Tag Archives: utah

basic stuff about the mormons

Posted on November 4, 2012 by admin| Comments Off

“i’m going to tell you how god came to be god.  we have imagined and supposed that god was god from all eternity.  i will refute that idea and take away the veil so you may see…he was once a man like us: yeah, that god himself, the father of us all, dwelt on earth, the same as jesus christ himself did.”
from teachings of the prophet joseph smith

with mitt romney challenging barack obama for the presidency, i thought it would be something to read up a bit and spell out some of the particular beliefs of the church of jesus christ of latter day saints, since many in this country know very little about the mormons.

interestingly, at the first republican party convention in 1856, their platform contained the following language: “fight the twin relics of barbarism – polygamy and slavery”.    the republicans were anti-mormon because of polygamy and various anti-american stances the mormons had taken.  the church leaders also endorsed slavery.  democrat stephen douglas, in the following presidential election, counted on the mormons and backed their squatters rights of sovereignty.    he was defeated by abraham lincoln.

but given the current presidential race, a lot are calling it the ‘mormon moment’ – a time prophesied to come when a mormon would take power in the americas.  but romney isn’t the first mormon (or even the first romney) to take a stab at the presidency.  mitt’s father ran but didn’t get the nomination.   this has puzzled me a bit because he was born in mexico while his parents were living on a mormon mission there.  george romney wasn’t a natural born us citizen, nor was he born in a us territory or on a us military base, so i don’t know that he had a legal basis for running.   why were his parents in mexico in the first place?  it wasn’t simple missionary work.  many mormons originally went to mexico so that they could continue to practice polygamy.  and yes, mitt romney’s ancestors practiced polygamy.

in addition to the two romney’s running for president, the church founder, joseph smith, also ran for president in 1844.

up front i think i should say that i have never been close to being mormon.  i currently live in utah, but did not grow up here.  i came to utah for the first time in 1994 or so, and up until then i had only heard the word ‘mormon’ in an offhand way.  i never had reason or cause to investigate it, and i don’t think that before i moved here i had ever talked to a single mormon.

but being in utah, it’s a thing you learn something about.  a lot of non-mormons here are really hard on mormons.  they complain that they stifle and ruin the culture, that they are judgmental, boring, uninspired and sheeplike.  i don’t see them as any different from anyone else or any other religious group, as far as the individual goes.

mormons believe and follow a totally self serving belief system which comforts them and assures them of certain rewards and blessings if they believe, behave and contribute.

it’s just the odd specifics of some of their beliefs, some of them beliefs they don’t like to talk about publicly too much, that i mean to share for those who might not be aware of them.

it is a religion which borrows liberally from other faiths and scriptures.  it has a curiously comic but very specific origin story, because it is so historically new.    the mormons have a history of being anti-american, until it suited them – with spates of violence and rebellion filling that gap.   they believe in revelation and prophecy, and despite the moniker ‘the church of jesus christ of latter day saints’ they really are not ‘christians’.

mormons believe that the book of mormon is the most correct book of all.  they believe that every person that has ever existed is a spiritual brother or sister.  nothing new there so far…. but they go on to believe that there really is not just one god, but many gods.    mormons are essentially polytheists.

for them, god was once a human being and grew to be a god.  they believe jesus was the first born son to god and one of his 1000′s of wives.  they maintain that jesus wasn’t born to be our savior, but that he became one through a vote of a ‘council’ of gods.

mormons believe that they too can become gods.  they further believe that if they reach the highest level of glory they will eventually get their own planet when they die.  god supposedly lives on a planet called kolob.

for mormons, there are three degrees of glory for all mankind:  the telestial kingdom (doctrine and covenants 76:103), the terrestrial kingdom and the celestial kingdom (76:58).   the celestial kingdom is, of course, the highest.

maybe i’m getting ahead of myself.  let’s go back to the beginning:

“the bible is so full of errors, one can hardly believe a word in it”
mark e peterson (mormon apostle)
from the book the way of the master

joseph smith

joseph smith was the founder of the church.  he was born in 1805.  he was born into an area of upstate new york that was given to revivals and end of days preachers, so much so that it became known as the ‘burned over district’.   joseph, his brother and his father all had some limited involvement in the occult.  his father was said to have the ‘gift’ of visions.    i am not certain if this involvement was because they actually believed it or because inciting occult practices helped in short term con games.

joseph engaged in glass looking.   this was a con wherein a special stone or glass is used to ‘determine’ the location of treasure, other valuables or even water.    by and by this leads to joseph being charged in court.

where they were living was home to many indian burial grounds, and the idea that they were living in an area where ‘treasures’ could be found permeated.  so too did the idea already exist that the lost tribe of israel might be somehow interred there.

in the spring of 1820, as a teenager, he went to a grove to ask god what church to join.  he said that god and jesus both appeared to him over the sun and told him that all the earths churches were wrong, and that all their creeds were an abomination.

six years later is when smith is criminally charged for his necromantic exercises of glass looking and money digging.  this link is for the 1826 court proceeding against joseph smith

it is some months after this that joseph smith said that he was visited three times (religions are real big on things in threes:  visitations, trinities, books, etc) by an angel named ‘moroni’.

joseph smith will eventually provide at least 9 different version of these ‘visitations’.   he was told that the true gospel of jeus christ had been lost to the world early in the 1st century – and that he should uncover it.   the angel moroni appeared and instructed him what to do next in the holy restoration.  he was directed to a stone chest which was supposedly buried in the hill cumorah, luckily not far from where smith lived.   it contained a book written on gold plates.  it was left there by jewish settlers who came 600 years before christ.

likely due to a fascination smith had with ancient egyptian culture, he reported that the word of god was written in reformed eqyptian characters on the gold plates.  the question of why jews would write and bury a holy book in egyptian is never explained.   smith translated these via two ‘seer stones, the thummim and urim, which were also provided.

several people were enlisted to help in his ‘transcribing’, starting with martin harris.  they would be separated by a sheet and smith would put the seer stones in his hat, as he did when money-digging.  he would ‘read’ what he saw there.    why didn’t smith just write down the book of mormon himself? because he may not have been able to write, or if he could, he couldn’t write very well.

after the translation was complete, the golden plates ascended into heaven. not harris, oliver cowdery (another helper), or even joseph smith’s wife emma, ever saw the plates.

the book of mormon itself is really tiresome to read.  the phrase ‘and it came to pass’ is used over 2000 times.   a lot of text appears to have been liberally repeated from the bible itself – 25,000 words form the old testament and 2000 or so from the new.  many other ideas appear to have been culled from ‘view of the hebrews’ by ethan smith. this book’s tales were well known around the time smith would have been supposedly getting his divine direction.

looking at joseph smith and mormonism through the lens of history, it seems he plagiarized a great deal of, if not the words, then the character of the religions he knew a little about:  the texts of christianity, ideas from islam, and the character of the jews, going so far as to refer to non-mormons as gentiles.

the definitive biography of smith is ‘no man knows my history’ by fawn brodie.

later, smith reports that john the baptist returns to earth and baptizes he and oliver cowdery into the aaronic priesthood.   he further claimed that peter, james and john also come to earth to bestow the melchezinuk priesthood upon him.  in this way, followers of smith who were baptized could trace their spiritual lineage back to the ‘beginning’ of christianity.   it’s a kind of spiritual genealogy.  mormons are big on genealogy too.

more visitors appear to smith over time:  moses, elias, elijah all appear to smith with special messages and different keys for the restoration.

and so joseph begins to build his church.      over his life he would have at least 30 wives, many of whom were married to other men at the time of being sealed to him.   he had a lot of range when it came to women.  while many of his brides were underage children, many were also over 40.

he models himself on the islamic prophet muhammad, even appropriating an islamic slogan for himself:  either joseph smith or the sword.    he actually says “i shall be to this generation a new muhammad”, which is interesting because both were essentially illiterate men who were supposedly charged by god with writing lengthy holy books and who, in turn, borrowed like crazy from religious stories that illiterate men would be familiar with at their given times.

eventually he lands in nauvoo, illinois with 20,000 members.  on april 11, 1844 his council declares him king of the kingdom of god.  he’s also mayor of nauvoo, as well as the chief judge.   all this power and his numerous declarations, not to mention all the wives he takes and the men he casts out of his church because he wants their wives, begins to rub many non-mormons the wrong way.

at this time he also has an ‘army’ of 2500 men he leads under the title ‘general joseph smith’

1844 is  also the year smith runs for president.   smith is reportedly asked by a subordinate “why run for president when you’re already present pro temp of the world?”.    joseph smith was trying to build his political kingdom of god.  he meant to fulfill his own prophecy.   he and his apostles are constantly making anti-american statements, bucking the federal government and fomenting basic disorder among non-mormons around them.  the mormons, especially during the first 50 years of the church, tended to see the authority of the government as at worst a hinderance and at best secondary to the word of their prophet, and therefore the word of god.

eventually, joseph smith is bound over for trial on treason and is jailed.   quite fed up with him by then, an angry mob storms the jail on june 27, 1844.  smith and his brother hyrum are killed, unintentionally granting smith martyrdom and reinforcing for mormons for 100 years the doctrine of blood atonement.

a jupiter talisman is found on joseph smith when he died at carthage, illinois.

the mormons begin an exodus , eventually stopping in utah, under the direction of brigham young

 

“the father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.  the son also”
doctrine and covenants
section 130:22

prophesies of joseph smith

the city of new jerusalem – smith said a temple would be built in missouri in his generation on ‘mount zion.  this did not happen.

the coming of god in 1891 – smith was very specific about the time frame, which is always a shaky move for a revelator.   smith said jesus would return within 56 years of the revelation.  this did not come to pass.  (history of the church vol 2, pp 189)

white horse prophecy  – this is the real biggie.  this is what many are excited about with the ‘mormon moment’ chatter.  this is the idea that the united states would fall under theocratic rule of mormons.  this has yet to pass.  and even if mitt romney gets elected, do you think it’s likely?  and yet, a lot of mormons might secretly think this is a possible and even realistic outcome.

civil war prophecy – smith, like a lot of americans, could see a civil war coming.  he thought that the entire world would become embroiled in it and that the confederacy would align with the british

he also actually and incorrectly predicted that the sun would disappear for ‘many days’ (doctrine and covenants 88:87)

“no, i don’t believe in the traditional christ.  the traditional christ of whom they speak is not the christ of whom i speak.  for the christ of whom i speak has been revealed in this the dispensation of the fullness of times”
gordon b hinckley
deseret news, june 20, 1998

brigham young

brigham young’s many adventures, misadventures, wives, crimes and conspiracies are worth a blog entry all their own, so i’ll cover just a few things here for historical continuity.

young succeeded joseph smith as president of the mormon church after smith’s murder.  but it wasn’t immediate.  there was a gap of over two years where the mormons fought among themselves.    he is the one who, like moses, leads his people west to fulfill more prophecy but also get out away from the government and the locals with whom they were in nearly constant conflict with.

over his life, brigham young had at least 55 wives in his life time, and had 57 children.

they arrive in salt lake city and brigham young is appointed governor by millard fillmore.  he sets up what would become the university of utah and starts mail delivery.  but he is also very isolationist.

in 1855, president franklin pierce appoints a non-mormon governor for the utah territory.  this incenses young and he starts a plan for cessation.   he tries to foment revolution among the native americans, too, because at this point they are often cooperating with the us government.

in 1857, brigham young has the faithful involved in the mormon rebellion, which is not referred to as the utah war.  it was really the first civil war in the united states.

brigham young employs a deadly group of militant mormon solders called the ‘danites’.  they are an armed militia and act as the political police of the mormon church.  the are ruthless enforcers and some tales revolving them will also get their own blog entry soon.

eventually, president buchanan sends troops to try to steady things.    but on august 11, 1857 – young tells a crowd in salt lake city “i have fixed my determination to not let any federal troops into this territory”.  immigration to utah ceases, and travel through utah becomes a touch matter for any travelers.

all this comes to a head when some travelers from arkansas are traveling through utah.  they are eventually attacked by the mormons and 140 are killed.      the date of the final attack?   september 11.     this would become known as the mountain meadows massacre.

brigham young remained president of the mormon church until he died.  and like joseph smith, brigham young wore a blood stone around his neck as protection.

below, watch a wonderful animation that explains a lot about mormonism:

parley pratt

parley parker pratt has been called the archer of paradise.  he opened a private toll road that runs from the park city area to salt lake.  to this day the road and the canyon bear his name.  he was great-great grandfather of mitt romney.

some accounts i’ve read say that the aforementioned mountain meadows massacre was allowed to take place because the mormon hierarchy circulated the rumor that the people from arkansas were somehow involved with or related to hector mclean.   who was hector mclean?  he was the legal husband of pratt’s twelth plural wife.    after a court battle in which pratt was cleared, mclean tracked down parley pratt and shot him.

i mainly only mention parley pratt because he is mitt romney’s ancestor and was a devout polygamist.    he had 12 wives and 30 children.   mitt’s father, george romney, was born on a polygamous colony in mexico, as well.   this is just background information.  it does not indict mitt romney or mormonism.  i’ve actually mentioned polygamy very little here, if only because i’m a little bored by the subject.

mormonism and freemasonry

joseph smith joined the masons in 1842.  he adapts many masonic rituals and dress from freemasonry for mormon ceremonies.     for example, the temple endowment ceremony is introduced just two months after he joins the masons.  additionally, the nauvoo temple architecture is very masonically influenced.

freemasonry is a curious fraternal organization i mean to talk about more in the future, but for now let me just provide some extremely basic information.

freemasonry most likely began so that men who worked with masonry could know if someone else knew what they were doing.   hundreds of years ago, as they were building huge buildings and temples with masonry, there were different levels of craftsman.   it was dangerous work, especially if you weren’t sure of someone else’s skill level.   this was before schools and certifications for trades, this was before social security cards and calling on the phone to check references.  masons formed an organization so they could ferret out who knew what.  they essentially certified themselves.   they would have meetings to teach each other tricks of the trade.   they would make each other swear upon death and other calamities not to share this information with anyone else because it was their bread and butter.  through all this, they were able to share knowledge and techniques only with each other and to quickly identify other master masons.  they developed various hierarchies inside the organization – replete with secret words and handshakes.

eventually ceremonies evolve and the organization expands.   in the modern age, freemasonry has little to do with masonry work.  the guy working on your house is likely not a mason.   now it’s a private group that boasts about it’s secrets and has long had men of power who enjoy whatever shadowy fun and knowledge is to be had there.

masonic ceremonies and dress are curious things and a lot of them are ripped right from the occult.   it is a lot of these aspects which smith lifted (again plagiarizing) for his own church to use.

baptizing the dead

the way mormons baptize, you can trace your baptism all the way back to john the baptist, peter, james, john and jesus.

one thing:  joseph smith claimed that john the baptist descended from heaven and restored the levitical priesthood of aaron upon him, but so far as i can tell, john the baptist never held the levitical priesthood, so how could he restore it to joseph smith?    but that’s just splitting hairs.

the point is, mormons are big on baptizing.  they don’t just baptize new members or eight year olds who can’t possibly know enough about god or the world to make an informed decision.    they have found a funny workaround for the fact of all those people who perished without knowing the good news joseph smith and mormonism had for them.

in secret temple ceremonies, the baptize dead people into their church.

the huge mormon genealogical database in salt lake city doesn’t exist just so that people can research their family trees.   it exists so that the mormons can systematically pray into the church, i suppose, everyone who has ever existed, save for those that they excommunicate.

this still goes on.

mormon archaeology

38 major cities located in south america are mentioned in the book of mormon, built over 1000 years, with temples and huge buildings and everything that goes along with ancient civilizations.  archaeologists cannot find any evidence of any of these places.

at least geographically, the bible, is based on many actual places that existed, that still exist.  this is just more evidence that joseph smith was mimicking bible stories as he made most of this up.

in the book of mormon, there are references to animals that would not/could not have existed at that time in the places smith mentions.  there are references to chariots and ‘steel’ swords which could not have existed at the time (and of course, of which no evidence can be found).  the book of mormon is full of these types of errors, because smith was describing a story that takes place hundreds of years before christ, but he was telling it through the eyes of someone living in america around 1830.  he just didn’t know enough about history to fabricate correctly enough.

for example, 500,000 people are reported to die at the battle of cumorah.  this would make this one of the largest battles in human history.  but nothing has ever been found – not even an arrowhead, at the the purported location.

antinomianism, blood atonement, voting, racism

the mormons had a very anti-law tradition, especially in the first 50 years of the church.  they paid dearly for their antinomian ways and slowly began to take a different tack.   when church president woodruff officially denounced plural marriage so that utah could finally become a state (in 1896), they can be seen of at least trying to appear they were coming into the modern age.  it would take another 40 years or so for this really to click into place.

it wouldn’t be until 1978 that the revelation would come down that black men could hold the priesthood in the church, an usually slow change.  there may have been a couple of freed slaves who held the priesthood back when joesph smith was still alive, but the church would officially become pro-slavery as it was trying to expand into southern states around the time joseph smith was murdered.

in the past 100 years they got much more savvy.   now the church of jesus christ of latter day saints is a diverse organization with an array of diverse, tax-exempt corporations under it’s umbrella.  they evolved their ceremonies away from the more occult aspects and cast out those among them who wanted to remain more fundamentalist.     they have a great pr organization that puts on a great show for those with just a passing interest in the church.

the mormons also engage in monolithic block voting.   this means that they essentially will all vote the in the same manner.   if you speak to mormons individually, they will say that this isn’t the case, that no one instructs them how to vote.  and how could they?  but the result of the conference talks and all the sitting in church is the same:  they vote almost exclusively republican.  and given the origins of the republican party, this is a curious outcome.  but then again, mitt romney is a long, long way from abraham lincoln.  so too is the rest of what the republican party is today.   but to be fair, there’s certainly no lincoln on the other side of the political spectrum, either.

jesus supposedly gave joseph smith special knowledge.  this is  not really christian and more like gnosticism.      the idea that a mormon could ‘become’ god is a facet of the original teachings of joseph smith that hasn’t been abandoned by many in the church.  and it’s what makes mormons un-christian, despite their branding.

i spent a lot of time on the origin story of mormonism here, which was wonderfully parodied in an episode of south park.

religions lean heavily on their origin stories and i don’t know why.   there is this needless, eternal justification of religions having to be true and correct and the ‘one, true faith’ that they all go through.  they needn’t do this.

if religions stuck to the tenets of:  here is what human nature is, bad things will happen and this is how you can deal with it.  good things will happen and you ought not to get to swell a head about it.  this is why you often are unhappy, here is how you can be happy since, as people, that feeling is very important for you.  if religions could stop at teaching people that they will be happy if their life has meaning and purpose and went on to show them here is how to give yourself meaning and purpose so that you can live a kinder, better, richer life, who could find fault?

if religion were just a guide for life, religion might have a great deal to recommend itself.   instead, religion insists on itself.  teachings that merely help you live without having to define yourself as this-one or that-one are referred to as self-help and are relegated to something below religion, because they don’t require faith in some silly backstory that was written in a primitive time when people understood very little about the natural world.

they have to put forth the notion that you aren’t righteous enough or holy enough to know the truth, as you are.   you need more than just morality lessons for life.  you need to accept the church’s origin and history as fact and be prepared to defend it.   mormons take it a little farther to believe that the real truth is only for some.  in fact, some people, though study and time and more importantly, money – can themselves become more than human.  this is a good basis for cult.

the mormon church is big on disciplining members who say or do things the church elders think they ought not to.  joseph smith’s own biographer, fawn brodie, was excommunicated almost immediately for her book.

even more recently, blogger david twede, who ran mormonthink.org, criticized mitt romney and was threatened with ex-communication.  he resigned the church instead of waiting to be cast into outer darkness, but as of this writing, his blog and all of his writing has disappeared.  maybe it’ll pop back up after the election?

mormons seem nice when you deal with them – but i often wonder if it’s because they really want to be friendly or help me, or if they are simply trying to prove their worthiness.  maybe it’s a mingling of both.   it’s not a bad habit to have, but i always wonder what’s behind it.

mormons are instructed to never question the church leaders.  it is the word of god.  to question your leaders is essentially to doubt god.  this seems like a doomed path not just for religion but for man kind.

looking at the origin story of mormonism, it seems to show that smith was just making it up as he went along, cherry picking various ideas from occultism, christiaintiy, islam, freemasonry – a cafeteria approach to creating a religion.  and with whoever the current leader (prophet) of the church is at any time having the power of ‘revelation’, he is allowed to do just as joseph smith did: improvise!

i initially intended this blog to be much more comprehensive than this, covering topics like:

märk hofmann and salt lake bombings
ervil lebaron – crimes he and his followers committed
brigham young in general
the kirtland, ohio mormon cult murders
warren jeffs and the flds church
the mountain meadows massacre
gordon b hinckley sexual controversy
freemasonry basics and history
the john birch society (strong mormon ties)
joseph smith and the mummies (papyrus)
brief history of mormon temple ceremonies and changes to them

instead i’ve pulled out the stuff related to these because this is getting too long.   i will do a post or so a week on each of these topics until i get bored.

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lost sierra – update

Posted on July 21, 2012 by admin| Comments Off

following the media and the little bit the police said about the sierra newbold case as much as i could, i logged onto facebook and predicted on july 5 that we should expect to hear a big announcement late in the afternoon on friday, the next day.

instead, early next morning, the cops issued this rather generic, basic statement:

i really was thinking something bigger was about to break but all that dropped was that notice, and nothing else.  it didn’t seem right given what i knew about the case.

the police opted to wait till the following tuesday to announce the break in the case, and the arrest.

and on that following tuesday, terry lee black was charged with the little girl’s murder.  his mugshot is below.

how was caught is actually kind of goofy.  he was in jail since june 29th, and from the day of that arrest, the chief investigator of the sierra newbold case knew he was the guy.  i think the statement released that friday morning was put out just to placate the public while they shored up their case against black, who was already in custody.

check this out:  terry lee black, on june 29th, goes to the deseret industries thrift store at 7166 south redwood road.  this is around the corner from sierra’s house.  he steals a jeep cherokee and decides to drive to the wells fargo bank that is 8 blocks south of the store, to rob the bank.  at the bank, while he’s inside trying to rob it, a manager from the thrift store happens to be making a deposit.  she recognizes her employee’s stolen truck.  when she sees black approach the vehicle she shoos him off and takes his picture with a cell phone.  she calls the police and black is arrested for the vehicle crime.

the detective who gets the call is james bigelow, who is the lead investigator on the sierra newbold murder, too.  and he has a hunch about terry lee black almost immediately.

a lot has been made in the local mormon media because west jordan police chief doug diamond said publicly that he believed ‘divine intervention’ helped solve the case.  this really feels cheap and silly to me.  it seems to minimize both the stupidity of this monster terry lee black and the good police work of the detectives involved.

terry lee black lived in these apartments that are on the canal she sierra newbold was found in.  i will take a pic of them and post it below when i drive by them tomorrow.   they, like the crime scene itself, are less than 100 yards from my house.

terry lee black has been charged with capital murder.  the case broke just when i expected it to but not as i expected it to.

i harp a lot in life on how i am not so much interested in what people believe, but why.   and why they seemingly need to believe what they believe.  all belief serves a purpose in the individual.  it is almost all self serving.

i needed to think it was the family somehow, that it was a domestic situation that got sadly out of control.  i didn’t want to believe that some egregious bastard could live 100 yards from me and sexually assault, strangle and ultimately drown a six year old kid.  i didn’t want to think that could be the case.  it turns out that that’s exactly and simply what it was.

i still don’t know what to say about all that.  i’m mostly only posting this as an informational update, since i posted about the crime when it happened.

end of transmission.

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lost sierra

Posted on June 29, 2012 by admin| Comments Off

there’s this little girl, pictured above, who disappeared from her home a few mornings ago.  sadly, her body was found very close to the home that same morning.  her name was sierra newbold.

it’s a rare and sad story.  there was ‘evidence of sexual abuse’.   she is gone.

this story is like some others you might know about, but this one is especially disturbing to me, and gnawing at me, because the little girl lived, and her body was discovered, maybe 100 yards from my house.

the day she was killed i woke up at 10 am or so.  it was the morning after i ran the camera on my friend’s awkward hour podcast, where he interviewed chalk artists and quasi-sideshow freak hippie girls.

we had to drive them home and so we were up quite late.

i woke up that morning and edited photos and worked on some writing stuff.  i didn’t leave the house until about 3 pm that day.

as was usual, i was walking out to my little truck with a lot of crap.  i had a shopping bag with my work clothes for my night job, a camera bag which contained my dslr and my zoom sound recorder.  i also had my skateboard, skate shoes and my tripod, which i had removed the night before because of cramming all these people in my truck to drive them all home.

as soon as i was in my driveway i saw several police cars in a row on the street adjacent to mine.  i thought there must be a tremendous automobile crash and dropped everything but my camera bag, because i have a strange fascination with car crashes.  this is probably due to the fact that i have to drive a great deal more than the average person, and some part of me really does think i’ll meet my final and accidental end out there on the road some day.  perhaps it’s my way of dealing with that queer, likely possibility.

but as i got to the corner, not 100 feet away, i saw that it was no car wreck.  there was no wreckage, no ambulances and no sirens.

i saw the driveway that goes through a wooded lot to a canal.  i saw police cars, both marked and unmarked, parked all the way down that drive.  and near the end of the drive, which i could hit with a rock from my front door, i saw gazebos set up.

i know what police and gazebos usually mean.  it usually means a complicated crime scene and often, a body.

i remembered back when the salt lake city police were searching for the body of lori hacking, who had been shot in her sleep by her husband.  he disposed of her body and the mattress that she had been laying on in various dumpsters and only after long weeks of searching did they find her in the landfill

i have to go to the landfill a lot in my daytime work.   i was there with my dump trailer dumping some construction debris when i got word.  the police in the gazebos off in the distance had made a discovery.    they were strangely quiet over there, where they had been active for a couple weeks before.  one of the landfill guys told me to watch the news that night.

maybe this is where my loathing of anything involving gazebos came from.  as it is, i loathe festivals and events that are essentially collections of gazebos where people linger or spend money.

anyways – tuesday afternoon, upon seeing the gazebos, i knew something bad was happening.

i quickly found out on twitter what the deal was.

a little girl’s body had been found.   the other details came a day or so later.

immediately i was oddly comforted by the idea that she was probably killed by someone close to her.  she disappeared early in the morning – like 7 am, and was found a half an hour later not 100 feet from her home.

it sounds odd to say but i thought ‘well, she was probably killed by someone close to her and her family, and that’s…. pretty standard.  it’s not as egregious as some anonymous monster, which seems inconceivable.”

it’s now late thursday night, friday morning.     this afternoon, the police finally opened the road where she lived and drove their giant rv, which serves as a mobile crime lab, away.   after i noticed they were all gone, i wandered down that lane.  i looked at the canal where she was found.

it seemed a crummy place to have to die.  a stagnant water canal whose water doesn’t seem to move until it nearly disappears in the winter.  there weren’t even ducks or birds – just still green water and an eery feeling.

i was struck by the fact that, though we live less than 100 yards away, our house has not been visited by any police.

this makes me think that the police already have a focus for their suspicions and that it isn’t a random stranger.  otherwise – i’d have expected them to knock on ours and everyone else’s door around us to ask us who we are, what our history is, and did we see anything that morning.

instead, the police have said little publicly.   no sketches of people of interest have been released, no real precautions anyone should take have been outlined – very little details.

this too leads me to think it’s a family member or someone close to the family.

and i find this strangely comforting when compared to the idea of some random killer of children stalking my neighborhood.  statistics tell us that people are much more likely to be killed by someone they know than by a stranger.  and unfortunately, children are more often killed, either accidentally or on purpose, by someone close to them or even their parents.

time will tell.

the day of the killing the purple ribbons started popping up all around.  on the outskirts of where the police forbade cars and pedestrians,  people left animals and stuffed animals at the feet of signs.

ribbons and stuffed animals.  they don’t help the poor dead girl.  they can’t.  i guess they are for those of us who are left sad and appalled that such things can and will happen, from time to time.   that they can happen on streets that surround us, on terrain that is so familiar, and in a place that seems so stable, unremarkable and frankly, dull, reminds us of the evil that is possible, the sadness that is always at the end of a moment’s violence, the unfortunately frequent darkness of our own hearts and the senseless cruelty that can be visited upon the most sweet and helpless.

the ribbons are our self assurance that isn’t us that did this.  and the idea that she is somehow in a better place makes the unfathomable awfulness of it all and the nature of our tenuous existence palatable.  i think without these cheerful assurances, many people would be ruined.  i myself cannot be assured by them – so maybe i already am ruined.

below is a collection of items at the intersection near the little girl’s house that i took with my iphone today.  i hope they find out and tell us what happened soon, because even though i’ve assured myself it’s some out of hand domestic thing that turned horribly ugly, i find it hard to sleep at night, this close to such a gruesome, awful scenario.

still, i don’t think that knowing ‘what’ happened makes anything any different, or better – just less mysterious.

 

 

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skateboarding

Posted on July 15, 2011 by admin| Comments Off

i’ve been skateboarding off and on for over 20 years now.  closer to 25, truth be told, with breaks in between where i just rode bmx bikes.  i started in 1985 or 1986.  boards were still 10 inches wide with no nose and awful kicktails that actually made them harder to ollie or kickflip.  the wide trucks and oversized wheels made the boards heavy and clunky.  it was a rebellious thing to do then, but that’s not why i started it.

i started doing it i think because it seemed like a small universe i could immediately understand a great deal of.  just as i still do now, back then i struggled with trying to understand the world somehow.  skateboarding was a world i could try to figure out.  i think i figured it out really well for a good long while.  and after that, it’s just been a nice companion in life.

of all my friends in my neighborhood, i was the worst at everything physical.  micah had a honda cr80 and would never let me ride it on my own.  he ruled dirtbikes.

a kid named joe could do ‘squeakers’ on a freestyle bmx bike.  he ruled the bike world at times, though the bike daredevil title shifted daily.   some days i held this title.  some days it was bennie.  speed and luck played the biggest part.  we’d set a piece of plywood on two, three or four stacked cinder blocks and on the road we would pedal as fast as we could toward it.  we’d see how far we went.  god, sometimes kids would lay in our path for jumping or bunnyhopping over.  where were our parents?  luckily no one was ever horribly mangled.

even with skatebaording, my friend jeff could ollie like an angel, once we figured out the mechanics.

me, i couldn’t even stand up on my skateboard without falling down.  my very first board was a variflex vectra bought through the mail from calsurf or valpak or something.   pictured above is a totally NOS (new old stock) vectra i bought in 2006 or so.  i never put it on the ground.  eventually i resold it on ebay.  i learned, after re-acquiring it, that nostalgia for me exists only in the mind and that i needn’t recreate it physically to enjoy it.  but my first set up ever looked just like this new, never used board i bought a few years ago.  oh sure, it didn’t have lappers or copers, but it did have the nose and tail guard in addition to rails.  i used to stare at the graphic and think there was something deeper to be found there.  i just thought it was beautiful.

but i couldn’t ride it.  while my friends would push their way down the newly asphalted streets in the gateway east neighborhood, i’d be on my hands and knees on the board pushing.  i was the last person to be able to stand up and push my board and feel natural on it.

one day while wandering in the woods i saw these two dirt mounds.  they were close together.  in my brain i saw a halfpipe.  i schemed and shortly thereafter i stayed up after my mom and step-dad went to sleep and snuck out my window.  i stole a few sheets of plywood from a nearby construction site called ‘lions gate’.  it is now a mediocre neighborhood.  i put the plywood leaning on both dirt mounds and put two sheets on the bottom to serve as flat ground.  it looked like this:

it was so sad and so pathetic but i thought i was a genius.  it wasn’t a halfpipe but it sure looked like a ramp to me.  it took me hours to walk across a couple cow fields carrying full 1/2 inch thick sheets of plywood one at a time from the soon-to-be-subdivision to the dirt mounds in the woods..  by the time i was done it was 4 am.

i went back home and imagined what it would be like in daylight.  soon it was morning and i hadn’t slept.  this was just after i had learned to skate upright and feel comfortable on my board.  it must have been saturday or sunday because everyone was home.  i said i was going to go ride my skateboard.  it must have been 7 in the morning.  the dew was still about, it was somehow cool in florida.

i skated down the street to the entrance to the woods and went to my ‘ramp’.  slowly, over the next couple hours, i taught myself some very basic fundamentals.  i taught myself to ‘pump’ – to maintain and even gain speed by bending your knees just right through a transition. though in this case, it was more like a 45 degree slant.  and i taught myself to kick turn (going up a transition or incline and at the peak, picking up the front, pivoting on the rear and turning the front so you go back down forward).  i did it first backside, because that wasn’t as scary.  backside is when you turn away from your back.  it’s easier because you can see where you are going the whole time, and it’s much easier to bail out of.

but on this first morning i was so full of myself that eventually i learned frontside, too.   frontside is a bit gnarlier because you can’t totally see the whole time where you are going.  in frontside you turn away from your front.  but after some falls, i succeeded.  and i did it over and over and over again both ways until my knees became sore.  i was home before lunch.  i didn’t realize the milestone i had reached both in skating or in my own life.

i don’t remember my friends reaction to my quick learning but i do remember vaguely explaining how to pump and kickturn.  one day we went to our plywood kick turn ramp and it had been set on fire by someone.  i remember that.  this was a recurring theme during this age in this part of florida.  there were certain people who, when they saw someone enjoying something, would do whatever it was they could to stop you.  i know some of their names, still.  they were usually a couple years older (no matter which age you were) and they usually had no particular outward passion of their own.  when they couldn’t destroy it for you somehow, they’d physically jump you and you’d have to fight.  in my lifetime, i reckon i’ve hit more people swinging a skateboard than i have with my fist.  and to be honest, i’ve had to hit more people with my fist than i care to elaborate on.   these are just the perils of growing up in a shitty place.

but we resolved to build another ramp.  a REAL ramp, this time.  added to which my skateboarding group was growing.  a good mix of different personalities, senses of humors and skill levels.  apart from skateboarding taking shape, my circle of friends were as well.  i still know most of these guys today.

jim’s house was somehow selected for a ramp.   we got a good group together and painstakingly stole all the wood we would need from a nearby construction site using my special method.  i have this great memory of arguing and joking with various sheets of seemingly floating sheets of plywood in the middle of the night.    we would carry them on our backs.  to a faraway observer, it must have looked like a low-rent, white trash version of fantasia.

there was much discussion and heated debate at the proposed dimensions of our new ramp.  i remember at the time i was in an oscar wilde phase, so i sat in jims tree swing reading the importance of being earnest while everyone else bickered.  i had the suspicion they were fucking it up but i didn’t know how or why, so i just stayed out of it.  at one point, jim’s dad ambled out to ask who bought all the wood.   jim said ‘victor’s step dad did, that’s why he doesn’t have to help build’.  worked for me.    it satisfied his dad.  eventually we ended up with a ramp that was about six feet tall, with 8 feet of flat bottom and that went almost to vert.  it was a disaster.

eventually the ramp was turned on it’s ear and it became a four foot tall ramp with 8 feet of flat and a more mellow tranny.  now it was game on.  everyone could start to learn, now.

i still lagged behind my friends.  so one day i skipped school – anxious to do a rock to fakie or to engage the coping of the ramp somehow on my own.  by the time the bus came back at the end of the school day i had learned axle stalls, rock to fakies both ways and full on rock-n-rolls, backside.  my friends were amazed.  my mom severely beat my ass with a belt.  i was in ninth grade.  it was worth it.

i kind of found my place on halfpipe for a bit there.  i became quite technical, especially with lip tricks.  i also learned a lot of things switch (doing it the opposite way).  i had learned to skate both ways almost from the beginning, because i was so bad at it.

this is something i did with the guitar when i first started, too.  i was so bad at it right handed that i thought ‘well, maybe it’s because i’m left handed’, so i tried the guitar left handed.  for some time, i was arguably as good playing guitar either way.

this probably explained why i was so slow at learning at the pace of my friends.  but at the time, i figured it was just me being inadequate.  i still do that today.  i always assume i am the one who isn’t getting it, or isn’t smart enough, or isn’t good enough to make whatever it is happen.

we had a world of about six 9th graders who were dedicated.  we looked at the magazines and it seemed everyone could do the things we aspired to.   so we kept trying.

were we now in high school.  we lived in crummy town where there really was only one ‘punk rock’ kid who seemed to skate.  there were a handful of guys in high school who ‘skated’.  they had vision street wear shoes and t-shirts.  they had all the newest mags in their backpacks.  we assumed that theses dudes must shred.

after some months, some of these kings of the local skating world deigned to drop by and skate with us.  turns out almost all these guys were terrible.  they couldn’t go frontside.  they couldn’t do handrails.  couldn’t ollie on a halfpipe.  couldn’t kickflip.  they were just lame, it seemed to us.

i think we assumed that everyone was trying just as hard as us.  by now we’d built amazingly long board sliding and grinding rails.  we’d appropriated a ditch by the state road 70 post office and built up the sides of the ditch with obstacles and walls and coping.  we’d been imitating all the ‘launch ramp’ tricks that had become popular at the time.  we thought everyone else who skated was out doing the same thing everyday and we were just catching up.

turns out the badass guys from our school were just kind of posers.  they weren’t the real deal.

but we got the attention of a bunch of sarasota guys who were the real deal.  they must have seen us in our ditch somehow driving by towards the interstate.  they swooped in a few times to our ditch to show us what was real.  brett, joe, scott – guys like that – and guys that again, i still know today.  they were a revelation.  they showed us amazing things that only an older teen can hand down to a younger teen – stuff no one else could possibly know.  early release frontside airs, layback grinds, taking your sweet time in the middle of a trick.  in my dreams i still see these guys as angels.  but truth be told, they were just well meaning, laid back pot heads who didn’t have an axe to grind.  i’m grateful for those guys, still.

a funny series of events took place surrounding our drainage ditch on state road 70 that we built up with wood, pvc sliders and coping.  some guys kept coming by late at night and tearing it apart.  they were just local buttheads, not county workers.  they’d throw all our wood in the water and just dismantle everything.  they did it only late at night and they did it a lot.  they started to do it so often that we started having a series of stakeouts to try to catch and confront them.  one night four of us waited till 1 AM on a school night, trying to catch the saboteurs.  but we ended up skating a lot in the parking lot and playing too much grab ass and we likely blew our cover.  another time, i was up at the post office (which was the parking lot where our ditch was located) on the payphone talking to my girlfriend.  i heard a truck speed off – big redneck 4wd.  i ran to the ditch.  it was THEM!  we never thought they’d just stop ON state road 70 to wreck our ditch.  we always assumed they’d drive into the parking lot and park.  so i didn’t even know that they were over there in the dark, although that night they did a quick, small, sloppy job of wrecking things.  they were only down there a minute, if that.  but, that was the closest any of us ever came to catching the guys who kept trying to ruin our drainage ditch fun.  probably best we never did.

getting boards was always a hassle, because my family didn’t really understand, support or care about skateboarding.  after my variflex vectra pictured above, my second board was an early santa monica airlines natas kaupas board with the little kitty on it.  this was back when maybe he and jesse martinez were their only riders.  skip engblom was putting them out.  this natas deck today in nice shape fetches a ton of money.  to get this $100 setup, i had to work all summer, about 8 hours a day and five days a week.  looking back i was underpaid.  but i worked for family.  getting a board was always a hustle and a hassle.  and eventually, i turned to crime.

one day, being very, very frustrated with not having a proper board, i saw some kids skating and told my friend mark to stop the car and wait for me at the other end of the parking lot.  i walked over towards the kids and said ‘can i show you a trick?’.  the kid was tentative but in front of him i did a good ollie and a kickflip.  he was put at ease.

he was by a curb i had skated before, so i said can you do a board slide?  he said no.  so, i said, watch this and i pumped toward the curb at a high rate of speed.  i did a board slide on this huge, painted curb that was about 15 feet long, which probably seemed really far.  i popped it off and was skating maybe 50 feet from them.  they yelled that they thought that was cool.  then i said ‘watch this’.  and i skated slightly farther away towards a wall and did a little wall ride trick called a ‘crail snatch’ where you popped it on the wall straight up and than with your back hand grabbed the nose and pivot off the wall.  it’s a dumb trick but it photographs well.  the kids were pretty happy with that.

then i realized i had enough space and i pumped off with the kids board to my waiting accomplice and drove off.  the board was a ‘small room’ deck.  just a little upstart company whose boards are also hard to find, now.  i always felt bad about it but i hadn’t had a board for a couple weeks and was beside myself.

this deed did not go unpunished.  right about this time a guy named chuck williams started to build this private skatepark in bradenton.  the timing of this was curious, because skateboarding was pretty dead.  at this time vert was dying out,  and i think the industry was in a slump.  i don’t know who this guy is or where he came from.  i guess he was a 70s skateboarder who wanted to do something ‘for the kids’.  and construction began.  of course, we couldn’t wait to try it.  it was shortly after i had stole this board from the kid, we ended up sneaking in to try to skate it before it was finished.  we did this a few times.  one night the cops came.  we tried to hide and lay low but they had us dead to rights.  they took our names, but we were never arrested.

finally grinders opened and a buddy named gray and myself went down to check it out.  chuck was waiting for us.  i was with gray and a bmx guy on the night we got caught sneaking in.  chuck already had my name.  the kid whose board i stole found out who i was.  it wasn’t hard.  there weren’t that many skateboarders in my town.  he walked up and yelled at us, spitting as he explained that i would never get to ride in his park no matter how much i paid and that i was trespassing.  and we were tossed.  it took chuck a few weeks to finally let us in.  we were fairly good skateboarders at the time and people must have told him that despite our ‘priors’ we were good guys.  eventually i got to skate at his park for free, though i rarely did.

why would i pass up skateboarding at a properly made skatepark?  because grinders was a horrible skatepark.  it had this ridiculous snake run that was essentially unusable.  it had a large ‘bowl’ that was more like a concrete version of my very first ramp attempt, just round and 11 feet deep.  he had two tiny bowls that were smooth but i don’t remember if they even had coping.  grinders was a mess and they closed after a few months.  it’s now a grease monkey car lube place.   there was a miniature golf place that was built across the street.  we snuck in there to skate before it was completed as they did concrete for the water feature where the pirate ship would be.  i remember that skating this was more fun than skating the freshly and specifically built skate park across the street. some years later i heard some awful rumors about chuck that i won’t reprint here until i can confirm them.  his name is so common it makes difficult the verifying.

eventually i ended up running away from home a couple of times and getting sent to live with my grandparents in a dinky place called palmett0, fl.  my friends weren’t too far away, but with none of us having cars it might as well have been the other end of the earth.  i concentrated on skating as i could and i started to write.  i wrote short stories, a short novel and i wrote letters.   through my writing i eventually befriended the editor of one of those skateboard magazines we consumed.  he seemed to take to my fiction and we became friends.  interspersed with our correspondence, he sent me merchandise and boards and basically kept me alive through my senior year of high school.

he sent me parts and decks.  most notably among these, at one point he sent me the mike vallely ”farm’ deck, which is one of the first boards with a serious, usable kicknose on it.  i remember he sent me the first ‘jason lee’ deck.  jason lee is an actor now, but years ago he was a great professional skateboarder for companies like blind and world industries.  the deck my friend christian sent me could likely fetch well over a grand today on ebay – but i rode that sucker to the absolute nub.  eventually i re-drilled the truck holes to move the trucks back so i’d have a nose and tail to ollie and flip off of, because i had worn it down so much on both ends.

there was a church in ellenton, florida on hwy 301.  for some reason they built this 3 foot tall ramp with extremely mellow transitions.  everyone was welcome to skate, provided there was no smoking or swearing.  at first we hated the ramp because it was very hard to pump.  but we quickly realized how we could use this ramp like a bike with training wheels.  tricks that were too scary to try on a real ramp were childs play here and bailing out of something intricate wasn’t spooky.

learning an ollie blunt to fakie on the 8 foot ramp that went to vert at mike mcgill’s skatepark in oldsmar was a little unnerving, especially with all that slick masonite.  but not on this thing.  on this ramp i learned to frontside ollie switch, which seemed impossible to me and my friends at the time.  i learned to actually drop in and frontside ollie totally switch.  this was the kind of thing that seemed physically impossible to learn before we found this ramp.  the next stop was to ollie to lipslide, totally switch.  instead of blunt to fakie it was blunt kickflip to fakie.  eventually i think there were things as convoluted at 360 kickflip to blunt to fakie, 360 nose and tail stall reverts, 360 backside ollies, and on and on.  the ramp at the church was torn down as quietly and as inexplicably as it was built.  it was there a couple years.  i remember helping the pastor do things around the church when there was time.  i remember he was a very nice man, and he didn’t even try to save my soul.

and there were road trips.  mike mcgill’s skatepark was near tampa.  his mom was always there.  i never really was interested in mike mcgill as a skateboarder but the couple of times i skated with him there he was very friendly and decent.  there was a black pro skater from florida, i’ll edit this with his name when i can remember it – i think he rode for walker.  we both dropped in on opposite sides of the huge mini spine ramp.  we were both hauling ass.  we both had rails.  we both went, without knowing it, to the spine from opposite directions for the huge boardslide-across-the-whole-ramp-transfer over the spine.  we were like guided missiles.  we hit each other hard on the ramp, both of us sliding at high speed atop the spine.  i think i might have gotten knocked out.  that was a fun ride home.

anyways – that’s how i got going.  eventually i got pretty good both on ramp and flat ground due to my devotion to the life and works of a guy named rodney mullen and an over ramped sense of balance from all the halfpipe skating i did.  soon, i got a car and started street skating more.  this was a time when you could be arrested for skateboarding, which seems silly now.  there really weren’t skate parks, then.  and if they were they were pay parks and far from where we lived.   it was private ramps, flat ground or treacherous street skating.  that was it.

downtown sarasota was one of our favorite places.  city hall had these amazing benches.  about two feet tall.  smooth white painted concrete.  and several sets of steps – 3 sets of three and 2, i think.  and a nice 10 set or something on the opposite side.  but it was cat and mouse.  you couldn’t just skate.  you had to watch for the police, who seemed to take special zeal in the detainer of skateboarders or their property.  it was silliness, but we had no other place to go.  i still get an itchy feeling when i drive by sarasota city hall.

there are some great stories here about teasing security guards and screwing with police that i could share.  they are funny.  maybe i’ll go into them later.  suffice it to say that for a group of guys trying to pursue a kind of physical perfection and essential self exploration, having authority figures fuss with us or chase us off only made them and the world seem quite absurd.

i think i should say something about trick progression.  it seems that it has really reached it’s apex.  really it seemed to do this almost 10 years ago now, maybe more.  it was amazing being able to see it progress in real time.  every year or so there was some miraculous trick breakthrough.  handrails first started getting done, 360 flips were popularized on street instead of just freestyle ground, blunts on ramps and then bluntslides on curbs, darkslides, manuals.  there was this explosion in the early 90s of doing huge gaps, notably by guys like frankie hill.  the tricks over gaps weren’t really any harder, just they just took a lot more balls, risk and speed.

i was never a good ‘gap’ guy.  the most steps i ever did was probably 10 and the longest gap i ever ollied was this 9-10 foot gap at a church on 26th street in bradenton at the end of a foot tall curb.  the gap is still there.  it seemed huge to me when i was trying it.  when i am in florida now and i see that gap it looks so small now.  my group of guys went through the phase where you’d put a launch ramp up to a wall and wall ride.   some of this stuff seems silly now.

some tricks came along and became a staple.  they become a go-to trick – like a 360 flip.  other tricks just have a phase, like boneless ones, street-plants, wall rides and no-complies.   there are trick combination phases, too.  for a while in the early 90s it was popular to do slide to grind tricks, especially on benches but rails worked, too.  there was also this insanely technical pressure-flip based big-spin madness in the early 90s.  some goofy stuff there, but still satisfying to land.

i lived through all these tricks and phases coming one at a time.  i learned them as they came.  i never forgot them, i just rarely do them now.  then every once in a while, in a fit of muscle memory nostalgia you’ll do one in some form at a skatepark and invariably a kid will ask you ‘what the hell was that?’.  then they all take 10 minutes to learn it.  before you know it, they are doing variations.  that kinda stuff is fun when it happens.

a trick that was before our time that we (and i, especially) took to were slappys.  a slappy is when you ride up to a curb at a fair angle – maybe 40 degrees, and as you get to it you un-weight your board and ‘carve’ it up onto the curb into a grind.  it’s like a mini wall-ride into a grind but when someone does it properly, you look like you are merely floating from the ground, up to the curb and hopefully, off again with style.  slappys done poorly are an excellent way to break the hangar on even the best name brand truck.

the first time i saw a slappy properly performed was at abc liquors on 14th street in bradenton.  brett, one of the sarasota guys, did a frontside and explained how to do them.  it was an older school trick than even these now-old school days i was living in.  i got very good at slappys.  i used to go as fast as humanly possibly and grind 20-30 feet on the large, 9 inch tall curbs at publix on cortez road in bradenton.  i made a lot of friends this way.  kids would see me and ask what i just did.  i met a lot of security guards thanks to slappys, too.

but back to the amount of skateboarding tricks in existence:  tricks have reached the apex of what is reasonably accomplishable for most skaters. that is to say, the amount of possible tricks is certainly finite.  but thanks to the seemingly unlimited imagination of even the most inept skateboarder, the the variety of combinations are so many as to appear endless.  and coupled with all the amazing terrain built just for skating now, you’d never live long enough to do it all.  the sport can go on forever.  stagnant or not it’s still a lot of fun.

sometimes i’ll get an ‘atta boy’ at the skatepark when i land something interesting.  if prompted though, I have to confess i probably haven’t learned a wholly new skateboarding trick since 1995.  not since then have i truly learned anything new.  everything now is just re-doing what i’ve done in a different way or place.  i can’t think of a wholly new trick invented since then.  maybe someone can help me.  but still, the variations of them are endless.

injury-wise i was fairly lucky up to about age 20.  i broke a finger twice and an ankle twice.  pretty routine.  nothing exciting.  however – one time when i had a broken ankle, towards the end it felt healed but it was still in a cast.  so i started skating, with my cast still on my front foot.  somewhere there is footage of me at ryan’s ramp doing ollie stalefish grabs a foot or so out with a cast as my front shoe.  i wish i could see that footage again.  eventually i wore an a hole in the cast from doing so many ollies in it.  one day, my friends and i just cut it off.  my mother didn’t notice it was gone for a few days.  every day my friends were like ‘did they notice that your cast is gone yet?’.  and i’d say ‘no’.  they’d invariably reply ‘what the hell!?’

since age 20 i’ve been pretty lucky, too.  a couple of cracked ribs.  one time i had to jump over a kid who stopped dead in front of me as i was really hauling ass.  i landed so awkwardly i tore a ligament in my foot.  i broke my tailbone once.  i’ve gotten knocked out a couple of times but not for a long, long time.  this is what i’d call pretty lucky.

this story of how i started skateboarding was really started with me wanting to do an exploration of the idea of what skateboarding meant to me.  and what it still means.  i’ll try to finally get to that, now.

i still go skateboard 2-4 times a week.  little kids ask me questions.  i’m older and they seem look up to me.  even the snotty 17 year old assholes like i was seem to defer to me, in a way.  i’ve kept up a lot of my tricks, but i don’t think this is the reason.  i think they defer to me because somehow they can tell i didn’t just pick this up three years ago.

i started skateboarding when it had no place to go – when it was not a sport but an awkward and trying edgy activity.  i started skateboarding before rodney mullen redesigned the modern board shape making all those new school tricks so much easier to learn.  i started skateboarding before public skateparks and before the x games, before acceptability.

i started skateboarding long before the internet – when you had to drive into a strange town and just ask the first person you saw under 16 was there ‘anything good to skate’ or ‘are there any ramps’?  i started skateboarding in a time where you could get someone’s couch for the night who had a ramp in some town like brooksville that you somehow ‘heard’ about and just showed up to find.  i started skateboarding when a kid could be surreptitiously fed something called ‘shroom juice’ when we thought it was iced tea but it still seemed a fair price to pay for skating that cool ass, smooth ramp in the middle of nowhere.

i started skateboarding before it was interesting but before it was ever dull – when it was just a thing that no one but us seemed to understand or care about.  when it was an inside joke, not a mainstream form of recreation.  i started at a miserable time for skateboarding but i still got a lot out of it.

not that i am who i am because i started skateboarding when i did, or that skateboarding is now some watered down, mass consumption thing.  i love it now.  i’m glad kids now don’t have to take screwing with the police as a regular part of the deal.  i’m amazed they don’t have to steal plywood and prop it against a mound of dirt in a field.  i’m delighted that they have video to see and not just stills to guess from.  i like that they have perfectly shaped boards and finely crafted parks to skate in.  i assume that a kid starting today has the same idyllic experience with it that i had.  or, i hope he/she does.

i don’t know if skateboarding is boring now, it’s just mainstream.  save for some special daredevil ramps built for special show cases, the envelope hasn’t just been pushed, it’s been f-ed out.  videos all look and feel the same now, but i know it’s just as exciting for the kids who have the pros they identify with as it was to me back in the late 80s waiting for stacy peralta’s cinematic bones brigade videos that seemed to come out painfully slow when we were waiting for them and reading about the rumors.

back then, when we used to drop by somewhere foreign to skate people would always chat us up.  and we would do the same to them.  ‘where are you from?’, ‘what music do you listen to?’ – they wanted to know you.  skating then was so subversive that anyone else who did it was an immediate friend.  now it’s much more business like.  now it often feels like people at the skate park are as likely to start a conversation with you as would someone in line with you at the post office.

of course, the little kids always say something.  how old am i? what abec bearing do i ride?  how long have i been skating?  i always talk to them.  my best response to ‘how long have you been skating?’ is to reply with however long i’ve been skating that day.

‘how long have you been riding?’ the kid will ask.  ’20 minutes’, i reply.  ‘aww c’mon, you know what i mean’.  same thing every time.  it’s my little joke.

i traveled a lot because of skateboarding.  i saw a lot more of this country than other guys my age because i was on a quest.  you had to get to this or that place because it’s rumored they have this or that to skate.  and along the way you saw this or that.  i met some people who i thought were truly revolutionary.  maybe, in the long run they weren’t so much, but i sure believed it at the time.  and well, there’s nothing like belief.

i learned a lot of things about myself because of skating.  what are they:  i’m not too worried about hurting myself to find out something new.  i never try the same thing the same way twice and expect a different result.   oh – and busting your ass isn’t so bad.  it really, really isn’t.

here’s some video of me skateboarding. big deal.

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sons of perdition – film review

Posted on February 25, 2011 by admin| Comments Off

this is a subject that cries out for a good documentary to be made about it.  unfortunately, sons of perdition is not it.  as someone who has lived in utah for a number of years (but who was never mormon), the subject is familiar enough that i did find this film rewarding and interesting, but i can’t imagine what someone not already familiar with the flds church and mormonism in general might make of it.

the film follows several young people who have either been kicked out of or who have escaped from ‘the crick’ – the bordering sister towns of hildale, ut and colorado city, arizona – a hotbed of polygamy and the seat of the mormon church off-shoot, the repressive fundamentalist chuch of jesus christ of latter day saints.

the flds church is led by warren jeffs,  even from his prison cell.   this is the church still clinging to the principle of polygamy and that insists on doing so in utmost secrecy.   the world of this church and life at ‘the crick’ is artfully and interestingly portrayed in the first two seasons of hbo’s big love.  if you are interested in this subject, you should check that out if you haven’t already.  but do yourself a favor and limit it to just the first two seasons.

my biggest complaint here is that this film suffers from a lack of an overview.  the closest we come to being explained what the basis of the situation with these kids is are some scribblings on drywall but an ex-crick resident who, for some reason, keeps applying joint compound and walking around on a bucket the whole time he’s being interviewed.   were he and the filmmakers too busy to just sit down and talk?

a lot of the interviews are unsatisfactory in this same respect.  the interviews aren’t ‘staged’ but they also aren’t really produced, either.  people just talk to the camera standing outside or sitting in an apartment – and it all looks like it was shot on a camcorder.

there are some segments that are well shot – mostly when a couple lost boys wander about in downtown salt lake city, goofing off at the library – but other than that, the production values really held the film back.

also i think just the caliber of the interviews and the way they are edited hurt the subject.  it doesn’t feel like they probably had enough great material to work with so they edited what they had.

i would have liked to see more interviews with ex-members of the crick and just a little more insight all the way around.  there are lots of compelling, interesting people i’ve read who i might have expected to be here.  also if they might have found some lost boys who don’t have the luxury of living with a mormon software magnate in st george or having the networking ties strong enough to secure an apartment.  there are many more types of lost boy stories than are dealt with here.

i don’t mean to say that i didn’t like this film.  i just found it a poorly made and oddly constructed one.  the film is at it’s best when it reveals that, even after their ouster, even after the cruelty of being shunned and cut off, these kids still love their fathers.  they miss the community of the church and they still long to be with their families.   the film gets the most relevant when the subjects talk about the pain of abandoning their childhood mythologies to essentially jump off the end of the known universe and go into the rest of the world, almost totally alone.  the film is at it’s most interesting when a mother flees with her children and the husband shows up outside in his truck demanding she return.  and inexplicably, she does.  that’s where this thing pays off.  i just don’t think people who aren’t intimately familiar with the flds church and their legacy and doings will be able to get much out of this presentation.

a nice viewing companion to this might be the devil’s playground, which details kids from the amish community and has some similar themes.  also, i wrote a blog entry about colorado city, az on my last time through there this past year.  that’s here if you are interested.

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