Roll

Greetings from Milwaukee! I finished a whole mess of prints, shipping, and invoice writing over the weekend and earlier this week, so that we could take a little trip up here for a couple of days. I even had to recruit an assistant for the first time ever to pack and label orders while I was printing a new art print. Milwaukee's a fine city to visit. We had some outstanding sandwiches at the Riverwest Co-op, saw the art museum, ate espresso cake, wandered in the cold for a bit, and I had some drink called a Pink Lady.

To the left is me ollieing over a light fixture on the sidewalk outside the Milwaukee Art Museum. My girlfriend was nice enough to not only let me roll around and burn some energy for a few minutes, but to also take a few videos with her phone. I'm pretty surprised with the quality we were able to get by pausing the video at the right time and taking a screen shot. Cellphones!

I've always felt skateboarding was a pretty therapeutic part of my life, but this year I think I've come to realize that on an even deeper level. Skateboarding has been part of the equation for me since I was twelve years old, and it quite certainly dictated the paths I've chosen. I still remember how good it felt to get on my board after school to escape high school melodrama, skating in between classes in college, and finding solace in empty parking lots when I was nineteen and so many of my friends (and I) were changing. I'm almost twenty-eight. I have been skateboarding regularly for over fifteen years. Yet I'm still sometimes surprised at how much even just fifteen minutes on my skateboard can do to tame the ugliness and uncertainty of obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, and worry.
I hope you'll always be around.