Nostaligia (becoming old is lame)

The best car I ever had or will ever have was a 1988 GMC diesel suburban. It was red. It had bench seats. I installed a compact disc player. I drove it to school for three years, 90 min each way. I could take out the back seat and fit in several rails and a box. I could drive those things, and my friends,  down to Atlanta and skate all night. We could eat at Waffle House at 5 am on the way home. 

During my last year of school, I realized that no one there would realize I was missing until lunch. It was a quirk of my schedule, at a small school. I could leave before sunrise, drive the Big Red Beast Machine to the skate spot, and skate for 4 or 5 hours, and then go to school. It was a glorious spring. 

About six songs into AC/DC's Back in Black, I could arrive at a spot in a tiny ancient town called Suwanee. It was a basketball court, with a very short flat rail, and a very tall and steep slanted rail (on flat). It had wooden benches, long and thick, from normal bench hight, to pretty high bench hight. It had a pavilion with a four stair, where I had one of my most memorable slams. I met the man (he was already fully bearded by 1996, and looked like a Rob Zombie clone) who put the rails in. He was psyched that we were skating his spot.

One day, I got there in the late spring, before the sun was really blazing, and the cool morning air made it skateable. I parked the truck, and started trying a trick on the lowest wooden bench. I never made it, but I tried it all morning. I came very close. An orange short bus of prisoners pulled up, and htey weed whacked the grass around the basketball court, and after a while, they noticed that I had been skating like a maniac the whole time. I had run out of water and they gave me some gatorade from their big prisoner gatorade barrel, the kind that they pour over coaches when they win the sports game. One of the prisoners was a skater. They all told me what they had done and what prison life was like. I decided to go on to school. I came back many times, but I never landed the trick. Also, I went to prison later, for the same kind of bullshit that most of them had been in for. 

Since I am back in the place I was born in, I went there. It has been about seventeen years. I got out of the truck (not the BRBM, it has long since been donated to charity against my will) and was surprised to find a quartet of skaters there. This spot has absolutely nothing going for it. It didn't back then, and now, the surface is like molasses coated gravel. I was pleased to meet the kids who are skating my old spot. I knew it sucked. They know it sucks. It has a certain vibe though. Something that draws us, across the generations. I met more atheletic people at the various skateparks around, but those dudes were the realest skaters I've met so far in America. I think lay lines brought us together, spiritual crystal energy mixed with cyclic total rotation numbers of our wheels, divided by the number of days we have skated. Or something. Either way, I'm happy they were friendly to me, and I hope they have good lives. Mine has been.