I’m hurting. I have strep throat (and some penicillin) and a very touchy left shoulder which I threw out of socket earlier this week, skating during a fifteen-minute break from work on Haight Street.

And I didn’t even fall on it.

It was one of those days where it’s 75 degrees (I spontaneously bought a tank top), and I was in the Street, jogging through my flip tricks when I started getting into some really clean varial heelflips; I figured I’d stretch one out over a patch of discolored pavement. Traffic was kind of heavy, but it broke and I set my board down, pushed a couple times, set up, and popped.

Half-way through the trick, the board rotating the way it should, I rotated my body to reallign with it when I feel a sick pressure give in my shoulder. I know what this is, I kick my board away, and fall to my knees in the middle of Haight Street.

My left arm hung limp, and I knew it was out of socket. And while this had happened several times before, I was no more used to the pain and, as a result, bellowed like a wounded water buffalo as I took my left wrist with my functional right hand and rose it slowly above my head.

Shhlu-Pop!

I felt a bundle of tendons and muscles and sinew squirm around as the head of my ulna slips back, which was an immense relief, but I could barely move my arm, and my whole body kept shaking. I don’t know if anybody saw this spectacle, but I really wish I had some cell phone footage to post to the page.

Now, later in the week, my left shoulder feels alright, except when, after a shower, I try to towel off my back my back a certain way. Under my bicep is a thin, tight line of heat I wish I could explain (is a nerve pinched?). I haven’t tried skating since then. I pretty spooked, now that I don’t have to fall directly onto my arm to dislocate it. Given all that and my upcoming move to New York, I really don’t want to push it and end up needing $20,000 rotator cuff surgery in a city without socialized health care.

Beyond that, I’m drinking 7-Up, eating chicken soup, and throwing out my apartment’s garbage (i.e. my possessions) by the bagful. Well, not exactly, but I did throw out a plastic sack of musty boxers, socks, and t-shirts today. I’m looking forward to the day when I pack up two Weekender duffels, stuff my laptop into my Freight bag, and zip Truman up in a kitty carrier before heading to my one-way flight to NYC. Yet even with less than a month to go, it seems like a long way off.

Self-portrait by Noah Love

So I’m changing the name of my skate blog from “Skate Crew” to “No Comply.” I think you’ll see me through with this one.

I was talking to Noah (pictured above) about my blog, and he was like, “Dude. You have to change the name.” I was all, you know, huffy about it, until Noah (in an uncharacteristic move) qualified his statement: ” ‘ Skate Crew’ is generic. When I think of it, I think of ‘homies’, like, little thug kids who break flowerpots and smoke cigarettes and only carry skateboards because they’re not allowed at school.*

“Think of something better.”

Until then, I had only conceded to Noah (who “hates” hip-hop, reading, and ironic Bay-Area slang) one point: that text needs imagery to make anyone notice in the first place. Fine. Fair enough. But was he right about “Skate Crew”? I tried to justify the name: Dudes who skate, when they skate together, are a skate crew. The blog is about dudes coming together around skating, making photos, and blabbering about it.

Maybe I could do better.

I’m going to link to 180nocomply.wordpress.com for a week, to which I’m transferring all content thereafter. I hope I don’t lose anyone along the way.

*This is a complete reconstruction.

\

Despite my girlfriend hopping on a bus this morning to spend a few weeks working in LA and New York, today was a pretty good day. I came home from the bus station, scarfed down the wonderful bread she’d just baked, and headed out to Precita Park to meet Noah for a skate sesh. I didn’t know where it was, so I hopped on-line and happened onto its Yelp page*, where I read a whiny review about all the dogshit in the park grass.

Anyway, I beat the mopeding Noah to the spot (yeah J-line!), so I got coffee at a coffeeshop (big surprise) and called my buddy Mitch. Something he said made me cough up a little:

“Dude, I saw your Buck 65 article in Thrasher.”

Really?

The skateshop across from work hadn’t gotten the latest issue, so I had been waiting to see it for weeks. I later picked up a copy at DLX and sure enough there it was. (I’ll link to the Thrasher site if it goes on-line.)

With that to look forward to, I set to work on a little bay block and planter ledge with Noah. I’d raked out the side of a plantless mulch garden to dig out the ledge for some proper boardslide action. For my part I muscled a boardslide, both regular and half-cab, and, per Noah’s encouragement, a board pop-out to match his frontside variation. Dude also stuck a noseslide-270 shove out and a textbook ledge boardslide to fakie. That shit ain’t easy. I finally got the hang of normal exits out of lipslides on ledge (I’d always done them fakie), and it got me to think about how sick a lipslide-manual-firecracker would be at the 3-Up 3-Down.

The rest of the day consisted of finishing and sending off my article on the recent Zip Zinger Rally to Slap’s Shorts section. Hopefully the editor will dig it.

Beyond all that and blogging about it, I’m tuckered out.

*Now, I thought I would be all clever and see-see-see! by reviewing Precita Park on Yelp so it’d be a big punch-line once you clicked the link, so that’s what I tried to do. But halfway through the registration process (and after I’d punched in my e-mail address) Yelp culled every single person in my inbox and asked me to invite them to Yelp. Their proposed ice-breaker:

How’s it going? Have you heard about Yelp yet? I am addicted to it!

“Addicted to it”?

How watered down is our notion of dependency? Remember those old scare-videos about the evils of the “devil’s lettuce” they’d show high school kids in the ’60s? Uproarious. Anymore, we use the word addiction as if its synonymous with love or infatuation. Can we attribute the free use of the word to today’s prescription drug culture, where if the kids don’t like to read, give them speed, and if they don’t behave in class, opiate them? Also, I’m addicted to shopping. is something I hear more than once a week at my job on Haight Street. Nevermind the junkies and base-heads who wander the district like zombies — the real dope on the Street is gold lamé leggings and $50 Stüssy hats. Anymore I’m questioning what drugs really are.

I love this photo. This little doofus isn’t me, but I swear to god I now believe in dopplegangers. He’s my spitting image (right down to his propensity for drunken stupidity). Not only did I fool all my friends when I found this Vice Don’t*, I even worried my own father when I initially posted it as this blog’s banner photo (I wonder if he’s been back since).

Anyway, the current banner pic is a decidedly San Franciscan one, what with EMB peeking out like a wee strawberry in milk. The next banner (more like, “banger”!) to grace my blog should have more to do with a golden delicious, or, say, a granny smith.

This guy kinda looks like Five Points, huh?

*Let me state for the record I pretty much regret my “cyber textual graffiti bomb,” which Charlie explains on his blog. Like the guy in the photo, I was a far different person when I a.) wrote the story in the first place and b.) drank beer two years later and serially posted the story on the message boards of Vice‘s first fiction issue. Could the photo above be a metaphor for how I’ll never get to write for Vice?

I hate drinking.

Photo by Noah Love

I checked out my buddy Noah’s bro blog today and was hyped by his post about the Zip Zinger Rally we went to Saturday. As he chronicles, there I meet up with my new photog buddy Mike (yet there’s no replacing Wolf!), I eat a banana or three (props on the photo!) and we generally zipped, zigged, zagged, and zinged (say that in rapid succession!). Noah also won the “Best Old Skool Steez” award. Nice one, dude.

Photo by William Wheeler

William sent me another take on the smith grind. I really like the angle and the crispness of the shot (especially the indifferent mother and daughter) but I wonder if the shot was taken half a second too late. What do you think?

Photos by Dashiell Collins

This bench was one of the first spots I noticed when I first moved to the City. It’s on the edge of Golden Gate Park, on Stanyan at Waller. It’s a two minute skate from the Kezar spot (you know, it’s the spot with the pillars and the coral-colored pavement. There’s those two long rails [Bobby Puleo skated it in his seminal part in Penal Code], and every time I skate there I scope out the quadruple-kinked rail that Brian Anderson boardlslid in Welcome to Hell — so sick].

Anyway, I boardslid my little bench — definitely not virgin, but freshly repainted — during my hour lunch break at work (you can see the store front in FTC’s live camera view. Yeah I know — but it’s not what you think), and I tapped Dashiell to shoot a photo for the the fun of it. Like a champ he met up with me a couple days later, this time during his lunch break, and, along with Matt working as a Big Black bouncer-slash-hypeman, got the job done with enough time to grab some falafel

photo by William Wheeler

Just skating up Haight Street like any other day, but I found this amazing construction site at the intersection at Scott. The City had broken a patch of concrete, and there within sat a plastic jersey barrier, sunk half a foot into sand. After propping up a side of the barrier with some chunks of concrete, it was steady enough to bear some weight. It was well into evening rush-hour by the time I got a couple noseslides, and I had stuck a couple front noses and a few fifties (and a 5-0) by the time I started locking into a smith. After about ten minutes of not getting it, this dude appears by the barrier, pointing at his camera.”You care if I shoot some photos?”

After he promised me he wasn’t shooting a photo that would accompany a Chronicle article about what property-damaging dickheads skateboarders are, I was like yeah!

[For some reason I was only able to upload the thumbnail version of the photo (hence its size), but you can check out a larger version and the rest of William's photos on his flickr site.]

Got one today. Skating on Haight Street. A couple buddies from work bore witness. Bus was coming but I wasn’t even faaaaaaaaaased.

[Dashiell, hurry up, dude.]

In the meantime, check out some radness on 48 Blocks: Guy Mariano interview.

[disclaimer: I got the cat photo on the photobucket.com page after clicking on a picture of Tony Hawk (making a very scary face!) titled "Skateboarding." This tre-flipping kitty came up above the fold. I lifted it assuming no one would think a.) I took this photo, and b.) Truman is this generic-looking. But when I looked closer at the dude's apartment (and at his terrible sticker work!!!) I got spooked: Again, let me say, "This is a random photo I found on photobucket (i.e., I don't live in a basement apartment)." No one associated with Skate Crew condones, cuddles, or harbors this irresistibly kitschy, tre-flipping kitty (not even a little). Especially not hard-as-nails photog Dashiell, who will be sending over real skate photos soon.]