minimalism

The cement job was a D-. It's mostly just dust now. we went as a party to main station and hit a variety of spots. i went home to complaints. ankle injuries. tired legs. **** ** ***** on the rooftop samurai helmet. kind of incredible cops didnt come, and that noone coming out of the exit wsa killed by a falling skateboard . new ledge spot chunked. yoshinoya metal curb to street. cops came. we thrashed back to the bridge and i went on home.

A hesitant first foray into cementing

my roommate announced that the grill has to go. i cleaned it, kind of, and hid it under the living table. she announced that if she can find it, she will throw it out. i got back home, expecting the worst, but it's still hidden there, and she's asleep.

earlier, she gave me Lettres a Anne, which is easily the best white valentines present i have ever recieved, but also compels me to buy her something equally expensive (dear lzyk; you have ot take the price tag off of gifts), or else. It won't be as easy for me, as she isn't a fan of Mitterand.

My bags of cement came, delivered to the all marble and donald trump fake gold lobby of my appartment building. The guard is my favorite old man in taiwan, but it took some time for us to work out that i was trying to pick up sacks of cement from behind the counter. in the end, he gaveu p trying to understand why foreigners do the things they do, and i put the box of cement on the skateboard and took it to the bridge. it was pretty fun time; the tienmu homies were there, presumably driven south by the constant rain, and a scattering of others were too. younguns got creative and stacked rails upon rails and *********** them until lights out. I was responsible and waited to drink beer until lights out. A japanese guy introduced himself and we shared some yellow beers. he told me wants to quite smoking, and i had to say, yeah, it's fucking hard to do. He knows k, who showed up with a couple of other guys and eventually they left for takoyaki (there is a legendary skater-owned spot that I still havent been to yet, apparently around linsen; now i am formally obligated to visit).

then i tried cementing. it was harder than i remembered (or maybe i just forgot that i sucked at it 20 years ago). part of the problem is that taiwan's mailorder cement is like grey diahhrea. mostly, it's that i just dont know what to do. i did some zen scraping and learned the hard way, for 90 minutes or so. as i finished, a couple of dudes showed up who were learning to ******. They skated until after I left. Pure.

i went home swinging a red plastic pail with a couple of left over beers and a trowel in it. if interior painting is like trying to paint with the least artistic expression possible, then cementing a spot is like trying to do architecture in the least noticiable way possible. it's really expensive here, $500 to just recoat the top of a manny pad. i feel pretty damn addicted.

A hesitant first foray into BBQing

I got a grill when we moved to the new house but it sat under the couch until tonight. I spent most of the day gathering supplies in the freezing rain and zw and i met up under the bridge. it was crowded and wet and hard to get the charcoal lit. we perserved with the help of some younguns. zw and i mostly discussed insects we've eaten or encountered. taiwanese centipedes sound scary, but the ones he dealt with in thailand are the creepiest thing i've ever heard of. i dont like the idea of intelligent bugs. alledgedly, scorpions are 'dry' when you eat them. we gave away some hotdogs and ate most of the chicken and mushrooms ourselves. lzyk hasnt realized the dirty grill is in our living room yet (i didnt think this through and i m not sure where to keep it).

skating, post anal probe

i was shitting blood, so i had to get a thing stuck up my ass to find out if i was dying from cancer or not. this was kind of cool, because i got to try a new drug. i had to wait a month or two, because although taiwan has cheap health care, you have to wait a month or two, even if your butthole is vomiting blood. i showed up at the hosptial and they stuck my patient ID sticker on my actual skin. at this point, i realized i wasnt in america anymore. taiwan's cost cutting philosophy is so extreme  that patients at the hospital dont even get an arm band. later, i was told that this is in violation of J-CO, but i guess joint commission will handle that.

anyway, for about thrity seconds , i wondered why i was still awake after the anesthesia, but then everything went dark as fuck. i vaguely remember watching the pink video from teh probe in my ass, but i've mostly fortoggten it now. then i tried to get home, fucked up as fuck. eventually, i made it home, and slept for 22 hours. drugs are cool. i wish i could buy the one i just took, but it's Rx only.

i went to work ,adn wen tot eh bridge, whre rmj adn i skated for a minute and mostly drank beers in the rain on various stoops in the area. its goign to rain for days, according to the wather man.

Your next airline pilot might be able to ********

On occaision, the illusion of progress in skating can make up for the very real lack of progress in the rest of life. It was hot and sunny, and I knocked off around noon in order to visit the bridge. A couple of hours of excersize break from work turned into five hours of skating. I got my first ****** ********** ** *****, which was easy to make after the first one, I just never thought of it before. More importantly, I got ***** **********, which is my first legitimately new flatground trick in a long time.

Most importantly, a homie from years ago cruised up as I was about to leave. We caught up inbwetween runs but I wasn't much for conversation, because seeing him put me into an extended flashback of skating at the bridge in the mornings before work, in my first few months of skating, and also of the first few months of being in Taipei. So that's why the paper hasn't been written yet. I couldn't go home until he had to.

By the time we left, an assortment of skateboarding enthusiasts had gathered to celebrate the perfect weather.  The sun hasn't even set yet. Yall need to get out there.

spring time

rmj met me at main. hobos were hoboing all around, before he got there, so i had to warm up and skate the banks with my backpack on, because if there's anywhere in taiwan that someone is  going make off with your shit, it's at mainstation. a security meandered outside but took one look at my gut and waddled back inside. he had me beat, but i'm guessing someone told him to go tell me to leave, and he gave up before we had a chance to meet.

rmj and i met up.

a hobo came up, and shouted at us "I'm trying ot sleep." so were dozens of his compatriots, all over the spot. it was so loud from all the traffic taht only rmj heard him. i dont know why skateboards piss off people so much. i do know rmj bought me a series of beers at the end of the night. thanks man.

in between, we went to a very sketchy dark ledge spot, there is probably a very asesome daytime spot, and the classic pink banks by main, where he did some *********s and i landed my first street ***. in between, we found a bank to metal curb that exits into traffic, and he got some entertaining ******* on it, but i didnt. nevermind, we blasted around the emptying streets until we decided to act like adults and hit the sack. somehow, it's still almost 0500 before I got home. i tallked to my parents in the park outside, and listened to georgia spring birds singing in the background. my mom talked a lot about the flowers there. That isn't my home anymore, but i miss it, especially this time of year.

i nearly forgot the mention the discovery of a new plaza. there are eight very large raised flower beds in the new area by mainstation, with hard slick cement ledges all around them. they range from upper calf height to mid thigh. the surface is tiled, but smooth for sections of it. it isa topnotch spot. rmj got the first trick ever there, as far as we could tell, noone had ever skated it. i waxed a little bit. it's going to be a regular spot.

trying too hard is stupid

stayed up all night writing. haven't had a proper skate session in a week. It's not that I'm in way over my head on this project. It's most like drowning in a bath tub.