(Reprinted from my personal site)

I started skateboarding when I was a 10 year old hellion, living in a really rural part of Louisiana known for its “rolling hills” (in quotes because the term is also the parish’s motto).
I’m 32 and ten twelfths now… the only time I haven’t skated for any significant period was because of injury (typically skate-related). It’s a little weird to look back and realize that you’ve dedicated over two thirds of your life to manipulating a wheeled plank of wood, but it’s weird in the greatest of ways.To the non-skating reader: for many of us that roll, skateboarding isn’t something that’s picked up and set down (like an office job that you forget about once you get home to your couch). At the risk of reusing the same word too much, skateboarding is the act of manipulating one’s self (in some respects, the same way a martial artist might), manipulating one’s skateboard (juggling and doing various balancing acts), and manipulating the terrain available to the individual that takes part.

The more experienced a skateboarder becomes, the more obsessive he or she becomes as skateboarding transcends simply being an act that someone simply taken part in… the more comfortable you feel on a board, the more you become infatuated with the act of riding. The correlation to skill sets on board and the following obsession is really easy to diagram:

If you can barely stand on a board, it’s probably hard to imagine doing a trick over a set of stairs in the middle of your city… but when you’re at a point where you know how to roll with speed, jump over things, and cruise with some authority and control, you see cityscapes (and architecturally functional spots in ‘lil towns too) as a puzzle to solve with your board.

An experienced skater knows the city you live in better than you ever will. Sure, you might know four shortcuts allowing you to get from point A to point B, but your friendly neighborhood skateboarder knows the little things often overlooked by the average civilian… from what kind of asphalt is used in every parking lot you pass by to the color (or lack thereof) of the parking curbs at any given business in your city limits (different colored paints, at least on concrete, have unique characteristics that manifest themselves when skated on… red’s the best, by the way).

The experienced skateboarder is always looking for something they might have missed… when he’s a passenger in your car and he’s gazing out of the window, he’s scanning for something he can skate on. The snake eats its own tail… as the skater becomes more skilled on the board, the more things he can skate, opening doors for that person to attack even more constructs that architects and business owners never imagined.

I can’t justify the pant chips, the scratch marks, or the paint (rubbed from our boards) left on the various things we ride on, nor will I attempt to. It happens, and it’ll keep on happening. I can say that for the skateboarder, the intent isn’t to damage, it’s to open up a potential experience on something that was never intended to be used in the way we choose to utilize it. We’re not trying to destroy anything, we’re trying to create tricks… even more importantly, we’re trying to have fun on things that most people don’t see the fun in. We see it, we extract it, and more often than not it’s simply not understood unless you’ve been there.

I’ve seen a lot of skaters come and go in the couple of decades that I’ve been on board. I often hear “yeah, I used to skate, but one day I broke my arm and quit…”. Though I can understand the logic here, I can’t relate. Over the years, I’ve broken ribs, legs, wrists, encountered multiple sprains, bang ups, cuts, concussions, hell, I even chipped a tooth. I’m not an especially tough person, but my obsession outweighs my willingness to succumb to the pain involved with my activity of choice. As I write this, I’m breathing with some effort as I just bruised half of the ribs on my left side, and I gave myself a minor sprain on my right ankle, but I plan on skating today anyway (after Ace-bandaging the crap out of my foot and supplementing the wrap-job with an ankle brace and some tightly-mounted high top shoes).

I don’t want this to come out wrong (or cheesy), but skateboarding is my religion… I’d even offer up that I’m more of a skateboarder than most priests are Catholic. There’s never a point in which I’m not a skateboarder, even when I’m about to get into a fight at the bar because of drunken political dialog.

Anyway, I just want to say that skateboarding is really, really neat.