Halfmast Flags Under Clear Blue Skies

I got my first skateboard a few weeks before I moved to Taipei. I started learning to skate again at a place called Rhodes Jordan Park in Lawrenceville. The other time I came to America, I had a list of things I wanted to skate there, but it rained the whole trip. I'm still not over the jet lag on this trip, so I after many beers at the growler store last night, whose owner had on an alien workshop shirt because his four year old skates, I woke up hung over at midnight. And again at 2 am, and again at four and then for the last time around six. I decided today would be the Rhodes Jordan day.

America is a weird place to be right now.

Lawrenceville has hills. Not exactly San Fransisco, but I'm not used to bombing real hills. American traffic is at once lighter but more dangerous. I didn't trust the drivers to give me any room at all, and the roadsides are littered with gravel, twigs, and garbage. In fact, America is a filthy place, garbage is everywhere. Taiwanese people probably throw more garbage on the ground, but people get paid to clean it up, so you don't see nearly as much of it. 

Because the morning rush hour roads were virtual unskateable, I had to bomb the narrow sidewalks instead, which are also littered with rubbish and pebbles, but have the added bonus of large cracks between the segments of sidewalk. 

When I got down to the park, I found a spot that I had forgotten about. It's a very mellow bank to curb, and while it still had some marks from when I used to skate it two and half years ago, no one had waxed it since then. Fortunately, I had a candle. I did all the silly little tricks I used to want to do there. I don't want to spoil the rest of the trip, but it was the most fun spot of the whole thing. It's one of those rough rough american asphalt parking lots, with lots of sticks and trash and rubble in it, and the bank is too mellow and the curb is too small, but it's backside, and started grinding quickly, and sometimes you hit a spot on the trip where you know there isn't going to be a better moment than that. I left it sooner than I should have, but I had an agenda.

There were some stairs, up the hill, that I couldn't skate the last time I was in America, because it was raining. They had canyon sized cracks in front of them, and on landing, but I achieved my goals. Then I went exploring and found a parking lot on a long gradient (maybe 150m) that maintains your speed all the way down, but requires smoothly landed tricks in order to not lose speed. I am a big fan of these hills. I skated it for a while. As a bonus, it had a manual pad at the point where I kept running out of easy tricks and started fucking up.

Then I bombed a hill, and went up up up another to the highest point besides home, which is a public pool which used to be a place to take sluts after dark and later became a place to learn how to skate yellow curbs. The ground is so rough compared to Taiwan. The asphalt must be very old. I never realized how hard it is to skate in America. Anyway, I skated the curb where I learned my first curb tricks and it got hot. By 10 am, it was actually annoyingly hot. I say this as someone who lives in the tropics. Georgia is a hard place to skate in the day. Or the night. There are no street lights, like in Taiwan, and the American police don't seem very interested in providing security to the people there, unlike Taiwan. I miss Taiwan's police. Anyway, the cops ran me off from a public park in a giant empty parking from a yellow curb at 10 am on a weekday. Fuck it, it was hot anyway.