As a skateboarder of any age, we’re repeatedly faced with heaping piles of our own bullshit and then left to take big nasally whiffs—eyes squinting, mouths drooling. We see things differently than everyone else, we say. We’re all family, you know. We’re united through our weirdness. Wherever we go in the world, we find friends… Continue reading The Metre Reader #2: This Something Is You (Skateboarding And The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation)

Grrr. You read right. Grrr. Sure, I know better, but, “Frickin’ Grrr!” anyway. So entrenched in not giving a shit after decades of self-taught apathy and counter-intuitive methods to everything from eating, drinking, making nice with the neighbors, and all the rest, that even though I can see myself doing it, and I know it’s… Continue reading Timbre #25: Don’t Care Bears

You’ve been derailed before. I read about it somewhere; I’m almost sure of it. A bomb fell, a hard drive ate itself, a late fee was assessed, a plane didn’t stop and instead skidded, and the tracks were jumped. Everyone saw it, and it hurt, but they said, “Nice fall.” And you got up and… Continue reading Timbre #24: The Get

This is blog version of the telephone game: A Prince story told by Taboo to my friend Animal Chan, who posted it to his What Is SGV site almost ten years ago, and now, through the power of the never-ending internet, The Good Problem is passing it on to you. Hello. Anyone who knows me… Continue reading As I Heard It: Taboo’s Prince Story

This is a test. For the next 500-ish words, this blog will be conducting a test of the Emergency Skate Publishing System. This is only a test. If you are bored: 1) It’s someone else’s fault. 2) It must be 2006. 3) You are boring. 4) You could always go skateboarding. If you have multiple… Continue reading Timbre #23: Always And Forever

Holy shit! Still reeling from the trip of a lifetime. Last week’s reimagined CHP Open was a … well … I can’t really call it a skateboard contest. But it had contest elements to it, for sure. And it wasn’t a demo, but everywhere you looked you could see amazing demonstrations of skateboarding prowess from… Continue reading Visual Rep: CHP Open Field Trip

Photo: Pete Diantoni I’m twice guilty of the bike toss. Once in a race somewhere in Iowa in ’93 when I flatted out of the break. I tossed my bike into the ditch and bent my saddle rails. Served me right. Another more recent toss happened after a Wednesday night ride crash in 2005. Side… Continue reading TGP Works: “Bike Toss” from issue #2 of TWO magazine

There’s really nothing overt about skateboarding, other than its overt nature. Walking through a day’s worth of hours — anywhere in the universe, it seems — it’s easy as baked goods to take notice of skateboarding’s newest personality flaw: the obvious disposition of mainstream agreement. Even at quick glance, it appears our activity has seeped into the nooks and… Continue reading Timbre #22: You’re Welcome

I haven’t skated in over a week. It was last Saturday, and I’m feeling weird about the “time off,” almost guilty. Isn’t that stupid, stupid? A few days before that Saturday, I hit my knee, innocently enough, with a comical fall, rubbed it through my scuffed trousers (steady on, mate), and kept going. It got… Continue reading Timbre #21: 400 Blows

Here we are. Every reader of this essay, every friend of every reader of this essay, and every skater in the world is at an age where we’re no longer observing from the sidelines as our grandparents’ friends, our parents’ friends, or our older siblings’ friends pass away. We are here, watching as our friends… Continue reading Timbre #20: Even Now

Much commentary — hell, most of my own — drills its way into what’s wrong out there. I’d even venture to say that focus is pulled on wrongness largely because there’s a lot wrong and it’s easy to find targets: potholed roads, erroneous reasoning, elected officials, that smoke that comes out of every single Burger… Continue reading The Metre Reader #1: Soft Focus

I crack myself up. Like just now, I imagined myself in an XXL Hawaiian shirt, lugging one of those massive steel drums into the doctor’s office and trying to get him to prescribe me Rogaine because I’m interested in cultivating some dreadlocks. The look on his imaginary face was pretty amazing. Not quite Hawaiian shirty… Continue reading Timbre #19: Be There

My son, Miles, who we named after the great trumpet player, Miles Davis, told me about this story he saw on Reddit the other day. And it’s one I’ve never heard before. That’s my boy! A good friend of my jazz professor was a young (I think he said like 20), white jazz bass player… Continue reading As I Heard It: Playing Bass With Miles Davis

Things always happen. On that you can rely. Last weekend for example, I was petitioned to be one of five gentlemen judges for the Dew Tour skate contests in Chicago, Illinois — one streetstyle and one just regular street … but in a park. I’m a sucker for live, pro-level skateboard watching and, as you… Continue reading Visual Rep: Chicago Dew Tour Field Trip