digital again, spent more time Switched on, went crazy and came back, but that is not this essay.
When the remastered Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 came out for the Nintendo Switch, I was ecstatic and eager to drop back into the Tony Hawk universe. It was pretty surreal to skate through these old iconic maps, the creation myths of Tony Hawk refreshed and retold to a new generation. I had a lot of fun dancing along these ramps and rails, discovering old lines, and disappearing for two minutes at a time. It turned out I was still pretty good at Tony Hawk, so I kicked and flipped and combo’d my way through the whole game over the course of a couple days. It felt good to eSkate again, to hit old spots, and throw old moves. I was certainly enjoying this new Tony Hawk, but it did not yet have its hooks in me, I was not staying up until 2am, not building stats, not practicing lines or tweaking tricks, I was not obsessed, not desperate, not yet. All of that changed when I found the new Global Leaderboards. I quickly suited up, navigated my way to the Start button, and wiggled my thumbs loose and ready.
Beep, beep, beeep. The clock ticks, the glass bursts, and I roll down the entrance ramp to The Warehouse, the first and my favorite Tony Hawk map. Two minutes later and I am virtually exhausted. I score a few hundred thousand points and rank somewhere in the high 500s. I go again, I cross a million this time and break into the 300s. It was settled. I was gonna make into the Top 100 in the World. No real reason, I just hadn’t wanted much of anything lately and it felt good to do so. Ranking in the Top 100 would need a score of a few million, this means nothing to you if you’ve never played the game, but know it is not a little score nor an impossible one. It was a mountain I had climbed many times in my youth. Different games, different consoles, different controllers, but a peak I was familiar with all the same.
I was good at Tony Hawk as a kid. Better than anyone I knew personally - or I guess, technically, anybody that I knew existed. This was a time before eSports, streaming, or Global Leaderboards so, though I didn’t think of it this way, I was the best Tony Hawk player in my known universe, the best I’d ever met. My friend Josh may debate me on this, but I choose to remember that I won more than I lost. I know I was in a very small pond and there weren’t that many other fish that played Tony Hawk, but this is one of the first things I remember being really good at. That knowing you are good-good, the fair pride, the earned wisdom and motor skills, the self love and the baby ego; this “feeling of being good” is something that has haunted me in a strange way. I often have such a lovely blend of Narcissism and Low Self-Esteem that I spend a lot of time feeling bad about how highly I think of myself, believing me to be too small to feel this big. I know this was not a big thing, this internet leaderboard, this video game, this reflection of a reflection, but it was not a small thing either. Never a small thing to want this life, even a virtual one.
It took me a couple weeks and a new “Pro Controller” for the Switch, but I did crack that Top 100 and it did feel like a something to me. It felt good as shit, honestly. I was ranked 85th in the World in The Warehouse level of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 for the Nintendo Switch, but I was living and laughing and loving again. It was an early peak in the vast mountain range that has been my mental health over the last few years, a series of Badlands and Blue Ridges, mountains and molehills and madness. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater did not cure whatever it is I’m self-diagnosing here. It did not mark the low or the high or hold me when I was unholdable. It did not save me, did not keep me here-here, grounded and not floating, always closed-mouth Ommming and hoping my body would still be here when I got back. Tony Hawk and Skateboarding is not the whole story, but it is a reflection of the shadow, a fragment of the light, it is a tough tether and the missing link to an earlier composite of myself, a me less heavied by all this thinking and time, a me less swollen bitter, less full on fruit and knowledge, less good and less evil. So often a self of less is so, so much more. Unbelievable how light being alive has been, how these old versions of me danced and sang and floated. These smaller bodies that could not hold so much self, these nesting dolls of personhood, incantations incarnate not here big enough yet to boil over, to overflow and burn off, to steam and smoke and bloat. Funny, huh, to lose the layers of the self you love, to be always new but not always better, forever evolving but not always forward.
This short lived but vivid reconnection with Tony Hawk Pro Skater is the only reason we’re here doing all this writing and reading and drawing and looking. I had been learning to draw again by tracing old Sailor Jerry stencils and wanted to try the same technique with a photo. I rather flippantly thought of skateboarding, thought of Eric Koston for no other reason than this video game, and now here we are - a few hundred hours of time, a handful of drawings, and 10,000 words of shadow play, of homonyms and slight of hand, ambidextrous and bilingual, still two-tongued and talking in circles, still riding Switch, still writing about Skateboarding.
Part 3
A funny thing I’ve realized after spending so much time with this subject matter is that I’m technically more a fan of the idea of skateboarding than the sport itself. I am a fan of the video game version, the computerized grabs and flips, skateboarders carved of moving marble, their bodies still rigid marionettes, faces chiseled chunks of code. These early limitations of video game graphics are now immortalized in my brain as the skater’s staccato face.
Skateboarding as a god-scale concept of cool has largely defined what I think of as such for the last 20+ years and its influence on me is almost exclusively second hand. I know very little about the actual meditation of skateboarding or the hard-headed monks who wrote its history. I know it only as legend, the exaggeration of nostalgia and pop culture filtered through video game physics. Not to say that I do not love to watch real skateboarders doing real tricks on real boards, but my fandom is rooted in the aura of skateboarding and the lore that forms around it, not its history but its myth. These rendered relics, these allegories of art and algorithm, this poetry written in pixels, this new stained glass that moves and spins and bleeds. I love skateboarding, but I KNOW it only through Tony Hawk and his digital disciples.
ERIC KOSTON IS A VIDEO GAME CHARACTER
This of course means that Eric Koston is not really my favorite skateboarder - but one of my favorite video game characters. Not for any of his actual abilities, but for my own ability to take on his programmed shell. I am a fan of Eric Koston like he is a favorite sweatshirt, because he fits me well and is comfortable to skate in. What a bizarre fandom to hold for so long. I have bold-faced told people that Eric Koston is my favorite skateboarder and I hardly know what he looks like, hardly think of him as a physical body that exists on this side of the console. I think of him as a character in a video game I used to love, like he is Donkey Kong or Sonic the Hedgehog. Sorry Eric, I follow you on Instagram now and you seem like a real person and a genuine dude.
When I think of Skateboarding, I think of it from inside the digital zombie of Eric Koston, the coded corpse I sway to my will, to skate as I would, to trick as I trick. When I speak Skateboarding, I speak only with my thumbs, only in silence, sign language and psychography. We could call it channeling if we were cute, could call it crazy if we were kids, but around here we call it often and quiet, respectful of this Woo shit. Humbled by this conjured coincidence.
I’ve been playing as Eric Koston in Tony Hawk for as long as I can remember. For no reason other than gut feeling and coincidence. I probably liked his vague aesthetic or his default skateboard. In THUG 2, I know he wore a headband and basketball jersey, a look I have unknowingly borrowed many times over the years. Funny how this life reflects itself whether we recognize it or not. I always liked that he skated for Girl Skateboards. I found it a soft subservience, a salute and submission to the notion of softer sex, I found it kinda sexy to love Girls so boldly, I found it kinda liberating to do something so gnarly under the umbrella of something so pretty. Much like my accidental Koston uniform, this amateur tension around sexuality has carried with me. This blending and blurring and blooming. I have no idea the philosophy of Girl Skateboards and I assume, like most businesses it was intended to awaken sales and not souls, but I am grateful for the toxic spill over, thankful to have been planted near enough the nucleus to get all that sweet cultural radiation. Got all them growths whether wanted or not. And not to say that Girl Skateboards is a nuclear power plant, whatever it would be to be saying that, just to say that everything we do has unseen consequences, including starting businesses, including cute names and cute logos, including selling skateboards or snow cones.
No man is an island as they say, so obvious now, we were always the water.
So if I picked Eric Koston for his vibes, then I stayed for his trick selection. To be Junior High good at Tony Hawk, you need only a few things - timing and to know your tricks. If you mash buttons, you will fall, if you fall you will drop your combo, and if you drop your combo you will lose the run. You must be able to time the tricks and rotations to not overcommit for the amount of air time you have. You must juggle the balancing of the rail and the manual and the spin. You can be very, very good at this. You can know all of the tricks and lips and gaps. But if you’re just a kid who is pretty good at this, then you learn only what you need to know. For me those tricks were the Dark Slide and the Christ Air. Two badass and high-scoring tricks that came default to Eric Koston in THUG and thus became the staples of every High Combo I ever landed.
The Christ Air and the Dark Slide being my two favorite tricks sounds like some kinda metaphor and maybe it is. Or maybe it just says too much about me that I find it even here, the balance of dark and light, the rail and the pipe, the yin and yang of skating, as above so below. The basic steps to Christ Air is this: get high enough to leave this world without wanting, take the board from your feet with one hand and stretch your body out for crucifixion, hang time like Christ on the cross, float, spin, hold, suffer, land, or bail. It is a trick that takes more time than muscle memory, needs less gravity than dexterity. It is a trick, I assume, that is difficult in its vulnerability, in its nakedness and humility. The Christ Air feels like art to me. Like the gallery and the canvas and the paint. Like an inside joke spoken too loudly, irreverent, honest, and veiled. Nailed to the sky for the crime of skateboarding. Tongue still in cheek. Body still holy in this light.
The Dark Slide feels like a long exhale, smokes smooth and fast like James Dean. It is a trick that would be too goofy if it wasn’t so cool. To flip your board upside down and grind on the grip tape, an act of violence so defiant to the play of skateboarding it would be mortal sin if not so set-apart, so Peter’s cross, so blunt and crude and not right, so silky and soft and unsettling. The Dark Slide feels far out there to me, like an alien love song, or laser tag in a black hole, a lesser devil dressed in church clothes, she’s beautiful but she‘s dying. Like a poem too esoteric to be enjoyed the Dark Slide is always haunted by whatever you need it to be.
When I was younger, pulling a Christ Air in Tony Hawk always felt like mild sacrilege, like a subtle stick poked into the clouds to nudge a sleeping giant. It felt liberating to take God less seriously, and to learn at a young age that if God was God, then he could certainly take a joke. I say all of this now, looking back, as an adult with a bad habit of deconstructing every path I trip over. I say this with future wisdom and at the wide tapered end of a long spiritual depression, a near psychosis if I’m honest, which is another story for another time, but the lesson is you will always find whatever you are looking for. As a kid, I’m sure I was just giddy for the high score, just horned up on heaven or hell, and seeing somebody wear Jesus like a metaphor probably softened my young anxiety. It allowed me to relax how serious heresy feels to a pastor’s kid, to carve some digital space to practice digital kickflips and digital blasphemy. To rise and float and whirl, to stretch my pixelated arms out wide and channel some binary Christ, dying for my own sins, no virtual forgiveness needed. To be the whole metaphor is to be both the reference and the work.
Christ Air WIP - Estimated completion 2035Part 4
Truth be told, I never was much of a skateboarder in real life. I had some second hand box store skateboard that was too heavy and wide for me to really skate. I had a mild ollie and a semi-consistent pop shuv it, but most of my skateboarding was just rolling and pretending to flatland like Rodney Mullen. I was always more of a Rollerblade kid. Not for lack of want, but for consequence of exposure. The 1990s was a big moment for inline skating, and for the few years that lined up with my early motor skills, it seemed like Rollerblading would be cool forever. We all wanted to SKATE BETTER, to roll easy through life like Soul Skaters or D2: The Mighty Ducks. We were all caught in the moment, and I, a small boy of the We was Inline by birthright. Before I knew what Skating was, I was strapped to those bright colored, primarily plastic skates, you slip your whole shoe into. It is less skating than it is balancing on wheels, but the slow shuffling of feet, eventually becomes a roll and what is skating if not a controlled falling. Small circles to small rolls, big rolls to big circles, head over heels. From then on I always had skates.
Once we moved to Texas, we’d go to homeschool skate days at Interskate off Interstate 35 in Lewisville. A classic roller rink that looks and smells and sounds exactly like it should. The DJ plays our song and the teenage staff move like thin giants, roll the PVC Limbo Bar into the center of the rink. Pizza grease glistens in the neon lights and we all roll as one body, little cells spinning in a big orbit, always coming and going, no first and no last. The shrinking limbo bar our only judge. If not this round then maybe next. There is only hope in the infinite loop of a roller rink, only light and sound and movement. Interskate is still rad. We went last year for my brother’s 22nd birthday.
These days inline skating feels extreme sport adjacent. It can certainly be radical, but it is often boardwalk jazzercise and roller rink. Which admittedly I love, but still feel some need to be gnarly, some innate desire to be dangerous while exercising. There is nothing inherently less extreme about rollerblading than skateboarding. If anything, strapping the wheels directly to your feet makes it more of a commitment. Bailing becomes a cumbersome percussion. Your face first hits the pavement and the skates, like plastic pendulums, swing over you, their mass somehow supernovas and keeps coming. You kick yourself in the back of the head and you roll over and roll on. I have eaten heavy shit rollerblading and the truth of all this is in how I keep typing out “rollerblade” to avoid feeling like a poser.
In my universe, the term “skater” is reserved for skateboards. A certain distant type of hero who is unafraid to be untethered to their rolling coffin. Who would fall out of orbit and let go of their rocket. Skating always seemed so much more extreme to me, because you could be soaring and then just lose your landing gear. It’s just you up there flying until you are falling. Skateboarding also has the flip tricks. Which is a strip tease to falling. A willingness to let the board leave you allows both you and the board the freedom to dance in the air unfiltered. To say out loud with your whole body, “if this doesn’t work we will all know it.” There is no hiding in falling or flying. You are either up there, holy, or you are down here with us. Mere mortals and the lesser gods we awe over.
This is no shade to anyone who rollerblades, roller skates, inlines, scoots, or Heelys. I thinks its all equally rad. I’m just exorcising demons and talking out loud. When I’m real honest with myself, I still feel bad that I never learned to skate, it feels like some early little box the world put little me in, the not skateboarder box, and as I’m digging through all these old selves I’ve worn, it’s just kind of a bummer to see something I have loved so much through a glass dimly lit. Like much of the culture of my childhood, it feels like I grew up on the wrong side of the Zoo glass. Skateboarding was accidentally look, but don’t touch. Not an intentional restriction, just the needless casualties of a sheltered life. Skateboarding always sat 8 inches of safety glass too far for me to get to. It lived with “secular music”, Public School, and PG-13 movies. It lived with celebrating Halloween, having a girlfriend, and sleeping in on Sundays. For my whole life I thought I was observing the world from my holy high horse on the outside of the glass wall. Kept just safe enough to know what a 90s baby was supposed to feel like without having to do all of that feeling. Very “in the world, but not of it” to be raised this way. So close to nostalgia I can smell it. Nostalgia still a dirty word, feels borrowed, feels like a costume I can wear when I want to be normal. Watch me how I look the part of 1991, wear it quirky to the side, color blocked and born with a bowl cut, know nothing, if not fitting in, if not quiet lonely, if not safety glass.
Maybe this is just what being human is, being bigger than the small glass boxes we’re born into. Forever growing, forever breaking bigger boxes. Maybe I just waited too long to start swinging at that early glass, waited for my body to fill its edges, to become my own box, to carry that see-through distance like a suit of armor. Maybe it felt safer this way. Or easier. I was a really good kid and didn’t know any better not to be. I had loving parents who did their best, and though not perfect, this essay is not their essay. I just obeyed too many rules for too long, assuming their best was the same thing as holy. And now I’m stuck wearing it like a chip on my shoulder. Like a good boy who never got his treat, perpetually empty, horny for accolade, all stomach ache and no bark. Always feeling guilty or enlightened or both. It is this sheer neutrality that I have finally gagged on. This liminal self of not quite anything interesting enough to be the new me, this hold your breath until you want to be here. I have been blue, and swollen, and leaving, and I have begged to stay.
But this is the dark side of the moment, and we are supposed to be keeping things light.
LEARNING TO FLY AND THE CHARM OF FALLING
So all of that to say, I started roller skating when I was a little kid and I always really loved it. Wishing I was a skateboarder instead of a rollerblader came later in life. It came with puberty, and shame, and looking the part. It came with the labels I put on myself and the ones people assumed of me, the Venn Diagram of “I am” and “you Are.” How often our self-esteem is found in that overlap. When we are seen as we project ourselves, we feel known; though we know we are not the projection, we feel heard, and being heard is the marketplace of knowing. So all of that to say, let’s get back to soul skating.
The graduation from Roller Rink to Half Pipe came sometime between the ages of 7-10. Since I already had the skates for homeschool days at Interskate, I started playing roller hockey in the cul-de-sac at the end of my street with the Igarashi boys, who played actual hockey which is another sport I have always admired from afar. Roller hockey in the street taught me to get hurt and keep skating, taught me not to be afraid of going too fast for safety’s sake, or of climbing into storm drains to fetch lost tennis balls; all lessons in discomfort that have served me well in my years outside the cul-de-sac. This suburban street was a Hallmark card in a lot of ways. Very ‘97-99, very last breath Americana. Ball gloves for goal posts, always bloody kneed, shout “Car!” and we all clear the street. Front yard football, N64 and Pokémon cards, jump the curb, crawdads in the creek, run away to the train tracks, bike home before the street lights. It was a neighborhood for the end credits of Disney movies. I loved it a lot and though we only lived there for a couple years, it still feels like half my childhood was spent on Rolling View Court.
Because we were already skating down the street, the boys up the street invited us to hit their kicker gap. We laced up our wheels, lukewarm nervous, made that slow uphill skate, and braced ourselves at the top of the street.
Dead center.
Ready and rolling and raucous.
Waited for the cars to clear and the courage to leaven.
Exhale.
Fingers crossed on coordination.
Let go and let gravity.
This is the first time I remember flying. Of skates leaving the ground and hurling me forward. Of time accelerating to a stop and that early taste of oneness. Of the bent knees and the reentering of atmosphere. Of the crunch of asphalt and returning to rolling. As someone who has flown and fallen and flown and landed, I can say that the landing is most elegant in its context of falling. When your skates finally touch the ground again, all of the time between your first jump and your last fall condenses into this jump, into this landing, into this moment. The trick is so often not the trick, it is the reflection of all the trial. It is in the falling that one finds flying. You can only learn to land after you let go of the ground.
Now that I knew what skating could be, I made a regular habit of skating up the street, that kicker gap calling, me getting comfortable with the weightless-half of skating, jumping curbs and learning grabs into the grass, expanding the art in ways kids do, reckless. Eventually, my good friend Bret and the rest of the Hawkins boys built their own plywood ramps and we all made a practice of lining up to take turns at that altar. Our early sacrifices timid, but honest, too bashful to shed blood but bold enough to risk it. We skated slow, learning the new ramp’s curves, quirks of the first dance and child carpenters. We kept skating, praying faithfully to that same ramp for years, until the skate gods heard our cries and Woodward opened a skatepark in Grapevine Mills Mall.
Mrs. Hawkins would pile all of us all into her maroon 12 passenger van once or twice a week and take us to Woodward. This was a pretty cool place to have in the mall, even by today’s standards. Several thousand square feet of all wooden ramps. Multiple kickers and rails. Quarter pipes. A bowl. And the big boy, The Halfpipe, which felt like a mountain, but I’m reading now was a 13 footer. You had to climb a staircase, in skates, which just sounds dangerous to my 31 year old body. I climbed those stairs many times to peer over, to put my skates on the edge and wonder, but never quite got the courage to drop in. We’d slide down on our butts to try and get acclimated to the feeling of falling, to how long and how fast you’d drop before reaching the curve. I might’ve built up the bravery, but my friend James beat me to it. It was any random slow day at the skatepark, we may have been the only ones there, but it definitely was not crowded. We’d avoid the big ramp anytime there was somebody around who really knew how to skate. So for whatever reason James decided today was the day he dropped into the big ramp. He was the oldest by a couple years, but definitely not the best skater of the group. Maybe it was those extra years of self confidence or the foot or so in height he had on us all. Maybe the big ramp was just less big if you weren’t 5 feet or under. We all clunked our way up those stairs. We practice slide, we nervous hype, and James steps to the edge. He takes a breath and leans forward.
If you’ve never dropped into a ramp, then know the first few moments are a free fall before your skates hit the curve of the wood. You have to bend your knees and lean forward to perfectly time and balance the gradual transition from fall to skating. James, in my memory, did neither of these. After he leaned forward and dropped in, he stood tall and straight, like a corpse, his skates hit the curve and he fell backward into his coffin with a thud. His body hit the ramp like a closed book and slid across the wooden valley, up the bank of the other side and back down. Still, but not lifeless. In shock, but not injured. A legend, but not a hero.
We were loud and then quiet, the way one is in the presence of something monumental. We had only ever seen one other person actually drop into that halfpipe. They had cut hard left and front flipped a 10 foot gap to land on a different ramp. He made it seem like this was the only way to skate a mountain. We had slack-jawed seen Alex Honnold free solo El Capitan and now we were in the Valley watching our friend lose his footing. The fall is so much easier to feel than the climb. The climb is quiet and slow, the fall, so quick and cacophonous. James was windless and we all sat humbled in the long shadow of the big ramp. This was not the last time we skated Woodward, but from this valley looking back, it was the beginning of the end. I had seen how our bodies are not forever. How falling can define us as much as flying. Or to put it less pretty and more honest, I was scared of the big ramp now. When we are afraid of the peak before us, we will either learn to build courage, or we will find another valley.
Wisdom is in knowing which peaks are worth falling for.
The “Koston Drawing” that started it all. For better or worse.Honestly, this whole essay got away from me. I thought I’d spend a couple months waxing poetic about skateboarding and get back to the “real work” of getting better. I am coming out of a long, dark depression spurred on by some concoction of prolonged stress, poor health, spiritual codependency, and a strong interest in psychedelics. I started this year writing a lot on my experiences drifting in and out of, what I can only describe as, my idea of myself. For over a year, I could hardly keep my consciousness in this body, always tempted by holiness or the high of knowing. Spirituality can be such a tease and a guiltless excuse to disappear from your life.
I got lost on my way out looking and was writing my way back home. It was really difficult and emotional work that I got tired of doing. I thought that creating a “lighter” outlet for my writing would give me an excuse to continue without having to do so much self-reflection. But if you’ve read this far, then you know that didn’t really work out how I thought it would. A lot has bled into this essay that I didn’t expect to be relevant here. A lot of spirit and soul and mystic mumbo-jumbo. Mostly nonsense and poetry, but looking for beauty in the bullshit has become a religion of sorts for me. The longer I wrote, the deeper the well. The deeper I went the more there was to write. This infinite pool of wisdom in the finite puddle of a video game is exactly what I was hoping to find. Finding it was pure joy, but the excavation has been excruciating. This is the longest thing I have ever written and it is about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and a sport I do not know how to play. I have spent 100s of hours drawing and thinking and writing about skateboarding, in order to avoid the much harder work of understanding my emotions and rebuilding this body into a self I recognize.
I will be short and blunt, I am out of pretty things to say about Skateboarding.
I have been trying to put a bow on this essay since I started, but it kept getting longer and harder to wrap. There was too much to say and I wanted to say it all. But I’m out of radical ribbon or whatever clever sentiment should end this analogy.
Writing and drawing was supposed to help me process my gnome-themed burnout, but this first attempt at healing came heavy with a lot of old, bad habits. It turns out I still trend towards overexertion even when it’s only me making only what I want to.
Still burning the candle at both ends in broad daylight and letting good things turn sour cause I don’t know when to quit.
Still learning that rest is a prerequisite to making anything beautiful, to happiness, to success, to peace or purpose or positive vibes.
You can drown yourself on a cool glass of water if you don’t know when to come up for air. No matter how refreshing the healing of trauma is, it must be taken slowly and with a grain of salt, or the treatment will become its own traumatic baggage. Too heavy to be healthy forever.
“Skateboarding” has become this in a lot of ways. A never ending confessional and I am tired of talking.
This poem or essay or drawing is gonna be done for now. I never even got to the sweatshirt, or the Read-a-Long, or the fact that I bought a skateboard to keep under my desk while I wrote this.
What I do know is that writing is good for me regardless of what I’m writing about. So I plan to keep writing and drawing and making stuff that I love in hopes it helps me find myself again.
Thanks for reading.
Sorry
it ends
with a whisper.
I have other
essays to
write.
THE ORIGINAL PHOTO
“That was big gap at one point right? It was a justifiable sized gap to do a switch tre flip over. It’s about a three or four foot patch of grass. I think this was ’92 and Steve Sherman shot that photo.”
- Eric Koston
Skateboarding is not a jealous god, not a god that needs your full attention. Much like the older Gods of man, the Spirit of Skateboarding works in mysterious ways. It will come for you in the suburbs, in cartoons and culture wars and character tropes, it will find you while resting, the All-Seeing-Algorithm’s slow creep closer. It will be Suggested, For You, and Explored. Skateboarding will be remastered and re-released again and again and again. Skateboarding will be worn and borrowed, warned and banned. Skateboarding will be cool forever, eternally radical, a sun always rising.
