It is fun to develop obsessions, fascinations. By that I mean interests that can be described as “nutritive”, that absorb attention and make your life better. And at the age of 43, skateboarding has become one of a few such nutritive obsessions. It is because of the anarchic nature of at least the way the videos are filmed and the attitudes of the skater’s - I really liked to hear skateboarding described as the demimonde of outsiders. I am struggling to deal with my status - do I embrace my inner outsider or do I hide it, repress it in some way? Up to now it has been the latter especially since I started at the cemetery. In an easily approachable sense my job is outre with the routine placing of human corpses or ashes in the ground or in columbarium wall niches. My wife feels it is neat and I do too - it makes me comfortable in a place in society that is necessary and in some ways (intentionally?) overlooked, shuttling bodies off to these repositories, a social need for the post-death respect that we hope we all may merit.
So I’m in what is an outsider profession - is that right? What of my colleagues at the cemetery? I would say they definitely are unique and wild in their own outsider-like ways. I will leave it up to them if they would actually regard themselves as outsiders. Dudes down to have a good time and keep things “ladish” on the job. And that is an aspect of the lives that skateboarding videos capture - a community with smiles on their faces, allies in something outside of the mainstream - yet a society at peace with itself. I accept that mirror to my own life and I accept that in my private life this vibe is modified yet still resonant - off work I am a different person yet still one who revels in being different.
I’m sure skateboarding has attracted many, many paeans, odes, etc. And I seek to add to that because, when you are moved by something - especially unexpectedly moved - you want to understand it. And just as with graffiti - that fellow traveller of skateboarding - it only counts when it is seen. So I might publish this - always a debate about what to share.
I feel the pull of sport and consider myself to be an amatuer athlete. Whatever psychological needs are satisfied by my athletic endeavors I get similar, sympathetic satisfaction through watching sport. American football, basketball, baseball. Even tennis, hockey and rugby I have spent time in front of the tube watching. But no sport have I watched more of than world football/soccer. I’ve played a bit of footy - one of the main reasons I like soccer, along with for me, its innate watchability, is that I look like the guys playing - they are runners. Yes, they perform a string of near-miraculous touches and passes in a match but this comes on a foundation of mobility with the more speed the better.
Skateboarding’s recent appeal must be similar, that I see myself as close to the prototypical skater. And I’ve skated a bit too so, as with soccer, I have a sense of the difficulty involved and thus how hard it is for a football forward to score a goal or a skater lands a difficult trick - both are movement-based and both rely on fancy footwork. Bodies in soccer, skateboarding, running must conform to demands of speed and balance: a certain grace is attained, success relying on this grace. In running this is seen in the runner’s gait, how they move and how they meter their effort over distance. In soccer this is seen in the timing of runs and the player’s deftness in bringing the ball under control. In skateboarding this grace is seen in the body positioning, how the arms provide balance as the skater ollies up to a rail and then complete some complicated board-flipping trick when they dismount.
It has been slightly jarring to come back to skateboarding after a couple of decades and hear the skaters describe what they do as “tricks” - sympathetic with my interest in magic, I suppose. A series of tricks to unlock a goal, a recorded video segment that lands a skater sponsorships, the rolling and clacketing of skatewheels an incantation. If magic is intended to change the world in accordance with one’s will then what is skateboarding? Whether a busy city streetscape or a graffitied swimming pool in some atrophied suburbia, skateboarding is a melding of a person with an environment - skateboarding is a re-interpretation of the built environment, an altering of the landscape to suit one’s will.
When I see a skater do some trick that utilizes an odd, slopey bit of infrastructure I marvel at how a bit of canal or sidewalk or whatever it may be takes on a new meaning, a meaning different than the people that designed it and built it intended. Handrails are now urban downhills. Stairs become chutes seemingly purpose-built for providing a corridor to sail through. Unseen back alleys with loading docks and concrete poured to suit commercial needs are now gathering sites where the skateboard crowd meet to share acts of bravado and serve each other as surrogate families in lieu of perhaps problematic or non-existent real families. The demimonde of the outsider, the outsiders who re-create the world in their image.
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