Hank's Overblown Sense Of Entitlement Remains As Big As His Stature...

I’d never been to this particular skate park before. It’s close to where I live, but I don’t have knee pads and a helmet, so I’ve never gone. But, today I went with a couple of kids from my work. One of them lent me his brother’s ratty-ass equipment. We’d been talking about it forever, so it was good to finally go.

I did feel weird, though. There were kids that measured up to my belly button popping ollies behind me as I paid my twelve bucks. I’ve never paid to skateboard anywhere. But I chalked it all up to experience and I knew that it would be interesting, or, at least be a cheap way of committing suicide. I haven’t skated much since I broke my ankle in a drunken fight with my girlfriend. Besides getting older, you tend to rethink certain types of physical activity when one spends months not being able to walk naturally. It makes the already too-fast aging process progress faster, I think.

One of the teenagers behind the counter asked me if I’d ever skated there before. I lied and told him, yes, that I had. I didn’t want to hear a bunch of legal jargon, and I think that he was only telling me because he had to. That type of stuff was for the little kids. Not for old men in their-twenty-something’s like me. I figured that I started skating before this kid was even born. If I told him that, he would’ve looked at me like I look at old people when they tell me things similar to that.

I was dancing before you were born!

I’ve been eating here longer than you’ve been around!

Blah, blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s the natural order of life. 365 days allocated in a bracket.

I get it.

I’m not down with all of that. Usually.

Sad to say, but I told both of the kids that I worked with, that I was going to go smoke before I went in. They said okay. Maybe I shouldn’t call them kids. One’s nineteen and one’s twenty. Those aren’t kids, I guess. I’m fucking dorkier than them. And they both act more adult than I do at work. I have more toys than them, though.

So, I smoked. And stretched some. Or, at least tried to without looking like a freak. I used to stretch all of the time before skating, but have never seen anybody else do it. And it looks kind of stupid when you’re smoking too. Smoking cigarettes and skating is like fat people super-sizing their orders while ordering a Diet Coke. What’s the point? Stupid balancing acts make no sense when you’ll inevitably fall down.

Speaking of balance…

I must’ve slipped something spine-wise trying to grind on the lip of their mini-ramp.

Even typing this hurts.

But I did fit in some good, old-fashioned pop shove-its and pulled off some backside rail slides that nobody ever really pays attention to anymore.

Oh.

And my ankle hurts again.

But not my pride.

Because I was the actual, oldest person skating there.

29 years old, baby.

Skate or die.

Die probably.