Today I turned 62.

When I became a skateboarder at 11 years of age I had no idea I'd be riding 51 years later. On the other hand, I think if you'd asked me I have said "of course I'll be skating when I'm 62."

In skateboarding, as in life, you will always be you.

Just skate like yourself.

A little video from today, at one of my favorite spots.

This spot is known as the Turkey Bowl, in Austin, Texas. When I lived here I skated it two or three times a week. It is the only piece of Austin that I miss at all. Today was the first time in 20 years that I've skated it -- since we moved back to Dallas in 2005.

So, ditches. Drainage ditches and other "found" terrain with banked walls predated skateparks. To this day a good ditch, like this one, is my preferred terrain.

A skateboarder's life is a series of spot found, skated, and usually lost to development, redevelopment, or intentional destruction because someone doesn't like you skating there (usually because there are dickhead making too much noise, or these days "improving" the ditch/spot with their own "DIY" concrete doors. As it turns out, most city public works departments don't actually love it when skaters add a bunch of shit to a drainage ditch that was designed for - GASP - drainage. They may turn a blind eye to a few parking block, but once you start pouring concrete, bringing ramps, or having all your friends out for a BBQ while you skate, things usually go south quickly.

The Turkey Bowl was victim to such happening in recent decades. Due to the antics of skaters, people on motorcycles, etc, "skate stoppers" were driven into the concrete. Quite literally hundreds of them. Some industrious skaters, however, went out and somehow smashed them out, leaving only a little plastic "pimples" and a metal spikes still in the pavement. They hammered the spikes deeper, so now you only run over the little pimples.

You can now ride the ditch with little trouble. I started the day on some smaller, harder wheels (54mm, 95a durometer). Having never ridden the now-pimpled Turkey Bowl, feeling the pimples through those small hard wheels was not to my liking. So I switched to the other board I brought, a 1980s style retro-clone from Super-8 Skateboards, on which I had 60mm 90a Powell-Peralta Rat Bones wheels.

Rat Bones were the go-to wheel for skaters for many years in the 1980s, and for good reason. They are big, but not too big. The 90a hardness ones roll fast and are very smooth. Turns out that having wheels that roll smoothly and fast over semi-rough concrete with hundreds of little pimples is better for rolling over that stuff and flowing.

They would have been the superior wheel choice even without the evil pimples.

Anyway - all you DIY lunatic assholes - stop being so fucking stupid! You are ruining spots. I hate you!

I've written so much about this little video I made in the Fall of 2020 during the early days of the pandemic. It's the video that keeps on giving, as every few months I watch it and experience some new feelings or memories associated with it.

February 2020. Very few people were out. It was like a neutron bomb had hit. It was quiet outside. The air was crisp. If the virus hadn't been around things would have been perfect (my wife's cancer had not yet been diagnosed).

This was not, at the time, my regular skate spot. My normal spot was on the other side of the buildings, and was frequented by more potential virus carriers, so I skated here in this parking lot of city hall. I set up a new street board, started just riding in this parking lot, and began to develop what I call "parking lot style". A little freestyle, a little street skating. All mixed up into one big mess.

It really says a lot about our society (or maybe just me) that I have some level of nostalgia for those days. I hated the stress and fear of the virus, but I was working from home (and getting a lot done), could work with my cat Lefty in my lap, have a relaxed lunch with my wife, go outside and hear a quieter environment. For my entire married life I had never gotten to spend so much time with my wife. It was great. Again, a lot of people died from the virus - not good - but fuck man - why can't we all just live like that, without the virus, all the time? Sure there were the actual heroes who went to work at the grocery stores and delivered stuff to stores and our houses, but so many of us were able to reconnect with our loved ones in a deep way.

Why did it have to take a bad and novel virus to bring us to that point?

Anyway, I would go skate this parking lot almost every day, usually about 5pm, but earlier on the weekends. I'd roll around like in this video. I'd set up my camera. Sometimes I stream the session to Facebook or Twitch so my friends could check in. It was really fun. During my wife's chemo months this place was my getaway. The rolling became therapy even more than usual.

The utter simplicity of riding a skateboard in an empty (for the most part) parking lot is just a thing of beauty. The possibilities for discovery are infinite, as are ways of self-expression.

I was sitting here listening to an interview with Geddy Lee, from the band Rush. I don’t have a link. My wife was playing it.

In the interview, he talks about the period after their last tour with the late Neil Peart. At the time Neil had not yet received his death sentence – a diagnosis of glioblastoma multiform - the kind of brain cancer that killed my dad. It’s a cancer that no one survives. But at the time Neil had retired from music. He was in his 60s, had spent his entire life touring hard. And the man never phoned it in. They said he didn’t want to perform as anything but his best self. So he was worn out and wanted to live his life with his new family.

Fore that tour Neil had created an amazing drum solo. Like everything he did, he put a massive amount of work into it. In this interview Geddy says that post-tour he was listening to the recordings and video and was just amazed by the solo. He emailed Neil and said something like “man, that solo is just fantastic.” Neil emailed him back a long letter, and said he was kind of disappointed that during the tour no one said anything about it.

The greatest rock drummer in the world - disappointed - that no one expressed appreciation of his work during the tour. Not even his beloved band mates. The thing is, Neil was just a guy. The greatest drummer of his generation, but a humble and quiet man who liked to write and read and ride his motorcycle. Just a guy. A guy without a massive ego, who still appreciated being appreciated.

This got me thinking about how nice it is to be appreciated. I think no gift you will ever give anyone is as valuable as an honest and deep expression of appreciation for them.

So, during my first trip to the Paderborn freestyle contest in Germany during 2015, people came up to me all weekend and told me how. much they appreciated my old freestyle trick tips website. How they got their start by going to the site. This was from about 1999 - 2010. No YouTube yet. They were genuinely excited to meet me. This has happened a few times.

I’m just another old skateboarder from Texas. I’m not that good. All did was put up a website with video and sequential images teaching freestyle skateboarding tricks. I knew it was popular, but I had no idea. I honestly didn’t.

A few years later, during the premiere of the first NeverWas Skateboarding video (I had to miss the premier), a person who would become a friend, Ben, stood up and talked about my site and me, and how as a teenager with a lot of stress and problems going not he would go to my site to study and learn tricks and it made a big difference for him. When the guys told me about this the next week I just cried.

Again, I just put up trick tips. I’m just a guy who did something.

Finally, a few years ago a the World Freestyle Roundup contest in Vancouver, Canada (once again I wasn’t even there), I was given the Ambassador of Freestyle Award. My friend Terry Chui apparently said some very nice things about me and my site, and they sent the award to me.

All of these demonstrations of appreciation happened at times I really, really needed them. The adulation in Paderborn happened when 1)my beloved cat Pancho had just died, and 2)my mother was in the middle stages of dementia. I had a lot of stress. I wasn’t entirely happy. The comment at the video premier by Ben happened when I’d had to leave that group’s gathering weekend early, because my mom (in memory care) had fallen and cracked her skull open.

So my point is that if you appreciate someone, tell them. Don’t wait. Tell them. I’m sure Geddy wishes he’d shown appreciation for Neil’s drum solo when it was actually happening. Everyone needs to feel genuine appreciation. It is better than money, better than gifts, better than trophies.

So Terry, NeverWas guys, Monty, Ben, and anyone else who has just shown me that appreciation - thank you. In ever case it lifted me up more than you could know.

This afternoon I was walking out to my car and as usual I spent a couple of minutes fiddling with the various skateboards hanging on the wall out there. It's just too hot to skate here in Texas right now, so the poor boards hang there forlorn, their special purpose not being enacted. This saddens me greatly.

One of the boards is my freestyle board.

For those not in-the-know, a freestyle board is a skateboard that is a bit smaller than a typical board, and it is designed for very technical flatground tricks. They tend to be significantly narrower. A standard board these days range from 8" wide to about 9". That's typical. A freestyle board is about 7.3" to 7.5" wide. There are a few slightly wider, but you get the picture. The narrowness facilitates doing tricks in which the board flips, like kickflips. The relative shortness facilitates a number of other very technical tricks, but it all really boils down to smaller is easier to manipulate.

For most of my skateboarding life I have been known as "the freestyle guy." Freestyle is a very small niche within skateboarding. In my early days in skateboarding, the late 1970s, good skateboarders were expected to be good all-around. That meant they could do freestyle, skate bowls, do slalom, etc. So that's what I did. I became pretty good at freestyle because finding a flat parking lot in which to practice was a lot easier than finding a bowl. I could practice freestyle every day. Back then there was no such discipline as "street skating." There was only skateboarding.

I had the good luck of living in a neighborhood with alleys running behind our houses. Most of the driveways were sloped up. So we could skate the alleys as if they were snake runs or ditches. I became good at skating large flat banks because of this. In fact, while people still seem to think of me as a freestyler, banks and ditches are my preferred terrain, and really always have been, but I do love skating flat ground and doing tricks.

When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020 I was forced to stop my regular heavy freestyle practice sessions. For the previous 6 years I'd been practicing a lot and going to contests in Germany when I could. It was a lot of fun, and those trips are some of my best memories of my life in skateboarding. But with the pandemic in full swing and simultaneously a wife battling breast cancer (and thus immunocompromised) I simply couldn't afford the risk of breaking my ankle or whatever and ending up in an emergency room full of Covid patients.

So, I stopped flipping the board. I totally stopped. No kickflips. No rail flips. No 360 shove-its. No caspers.

Instead, I began thinking much more about the simplest elements in skateboarding. Simple but not necessarily easy. Flowing. Turning. Different kinds of kickturns and pivots. Spins. Wheelies. Footwork. Creatively linking those elements into smooth flowing carving turns. Sliding into different positions.

This has become my preferred way of skating now. On flat or on banks. I have no interest in flipping the board or getting airborne in any way. Zero. Zilch.

Today when I was looking at my freestyle board I realized the depth of this change in my preferences. I've known for a long time that I'm having more fun with my current way of skating and didn't have much desire to go back to my old ways, but today I realized very abruptly that I have NO desire to go back. And that feels - not weird at all.

One might think "Bob's getting older and his afraid or weak, or afraid AND weak." Not true. Today I spent 4 hours at a very strenuous aikido seminar. At 62 I have excellent agility. I can move with grace. I can do huge breakfalls without injury. If I wanted to do kickflips and whatnot I could.

I just don't want to. At all. If I never did another "technical" freestyle trick again I wouldn't miss it at all. I just don't enjoy doing them anymore.

Here's something I filmed last year. I'm riding a fairly big board. It is representative of the kind of thing I enjoy doing now. Rolling, flowing, spinning, turning. On flat or on banks. There are endless combinations of the basic elements of skateboarding. Putting them together in sequences with flow in and out is a challenge. It feels good. That's the thing. This kind of thing is connected to the Earth. It's about movement, not board manipulation. This is what I like now.

This post will be kind of a rambling stream of consciousness thing...beware...

I've been having some interesting conversations with my niece this week. We've been talking about the notion of "self", Zen, masculinity/femininity and the continuum of such ideas, and how to live one's life. Yes, it is nice to have a niece like this, with whom you can solve the riddles of human existence.

This morning, for some reason, I was thinking of my parents' old friends Dalton and Elsie, from Monroe, Louisiana. They were good friends when we lived there, though that wasn't a long time. We moved to Texas when I was 5. But for many years we would visit them when we went over there. They had 3 or 4 daughters, the youngest was my age. A good family. Good people. Anyway, I did a quick search and found that Dalton and Elsie are both dead. Not a surprise. They were old. Dalton lived to be 94.

I suppose I've been thinking a lot about mortality the last few weeks. Don't worry - nothing profound coming up. It all seems like yesterday and a million years ago. Looking up our old friends reinforced that feeling. When I think about all this it's impossible not to reflect on my own life and how I've lived it. I've had a great career as a public librarian. I love it. I believe in it. I believe in public service and intellectual freedom. I've helped promote and continue those ideals. Furthermore, I think a proper life on Earth centers around lifting others up. Cooperation over competition. Kindness and generosity. I think anyone who thinks otherwise should be taken out and maimed (kidding...kind of).

Everyone struggles to figure out who they are and what they should be doing. We all come to different conclusions. I think it's critical that we all be free to be who we really are and to explore and figure that out. The roadmaps to happiness we are given by society are not for everyone.

Which all why, a few years ago, after I accidentally recorded this beautiful skateboarding clip I used it to make this very short video and used "If 6 was 9" by Jimi Hendrix.

Because when I was 11 years old I became a skateboarder and beneath all the layers I am happy to be a dirty old skateboarder.

I'm the one that's gonna have to die
When it's time for me to die
So, let me live my life the way I want to

I am writing this book because we're all going to die.

That was Jack Kerouac (writing as the character Sal Paradise) from On the Road.

I'll be 62 in a couple of months. In the coming years more than in my previous years I think I'll be reflecting on my life, and my life in skateboarding in particular. The people I've met, how it feels, what it means to me. How it fits into my life. Maybe I'll occasionally say something that connects with you, whether you are a skateboarder or not.

I hope something I write here means something to you, dear unknown potential reader.

I wrote this in 2011, a couple of years after my father died from brain cancer. I publish it here, years later, as an example of how skateboarding has filled in the holes in my life, given me respite in times of stress and anxiety.

The Hill at 7pm. August, 2011. Still hot outside...97F

Careening down the hill, I carve from curb to curb, projecting my center of gravity through the board, through four moving points of contact with the pavement, feeling the wheels struggle to grip the surface of the white concrete. They don’t succeed entirely. I can feel the tiny slips as my board drifts slightly with each turn. I like the slipping and drifting. Reminds me that control is an illusion. All control. An illusion. The best we can do is surf the wave of chaos. Better have your mind in the game.

Get your shit together, son, or you are going DOWN!

Some say that the concrete is a constant, unlike a surfer’s wave, which always changes, never repeats, and is impossible to really predict. But they’re wrong. They aren’t paying attention. No ride is ever the same. Then you’ve got the wind, perhaps some traffic, and whatever random junk has blown into your path since the last ride.

So leave the fucking earbuds at home. This isn’t the skatepark.

As I approach the left-hand curb, I kneel down into a tuck-knee position, reach out, and drag my gloved hand across the curb like a surfer feeling the wave. Then with that same trailing hand I grab the rail, turn sharply, and feel the wheels lose traction slightly as I head for the other curb. I stand, hands behind my back, and back arched for attempted style, as I carve backside an inch from the other curb.

This hill became my place of both tranquility and rage a couple of years ago when my dad was dying from brain cancer -- the kind that starts in the brain and no one survives. My dad was a minor league baseball player in his younger days, and had remained a great athlete throughout his life. Strong as an ox and physically gifted. Until the cancer hit. I watched it drain him, first his mind, then his body. Then he was gone. Fuck.

Like I said, control is an illusion.

This hill isn’t that steep, but with a good south wind, like there is today, it’s pretty fast. Tops out today at about 27mph. What -- you don’t think that’s very fast? Can you run 27mph?

As I pick up speed I head for the first of the left-turn lanes, where I slalom through some of the white city-titties that mark out the lane. A few days ago a buddy hung up on one of them. He was behind me. All I heard with the CLANK of his rear truck hitting the tittie, and then the sound human meat hitting and sliding on concrete. Luckily the wind wasn’t strong that day, so his speed wasn’t maxed out. Except for the flesh that got peeled off his palm like an orange skin, he was fine. Helmets are good.

The concrete doesn’t lie. It doesn’t sugar-coat your mistakes. 20mph to zero in three seconds with your body as the brake -- the shit gets real before you know what hit you.

I shoot out of the turn lane and carve close to the left-hand curb, then turn and head back toward the middle of the street. I hunker down in a tuck and speed up a bit.

There’s a left-hand turn coming up, 90 degrees, that leads into a short feeder street (about 50 or 60 yards) with a steeper incline, followed by an immediate turn to the right.

I take the left-hand turn at an angle, and making use of my slide gloves I put my leading hand down and slide to fakie as I turn the corner. Coming out of the slide with most of my speed, I immediately jump, twisting my body so that I’m facing forward again. Yeah, the board is backwards, but it’s symmetrical, so there is no front or back. Gotta love this modern downhill equipment.

Time for a couple of quick gyrating pumps to increase my speed, and then I spot the little bits of gravel in intersection. I head right for it. Love the sound and and gnarliness of blasting through the gravel at the bottom as I make the final right turn.

Compared to normal people, skateboarders of my generation have spent and continue to spend a lot of time in drainage ditches. They are some of the best naturally occurring man-made terrain for skateboarding. This is me a couple of months ago. I shot this on a crappy old Canon Point-in-Shoot Digital Elph camera. I'll write more about the importance of this skate spot to my life soon. For now, here is a quick video. Just me doing a couple of slides. The song is By the Door, by the Crucifucks.

This is the first post here on this site. Honestly, I have a lot of skateboarding sites, but what the hell here's another. I probably won't post any more this big. But this is who I am. This is from a collaborative video project from a few years ago called NeverWas Skateboarding. It was the 2nd of the NW videos.