Early Morning Self-Portrait

I woke up early this morning to go skateboarding.  I also brought my camera as you can tell.  Now you might be thinking to yourself, "Damn, Dean is so freakin cool. He skateboards...I hate him," but please reign in your jealous thoughts.  Whatever "coolness" this image might have captured, it  was quickly diminished very shortly afterwards.  

I went on snapping a few more pics then got back on my board (technically Austin's board) for a final run before heading out. So, I drop into the bowl and quickly gain speed towards a particularly steep wall.  I'd done this particular portion of the bowl several times, no problem, but never really this fast.  Needless to say I got a lot of height.  It was awesome, but as I'm coming down I don't quite make it and I have to bail.  This would have been fine had my skateboard done what it was supposed to do, shoot off to a safe distance away allowing me to regain my balance without injuring myself.  Instead, the board barely goes anywhere, causing me to step on it and fly backwards on my ass...hard.  "Son of a @#$%," where the first words out of my mouth.  It hurt.  A lot.  It hurt so much in fact that all I could do was roll over onto my stomach and lay there unmoving like a fool.  Fortunately, I had made a wise decision early on that coming to the skate park in the morning was best because when a fall such as this occurred there wouldn't be anyone around to scoff at me. I lay there for several minutes, in pain and pissed that I might lose some money on medical bills (a typical post-graduate thought in the face of injury).  Pretty sure that nothing was broken I finally got up and left.

Here's the moral of the story.  Skateboarding sucks.  You can go several sessions accident free and it makes no difference.  Eventually you will get seriously effed-up.  In fact the times you don't get hurt are worse.  Those times act like bad roll-over minutes.  All those injuries you could have had and managed to avoid get stored up and concentrated into one epic fall later on.  Anyway, I certainly cashed out today.