Birthday Downpour

After working on my skate-theory opus for a couple hours, I decided to take the board out for a romp. I ploughed through downtown, causing a ruckus along the sidewalk. Tonight, there was what might best be described as a pack of Hispanic kids on mountain bikes barreling along the sidewalk in front of my apartment. They were singing some kind of song, and riding at breakneck speed. As I stepped backwards onto the sidewalk while opening the front door to the apartments I was almost hit by the last two of them. Later tonight, while taking out the recycling, two girls on bikes almost did a similar number on me. Each time that I thought about yelling, "get off the sidewalk!" my conscience stopped me short: I cause the same amount of pedestrian terror each time I weave through downtown traffic on my board. And sometimes I even take a slight mischievous pleasure in it.

At any rate, yesterday, I found my way to the big pay-parking lot on Wilson and John. After five pm the downtown lots empty out of cars, producing a paved field of open playground. I did a no-comply over the painted yellow curbs, and tried, unsuccessfully to do some slappies. The yellow painted island that housed the "arms" of the automated gate provided a perfect centerpiece on which to do some manuals. Mostly, I sped around surfing the 'crete, doing nose and tail manuals and little shove its, revelling in all the empty space. The clouds sat on the horizong like a floatilla of spacecraft, and an orange, almost full moon was coming up over the eastern horizon. It sat, perched atop a distant condo, an I realized that I had forgotten my phone/camera, and so had no way of registering a visual image of the event.

What was making my tour extra-special, was my "new" shoes. They weren't really new because I have been breaking them in slowly since last summer. They are an oldschool looking pair of white Adidas leather lowtops, like my Mark Gonzalez pair, but without the ghosties decorating them. They pinch my toes a little, but provide greater protection than my old Vans, which are mondo comfortable, held together with shoe goo, and have very little resistance or support left in the rubber of the souls. The tighter toes of my Adidas allowed for faster shove-it capability, and I caught a perfect railflip-to-caspar while waiting for the bus (though nobody saw this little bit of magic but me).

I like skating Gore park, waiting for the bus. The fellow who sold me a bottle of water at the convenience store was singing a Hindu prayer. He explained to me how it kept his strength up, because he was a student and working on the side and needed all his energy. The old guy, Doug?, at the pool said a similar thing about swimming. A few downtowners tried to get some change off me, but I wasn't going to give up my last seventy-five cents. It took about half an hour for the bus to finally arrive, and when it did, it had a slashed tire, and we had to wait a little longer for a replacement.

When I finally made it to the park, it was about ten. The skater from Trinidad? was there, and told me it was his birthday. I wished him happy birthday and started skating. There were a couple oldschoolers in the bowl. They weren't the friendliest guys, but I had seen them before. The one guy used to skate Beasley, but was a bit of an outsider. Kind of agressive, always hovering around the periphery. I call him the coyote. The other oldschooler had a vintage board with Bullet 66 wheels, yellowed with age but in mint condition. I dropped into the bowl a couple of times, and on my last run I actually felt like I got the sense of flow on a few lines, carving around the corners and getting a feel for how it's done. It was a nice feeling.

I was skating pretty well last night, not getting to caught up about anything. It started pissing rain at ten thirty, so I ran to the bus shelter with a couple of the kids and waited for the slow Sunday service to bring us back downtown. The kid whose birthday it was was turing 17, making me twenty years older than him. I could be these kid's dad, and yet I'm still cruising around the park like a wierdo. But who cares, its fun!