Reading Week

It's reading week, but eyestrain is making me take it easy. Drops of water are crawling down the window of the coffee shop, cutting little lines through the gray skin of condensation that obscures the parked cars and roadway outside. I think there is something else I'm supposed to be doing right now, but I can't quite remember what it is. I just drank an Americano and ate a tasty chocolate chip cookie. Ok, this wasn't the healthiest snack for a Healthy Snack Monster, but it was tasty!

I had some thoughts last night, but forget what they were. Let me recount, instead a skateboard excursion I made about two weeks ago now, when the air was cold but the pavement of downtown Hamilton was dry and clear. I had just put together my new Mark Gonzalez oldschool deck and went to Beasley to test it out. It's a pretty nice ride: wide but not unwieldy. At the park, I was carving around, enjoying the feel of being rolling again after being landlocked for so long. There was nobody else there at first, it being the dead of winter and all. Then a young guy showed up. I forgot his name, but he was riding the most dilapidated skateboard you ever saw. I mean, the deck itself was suffering from massive delamination, and the layers of plywood that had split apart at the nose clacked against each other as he skated. It looked as though the entire nose of his board was about to break off at any moment.

And yet, this kid was thrashing the "Widow Maker" quarter pipe with reckless abandon, landing tricks on his rickety old deck that would have sent your average skater plummeting calamitously to the ground. I could only watch in awe, and try to avoid wrecking myself in the process. Something about watching another skater land treacherous tricks inspires one to try things that one perhaps shouldn't rightly attempt. Part of it is the desire to show off, but part of it is just the inspiration of seeing someone else do something truly radical.

So I was having fun just riding around and doing little shove-its and such. I was still getting the hang of the new plank. After skating for a while, I started to get warm, so I took off my outer jacket. I was wearing my wrist guards to avoid re-spraining my wrists, and I was nonchalantly cruising into a carve around the bowl when my wheel caught on a tiny piece of glass. Perhaps it is something about the cold temperatures making one's wheels harder and thus more sensitive, but I was expecting to be thrown off my board at just that point: the pavement was relatively smooth-looking and the obstruction that proved my undoing was actually tiny. Because I wasn't really expecting to be dislodged, instead of falling on my wrist guards, I did the unusual thing of falling shoulder-first. It was my right elbow that actually made first contact with the ground, and my shoulder second, but the impact hurt quite a bit. I got "road rash" on my elbow which has only just healed and bruised my elbow bone, too boot.

But not to whine: a good fall from the skateboard is often just the thing to make one feel alive again. It at least gives you a renewed respect for the whole gravity-ground nexus. The kid I was skating with was still ripping up the park fearlessly on his crappy old deck. When the sun started to go down, casting Beasley park in the dull grey shadows of a deep winter, inner city evening, we decided to call it quits. I offered to give the fellow my old deck, which I had just removed to set up my new Gonz. He was enthusiastic about this offer--my old deck was actually in much better shape then his, with only a bit of wear on the tail and no major chips or splits. So we skated back to my place and retrieved the deck. JP, the contractor was there with his power tools, so I offered to set up the new/used skateboard then and there for the fellow, but he said he would do it when he got home. It actually takes some time to get used to a new deck, so his decision to wait was probably a wise one.