Progressive Destruction.

I skated today for the first time in my entire life.
That wasn’t at all a false bold proclamation, nor was it conscious felating of my ego for having tried something new. No, I actually felt for the first time in a long time that I was skating for the first time ever.
Ignoring the fact that it was skateboarding that had consumed my life from age 15-18. I hoped on my board today, for the first time in about 4 years. But this time, not concerned with getting from one place to another, or meeting people to skate with to shoot the shit and just watch. Not concerned with making sure I practiced my technique and style in order to give off the impression that I semi-know what I’m doing and that I’m cool. I had experienced it while skating in the past, but I always overlooked it.
Today, I went outside with a feeling in my stomach and a restlessness in my legs, just pushed up and down the block, remembering how to hold my balance as the pebbles under the poly urethane, shook the wood like a fissure concussing itself further into another plate. Holding steady to the thought I had long forgotten, that falling is okay.

Remembering in a hilarious instant that the truth of the matter was, as out of shape as I was back then, when i was just a chubby Muslim kid who didn’t do the bad things and prayed 5 times a day to make sure that I everything wouldn’t go to shit again, because there was finally something good in my life, that I’m the same as I was back then, but just a little more prone to getting winded after spending a half hour trying to remember that ollie’s while moving are a lot harder than kick flips, but eating shit and having the deck fly into knee’s: still feels like getting somewhere.

Beyond that however it brought back a question that festered even back then: “How long can this last?” “How long before I have to grow up to whatever responsibility I’m supposed to take beyond what I already have?” Suffice it to say, I skated for the first time today, knowing, there needn’t be a limit. There needn’t be a time required for something to end because it is thought to be the thing that would end, for nothing really ends. Like a connection to a six layers of wood, six bolts, eight bearings, four wheels, a design manufactured to promote a brand of some kind and adhesive sandpaper that makes the whole thing follow a certain criteria of safety, it is unanswerable to the seeker of the question until they themselves decide that they are done, or when it comes to be that it needs to end to some degree.

I skated for the first time today, not alleviate the urge to skate but because this was the first time I’d pushed down the street, comfortable in my own skin. Comfortable in the idea that, sure, I’m still a big-ger dude, but I can rip better now that I know I’m in control of my body, that I can actually do something other then just push around and practice my technique and hope that hours, weeks, months of pushing around the park where we’d go every time we could, just to make sure that I was keeping afloat with everyone else. I was me again.
I skated for the first time today, and yesterday was international go skate day, and what did I do, go out and not skate. Why, because it was too late, and it’s just not something that I can keep up with anymore, but I still felt an absent bond to it, even through have been separated from it for so long.

June 21st… the first day of summer, here, in the city that made me the way I am where not many of the rules apply as long as you know the where the cops don’t give a fuck, its probably has some other connotations to others, but heavens knows those couldn’t be as important to me.
I had missed skating, just to skate, it was something i hadn’t realized I had done. Just the vibrations of beneath my feet and the ever present sweat drenching me like any high intensity circuit workout would. I could breathe, and these words just came.
Have a wonderful week to anyone reading this, I couldn’t honestly call this rambling, nor could I call it madness, I’d go so far as to say its love, for what I can’t explain, for what’s there and can’t be, never mastered, never conquered, just— Being.