A departure and a photograph

Today was the day taht FeM left but we went to all you can eat gourmet first, then the mountains overlooking tiapei after, then saw a littel black puppy, then eventually got home, then I went back out to meet up with rmj and take the couch photo. this photo is mabye my favorite ever. i wore shorts adn now i m covered in mosquito bites, like hundreds of them. then i realized i rescheduled my chinese lesson for sunday morning, since i was too busy this week. i'm supposed to be there in three hours and 30 minutes. this is not going to happen. sorry felix.

There's a thing line between entertainment and war

There wasn't time for skating but I did it anyway. Sleep has been a precious commodity lately, but I went out anyway. It was the first session for the biteme's. This is probably the most hated shoe company in the world, and I always hated them, from the very beggining. However, I had been told that they are actually the best skate shoes ever, and I bought a pair because Marshall's had them for $900 last summer. They are ferociously uncomfortable. Maybe the least comfortable shoes I've ever skated in, including nightmarket shoes with paper for soles. They're also stiff, which means they have no feeling, like using hospital gloves for a condom. Worst of all, they have a huge logo on the side, so I have to only skate spots where there's no chance of anyone seeing me in them.

To distract from there regretful shoes, I wore tie die and camo to work today. I'm pretty sure I'll never work for someone else again, after this contract is up. Whoever said "it's better to be taken advantage of by capitalists than to not be" clearly never met Taiwanese business owners. 

I warmed up at the three stair, adn my legs didn't work very well. Then I went on a cruise. It was at least 14 degrees cooler than this time last year, adn I tried to make the most of it. I rode around the little allies, and the combination of terrible new shoes with a pretty bad new deck meant that my shins suffered for it. 

Near Linsen Bay is a small hill. It's an artificial one, built up over teh open sewer river (ok, it's not quite an open sewer, but underground city rivers are nasty as fuck). From there, you clackalack down teh square tiles, and there is complex, sublte spot. As the road falls away, the sidewalk stays high, out to **** stair height. At any moment, you can go from the smooth upper, a stone sidewalk, down to the bottom rough clackity tiles. There are two stair sets on the sidewalk, and mostly, I either bomb it that way, or if I'm too tired or drunk, cruise down the tiles. 

This time, I noticed a new and excellent micro spot. Where the stairs are still ***** tall, as you cruise down the rough tiles, a little bank had been cemented up flush with the bottom stair. It's a pink marble stair, so I stopped and applied parrafin. It's just teh sort of slope that you don't really gain or lose speed on the way. I tried a line, adn landed my first *******s with these shoes. I never got the line I was trying for, but I'll be hitting that curb every ride home from now on. 

I got another ******** and suddenly, it was as easy as pressing a button on a skate video game. I missed a few though, and security kept coming out, even though I was cruising by. At one point, missed a ****** and looked back and three  seperate security guards were standing in teh sidewalk watching me. I kept going. My feet hurt. Maybe these shoes will loosen up. I've never thrown away skate shoes until they couldn't be sakted anymore, but these might go in the garbage. 

Total ********s in biteme's: 6

Costco Seafood is Something You Pay for Twice in Taiwan

Lzyk was busy all day having fun with friends so I slept in and ate some costco seviche for breakfast. Don't do that. Within an hour, it was exploding out the other end of me. I spent most of my afternoon on the porcelain throne. I had time to contemplate our dehumidifier, and realize that it isn't working properly because of the sensor. I have no idea how to fix that, so I guess we'll throw it out and buy a new one. I think I'm becoming Taipeinese. Now that I had 拉肚子  this weekend, I'll have something to talk about with my coworkers tomorrow.

The upside down gut volcano had calmed enough by 20:00 that I thought I could try skating at the bridge. It was mostly empty, except for friends. My stomach felt like a full water balloon that I was keeping from spraying out its contents by squeezing the end, so the quality of the skating suffered, even though I made a few trips across the street to the toilets. Some korean clients came up and I made a sale through the fence. Then I skated home and realized I've lost my motherfucking goddam shitsmeared credit card again. The last time this happened, it required a whole new set of ID photographs and an entire afternoon to sort out. I won't have even one free hour this week until Thursday morning. At least I left the white halfcabs on the roof of the cop booth. The heel had completely seperated on teh back foot, and the toe had ripped in half on the front one. I always said I would never be caught dead in naikees, but then I found some for $900, so here I am. They felt really stiff on the skate home.

Rolling into Adulthood

Other people's facebooks show off conspicuous consumption so lzyk wants to upgrade, so we went international househunting. I thought it was a decent spot, three and a half floors, with a balcony on top, and big enough to meet my business needs and also a prime location. she balked at teh lack of western amenities, like a kitchen or bed or hot shower or fridge or 20th century windows or lighting on the 4th floor or total width above 3m or parking or washer or dryer or sink or microwave or hotpad or couch or roof free of debris or shelves or tv or lighting on the fourth floor or stove or not rotting appendages on either end or living with a glass wall with thousands of people walking by and looking in while we ate cheese adn drank wine with the current tenants.

I especially loved that last part. If we move in, I'm going to have a fuck ton of fun with that part. If they don't look at you, you have to make them look. If they do, you have to make them break eye contact again before they walk out of frame, but if they don't, you get a multiplier, because by then, they've twisted their entire backs almost 180 to keep looking at the foreigner in the window.

She isn't going to agree to live there without renovations. I'm pretty sure we are too poor for that house, but goddam, it would have been glorious. Now the sun is rising, and I'm on my third screw driver, after discussing this with lzyk all night. Adulthood is proving to be a strange fish. I'm watching skatevideos and drinking after 0500 while the sun rises but thinking about housing adn tricking clients and making lzyk happy. After all, she's the reason that I don't currently live in a tent, on the literal and metaphorical level.

Edit: I forgot to say that when we came home, a bit after midnight, a balding home boy from our floor was screaming at the security guard downstairs and generally gathering attention. I could pick up through the chaos something about theives and gangsters adn my floor number, and everyone needs to be careful, and they forced teh door open and so on. Then we gotin the elevator, adn homie came with us, still very energized. We chatted with him for a while and I couldn't get much more out of it, so lzyk filled me in when we went inside. Apparently, he is convinced that a secret society of gangsters lives in our building and is out to swindle him out of his appartment. This is unlikely, but possible. Less likely is that they are apparently fucking with him by stealing his dirty socks and calendar, then replacing them later. They've been doing this for years. Also, this bastard who lives across from us is in on it. Also also, they follow him around a lot. I'm not sure what would be worse - living in a building with a secret society that breaks in a steals people's socks, or living beside a paranoid schitzophrenic.

Interrupted by a domestic dispute

I went to the bridge, but lately it takes me two hours to warm up. It was basic basic for the whole time, and barely that. At least it was cold and breezy. I saw a super slam. He got up, but he sat out the rest of the session. FeM showed up and got some footage. We left before lights out, and set sail into the streets of Taipei.

FeM is going back to Europe soon, and he will be missed. This night was an illustrative example of why.  We went up towards the house, and hit up the yellow jacket rail, and OldLi, the best bar owner in Taipei City, rode up on us and asked what the fuck we are doing, because apparently, I forgot to tell him I skate. He watched a couple of tricks and rode on back to work.

Then we went east to the arena. There are many spots on teh way. Mostly metal and stone curbs, interspersed with a magnificent


*three hours later

it was good session that ran out to the arena and I enjoyed it with FeM who can do things I can't imagine and makes every spot like skating something completely new.

Then  I got back to find out lzyk was up and although I honestly tried my damnest to avoid talking about finances, we did. It didn't go well. Now I'm watching "this is not happening" at 05:00. Having to work sucks.

Smug Aliens

They say you can't run away from your problems by drinking beer and skating around Taipei. This is pretty much true, in so much as they will catch up as soon as you get home, but the only problems as you skate around the best city in the world are taxis, scooters, and cracks. 

I spent twenty minutes at the bridge, and it was the bridge's last twenty minutes before lights out. Two Old Gee's were there. If the night had ended with seeing them, it would have been worht going. Spongebob Square Pants got a weak first real session; the problem is the shape of these decks is so shitty. The wheel base was drilled too fucking short for the deck, so the tail has a huge long flat bit before it turns up. This removes any semblance of pop from the geometry. It's fucking dumb. I regret them, and I even guilty about the ones I've traded away, much less sold. 

I took this shitty but rock hard deck to the three stair, and learned ***** ****** ***** on the curbs. I could even grind it for a board length. 60 Seconds later, I did an accidental ****** **** ***** *** ***, which is probably the best trick I've ever landed, but it was terrible style, on a curb, and I couldn't repeat it in the next half hour. I'm not sure it really counts. Ok, I know it doesn't count. One day, when I'm so old that I can only skate curbs, I hope to get it down. 

In the meantime, I played random walk with the rule that if I miss a ********* in between a block, then I have to turn. I missed one, went to towards 林森北路, and then couldn't miss another one if I tried.  Sorry Lzyk, I know you told me I'm forbidden from going there after the CIA accusation thing, but the skateboard has a mind of its own and I had no choice in the matter. I slappied some marble curbs and got another beer. I talked to my mother, skating down the road, for half an hour. I'm glad my family is doing well, but I'm very glad I don't live in America. It's becoming a shithole. 

Taipei is filthy with pollution and traffic, but it's far from a shithole. I skated up to the Temple, to try and repeat the ***** ** *****, and got a few of them. The ledge was begging for it, so I made spongebob **-** it until I was so tired I couldn't really go on. Then I went on, and got a shitty but very long line from the hobo ledges, into the road, up the tall bank to flat, down and around the corner to the rough curb, to the down stair, into the smooth flatground, to the three stair, to the ledge, and then to the low flatrails. Then I went back, and my chest was bursting out through my ribs. I mean my lungs, but whatever. The hobo at the hobo ledges was sitting up awake in his sleeping bag, so sorry about that bro, I just had to grind some shit. 

I went back to the yellow and black flat bars, but couldn't get a ******** in three tries and attracted the attention of a weirdo who was creeping closer and closer to my little backpack, so I moved to the red curbs and ******* across the grate. 

Then I stooped up for the first time in a long time, and had a 7 sandwich which was on point. This spring's sandwhich line is decent. I listened to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiAW5mg_wCc.

I need to spend more time at the bridge. It's like visiting your grandparents. There are downsides, but you don't get the chance to do it forever. 

Brim full of Asha

I left the hawaiian shirt deck on teh trucks long enough for them to meld. This is a very important step when setting up a new deck. The components need time to bleed into one another. While they did so, I went ot hte darts bar and ran into a slew of friends. We played lots of darts and drank lots of beer adn ate lots of food. My sum total for the night was $600 ($19 USD). God Bless Purchasing Power Parity. On the way out, some homies invited me to linsenbei for more drinks. This was a mistake to accept. We taxied over there and I found myself in a gangster's den where I couldn't escape for a few hours and I had to sing karaoke and I got accused of being a Central Intelligence Agency Operative by people I would really rather not be accused of anything by, and when I tried to buy everyone's drinks so I could leave, they pushed me back down in my chair and let me know that they had some questions for me. They let me know they were marines, but I made the mistake of saying they were Taiwanese Marines. They werent; they were chinese ones, and let me know. I guess I answered most other questions correctly, because I didn't get my throat slit or my shoes tooken, but this was strike two for linsen. It mostly super sucked, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to go into anymore hidden doorways in Linsenbei. Also, they somehow had my phone number, and made some threats (this was before I convinced them that I don't actually like America, much less work for the place).

I woke up with the sort of hangover that only russian spies get in the UK when they flip, and it got worse through the day. I mostly moaned and rolled around on the bed and couch. At one point I vomited in the shower. I guess I can say I've been poisoned by Chinese agents, but it's less cool if I say that it was with free tequila and they refused to let me pay my tab at teh end. It was a mixed night.

Like I said, today was spent mostly suffering. Lzyk and I drove to the fake carrefourre and bought some cheese and wine. We got back about 23:00 and I took the hawaian deck out for a shakedown cruise.

I started with some *****s. I mean, you always do. Then I went to linsen park and skated flat for a bit, and then cruised up and around to the tiny marble hubba. I put some marks on the new deck and winded back to the three stair park. A hobo was sleeping there, and he made me feel guilty about grinding and sliding by huffing and sighing at me after every failed attempt. Sorry bro. I usually dont want to be an asshole, but tonight, I felt like the best cure for a hangover was more beer and curb skating and being an asshole. Now I've got four hours until I have to make my livelihood by being chipper adn interestering to people smarter than me. At least I skated the new red curb, and also hit the flatbar in teh park by the house, because the cops creeped up on me at the three stair park.

I hate the shape of this deck. I can't wait to kill all of the shitty decks and get some real ones.

Guest Column: Foreigners Are Weird

Hi Everyone! My name is 林佩君. I am the owner of a small shoe outlet in Taipei City. Our business model is getting display shoes and factory seconds and selling them at 80% off. We never have the same brands for long, because Taiwanese shoppers love a deal, HaHa! I have a strange story to tell you about today. A Foreigner came into our shop today and was an unusual and creepy guy. He was very interested in the brand called District of Columbia, so I asked him if he needed any help. He said no, and when I realized he could speak Chinese, I asked him about the postmodern interpretation of applied socioenconomic linguistic theory as it manifests in the comparative folk literature of Peru and the Andaman Islands. I think he was stupid, because he just stuttered a little bit about skateboards and shoes and how much the D.C.'s cost, so I told him again that they are $300/pair. He looked happy, so I asked him if he thought that differential equations in a bathybenthic supercooled thermonuclear hadron detector could possibly make accurate predictions about the state of social network nodes through machine learning in a post-Trump political landscape. He just kept looking at me like an idiot. I can't understand why he is stupid, he said thank you in Chinese, so I know it isn't a language barrier. I probably should have repeated it faster and louder. Good thing I didn't, it saved him some face.

Not that he had much face to lose. He wasn't wearing socks, but he kept trying on various shoes barefoot, like a disgusting, shameless orangutang. He started piling up the shoeboxes, until I couldn't believe it. He tried on shoes like a total weird guy for about an hour, and ended up with a stack of 12 pairs of Dist. of Co. shoes. What a weird guy! I couldn't believe anyone would buy these slightly discoloured but otherwise perfect skate shoes for $10USD a pair. Just because they are promodels from two years ago doesn't mean that they are worth anything at all, since noone who buys them here actually skates anyway and now skateshoes are out of fashion. I tried to bring up the subject of the Shackelton Expedition's trials in the context of the colonization of Mars and the terraforming of near Solar Intersetllar Objects and what sort of Ruby coding would need to be written for SAS analysis of electromagnetic remote mining drones, but he just kept asking "price is what? uh, final price is how? uhhh, how much final price is?" I had no idea what this fool was trying to say, so I wrote out the total and he gave me some money and then left.

The absolute weirdest part is the exact same thing happened a few hours later. At first I thought it was the same Foreigner, but this one had socks and couldn't say any words at all. I didn't even try to talk to him about the interplay between Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and punk rock as it effected Vanuatu cargo cults and the stability of the Deutschmark. I could tell he couldn't handled it. But he did handle another dozen pairs of $10USD skateshoes, and then kept taking selfies with them and sending them to his weird foreign friends on the Line. I will never understand these people.

Euthanasia/Reincarnation

I don't focus boards. It's immoral, and it's usually an embarrasing display of lack of personal control, or of cold, heartless disregard for a trusty old friend, like a man shooting his 17 year old pet dog in the face because it doesn't have enough pop anymore.

The problem was, this skateboard was invincible. Actually, not invincible, since I cracked through the middle on a ******* in Taichung, and since the tail has split into several pieces. We both knew what was up. The Black Bastard/Black Beauty/Black Behemoth/Black Bazooka wasn't going to go out like a rabbit, but instead like a cat, with an eyeball hanging down its face and half of its guts out of its abdomen. So be it.

We went to the three stair park, this skateboard and I. It's the spot where I learned more tricks on deck than ever before, or at least more variations. It was this deck. It wasn't because it's a good shape. It's a terrible shape. Really awful. But it was the second one in a row of the same shape, and that goes a long way. Tonight, I just wanted to say goodbye to an old friend, but the BB/BB/BB/BB had one more surprise in store: a ** **** to either *** ***** out or to ***** ** ***** out - it's such a weird thing that I'm not sure what it actually is. Weirdest of all was how natural it felt immediately. I had just never thought of doing it that way before, and within a half dozen tries, I was slidin and ridin em out. I tried to kill the skateboard on ****** ***** and so on, but it just wouldn't get ruined. The weather was neutrally hot, ie not bad for the tropics, and I downed a 2.5 L of water. This meant that  Icouldnt fit as much beer in my stomach as usual, and I had to skate basically sober. At this rate, I'll have a six pack by next winter.

I was kind of emotional about the trip out to the skateboard graveyard. The BB was cracked all the way across the middle, and the tail was competely delammed. Out of respect, I didn't try any more tricks after a street ******** put my heel through the middle. But it still kept going. I rolled all the way to the dog piss curbs and dismantled it there, finally, placing it's broken but unsurrendering corpse under the fence beside its ancestor.

Then I set up the new one, in a hail of mosquitos at Yitong Park. I skated it back home in flipflops. I am now as optimistic as I was depressed when I set out to say goodbye to my best deck ever. Godspeed, BB, godspeed.

A Day at the Cemetery

On the rare occasion that I'm awake at 07:30, it's usually because I've been up all night. This was an exception. Lzyk said she couldn't go because women are ritually forbidden, but I didn't believe her. Our crew met up with the extended family near a large cement canal, about 50m across and 10m deep. The canal is so fouled with garbage and water plants that the water flows through more like a swamp than a river. Amazingly, thousands of large fish thrash around in the septic quagmire, and I've seen people trudging through it barefoot, carrying funny little nets and coolers. "Phillipine people," I was reassured. "Taiwan people will not eat these fish from the trash." I didn't ask if Taiwanese people might sell these fish from the trash. Tilapia are amazingly hardy. The trash canal is lined with the brilliant pink eggs of the African land snail. In their infinite wisdom, the old government had imported and released them, imagining that they would be edible. Instead, they carry too many parasites and outcompeted the local snails. Now everyone has less food and more disease. I've been warned against handling them. If you hit one on a skateboard, it's like hitting a meat grenade.

We got our gear together. There was a normal pair of clippers, but the other two tools I had to choose from were very foreign. One was a slender, hooked hatchet sort of thing. I learned later that it's used for chopping bamboo. The other was a delicate little hand saw, the blade being no bigger than a TV remote. It's used for cutting the thick clumps of grass that grow so fast here.

We started up a steep single lane asphalt road. Within a few dozen meters, the air was thick with the smell of rotting garbage. The road was lined on both sides with knee high burms of trash that some filthy fuckers had systematically thrown out down the length of the entrance to the cemetery. Noone else batted an eye, but the stench was so powerful that I was gasping for breath by the time we had climbed above this section.

Cemeteries here are strange places. From a distance, they look like cities, but the old kind of cities, all higgeldy piggeldly and disorganized in such a compete way that they start to look like naturally self-organizing structures in nature, like crystals or mud as it splits and cracks and dries in the sun. Up close, the chaos is more visceral. Trash was absolutely everywhere. Smashed bottles, cans, cigarette packets, food refuse, batteries, ... there isn't much point of trying to list what species of garbage had been strewn all across cemetery, as though a Chinese bomber had flown over and dropped bits of every single thing that modern people throw away across the hilltop. I had to assume that their bombers were active this day, because our air force certainly was. For hours, flight after flight of interceptors roared over and out to sea, warding off the enemy. This is what war would sound like, at first.

The first grave we cleaned was someone born in China. According to my translator, he was a pirate. He came to Taiwan around the same time my earliest ancestors first came to America. We chopped, pulled, cut, sawed, and collected all the vegetable life that can grow up in a year in the tropics. Then we put rows of yellow paper slips on the ground, and put little rocks on top of them, to hold them in place. After taht, we put some red paper on the headstone under another rock, and lit inscence. At one corner of the grave site, inside of its randomly drawn little rock wall, was a rock just big enough to be unable to pick up. On it was written the name of the god of the dirt, and we offerered that god some insences and snacks. We also left some for the pirate anscestor, but neither one was hungry, so we gathered up the gifts and went on to the next grave, where we repeated the process.

Some people had "accidentally" caught the grass on fire a few days before, and partially melted plastic bags hung from the trees like flying jellyfish caught on reefs. The fire had been recent enough that we stirred up a good bit of soot and ash as our party proceeded to the next graves. "Pirates' helpers," I was told.

We walked back through the rubbish to the canal and then down the canal past a filthy dairy where cows were locked into a tiny room, standing shoulder to shoulder in a morass of their own shit. Some dogs attacked us, but I had the little hatchet thing, and didn't have to really use it on them.

The last grave was my favorite. It was by itself, on a steep hillside. We had to climb up through a thick bamboo forest, through sickeningly rotten bags of goop soup that someone had been throwing out there for a long time. The motivation fro someone to dump grocery bags of food on the path to a gravesite, high up on the side of a small mountain, completely escapes me. Some bags were old, but others were putrid and fresh. The ground was slippery with bamboo leaves and I developed a healthy fear of slipping and falling into one these horrors. The bamboo is viscious here, and sports inch long razor sharp spines at every junction of its body. We cleared the site and I felt like part of the family. I sat there with lzyk's dad for a while, after everyone left, because he felt weak from the heat, and we enjoyed the wind playing in the bamboo. Eventually, we descended through the haggis-landmines and into the roar of scooters and air pollution and garbage rivers and feral dogs and heaps of trash in random places on the sides of the road.

No wonder every advert here is so cloying. It's consumption as an alternative to taking responsibility for your surroundings.

The Tombsweeping Holiday Tour of Taichung

I'll post something about actual Tombsweeping Day later. It will have plenty of complaining, but no skateboarding whatsoever. This post however, will have mostly skateboarding and probably minimal complaining, because it was an awesome trip.

The slow train took me a couple of stops over to Taichill City. I got there a couple of minutes before RMJ, and stocked up on water and an 18 Day. Just as I cracked it open, a half dozen dudes skated up, under the blocked parking lot of the station, which was shady. It's a big smooth area, with a curb, rising to about three stairs high drop, over a maybe 100m. I skated over to shake hands and realized we had all met before: it was the Indonesian crew that mw and I had met in the streets here a few months back. "Apa Karang" was all I could remember, but they had gotten better at chinese and at skating, so it was a pretty cheerful reunion. With those dudes and the shop owner I met in the streets back home in Taipei, I feel like true street skating has a healthy future in 台中. 

We went on a spirit quest to find the long long stone bench plaza. On the way, we ran into a young man carrying a skateboard. He was just learning the craft, and we chatted fro a while. He said the benches were still skatestopped, and worse, he had recently been accosted by the thought police and photographed, so he was afraid to ever skate there again. My plan was to pretend I didn't understand why they were taking our photos, and try my best to politely take photos with them if they kicked us out. As it turns out, I didn't need to bother. 

We wandered to the spot in due time. Taichung doesn't have as many people as Taipei, but it's a huge sprawling city. Skating to spots is an ordeal. Distance is the worst part, it's like skating through interstellar space, just a void of no spots for hundreds of millions of km. The surface is also mostly terrible and rough, filled with trash and debris, and riven with cracks. Also, they have no MRT and only nominal public transit, so the roads are overflowing with cars and scooters, at least on the same level of Taipei, but with a less dense distribution of civility and respect for human life. We survived the passage.

Happily, the spot wasn't a bust. It's got a perfect long downhill run, with reasonably tall marble benches on both sides. Each bench is about 200m. It was once a majestic place. Animal Chin was there, probably in his early childhood. Since then, the man has tried to cleanse the spot from skating, but it hasn't work. A team of young people were there. Most where skating, but some where freestyling and there were some hangers on, like an eight year old kid who adopted me and ran from one of the spot to the other as I skated, jabbering at me in Taiyu. I kept asking him if he wanted to try skating, but he just wanted to run. Each to their own. 

The benches end with a minibank/steep kicker. The Taiwanese Marine was getting some on there. RMJ got a *-***** to ************, and some ***** ** and ***** *****s. It was saf, but he didn't have on a blue jean jacket, so Taichung hardly noticed. I wish I had my old jean jacket, it's the only excuse I could have for wearing one in adulthood. Maybe I'll get one anyway - I've had no such compunctions about wearing camo everything for the last couple of years. 

The Benches are a pilgrimmage spot. If you're in Taichung, it's one of two that you absolutely have ot skate. It might be mostly stopped for now, and the crowd might be so thick that you have ot skate the waves of people like how surfers treat waves at the beach; crowding out away from teh break, waiting for the right moment, then trying to pounce before someone snakes them, but one day, with good government, they will divert the pedestrians around the spot and give us 150m of sidewalk and solve all the problems and complaints from those whiney assholes. The city doesn't need to build a skatepark, they already have a perfect one, they just need to fence it off with some orange cones to keep keep morons from wandering in there. I barely got a ** ***** and the Black Bastard cracked under me on a *******, so I took it easy after that, because breaking it would mean walking all the way home or taking a cab, and I refuse to support taiwan's murderous taxis. 

I got asked about my relationship status and we moseyd on. The other pilgrimmage spot is the yellow brick road park. It's a giant park, surrounded by amazingly perfect quarter pipe with granite coping. 

After a point, skating ability comes and goes. You gain some tricks, you lose some tricks. On an x y axis, after a point, you start to roll downhill. I might already be there. You probably don't notice til you're already well on the way down. I think RMJ and myself have plenty of skating left in us, but neither of us got the tricks here that we were going for. A couple of years ago, shwasted, he did a massive ******** here. I've never gotten the *********** that I always wanted, but this time, we both came close without the cigar. On my closest try, I had popped over the lip and was back onto all my wheels and just fell off the fucking skateboard. It's been four years of trying now. I can't accept never getting this trick. I'm giong to start training for it. If it's the last thing I do on a skateboard, I'm going to fucking learn how to do this. 

Come back behind your shield or on it.

I was so frustrated that I nearly focused the board, which was cracking completely through anyway. I held my temper, because I am a man, and I failed to ride away from the trick, because I am a pussy. Also, I'm afraid maybe I don't have the ability. It's been years of trying. I hope this wasn't the high water mark. I hope that wasn't as close as I ever get.