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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.

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