He Was A Sk8er Boi

I’m buying a skateboard. Quarter-life crisis, midlife crisis, whatever taxonomy you want to use for sitting around feeling purposeless. But I don’t think of it that way. It’s just: there’s a thing I thought about doing as a kid, couldn’t pull off, forgot about it for decades, and now I’m back at it. No deeper meaning. Just impulse.

I had two skateboards as a kid, both cheap and broken almost immediately. Low-quality wheels. Bad bearings, though I didn’t even know bearings were something you could think about. I rode them badly in driveways, fell off, and gave up. But skateboarding stayed in my head as one of those movements that just works—like surfing, like snowboarding, like anything where you’re just moving through space without an engine or effort. Beautiful. Pointless. Always appealing.

Now I’m staring at skateboard websites and I understand nothing. Decks, longboards, cruisers. Kingpins and shockpads. There’s terminology for every component like this is aerospace. How much griptape does anyone actually need? What’s the actual difference between wheels? Axes matter, apparently. I can’t figure out if I buy a complete setup or customize one or whether that distinction even matters. Modern versus vintage—is that looks or performance? I’m not really trying to find out.

The honest thing is: I don’t actually care about skateboarding. What I care about is doing something I’m obviously bad at. Falling. Trying again. Scaring old ladies if I’m lucky. There’s something about approaching something you have zero skill in at this point in your life that feels like telling the truth. No YouTube tutorials are going to make this graceful. No amount of research changes the fact that I’m going to look ridiculous.

And then there’s the Avril Lavigne thing. Sk8er Boi was a joke about the intersection of social class and music taste, but mostly it’s just stuck in my head for thirty years. If I actually pulled this off—if I actually learned to skateboard as an adult—it would be the slowest, most indirect callback to that song that could exist. A middle-aged guy buying a skateboard because a pop-punk band made fun of skaters in the ’90s. That’s either the worst reason to do something or the only honest one.