blade or die

If there’s one limited resource we all have, it’s time. We can always grow more trees and shit like that, but we can never get our time back.

Never. I don’t give a shit if you have a Delorian with a Mr. Fusion on the back. That shit won’t work. You’re not getting any younger and you never will. Deal with it.

If you’ve never thought about your mortality, you should now. This isn’t some Jesus-based schpiel or anything, but perhaps a wake-up call to what the fuck you’re doing with your limited time on this shared space we call Earth.

Think about it: you’ll end up working eight or more hours a day, with some extra time devoted to getting to and from work. Then, you’ll spend time cleaning your apartment, washing your clothes, scrubbing your butt, and all sorts of other life maintenance. Then you gotta eat. Some days, you’ll get to sleep. That doesn’t even include time you’ll invest in the time for others, when it be the lady in your life or a child you spawned. (And if you have a kid and don’t take care of it, fuck yourself with a broken skate frame and die.)

All that shit eats into your time, leaving you with only a fraction devoted to things you really like to do, unless, of course, you’re blessed with a job you love, stuck with a time-saving eating disorder, or entirely welcome an OCD lifestyle dedicated to cleanliness.

This life-on-a-deadline shit fucking sucks and you know it. Go ahead and try to live forever, you Twilight-loving freak. The rest of us will know our time here will run out.

I didn’t think I’d ever write this, but fuck the Rolling Stones: time is not on your side.

The key is what you’ll do with the free hours of your life not dedicated to prolonging it…

You could keep it all to yourself. You could only chase your interests, do what you want, and completely neglect the world around you. No one would blame you for that, but not many people will love you for it. That is unless they share the exact same interests as you and don’t mind you don’t give a fuck about them.

Yup, you’ll be forever alone and no one wants to die that way.

As long as you’re thinking about how someday you will die, you might as well think about if you want to leave anything worthwhile behind. If you’re the type that wants to leave the planet as nothing but a smoldering, rotate ball of shit, good for you. You have goals. That’s awesome.

Painting by Eleanor Gilpatrick, New York, U.S.A.

However, if you’re looking to leave a positive impact on the world you inhabit, think about your time and how much of it you can give away. No, I’m serious.

There are those artists like Van Gogh that suffered through their lives penniless and tortured, only to be revered as a great long after their death. While it may sound cool, that’s a bullshit way to live. You gotta enjoy yourself, but you have to think about what you’ll leave behind. Think about the word “legacy.”

Okay, not that Legacy, but at least we’re getting somewhere.

The likelihood of any of us saving the world is slim, but not impossible. However, to do that you’d have to sacrifice everything you have, risk imprisonment, and basically turn into a mother fucking super hero. That could be fun, too.

Your time here is finite. Make you actions infinite.

So, just say “fuck it” and give up some of your shit.

Give your time, money you spend your time earning, or better yet, do what you normally get paid to do for free.

Becoming talented in anything—design, photography, sucking dick, etc.—takes time. Yes, that limited resource of it. Remember back when you started doing it and how long you had to labor to get better. It was work, but it was fun work.

Share the fucking love, man! Non-profit groups doing great things can save a shitload of money if you volunteer time doing anything. You do video? Guess what? Lots of places need video work? Same with photos, writing, etc.

Take a look at the Surfrider Foundation. It’s dudes doing what they love while working hard to protect the places they do it.

Do you realize how quickly your skate crew could get shit done? Get your buddies together, go down down to a Habitat for Humanity site and fuck shit up, blader style. You know how to build ramps, so why not help build a mother-fucking house? I bet you could put a house together faster than the Amish can raise a barn. Those dudes blade, too.

If you need a reason to do it, volunteer and let everyone know you blade. If each one of us did that for a few hours a month, no one would say shit about bladers, except for “Rollerbladers? Good fucking dudes.”

Sick of all the trash and shit at your local skate park? Spend one hour a week with a broom and dust pan to clean that shit up. You might not be able to design a new website for the YMCA, but fuck if you don’t know how to stoop down and pick garbage up. While your local municipality might have coughed up a few million or so to build the park, I doubt they factored in enough money to keep that thing as spotless as you’d like. So, quit your bitching and get your ass to work improving it.

Tracy White’s old headquarters at the Boys & Girls Club in SoCal used to be the place to drop gear you no longer needed so it could go onto the feet of people looking to start blading. However, despite that’s all long gone now, there are still plenty of ways to keep your place clear of all the skate parts gathering dust.

If you’re not chucking your old stuff to the groms—recycling the good way—then you’re a dick.

Donate & Skate is a great example of turning people’s used gear into gold. People who have old shit give it away to people who are happy to get any kind of shit. Shit’s tight, right? Yeah, well, your used wheels, frames, skates and whatever miss your attention. Just like Buzz and the gang in Toy Story 3, they want a new home.

If even that seems too hard, gather up your old clothes and donate them.

Nothing makes me prouder to be a rollerblader in San Francisco than seeing all these homeless guys decked out in the clothes skaters here donated to them. (However, that is a sad statement that is about the current monetary situation in rollerblading if you think about it.)

If rollerbladers can all get their asses to Detroit or Germany in February—two of the most God-awful frozen tundras known to modernized society—just think of all the good we could do together if we gave up some of our free time.

No matter how limited that time may be.

Even if you’re unwilling to give, at least quick fucking stealing from rollerbladers!

Fuck it, just skate live better.

Blade or die,

— Brian Krans

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