from Using so Little by Sean Wilsey

Skateboarding is having filthy hands from always touching the street, and not washing them before going to McDonald's for lunch. Skateboarding is feeling that every flight of stairs is nagging you, begging you to boneless, or ollie over, or railslide down it.

Skateboarding is looking into toilet bowls and fantasising about skating them. It is using the word ‘transitions’ to refer to curved areas between horizontal and vertical. It is three skyscrapers in Manhattan with transitioned bases (47th and 3rd Avenue; 49th and 3rd Avenue; and 96th and Columbus). It is a review of a new California skatepark that says: ‘As usual, it’s behind the McDonald’s.’ It is a California newspaper reporting on a law requiring all underage skaters to wear helmets: ‘Skaters . . . think the new law - the toughest helmet law in the nation - will signal an apocalypse for the sport. “They're going to ruin the sport, and everyone is going to go home and do drugs,” said Ray Rusniak, 13, after hearing the news.’

Skateboarding is 96 term papers available for downloading on the Thrasher website.

Skaters are people like Jerry Hsu: ‘What do your grandparents know about your personal life?’
‘Not very much. It's a pretty sparse relationship I have with them.’
‘What are their names?’
‘I have no idea. Grandma and Grandpa?’
‘You don't know their first names?’
‘No, they're not English names.’
‘But you must have heard their names mentioned around the house?’
‘No, never.’

Or Ricardo Carvalho: ‘We should bomb Germany,’ Ricardo declared one day at lunch … ‘Germany sucks, man’ … We were at a loss … until he described how he had struck his head at the Dortmund contest this summer. His German doctor sent him to a mental hospital where he was forced to remain for two weeks.

Skateboarders are not role models.

Skateboarding is observing things minutely. It is tuning the world out: cutting your hand and not noticing till hours later. Looking at the world like a skater means looking down. It means rarely raising your eyes above kerb level, constantly monitoring the smoothness of concrete and being alert to the presence of pebbles or grit, experiencing an instant elevation in your mood when you roll through a spot where you've successfully pulled a trick, and depression and superstition in a place where you've slammed - no matter the scumminess or beauty of the location in conventional terms. Skateboarding is bringing emotion to emotionless terrain - unloved parking lots, vacant corporate downtowns long after the office workers are home. I remember skating in such places and feeling I was somehow redeeming these sites from their daily functions, giving them a secret life.

Skateboarding is unresearchable: anecdotal, singular, self-expressive.