As I mentioned before, I was looking to get out of paying the parking permit at my university. Every year they raise the price while not providing very many parking spaces and doing something silly like giving you a ticket if you back into the ones they've got. And since I live just off campus, I figured I could use the exercise anyway.
Originally I was a biker. No, not the hardcore leathery kind; not even the girl's jeans wearing "I am less polluting-er than thou" kind. I bought myself a brand new bicycle a week before classes started, and it was stolen the first night of the fall semester. I even went to the cops and we got into a staring match when he asked me if I wrote down the VIN number to my bike.
So, I got a new (used) one that was cool enough for me to enjoy but crappy enough to not get stolen (and this is why you can't have nice things) and I rode that all year until the summer, when I went to go visit my parents and my apartment complex decided that they were going to clean out all the bike racks and left a note to that affect on everybody's doors 2 days before. They never said what they do with all of the bikes that they get. I had a theory that they were in cohorts with some bike shop in north Tampa. A kind of bike mafia.
Having failed twice as a bicycle owner, I decided that I would go for something more compact that I could keep with me at all times. I went down to the mall (the mall - in case you ever wondered where your little bratty brother got his skateboard, it's between Neiman Marcuss and Saks Fifth Avenue), and I picked up a skateboard. I even let the dude selling it to me talk me into getting it insured. I'm not quite sure what I was insuring it against, but...as long as there were no premiums and heavy deductibles involved I didn't mind handing over three more dollars.
Unfortunately, I did overlook an important aspect of skateboarding: I didn't know how. Let me tell ya, if you plan on getting one of those bad boys, teach yourself how to skate before you have to get to class in under 10 minutes. Trust me on that one. So after that first day, I started practicing by skating from my apartment to the dumpster at the end of the road. Let me tell you, I'm a pretty short guy and still I felt as though that skateboard wasn't big enough for me. I would propel myself forward on the grainy asphalt perhaps a total of four feet before the skateboard would come to a rocky halt. It didn't feel very productive, especially when I took on one of the speed bumps to what could only be described as a Disney's Goofy kind of moment. That's when I remembered that whole longboard idea.
A longboard is very much like a skateboard except that the board and the wheels are much, much bigger. This is the difference between a skateboard and a longboard. The bigger wheels of a longboard allows it to simply roll over obstacles that a regular skateboard could not, such as twigs, debris, and larger cracks in the concrete. The bigger board....well. The bigger board just makes it easier to balance as far as I'm concerned, but ultimately while a skateboard is designed to do nifty tricks, a longboard is designed to cruise the sidewalk in much the same way a surfboard cruises a wave.
I googled longboard shops in the Tampa Bay area and found one out in St. Petersburg, and drove out there one day to check out what they have. Longboards are clearly an investment because while I spent a grand total of $13.99 plus tax on my skateboard, I spent just over $100 on my longboard. But when I bought it, the guy asked me if I ever longboarded before, which I hadn't, so he took me out for a spin around the block and explained that it wasn't much more difficult than that. That day I drove home with a longboard in my back seat.
That was 5 months ago. Ever since, I've tried to up the metaphor that I'm a land surfer (since I can't actually surf, but it's got the laid-back yet cool connotations that could only be associated with the Fonz from Happy Days so I'm riding this wave and telling no one about it). It's easy to do because it already looks like a surfboard with wheels.
Because I carry my board around with me everywhere, one day my coworker ran into me on campus with it. He took one look at my longboard and my threadless designed T-shirt and said "Andrew, I didn't know you were punk". I just smiled and added it to the other list of groups I've been categorized in: goth, jock, slacker, nerd, geek, over achiever, and hippie. I am a man of many hats.
-Andy
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