Landfill

This week I made four days in a row swimming at lunch time at the local rec. centre. It's the same bunch of guys who show up there each day, and I've gotten to chatting with them a little. There is also a really cool lady who works at the Mennonite thrift store just down the street from the pool. This is one of the best thrift stores I know, since everthing there is rediculously cheap and they don't charge tax, being a charity orginization. I haven't skated for a few days. The only skateboard related activity I've indulged in is taking the trucks off of a couple of old decks that were in the storage room.

Last summer, when I left my board with a friend up north in an attempt to quit, I would start jonesing and go prowling for wheels at the Mennonite store. For a while I was riding a DSC (Dominion Skate Corp.) "Ramp Rager". This was an old fat piece of crap with plastic baseplates and wheels that hardly turned. That deck eventually broke and I found a replacement, another DSC model: same shape but with cartoon graphics of a skating Kangaroo. Finally, I made it back to my friend's place in the northlands and retrieved my skate, which was pretty beat up but was dreamy compared to the stone-age planks I had been using. My friend also gave me his old skate.

A few weeks later my neighbour brought over yet another DSC monstrostiy that she had found by the curbside; appearantly someone was throwing it out. This one looked like it had never been ridden, but had sat in someone's shed for about twenty years. It was lime green with yellow grip tape and green wheels. On the bottom is a gnarly graphic of a blue, lion-headed demon wearing a crown and leaping out of the mouth of a fishy behemoth creature. In spooky letters above the picture it says "King Oedipus". I never skated this board but I wanted to keep it because of the wild graphics and the classical reference. I guess some overeducated guy in the DSC art department got bored of drawing skating kangaroos and decided it was time to bust out some serious Cthonic imagry.

So yesterday I removed the trucks and wheels from the thing and added it to my collection of DSC skate art pieces. The collection is actually sitting outside on the picnic table, allong with some other derilect items that should be thrown out, but somehow never make it to the curb. These include a portable RCA turntable-in-a-suitcase thingy that doesn't work, a single DVS skateshoe with the soul torn off, and five yellow candles shaped to resemble Strawberry Shortcake. Why can't I just throw that stuff out?! Sitting there half covered in snow it all together resembles an abandoned art school project, or a neglected voodoo shrine of some sort. Crap just seems to accumulate in empty spaces. Didn't Einstien have some sort of formula about that?

Boards with Great Graphics I Skated and Threw Out Eventually:

The first Ray Barbee model with the scarecrow graphics -I went through two, a green and a white one
A blue Skull Skates, Hackett Street Sickle -a true classic
SMA Natas mini that I painted with a black and white hommade reindeer stencil
A green Dogtown logo board, mini - I don't know why I always ended up with minis -I'm a big guy
Powell & Peralta Caballero with the dragon head on the bottom and the Bonite for added druability
Pink Per Wellender freestyle board with a giant sticker of Super Dave Osborne on the bottom

The Ray Barbee was my favourite.