Basically Phelps and co. are on tour in Africa, and the brakes on their van fail and they crash into a building and get fucked up.
Phelps then writes about how important music is, what it has been like being a fuck up/addict/thrill seeker since childhood etc. but also writes about sobriety and aging.
He also writes about getting hospitalized in a psych ward and not being able to fly back to the US and what a fucked up experience it was for him, alone in a foreign country just trying to get home.
I get that Phelps the personality, and Phelps the writer, don't appeal to a lot of folks, but I dunno, I think he's so fucking crucial to skating. Maybe I am being naive or just buying into the the "cult of the personality", but Thrasher is important to skateboarding, meaning their ethos of 'skate and destroy', and Phelps is basically the walking embodiment of that, he is Thrasher, and it's cool. I am grateful that we have something like that. Skating is young enough to still have OG legends contributing to the culture--not many other art forms/activities/hobbies/sports/whatever have that going for them.
Like, I know he's a walking Quaalude who babbles too much and occasionally wears a fedora, but I choose to look past all that and just respect him at a distance for being so fucking stoked on skating, still, at fifty whatever years old and his vision of what skating should be--gnarly, painful, terrifying, and insane. He's a presence/force in our world and you gotta respect that shit.
Anyways, I was pleasantly surprised by this article and his writing in it. It's got the classic "fuckin' hellride, brother!" vibe, but also something more sentimental and abstract feeling. I've gone back to it multiple times over the past few months and continually enjoy it.
Edit: if that shit is too small to read (I think if you save the jpegs you can zoom in and be able to read them easily enough?) I can just email people the zip file or something. I am pretty technologically inept, unfortunately.
Thanks for posting that man, that was a good read. I'm also glad that he's still around and agree with what you said.
Topic: Thrasher Social Media Captions (Read 8130 times)