Looking back

I can't exactly remember when I started being absorbed with watching skateboarding online but I know it was sometime in my 18th year of being alive. I think I'd been skating for about a year and I'm pretty sure it was after the summer I'd received my very first skate video from the Dew Tour. It was C1rca's It's Time and the only skateboarder I knew the name of at that time was Ryan Sheckler. I still remember winning a contest for which my prize was a FatHead poster. They offered me a Paul Rodriguez one but at the time that name meant nothing to me so I chose the Sheckler poster. My mom still has it in her house on the wall. I also remember declining a picture and an autograph from Anthony Shetler because I had no clue who he was. I know who he is now but I can still remember his face when I snatched my shirt away before he could sign it. Boy, was I a jerk! I knew close to nothing about the professional side of skateboarding. I don't think I even knew that you could go online and watch skateboarding.

After watching the same video probably a hundred times, I went online and started looking up the guys from the video. I realized that there was a whole world online of magazines, pictures, articles, and of course videos. I think I've written a post or two about it before, but one of the first skateboarders whose skating I looked up to was Ryan Reyes. That lead me to Arizona skateboarding which lead me to videos that featured guys like Preston, some kid that made videos of his friends in Arizona. Before I ever met anyone from Arizona, I watched videos on the skateaz website and was in complete awe of how amazing the parks looked and how great the skateboarding was. And the music! The music was always great. I never, in a million years, thought that I would meet the men that were in those videos, let alone be skating the same parks. I knew nothing about Arizona except the skateparks were amazing and there were rumors of big cacti.

Fast forward a few years and now I've not only skated many of the parks in the videos I used to overplay but actually live in Arizona. If I could go back and tell 18 year old me that someday I'd be living in Arizona, skating the parks, meeting the people and attending video premieres that feature people that are in the same room, I would probably call future me crazy.

Anyway, here is one of the videos I've watched close to 5 million times..just kidding. But I've watched it many, many times. It's so fucking weird looking back on these videos now. I've briefly met a lot of these guys. Upon meeting some of them, I never connected the people in the videos with the actual humans. Upon meeting others I completely fanned out mentally. It's so fucking weird. It's cool to look back on and laugh about but I'm starting to realize I have way too much time on my hands. Can I go skate now?