The Ever-Aging Skateboarder

A Call to the Geezer

Dateline: 20 January 2001

There's nothing quite as sad as the progressively aging skateboarder who, having gone passive, wants to get back in the game but feels he has to make apologies for lost youth. In a sport where newbie 17 year olds are somehow feeling past their primes this is a poignant annoyance that borders on the absolutely tragic.

I know the pressure to not get out there at all can be completely overwhelming, but guess what? If you pack it in...

Your loss.

You want to get in it, then get in it. Forget those young grommets whose moral imperative seems to be ridicule the geezer. They're just annoying kids and it is without a doubt their inherent right to pass the heckling along. You did it too, didn't you? Afterall, what goes around always comes around big, and you know as well as I that their encroaching day is at hand. Obviously, fifteen is fifteen but the ever looming [gasp] 22 is right around the frikkin' corner and the approach is upon them faster than they could possibly imagine.

They have no conception what it's like to be 25+, and while every individual is different what you do have is your own experience to draw on. If you're not completely brain dead you should be able to recollect what it's like to be their age, so be forgiving, then blow 'em off.

As for the elderly set who won't get off your back and keep telling you to grow up, you've gotta know that's just envy. They wish they had the guts to get out there with you and mix it up so definitely don't pay them any mind. Seriously, they're the ones who are killing the spirit, forget 'em.

Here's what you do. Grab some of your "old" pals and pick it up again and again and again the next day and forget the naysayers altogether. Take back the parks and the streets and use that nest egg of cash you have no doubt accumulated to go about doing what it takes to reshape the environment so that for once in our long boring history maybe getting from point A to point B will no longer be the weary, suffocating irritation that it currently is.

This is worth your while, I guarantee it. Get out there NOW and change the world.