Injury Gives Me Insight Into the Dark Future

One day, I won't be skating. Hopefully, it will be the day after I die. In the meantime, injury is shining a terribly realistic light onto this dark corner of my future. Fuck, this IS my future. I spent the night popping pills and drinking beer on the stoop, well away from my front door, but a marble manny pad/ledge complex with three convenience stores within stumbling range. I vow to be skating again by next weekend. There is nothing at home but childhood internet reruns of simpsons episodes and more pills and beer.

No, that's not true. There are questions like, why does my roommate (fiance) have 14 bottles of personal cleaning product in the shower? Are there really 14 different regions of the body that require independent unique cleaning products? In times of prosperity, I have separate soaps for hair and torso, but I have survived for months at a time on orange scented dishsoap for the whole thang.

I am starting to consider what my first trick back will be. Fuck, it's only been 48 hours....

Not worth reading.

In case you don't know, laying on your back without a pillow and staring at the ceiling is incredibly boring.

Taiwanese Healthcare and the Consequences of Skateboarding into Old Age

At one point, Taiwan's national healthcare system was a point of national pride. In my opinion, it should still be, but apparently, it's finances and working conditions are getting a little rough around the edges, and I rarely hear good things from those working in the industry. Allegedly, fewer and fewer students are entering the workforce, as more sacrifices are demanded, and pay stagnates.

This morning, my neck was painful to the point that it me about thirty seconds to get out of bed, gasping and cursing. Lzyk booked an appointment for me online at the local hospital, and I carefully shuffled and groaned over there. It was standing room only, even before I got inside. It was as crowded as a nightmarket; a full press of bodies short-stepping in every direction. I had to wade through the human current flowing in the opposite direction to get to the escalators, which sucked, since even though Taiwanese never push in crowds, some jostling is unavoidable, and every time someone touched me, it made stars of pain appear in my vision. In that kind of crowd, someone is bumping you all the time.

I found my way to what I gambled was the right place. In Taiwan, everyone gets a medical record ID card, and you check in by swiping it through a scanner. The problem is no such thing as an appointment, at least, not as I know it. Instead, there are clinic hours, and you get an appointment number. The clinic might go for four hours, and if your aren't there when your number gets called, you go to the back of the line. So if like me, you're number 30, you have to show up when it opens, because if the first 20 people are late, then you're likely to go to the back of the line with them if you show up at a reasonable hour. So, I sat grimacing for a few hours, lucky to have a seat at all. Once it was my turn, things happened quickly. I got my x-ray, and got a couple of baggies of pills for less than $500 NT total.

I was pleased that none of the pills were antibiotics (Taiwanese MD's tend to write prescriptions for 72 hours worth of weak antibiotics, no matter what your complaint, "because the patients insist." And this is why we are entering the post-antibiotic era). I was disappointed by what I did get though. In the past, I made the mistake of taking Taiwanese pills before work, and was reduced to zombieism for 12 hours. One downside of a national healthcare system run by a country where management is synonymous with cost-cutting. Thus, we use pharmaceuticals from the 1950's. It's popular in the West to whine about "big pharma," and comparisons with war-profiteering aside, I have to say I prefer their products to these WWII era pharmaceuticals.

Last time, I had to stop taking the pills because they labotomized me. This time, I delayed taking them at work until tears were streaming down my face, but then, nothing happened. Several rounds of pills later, I can feel the secondary effect of the fall slowly spreading through my body. It's almost an enjoyable kind of hurt. It will validate every trick I land, after the two weeks of no skating the doctor ordered. I don't think I'll make it two weeks, but if I come back early, it certainly won't be because these pills helped with the pain.

Karma is a Cliche, and Taipei is Weird

RMJ met me out at the amphitheater. Before he got there, I saw a star in the sky that was moving slower than an airplane, but was brighter than Mars. It faded after about a minute, like a satellite. Surely if China needs photos of missile targets in Taipei, the gangsters can just take some from the ground (more on that later). 

The session was good, but the surface is shitty. It's pebble dash, so it's exhausting. As we bombed the 2 km hill back home (it's a steady walking pace, all the way down), I did a trick in front of two girls who were mall grabbing new set ups at a cross walk. They responded with suitable amazement. I'm glad I'm learning Mandarin.

RMJ and I got outside some beers and then rolled back by his house. We went around a corner and I was innocently reminded of why I love Taipei: two trucks, parked end to end, where frantically offloading halves of pigs, in the middle of the street behind the Chinese tourist nightmarket! Why, what fun! How foreigner these foreigners are! I took out my camera to take a photograph and document their exotic customs, and they freaked the fucking fuck out. Fleeing, it dawned on me that this were either $3,000,000 NTD worth of stolen pork, or it was illegal pork to start with, almost certainly on health grounds, destined for the nightmarket. It is only a small consolation that American pork is illegal here, so maybe it was smuggled in from Georgia. 

RMJ has to work in the morning, but I felt irresponsible, so I wandered east, beer in hand. Several hours, beers, and new spots later, I slammed so hard that security guard came out to see if I was OK. I hadn't even noticed that there was one. I landed on my right shoulder and left palm, somehow. Now, my neck won't turn to the right. Also, I scrapped some hair off my head. I got back up as the astounded security guard held onto the gate with both hands and an open mouth, and I landed it next try, before the hurt arrived. As I skated away down the empty highway, I looked back and he was now standing in the middle of the road, watching me leave, like he had just seen an alien or a cowboy in a flying saucer. 

Here is where the karma comes in: having criticized anyone who doesn't skate to the spot, I was now one hour skate from home, and that was the last time my neck or upper body could turn to look over my shoulder. Idiot blog in mind, I beered up and kept skating. I stocked up on beer and instant meals at Fami. I might call out of work tomorrow. This was the second hardest slam in many years. 

A Polemic: the Worst Part About Skateboarding is Skateboarding

Fortunately, no one reads this, because I'm going to be insulting people I love and skate beside.

I don't literally skate everywhere. I don't skate from my door to my elevator. In fact, I almost never skate inside buildings. I don't skate when it rains, unless my set up is old and I've been drinking and the MRT is closed. I can't skate up hill, if the hill is steep enough. I rarely skate on dirt, and I can't skate on gravel. I don't skate to dates, because for the most part, from trial and error, I've found that Taiwanese women aren't especially attracted to sweaty foreigners.
This being said, I believe in skating everywhere I possibly can. Taipei is a perfect city for it. It is compact, only about three or four kilometers across. At first, the traffic is intimidating, but the pedestrians are worst than the scooters, which are worse than the cars (taxis and buses excluded, those dudes are out for vehicular homicide everytime they drive). The worst part, for my money is the air pollution. It's like skating behind an old car's exhaust pipe, all the time. The sky is almost never blue here, unless there's a storm that blows through and cleans things out for a day. The last blue sky day I remember, without a storm, was a day during CNY, when everyone in the city had gone home for the week, so no scooters were poisoning our air.
I can't fully respect anyone who doesn't skate to the spot here. There are even people who complain that it's too dark. There are myriad excuses, besides the ones I've listed above. None of them are valid. Riding a bicycle or scooter to the bridge with your skateboard in a shoulder bag is shameful. Taipei is a skatepark. Treat it as such. I've actually heard children complaining that there aren't any skatespots in Taipei. Skateboarding is not the xgames. You don't need a net, or a bowling lane to do it. In fact, if you have a purpose made place, it makes skating worse. Next week: why park skating doesn't count (although I still do it because it's fun and convenient, just like how I ride the MRT to the bridge nearly every time I go there).

Taiwanese Police Are There to Protect and to Serve

I tagged along with a homie and his friends for filming, and at one point, early in the night when the streets are still frothing with people, he was skating a low rooftop that is shaped like a very mellow miniramp with no flat. We set up a barrier to keep his board from murdering scooterers if it zipped out, as the landing was a few feet from a busy street. He tried it for about 45 minutes. The spot is in front of the ministry of internal security (I use lower case because I don't know what it's actually called) and at one point, a pair of police officers came around the corner, watched him skate the roof, and never broke stride. At two other spots, bored, fat security guards waddled out and watched, but the only one who said anything was an ancient one at the nightmarket, as we were cruising home. He had a point though, skateboards are loud in narrow alleys. He probably could barely hear the roar the scooters for a few seconds, but by then, we had passed, and he went back to the background lull of Taipei, which sounds like an internal combustion waterfall.

RIP Keelung Harbour

In this great circle of life, skatespots are born, and they die. It is our great joy to love and appretiate them while we have them. It is our great sorrow when they leave us and return to the sands of time. Heavy though our hearts may be, we have a duty to be cheerful, even when facing loss. 

Keelung Harbour was one of the most iconic skatespots in Asia. Its weird geometry and charming backdrop delighted us all. Lest we forget its flaws, we must mention them here: it was so, so crowded. It was ruined by American teams who came and acted like asshole skateboarding colonialists, drawing the ire of local security, and leaving burning, wrecked spots in their wake. The wooden surface was rickety. It was slick when even a tiny bit wet, and since it's the center of Keelung, it was always wet. Now that it's gone, we can be doubly annoyed by those long, terrifying bus rides out to spot, only to find it raining on arrival. There are longer any chances to go back.

Most of all, it was the first place I've stood where I know American bombs have fallen. 

Also, it was right beside a kickass nightmarket. 

It's the little things

RMJ tipped me off on a daymarket spot that has $20/pair Circa's. I bought as many as I could carry.

The saga of Nangang skatepark

I woke up with some things to do. I didn't end up doing many of them. One of the things I did do was skate at the skatepark at Nangang.

When I arrived in Taipei two years ago, I tried to find some skatespots on the internet. One of the best ones was apparently in Nangang. It's about 30 minutes east of the city, but the MRT goes there. So I rode out there, and was greeted with a destroyed skatepark, and a sign saying it would reopen in a few months. There were promising stacks of masonite. A few months late, I came back, and nothing at all had changed, but I learned to appreciate the best bowl in Asia, hidden up on the hillside. I gave up for a year, and came back. Nothing had been done. Somewhere around two years later, the park has been finished, but only in the Taiwanese sense of the word. It is still roped off, and you still get kicked out if you skate there (sort of). The problem is apparently that the Department of Skateboarding Health and Safety (apparently a career path in Taiwan) hasn't found the time to approve the new park as skateable. When it had metal fences all around it, we climbed over and skated it anyway. Now that it only has some yellow caution tape blocking it off, we aren't exactly treating it as though it isn't open for business. However, the Thought Police thought differently today. Admittedly, this is because Mr. Important came to visit. I wasn't there to witness the spectacle, but I heard about it later: the gendarmes kicked everyone out for an hour or two, and then the Main Dude and his crew of lesser dudes came up with helmets on and checked off some things on the checklist, and counted how many mosquitos were breeding in the pond nearby, and then left. By the time I arrived,  all was well again in Nangang, but the Leuitenant Inspector came by to make us all sign some paper work that I couldn't understand, so I signed it Willie Nelson.

Afterwords, I went to the bridge and taught a kid how to kickflip. This was satisfying. Then, he showed me a video of myself cursing in Mandarin, to ask if it was me or not. I am the lowest level of celebrity possible.

The Hardest Decisions Are Best Made While Skating and Drinking

I am infatuated with Taipei, and skateboarding. If we move to the suburbs (Linkou) (in Taiwanese, this place is considered a completely different city), I will be 20 minutes away by bus. There is nothing to skate there, and nothing to do, except drink, which I already do too much of anyway. I told She Who Must Be Obeyed that I absolutely hate that place, our home has been civil war ever since. The one redeeming factor is that I found an abandoned basketball court (x6 courts). The one irredeeming factor is that it rains there nearly everyday. Also, I work in Taipei. 

There was a medium sized earthquake during my morning lecture, and a student grabbed my arm in fear. This made me realize that I should also feel fear. I didn't, not because I'm brave, but because I'm stupid. Then I skated the rest of the day. It was up to par, but nothing new. Then I got some beers. RMJ was there, and so was mrb. We threw back some beers and I ended up in the nightmarket discussing my decision. In the end, it makes sense to take one for the team and move to Linkou. The problem is that I'm assuming there is a team. 

At any rate, skating late at night through the Taipei streets with a friend is an order of magnitude better than doing it alone. Cruise or die.

A short note on house hunting in Taipei

This is the tropics, and it's only colder than 70 degrees for a couple of weeks out of the year,  but houses that are listed as having "a pool" charge you for the facility year round and only open the pool for July and August. There are public pools in Anchorage that stay open longer than that. Also, it's still 95 degrees here in December, but I think I might have started to mention that earlier.

How Satan's Bunny Curbs Got Their Name

When I first came to Taiwan, I hadn't skated for many years. I wanted to learn how to grind again. I found some curbs in a river park. It was a pretty grimy spot. The trash trucks park nearby, so when the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, it makes the spot totally unskateable. There are lots of little stones, and it's by a sewage output station, so if the wind isn't blowing the trash truck smell of hot tropical garbage, it's blowing the smell of chlorine and presumably somewhat treated sewage water, from the other direction. It has the only pack of hostile feral dogs in all of Taipei, who harass passers by and once caught my skateboard in the mouth when they came at me. Also, it's far away, and there aren't a lot of other spots nearby, and it's really rounded curbs that are difficult to lock into. Last year, a typhoon flooded the river park and buried many of my favorite spots under three feet of stinking black mud, and I didn't go back for about a year. But the Satan's Bunny Curbs have another reason that I don't go there much.

The plot of this story will be painfully obvious after I list the details that at the time seemed circumstantial. I had smelled the smell of death during the last session there, and I don't mean metaphorically. But things die in parks, and I was vaguely hoping it was one of those dogs. The next session, the smell was still really strong. I skated for a bit and slammed. All kinds of trash is scattered around the area. I picked up  an empty shoe box to ollie over, and to my disgust, someone had thrown it out with the shoes still in it. The cardboard was all soggy from being rained on. I was totally surprised though, because sometimes I throw out my old shoes in the box that the new ones come in. Although, never in a river park. The shoes thumped and slid around inside the box, especially when I clipped the back wheels on the edge of the box. I went back to stand the box back up on end, and the sweet death smell was suddenly over-whelming. At this point, I kind of knew not to open the box, but I was wondering what sort of shoes were in there.

It wasn't shoes. It was a rabbit, with perfectly white fur. In the place where its decapitated head once was, was a writhing mass of maggots, each as thick as my pinky finger. I composed myself and left. Later, I went back to ollie a small gap that I had been coveting, but until last night, I hadn't been back for a couple of years. Not much has changed.

Heat is Coming

Sometimes it is necessary to skate, even when we don't particularly feel like it. For example, when it's mid-May in Taipei, but it's 70 degrees. I set up the new board and went to the wharf. On the way, I ollied a loose tile and caught on the end of it and the board shot behind me, into traffic. Fortunately, it smashed into a parked Mercedes, instead of continuing its trajectory into the scooters, where it would have murdered someone. At the wharf, hobos were littered all over the ledges, so I kept going down the bike path, and found a huge new parking lot. It was a windy night, and the cattails were noisy on the river bank. I skated flatground until I was sweaty. The new deck is 8.5. I have never skated bigger than an 8.0, and I'm pretty sure I'm a convert. It's like landing on an aircraft carrier. Also, my old deck was so flexy and chewed up that this new one is surprisingly loud on landing. It's remarkable how much you get accustomed to particular set up's little noises. Slightly more interesting was cruising up the river park, beer in hand, and then out into the empty city and back home. The heat is coming. At least I got one last cold weather session in.

Rolling Thunder, Pouring Rain

After a day of accomplishing nothing but cleaning papers off a desk, I went to mandarin class, which happens to be by the bridge. I happened to bring my skateboard, and it happened to be pouring rain, so I spent some quality time under the bridge. I met a foreigner there who has been here for seven years longer than me. As he was cool and twisted his ankle, I postponed skating to talk to him about what to expect from my next seven years in Taiwan, as the lightning flashed on either side of us, above the bridge. I am delighted by people who are free, and I think he was free. Free people are a rare thing to encounter, in a world of wage slaves and zealots. After he left, I had a couple of TB's and came very nearly close to landing a handful of new tricks, but didn't roll away from any of them cleanly. Then skateboard gave up the ghost. It looks like lightening struck it, right across the middle.

Breaking a skateboard is similar to death. It is final. There was one last trick, at one last place, on one last day, and then it ends. There is a sort of reincarnation in this metaphor, but it's more like that greek dude's ax than actual reincarnation. Focusing a skateboard is a form of suicide, which maybe speaks deeply for why we are all doing this. Or maybe it's just imaturity writ large. Either way, the function doesn't change: one day, you will break the board. There will have been a last trick. One day, you will die. What do you want to do tomorrow?

Depth is lame. I can't wait to set up a new deck. I hated that piece of shit.