Thrashing Down Memory Lane

Copied from my MySpace blog. Originally posted August 22, 2006.

As I was sitting on my couch this evening, enjoying a beer and watching the Canadian Idol top five contestants sing with country star Martina McBride, I thought to myself, "man, she has a killer voice. What a beautiful song."

Then I thought to myself. "Canadian Idol? Martina McBride? When did I become so friggin lame?" I thought hard, but couldn't pinpoint the moment when I entered full-fledged lameness.

Since I was just sitting there, being lame, I decided that I would do something I had been planning to do for a while, and get some old pictures scanned. I recently discovered a high school friend on the internet, and told him that I would scan some pictures of our skateboarding adventures for him to see.

In going through those old pictures, I found the answer to my question. I didn't become lame. I was born that way. Good lord what a loser I was in high school!

Looking back at the pictures, my friends don't seem lame.

Sheldon was pretty cool.

Nothing wrong with Darrell (unless you count skinny legs ).

The old friend I mentioned above was Pat. Pat was always an artist in school, and still is. Check out his website here and his MySpace page here. He's done very well for himself as an artist, just like everyone knew he would.

Here's a picture of skate hero Jason Jesse going through Pat's sketch book at a demo in August of 1989. He was rightly impressed.

In addition to being a good artist, Pat was a good skater too.

And then there was me. The reason I took so many pictures is because I was afraid to try the skateboarding stuff. My board was just for transportation. Once we all got somewhere to actually skate, I parked the board and took pictures.

But on the few occasions when someone took my picture, it sure was scary. I was usually wearing sweatpants that were about two inches too short. The ones with the elastic around the ankle. Nice. And I had these cycling gloves that I wore to protect my hands when I was skating (not for protection during any tricks, but in case I hit a pebble and went flying face first).

And I had these horrible turquoise Vans (size 12, I think) that looked like clown shoes. Heres a picture of them I took while we were on the back of a friends father's flatbed truck that we used to move our ramps around.

Nice, eh?

But the picture that sums up "High School Lloyd" the best is this one, taken the day I got my new Kevin Staab board, by Sims. Check out the mullet. Wow.

So, you see, I have always been lame. Now Im just a different kind of lame.

Oh well. I have a wife with a great butt and we have a cute kid. Even lame people do some things right.