Fascinated by style

Where to begin?

Perhaps at the beginning. In any case, the length of this particular Word document as I type furiously at it suggests that this post may very well be a multi-part deal as a result of my laziness. But let us not dally on such matters.

While biking is the hippie self-propelled transportation of choice up in the good ol’ Northwest, down here, the preferred mode is the longboard. Lacking both the necessary funds to legitimately acquire a pimpin’ longboard, and not wishing to appear to be compensating for anything whatsoever, I made sure to bring my skateboard when I got back from break.

For those of you familiar with my trials and tribulations, this is the very same skateboard I got for free at Jason’s rave, and the very same board which has followed me from Disneyland to Egypt with its rebellious Independent brand trucks and jammin’ Jamaica flag wheels. With this weapon of mass destruction, I set off to carve up USC with my groovy deck and my groovier mad skating skills. I had watched the just released Almost skating video, featuring Rodney Mullen and Daewon Song. I had played just about every Tony Hawk game, and can reliably hit a relatively impressive score. Armed with this knowledge, I set out.

What they don’t tell you in both the Tony Hawk games or the skate videos is that skateboarding is hard. Tony launches fifteen feet vertically in the air spinning around three full rotations and landing it. I am more likely to fall off my board, slide a painful fifteen lateral feet along the pavement before getting hit by a USC tram, causing my battered spine to torque three full rotations before I land back on the bloody pavement dead as a doorknob.

All the coolest skateboarding kids start a skating run by first grabbing the nose, jogging, and then tossing the board across the pavement and running along as it rolls across the ground, and then jumping on it, the added momentum of the jog adding yet more speed. It is a good way to get quick speed, and looks very very cool.

Yesterday, I attempted this maneuver. I dropped the board as per the fashion described, and attempted to hop on. I quickly lost balance, and fell off, shooting the board forward as I fell back. Luckily, I had managed to stay on my feet, but now I had to sprint to catch up to it, and when I finally did, I managed to hold myself on it for three seconds before it shot out from under me again. At this point I noticed it was headed into a wall, so I quickly (and as coolly as possible) tapped it with my foot to veer it back on course, but tapping a skateboard precisely while running full tilt looks a little bit like if you asked a kid with Downs Syndrome to imitate Michael Jackson’s moves.

By now, I had gathered the nerve to attempt to jump back on again, and this time, I pushed off several times, before falling back and stepping off yet again. By the time I finally got a hold of the board, the entire population gathered in front of Trojan Grounds (a little convenience store/coffee shop) was staring at me and laughing, and I was basically at my destination. What this amounts to is basically running after my board like a moron, and riding it less than one percent of the time, and with tons of people knowing that I suck, and I am hilarious at sucking.

This is only one of a string of embarrassing attempts at merging into skate culture, but instead mistaking my accelerator for my brake and causing a forty-car pileup on the highway to cool. When returning some equipment to a building off campus today, I saw a crack in the sidewalk. “It’s totally cool,” I thought to myself, “I will pop the nose up a bit, and clear my front wheels and it’ll be groovy and I’ll look like a mofo.” I successfully execute this deft maneuver, but fail to realize that a skateboard has both front and rear wheels, which meant the wheels lodged themselves in the crack, halting my skateboard instantly, while inertia missed the memo and my body kept going, right into a near faceplant on the pavement right in front of a fly hunny. “Whoa,” she said with a smirk, “be careful.” “Shut your pie-hole!” I thought (very loudly), while my mouth stammered “Yeah I need more practice.” “You sure do,” she threw back helpfully as she walked out of my life forever.

Once, returning from a particularly grueling day of skateboarding (read: falling and almost taking off people’s shins), I ran into my R.A. John in the hall. “Oh,” he said, “you skateboard?” I laughed loudly at the thought of me actually skateboarding, but he persuaded me to head out into the courtyard with him and show him my mad skills. He leapt on and kickflipped the pants off the board, landing it and doing all sorts of crazy stuff with skills that apparently come with being born in California. At least I know that, being born in Seattle, I can sit around, play guitar and commune with nature better than he ever could hope.

Not content to quite write off the whole idea of putting wheels on a plank of wood as a viable form of transportation, and perhaps influenced by the ever pressing need to acquire the proverbial “Benjamins,” Max and I have decided to attempt to make custom longboards to be sold to the various Spoiled Children who attend our University. A longboard is basically what it sounds like – a longer skateboard, often with fatter wheels, and intended for smooth riding, speed, ultimate coolness, while simultaneously eliminating the potential of falling on your face in front of hot chicks because it’s meant to navigate the perils of Los Angeles pavement. With absolutely zero experience with this type of board between us, this venture is perhaps doomed from the start, but nonetheless, we have some brilliant ideas, in my opinion.

For example, taking a cue from the Fast and Furious culture evidently enjoyed by Socal youth, the first modification would be the addition of fat coils of EL Wire in the shape of a Tiki God on the underside. On top of a neat-o glowing design, this would also give the board fat neon underlights, which would make you the pimpinest boarder alive as you cruised around at three in the morning. Unfortunately, there really isn’t anyone around to see you, but with a board this cool, you wouldn’t even need direct witnesses. And if you’re wanting people to look and gawk at you, then we sure as hell won’t sell you this board.

In addition, we would mount a headlamp flashlight on the nose, so you can see the pavement you’re just about to conquer in breathtaking detail. The light would function both at night, and during the day. Riders of this board are the kind of people who want to look their enemy right in the face right before they skate right over it. Any riders who are at all squeamish with the concept of pavement, or disfiguring an enemy’s face with two longboard wheel tracks raked across it need not apply.

Those wheel tracks aren’t just your standard wimpy 70 mm soft longboard wheels, no sir. We’re going to get fat knobby offroad tires, which is the equivalent of taking Big Foot’s wheels and mounting them on your Jetta station wagon. That means any sidewalk crack smaller than the Marianas Trench better look out, because they’re about to get ridden over. In addition, the 30% of Los Angeles that is still unpaved better look out too, because, who knows? Some patch of grass might be sitting there, all growing, and then WHAM. Shit wrecked all over the place!

And on top of those fat knobby tires, Max and I will spend hours in the lab and engineer micro spinner rims, so that your tires appear to be in motion even when you are at a dead standstill. This will confuse all the player haters and biters who want a piece of your sweet board, because they will think “Oh the board is still moving now is my c
hance to hop on it!” But they’ll be wrong. They’ll run over all excited and patting themselves on the back for being so observant and then WHAM. Shit wrecked all over the place.

The problem with this scheme is, of course, it is still in the all-important conceptual stage. But as soon as we get a longboard, oh man. I don’t even want to think about what might happen, or even the amount of fecal matter that will get ruined.

Also, I might note that South Central Los Angeles is not the best place to pick up longboards and longboard accessories. If you want nightly LAPD Helicopter raids, fake IDs, dorms with windows barred like liquor stores (and conversely, liquor stores with barred windows akin to USC’s dormitories), then you’re definitely in the right place. But longboards? Nuh-uh. A Crip with a bandanna placed carefully on the “crip side” is going to have his hand on his Tec-9 nine millimeter at all times, not pushing himself off spastically on a Sector Nine longboard.

Let me give you an idea of the SC (South Central) crowd. I once drove past a group of four people around a used car on the side of the road, price all soaped into the windshield and everything. They stood around approvingly while one of them activated a black box in his hand. The car leapt to its feet, and proceeded to bump along courtesy an insane hydraulics setup. The men stood around, hands under their chins, appraising the vehicle approvingly. To imagine these same people cruising around Compton on longboards would be like imagining a maharajah humping his way around with one of those big fat exercise balls with handles on them like we had in middle school – that is, they would look ridiculous. Besides, hydraulic suspension and an automobile affords a greater degree of cover in the event of a shootout – the kind of cover that a plank of plywood ain’t gonna match up with.

With this in mind, along with the fact that Los Angeles and her constant 80-degree cloudless days was starting to screw with my sense of time (I would awake, walk outside and think that I was stuck in an infinite loop because everything looked the same every day), I decided to call Reed up and rather impulsively go to San Fransisco for the weekend before Valentine’s Day. Saint Valentine and his card-making cohorts could all collectively suck it, I thought, as I revved up the Wongmobile and drove out towards Pomona. I’m going north, to a city where trees aren’t placed like traffic lights along the boulevard. To a place where civil engineers know that rain collects at the lowest point, so you need to put little holes at those points so roads don’t become wading pools for cars to slip around and kill each other in.

As I write these words, Los Angeles is in the midst of a record-breaking rainfall year. I hear a sharp cracking noise. I think it’s thunder at first, but then realize it’s too close to sound like thunder. Outside, I hear a girl screaming. I run down and this is what I see:

A tree decided to uproot itself and take out some parked cars with it.

In short, I want to go to a place where trees don’t commit suicide when they get some water. And, really, is that too much to ask?

Next time: Stanford and how hours of practice at USC’s pool table payed off, San Fransisco in a single day and drunk drivers and sleeping on the side of the road. Still to come: Singles Awareness Day (S.A.D.) and making a movie in twenty four hours. I’ll update as I go.

-f.w.