Treasure Trove

I'll admit, I've been trying you as of late. The posts I've been putting up lately have challenged you, questioned you, and occasionally asked you to think. I thought I'd give you all a break today and just give you something easy to enjoy. David Law is easy to like and watch skate, and this crooked grind is especially easy to like. I do not crooked grind. I cannot crooked grind. Well, I can do them, I just can't land it yet... But I got into one on the red curb over at our parking lot the other day. And as I thought about it, I've landed more kickflip crooked grinds than I have regular crooked grinds. I landed one crooked grind once down the bigger hubba at the St. George park. It was when everyone else was learning them and I was falling behind by not adding that trick to my bag. So I landed it, and I walked away. Like Ben Affleck on Pearl Harbor. I landed it, walked away, and never touched it again. Also like Ozzy and the junk, except I really haven't been secretly landing crooked grinds all these years while saying I can't do them. I really haven't landed a single one since that day at the St. George park. You see how easy it is to get me off track?

So Matt and I stumbled upon a treasure trove of our old skate videos yesterday!!!! It's one of the biggest finds since the Rosetta Stone and King Hut's tomb. So me and Matt were extremely thorough in filming all of the homies in St George when we were growing up. We're talking about when we were 14, 15, 16... Those years. Well, 17 too. And I guess 18 and 19 for Matt. Either way, back in the day, we pretty much had sole proprietorship our friend Nick's grandma's video camera that he told her he would borrow for a weekend. We had it for years, and I don't think she never even noticed. It eventually died because we were trying to skate the handrails at the Bluff Street church and a cop gave us pursuit, so we fled. In our haste, we knocked the video camera off the wall and onto the ground, and that pretty much did it in. Every time I think of that incident, two things usually come to mind. The first being one of the angriest and most sincere "F" words that I've ever heard and that was ever pronounced in Washington county in that year came forth from my friend Nick when the camera fell. The second being that the cop wasn't even chasing us, he was just turning around in the parking lot where we were skating. He hadn't even seen us... But either way, that was one of the final blows to the camera. I can't remember whose camera we used after that, but we found someone's camera to use... Probably Matt Pace's and Justin Griffin's.

Anyway, yesterday me and Matt found in one of my old boxes around 10 or 15 two hour long VHS tapes filled with our old skate footage!!! I knew the tapes still existed, but I seriously had no anticipation in finding them again. So last night we watched a couple of the tapes, which is just scratching the surface of all we have to watch, and we stumbled upon several little gems including the episode of Justin Griffin breaking his foot, when he boardslid Pineview, my ollie over the Burger King gap, frontside flip off the baseball diamonds drop, Matt with a full head of hair ollieing gaps, and in general just chilling and hanging out with each other. It was funny to watch all these videos because it brought back tons of old memories that I had completely forgotten. Also, it made me realize that the funnest parts of skating - hanging out with Matt and all my friends, laughing, having fun, and throwing skating into the mix of all that - have not changed a single bit for us. It's funny to see that 12 years ago or so, we were still out doing pretty much the exact same thing we're going to do this afternoon: meet up at a spot, do a couple warm up tricks, talk about nothing important but still enjoy it, try to land a new trick, film something if we feel like doing something, and during all of it laugh and just enjoy ourselves. I'm really glad to see that we weren't overly serious about skating when we were teenagers, and we're not all that serious about it now. When I say not serious, I don't mean we don't enjoy it because we love it. We seriously skate just as much now as we did when we were teenagers. Sometimes life gets busy, but for most almost 30 year olds, I'd say we're doing just fine in keeping up with our skating regiment. We haven't lost sight of what's really fun, and we haven't gotten caught up in all the trends and whatever other people are doing. As a quick side note, I'm glad that I can watch those old videos and not be the least embarrassed of what I was wearing, the tricks I was doing, the music I listened to, or any of that... We're still having the same fun we had back then, and I really don't think things will change for us as we get older. Sure we'll be busier and all that, and we might not be able to skate all that much. But when we do get out there, with our kids or whoever, skating will mean the same thing to us as it did from the very get go. And that's something to be proud of.

So now that we've found these tapes, we're going to go through them, and you're probably going to be hearing a lot more stories on the blog in the up and coming days from our childhood. Just to warn you.