Slow Impact Reading

The very fine organizers of Slow Impact invited me to Phoenix a few weeks back to be part of a reading series put together by Kyle Beachy for the conference. It’s weirdly rare for my two defining pastimes of storytelling and skateboarding to overlap, so it was novel and compelling to try and figure out how to combine them. There was no AV department at the reading, so I just read a thing, no pictures. But fortunately George Cutright snapped a pic of me on the wobbly little stage and Eric Ursin took a professional-grade snap of me doing a tailslide (to backside revert?) on a mini quarter earlier in the day (above).

For what it’s worth, the event was amazing, even if, like me, you only caught about 24 hours worth. Many thanks to Kyle, Ryan Lay and all the organizers and panelists. I recommend scrolling through their instagram to see some of the magic they made. Here’s to next year.

Below is audio of me reading the piece. And then the text if you prefer visual upload (it feels like a very different piece to me, read aloud, for what it’s worth).

Thoughts On Skateboarding as a Social Activity with Reference to the Life of the Author

Close examination will reveal to the discerning observer that skateboarding is a social activity. This may not be obvious, because unlike some other closely related human endeavors like baseball, or a Beyonce concert it doesn’t require a large group to perform.

This wasn’t an actual thought I had until I’d been doing it for a while.

My introduction to skateboarding was the movie Back to the Future, which came out in 1985. In this movie the social aspect of the activity isn’t obvious, either. Its protagonist doesn’t appear to have any friends – skateboarder or otherwise. But if you pay close attention you’ll realize that the pastime is indeed depicted as part of an interaction between multiple individuals. Accidental time traveler Marty McFly is forced to invent skateboarding in 1955 in order to escape his uncle Biff, who wishes to do him violence. There is a chase. And a chase scene, of course, is a social activity. A chase takes at least two people to enact in anything like a convincing manner. You can verify this yourself, just try it. A one-person chase scene is considerably lacking in human interest.

I didn’t fully assimilate the subtle sociological message about skateboarding from Back to The Future. I was only eleven. But when I turned up at school that fall nearly all the other young boys also had gotten skateboards, and they became a primary hub around which much of our social activity orbited for the next couple of years. Actual chase scenes with security guards or, even better, but more rarely, the cops, were still a couple of years in my future, but in preparation we all started growing our bangs and drawing skateboard company logos on the covers of our notebooks to signal to ourselves and our older siblings that we were now identifying as a part of a discrete social subset to which they were not invited.

But this was junior high. The embrace of these signifiers bore only a tenuous relationship to how much time each of us spent actually trying to figure out the possibilities of the device we had just acquired. The degree of tolerance for bloodied elbows and jeans torn in the knee area varied widely. As did the amount of time our parents demanded that we go to swimming meets or run track or practice piano. I wasn’t required to do any of these things, or at least I resisted the requirements successfully. And I didn’t mind torn pants. And for some reason, I was keenly interested in figuring out the possibilities of the device. So I kept skating. I don’t even really remember everyone else quitting. But in retrospect a pattern emerges. People would come. We’d skate together for a while. Then they would fall away. This is how it worked for the first fifteen or twenty years that I skated.

Skateboarding is hard. And demanding. Of your time. Of your shoe budget. Of the flesh on your shins. And quitting is easy. Sometimes it’s not even a choice.

After a few months or a year or two or three someone moves away, or they start spending more time with that person they made out with at that party the other night. Or they have a kid, or start a band. Or maybe one night they do a manual across a median on Central avenue and get hit by a car going too fast for a business district and they have to stay in the hospital for a week and to get a steel rod put in their leg. Relearning how to make that leg do a kickflip might just be out of reach. Life is complicated, skateboarding is complicated, and they aren’t going to fit together for very long for that many people.

And this isn’t really a problem. Skating in groups, having a herd, a flock, a pod, a crew has its decided advantages and distinct pleasures. Yelling “Yeah” at people when they land a trick they’ve been trying for an hour clearly releases a chemical in your brain. A good chemical. That we like.

But it turns out skateboarding is a social activity, even when you do it alone. Whatever you’re doing, whatever trick you’re working, whatever shit you just ate is something that further cements your weird membership in this club. Or something.

If I found a stainless steel sports car that could bring me back 30 years into my past it wouldn’t really make that much difference. In 1994 I’d already been skating for nine years, and let’s be honest, I probably already knew how to do more than half the tricks I do now, so I don’t think I could even blow my twenty-year-old-self’s mind with my advanced skills from the 21st century. He’d probably be bummed I hadn’t ever learned to flip in to anything. And I don’t really run from security guards anymore. But maybe we could hang out and skate for a night or two in some vacant downtown area. And maybe we could talk about what kind of shoes we like best. And I could encourage him to hang on, that he’d eventually meet some guys in Chicago that he could skate with forever. That they’d get old, too, almost, but not quite as old as me. But they’d never quit.