De Rigueur

The bringer of great skate ads.

At the end of my Freshman year of high school, I rolled my ankle skateboarding. In my cooler life, it would have been over an attempt to do a sweet trick against some box, but what really happened was that a little stone found its way into a wheel as I skated downhill. The following day I showed up to my history final exam with a welt as big as my fist. It took several weeks for the welt and my muscles to alleviate back to normal, but after regaining capability I looked at my skateboard like a child would with the boogie man in the closet.

Eh, I wasn't all that great at it anyway.

Seven years later, I took my brother's unused World Industries skateboard, completely covered in a bunch of band and brand stickers I incurred, and decided to skate the same bike path that my Girl skateboard (rip) traversed. Ate dirt twice from misplanting (it's a word now, deal with it) my left foot, but I laughed my ass off. I've been telling Branka that I wanted to get back into skateboarding once the weather permits, and just two days ago the temperatures climbed from 45 to 69 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm not shooting to go pro, but I would like to champion terrain of all sorts like it's me against a raging bull. Adrenaline rushes through the hair on the back of my neck when I've reached full momentum, and somehow steadfast when I slide and do a leg split against concrete. When there's pain, it's flagellation; when you've somehow managed to execute a downhill slope or an ollie, it's an orgasm.

I have and always been fascinated not only by the sport, but the culture itself. It's young, it's colorful, it's destructive, it's fucking punk. Well, should it be called a sport when some may not add an aspect of competitiveness to it? (And the X-Games, the contests, and so forth.) Anyway, the following videos below came from some of my favorite skate videos growing up. Between 2001-2005, I paid attention to the ams and the pros, the issues of Transworld and Thrasher, Crailtap, the artists behind the graphics on the boards, the trending skate spots, and even the touring demos hoping that one would come within a three hour radius of Athens, Ohio (and many didn't) - all behind the backs of my skateboarding dude friends because, at the time, I feared they'd see me as a poser. I wish I still had these old issues so that I could flip through and remember the favorite photographs and ads. Instead, I dug these video up from Youtube (the higher being's great gift to our society), so maybe nostalgia will hit you too upon watching.

Image source: Grindtv.com