Real 80s Suck Weekend

Despite my carefully laid plans to "80s out" this past weekend, only speaking to people who skated in the 80s and, of course, only skating 80s-type terrain like jump ramps and shit, my weekend was doomed from the get-go. One, we fucked up the weekly budget so I wasn't able to buy a piece of plywood to build my jump ramp... a poorly conceived 80s retro idea to begin with because, back then we obviously would have stolen the wood anyway. Then I was dumb enough to listen to some dumbassed kid who told me that a certain park had an "80s style" mini ramp... which he swore was a vert ramp chopped down to "eight feet."  I figured if this panned out I'd easily salvage the weekend, 80s style.

Not surprisingly, the mini turned out to be a typical, lame-ass 6 x 16 pre-fab job at some ghetto-ass municipal park. "Fuck it. It's my day off, I'll skate anyways," I thought. Not so fast. The chain link fence was pad locked and the parks and recs maintenance guy who happened to be tooling around said the place was closed indefinitely due to a "big hole" in the mini ramp, as evidenced in the photo. "Don't worry about it, though. There's an even better park twenty minutes down the highway in the next [shit hole]," the guy informed me. To my persistent queries of "is it concrete?" his answer was a resolute, reassuring "yes sir!"

Great. No problem. It was still early on Friday, so I figured I'd head out there and check it out. Perhaps not surprisingly, I started getting suspicious about ten minutes into the drive. I mean, what were the chances of a concrete park within an hour of my house that I hadn't heard about? Sure enough, the next park was obviously built by the same pre-fab scam outfit. Who knows how many years ago? The set up looked alright from a distance, though, so I figured I'd skate the bitch.

Unfortunately, the only real difference between the first and second pre-fab parks was that the hole in the mini ramp at the second park wasn't quite as large as in the first one, so the park was still open. The mini and in fact the whole park was in awful disrepair with screws jutting out everywhere and unfastened edges gaping out all over the place. In retrospect, this dump's rabid sketchiness was really the most attractive, fun feature about it. I skated about an hour and a half and, of course, not one other skater showed up despite that it was a super nice day. Later on at home I looked the second park up on line and the pre-fab company who built it had the nerve to advertise it as "skater made." What a crock of bullshit, unless by "skater" they meant "roller-blader," which may well have been the case.

Anyway, I figured "fuck it." 80s weekend had become late 90s pre-fab weekend. It was still Friday so I was sure I'd salvage some sort of retro action. But it wasn't to be. It rained all goddamned weekend from that point on. So, skating took a back seat to brew drinking and lazing around the pad watching videos of other people skate. Which, had I planned it that way, would have worked nicely as my "Real 80s Shit Weekend" to begin with! Overall, I did learn an important lesson by trying to go retro, though, which is that the only disadvantage I've got in comparison to the good old days of the 80s is my geriatric age. In a lot of ways, I think skating is better, at least for me, nowadays than in the desperate, difficult days of yore, when things to skate--even shitty things--were often at a real premium. Perhaps more importantly, I know I appreciate it a lot more. That's for sure.