StrangeLove
jim thiebaud and the contest of holiday champions
Sean Cliver
You know what's fun about running your own skateboard company? Being able to fulfill all sorts of silly fantasies. The flip side to this, however, is that in my whimsical case it often means doing so to my own detriment, because running is only a typo away from ruining—but not today! No, today will not be yet another instance of me shooting myself in the foot, because I finally feel like I managed to successfully stitch up a loose thread that's been dangling through my life.
the 8th annual reggie destin memorial
Sean Cliver
A little over a decade ago, my friends and I gathered our resources, jumped through all the grown-up hoops necessary, and built ourselves a skatepark — The Donuthill Project. Beyond surprising ourselves with one of the best designed, best executed, and best detailed things any of us had ever skated, we quickly realized the power of our collective abilities to move mountains in the name of fun.
strange bedfellows: skate or dead
Sean Cliver
Something about the words “Dude Ranch” smacked of an unhappy conflict. And so it was. I had to be the only person who said the word “dude” on this ranch somewhere deep in the Santa Ynez valley. I’m sure it was beautiful, but my god, dude, it was boring, oppressively so.
how did it get there?
Sean Cliver
Eventually this post will, I swear, provide an answer to that question, but for now I'm going to fly in the face of upstanding journalistic standards* and veer straight off to Tangent Land rather than Main Point. If you've come to expect anything from these entries, though, that bar should be set very, very low, because: a) I'm my own worst editor; b) I'm not getting paid so there's no reason to be all professional and shit; and c) I'm by no means equating myself to Kurt Vonnegut, but similar to his novel Breakfast of Champions I do think I'm in the process of purging all the garbage that has been piling up in the assorted sordid waste bins of my mind—and, if I may be entirely honest, I wish the contents were more substantive in nature to reflect a life well lived, but… well… so it goes.
just in time for… st. patrick's day?
Sean Cliver
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The same can be said for the boulevard to holidays. You see, we had every seasonal intent to release this new "Gargoyle" board by Todd Bratrud last Halloween, but the moving parts in our production schedule proved to not be so moveable—or at least not to the limitless bounds of our wildest unrealistic fantasies—so we, in turn, had to temper our expectations in a much more malleable manner. But that was then, this is now, and at least it's green so you can ride it with pride come St. Paddy's in a week.