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).