The Real Fight club

Funny story about Matt. So a couple months ago he parked his car at school, and as he was getting out of his car, he noticed this dude in a truck pulled up right behind him and was blocking the car in. I don't know if the guy didn't realize that Matt had just parked his car which means he probably wasn't planning on leaving, so his little blockade wasn't all that effective. But then the guy (who Matt described as "big", must have been really big for most people standards) started telling Matt, "hey man, you took my spot! I wanted to park there!" How do you respond to that? Do you get into your car and back up into the dude's truck? That's an option. That would probably really ruin the guy's plans of intimidation. Man, that's a good idea, if we come across this again, I think that's what we'll do... Anyway, Matt just told the guy sorry, but he got there first, so cut his losses and move on. Something like that. But the guy insisted that Matt took his spot and even told Matt he was going to do something about it. Having mentally prepared himself for this exact scenario by running possible scenarios in his head of how he would preemptively attack an aggressor, Matt knew that he needed to get the first hit in to either scar the guy, disorient him, or at least say he got the first hit in when he was at the hospital and/or put in jail. Matt figured that if he looked confident and angry enough, the guy wouldn't know what to do and would either drive off or release fecal matter in his pants. Matt charged the guy and said "whatever mean things came out of my mouth (quoting Matt)" in a really mad voice. Most of you have never heard Matt really yell at someone. I have. And it's scary. It was the day before his 18th birthday and he had pinned this kid Logan that had punched me for backhanding his girlfriend for kicking me in the balls because I spit on her because she spit on me because I told her she sucked at skating because she flipped me off for no reason, and Matt was holding Logan by the hair, lifting his head off the ground, and told him in the angriest, most confident voice I've ever heard, "YOU DON'T (can't remember what goes here. sorry...) WITH US!!!" Logan's eyes were huge, I've never seen anyone that afraid before. It was like the hyenas pinned by Mufasa in the Lion King. Just helpless. That's the last and as far as I can remember the first time I've heard Matt roar like that. It was scary for everyone that saw it. Then Matt proceeded to squeeze Logan's eyes like Mr Myagi squeezes the guys nose when he could just knock him out. It was like that, a moment of true self-mastery. So I assume Matt used his angry roar when he charged the huge dude in the truck, and the guy just took off as fast as he could. Seriously, all that threatening just to drive off like that. Needless to say, I was proud of Matt for not taking his guff. He won the battle and the war because he was prepared. Like a true scout. Not that we condone fighting at Bolts of Thunder, but a man's gotta protect himself when his parking space is on the line. Anyway, long story short, Matt is usually cute and cuddly as a koala, like you see him in the pictures above. But once every decade or so, someone with a huge ego and little expectation of anyone standing up to him comes around and transforms Matt from his cute and cuddly self into a lion. A Mufasa lion. So all you people idolizing Brad Pitt in that fight club movie, whatever it is, I don't think Brad Pitt would last more than 2 minutes in the ring with Matt. And Bolts of Thunder does way cooler stuff than blowing up buildings, like going to school and staying drug free. All you Thunder Bolts out there, be proud to be a part of the real fight club.

Give us your money, please

Bolts of Thunder has some extremely exciting news for you all: We're going to Europe! That's right. Reuniting with long time Thunder Bolt, Dave McDonald, we're making our way across the deep blue to visit and skate with our friend. You see, while trying to film for this video, we've had difficulty tapping into the the inner skater that lives inside of all of us. Hoping to make our characters more real to life, we're going to Europe to hang out with skaters in the streets of Paris for a couple weeks to research what it's really like to be a skater. Hoping to truly be in the mindset of a skater, we'll come back to America more ready than ever to film and finish our up and coming Bolts of Thunder Gone Wild video. We are accepting all cash and product donations at the time. Operators are waiting on standby to take your calls.

Photos: Lauren Cooper

Bolts of Thunder Gone Too Far

So the other day I showed a friend our most recent Bolts of Thunder Gone Wild trailer of Dan Shaw. You know which one I'm talking about because you have feelings for this trailer, don't you? So when it was over she said, "you guys take this way too far..." I don't know what she meant by that comment, but it really made me happy. That's right people, we're taking things way further than anyone is dreaming. Not true actually, but we're taking things further than I've seen anyone go in a long time. And we might lose a few of you along the way. That's right, some of you might lack the internal strength to understand and accept Bolts of Thunder's direction. Some of you might be hoping for more HD panning on my dolly footage, ride up shots, 4 trick combos on ledges, and fast motion cars driving through the city at night. But that's not where we're going because that's not going anywhere. If I can give you my honest opinion, which I'm going to whether you want it or not, all this artsy stuff was successfully pulled off by a few people in a few videos, it worked at the time, and now every kid is trying to recreate that. And that's just fine. But that's not how every single skate video has to look. You can do other things. But what we get instead is everyone thinking that's the only way to make a video these days, so you get a million different videos coming out that look the exact same. Well here at Bolts of Thunder, we're anything but your average skate crew. We should be a bowling crew, or some sport with less impact on our joints. But we're sticking with it because we have fun with it. And being such an odd group of skaters, we've decided to take a less conventional approach to our video making, and we're making the video that we want to make. Not what everyone else is making. And if we're going to make it what we want, we're going all out with it too. The image above is but a small taste of where we're going with our next video and what you should anticipate. So for those of you who disapprove of flames shooting out of a scooter, Matt growing his hair out long, or me showing off my legs, or you simply can't hack it as a Thunder Bolt (devout allies loyal to Bolts of Thunder),you should abandon ship now because we're going much further than this. We're going too far, if that's even possible.

Defenders of the Ditch

This is our ditch, of which I am extremely proud. Maybe it's like a mother that loves her ugly baby even when everyone else agrees the baby is ugly. It could be like that. Dave and I spent hundreds of dollars and a lot of time last summer repairing and creating skate spots, this one being the poster child of them all. Neither of us had ever done cement work, but that didn't stop or discourage us from buying $250 worth of cement and just going for it. By the end, we kind of figured out what we were doing, and the section that we did last is the only smooth part of the cement. That's the part I ride on. But all in all, the roughness of the spot makes it fun to skate, and you feel good even if you do a little grind on it. Or even just pumping back and forth is an accomplishment. But as soon as we finished it, word got out it was here and kids started riding it and busting up our cement job. What can you expect from skater kids? But then someone had the great idea to spray paint a purple robot and an eye in the ditch, both of which suck really bad. That's right mister tagger, I'm calling you out! Your work sucks! You and us, 5:00, at the flag pole behind the middle school, or the abandoned house on vineyard ave, your call! But we'll be there, and we're coming out swinging! So Dan and Nick were the ones that really embraced the power of the ditch, and they could pull of maneuvers that nobody else dared or cared to try, like 360 body twirls and crazy stuff. Oh yeah, funny story, this one time we were here and a cop pulled up behind my car parked on the road. Dave and I had told Dan that we wouldn't let him fall into the law's hands in case a cop came (we didn't think a cop would come), so when we saw the cop, we told Dan to high tail it while we smoothed things over with the cop. The first thing that came to my mind was how Martin Sheen lets Leo go on The Departed when the mob surrounds them in the building, and Martin Sheen thinks he can smooth things out with the mob, but they just throw him off the roof. I kept thinking that as Dan was fleeing the scene, he'd hear gunshots and come back to find our dead bodies int he ditch. But even with our very lives on the line, Dave and I held our ground in that ditch. We're loyal like that. Anyway, the cop didn't care at all, he even gave us permission to skate there whenever we wanted, so I called Dan, who was running up a hill, and told him to come back out of breath. All in a day's fun...

Whitemen can't jump, but they can frontside air and blunt to fakie

Here's a taste of the wrath that will be poured upon the heathen nations! A steaming hot cup of blunt, filled to the brim and overflowing with frontside airs. No hands, might I add. "When I came home, there was a man in my halfpipe! I fought with this man! He had a mechanical wrist! You find this man!" Look no further, he is here before you in all his glory... Nick Edwards, aka, the one wristed man. He's innocent until proven guilty, and by the looks of these airs and blunts, you've got nothing on him...

Supporting strong moral values

This is Dave and me skating a hubba ledge. So towards the end of our filming for our first Bolts of Thunder video, Matt, Dave, and I were all suffering from bouts of sleeplessness. The stress of making a skate video based on cartoon drawings and cheap rip-offs of movie trailers was getting to us, and we couldn't sleep. So one night Dave put his time to good use. I usually just laid in bed for a couple hours then I would draw on my computer until my eyes burned. Then I'd fall asleep. Dave decided to fix a skate spot when he couldn't sleep. So at 1 in the morning, equipped with no more than a butter knife, yeah, a kitchen butter knife, Dave came to this hubba and gave it butter knife treatment. So the ledge had patches of stucco on top which made it not very skater-friendly. It also has somewhat of a crack that me and Dave somewhat repaired, but we hadn't bothered yet with the stucco on the ledge. So for a couple hours or something, Dave scratched the stucco off the ledge with a butter knife. I think this is where wives should really start to worry. If your spouse leaves the house at 1 in the morning with a butter knife and says he/she is going to scratch stucco off a hubba, you should be asking questions. If your spouse is a member of Bolts of Thunder, don't worry, this is normal behavior and will help in the progression of the next video. If your spouse is not on Bolts of Thunder, inform the police as soon as possible; your spouse is a drug dealer. A cheap one at that, he/she doesn't even know to use a spoon instead of a knife in the lab... Not that I know what I'm talking about. I've never eaten drugs off of bent spoons. I assume that's what people do with drugs, they eat spoonfuls of them so they can gauge how much they've had and when to stop. That way they're not too intoxicated. Yeah, druggies are responsible citizens. But butter knife drug dealers, be weary of them. They just want to take advantage of you. So Dave fixed up the hubba, and we skated it a couple weeks later. Weston Colton shot the photos with his 8 month pregnant wife Erin and daughter chillin in the mini-van in the parking lot, and his nephew holding the flashes. Yeah, Bolts of Thunder supports high moral, family values, such as outings to the local skate spots to take pictures of butter knife skaters (not to be mistaken with butter knife drug dealers). Dave came out of the gates swinging and 50-50ed the ledge in just a couple tries, and he did it twice. I front boarded it twice as well, mostly because Dave inspired me to do it. Then Dave almost 5-0ed it, he hit his head twice trying it and just kept skating. A real trooper. Anyway, Just wanted to tell you that Bolts of Thunder supports strong family traditions. I guess I chose a real round about way to say it.

Weston Colton took these pictures. Don't believe me? Ask him!

Seduction of the Shaw

Admit it, you've all been waiting for this trailer for a long time. And now that it's here, you're secretly very excited. You won't even tell your friends how excited you are. But you don't even need to, they're just as excited as you are... So Dan's been busy taking his shirt off and flying through the air for the up and coming "Bolts of Thunder Gone Wild" video. Be excited. Very excited.