Welcome to the Sidewalk Surf Club.
First of all, I promise not to make everything about me, or to even continue writing in the first person whenever humanly possible. But as we try and kick this thing off, I feel the need to explain myself. Sidewalk Surf Club is an idea that I've been mulling over for the better part of the last 12 years, since my wife and I lived in a tiny apartment in Nashville, Tennessee where I was pursuing a different long-term vision of myself.
We'll back up to skateboarding in a bit, but when this idea first presented itself to me skateboarding was not a prominent feature in my life. I had retrained my obsession as a young adult to chasing the dream of making music for a living. I'll save you the details (I wrote about it a few years ago here if you're interested), but that part of my life did not go as intended, and I found myself in the twilight of my youth chained to a desk doing the kind of work I told my younger self I should avoid at all costs.
It happens.
Throughout all of this, and somewhat unbeknownst to me until a little too recently, my touchstone back to myself was always riding skateboards. While I had certainly turned my focus away from it to concentrate on "building the dream," I always kept a foot, or at least a toe, in the world that built me. I always kept a skateboard in the back of my car, would hit a park from time to time, and always without fail went skateboarding on my birthday - no matter what. I even skated the morning of my wedding, without so much as rolling an ankle.
If my math is correct, I got my first skateboard in 1993. It was a pink Nash single kicktail with plastic trucks that came to me as a Christmas gift from my grandmother. Around the same time, I got a secondhand copy of the Kids Klassic 1987 VHS "Skateboard Super Stunts" from a family friend. The video was a made-for-children informational film featuring a pre-incarceration Christian Hosoi absolutely ripping at full speed down an otherwise sleepy suburban street, among other foundational aspects of skateboard culture at the time (Launch ramps! Early grabs! Open aloha shirts!). It was, without a doubt, the greatest thing I had ever seen.
The video was from the end of the second wave of skateboarding's popularity, before it got driven back underground, when you could still find a skateboard along with a serviceable skate video at Toys R Us. By the time I got to it, however, skateboarding had entered its derelict days, complete with pants as big as the wheels were small. To dedicate yourself to skateboarding in this era was to knowingly remove yourself from popular culture in pursuit of some higher degree of radness. It was to choose a tribe.
It was, I suppose, that tribe that ultimately raised me.
As I enter middle age, I look back on the life I’ve lived so far and I’ve realized that nearly every aspect of who I am as a person is directly related to skateboarding. I learned how to tap into my creativity, how to find joy in the small moments, the absolute euphoria of the wind at your face when you’ve pushed yourself farther and gone faster than you’ve ever gone before. I learned that the people that were in your life on purpose were the ones worth keeping around. I learned that you can fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, and that failure doesn’t define you so much as it builds a pedestal for your success. I learned that you have to push yourself to get better. I learned to celebrate others’ wins harder than my own. I learned all of this while having the absolute best time, without pressure, and with the support of a culture that celebrated the creativity of making one’s way in the world.
I have young kids. They’re trying to find their feet, building their own communities, and discovering that most things worth doing are also hard to do. It was skateboarding that taught me to delight in the process and have fun in the failure, and I want that for them.
But I also still want it for me.
I think a lot of us of a certain age feel unmoored. At some point, my focus shifted from skateboarding to making music and eventually to providing for and raising a family. I don’t regret the trajectory of my life even a little bit, but it does mean that the community I built as a young skateboard-obsessed kid doesn’t exist in the same way it used to. And skateboard “culture” and the skateboard “industry” are no longer built for me.
This is not a complaint. It makes total sense. Skateboarding is built on progression, and like any athletic endeavor, progression generally comes from the youth*. Young people see themselves in their favorite skateboarder, and their favorite skateboarder is the one charging the hardest, or doing the most technical tricks. They’re the ones pushing the envelope.
At nearly 40, the only envelope I’m even touching is the one that holds my electric bill.
But those of us who grew up here still belong, and that belonging is ultimately what Sidewalk Surf Club is about. I want to carve out a place for those of us who may have grown up skateboarding who can’t be full participants in the culture. I want space for those of us who found this later in life, who want to share it with their kids, who want to rebuild that community that’s hooting and banging their trucks on the coping whenever we ride away from some sketchy mini ramp grind.
I want this to be a place where we can reflect on and celebrate what’s special about skateboarding without feeling the need to dial in our 360 flips (I am much too old to call them “tre-flips”) or huck ourselves down dozens of stairs.
So this isn’t for the kids, although the kids are welcome. It’s not for the old or the young, but for anyone who finds themselves drawn to this thing, whatever it is.
In the coming weeks, I hope to begin showcasing creative projects from passionate individuals who share a common origin story, whether that’s written essays, photography, videography, music, art, etc. This website will serve as a gathering place for those pieces, as well as a platform for us to announce when and where this community will gather IRL, which I hope we can do soon and often. We’ll also have merch, because merch is fun and cool.
If you have ideas for what to feature in the Sidewalk Surf Mag, let us know. If you just want to say hey, please do. And if you want to come skate, you should. We’ll be popping up around Atlanta (and beyond?) in regular intervals, and will bring hot or iced coffee depending on the season. It doesn’t matter if you’re an old head still slashing the bowl or a grom just learning to drop in, all are welcome in the Sidewalk Surf Club.
After all, there’s no sharks in the parking lot.