Driving

Learning to drive is a major change in the skate game. Without a car you are forced to stay local and skate shitty street spots if there is no skatepark nearby. If there is a skatepark near by, you might just get sucked into hanging out there all the time, leading to stagnation. Driving costs an incredible amount of more money than riding your skateboard everywhere, yet it greatly expands your possibilities and is most definitely worth it. Driving, not skating, also leads you to explore new things not considered skating. You get caught up in driving, going out and etc. With driving a car everywhere, you slack on your discipline of skateboarding, partially. You do have more energy to practice your craft when you are at a specific spot to go harder for your tricks, but is skateboarding really all about that? To me a good portion of the fun is the journey. How you get to your spot is almost as important as what you do there.

Driving is definitely a game changer especially for skaters. You dive into a whole new world. Then your friends all get cars and its not like it was back in the day, traveling together; being able to communicate person to person, granted your ipod headphones aren't in. Growing up and getting a car is I suppose a fact of life, at least where I live. All the spots and parks that are worth it need driving to get there (except Mountain). Driving alters the community you have around you and has introduced me to some of the funnest bank/ditch spots I have ever skated. I suppose banks and ditches are my thing; not enough courage to do most of my tricks on sizable tranny yet, I still have the motions down.

Certain places, mostly parks, get greater emphasis because it is a congregation area and you are judged, at least the way I see it, by what tricks you got there. The people you skate with at a certain park know you only for the tricks that you do there, yet you may have a completely different arsenal at a different park and/or spot. I always thought parks are places to practice you tricks for the real thing, street. That is an anomoly. Practice your tricks at a place made for skateboarding, then doing you tricks at places not made for skateboarding? Hmm, interesting.

Skateboarding involves not skateboarding. You just have to be killing it at life in all categories for your game to be strong, I believe. Gotta somehow be earning an income to put things in perspective. Doing things independently. Isn't that what skateboarding is about? Doing things your way? The idea behind skateboarding surpasses the mere act of skateboarding and translates into other successes in life because face it: the same skatepark with the same friends is boring/depressing.

Skateboarding is essentially a mode of transportation, if you don't practice free styling like Rodney Mullen, but the thing with skateboarding is you are constantly in motion. In skateboarding, you find the best way to get from A to B; sometimes getting creative, sometimes getting gnarly, but the best when you find a mix of both.