“What the hell are you so worried about?” I ask me.
Starting to answer quickly, I pause for a sec and the list comes flooding in so fast I can’t even begin to start responding to my own question. Should I worry about that, too?
The complete stupidity of skateboarding’s minute nothings are driving me out of my skull.
Off the ceiling. Sam Hitz kicks out the jams. Photo: Joel Muzzy
Wheels, for example, are not at all right. Sure, they’re round, and lining the shop’s shelves, sure, (three times fast) but they’re all either too tall to too short. Doesn’t matter, though. If the right size was there, the wheel would be too wide, or too fat, or too whatever. Wheels are beautiful, all inked up, many with delicious centers, but none are right—ever.
The newness of trucks is not appealing, either. This is not something that’s going to blow minds, but really, new trucks eat at me more than they ever should. I should worry about hormones in milk instead, Bosnian refugees, anything, but the whole time I groove through to the axle of my old trucks, I’m falling apart inside. I’m trying not to think about my next pair—the newness of the pivots, the stiffness of the bushings, the awkward unmarked nothingness of the stupid hangers. Damn it! They have to be right, right now! I mourn along side those who ride fresh aluminum—it sucks for them today just as it will one day suck for me. Future fucked.
Ethan Fowler tucks a back-seat indy over that BART hip. Photo: Tobin Yelland
Can’t have a sticker running under the trucks.
Can’t have a sticker running on the rail.
Must have a sticker covering the bottom.
The tape can’t be notched or scratched or designed or scuffed or hanging over or colored or too new or too old. It’s a fine line, my friends.
You’re still my friends, right?
As I kick the board ahead of me and watch it roll away, it better not look like a g-ride, a monster truck, or any kind of ill-proportioned automobile. It’s a skateboard. It has to look drivable.
I have the same hardware I’ve had for three years, though, and I don’t want to talk about it.
Harold Hunter drives one through the lower east side. Photo: Giovanni Reda
Bearings (shmearings) shouldn’t bend when I press them into the wheels I hate, and should probably just come in a plain container. I can’t support the idea of a bearing that came packaged inside some kind of satchel, transforming Power Ranger, or a weed tin.
Sigh.
The perfect set-up was my last one. Let me tell you. I had it all. Rode the hell out of it, too—got months out of that beautiful lovely. But one day I snuck up from behind and caught it turning ugly. Right in front of my eyes it became so totally ridiculous that I passed out on the spot.
“What the hell happened?” I asked me.
My perfect set-up—the one that took years of foot tapping through classes, years of purposefully ignoring my way through trends, years of knowing exactly what I wanted—had morphed into an over-obsessed upon hunk of idealized cat crap. When I came to, I dry heaved a couple times and tried not to make eye contact. What did I ever see in that board?
Lizzie Aramanto bashes through to a second of awareness. Dave grab. Photo: MRZ
Point is, satisfaction is elusive. Wait. That’s not my point. It’s that my friends seem worried about me. No, that’s not it either.
Maybe it’s that by obsessing over the things that don’t matter, and then obsessing over obsessing over them, I can actually bash my way through to a moment of understanding, a level of awareness, a instant of “getting it” that will allow me to relax for a second and just live.
But, seriously, these shoes aren’t working for me. I don’t know what it is. Maybe they’re too … uh …
Too, uh …
What was I worried about, again?
Listen to Sam Hitz’s An Open Trunk, A Parking Lot, And You Playlist.
