counting my curses

I got the flu. Then a sketchy thing happened at home: suddenly, my appartment was filled with the smell of spray paint, like I had just painted the inside walls of the place. I puked. In a minute, it went away. It's not been teh best week.

agony

I can barely walk. The air smells like smoke, even inside my apartment.

I made a mistake

I was bored and momentarily felt like human contact, so I went to skate even though my back hurt. When I went outside, it smelled like burning trash. This acrid, bitter flavour stayed in my mouth for an hour, while my back hurt worse and worse. I didn't know anyone at the bridge. Someone repaired the potholes and the box, and had carefully blocked off the virgin cement with orange cones. The strangers moved the cones and skated on it anyway. I moved them back once, but they got moved again. Just so I didn't get pissed off about something that doesn't matter and/or stroke out from pm2.5, I went home. I'm still glad I skated, but it was kind of stupid. Now I have some real pain.

when one quarterpipe closes, another one opens

i m trying to paraphrase optimistic quotes, but i'm not good at that. I went out to the build yesterday and it was still there. i skated the ampitheatre and tweaked my back on a *********. When I went home, the qp was still there.

the next day, fm and i went to get the finishing touches and while we were at the store, we got word taht the spot was swept clean, like a ufo cattle mutilation. the udders of the quaterpipe were completely surgically removed, without any trace of blood, as well as the anus, tongue, and one eye. No one saw anything. DIY tip: don't try to build there. I feel like I got kicked in the stomach. On the way home, the foreman sent a message to say we might get a chance to build somethings at the bridge. at least that probably won't get destroyed right away. we'll see what happens. having lzyk out of town sucks, especially with the injury. i had been planning on spending every night in the streets. the weather is perfect.

the best bank in taipei

my elbow hurts

the troups couldnt be rousted to finish the qp. someone took the time to find it, then put "danger" tape on it, which represents at least an hour of "work". i think we have a 25% chance of complete the project, much less skating it.

since we couldnt roust the troops, most of the troops went to the bridge. it's getting warm, but not exactly hot. it was a weird night for good weather, on a friday night, because only people i know well were there, and only a half dozen of them. we all put in a good 90 min and lights went off, so i went north. rmj is injured for at least a couple of weeks, but he is always down for a kirin walk, so we mosyed across taipei, from my own nieghborhood through some kind of portal into a place i've never been, down back allies and across weird streets, and it started raining, and we talked lots of shit. so much shit, that when we came around a certain corner, he offered the sentence "do you want to see the best bank in taipei?"

rmj knows taipei better than be. i said yes. we went there, not 10 minutes skate from my house. it's a 10 foot black marble bank, dark at night, but not bad for those of us who skate in the city at night. it looked like the black marble monolith from 2001, at a 45 degree angle. I put down my beer, and gleefully pushed to it a few times. I didn't even expect to makeit to the top, just maybe a kickturn. there was no plan. it will immedeatly become apparent that in my joy of seeing this bank, i did no research waht so ever. i have no excuse.

street spots are weird adn hard. you have to research them. this spot has a .25 inch gap betwettn the beautiful black marble and the floor. if you know it's there, you can ride up it as easily as if it was perfect. i didnt know it was there, and it wasnt. so i went into the 1/4 inch executioner at full speed, buzzed enough to never notice until i was slamming into the black marble, but no t so buzzed that i didnt put my elbow down into it first. slamming into marble at speed is a beautiful thing. there is no scraping, just a pressure sore as big as my fist. The pain is in the bone, not on the surface.

anyway, we drank more and talked more shit until i couldn't avoid going home.

lzyk goes to baltimore soon. i used to keep a sig on the nighttable. i hope this wore off on her.

tea eggs and tap water

we spent all our money on cement and quarterpipe supplies. It's going to be a stark couple of weeks. I'm not declaring defeat, but we couldnt finish the qp in the alloted time, so it's sitting unattended until tomorrow night at the earliest. I'm terrified that it's going to get torn down before we can finish, and it will all have been for nothing, excepting of course, the experience of having made a mistake, with friends who are worth it.

I skated home across the city, but each spot had  tiny curse, it was either wet from cleaners, or a cop road block was just across from the ledge i wanted to skate, or a truckload of gravel was inexplicably spilled across the run up. i gave up and met lzyk at mosburger. she's been working 22 hours straight. i cant understand willful wage slavery.

je m'en fout de gwinnett

This has nothing to do with skating.

French rap has now almost caught up with English language rap. Admittedly, catching up is not the same as overtaking, like in f1, in hiphop, and other things. Just ask china. Catching up was the easy part.

French rap used to be a 1985 american hiphop in 2005, but now it's 2014 hiphop in 2017. In other words, they're only as far behind as california.

I tried to listen to german hiphop when those homies were here, but I can't understand much. I like the idea of judging flow based on flow alone, but that got me into mc dragonface face, for a short time, before I realized he sucks.

the generation sauvage is like a collective reincarnation of certain american hiphop from the golden ages, over annoyingly trendy american style trap beats. when france has good rap and unique beats, they will have surpassed american hiphop.

and htey're starting to. some of these songs have less of a gwinnett county and more of a kinshasa style. I hope they can evolve away from their icy gwinnett beats and 25 year old tupacish delivery and do something new.

financial compliance

we decided to make the quarterpipe with a metal plate at the base, but that costs a lot of money in taiwan. this is surprising, since taiwan is a steel producing country. we met up under the bridge to pool funds. i skated some, with lots of new faces, and thankfully, no dancers. each cold session is a blessing.

from the east side of taipei to the west

started out at cialiao with zewei but the ledges are still tall. skated the perfect round marble curb.

rode the mrt across the city to hte city hall. skated a new spot with a couple of homies. they were better at it than me. it's a pebble dashed and steep wallride. we cruised around for a while in an area i dont really know, and even when we decided to go home, i managed to get lost, and wander around for a while. eventually, i realized that i had wandered the wrong way, because i found a lost spot from a long time ago. it's a metal bank/ art installation, mellow enough to grind down and up. it has a key hole circle in the middle, and weird polka dot pattern of old old telegraph glass cups on the bank. i tried to grind a lot of unwaxed ledges and curbs on the way home. the ledges always slide, the curbs almost never did. eventually, i got a couple of flower beers in the park by the house, and day dreamed about what to do down the three, and up the three, and through the circle hoop of bricks. i came back and lzyk was still awake, and somewhat critical of my evening.

abort x2

It's the rainy season, so it immediately started raining as soon as I walked out the door and soaked the city. It stopped in an hour, but skating is called off.

build aborted for the night, went skating instead

Six of us met up for the quarterpipe build but it was impossible to get all the materials together, so we carried infill for a while and we went skating. It started out slow, and pretty much stayed that way, but two of the guys had never skated out there with us, so it was was fun to see their though process for skating the ampitheatre. rmj and i stooped up until daylight. i think the same crew all went skating this afternoon, but i didn't feel like moving until just now, at 10pm. hopefully the traffic has cleared out by now. Maybe I'll swing by the bridge and see if I can tag along with someone's street mission.

board meeting

worst pun i can think of. we meet out by the spot to plan for a cementing project. it's been raining hard.

such a winter's day

I swooped over to the bridge after work and it was strangely busy. It was chilly and overcaset and the they were calling for more rain, so I didn't try to go anywhere else. The cement working tools disappeared, so I hope they went to a good home. j and face and a couple of americans i dont really konw where there. The flu is still with me, so I halfassed the session, but I got through most of my bare minimums. It's white valentine's day, but i forgot to get reservations anywhere, and taipei's restaurants get booked thick on holidays, even weird holidays that don't exist anywhere else. I think that means I have to cook tonight.

depression session

I felt bad for myself so I called out of my morning session. Work session that is. I wish I was so awesome that I went straight to skating, but I didn't.
I coughed like I have TB (actual TB, not tb the beer) and slept until 16:00. Taiwan is so rich it's unbelievable sometimes. In a place where the average salary is $800usd/mo, I passed at least $100,000 of immaculate white leather furniture, thrown out on the curb in the rain.  I would have taken as much of it home as possible, but it would have literally filled my entire house, floor to ceiling, and then some. Most of my hallway too. Brand new expensive furniture is routinely left on the curbs for garbage men here, but I have never come across a vein so thick. Maybe I will start a used leather furniture export business, right after I start my flushable toilet paper company. The former is targeting a western market, the latter is for the local one.
I went to the bridge because if I hadn't, then I wouldn't have tried at anything today. It was disappointing, except that I saw passac and a crew of lil homies skating the recently cemented pad.
She Who Must Be Obeyed summoned me to eat at a vietnamese hotpot, but I wasn't very good company, because I wear my heart on my sleeve. We went home and watched The Show. She is about to go to Balitmore, which isn't why I'm unhappy (I don't want ot jinx it, but she didn't get robbed or raped the last few times she went ot hte US, so I'm not so nervous as I usually would be. I'm still nervous though, because lzyk is inept at situational awareness).
I started planning a trip to the east coast during her vacation to America (I called it that tonight and she cursed me out. it's true taht she is flying for 26 hours, then doing 96 hours of sleep/conferences, and flying 26 hours back, but fuck it, that sounds like a vacation for me. I have to teach children not to become Pol Pot, write research that I'm totally unqualified for, and teach grammar from the Economist to grown ups who are younger, smarter, and more successful than I'll ever be. All day conferences in the murder capital of the north east is my dream vacation). Actually my dream vacation is to a surf spot called ********. I went there before with some homies and raised hell. This time, I dont intend to raise hell, but I intend to actually do some surfing and camping. Camping is when you make a small ground fire and sleep in the sand.
My phone charger won't charge my phone, so my alarm won't go off, so now I have to stay up for two more hours before Friday starts. I went for a beer walk, adn the city is completely empty, but a taxi still tried to kill me by screaching his tires through a wet cross walk that I happened to be in. Yellow is the scariest gang color in Taipei.
 I was walking down the covered sidewalks, the empty square void sucking me forward, faster and faster. Skating was on my mind, but these tiles make it slippery as a mirror. Them boys in Portland got it easy, the surface is so rough you can skate even if it rains.

Lastly, a thought on marketing: usually I subscribe to the Hicks school of thought on marketing; if you're in marketing, kill yourself. However, a few nights ago, I had a kirin with a funny sakura graffic on it. It was as good as the first time I tried a sweetwater IPA in Atlanta. It was subtely life changing. I can't go back to busch or bud, and it's because a marketeer made a good label that made me forget what I was drinking and evaluate it on taste alone. Touche.

Lastly Lastly, the non-surfing option is the skating option, which would be to ride the scooter to places I haven't been adn skate things I haven't skated. I'm wary of this one though. In a few weeks, it'll still be the rainy season, and I'd rather surf in the rain than ride a scooter in the rain and then not be able to skate.

Lastly x3, I rode litre bikes for 12 years, and I just can't stand the idea of getting killed by a taxi on a 125. I think I'm going surfing.

old man syndrome

this is how you die: you just dont want to get up anymore. it starts slowly. it takes a long time. you dont want to take so many risks. young skaters dont realize this. it's a disease. we need to vaccinate against it. i went to the bridge on a rainy and we skated and it was good and i got some new things, so did rmj adn homies responded.

i woke up hte next dy and went ot real work. it sucked, adn i didnt skate, and it was raining, so we nt to takitori again at minquan. best place ever. then lzyk adn i plannned our attack on the world under florescent lights at 7, until 3. Then I put her to bed and called my sister to review our strategy, and eventually my phone died.

i hate ambition

yakitori in the cold rain

Spent some time at yakitori by Minchan West Station. It's raining and cold. the lights are kind of magic on the asphalt reflection.

Idyllic Weekend

There is loud rain on teh roof now at 4 am. I'm construct ing this from notes, some of which repeated themselves in the last couple of days. A few nights ago, I had planned to go build a bank with a couple of homies, but complete disorganization and irresponsibility on my part sank the plan. In the end, we would either more the stones and sand filler to the spot but not cement it and risk it getting dispersed, or we could just not do that. We didn't. It's impossible to find quikrete in Taiwan.  I had already arrived at the bridge to pick up my red bucket and trowel when I made a series of phone calls that ended up in aborting the building mission for the night.
syncronicity is a terrible thing in medical research, because you can work hard for something and get fucked. in cementing skatespots, it's awesome.
More people that I know in Taiwan were under the bridge than weren't under the bridge. They had been planning to building some new things before I cemented up the failure of the manny pad in the back. They tried to building it i nthe morning, but the city authority came and interrogated them, so they stacked up the matierals and I met them as they drank beer and palnned the next steps.
We warmed up and a party of myself, rmj, tc, skukkotosan, jieray, and of set out down the sidewalks. we ended up at ximending but on the way hit each spot, clacking over the big squaretiles. We tried the samurai helmets and then mainstation's banks. we spent some time at the yoshinoya metal curbs, which are maybe my most fun new skatespot in taipei.
cruising, sks told me a rumour that some skaters got fined $300k for breaking shit near there at a historic site. Don't skate old shit, you dickheads. Especially if there's a cctv on it.
we all roared around a corner and were suddenly at the plaza. We gleefully showed of a black marble bench so perfect that it looks like the bench from 2001, on it's side. it the smoothest grind of my life. of proceeded to destroy it, by which i mean, skate it well with tricks i've never seen there. It's a tough ledge, so no damage was done the the actual mirror smooth corner. In the future, skateparks will be made out of this species of stone. remember that girl you locked eyes with 20 years ago and never saw again? I imagine this is how of will feel about this bench if he never comes back through taipei.
it's worht mentionging that at the same time, tchris was practciing ******s and slammed hard, standing still. respect. skating is hard, and dues must be paid.
we went up the normal part of the plaza (it's all marble, adn bigger than a couple of football fields, with ledges throughout) because it's closer to the 7 taht always reeks of human shit. I think the clerks must be shitting in a bucket in the back. ximen is a pretty dirty spot. the 7 has the usual beers.
looking up at the hotel windows during the skate session, rmj said "we are currently creating negative yelp reviews".
during beers, tchris critizied me for skating too slowly. he can't *****, but he is right. we all ended up standing in a cirlce and talking shit for an unknown amount of time. cops came up, but the skating was pretty much fizzled by then. they approached me and aksed "do you know this guy"? in english. It was a grainy photo of a maybe a foreigner, who they said was stealing cars. I'm pretty sure I don't know him. they encouraged us to have a good night, and rode off on their neon scooters. it was a pearl of a moment for me.
it started spitting rain, so we all took off. rmj and i walked home under the eaves, 7-11 hopping as we went.

lzyk and i rod ethe gondola and ate pizza and watched movies. I wish I could make her life better. Working in taiwan as a taiwanese is total shit. It's the 18th richest country in the world, but the gini index is so bad that even people working at her level get almost nothing.




coin flips are not random, unless they have infinite outcomes. heads or tails is not random. if you flip a coin and get an elephant, that's not random either, but it's a step in the right direction.

reflections on longboarding

There are two kinds of longboarding. One kind is like real skateboarding, but only with one trick. In the favor of those hobbyists, that trick is a hillbomb, which is rad. In pursuit of this trick, they made longer boards with wheels that chalk up the ground like rally cars and put life on the line, even though they're wearing silly micheal jackson gloves and goofball bmx helmets. They are definitely a step above downhill speed roller bladers, but that's only because those guys are roller bladers, and also maybe because that doesn't exist.
A second kind of "longboarding" isn't skateboarding at all. It's just standing on a weird skateboard that really easy to stand on, and rolling around on flatground. In the second kind of longboarding, the one that most longboarders (maybe three or four aren't, and I actually met one of the mountain boarders on the MRT once) are doing, you just do the same thing that penny boarding scum do, only on a skateboard so easy to ride that you might as well walk.
On a side note, I saw a kid on a penny board cruising in the rainy Taipei streets through traffic, and it was actually neat, but mostly because I don't know if he survived it. Any activity in Taiwanese traffic is as respectable as a longboard hill bomb. It's only one trick, but it's a damn scary one.
Anyway, if you're riding a longboard on flatground, you won't be in a few years, because it's a soulless, empty fad that only immoral and gutless people would ever attempt. If you're riding down a mountain on one, well, godspeed. If you're riding a penny board through rainy traffic, fuck dude, just buy a real skateboard....

Skateboarding only appears twice in this post

I'll get those appearances out of the way:
1) I was walking back and a long haired girl skated by down the street. she turned and pushed up a dark alley. fucking excellent. skating will never die with her around.
2) I drank a beer at the bridge on foot, because of nothing. A crew were just leaving, heading out to skate, but it rained on me on the way home, so I guess they ended up doing something else.

I walked around all night because what I had intended to be a short walk to get food turned into a five hour walk around the whole city.  I went up and down and all around the bridge area, and also linsen bei, which is the best and most disturbing place I've ever been. Panties and dildos are sold on the sidewalk, and this having been the commemoration of the 228 massacre, there was an All Things Fucked Up and Creepy About Taiwan sale going on. Pimps tried to pull me into their lairs like sand lions, insisting each one has the most beautiful women. This is pretty normal for foreigners in Taiwan (my impression of japanese business men is that all they do is drink scotch and visit whorehouses). The fucked up part is that on the way back, the pimps recognized me and didn't bother me again, but a platoon of agressive and mostly older than 55 women lept from the dark crevasses and shouted at me about having young women. Advertising young women is a lot more fucked up than advertising beautiful ones. Beautiful ones are art. Young ones are cattle. Taiwhathefuck.
I went ot the shitty but cheap and late night yakitori by the house. It was good, even though some japanese women sat with me, then realized I was a foreigner, and move across the room, presumably for safety. I like being scary.