Man, this was a long day. Kari and I got into Dallas at 11, then met
Maddie for lunch. We checked out BJs brewery then toured the HSL offices. It was pretty awesome. I was like a kid in a
candy store. I got to see a couple prototypes for new shoes. One is really dope. The other is in the super early stages, so it was pretty funny. I can't really say anything about it... But if it gets invented I will laugh. Roger (the inventor of this prototype - and Heelys) rules. He's in the guinness book for being the youngest person to rollerskate, haha. Like 8 months old or something.
Anyway, there are huge heelys and
soap posters everywhere, plus the entire place has hard floors so people can heel around. It was nice to finally meet …
I guess I should start with the first time I started Soaping. I was at my buddy, Hugh Hermes' New Years Eve party my Jr year of High School. He had some Soaps and a practice rail so I decided to give it a shot. I fell really hard but loved the feeling of grinding.
Anyway, about 2 years later in October of 1999 I wanted more soap stuff, mainly new grindplates. I didn't have a credit card at the time so I sent an email to Soap asking for a catalog. This way I could order some products by writing a check. They didn't get back to me for a few weeks so I sent them another email, and then another, and another. Then I gave up.
In February, I got a call on my cell phone from the CEO of the company, Chris Morris. I was super geeked when he …
So, I just got back from Saint Louis with
Aaron,
Zach, and
Jordan... It was so much fun.
Friday, I got on the tiny plane for my hour long flight to STL, haha. The plane was small enough to where we had to board from the tarmac, hehe. We stayed in Chesterfield, which is a lame lame town. There is nothing to do at night... at all. We ended up walking around the town, swimming, and by the end of the night we were beating the crap out of each other. We got into some pretty good punching, slapping, and kicking games. We all had huge
bruises on our arms,
welts on our backs, sore stomachs, and sore nutbags. I even got jacked in the face by Jordan, haha.
Saturday we showed up to the demo which was sooo much fun.
Xtreme Nation is …
I picked up the rental van Thursday, then Kevin and I drove down to Kansas City. Once we got there, we met Oliver, Chris, and their friend Kevin. They played a bad trick on us. Chris didn't show up for a while cause he had to take a crap or something, so Kevin said that he was Chris, even though he's a pale skinned red-head, and Chris is tan with longer, brown hair. That had me so confused for a while. Anyway, they showed us a movie that the made called "Soap Movie." It's a full length movie! I didn't see the whole thing, but they showed me the highlights, and it was pretty good.
The next day, we went soaping around Kansas City and the suburbs. They took us to this one rail that is about a foot/foot and a half off the ground, insanely …
So spring break started yesterday and I'm flying to Phoenix this afternoon. I plan on getting tons of pictures and will be promoting Soap to the max. (for those of you that don't know, I'm sponsored by soap shoes again). If you need to get a hold of me you can call me on my cell phone or text message me
here.
So far, so good anyway... I went to check my mail and I had 2 package slips. So I went to the campus mail center and got my 2 packages. The first was from a contest that I surprisingly won at monsterskate.com, which included a new set of grindking trucks (which normally cost $50), Rims bearing gaurds, Rocketbolts hardware, a shirt, and some stickers! Me next package was from a company called Heelys. In that package was a pair of grey/blue Grails, which is their newest shoe on the market. In fact it isn't even in most stores yet.
The grails are a mix between a Soap grind shoe, and a standard Heelys shoe. They're incredibly cool looking and I can't wait to try them out tonight. A great new product by Heelys to save the grindshoe …
Alright, it's almost March and the April 2002 issue of YM magazine is being distributed to subscribers all over the U.S. Why does this matter? Because me and 10 of my friends did a photo shoot with YM last summer and some of us are going to be in it! That's right, a writer from YM (Sara Lyle... who's awesome) flew down from New York, and 2 Photographers drove down from Chicago. All this for me and my buddies: Aaron, DJ, James, Jordan, Mike, Nate, Nick, Travis, Zach, and Zack.
Why did they do this? Well, apparently YM does an article about 'regular guys', who aren't actors or models or anything, every month. And they always try to do it about different groups of guys, whether it's football players, skateboarders, whatever. Well, Sara …
Ok, so I messed up my knee really bad grinding this "sideways kinked rail" toward the end of June. 2 weeks later I went to the Dr. to get it checked out because it still hurt real bad, and it was still really swollen. They ended up draining 20 CCs of fluid out. Then the Dr. scheduled me an appointment to get an MRI, wednesday of last week. So I went, and got the results back yesterday and they came back negative! Which means I don't have to have surgery. But they are still recommending physical therapy... So that's good news.