once again, i’m a fan

Old Bad Religion is still awesome.

Chris Cole is Thrasher’s SOTY again and I must say that bums me out.  Not that it really matters, but it just seems ridiculous.  Sure, Cole may have won the most contests this year, but really?  I don’t see him influencing skaters and his style is hideous.  He looked so bad at BATB2 that I started routing for PRod.  And that’s saying a lot!  My pick would have been Busenitz.  He may have not “done anything for the mag”, but he has started a whole new wave of all terrain fast as hell complete destruction warriors.  To me Busenitz fits the whole Thrasher “Skate and Destroy” motto way better than Mr Cole’s robotic and boring style.  Once again, I don’t really care that much, but I’ve seen Chris Cole skate in person and it was absolutely nothing special.  I have also seen Busenitz skate in person and it hyped me up to skate for weeks.  So to see Chris Cole get such a distinguished award twice while the best skater ever goes unnoticed, it bums me out a little.

Jake, Travis and I got things started for awhile just the three of us.  It started of pretty awesome too.  Jake was killing as usual.  Travis was new to Rampy, but his warmup period wasn’t long.  He was doing cool wall bonk grab things quickly.  I warmed up quicker than usual and had some decent runs for me.  Although I couldn’t do the Travis trick (front 50 yank in).After awhile Lazer and Brian showed up too.  It took less than 30 seconds for Brian to stink the place up and start off a wave of farts.  Wonderful.  Brian brought his new trick to Rampy.  F/s halfcab rock to front rock.  So sick.  He also did a million blunts, bonks, tricks, slams and oh yeah, he farted a lot.  Lazer killed it as usual.  Prolly did all the same tricks as last time and then some.  Dude blows me away everytime.  Jake learned front hurricanes kind of and did another nosepick stale grab out.  I went through a long dry period where I didn’t try to really land anything which sucked.  Towards the end I got a couple fakie pivot’s to fakie and a new trick – front disaster 180 out.  Cool.  Fun session.  Good crew.  Screw the cold.

On a super cold night (about -9f) I met Nate with my box in the Steelyards parking garage. I thought that garage used to be warmer, but it was freezing. I guess there was water puddles instead of ice, but it couldn’t have been much more than 35f in there. Warming up was really rough and it didn’t help wearing a big coat and gloves. Eventually Nate and I both shed our jackets and ended up having a blast.Nate was did some crazy ledge tricks.  Back 180 nosegrind, back smith, nosegrinds like their nothing, 5-0s of course, switch front board and about a million front smiths.  I’m sure he did more, but it’s been a couple days and I forget.I ended up prolly getting more tricks on Ledgey then ever.  50s, 5-0s, noseslides, nollie front tail (“nollie” is a bit of a stretch here – more like slappy, but whatevs yo), crappy front tail, halfcab noseslide, back crooks, back crooks fakie and fakie front nosegrind.  The funnest was doing some of these in runs though.  Got a first try run of front 180 a puddle, halfcab noseslide Ledgey, varial flip.  Another run was kickflip the puddle, crooks, bad backside flip.  Almost got another one with pop shove the puddle, back 5-o, but missed a treflip.  Tried to do fakie ollie a puddle, fakie nosegrind, fakie treflip.  Not sure I ever got the fakie NG in a run, but I know I didn’t get the fakie tre.We were both pretty tired, but before leaving we put the ledge down the curb.  Nate back 50’d it like it was nothing.  I got back board and back nose, but chickened out on the back crooks.  It was fun having to get to it because you had to ollie a puddle, ollie up the curb and get ready quick.  Nate got all Leo on it too and front 50, 5-0 and smithed up it.  Sick.  I bailed the front 50 up.  I was bummed at the time, but in retrospect I really shouldn’t be too bummed at not being able to grind up a ledge that tired.  We switched sides and both boardslid up it.  I even did one to manual.  Then I slammed hard trying it again.  Nate back 50’d up it like he was riding off a curb.  Sick.  At the very end we put the ledge out past the curb and ollied onto it.  Took me a few tries to get front 50 and that was the night. Fun.  Tiring.  Cold.