Jay Riggio: Fountain of youth
A yearning for the good old days of skateboarding.
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Growing up, we were the future. We had Nintendo, laser discs, CDs and towards the end of our adolescence, the blossoming internet. And all the while, we had skateboarding.
Nothing around us could be dated. Nothing we were experiencing first hand could have possibly been surpassed, outdone or hammered deep beneath the surface of the what went before it. We were paving the way, digging the imprint for our contemporaries to follow. We were the youth and, as far as skateboarding was concerned, we were what mattered most. And in our precocious, altered state of adolescence, that’s how it all truly felt.
It was a perfect time. If you weren’t a skateboarder, then you didn’t understand. You couldn’t understand because you weren’t welcome. We were hated, detested by the popular standard and misunderstood by all. Nobody wanted a thing to do with us and we wanted nothing to do with them - unless of course they had something to do with skateboarding. It was all perfectly fitting, beautiful and right in every single way imaginable. Skateboarding was ours.
But one day, a couple of funny things happened. We started to get old and perhaps even worse yet, we, as skateboarders, started to become likeable. Somewhere, someplace, somebody decided that skateboarding was cool. The media embraced it. Advertisements and movies featured skating: tailoring it to sell, deeming it cool and aligning it with popular culture. Corporate entities with no roots whatsoever in skateboarding began to infiltrate the market, repossessing the culture and the lifestyle in order to turn a substantial profit. What happened to the days of skateboarding being the graceful black sheep of the herd? And what happened to our youth? These two great questions seemed to coincide almost exclusively with each other and it was difficult as anything to make sense of.
As Tony Hawk, Rob Dyrdek and Bam Margera became household names, many of my contemporaries became unsure of the state of skateboarding and where they existed within its new model. It might be right to say that somewhere along the way they grew to be at odds with the new ideals emerging through the 'accepted' version of skateboarding. And if these ideals weren’t enough to set us apart, we continued to age, making our distance from it all that much more apparent. The younger generations were even calling us the “old guys” at the session. How could this happen? It hurt to admit it, but we had become out of touch with the very thing that we loved, nurtured and had built our entire lives upon.
Along the way, all of the guys I grew up skating with took on different paths. Some became teachers, others designers, some fine artists, some even bankers and stockbrokers, all essentially growing further and further away from skateboarding - and most likely making the 'new' skateboarding that much easier to swallow.
I somehow managed to find myself working within the skateboard industry, writing about it and stepping straight into the problematic shit with each concocted sentence. And as my job in the skateboard world continued I found it more and more difficult to let go of the way things used to be. After all, I was being reminded on a daily basis of the stark contrasts between the then and the now of skateboarding.
Today, I constantly grapple with the notion of taking on another line of work and the regret that I should have never let myself get so painfully close to the very industry that birthed my lifelong obsession. Essentially, I obsess over a sort of 'innocence lost' theme everyday.
Perhaps I’m the only one to blame but it seems painful and confusing to think that any disenchantment could result from ones dreams coming true. The solution appears simple. If you aren’t psyched on the heat then get the fuck out of the kitchen, right?
But it’s not that easy for me, especially since my leaving the skate industry will have little to no impact on my connection with actual skateboarding. Regardless if I take a job at McDonalds or not, it still wont change the fact that I still love skateboarding.
I mean, I still get excited when I see a new skate video for fuck's sake. I practically wear a smile as I flip through the latest skate mags. I still get giddy like a boy on Christmas morning when I set up a new board. And every time I get on my skateboard and push down the street, the exact same feelings surface that I experienced tick-tacking down my parents driveway some 25 years ago. Once again, it all becomes great and kind of worth it.
When it comes down to just me and my skateboard, my dissatisfaction with the industry, my yearning for the old days and the fact that I am an aging 31-year-old doesn’t mean so much anymore. It doesn’t mean much because once I step on my board, the magic always comes right back.
It’s easy to feel yourself torn by the past and the present, and allow it all to make you bitter. And at the same time, it’s just as easy to forget that as skateboarders, we all have the capacity to let it all go and become young again. All it takes is one simple direction forward.
All you need to do is step on your board and roll down the street.
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Fountain of youth (text) by Jay Riggio is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (5)
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If there are more pros, you can bet that there are a lot more people out there skating everyday and prgressing the sport.
Don't whinge just because your dream came true!!!
http://www.pierreprospero.com/.....blog/