72 Comments

The first time I jumped out of an airplane by myself.

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How many solo jumps in total have you made? I can imagine that every time is meaningful.

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MY 'Kill Hill" has gotta be starting my 'stack! I'm sure it is a big deal for anyone, but I've never been on ANY other social platform. Last year I decided on a miserable birthday, to take the plunge and start posting my story, and man oh man was it terrifying! I loaded all my family's email's because it was all I had, so I'd at least start with a handful of subs, and those first few posts were nail-biting, because no one else had ever read any of it. They knew that I write, but had no idea what I write and anyone who knows me will be shocked by the stuff that goes on in my head that I've kept hidden for the past 15 years. I think it's the biggest personal risk I've ever taken. Now, none of them read anyway. Yay for internet strangers.

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That's great! Congrats on making it to the bottom intact.

Those internet strangers here are pretty damn cool! I have lots of conversations about stuff I write, and I don't think that's possible any other way. I'm grateful for all of this thinking we get to do here.

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Yeah, you guys are the best. Me too.

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I like their first album A LOT.

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Do you consider The Smiths as punk? Clash? I dabbled with punk, but I never inhaled. ;-)

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I think the Clash's first album is punk for sure. I'm not so sure about their later stuff... I think they were just kind of exploring life as much as anything, you know? Smiths, not really, no.

You might really enjoy Death if you haven't heard them, though: https://goatfury.substack.com/p/death

I would say they've got strong punk elements, but there's also proto-punk with heavy guitars and stuff that you might really like. I was kinda shocked when I discovered this band in the late 2000s, along with most of punk America.

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Ours was called Tiger Hill and hosted a fire tower. At least one kid was killed coming down it on a snow sled! Not I.

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Dang! We didn't have much snow, but on those rare occasions, it was Herbie-Kerby lid time- we would take one of those green dumpster can lids and flip it over to create a sled!

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Kids are very resourceful!

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Not to mention, necessity is the mother. I feel like we had AT BEST really crappy video games that we had already played a hundred times. I think kids today are able to play new games all the time by downloading them, and there's generally not nearly enough boredom (which causes innovation).

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That last time I played a video game to the end was in 1994 with Doom. Nothing since but golf on the Playstation I had for a while before donating to a kid for Christmas that I will never (most likely) know.

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I think I beat a few 8 bit NES games over like 2020, but I'm not sure that counts!

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All my techie friends were gamers. I don't have the twitch muscles to make the challenge fun. Or maybe I just never tried hard enough. I am easily distracted.

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I don't have much to report. Just a single, 20-foot stretch on a ski slope when I first started venturing onto the blue runs, and a jump across a raging torrent from one rock to another that was far enough away that I wasn't sure I could make it.

I conquered both without injury. But a beautiful woman still scares the hell out of me.

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Ken, you've reminded me of my own perilous river crossing. I need to write about that so I can keep remembering it. Thanks!

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My gravity driven adventures began with a long wheelbase Soapbox Derby race car that was great in straight line runs but couldn’t manage the turns at the bottom of several hills. So, the axle and wheel assemblies were moved to a former gas powered lawnmower handle with the steering centerpoint attached to the throttle bracket in the center of the X-frame handle. A few 2x4’s formed the body and the driver’s and rear “pusher” seats. Braking wasn’t part of the formula and steering was handled by a rope loop attached to the ends of the official Soapbox Derby square front axel. The new turning radius was very tight and the steel lawnmower handle proved to be strong and stable.

The road rubber on official Soapbox Derby wheels are narrow, maybe an inch wide, and the wheels are tall, maybe about 12” inches in diameter, with double ball bearing races in about a 2” or 3” center, and designed for efficient gravity driven straight line speed but not so much for turning.

The best “hill “was a mile long route of two or three local neighborhood surface streets with four corners that ended with a slight uphill stretch to slow the car down.

With one driver and a pusher, we regularly outran car traffic on the race route and even learned to drift in the corners by using nearly the full width of the roadway thanks to the skinny tire rubber. Automobile drivers were usually surprised when we used the apex of to turn inside of them and drifted around them into the next turn. Never had an accident and weren’t stopped by the police. Fun times for a couple of 9 year old kids in the mid 1950’s in San Antonio, Texas.

Later, in the early 1960’s, in Southern California, we built skateboards using 1x3” oak planks and steel wheel roller skates, then moved to composite wheels used on wooden roller rinks with very short lifespans. Steel wheels are really fast but require serious balancing acts in the corners at the bottoms of steep hills with sandy sidewalks. More like skiing GS than skateboarding. By the time skateboards began to become a thing, we were off to college.

Adding a 10 speed gear assembly to a Schwinn two speed bike with middle weight 2.25” tires on 26” wheels in the early 1960’s is yet another story for another day.

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That's a great little window into how things used to be. By my era, a full generation later, we had pinewood derbies we made with pocket knives instead of the real thing (soapbox racing). I envision today's generation losing the pocket knife, and maybe one more generation taking the whole thing outside of the realm of the physical world and into some kind of virtual space.

All this daredevilling nearly killed us, but I also believe it made us into much more creative and thoughtful individuals. I hope we are not throwing out the baby with the bathwater by reducing physical risk as we have.

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Our grandsons participate in pinewood derbies today, as did our sons-in-law. My granddaughter may do those as well given her dad and brothers’ involvement. Sadly, it appears the dads are more involved in building them than the kids. Plus, they use bandsaws, routers, high tech designs, titanium weights, balancing devices, microfine graphite solutions for axels, wheel balancing and axel polishing tools and compounds, and race on extruded aluminum tracks with electronic .0001 second timing systems. Creating a competitive car might take three or four builds and cost $200, each year.

To the dads, and through them to the kids, winning is more important than the process. I didn’t win a soapbox race but learned so much more by doing everything myself. Including building and driving the second generation racer.

I still have several pocketknives from that era. And hatchets. But kids today are getting any of those skills thanks to societal menaces and scared parents. We regularly carried them to school. Today kids get thrown in jail and expelled.

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I am envisioning those parents, living vicariously through their kids, as little league coaches who insist on taking a turn at bat. Yikes!

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Yup. Or yelling at the coaches for not letting their kids play.

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Did you happen to catch "Swallow Your Spit"? I think this blends straight into what we're discussing neatly, although I always feel icky sharing a link to something I've written:

https://goatfury.substack.com/p/swallow-your-spit

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Of course riding down the dangerous hills always added to a bike boy’s status, and our’s was the intimidating “Terraces”. I remember how getting air on one terrace usually meant hitting the crest of the next terrace down, which often resulted in a crash for a rigid framed bike. It happened to me, and I recall lying on my back looking at the sky and having a spiritual experience🚲🚲🚲

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Were the terraces on land people owned, or like a public place where kids could play? I definitely remember testing the boundary of public vs private land, but it didn't feel like such a big distinction when I was a kid.

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It was at a public park that had paved as well as unpaved hills. The terraces were grass covered, which increased the pleasure of lying flat on my back after the mishap…

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Sounds fun! (and dangerous, of course)

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Ha! Yes, it wasn’t fun unless it was characterized as “dangerous”. That designation was usually attributed to our concerned parents of course…

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Excitement and danger go hand in hand when you don't know any better, that's for sure!

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well, the podcast-in-progress is absolutely the biggest Kill Hill of my life thus far...

But I'd like to know more about what you see as the relationship between punk and skate culture. That's intriguing.

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Oh neat! Congrats on the success so far in putting your ideas out there.

All the skater kids listened to punk, and that's how it was introduced to them. Usually, these kids would be like 9 or 10 years old, probably growing up with a rebellious older sibling, and they'd know about this music way, way sooner than I ultimately did. I didn't buy my first punk tape or record until like age 16 or 17. It was very late compared to the younger kids immersed in the music and culture.

They also dressed punkish, with haircuts similar to mohawks (but not quite) and generally "not mainstream" looking styles. They were not marching to the beat of the school system, such as it was, and I noticed that.

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right, but why do you think it is that these two cultures gravitated towards one another?

PS Podcast is work in progress. Not released till January. so we'll see... if I crash or not.

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Oh, I see! I think it was more or less two things:

1. They were pigeon-holed into the countercultural placeholder at my middle school. They were the logical group to face off against the preps, their "natural enemies" - https://goatfury.substack.com/p/skaters-and-preps

2. I think the lyrics and attitude from the punk music/lyrics pervaded their thoughts and made these kids more rebellious at an earlier age, whereas I found it on my own (and much later)

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obviously punk is built to be countercultural, but what do you think it is about skateboarding that's countercultural? I hadn't considered it that way before.

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Good question, and I'm not sure it's countercultural any more. I think skateboarding was viewed during the 1970s and 80s as something kids who didn't quite fit in did.

Skateboarding was also an individual activity; "cool" or "normal" kids played team sports. Because it wasn't mainstream, it was really DIY in the same way that punk was, so an ethos of running underneath the system developed over time.

The more the mainstream pushed these kids away, the more of a distinct identity they formed, just like punks.

It's a good question, and I'm not sure these are all the answers.

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it's a good start, though. and to me at least, an interesting question

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We had Puke Peak which was at the end of the 3 mile cross country course. I think I only puked once so that's a win?

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I never puked from any kind of athletic endeavor! That seems kinda crazy, but that is one thing that never happened to me.

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That’s what sets apart the men from the boys; I have multiple pukes to my name

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I was pretty good at drinking and puking in my 20s. Does that count?

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Low bar, anyone can drink till you puke

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True, but I did some pretty... professional level drinking for a few years there, and had at least a ten year puke-free streak (or at least that's how I remember it).

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The way you remember it is the way it was. My best non-drinking puke story was water polo where the workouts were so insanely hard (try eggbeater for an hour) and the pool had a little gutter around it to absorb waves/reduce turbulence. Etiquette was you puked in the moat to keep the chum out of the water

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"Mom, I'm going to go down Kill Hill!"

"But Kill Hill is dangerous!"

"It's NOT dangerous at all, and I'll die on this hill!"

I did have a very brief skateboarding phase back in Ukraine. But now that I'm in Denmark, it's all about those bicycles.

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What kind of board(s) did you use? I just never got into skate culture, which really was how everyone else found punk rock.

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I wouldn't be able to tell you. My older brother was into breakdancing at and skateboarding at the time, and I was using his without much understanding of what any of it was about.

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I was really into breakdancing, but at age 9, I missed my BIG CHANCE to see a breakdancing demo at my elementary school when a teacher told me to stay inside!

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An entire stardom-filled breakdancing career, ruined by one teacher.

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I'm not sure if I'm more salty about that, or about Lou Ferrigno telling me I should start lifting weights (at like age 42).

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Plot Twist: Your teacher was Lou Ferrigno all along!

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My hometown has land that was largely too flat for these things. The closest we had/have was a man-made hill based on an old garbage dump, which works well for tobogganing in winter.

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We didn't get much snow, but going downhill on a makeshift sled was definitely fun on those rare occasions!

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