What I txt about when I txt about #longboarding

#longboarding

What I txt about when I txt about #longboarding

by Justin Diamond

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#longboarding

I opened my apartment door and stepped outside to get a feel for the weather. The first place to look for the most telling clue is the sky. It looked halfly cloudy. The next clue comes from the ground. How wet is it? Because even if there wasn't a cloud in the sky, if the ground was wet enough, I wouldn't skate.

But the ground was dry, and I figured it would be a fine day to commute with my #longboard. Back inside, I checked the weather on the internet. Not now, but later in the day, around five thirty when I go home, there's a fifty percent chance of rain. Go figure. All this fancy technology to tell you what you'd guess just by stepping outside.

One of the biggest difficulties I have with #longboarding is that, when you get to know the sport, there really are so many different varieties. I only ride electric skateboards, which are kind of a new thing. And there I go again, using #skateboards and #longboards interchangeably. Like someone who *doesn't* skate would do. Am I wrong for thinking that most people can't tell the two apart?

The problem with electric skateboards is that they're so new. There's no standard in what to call them. A motorized board, or a motorboard sounds like a reasonable name. But one could make a strong argument for remote controlled #skateboard. Factor in for the skateboard/longboard conundrum, and you're doing math just to calculate the number of possible compound words to call a #skateboard with a battery and a motor.

I must be one of those guys who likes to have things both ways. That's what a good writer does. When I blog about #skating, I call it an electric #skateboard. But when I wrote a fictional story about a hero, he rides a motorboard. Maybe one of them will stick, but only time can tell. And then, presumably, I'd be able to look back, point at one of my novellas, and say, "I was calling it that *before* it was cool."

But no matter how often I ride, or how many miles I put on my boards, I'll always be a commuter. I heard about the very idea of electric #skateboarding in a Ted talk, where a young man named Sanjay held up his prototype #longboard and said, "This is the world's lightest electric vehicle."

He had me, he drew me in, board, trucks, and wheels. He talked at length about a *last mile vehicle.* Which is a luxury for someone in San Francisco. The idea that they could use this #skateboard to roll down to the BART (that's the name of the San Francisco train system), and then use it again to go from wherever the BART stops to their final destination. I call it a luxury because I'm from Miami, which like most cities, a last mile vehicle wouldn't really help anyone. You'd have to drive to the metro station, and chances are the rail doesn't even stop close enough to where you're going to even use the board.

But I lived in Japan for so long that white people all started to look the same to me. About four years. But for those four years, I found myself in *exactly* the situation Sanjay described, despite not living in San Francisco and being more of a Florida boy.

For years, I had to catch trains into Tokyo, and factor in for the fifteen minute, mile walk to the station. On a side note, I lucked out on the destination end, because the train stopped *in the building* where I worked. How cool is that? But even so, I would have wanted the board for that lonely walk home. So when Sanjay held up the board and called it a last mile vehicle, I *got* it.

In Tokyo, I caught the train based on a timetable. If the schedule said the train would be there at three fifteen, I knew I could show up at the station around three ten and be safe.

But that's not how the bus works in Gainesville, Florida. Here, there's a time table, alright. But you can toss it in the trash for all it's worth. Luckily, we have an app for it, that shows the location of all the buses on the map in real time. So the commute of an electric longboarder really starts on a computer screen at home.