words by Eli Shepherd
Photos by Allen Phillips
art by Michael Worful

I was trying to get my legs or maybe my confidence back. Stanley and I had abandoned the manny pads and were trying uncomfortable-to-us flatground tricks in between rows of cars, our bags and my bike now fully out of our sight back in an interior corner of Blue Lots. It was a day where my skill seemed to have peaked in the past, my self-worth along with it; I wasn’t skating great so I wasn’t feeling great. It was good to be outside since it was finally multiple degrees above freezing. It was good to be moving through space in a parking lot I have only good associations with rather than standing frozen in time in a parking lot I would rather never see again (what I currently do for work). On the rollaway from a gloriously shitty rocket heelflip I cruised back toward the curbs that people have used for manuals and slappys for as long as I have been alive.

I rolled up to find a guy in coveralls asking if those were our bags and if that was my bike. Just sitting out, unattended. I said true, we were being very trusting by leaving stuff out like that, thank you appreciate you. He said he would have had to take them if they were just left there and not ours because he’s homeless. Also said we should be careful leaving our stuff out because of the way the world is these days. Or something like that. Said he used to skate. Asked me if I had any weed because he’d like to feel a little better. I said sorry if I did have any it’d be yours, take care man.

At this point Stanley started workshopping a few comically high nollies up the curb. I tried fakie shuv or tre into a switch manual. A cop drove by us and the no skateboarding sign and said nothing. A younger guy drove by and yelled something encouraging. He pulled up again a bit later and said he was stopping just to watch. I said here I’ll do something for you, rolling toward him as he became spatially aware and backed his car a few feet out of my way. To our shared excitement I held on to a kickflip manual first try. He said he had a friend who passed away who loved to skate. I watched his eyes shift to a farther-off place. It’s a beautiful thing, man. 

Asking, What is the role of skateboarding in this moment in history?, is another way of asking, What is the point? 

…so i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn’t write [skate]
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply

perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all
-Nikki Giovanni

The question has come up at Slow Impact in years past. There are a few answers, all of them true. The first is that there is no point. Skateboarding is plainly insignificant to the flow of weapons and fossil fuels that have made the end of the world a whole lot more tangible than the end of capitalism. 

At the same time, a handful of skaters in Gaza filming Instagram clips in the rubble of the US-Israeli genocide is both a middle finger in the face of annihilation and simply an earnest expression of humanity. For those experiencing it firsthand its significance is acutely tangible.

“To have joy in a place like Gaza—it defeats the collective punishment in a way that is so radical”
–Maen Hammad

All this is true, and, at the end of the day, skateboarding is just a vessel, a vehicle, a medium. 

“To ask if skateboarding has lost its edge is like asking if music has lost its edge, or literature has lost its edge. Such questions aren’t just difficult to answer, they’re incoherent. Unless, that is, you are saying “music” and “literature” as metonyms for the recording industry or book publishing. Our shared, basic understandings of music — the arrangement of sound through instruments toward an expressive and affective goal — and literature — the arrangement of language and sometimes image toward the same — presume a spectrum of genres. Through these many genres, every micro-experiment of the avant-garde and each new corporate-funded, washed-out trend alike, will emerge, evolve, and inform the next.”
–Kyle Beachy

Perhaps the better way to wonder What is the point?, is less an exasperated What are we doing here?, and more a question of What are we here to do? I have found some answers in skateboarding and skateboarding feels like one of the ways I answer that question.

Skateboarding is not the revolution, the revolution is the revolution. Skateboarding is not art, skateboarders can make art. 

“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
-Toni Cade Bambara

In 2012 I hardflipped a four block, sacked a handrail, and e-mailed a sponsor tape to Cliché. I also started going to protests—for Trayvon Martin and the BLM movement, against Obama and his KXL pipeline—and meeting people I felt a lot better around than some of the people I met at the skatepark. I never quit but I certainly checked out; skateboarding felt less and less like something I belonged to or even wanted to. One impromptu convo at a local manny pad devolved into all three of the guys on the sesh calling the MeToo movement bullshit, volunteering that they had each been accused of sexual assault as proof of their claim. I still knew a few good people who skated but I didn’t know how to simultaneously hold both my values and any meaningful place within skateboarding. Enter—through the portals of Instagram, the pandemic, and my friend Preston—the likes of Arin, Unity, Marbie, Pushing Boarders, and Ryan. 

I DMed Ryan Lay in February 2019 asking if he had any more of the abolish ICE stickers I had stumbled across on his Insta, depicting a skateboard smashing the word ICE. He didn’t. On New Year’s Day 2020 I bought some Skaters for Bernie stickers off a Twitter account of the same name. I learned it was Ryan running the page when he was who the page said to Venmo with my address to pay for them. A week and a half later I got a DM on Insta asking if I was the same Eli who had ordered the stickers. He wanted to come to Iowa to knock doors for Bernie. A month later he was out with us walking through a Coralville trailer park in partially melted snow, wearing some vulc Etnies, helping Bernie win the caucuses. A couple weeks later the pandemic hit and Obama made those phone calls consolidating the Dems behind Biden. That October a picture of us canvassing ended up in a Slam City Skates blog interview Ryan did with Farran Golding, a fact I only just remembered when I met Farran for the first time at the fourth now-annual Slow Impact.

I stayed in touch with Ryan through the pandemic and fully intended to take him up on his offer to come visit him and skate in AZ. I floated some dates but nothing lined up until he started talking about putting on an event he’d been thinking about. I said if he did it, I’d come out early and help set up. Ryan picked me up from the airport, driving with freshly-sprained wrists from a botched Murphy bed installation hours earlier. I helped him and his seventy-something-year-old neighbor install a sink in his backyard outdoor bathroom, made like a dozen great friends and a hundred homies, Jerry Hsu gave me a ride home from the bar, and I rolled my ankle at Chompie’s and still managed to crook the NB table at The Wedge. I moved to Tempe six months later.

By the next Slow Impact (2 Fast 2 Furious) I had broken the same arm and had the same surgery twice. No broken bones associated with the third Slow Impact but I did go through a breakup that hurt(s) more. (Also the aforementioned rolled ankle was in the chunky Tiagos…something something 808s & Heartbreak?) Broke/n, I moved back to Iowa a few months later, adding a transition from 118F to -13F to my traumas. Which brings us back to skating the parking lot with Stanley in January. 

Even as Slow Impact was about the only thing I was looking forward to this year, I didn’t have the energy to get my hopes up. It was always great, but there was always something in my way, a FOMO for a different experience of the same event. One where I wasn’t so broken or busy behind the scenes. The double-edged sword of a beautiful summer’s day (an analogy clearly not from Phoenix): too much pressure to have fun. Then I got back to Tempe and everyone from my friends’ kids to Antwuan Dixon were loudly stoked to see me. We learned from the past and made sure we ate and slept and made enough coffee for everyone and had time to skate and see our people. I had the full-circle experience of now being the one selling the very same Michael Worful-designed abolish ICE merch I was unable to acquire in sticker form seven years prior. Closest thing to a regret is that karaoke at The Beast wasn’t working so Farran and I never got to duet Kate Bush (from Jensen’s part, not Stranger Things!). I got clips and Thai Basil, made new friends and said a lot of I love yous, got out of my head and into the experience. I still don’t know what I’m doing with my life, but this seems like what it’s supposed to feel like. I wouldn’t exactly call what we’ve made here revolutionary, but it’s a beautiful, irresistible thing, man.