I suck.
While I’m sure this is a sentiment shared by countless others, until this point, no one’s pointed it out in the simple and straight-forward language it’s deserved.
So I thought I’d give it a shot.
It’s my poetry. Weep with me.
I’m here by default, coming to you from the middle of nowhere, the rest of my peers dead, in jail, bored, or reconstructing medial collateral ligaments. Me—in all my suckiness—I’m bent over this twelve-inch screen, my leading elbow and knee literally throbbing after a ruthless, but completely enjoyable weekend of sucking on my skateboard.
Neil Blender copes with the sharpness of the only brick quarterpipe in America to be nominated for the Pritzker Architecture Prize: Burdines. Photo: Grant Brittain
I’ve come to this moment through years of misaligned enthusiasm about the wrong things, consorting with the wrong people, buying the wrong products, and speaking up at the most inopportune moments. No one else wanted the job—I didn’t, either—but the sirens of the rest of the world’s awesomeness didn’t sound as good as scraping together money for some second-hand wheels. I took the route of most suck.
Here’s where it’s gotten me:
I’m checking out the shoes of every single person who walks by and I’m making note (really, I’m writing this down) that there’s nothing I like. Brown leather with square toes. Tevas and toenails. Patent leather peaking out from the tailored cuffs of some perfectly faded and whisked denim garment. Only when I see the duct-taped left toe of some maintenance worker do I look up from my poor posture and take a second peek.
“Regular,” silently noted, but I’m either too phobic to nod or I just want to get back to my sucking, so I say nil. When it’s clear there’s no way the dude can make eye contact, I look at his shoes again. “There is hope for the world,” I whisper to my synapses and organs. My gut tells me to zip it, and when another set of shoes walks by, I get caught looking, get embarrassed, get back to my laptop, and continue this business of sucking. It’s sad … I’m sure you agree.
But, yeah, that’s it, pretty much.
Elissa Steamer answers the call of the sirens and crashes her sled into the rocks during that last west coast hurricane. It was a real gullywasher. Photo: Frozen stuck, this Steve Stedham will be stepping through his Clown Ramp backside boneless for all of eternity. Like, for FOREVER forever. Photo: Grant Brittain Me, I need extra shoelaces around, I’ve run a cut in my griptape, just behind the back truck, for FOREVER, it takes me something like fifteen or sixteen years to learn a trick, and almost all of my friends, enemies, and loved ones are only separated from my sucky existence by like one degree. It’s fairly pathetic. I know. Just the other day, I sat parked in a grocery store parking lot, in a town I know nothing about, eating these weird chicken nugget things I didn’t even like, because I didn’t want to be in the wrong part of town when my friend called and told me where he was skating that day. I was frozen stuck, I mean, sucked. In the end, I asked strangers for directions to a skatepark I’d never been to, just so I could arrive there after dark and skate with a couple kids, a BMXer, a bossy trog, and a rollerblader. Still worth it. Max Schaaf would like to thank all the cinder blocks out there doing thankless, tough work, day in, day out, waiting patiently for the next tail-grab nosegrind. You’re the real heroes. Photo: Brian Gaberman from Um Yeah Art’s film Ye Olde Destruction What makes it suck even worse? I read something the other day about how it’s cool to be self-deprecating. It wins you awards and whatnot. Great. I’d like to thank all THE WINNERS out there who’ve made this fantasy world a reality world. Listen to Max Schaaf’s Emotional Rollercoaster Playlist. 
