Yesterday the shop and me found out that one of our buddies died. The guy's name was Big Mike... he was an older skater, and he was pretty much what I want to be like when I'm rolling a decade form now. Every weekend he'd come to the park, put up a canvas roof by the bleachers, grill a ton of meat, blast music, and roll with his son and all of us locals.
He was working on a project that was incredibly awesome... in between grilling and skating, he took photos of all of our local and regular-visiting rippers and groms. He was a good skate photographer, and he recently showed me a box full of framed photos (one box had somewhere around 20 photos in it)... he told me that he had four more boxes besides that one. When he'd set up his camp at the park, he was planning on hanging all of those photos on the fence, creating a weekly (and growing) photo gallery. He was fucking rad.
I had talked to him last week at a skateboarding event in Baton Rouge, and he told me he was going to be road tripping with his son and brother up to Nashville... and it was there that he and his brother (a big guy like Mike himself) accidentally collided. Mike was wearing a helmet, but he still managed to hit his head. He passed away in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
I can't believe that Big Mike is gone. The dude was an asset to the skate communites of Hammond and Baton Rouge (and areas in between), and a very special friend to all of us in Hammond. Big Mike should be alive, and I'm sad that he isn't.
Topic: Things you are not stoked on (Read 473832 times)