Op-Ed | You Can’t Skate With Us
Self Portrait taken in 2021, right during the whole Atkinson/O’Neill fiasco. I would be in turned marooned and “cancelled” by the rollerblading community…
Why I Have No Friends In Rollerblading…
Let’s call out the elephant in the room; I have no friends in rollerblading. Maybe I have acquaintances, you know, people that know me, or interact with me, but I have come to the decision recently that, in reality, I have no friends dude.
And I know what most of you are thinking; well, you’re a fucking asshole, so what do you expect? True, I am not going to lie; I am a dick. But I am not a dick for the sake of being one, despite having a receding hairline that says otherwise. I have always been blunt and honest, it has always been one of my shortcomings alongside my height. So, I am trying to figure out why, why don’t I have any friends?
I mean, aside from me being a prick, I am actually pretty nice. And I take some decent photos, I always like to bring along a cheerful, in-depth conversation littered with jokes and references. While I am certainly not good at rollerblading, I do have a sincere passion for it and continue to try to get myself better despite my skillset. I am generous in my support to those that I think are my friends, but rarely in my life have I seen it in return. And I have had a handful of fallouts with friendships in my life. I remember when my first best friend, Catie, turned on me in the 7th grade; she had started smoking weed and running with a different crowd, a crowd that I didn’t really fuck with, and in turn, beef occurred between a band battle of the bands gig and a bunch of gossip. I saw the death of a nearly 15 year relation between my former friends, Josh and Melissa, after taking on a position with them at Hirshliefers that would be short lived. I quickly had found out their work ethic wasn’t equivalent to mine, and also learned that you really shouldn’t work with your friends. Or at least I shouldn’t. I can’t work with my friends; it’s too much, and I am too aggressive when it comes to business. But I didn’t learn my lesson the first time. It took me moving to Utah to work with Trevor Taylor, a high school friend, who then laid me off 6 months later due to poor business decisions (for example, paying $7000 or so a month on Google Ads and $2k to run a Hormozi style podcast). So, it isn’t people; it’s me. That’s the truth man. And that goes with everything I do, including rollerblading; I’ve never really felt a lot of true genuine support for anything I have ever done, rather feeling the need to beg to get anyone’s attention or time. I mean, shit, the most generous thing that happened to me in rollerblading, a $5,000 donation to help me move and get a car, was given by a rollerblader, Bryan Tan, who I never met. Aside from my friend Mikey, I don’t think anyone else contributed, let alone cared if I ended up homeless.
It makes me wonder, though, why. What is it that is so bad about me? I am thoroughly invested in the things I do, whether it be photography, skating, music, or my cooking, I show an absolutely absurd amount of commitment to what I do. And while I was in Utah, I tried to make friends with people in skating, but once they learned about my past, my interactions with Joe Atkinson or Jon Julio, I was quickly marooned and ignored. I thought moving back to New York would change that; a handful of messages appeared on my phone in the wake of my announcement of my relocation back east. But 90% of those, “dude, I can’t wait until you’re back in NYC, we are gonna skate!” fell flat on their face. Yet, it wasn’t surprising. And I have had a handful of interactions with skaters since then, mostly made up of attempts to connect, only to see them out skating with someone else later that day on their story. It reminds me of that episode of South Park where they all get on Facebook, and Stan becomes friends with this one kid, Kip Drody, who in turn, ruins his “social worth”, causing no one to want to be Stan’s friend; in fact, Stan’s friend base begins to shrink. I fondly think about how one skater, who I had intended on working with, told me at one point that they had to unfollow me because they did not want to upset Billy. I think I am definitely Kip, and the majority of you are Stan.
In 2021, I had a falling out with Joe Atkinson and Billy O’Neill. What started off as a disagreement resulted in a month long online fist fight.
There were a handful of people I had intended on working with, like the skater I had mentioned previously that I was going to put on the cover of the first issue of Daily Toast, there was a competition I was helping produce where I wrote an entire production board and road map, there was a skate video I had in mind as well. But that all seems to be just smoke and mirrors; it feels pointless and a waste of time on people that just don’t care. When I first got back into skating in 2024, I talked with Mal Ashby about my reputation. “Nobody is going to want to work with me man, I don’t know if this is worth it,” I told him via text. “Why?”, he naively asked, as if he had forgotten 2021’s fiasco with Atkinson and Billy. “Dude, the whole Atkinson thing? Remember?”. He took a second and then quickly responded, “Nobody remembers that.” Only a few weeks later, after venting some frustration for being left on read by a handful of people I had worked with previously like Danny Beer and Alex Broskow, Ashby jabbed me with, “90% of the industry doesn’t fuck with you.” Nobody had forgotten what happened, rather, it was a distant memory that my return had quickly refreshed everyone. Jason Reyna made sure of that too.
Danny Beer, pictured above, was one of my favorite skaters that I enjoyed writing about. Despite countless interactions and articles, Beer prefers to keep his distance from me.
Will I continue Daily Toast? Probably, but I will keep it humbly to myself in terms of who I am working with; I do not need to chase people down to work with me. If you’re so concerned about your reputation that having any association with me might compromise that, then I am not a person that should be working with you, ever. I think often about my mortality; I have, throughout my life, struggled with the idea of staying alive. And when I think about that, things like this help re-enforce that struggle. “I don’t think anybody would give a fuck if I were gone tomorrow”, is often the phrase I start off with when I am staring at a belt that I’ve hung up. The thought quickly leaves, however soothing the idea may seem, and I move on. Maybe you should all move on too.
