Skate (Or Die Alongside the Hula Hoop)

From 8th through at least 11th grade, I probably skated everyday but Sunday. Most people think of skateboarding when they hear the word "skated," but I'm talking about in-line skating, or Rollerblade® (just as people say"JELL-O" for any brand of gelatin dessert). It was an even bigger fad in the '90s than skateboarding was in the '80s because you have to admit that old people never rushed out to buy boards quite like they did wheels in a row. (Now everyone skates from Tony Hawk on Xbox to Lupe Fiasco on Mtv.) The Inline magazine I used to get was always half-filled with pictures of over-the-hill, spandex-wearing racers. I once heard that there were 20 million "bladers" (ew, I hated that word) when I was most into it, probably around '94 or '95. That one number has stayed at the forefront of my mind through all these years and is my baseline I use for calculating how "big" something is. For example, total U.S. population is around 300 million and it turns out the peak for the in-line skating fad was actually 32 million in '98. Therefore, a fad in my mind is somewhere around a tenth of a given country's population (or in this case, the total population of Canada). That's what I consider when I look at box office totals, building capacities, Nielsen TV ratings, and platinum records. The town where I got into skating had a population of around 30,000, so that's a tenth of what it would take to make a fad. Here are some current fads I checked up on:

1. Around 30 million watch American Idol, which is similar to the in-line skating peak.

2. Over 40 million copies of The Da Vinci Code have been sold (conspiracy theories over skating),

3. and over 150 million iPods have been sold also, (think of that as half the U.S. population).

4. I still want to know how many active blog sites there are,

5. and how many people regularly do Sudoku puzzles?

Last night, I was looking through my old skating magazines that I keep in "the box" (see my 9/11/08 post), and I made some surprising discoveries. The snowy picture above was taken just around the corner from where I lived (seriously less than a block away) and at the same time that the magazine it appeared in was released. That's probably why I kept that particular issue but ironically, I never saw anyone skating in that neighborhood the whole time I lived there. Then I moved to San Diego and lo and behold, most of the pictures in another magazine (from before I moved but that's not why I moved here specifically) are credited as being taken there or nearby: Chula Vista, East County, and Rancho Bernardo. The B&W picture above was taken at Point Loma High, just blocks from where I now live and the irony continues, I have never seen anyone with Rollerblades sliding down a handrail as long as I've lived in San Diego. How have I (at least for the last five years) lived this close to the sweetest skate spots in the country (or at least so close to the pros featured in magazines) and never known about it till now? Anyway, I just want to wrap this up now by saying that the No Fear/extreme sports fad kinda passed a decade ago, but for a while it was everywhere. I include below not one, but two of the Mead folders I keep in "the box" to store my memories. It appears that even "Trapper Keeper" cashed in on the fad when creating their "No Rules!" line: