StrangeLove

While doing some "research" for this first fabled* drop of ours, I ran across something in a Shiloh Greathouse interview—posted on the great historical archive of skateboarding that is The Chrome Ball Incident—that sparked the memory of an article we'd always wanted to do in the infantile stages of Big Brother.**

Unless you’ve been living a life of fancy-free solitude off the Facebook and Instagram grid, it’s been a lot of hot-shit debates, big-time controversy, and divisive* comment-bickering from triggered** minds around the skateboard world. So it continues to boil out in the real world, as well, where the baseball bat*** is even now swinging for the high humorless bleachers with deliberations over politically correct emoji-usage.

Some, I suspect, may be thinking, "Oh, how cute! You have a blog.* That's so 2002!" And I don't doubt or disparage that sentiment in the least. After all, just the other night I had a rare, chance encounter with mainstream television programming, where I was enlightened by a primetime reporter that GIFS have become the predominant shorthand for thought in human expression and interaction, while emoji-speak is eating its way through eons of language development ass to emerge as what may well be the new gold standard in global communication. The deathmatch of words is real, so why the fuck isn't this just a Tumblr account permanently set to spin cycle?

In 1976, Led Zeppelin released The Song Remains the Same, a film and subsequent album that comprised three hot shit nights of performances at Madison Square Garden. That was during the hey-day of hard arena rock and ultimately bears no semblance to anything you’re about to read here today… aside from the title, that is, because despite a new name, snappy logo, and fresh coat of paint, our song will in fact remain the same—dazed and confused though it may always seem at times.