Dear Element, what happened?

Back when I first started skating again, I found a long long curb spot at the top of the hill in 彰化. It's always a homecoming when I get to skate it again. It's the kind of magic spot where you find out you're able to do things you didn't know you could do. I did three of them. The DIY spot is nearby, but no one was there, until a single solo kid showed up. I embarrassed myself with my terrible mandarin and he talked about school and hiphop. We got out some rails and boxes and so on (they have a whole collection) and enjoyed the crisp, quiet winter air (I skated with a stocking cap on).

Which reminds me. I found a sort of Element outlet stall in 台中. It's been so long since I skated that I didn't realize Element ever made shoes. These shoes were $500, and until today, I have never passed up on $500 skate shoes. I passed up on these. They were the worst shoes I have ever put on my feet, and I have put on $200 night market shoes (in which I learned how to ******** and were still the best skate shoes I've ever had). At first I really thought that some counterfeitters had made fake Element shoes, but then I looked it up, and apparently Element really did make some shoes at some point. At that price, they were almost worth buying for the novelty, but they were so uncomfrotable that I wouldn't have even been able to wear them to work. 

Counterfeit Tequila

We bought a bottle of Don Julio for new year's. the first time I tasted it, it seemed super harsh, but I thought maybe it was just me. Last night I had four drinks of it, and we decided it must be counterfeit. It's like drinking lighter fluid. I've had worse tequila, but this was most definitely not Don Julio. I woke up with the worst headache of my life. I barely moved all day. Whatever this was was not for human consumption. I would say where I got ripped off, but I really can't remember. It's some liquor store by minquan rd.

round eight

leftovers.

calling it quits on the effort to catalogue a speciated list of taiwanese new years foods. it's winding down, but i'm also bored with it.

round seven

1. coffee
2. fried red bean loaf
3. fruit  (i got some funny looks for eating the desert first, but it was worth it. taiwanese fruit is good)
        a. apples
        b. pears
4. soup
     a. mushrooms
     b. corn
     c. clams
     d. scallops
5. baked fatty sticky thin fish. maybe flounder?
6. Flying Fish Roe (i called it airplane fish eggs in mandarin because I can never remember the name       of flying fish) with radish, green garlic stem, and red pepper. Nothing compares to this food. It
    resembles slices of dried hotdogs rolled in crushed peanuts. The flavor is otherwordly, like how           different truffles taste from the rest of the universe. This was awesome.
7. ham hock. until this moment, i had never had pork so delicious and melty and exquisite and I am
    a place that is very proud of our bbq pork. but it was just a prelude to item 8.
8. The Bite. My life is now divided into Before the Bite and After the Bite. It was a plate of grilled
    fatty pepper pork, and the bite I took was entirely fat. it was crispy and black on the outside. It
    a transcendental bite.

Round six

leftovers at 2 am. my back is ruined.

Chewed up in 彰化

It's a 20-30 minute walk up the hill to the brilliant DIY spot the homies here have built. The first spot you encounter isn't much of a spot. It's a three stair drop onto asphault so rough, it might as well be a bed of nails. I always skate it for a second just because I can't wait to get to the better spots. On my first ollie, I stuck the front wheels in the bed of nails and gave myself a stigmata. It bled until the end of the session.

When I got the DIY spot, two guys were folding up the ramps (they designed it all so that it stacks down into a cube for storage, so as not to piss off the thought police. fucking geniuses). They unstacked it even though they didnt recognize me, jsut so I could skate. They have narrow little kicker that I (tried to) roll into off a box and i must have put my wheels over its edge because suddenly, I was rolling off another fall. No matter, because now I pissed, and that helps skating. Right?

Before the entire army of 彰化 skaters showed up, I was trying the longest ** ********** on their box that I ever went for. It's no longer hard to do, just a question of staying on. Right? I did a few and was pleased with msyelf. Then I sort of started to lose my balance on one, but not so much that it would have ended badly if I had just rode it out at another spot. 

This spot is deadly: the surface is painted slick. The boxes are maximum wax. And the whole spot is on a downhill slope. All of this contributed to me trying to ride out the ***** and landing on my back wheels and just when I thought I had made it, smashing myself down in an unsavoury way and wrenching my vertibrae apart. It wasnt the end of the session, but I didnt really do anything after that. Total elapse time stigmata fall : five minutes. 

彰化's skaters get better every time I see them. It's a big happy friendly crew. This time I met one of their homies who's been living in Sydney for a few years. There were too many people there to be politely sociable, but I managed to say goodbye to everyone (I think) before the 10 minute hill bomb back home. The streets were deserted, by Taiwanese standards, but I hopped off a few times, because after three slams, I reckoned the fourth one would be death. Also, I'm a coward and some sections of it are terrifying. 

Round Five

1. Coffee
2. Vegetarian Soup
      a. assorted mushrooms
      b. the unfortunately named 'jew's ear fungus' (auricularia auricula-judea) which is still labled as            such in English throughout Taiwan.
      c. assorted tofus
      d. a tofu thing that is very like meat
      e. taro
      f. a thing that is sort of like an olive, but reminds me of a big fat round cockroach, with the same
         mushy consistency when you bite it, that leaves fragments of papery shell between your teeth.
         I think it's mean to be just for flavoring, but I ate them anyway.
3. Fried red bean paste cake
4. Fried sweet rice ball cake
5. taiwanese sausage
6. pepper pork
7. dried dark mushrooms
8. fried eggplant (i think it's egg plant, might be something else)
9. lima beans with spices
10. shredded tofu with pepper
11. dogan (hard tofu)
12. bitter greens with ginger
13. fried breaded sweet potato
14. spring roll

Round Four

1. Coffee
2. Pears
3. Pistachios

Round Three

1. Syrah
2. Hotpot
    a. milky soup
    b. spicy soup
         i.squid
              aa. dried
              bb. fresh
          ii. tofu
              aa. white soft cubes
              bb. off white harder foam rectangles
              cc. skin
              dd. brown and firm with veins
          iii. shellfish
                aa. fist sized scallops
                bb. clams
          iv. vegetables
                aa. taro
                bb. bean sprouts
                cc. cauliflower
                dd.  bitter greens
                ee. sweet cabbage
                ff. yellow corn
                gg. baby corn
           v. fish balls
                aa. round
                bb. squeezed from the goop tube
                cc. sliced to show the pink food coloring pattern on the inside
                dd. big ones filled with some kind of rich paste on the inside
                ee. big ones without filling, partially quartered
            vi. shrimp
            vii. meat
                  aa. lamb
                  bb. pork
                         bbi. fatty pork
                         bbii. not fatty pork
                  cc. beef
                  dd. connective tissues from joints, very small, maybe pork
            viii. dumplings
                  aa. sacks with pork and herbs inside
                  bb. yellow with pork
                  cc. brown bumpy tubes
                  dd. white with pork and spices inside
            ix. mushrooms
                  aa. giant mushrooms
                  bb. very big mushrooms
                  cc. big mushrooms
                  dd. medium mushrooms
                  ee. smaller mushrooms
                  ff. little mushrooms
                  gg. very little mushrooms
                  hh. tiny mushrooms
                  ii. very tiny mushrooms like thick hair
3. fried clumps of breaded sweet potato
4. fishball and parsley soup
5. lamb and ginger rice
6. taiwanese sausage
7. spring rolls
8. steamed bitter greens
9.  red been cake
10. armagnac
11. bananas
12. oranges
13. nuts
       a. pistachios
       b. walnuts
       c. peanuts
       d. pecans
            aa. candied
            bb. salted
13. tequila          

afternoon quickie

in only a single day of shutting down the factories for the holiday, taiwan's toxic, choking air has cleared out and we have completely blue sky and the brightest sunshine I can ever remember. I celebrated by heading out towards a flatground spot I know with a small gap in the middle of it. it's not much, but it's just big enough to force you to pop your tricks, or at least try them at a reasonable speed. i never got there. 

i tried to cut through a school yard on the way and found another flatground spot with lots of very tiny cracks, none of which were a problem. it also has a two stair with a flat granite ledge coming off it, and semi circle painted curbs. it was so hot that i skated shirtless, which is a first for a few months. i didnt have any wax, but the curbs didnt really need it. then something happened to both of my front bearings at the same time, and they refused to spin. i walked around the school, and it's got 4, 6, 8, and ten stairs, most of which have big fat handrails. There is also a series of weird, curved wallrides. Nine more days of skating and eating to go.

Round Two

1. Left over coffee
2. Left over ginger lamb rice
3. Fried Rice
    a. pretty much the architypical fried rice, with egg and peas and carrots. If anything, lighter than
        most fried rice.
4. Meatballs
     a. Very moist, in an oily sauce. Slighty smaller than a baseball. I think it's pork and green onions
         and spices inside.
5. Greens and garlic
      a. flash boiled, garlic is fried. greens are sweet like spinach, but i was informed that it's not                     spinach. i still think it's spinach though. maybe i was using the wrong word.
6. Butter cabbage
       a. all cabbage here is sweet, not nasty and weird like the american kind. this cabbage is steamed              slathered in butter.
7. Fried Rolls of Happiness
        a. vaguely like my pre-lzyk redneck concept of what a spring roll is. Fried, breaded
            meat and vegetable and herb cylinders. Infinitely better than my pre-lzyk, concept of what a
           spring roll is.
8. Sausage
        a. Taiwanese sausages are ubiquitous. They are dense, very oily, sweet, and unusually fatty,
             with a crisp skin that pops noticably when you bite in. Best with a chunk of raw garlic.
9. Pepper pork with green onion
         a. more like a vertical slice of bacon. the fat is still a little crunchy. This one is the highlight of
            the meal. it's served with diagonally sliced green onions. it's just barely spicy and very very
             pig greasy. exquisite.
10. Soup
          a. radish soup with parsley and fish balls. it's important to get this last so you can wipe your
              bowl with the daikon, so it's easier to wash in the sink when you're done.

Round One

1. Coffee
       a. papua new guinean coffee. Too good for me to really evaluate, but we made a show of                      inspecting the bag and so on. Orders of magnitude more expensive than what I'm accustomed            to. Disappointingly not very caffeinated.
2. Ginger Lamb Stick Rice
       a. brown sticky rice that stays clumped together with little pieces of fried lamb and slices of                    ginger. Served from a large plastic bag. oily and rich. sticks to your stomach all morning.

arctic skating

i tried to skate street for a minute but it was only 6pm and the traffic and pedestrians kept me from getting a clean run up to the curby ledges by the house. i gave up and went to the only place you can skate at 6pm in taipei on a weeknight. it was cold. I got a pair of long ********s in a row, and a **** to ******** but it zipped out and i didnt land it. lzyk called to go get ramen, and i left before most of the crew showed up, but some other dudes were there doing amazing things, and bf was there. we talked about rumours of a new plaza with somekind of plastic surfaces that dont need wax to slide. seems impossible. i ll believe it when i see it. rmj and the homies are going out street skating in this perfect weather, but i have to work early. god speed, gentlemen.

tropical winter

this is the first year i really felt routinely cold in the winter here. last night, after the camo tie event, lzyk and i met with her friends and tchris at a videogame bar. it's not one of those internet cafes where people get their throats slit and you can buy cheap noodles. in fact, you can't buy cheap anything there. but you can buy good beer and play just about every console ever made. i stopped playing video games around the time that controllers began to use a toggle to walk around and a seperate toggle to look around, so i was less enthused as the rest of them, but it's a pretty fun bar, and would be an exceptionally awesome if i was into video games. we dropped off lzyk's friends in the promised land (林森北路) at their hotel (they are upstanding citizens and I dont think they knew just where they were going to stay, or "live", as we say around here.) i insisted we go for a walk, since we were already there, and it was already after 0200. this was a good idea. you never know what you're going to get when you wander through the taxis, binlang, neonlights, garbage, foodstalls, racks of lace panties, bras and other assorted paraphenalia for hte career women who work in the area. 

i wanted to show tchris how to gamble for sausage (not a euphemism, it's just the most fun way to buy sausages here) but we stumbled through the conversation with the cook who finally made us undestand that if we win, it's going to take him 15 minutes to cook our winnings, because the line was too long. we passed and found the best pig parts stand anywhere on earth. i've been there before a few times, and it's the jewel of 林森北路. i was slightly disappointed that no prostitutes had accosted tchris yet, but i think it was because lzyk was there. tchris didnt like the looks of open air offal, so we waded through the taxis to the other bank of the street, where he had spotted the telltale red and black yakitori lanterns. we picked out the components of the feast and got invited to a table of women who shared their red wine with tchris, because he is 帥哥. they also ordered oodles of food and lzyk got a couple of rounds of tb's for the table.  tchris and i practiced our mandarin (this sounds much more responsible than it was) and lzyk gritted her teeth and talked to weirdo ghost women in the redlight district until 5 am. she is the perfect woman. thanks lzyk, i know that really isn't your favorite activity. then she woke up a few hours later to go sightseeing with her friends. she bought me a shuangxi stamp, the origins of which are too convoluted to go into here. 

i suffered through the day regretting those last half dozen tallboys. i only went outside when lzyk insisted i do so to pick up the turkish food she was dropping off for me. i think she was trying to show off how well she treats me to her friends. she came back home as i was returning to something like a human state, about dark. she fell asleep with her clothes and make up on, and is still asleep nearly 12 hours later. i woke up to the scream of the white ferrari that tears around taipei late at night, around 0230. i tried to go back to sleep, but i m not good at that, so i went for a walk instead. it is really cold. you can't taste the dioxins in the air anymore from the tire factory fire in taoyuan. the city feels unusually empty. while it's nice to never need more than a hoody, i wish i didnt feel cold in my house. we dont have heaters here. i wish i had skated.

the only reason we have knees is for them to hurt

god bless teh bridge; my next session will not be at the bridge. this one was almost totally empty, even though it was friday night. maybe this is because it was down into the single digits, and was cold even for me. I thought zw would show up but he couldnt because riding a scooter for 45 minutes would be frozen suicide. the metal band showed up for a quick beer under the bridge before practice, and then two homies i didnt say a proper hello to came up to play some skate. we did, and it was fun. a new americanish guy came up in the meantime and we ended up skating till well after lights out, despite the bitter, bitter cold. he is learning *********s, which he didn't make but tried at something like full speed. on the other sider, a couple of taiwaneseish guys were trying ******** *****s on the rail, and one of them got his first one while i was drinking some water. mutual joy is a strange thing to participate in. my knee hurts. karma for too much bridge skating. time to take a day off. i have another unpaid work function tomorrow, but at least this one is catered. it's a black tie event, but i m thinking of making it a camo tie event, since i have a camo tie.

rogue wave

I got there early and it was nearly empty, but not for long. after supper, it was as crowded as saturday afternoon. but unlike saturdays, noone was sitting on rails or standing on a scooter between the pillars. the rhythm of the bridge is a strange and a little hard to learn. because it's narrow, you have to time runs between people going at you in the opposite direction. this usually works. it's a little like skating in a long thing bath tub. too bad it doesnt have transition all around it, that would actually be ok.

like a kid sloshing back and forth in a tub, sometimes the waves of skating build up in the just the right way so that everyone charges from one end to the other more or less all together. it is awesome to behold. while i am generally not interested in footage from the bridge, i'd like to see bit of three dudes on the box at the same time, at maximum speed. fucking awesome.

many many people showed up by 20 00 but lzyk was one of them and she stared me down from entrance and we went to eat dim sum. we didnt get home till well after midnight.

my knee hurts and i have lots of work to do, so i m going to the bridge again. too many bridge nights in a row

I feel like I live here now

we moved a few months ago. tonight i was exhausted from work and went to see who was at the bridge in teh last minute sbefore lights out. rmj was there and we up the road to my seven and had a brilliant and wellspoken conversation on the stoop for hours. the cops came up on their round, adn gave us a peace up, then took off on their way. the tricycle lady was there, and the trash dragger went by on his scooter, and the old man who doesnt like me walked by four times. i loved this neighborhood quickly, but now i feel like this neighborhood loves me back. bonus: it's five minutes walk from the bridgeo n a rainy night.

also a taxi driver raped some women with rohypnol in some yogurt, so if you come to taiwan, don't take anything from the taxis. meanwhile, they've banned uber.

skatevideo evaluation metric

ideally, i want to see people i've never heard of skating spots i've never seen doing tricks i wouldn't think to do there, in a line. points are subtracted for overproduction, overfilming, park footage, slow motion, fast slow fast editing, and lame majestic soundtracks, or lame trap soundtracks, or tame punk soundtracks. points are added for vomiting, getting hit by a car and/or other vehicles, true slams (even in park footage), fights, vandalism, music that will still be cool in 5 years, music that will still be cool in ten years, and music that i think is cool. small points are added for actual skating style, and if the video is nothing but the best tricks i've ever seen, it gets another single, solitary point. if it's financed in anyway by a company that isn't a skate company but wants to pillage skateboarding for money, then it looses all points, except for the getting hit by car points. weird bumps a la adult swim can have a point each, unless i dont like them. substance abuse is awarded points according the substance, with shotgunning a tb at the top of the list. any video without black sabbath or outkast loses 50% of previously allotted points. old people complaining is worth some points. naked women are chauvanist cliche that i should be ashamed of and also get a few points. the ultimate cliche is if watching a given video makes you want to go skate. it should be the most important, but i m giving it zero points, because i always want to go and skate, because i live in taipei, and taipei is the best place to ride a skateboard.

skating when angry is hard but the weather was perfect

it's not really a gym session if you don't count tricks or consider what you just did or plan on what to do next. after most of a day lost at an unpaid training session, i tried to stay in the moment at teh bridge. it was a good moment so i cruised around the local area annoyed security, but never for more time that it took them to raise their chain mail gates and tell me to leave. i was already 500m down the road by the time they made it outside. skate ethically, you assholes. i visited a small plaza right by my house; it's all slate, with a three down and three up, and stairs around nearly the whole thing. It's a lovely spot, but i cut it short so as not to piss off my neighbors. actually, i was just tired.

skating when tired is hard but the weather was perfect

edit* we had a meal at 寶島燒創意食堂, which is the best yakitori in taiwan, and in the running for second best bar in taiwan. it might also be called bodoso, that was never clear, even though i've been a regular for a year or two.

it's hard to have a good time skating on night after an allnighter, but it helps if when you get off work and show up around midnight, j is there, filming homies across the street. directly across the street from the bridge is a long long bank, some of which you have to ollie into and some of which you can roll up. j hollered at me as i rolled up and he taught me a new trick. one of his homies got a line on video. i felt like i was skating in lead boots. lzyk was working across the street at mosburger (i might have been working late, but it's 0230 and she's still working, at least i got to skate for a minute) but she didnt finish in the time i allotted for her, so i got a blue beer and skated the red curbs outfront. finally, we walked home. this homemade skateboard is too heavy, and the tail is too big. it mutes the pop. i don't complain about these things much, so it honestly is a terrible shape.

tweaked neck = no skating. no skating = no sleeping. shitty way to start to the week.

it was raining anyway.

chasing authenticty

it was well after midnight and i got the heebie jeebies and had to go skate. last time out, i killed the last board i will ever skate that someoneelse made. i put the old trucks on on the rooftop adn let it all settle for a day so that the components would get used to each other, and even though it wa s humid and wet and nasty night, i took it out for a skate. i m glad i did, but then i 've never not been glad i went to skate street in taipei after midnight, even when i woke up hungover and and aching from a slam.

i could still hear the rain dripping from the eaves of the plastic poor people's roofs next door, and i had to carry my homemade virgin deck all the way to the bridge. a trio of dudes were partying and the blonde haired one ate shit after hitting a rock on his first push after a break. I deeply appologize for laughign at you man, but that shit was too fucking funny.

I ******** a bit and triedto get used to my bootlegged homemade disasterpeice. the tail is too big and the wheelbase is longer than before, which ididnt consider would be so difficult to get used to, but it is. however, it finally feels like my legs have room to move, so i think this is going to have been a good change. also, handpainting is fucking brilliant. instead of chipping shit away like i thought on ********* and ********* (i cant honestly do *********** yet), the shellac of clearcoat is a like a shield of righetousness and none of the paint has come off in anyway shape or form. also, it's so fucking slick on the bottom that i can't do my normal tricks because they all shoot out from under me, but i m sure i can adapt.

a friendly kid came over and we skated for a long minute. i went to get us a couple of bers and saw some homies on the way out of band practice. taipei is my teenage wetdream. the new kid thought that writing 'purify' all over my skateboard is 'terrifying', which is what i was going for, but now i'm having second thoughts. i want skateboarding to be pure, and ideally, i'd love to sell some skateboards to taipei skaters, but i also don't want to get confused with any sort of trumpist white surpremacy. maybe i ll just go back to being married to skating, and not worry so much about purifying it. anyway, this kid was skating under the bridge on a riany night at 3 am and drank a beer, so I think he qualifies for the purity aspect. also, he might or might not know about some statistics. lastly, i think he knows the song 'versace'.

dear ryan gallant, you made the best skate shoes i've ever had in my life. the soles wore out at the exact moment that the uppers wore out, but that was just an pleasant coincidence. most off all, they lasted a long time and had boardfeel like nothing i've had since the offbrand nightmarket white shoes i got when i first came ot taiwan and learned how to ********. i'm sorry that i only paid $600 for your pro models, but i found them in a weird dumpy dadaocheng nightmarket stall, piled up on the floor. my only regret is that i didn't buy more pairs of them. i lvoe how they are plain and unassuming skate shoes, just one color suede and good rubber, without the dildoes and whirlygags that you find on certain other brands these days. now that every trick makes my feet bleed from top and bottom, i will have to give them a sky burial at the bridge, and i think it will be farther up than any previous pair of shoes so far (the closer to the entrance of the bridge, the higher the honor). admittedly, there is a three finger wide rip across the inside of the popping foot, which caused a significant amount of pain in the last month or so, but that's what i get from buying them from animal chin himself in a dank alley in taipei by the river. i wish i had kept a collector's pair, but my house is so small that i wouldnt have had anywhere to put them, so i haveto skate everything i have until it's destoryed.

i knew i woulnt sleep after the bridge session, and the sttreets had semi dried, so i cruised the neirhgobood and ********** and ******* some curbs and marble around teh area. when i got back to the 4way park i hada spark of engery and *********** the stage that I've been eyeing for a few months. I got it on the second try. i also found a new secret metal curb, but it's backside for me so getting it right on cruising nights is going to be a matter of remembering tiny details to give away the location, like what color tiles and what kind of cracks are around.

i love taipei.

superbowl night

this was the big one, this was why we go the gym everyday and never eat too much and never drink etoh.
i came out of the locker room hungry and the first half was totaly domination. I ******* the whole thing that I never ******* before, many many friends showed up so I won't list stupid fake names for them here, a fewof new people were there, included a german and an america. i noticed that i didnt type that last word entirely correctly but this is not the ppoint. the point is that i left my wallet at home and got hungry after a day of suffering through almost no progress at work, so by 5 pm i was at the bridge and by 730 i was starving. i went back for cash and even more homies were there when i returned. the new trick was still in my feet so i did it until i took a fall (some falls are slams, this was one was more progressively painful and took about two seconds from start to finish. not a slam, but there will be an elbow mark for a few days).
my skateboard cracked on the biggest, fastest ******** of my life, and while it's disappointing to break one so soon, it couldnt have gone on a better night or a better trick. rmj and i stooped up at the 7 by my house, and just as i was complainging about my homelife, i noticed a beautiful woman at the table, so i went up to hit on her and it turned out to be lzyk. she handed me a packet of 200 pages of articles to review, and gave me the death march speech because she had locked herself out and had been trying to call me for two hours. fortunately, she bucked up when she saw rmj and was asleep inside by the time i got home. problem delayed.

now it's time to set up the new deck. i have two beers. i should go up on the roof to do it. in fact, i think i will, even though it means putting clothes on and going back outside.

Is there a Taipei style?

no. but also there kind of is. it's a gym training style, localized but friendly, skating the same spot every time,  mostly sober skate parties. this leads to skaters specializing, and deficiency in street skating. There is a chosen few who break this trend, but they are the exception. So for street skaters, a second part of Taipei's style is exploration. Third is skating in the dark at night, and in the crowds in the day ( I always go for the dark option). Fourth is heat, but it's not bad from December to February. There's more, but it'll have to wait. My breaktime is over. Back to wage slavery.

best skate city on earth

around 11 pm, I gave up on accomplishing my professional goals. our appartment bulding has a nice conference room, so i sat in on lzyk’s conference call to america, and felt guilty and bad. 

so i went skating. it wasn’t supposed to be much. i went up the street to the micro curb and did some things i’ve been fantasysizng about. i should have gone home and kept working, but it was only midnight, and i was miserable about work, so  then i went the old hood and ******* the median at a spot I’ve been fantasyzing about for 18 months. i also skated a beautiful grey stone mini plaza with 200 feet of granite stair, and a mirror smooth black marble manny pad. then I went to a granite spot and suddenly was making everything i tried there, no matter how ridiculous. i hadnt skated there in about a year. maybe i have improved after all. last year i had one flatground trick and one ledge trick i wanted to learn, and while i landed them, i didnt really learn them. i learned the ledge one tonight though. i got it first try, adn then again and agian and again.  then I blasted down linsen and found a metal bank to ledge (all metal) and wasnt exactly kicked out, but got such a crowd going that I decided to leave the getting kicked out part for another night. at this point, i might have started to get get lost. many many spots found me. further down linsen, i wandered to another bank/granite grind spot. i had a tb at the four kind hubba, just for fun. I ****** a spot there that I had forgotten about even trying. then i got pretty lost. i crossed linsen three more times and some other streets several times, over a few hours. in the mean time, i skated a marble down-sloping ledge that i used to hit all the time on the way home from the bridge, but now it’s out of hte way, unless i get totally lost. a murderous taxi driver nearly killed me, careening blindly through a redlight at a narrow crosswalk, but i saw the flash of his headlights a split second before and jumped backwards, mysteriously injuring my ankle in the process. 

one hour of sktating turned into five. my feet hurt. I know barcelona is supposed to be amazing for skating, but i just cant beleive it’s better than taipei.

fado and busch and all nighters on the weekend

I think I've become partially Taiwanese. It was 3 am on a sunday night and I was working (I'm going to end up losing the whole month of january to work. best skate weather month. there is a line sticker of a man rolling over and over. i dont know what it means, but i think it's appropriate for losing january to work). I went outside for a blue beer (flavorless but TB's have been a gamble lately; either decently bad or completely skunky) and a series of calls back home and a walk around the block.

it's the most perfect skate night ever, bar none. not skating tonight feels like cheating on a girlfriend.

I got back home and put on cristina branco so that she can sing me through this brutal worknight.

purist hypocracy

I don't like skate videos because I think they betray what skateboarding is. As soon as you film something, its soul is stolen, and each time someone watches it, the soul gets worn off until it disappears forever. One day, sports center is going to have skateboarding high lights from the past 24 hours with some peice of shit talking over the footage. Tricks happen when they happened, not on endless loop.

All that being said, I love street footage, especially of sketchy but heroic tricks, especially in a city, especially at night. In particular, videos filmed mostly at night and all in the same city are the best. Videos with well chosen music are almost always improved, but I stop watching at the third park trick, no matter what. Also, the entire video shouldbe  obvisouly flimed in the same season.
Over edited videos suck. It goes without saying that any park footage should be burned or deleted. scooters and roller blades and wiggle boards in skateparks make my day.

Here's who does it right: certain groups of dudes in new york city. Their videos make me not only want to go skate, but to go skate in their city. Because it looks hard and because it looks so different from taipei. It doesn't hurt that around teh time I started skating, I went ot new york with my class on a field trip and I saw someone ollie the highest popped ollie I've ever seen, over a manhole cover, cruising through traffic at 9 am. anyway, doesnt matter.

my point is this: all you can eat and drink hotpots are a good way to avoid doing work when you have to get work done on the weekends.

If I wasn't skating, I'd probably be a kleptomaniac.

everything was the best that it can be

I have work to do, so I went to the bridge to skate and drink and so on instead. The youngun from before was there and borrowed my skateboard while I talked to people. She should try skating more. It's fun.

Everyone showed up except except for the foreigners, and even some of them were there. I ignored the stiches in my side and went through about 5 hours of drizzle skating. after the lights went out, we posted up where we were. god bless teh bridge.

we partied and watched the traffic go by and discussed the finer points of things in general. Drifting across teh city on the way home, I realized it was kind of wet on the ground, but not too bad. I found teh smallest curb in taibei and (it's actually a bank to curb) and skated it for a while. It's about 1/8 inch high, but the wheels lock on. i thought this was so funny taht i kept doing it until i finished a round, and then went to get another, and came back.

Then it rained more, but very suddenly, and I had to walk back home, because the sidewalks under the eaves are slicker than goatswiddle when it gets wet.

everything was the best that it can be.

pm 2.5 kills people

Moe's last night skating in Taibei. we went to the bridge and met some homies, one of whoms keys I lost beause he soiled my apartment on new years with regurgitated gin and tonic. I didn;t lose his keys as revenge, just as an afterthought. actually, i m not even sure that they are lost, sorry dude. also, never puke in my apartment agian. also alos, i thought maybe i dropped them at the bridge somehow, so i went back and ended up skating around the area for another hour.

Moe's last trick in Taiwan (that I saw) was the most stylish (and buzzed to drunk) ***** *** **** I have ever seen. Thanks man, hell of a goodbye.

 I woke up early and went to do grown up things. Being busy is hard to reconcile with street skating, since the crowds and traffic make it impossible before 23 00, and skating after 23 00 makes it impossible to get anything done in the morning. By the time we got back home tonight, the city was choking with a poison cloud of pink pm2.5. There is no wind at all. We are stewing in the poison of the factories and scooters. It smells sweet like car exhaust mixed with burning tires. I have to produce sciency shit by tuesday, so I hope it blows out by then, which is probably the next time I'll be able to spend anytime outside. I can't see mitsukoshi or 101 from my rooftop.

Results

For short-term exposure, we found that for every 10-μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 exposure there was a 2.8% increase in PM-related mortality (95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.0–3.5). For the long-term exposure at the grid cell level, we found an odds ratio (OR) for every 10-μg/m3 increase in long-term PM2.5 exposure of 1.6 (CI = 1.5–1.8) for particle-related diseases. Local PM2.5 had an OR of 1.4 (CI = 1.3– 1.5), which was independent of and additive to the grid cell effect.

appologies to Kloog, et al. for the inappropriate citation. 

In Taipei right now, we are at 150+μg/m3

Rob Asked At

Went by Jimi's for some equipment on a drizzly night. A few people I don't know that well were at the bridge, and a few old friends. A brave local came up and asked to try my skateboard. I consented, and my fears that she would bash her brains out falling backwards didn't materialize. I cruised to the bus stop and ate natto with lzyk.

dont be talking to me crazy

met up with a homie at the bridge. warmed up and cruised across the city. stooped up and drank some tbs on variety of stoops and listened to a variety of hiphop. happy new year. ollie up a curb drunk enough for it to be risky. yelled french montana lyrics at passers by. 2017 gone be that year.