Homies gettin bad press/ a lesson in 關係

In an hilarious and only half understood semi-scandal flame war internet battle of some sort, a few friends recently appeared on some chinese news site, allegedly skateboarding in the street.

This entirely false and unsubstantiated claim came to my attention via 400+ (I'm not exaggerating) messages on my phone, buzzing constantly through the past 24 hours. If you want to know exactly how often my phone buzzed, you can do the math.

At first, many of these messages implored me to take up arms and wade into the fcbk war of posts, but I was at yakitori, so I couldn't be bothered. Also, this sort of shit is why I don't use fcbk. I have better things to do, like work, drink, skate, and play video games while I write and listen to flesh juicer. Those aren't good things to do, with exception of skating, but they're better than arguing with strangers on this electric idiot screen. If you've ever disagreed with someone on the internet and kept reading, you are too stupid to be allowed to use your electric idiot screen. I have argued with strangers twice on fcbk, so I fall into the "too stupid" category. Fortunately, I can keep going, since I don't live in China.

Back to WW3,987,345(the next one will be typed with sticks). As best as I can gather, a few skateboarding enthusiasts in Taipei filmed a [trick name redacted] on a deserted street, but in Taipei, streets are never deserted, so a passing taxi honked at them.  Concerned internet people bombarded a fcbk group about skating (this is where I know I'm starting to lose the plot) and it expanded into every person's 關係. What is 關係 you ask? Well, imagine if every person you ever knew never matured beyond middle school and felt compelled to either include or exclude you forever based on what a friend's friend thinks of their friend's friend. 關係 is perhaps the strongest argument that Taiwan is culturally part of China. Forget silly historical claims and overwhelming public opinion. It isn't Asia that's foreign, it's 關係. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Japan and Korea don't have 關係. I'm probably wrong. I don't know, I've never lived there. 

But I do live in Taiwan, and I've never had more than a handful of skate related messages on my phone in a 24 hour period. This has been absurdly silly. If I had nothing else to do, I'd write a thesis on it. I will never belong here.

I know I've betrayed the homies by not jumping into the flames, but I feel like I'm writing that wrong by typing this piece to no one. They won't feel the same, and I hope I haven't ruined the 關係, but maybe I can just play the foreigner card say " I have no fucking idea what the fuck you are talking about or why it was important to you that I participate." I'd rather get into an actual fight that I had nothing to do with. 

Sunday night lights

Back to the bridge. ZW and RMJ were there, and others. I had some kind of weird artheritis or zika or asthmatic nasal meningitis, so I really couldn't skate well, but I tried anyway. It was a sleepy, abandoned bridge session, but the weather was the best of the year, owing to a typhoon to hte north. I watched bits and peices of a disappointing grand prix on my phone, and skated in non-skating abibas shoes, which, it turns out are better than the purpose made skate shoes I've been using, but that I had to leave at home because they disintegrated too quickly and my glue repair didn't dry yet. I suspect that that last sentence has some grammar issues, but I never reread.

rmj and I cruise/walked home and hit up the stoop for maybe the second to last time. I'm moving soon.

I forgot to report that I saw a homeless man eating out a disgarded 7-11 box at the skatepark and I offered him $100. He took it, which is a first for taiwan, but he didn't speak chinese. he looked like a skeleton. turns out, he is probably a se asian worker, escaped from a factory here, but so far unable to return home. taiwan is not paradise for everyone.

It's still ghost month

I woke up terrified because a man was on my balcony looking in the window. He was wearing blue jeans and a brown jacket. I wiped my eyes and he was gone, but I had a panicky feeling in my chest all day. I can't remember if that's a hypnogaugic or hypnopompic hallucination.

Saturday night lights

I haven't skated in many days, because of adult things. Nervous anxiety coaxed me out to the bridge right before lights went out. It was almost empty, although the detritus of a major session was strewn all around, and a couple of homies were still here. J was there, with new ink (antihero sleeve) and soon after, K showed up too. He had a a bad week, the kind you tend to have in your mid 20's. He skated hard as fuck. I always admired his speed, and the consequent brutality of watching him try tricks. He has guts. That's why I know he will survive the mid-20's shit. He skates faster than lubbed fucking.
Some people have a bad day and show up at the spot and it has the same effect as if it had started raining. You can still skate, if you really want to, but no one really wants to go for it anymore. K is the opposite. He showed up and started blasting around at running speed or faster, in the dark. We had some TB's and I cruised home. I actually got lost. That is a rare experience for me nowadays. It used to happen every night, before I had an internet telephone, and I used to wander my way home based on the tops of the skyscrapers I could see. This time, I saw a fami down an alley, and I needed a TB, so I ducked down the covered sidewalk towards it. I don't get lost much anymore, but I still get stared at as much as ever.
Taipei has a few species of metal grates in the street. The smallest is a square, about as far across as a skateboard. The next size up is a man-hole cover. After that, you get rectangles, about the length of a man-hole cover's width. Sometimes, these are severely sons of bitches, and for some reason, the metal grating is super deep on top, and if you roll onto one of these son-of-bitch grates, you will eat shit into the asphalt like someone stuck a stick through your front bicycle tire. The largest grate is a huge metal pizza circle, and it took me a bit before I could ollie those while cruising.
I roared around the corner (wheels are loud at 3am in a one lane alley) and a couple of people stopped in their tracks to stare. I ollied the biggest pizza grate and grabbed a TB. Inside, half a dozen people stared me down, not so much in hostility as in shock. I came out and I was lost.
You notice more when you're lost. If feels like you've gone farther. Unfortunately, I came around a corner to a main road and quickly got unlost.

We ruin what we love by our intimate knowledge thereof.

I bet you never heard of a player with no game

I got another good session to report on, but for now, I'm buzzing at home, listening to outkast. One the last Americans I talked to before I came back home was at the HartsfieldJackson, early in the morning. I"m guessing he was in his mid 20's, dressed up ridiculous at a newspaper booth on the concourse, at 7 am. I got my newspaper and he asked me how I was doing, which is a question I savoured, since I was about to leave the south, and I said I'm alright, and asked him how he was doing. He waited a beat and said he was alright, even if he was "screaming on the inside." He asked where I was headed and I said Taiwan, and he asked if it was Taipei or elsewhere. I told him to get the fuck out of the states. Dude, I hope you are well.

Nonskating Yakitori

Hanging out with friends outside of skateboarding is weird. One of the two times that I've hung out with rmj when skating wasn't even remotely involved was tonight, when we met for yakitori at the yakitori spot. We both had just got off from work and showed up in adult work clothes. We got compted a lot of food. If we had been soaked in sweat and had some skateboards with us, I don't think that would have happened. But maybe. It's a good yakitori spot.

philosophy session

SenioreC and I went up to the slappy curbs and slappied some curbs. Bums were on the ledges, so we we went to the ampitheatre. He got what he was going for, after lots of effort. There was a good discussion, I mostly talked over him and said mostly untrue obnoxious opinions, but somehow my friends put up with that shit. Ok, having reread that, it was probably a pretty shitty discussion for him. I was happy when we hillbombed back home.

My knees don't work today.

A ghost must have attacked me in my sleep

I didn't notice it for some time, because I gave myself heatstroke and didn't skate for a week, but my ollie elbow has a long, wide gash. I didn't notice it because without sweating, the gash never stung. I skate tonight. It stung, so I noticed this mysterious gash, all night. One reasonable explanation is alien abduction, but in Taipei, it's unlikely that no asshole on a really loud scooter would notice the spaceship, no matter what time of day. So I'm forced to consider a less likely option: ghost attack.

It wasn't there when I had my first session back, which was primarily a slappy session on a fair to middling hot ass night in Taipei. I did bullshit tricks by myself for hours, and was willing to go home extremely happy, then I hit a pebble trying one last bullshit trick, and ate into a deposit of guano so large that it would have been merited and an invasion of taiwan by foreigners, in the 1870s.

I went home. Both, back to my apartment, and back home to the south, to see the family. As always, the food was the best in my life. I hope my fiance's mother never reads any of this, I would be mortified. If she did, she wouldn't get this far into. But if she did, I just want to let her know that words cannot describe how much I love going to visit, just on the food alone. It doesn't hurt that we set up a pool table in the basement either. Maybe I could eventually move away from Taipei.

We took the bullet train down in the day, and I was shocked by how clear Taipei was of pm2.5. The mountains were crystal clear. Then we went through a tunnel, and into Taoyuan, and it was like Rachel Carson had painted it all. Visibility was about 1 mile, everything was grey, except the fields our food is grown on, which were up close. More than a few hundred meters away, everything fades into a blur of grey poison. Taoyuan must be the worst place in Taiwan, and maybe one of the worst places in the world. I keep hearing anecdotes about how horrible Chinese pollution is, but I can't believe it's much worse than Taoyuan (ok, I think Indian pollution is worse, and I can personally verify that African pollution is definitely worse). Anyway, civilized countries don't have pollution that blots out of the sun.

I wish I had eaten more food.

When we got back, it was almost ideal skating time. I went out just before midnight. I played a game called 'random skateboarding walk through taipei.' Here's how you play it: drink 3L of water. Buy another L. When you get to an intersection, do the biggest {redacted} you possibly can spin, but don't try to land it, just let it fly. The nose points where your skateboard wants to go. It's a perfect game for any city that is flat and compact, like Taipei. My skateboard quickly took me to a spot in my neighborhood where I had to try something at the limit of my ability before I had properly warmed up. I never made it. I did however, shave the hairs off my leg with the new grip tape. I finished the water, and went for a piss and a beer. I skated the streets, and sidewalks and the cracks and the tiles and the worse tiles, and the loose tiles, and the marble, and the granite and cruised almost perfectly randomly around the 1 km circle whose center is my house.

The game brought me to a granite curb under the bridge and over the sewer drainage river. I got some TB's and skated it as hard as a curb can be skated in the smoke of smoulding city (when I got home, I spit a dozen grey loogies into the sink. I can't remember if I washed them out or not. Lzyk is going to be pissed off in about 3 hours if I forgot). I landed whatever nerdy shit I could think of, and bombed the little run back to the stoop. TB's and a light breeze were the reward. Traffic was heavy until I gave up and went home.

I almost bought a video game. It wouldn't load, so I got a refund. I'm glad. This was better. I could have just wasted my time tonight.

A new strategy

In order to combat the daily humiliation of not being good enough at speaking mandarin, I instituted a policy of No-English-Outside-of-Home-or-Work-Unless-I'm-Skating-With-Laowai. On the upside, this means that lzyk's poketmon session suddenly becomes a language and beer drinking session for me, as we wandering around the city looking at skatespots. On the downside, she flipped her shit in the first two hours. It ended up with us walking around Taipei, me repeating 聽不懂 until her meltdown. Doesn't matter. Blanket statements are never true, but taiwanese women are not the patient type. Promises usually aren't true. I promise that I won't be speaking english unless I'm at work, at home, or skating with the homies.

My First Deathmetal Show (in Taiwan)

In the past, I've complained about the lack of music around Taipei, when I didn't have anything else to complain about. As it turns out, there is at least one top notch metal band in Taiwan, and at least one top notch venue. The novelty of the production was a great part of its charm, so I won't go into detail. I am glad I went. I am grateful to 小t for taking me there.

Most painful injury since the neck slam

It is no coincidence that after the sweatiest skate night of my life, including pouring sweat out of my shoes, I woke up with the sensation that a voodoo priest was using a hot knife to cut the calf muscle off my effigy. It was like getting tazed but only in my calf. Ok, I don't actually know what it's like to get tazed. I imagine it sucks. This sucked. A lot. I went from dreaming about landing [censored] on the tall rail at the bridge, to shouting in agony, before I realized I was awake. Maybe I should eat more bananas, I hear they have uranium in them. At the end of the day, it still feels like I got punched in the calf as hard as possible.

This has happened once before. It was in the old apartment in 大稲埕. I should have never left. Anyway, I can't remember the skate day, but I do remember the cramp. Last night's session was much more memorable. Tomorrow night is white valentine's, or some other valentine's, so we have to go spend lots of money at a restaurant and so on. I have most of Wednesday free, so hopefully I can accomplish something then. It sucks to know that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and not skate and then go back to sleep. 

Taiwanese people know how to receive gifts.

Summer time, and the livinseasy

When I went to America, and sorry about this, skateshops of Taiwan, I found that prices are 1/3 to 1/5 the price of Taiwan, depending on the equipment. At the most extreme, a decent blank in America is about $12 USD online (admittedly, I've heard of local blanks here around the same price, but it's not quite up to par, even for blanks). Because I am not an idiot, I bought some stuff and flew it back home with me. I gave most of it out as gifts, because gift-giving is a facially important activity here, and also, I get 3 to 5 times the gift credit of what I spent in America. The gifts were well-received. I always hated gift giving, until this time. I hope I can learn how to receive gifts as well as these dudes.

The bridge was almost empty tonight, allegedly because PocketMan Go has come to taiwan. ZW didn't flinch, and we skated it with some young bloods. One sawty's arm was in a cast, but he refused to give in to Pokemon. A tiny kid in basketball shoes ripped around as best he could, mostly following us at full speed. He has what it takes.

I have never been so sweaty. I don't know how it's possible, since it was only 28 at midnight, but I poured sweat out of my shoes when I took them off.

I skated north after detente, and knocked down some TBs and fami food on the way. I was pretty happy by the time I got the midget marble hubba, so I skated it for a bit, until security came out to watch. I came back towards them to throw away my empty can and food trash, and they smiled and waved, but then froze up when they saw my hulk hogan/j. dill stache. The only thing that gets more negative attention in asia than a beard is a hulk hogan mustache. lzyk already announced that I have to shave the rest of it off tomorrow, but then tried to start a civil war about it when I got home, so I'm trying to suck up my nuts and wear it to work in the morning.

I met a new skateboard spirit

Some people can skate anything. I can't. Changing the shape of the deck means basically starting over. Fortunately, it's not really about the tricks. Tonight was perfect example.

I hadn't skated with 小t since I came home, so we met up at 西門站, where is a large 90's style marble plaza. It mostly turned into a beer and betel session, just messing around and doing tricks inbetween discussions about the sort of things you discuss in a skate plaza at midnight on a saturday while you drink and smoke and chew taiwanese chewing gum. 

Taiwanese chewing gum is a small green nut, with some kind of astringent nastiness inserted into the middle of it, I think it's lime. Not that kind of lime, I mean the kind of lime you would use to remove all your teeth by rotting them out, which is exactly what it does. It also gives you a mild buzz, not unlike it's redneck cousin dip, which by happy coincidence, has a similar effect on your gums and teeth and oral cancer sites. As you chew it, you spit out a steady stream of dark red happy juice. The best parts of town are stained by it, all over the benches, walls, sidewalks, etc. 

On this occaision, I  lost much face by instinctively wretching it up as soon as the flavor hit my mouth. Imagine taking a few cigarette butts, soaking them in stale beer, then drying them out and chewing them for five minutes. It's not exactly the flavor of binlang, but it's also not that far off. You know it's not really the best drug if you have to have strippers to sell it to you. 

At any rate, we all parted ways and I skated home through 大同區. I hate this deck. The tail is too steep for me. 

ghostin the hood

lzyk and I went to a yuppie pop up bar in 大稻埕 so that we could quarrel in public. It is my all time favorite neighborhood in Taipei. It's the only place left with the Japanese era brick architechture; business on bottom, family home on top (sidewalks with 5 kickers every block, but I was arguing, not skating tonight) beautiful taiwanese flowers and ferns growing out of gutters and cracks and arbors and folding sunshades.

It's some kind of beer week festival in that neighborhood, organized by a group of new bars. Most of the area is pretty much empty. I desperately hope the taiwanese people will preserve this jewel of a neighborhood and not replace it with a gaudy glittering monstrosity like the 101 area. But if the development vultures sweep in and eat out the rotting innards of old Taipei, at least I can say I supported it all by buying overpriced hot beer at one of the first yuppie bars to open there.

The bar was pretty awesome. The sweltering heat at 1 am reminded me of drinking at frat bars in georgia, with my white button down shirt sweating through, and my UGA hat stained with sweat and my pastel shorts with crocs at the center of a puddle of brah sweat. The bar was hidden away in the second story of one of those japanese era buildings, beautiful and well thought out. Taiwan was beautiful once. I wish I could have seen it before the communist (ok, fascist) era cement wasteland thing happened. At the same time, if the japanese were still running, I think the skating would suck. I hear it's at least as hard to skate in Japan as in my motherland, because of the human terrain.

Anyway, the bar felt more like an awesome house party in 大稻埕 than a proper bar, because the beer was hot, and we seemed to be allowed to explore whatever parts of the building we wanted to; some other early adopters were still hanging out in their shops drinking and chatting, and welcomed us to come down the steps and hang out, and later, the ones upstairs were just as accomodating.

We posted up on some cool (temperature) granite steps somewhere inside the building, so that we could argue at a reasonable volume and not over the blaring techno, and at one point, a someone came up from behind me, going down the stairs, so I moved my beer quickly, so they could go by without kicking it over. They didn't go by, and as I turned to see why not, lzyk asked me why I moved the bottle. No one was there. The only possible explanation is that I had seen a ghost out of the corner of my eye. I've encountered a few ghosts lately, but then again, it's ghost month, so that's neither here nor there.

Unfortunatley, some other laowai

(https://www.google.com.tw/search?q=laowai&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS557US558&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVgbeL66rOAhWIVZQKHbl8AAYQ_AUICCgB&biw=833&bih=613)

showed up, and pissed on my parade. I hate not being the only 外賓, partly for the same reasons that I like street skating. It's a poisonous cycle, I ruin what I love by the very act of doing it. Skating a spot and being the only foreigner at a place I like is like shitting on the side walk; you might get away with it, but if you keep doing it, someone angry dude is eventually going to shut it down.

And that is the point of tonight's warbling: I got kicked out of an MRT station today for standing. I was waiting on lzyk at the gate, inside of the Yellow Line of Doom, and security came out to tell me to leave. I played the foreign card, which means speaking to them en francais if they speak english, so they left me alone and I moved outside of the Yellow Line of Doom. Within about 90 seconds, they came at me again, bro, and pointed at the escalator and invited me to "go, go, you no here, no here". It could have been "no hear", but I'm not sure. I jabbered in french, but they looked pretty pissed, so I rode the escalator outside of the station and waited in the heat. I am proud. Being scary is awesome.  I think it was all because of the beard. Lzyk has been beard shaming me relentlessly.

Which brings me back to the bar argument. Fighting in public is not my thing. We walked back through my favorite neighborhood in silence, under the eaves with relentless, endlessly original tropical flowers and ferns hanging out, and between and on and around and under the bricks that were there before fascism and cement architecture, and eventually stomped our way home. After we went to radio silence, I was just thinking about skating all the those spots we were walking past. I can't wait to skate through there on my new set up. I'm going to set it up tonight so that its constituent parts can simmer overnight before it gets skated.

Ghost month begins

During the 8th month of the year, the gates of hell open and ghosts come out to fuck with people. My first year in Taiwan, I asked Lzyk about which god lived in the temple we were walking by, and drop of water fell out of the clear night sky into her eye, and she took this as a sign to never talk to me about ghost month again. Most of what I know is from wikipedia. For example, if you go in the water, you will die, especially if you go in the water. This is counter balanced by the rest of the year, when you will die of you cross the road or ride in a taxi or a bus.

I celebrated the start of ghost month by skating at the bridge, like how I celebrate the start of most months. I relearned a trick that I haven't landed this millenium, and then snapped my deck 5 minutes later.

Some people don't know this, but skateboards have souls, especially the wooden part, maybe because of all the constituent parts, that is the only one that was once alive. Unless you count stars as living things. I don't.

Anyway, at an earlier point in the night, I had consumed a hilife plastic box of noodles and peanut sauce, which wasn't an important detail in the night until the ghost of my broken skateboard compelled me to step on the edge of the sauce box, that I had littered onto the floor hours earlier. It slug a diahrrea-like, brown, sticky, sandy sauce all up my calf, but mostly down inside of my shoe.

My old skateboard lies broken on the floor tonight, still connected to the trucks. This is an honor I don't normally bestow. Normally, I like to put the new pieces together and let them cook for a night or two, so that they can get to know each other. After all, I have only ever had 2 completes in 20 years. You have to at least keep the hardware.

My old skateboard's ghost struck again on the walk home. I slung it's broken body over my shoulder, and stocked up on beers instead of water. After a few miles, I may have spewed TB foam through my beard in front of a relatively large number of taipeinese people waiting on the last bus. I'm not usually headed home this early, but my skateboard looks like hte bottom of a broken heart tattoo. No one reacted, so I spewed again a few blocks later. Skating the heat is brutal.

the only legitimate rule in S.K.A.T.E.

the berrics sponsored by mountain dew and nike has been a boring youtube channel for a while now, and the most annoying thing about it is the effect it had on skateboarding. Actual human beings have been witnessed in Taipei inviting someone to play skate, and receiving the response "ok I need to warm up first." The game is a warm up, or a way of judging how drunk you are. It is not the new xgames. ok, maybe it's televised form, it's the xgames.

Here is another way you're doing it wrong: s.k.a.t.e doesn't have a judge. You judge yourself. It's a gentleman's game. You're a total fucking piece of shit douche bag if you make the california-finger-circle-in-the-air gesture that means do-over. Only god can judge if the toe hit the floor. And since god doesn't exist, only the person doing the trick can judge themselves. 

You're also a total fucking piece of douche bag shit if you are trying a trick and claim to land it clean but you didn't. Only you can know. Onlookers might not see you fingering the ground with your toe, but I know that you know that you fingered the ground with your nasty big toe. It's a gentleman's game. Character is who you are in the dark. If someone claims to land a trick that you know they didn't, grab your front truck, swing that shit full arc over your head, and smash their collar bone to splinters. If you claim to land a trick you didn't, then grab your skateboard by the hind truck and throw it as high as you can into the air, and then try to catch it with your teeth. 

Also, fuck s.k.a.t.e. That shit is boring. 

I'm going to need a hip replacement

My ollieing hip was aching pretty bad this morning. I'm not old enough for this. I hate thinking that one day, I won't be able to skate anymore. In the meantime, I cruised to the bridge after work and did my best to ignore the heat and the pain. It mostly worked, and although it was crowded, I did what I came to do. SenioreC sent a message as I finished my water bottle, announcing he was up at the river,  and since I wasn't that into skating through the crowd anymore, I rode the orange line up there and met him out by the secret benches. They were still wet from the rain, the water pooled up on the ones that were waxed. I cupped my hands and slung it off the best I could. It turned into a good, calm session there; a cool breezy evening, with lots of people stopping their Ubikes to watch for a minute, and then moving on. SenioreC is well traveled, and a good conversationalist, so we talked about Taiwan and other countries, as the skating died down. Then we cruised down the hill and through the one lane back streets to the 24 hour nightmarket, and where we split some 臭豆腐, and I took home a sack of my all time favorite taiwanese small food, 鹽水雞. Now it's 1 am and I'm exhausted and suffering from the painful hip, but I'm wired. This might be a night when I give up and watch some skate videos.