Tenacity fucking hurts. Like on the deepest contour of self, that shit hurts.

I ate shit fairly hard today in the pool dropping in. Jammed my wrist up real good. Fortunately, I had on my wrist guards otherwise I’d be nursing a broken bone at this point.

On the run before I wrapped it up for the day I joked to Trevor that I wasn’t entirely sure if I liked skateboarding or not. I keep putting myself in precarious situations with ultimately minimal results. I drag my ass out of bed at 6 in the morning to go and face very well-spoken demons with sound arguments as to why I shouldn’t try to ride an empty pool on my skateboard.

I’m 35 for fuck’s sake. I’m fat. I make my living and several other hobbies based on the dexterous use of my hands and wrists.

By most accounts I should have packed it in several years ago, milked a couple brats and be working some dipshit job so my kids can wander aimless into existential malaise and slide a chair up next to daddy. It’s the circle of fucking life.

But I’d rather tumble my bloated ass down a cement wall 1,000 times while baby turds packed with razor blades showered me from above then give up on new and terrifying experiences. At least when I get hurt I can remember I’m alive.

And feeling alive seems a harder and harder trick to pull off these days. Americans have made a spirit craft of killing the excitement from every last bit of culture we ever had. Even our buildings look bored, like they’re coasting along one last food coma in hopes of numbing the pain for their ultimate and unceremonious death.

In most states feeling passion for anything other than tent sales and hating on brown people is punishable by a prison sentence.

At 35 so many avenues I’ve chased in search of pleasure and meaning now just look like well-worn footprints, mismanaged craters that I can track back to an unsatisfied self. I have given faith to so many beliefs in hopes that someday one of those might render something other than gas and the vanity that caused it to differentiate in the first place. But beliefs are just handy tools whose ultimate worth is belied by their all too eager marketing department.

As a culture we’ve managed to figure out how to disassemble, diagnose, and deliver any experience to any person at any time for little to no effort. We can make a facsimile of any emotionally derivative experience and hand it over to each other in the prettiest, most genre appropriate package imaginable. But we still can’t build the spirit that lives inside that original experience. Spiritless, our experiences become enslaved to commerce, to marketing, to selling you the best can of dirt water a group of sexless, dipshits in boat shoes can dream up. Our minds and our imaginations slog away, dispassionately selling ourselves out on promises of potential lives and life experiences that are as hollow as the simulated hope those aspirations were built upon in the first place.

This disturbs me.

Like a walrus with a hard-on, this deeply disturbs me.

So maybe I do hate skateboarding, I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t give a fuck. Because it’s not the skateboarding that turns me on, it’s the proximity to life I feel when I go against my conscious-mind’s will. It’s the rush I feel as we drive down LSD and watch the sun rise over Lake Michigan, the streets of the city practically empty while people sleep their lives away. It’s the rotten air in my guts as I stand at the top of the pool and face down my fears and the crowded brocade of voices in my head. It’s the crack against the pavement when I fall. And when I slowly stand back up again, laughing off the pain as convincingly as I can.

There is a devil’s arrangement that I have with this and it is deep and troubling. I need it like I need oxygen, or more like a diabetic needs their insulin shots. I hate how much I love it. But this addiction to pain, this lust for sensation is the only thing that compels me towards another breath. That same breath I bend over to catch when it gets knocked out of me at 6 in the morning by gravity, cement and my own thick headed brand of tenacity. That beautiful breath that, far too soon, I’ll no longer be able catch and, much before I’m ready, will no longer be able to call my own.

Cleaned and lubed the bearings on my pool board last night. It’s a pretty simple process, here’s what I did:

1. Took my wheels off my board and removed the bearings careful not to lose the little washers.
2. Put the bearings in a bowl with some citrus-based Goo Gone and let them sit about ten minutes.
3. Wiped down the bearings, spun them in my fingers and let them sit another 15-20 minutes.
4. Put one drop of Bones Speed Cream on each side of each bearing and spun in my fingers again.
5. Dabbed down my bearings.
6. Put them back onto my board.

Now my sickly fast Oust Moc 7 bearings are even sicker and faster and all ready for a chilly Dawn Patrol manana.

Pulled this from the Uprise site, this skate park in Northbrook looks pretty dope. Might need to go do an early morning Dawn Patrol there some time before it gets too cold.

It’s 5:41am on this cheeeely autumnal morning and my fat, broken bones are up and out of bed. That could only mean one thing: DAWN PATROL!

Thas’ right, meestah, me and Trevor are heading down to the Wilson skate park this morning, for the first time in probably a month, to do some slight tearing (as opposed to shredding I guess) of said pool and park.

In honor of this momentous occasion why don’t you lazy sleeping-in sons-of-lichens enjoy this video of the adequately awesome Chris Haslam.