Skaters Anonymous?

Hi, my name is Kraston and I'm a skataholic. Have you ever felt like you've got a problem? I know when I was around 13 years old after skating a couple years that I was an addict. I lived, breathed, ate, slept skateboarding. It was always and I mean always on my mind. I remember Rodney Mullen in a skate video....probably Public Domain where he talks about education and your mind and how skateboarding helped him focus so he wouldn't go crazy. After seeing that, I thought, yeah, that's right...skateboarding is good for you, good for school and my grades will get better because I skateboard. Wrong! I never did my homework, I just wanted to skate and when I was in school, I looked at skate mags, played with my finger board and dreamed about skateboarding once the bell rang. It totally consumed me and I never could imagine quitting...well, at some point in the early 90s, alot of my skater friends quit skating as much and looking back now, it was a slow time in skateboarding history. I wanted to hang out with girls more and drive and skateboarding just faded a little for me...I didn't have time for it anymore. So 12 years later, I get the spark again and I start skating again at 30 years old. Guess what happens? The addict in me comes out again, only now I am a responsible 30 year old adult with a wife of 7 years, a mortgage and 2 young children. Well, I didn't think I would be so consumed with it at first, I just knew I wanted to skate again...there were free parks I could skate at now that were not around when I was in my teens and all sorts of fun opportunities, plus I got on my board and I could still do all my old tricks and now I've even learned new ones. When I first started up again, I was nervous, embarrassed because I was the only old guy I saw at the park. Once I got over that, I just wanted to skate all the time, so my skate on my 30 min lunch break got to be much much more and soon I was skateboarding when I shouldn't be and lying to my wife and sneaking off somewhere to skate on trips to the grocery store even. I would get upset at myself if I didn't skate every single day, I was obsessed with getting better and learning and landing more flip tricks....it was crazy. It was just like when I was a kid, except now I was suppose to be more mature about things like this, but no, it took over...a song comes to mind...ST...."beware, he's possessed to skate!" Yep, that was me. You know, sometimes you can get too much of a good thing. I didn't want my wife and kids to be part of my skateboarding obsession. I wanted to go by myself to the skatepark....don't get me wrong, I wanted my kids to learn how to skateboard, but they were way to young and I was being selfish, not wanting to have to parent while doing my "stress relief" activity, ya know. Well, I've learned now that I had the wrong attitude. I now have gotten myself into a sticky situation with my family and with my finances and my obsession with having fun on my wooden toy played a part in hurting both my family and my finances. Since breaking my foot and causing a huge financial blow to my family, I have learned that skateboarding in your 30s with a wife and kids needs to done in moderation and you should get your family involved in your hobbies, not keep them hidden to yourself...make a day out of your skateboarding adventures or at least invite your wife and kids to come watch...don't exclude them from your passions in life. I did that and I screwed up. My wife supported my skateboarding and now she doesn't want me to have anything to do with it. I still love skateboarding and always will. I long to get back on my board and to the skatepark to feel the grind on my trucks against the concrete and do some noseslides on my favorite ledge and to knock out some no comply's. I will get to the park ones of these days as I am very rusty now since I haven't skated since March other than a few see if I can still ollie sessions! :) ha! I will do it right this time, I will not blow off other responsibilities to my family or work in order to go skate and I will not be obsessed about it. I will make attempts at involving my family in skateboarding with me and not exclude them like I have in the past. Any of you have a similar experience with being obsessed with skateboarding?

Pool Skating

So, I didn't skate my first Pool until I was 32 years old. I can't believe my friends and I never found one as kids to skate in Nebraska, but it just never happened. So, I'm 34 years old now and haven't skated another pool since. I was fully padded, helmet, wrist guards, elbow pads, knee pads....I know, pretty lame, but I am the father of 2 young children and I wasn't about to skate my first pool and kill myself. I have to admit, I don't wear my pads very often so it feels very restrictive but I had fun, I felt like a kid...just so stoked that I was going to skate my first pool. I just pumped and kick turned front side and back side as high as I could several times, but I never made it to the top...I'm sure I could over time and getting over the fear of it all. I do hope to skate it again, however I've not been back since that day because I had heard the owner of the property filled it up with something because kids were spray painting profanity...stupid kids...I mean, this guy was fine with us skating it, but the profanity pissed him off...oh well... It's wierd, It's like this guy lives on the property of an old public recreation center that closed down. His house is way in the back and there is a baseball field that has been overgrown with weeds, a gymnaseum with busted up floors and this pool in the woods that is coverered under a little shelter that is all worn out. Check out the video below, I found it on youtube...I don't know any of these people but this is the same pool...funny to see the footage of all the frogs because I had heard it was nicknamed "Froggy Bottom"

Nash Nightmare 1986

That is the model of my first fish shaped skateboard. My very first skateboard was a hand me down from my brother....it was from the 70s and was a red plastic skinny thing but I remember the wheels were oh so soft which made the ride real nice...the thing was tiny though and your feet hung over the edges alot. I rode that all the time as a kid and that was the first skateboard I had ever sat and then stood on. I broke that board after learning how to ollie and thinking it would be fun to try and ollie on that old tiny flat plastic skateboard and it was alot of fun at first. I was snapping huge ollies on this thing and well, I landed once not over the trucks and that was the end of that skateboards life, sad to say. So one day in the 80s when skateboarding was the latest fad and everyone was doing it, I went to the store and asked my parents to buy me a skateboard. The one I picked out was a green Nash Nightmare. I thought it was sooo cool at the time, it had this picture of Jason from Friday the 13th and creepy hands and other scary images for the graphic and I thought the cut on the griptape pattern was cool. Looking back on it now, I remember the grip tape wasn't even grip tape, it was like little pieces of black colored sand held onto the wood with glue. The deck was flat and the wheels were like plastic and the bearings made it hard to pick up any speed. I have in the past looked for pictures of the Nash Nightmare online with no luck, so I decided to see if anyone is trying to sell one on ebay and there is!!! I'm so excited just to see it again....I had just the picture in my head to go on and now I finally get to see it again! If I had the cash I would buy this board but I just can't afford to purchase
anything right now. This board was a total piece of crap, but it was my piece of crap, so that makes it special! :) ha! My fond memory from this board and I think the last time I rode it before getting a new deck was when I rode down my hill at full speed which wasn't very fast on the board because of the crappy bearings. One of my wheels hit a rock and my board came to a dead stop while I did not. I hadn't gotten used to falling correctly by tucking and rolling. So I put my hand down to catch me and fractured my wrist and had a nasty cut on my elbow. I didn't go to the hospital until the next day. The night of my injury I realized that I probably broke something becuase it hurt to lift my fork at dinner. :) So, thanks Nash Nightmare for my first broken bone! :) Since I've started skateing again in 2004, I have fractured my other wrist slipping out on a ledge and I have broken my foot (a jones fracture) by landing primo after just ollieing up onto my nose on a ledge and as I was doing a shuv-it out, I landed wierd. It wasn't even a hard landing, but it broke. Sucks becuase I was purposely "taking it easy". Oh well!
13 weeks in a cast....that sucked!

Butt Pads? I'm speechless.

So, I just finished purchasing a Christmas gift for my wife on Overstock.com and so it seems to me this store has everything, so I figured I'd do a search for skateboards and see what kind of deals and brands of skateboard decks and hardware they are selling. Once I saw this thing, my jaw dropped to the floor. Part of me is saying OMG, really, are you kidding me, a butt pad for skateboarding---how lame can you get? The other part thought, hmmm, you can hide it under your clothes, nobody would know and your butt and hips would be nicely padded....nahhhh!! That's just crazy...or is it? I can hear the conversation at the skatepark now, gee Kraston, you look like you've gotten a little chunky in the hips and buttocks area. Yeah, must be the holidays! ha! :) Little do they know, I've got my Hilbilly Buttpad on! :) Hilarious! I just realized it appears to only come in small and extra small....okay, so maybe this is intended for little ones...hmmm, great idea for my kids to wear year round---I'm often saying to my wife, we should make them wear helmets all the time! :)

Quicksilver's All 80s All Day Street Sesh!

Ok, so I've been reading when I've got the time about Quicksilver's "All 80s All Day" shindig and have seen some of the vert footage, but I hadn't stumbled upon any of the street footage and was wondering if it was just strickly vert that they were doing. So, I used my high tech searching skills and pulled up youtube and searched for "All 80s All Day street" and low and behold in my wildest dreams....I found the Street Session that went down at the Quicksilver All 80s event and it rocks your mothers socks!



I mean, I love 80s vert and all because I grew up skateboarding in mid to late 80s and when you watched skate videos, you watched alot of vert and vert is awesome....the only problem is where I lived in Omaha, Nebraska, the nearest skatepark was a couple hours away and so you had to have an adult willing to drive you and then you had to pay to get in. I remember doing this once with a friend and saw it as my one opportunity to skate vert. I was scared shitless and I owned no pads at all and the skatepark we went to didn't even require me to wear any! I remember distincly standing up at the top of that vert ramp with my naked deck that I had jigsawed into a Hosoi Hammerhead shape along with custom artwork and griptape and a nice polyurethane coating! :) I was trembling...I had never dropped in on vert before and nobody was at this skatepark when we were there to even encourage me but my friend Aaron who had never done it either. I tried to envision myself on top of the quarterpipe at my friend Tom Sullivan's house and kept telling myself to lean forward more because it was vert....I remember as I was dropping the nose of my skateboard down onto the ramp....asking God to please not let me die! :) It all happened so fast, all four wheels were on the ramp vertical and then the next thing I know I'm at the bottom of the ramp standing on my board and I hadn't fallin yet! Awesome I thought to myself and then as quick as that happened I was faced with the other side of the ramp and I was haulin ass real fast....I remember thinking, oh shit, what do I do now, I didn't think that I would actually be standing still going up the other side! :) LOL! So, I bailed, fell backwards on my ass and shot my board up the otherside, then covering my head as my board went straight up into the air and crashed hard back onto the flat.

So, that was my vert experience and my only vert experience to date unless you count my first pool session 3 years ago, but that is another story on it's own. So, back in Nebraska I grew up worshipping vert skaters like everyone else but I skated street, ledges, stairs, curbs, parking blocks, launch ramps, homemade rails and once a miniramp. That is not to say I didn't also worship street gods like Natas Kaupas, Tommy Guerrerro, Mark Gonzales, Ron Allen and others...Vert was just where it was at back then.

Ok, I just have to say when I watched this video, I was very impressed with how much the production of the whole thing was so believably 80s. I mean, if you were not watching closely, you would think it was authentically 80s footage....it's that good! :) Enjoy if you haven't already! :) Be sure to watch until the end to see the results...you'll be surprised that a dagger won the contest!

Transworld Skate Vids Rock

I always find it refreshing to kick back and watch the latest Transworld Skate Vid. I was just checking out a preview of "Let's Do This" which is probably already out, but I have not seen it yet with my whole being injured, losing my car and not skating since March.



But the preview got me thinking about skate videos and how you can watch so much footage now online and the amateur stuff is getting pretty sophisticated now with computers and cool software to edit digital video which must make it much more challenging for professionals now to put out material that is worth buying. Of course, I think most skaters download there skate vids anyhow, so there is money lost there too. But I just have to give thanks to Transworld for putting out videos that incorporate good cinematography and kick ass skateboarding all into a visually stimulating end product.

Skate Like A Girl

This morning I got an email from my Mom and Dad in Bellevue, Nebraska (My childhood hometown). They told me how it was -2 degrees outside. Burr! That is freakin' cold compares to the 70 degrees it is today in Williamsburg, VA. We don't really go below 20 degrees here and seem to mainly hover around 50-60 degree weather in the winter. So I started to get nostalgic about Nebraska and skateboarding and was thinking about the spots I used to go to on a regular basis for skateboarding as a kid. I was mainly thinking about this ditch we used to skate in Capehart housing (housing for the military but not on the base itself) This ditch intertwined down the middle of the backyards of these homes and it was a small ditch but not tiny...it probably had about 7 foot of flat and 4 foot of incline on both sides and it was not straight...it curved around and reminded me alot of Wallows in Animal Chin, but smaller. I maybe remembering this ditch larger, but I can't find for the life a me a picture or any video footage on Youtube or anything...so annoying in a day and age where you find virtually anything on the internet. Anyways, I remember having some fun sessions at that ditch...if any Nebraska skaters stumble upon my blog and know the ditch I'm talking about, post a comment! Thanks! So in my quest for youtube footage or pics of the ditch I used to skate, I found this website "Skate Like A Girl" and the redo of the Powell skull above is a sticker they are making. I enjoyed browsing this blog and enjoyed the pics and blog entries...check it out if you have some time. I love finding new to me skate sites and am always impressed with women skaters especially when I see them at my local park...they are such a minority and I welcome them!

Skateboarding Bulldogs get Float in Rose Parade

I remember the first time I saw a dog skateboarding. I was sitting at my parents house in chilly Nebraska in 1988 on Christmas Day. I got the Bones Brigade "Public Domain" video on VHS for Christmas and couldn't wait to watch it! I popped it in and there is a segment with Lance Mountain where a bulldog chases him down and steals his skateboard from him and starts pushing away...hilarious! :) Well, today's most famous skateboarding Bulldogs that I know of are Meaty from Rob and Big and Tyson and Tillman who are featured in commercials, TV shows, talk shows, etc.

Well, apparently Tyson and Tillman are sponsored by the Natural Balance premium pet food line founded by celebrity Dick Van Patten. Natural Balance will have a float in the Rose Parade featuring a track that Tyson and Tillman will skate on while the float comes by. The float features a vibrant 15-foot-long sculpted skateboard and a 16-foot tall floral bulldog. Unbelievable! :) I can't wait to see this. I found some practice footage of them on YouTube. They seem to have a problem with going around the track, instead they go back and forth but they have time to practice some more! :) ha!

John Lucero Curb Session

Watching this sadly reminded me of myself. It is just us old skaters that find so much enjoyment from a curb session? I mean, really that is all I need...I just get so much enjoyment from just skating a curb or parking block....I guess it is because growing up, that is where most of my skateboard sessions were held and if we weren't skating that, we either skated a ditch or the old launch ramp! :)

No Comply never dies!

The No Comply was invented by pro skater Neil Blender in the 80s.

I first recall learning this trick after watching Powell Peralta's Public Domain Video back in 1987. I first learned a 180 no comply, then a forward no comply, then I learned my one of my absolute favorite tricks to do and it always confuses little kids. A 180 no comply where you land on your back wheels and then pivot back forward again, a 180 no comply pivot perhaps? I learned it from this video though where Ray Barbee, whom I consider the master of no comply's, does a great job executing it and I can't really recall a video clip of anyone else doing it.



I have seen newer videos of people doing no comply 180s to pivot all the way around on their back truck 360. There are so many variations of the no comply that can be done and for some reason I just find this trick to be so much fun, I love it! Oh man, I absolutely can't forget to talk about the No Comply off parking blocks...I love this trick. I do it no handed and a grab variation. If you've never tried it, you must learn it and you will be sure to impress your friends. I also love doing no comply's to tail, both 180 and 270. I do those on curbs and ledges...again, so much fun and not very hard! :) I think I saw the 270 variation first in one of the Santa Cruz videos from the 80s. Yes, you gotta love YouTube!!! I just found Tom Knox's clip from the 1989 Santa Cruz video "Speed Freaks" This is the skateboarding I grew up with and some of the last tricks I was working on back in high school.

Here is a nice Tony Hawk Trick Tip with Mike V that shows a couple different variations on the No Comply...I think it is just missing the grab and the parking block no comply. Mike V had a nice part in Public Domain as well where he shows off his No Comply skills and that is where I really perfected the parking block no comply. Both of these video clips are below...check them out and then hit the streets trying out these fun old school tricks! :) I'm glad to see new skate vids with the new pro's and am's doing no comply variations like no comply 180s down a set of stairs...awesome!

Fingerboarding just got kicked up a notch!

If you are a 30 something skateboarder, then you probably remember making your own fingerboard skateboard by glueing sheets of thin cardboard together and cutting out your skateboard shape and then fastening wheels from a hotwheels car and some real grip tape on top in some fancy design like we all did our grip tape back in the day. Nowadays kids don't bother making there own, forget being creative! :) Just go to your toystore and get a Techdeck with your favorite logo or skater's graphic on it. Well, I have to admit, I have one and the little realistic trucks on them are quite impressive and what's even more impressive is the video of people on the TechDeck Trick Tips website doing the same tricks you do on a real board with there freakin' fingers! I've tried doing these tricks and let me just say, HUH?

Well, now that you are caught up with fingerboard evolution, this next stage is brought to us by the folks at Illusion Labs. It is called Touchgrind and is made for the iphone. It is touted as the first real multi-touch skateboard game ever created. Apparently Touchgrind has 12 unloackable boards that has different abilities, incredible 3D grahics and you can even jam to your own music with a custom soundtrack. Insane and all for $4.99 from iTunes! Too bad the iphone isn't closer to $4.99! :) Check out the insane demo video for this below!!!

The Real Free Credit Report....really :)

I was just browsing some other people's blogs this morning and stumbled upon an entry where somebody got tricked into signing up at FreeCreditReport.com....I know you are singing the song right now, aren't ya....."shoulda gone to freecreditreport.com, I coulda seen this coming at me like an atom bomb.."



Yeah, you know you love it! :) Well, they aren't the real free one...if you sign up there, you are signing up for some trial...you do get access to your credit report and you can save it as a PDF, because hell, I fell for it too and that is why I am telling whoever reads this...don't go there unless you want to have to remember to cancel your trial membership. Instead, go to

https://www.annualcreditreport.com

That is the site where you can get your REAL free credit report.....and it's jingle free! :)

Political Radness...NOT

Apparently, it was just a rumor that Obama's Treasury Secretary was a skater..thanks to Skatedaily.net for clarifying this. Sorry, I guess the dream of a white house skatepark will have to be put on hold...