Make It Count
Element just dropped the first part of Make It Count, a documentary series about skateboarding history that Kirk Dian directed. Four parts structured around the elements, with Johnny Schillereff and all the people who were actually there in the good years talking about the brand’s growth and why skateboard culture has this gravity that nothing else really touches. It’s the kind of thing that usually gets murdered by marketing, but sometimes you get people who were there just telling you what it was like.
I was into skateboarding once. Not seriously—I was the guy who bought really nice boards and broke them. Three boards, each one a progressively worse disaster. Eventually I stopped trying and watched other people get good instead. There’s that what-if you carry around when you quit something early. What if I’d stuck with it. What if I had the actual focus or the knees that don’t spontaneously fail. Maybe I’d be Tony Hawk. Probably not.
But something about skateboard culture stayed with me even after I quit. The way a board looks. The specific energy of people who are genuinely good at something. The way it’s all tangled up with girls who got into it and boys who got into it partly because of that. Element was always at the center of that scene somehow—the logo alone carried weight. Still does.
I’ll watch the documentary. I’ll think about those three boards again, and the regret that comes with it, and then I’ll get on with whatever’s next. But these small failures stick around longer than the successes. Not because they matter. Just because they’re yours.