Sk8tr Shoes

In this video we take our noob skateboarding skills to the local merchant to get some foot armor. Do we make it? Do we get hurt along the way?

Watch elder millennials have a midlife crisis after obeying their boomer overlords for too long. We spent half our life in school, work, and starting a family while ignoring all our dreams, passions, and purpose of existence. Now we are awakening and its time for a change! That’s how I started the YouTube description for this video anyway.

It is a bit of an exaggeration, and we have countless things to be grateful for but turning 40 and entering the Covid times has been a real wakeup call. Before Covid, Marie Kondo, David Goggins, and the Minimalists were helping us wake up and re-evaluate our lives and priorities. If you don’t know who or what I’m talking about, please check out their books/videos.

Zoltess and I had been giving everything we had to our jobs. Our bosses needed us, the organizations we worked for needed us, our co-workers and employees relied on us. We were raised to be like this, taught to be like this, socialized for teamwork, responsibility, and effective contribution. We practiced Extreme Ownership like Jocko Willink.

…and it was unhealthy, and it was all kind of a lie. We didn’t own or operate the organizations we gave our lives to. And all those people? They are doing just fine continuing along with new employees and bosses. Outside of work and family building time we were plugged into tv shows, movies or video games, mostly video games. I felt hardwired to work with a team, advance, achieve, level up, find harder problems. We are capitalism on overdrive, we consume, bigger, stronger, harder, faster, self-improve, more. I have never been to business meeting that didn’t involve doing more. No one leaves with less action items or smaller targets. We sacrificed basic needs for elite wants from the personal level to the societal. Global consumption.  

One of the skills we have always wanted to learn was skateboarding but we grew up in the north, had parents that discouraged it, and were too busy trying to do what we were told. Who knows, we certainly weren’t skateboarding. Good grades meant a good University, good jobs, good positions, adding value to society. One day, years later, we saw everything differently.  Before I get too carried away, I’ll try to explain this video.

This is part of our adventure vloggy video series where we get our isolated socially awkward bodies outside, have strange encounters with people and try not to get injured. We absolutely love being on the boards everyday, it’s helping us get in shape and keep me on some level of mental stability. Our video making skills are also getting amped up in this video as we have learned more tricks on Davinci Resolve. We are trying to keep our videos short and interesting but we still have to work on our ability to talk to the camera – talking to you! In this video we (Zoltess and Azelzor) head to Sport Check on our boards and get Zol some Vans. Zoltess had just twisted her ankle so we took things really slow. We already go fairly slow so you won’t see us bomb down a hill…yet. A hill for us currently is a slight grade – and if you remember rolling down your first slopped grade – its really fun! If you don’t know, go try it before you die. We’ve been mostly practicing our pushing and board stability and heading into public spaces but as you’ll see in our next video, we have been practicing ollies and some pre-ollie tricks. Some people don’t call them tricks but, if you can’t do it on the first try and it requires practice, it’s a trick as far as we’re concerned.

My shoes from Episode 1 were fairly destroyed after one use. When I first started riding on a board I could feel my feet starting to work a bit like hands.  They felt more like hands anyway, and less like clunky workboot feet. I could literally feel the muscles throughout my feet flexing and stretching and working to grip and move the board to maintain balance. Neural pathways (see modern neuroscience) were literally forming throughout my brain to manage the work my feet and ankles are doing. My feet tore holes in the sides of my soft shoes in no time. Blew holes right through the sides after 1 day. Soon after I went to buy my first pair of skateboarding shoes – which happened to be a pair of Vans. I  could go on about grip and durability as well but these are my first skateboarding shoes and all I can really say is that the board feels better. I don’t paint in hockey gloves if that makes any sense. Right piece of gear for the job and I’d say shoes are required to properly skateboard.

I included some information about the businesses we are interacting with and all the text in the video is uncomfortably nonfiction. In general, I see a lot of companies talk about the founding of the business and these heartwarming stories from the 20th century and they have very little to do with the 21st century multinational corporation that has gobbled them all up in the past 10 years. The system is so out of balance that I believe it’s currently designed (destined?) to destroy itself. The healthy ocean of the free markets now looks like 10 giant fish eating up any hint of movement.  There’s more than 10 fish but you get the idea. We look around stores and see all the different brands and options and think about how wonderful this healthy competition of capitalism is and not realize this is all an illusion. We are being played.

Food:

10 Companies that control the food industry

Fragrance:

Companies that own the majority of fragrance brands

Tech, Clothes, I won’t go on but you get the point.

Imagine these super companies (so called parent companies) had to use their logo on their products?   That’s a crazy idea. That wouldn’t be fair to control though. Who are you to tell a multinational corporation what they can or can’t do?! You’re just a human, not a human invented concept! Especially one that existed before we were born. It certainly deserves a greater place in reality than you – Some puny individual humas that came after it. I’ll save 20th century marketing and its exploitation of gender identity for another day. It’s a great example of how one boardroom meeting turns into billions in profit, global environmental destruction, and erodes our fundamental understandings of men and women.

Please send us your comments and feelings on anything you see, thought was interesting or disagree with.