Andrew Reynold's first gen shoe followed closely by Eric Koston's first generation shoe, both with ES were my favorites, though

Still making my way backwards on the CBI blog that is basically all things 1990's skateboarding. Salman Agah was one of my favorites growing up. I, and many of my friends rocked his shoe in all the colors, and I had more than one of his boards when he was on Real, and then The Firm. Interestingly enough, he owns Pizzanista, which is one of my favorite joints in Long Beach, unfortunately they don't deliver to us as we're a bit down the road.



Came across a Salman post and it got me thinking about a day from when I was in High School that had a friend of sorts tell me that Salman Agah was in Portland and that he was going to be at his house that night. Well, turns out that night was a meeting for some weird Christian cult like meeting and I went there, and it was weird and my friend wasn't there, but a couple of the other skater kids that I went to school with were there. I knew all of these guys, and we skated together once in a while but they were not in my normal group of every day friends by any means. So to be there, in a packed living room, with these dudes and no sign of the actual kid who invited me to his house was strange. After an hour or two of attempted indoctrination the meeting was over and we were in the street. The kid finally showed up, but no Salman Agah. I think at that point I wasn't surprised and I skated home, which was a few miles, at least.

Now, as I thought back on this incident, which I haven't thought of in who knows how long, decades maybe I see it through a much different lens. I imagine that the kid who promised Salman but didn't deliver was being pressured to get kids to his house that night. Why else would he have done this? Not that I was particularly angry at the time, or anything. I think, as a 14 or 15 year old, I just really didn't think it through. I mean, I was part of a church that, while not a cult by any means, still met in private homes and what not and at that point I was relatively impervious to the tentacles of other extremist Christian-Jihadi-like encroachments.

There were some points of my childhood where I wondered if I was a psychopath because I just would feel nothing when good, or bad things happened, in retrospect I think that outside of my teenager-ized mind, existed the fact that I really did feel things, of course. In some ways I am very much a stoic. But looking back it may have been a mechanism to decrease the pain, and if this life can teach us anything, people are driven, perhaps at the very root of everything, by the various manifestations of the transdimensional Universal Truth of the need to decrease the pain. Some of us take the direct route, and become dependent on alcohol and opiates, some others turn to food and others vanity; some use religion. Some have found that charitable acts and kindness act as an instrument decreases their pain; I find that some use the temporary but long term deleteriously natured cruelty and take a perverted joy in the proliferation of misery. This truth is played out in the hospital on a daily basis in an acute form. Of course I'm not stretching this truth to then conclude that all of the pursuits are hollow or in some way evenly equitable with each other, just as an aside.



For those of you, like me who rarely click on links, it is a white kid with a Southern accent taking a video of him cocking a shotgun, yelling that he will kill n****s and screaming for them to stay away from him. It is simultaneously enraging and heart breaking. It is easy to wonder how a kid could have so much anger inside of him. It is more difficult to remember being at that age, where adulthood, for the first time is on the very distant cusp of the horizon, and one thing that most 13 year old boys do not feel is any kind of empowerment. This leads to acting out, of sorts, to try and test their ability to take power, even if just a trivial piece. And this kid sounds scared, more than anything. He sounds terrified, in fact. A cornered animal, a desperate creature -- a creature that doesn't know love or mercy or the joys of friendship, the pleasure of a human connection that cuts through the cultural frictions. I pity him. I want to put my arm around him and encourage him; warn him that he will be eaten alive by this anger. Show him his anger is misguided and inflamed by lies and ulterior motives.

Working with people, all kinds of people, only serves to reinforce another truth: the manner in which an individual treats those around them is a clear reflection of how they feel about themselves; or at least allows a window into the egotistic machinations whirring away in all of our minds.


Hurt people hurt people, not that the hurters are necessarily hurt, if you follow. I try and keep this in mind.




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