DIY ya lookin at me? or ‘grafton holler midnight construction company’

in the never ending quest for spots that match your dreams we’ve been forced to actually extend laborious effort this yr to good results. this newest ledge is recycled angle iron from the holler glued to some giant cinderblocks from our factory spot. so far this is the only trick landed on it but next saturday [it’s a wkend spot] i’m sure more will be thrown down and injuries too. that 5 foot drop makes this a widowmaker.
i don’t wanna see any of my friend get hurt but as a friend’s grandfather once told me ‘danger can be fun’. also, even if none of them are perfect, wormtown has a plethora of mainstream ledges so unless i’m really digging the wall behind it, i don’t really feel the urge to make another. maybe if it’s a cool brick building w/ ivy.
i’d still like to make a statue of morrissey sitting down and you can wallie off his back. my ‘Morrissey in repose’ project might have to wait til i get a nut check but i haven’t forgotten about it. a hubba would be awesome as well as a flatbar sunk into grass like this one.

we’ve got access to a little of this or that but can always use cement/mortar, gorilla glue and angle iron.
down in baton rouge i usedta cop from crackhead chad. he and his wife had about 10 kids between them but only had custody of 2. that’s kind of how i feel about our DIY spots. i don’t love them any less when the state comes and takes them away from me but i just charge it to the game. you know, shed a tear and move on.
our company can always and forever benefit from a sawzall and a truck to redistribute light pole flatbars to impoverished areas so anyone reading who wants to help out, you’d be doing god’s work.
if not, that’s fine and you can skate our obstacles but i may call on you to bring me some yogurt so’s i can grow moss on the walls to give our spots more aesthetic appeal on tv. don’t question why i need yogurt, it ain’t to fix a yeast infection. not too often but sometimes we know what we’re doin over here.
you can’t make the whole world to your liking but ya can fix some of the cracks.
lata potatas.

the anti-suburbs dissertation

so one time melissa and i were in Memphis enroute to Detroit on the CN line, conversating on a grassy hill. i was going on didactically about Detroit and how there was racism so black people rioted and the white people ran to the suburbs and took the jobs w/ them.
then a black guy walked over w/ a sleeping bag and told us to get out of his spot.
just when i was talking about white flight…….
when we finally got there we squatted the Y that stretched from Larned to Jefferson [and i hear has since burned down, sadly] w/ a bunch of mostly white, mostly junkie types like ourselves and had a delightful if groundhog’s day-like summer.
one of the medium regulars i’d acquainted myself w/ asked about relics in our building and said how there’s a market for such things but it’s unethical to sell them to the suburbs. i related to that. if you want to live in a fancy historic place then you should but there’s sacrifices too.
i walked home from my sister’s main south apartment last night and made googly eyes at the former welfare office nee ‘worcester market’ and it’s sheep heads and other sculptures built into the limestone[?]. then i glanced up at vernon hill to the right and grafton hill to the left, the rows of 3 deckers like an endangered tree.
got me thinking how in 100 yrs worcester will look like anywhere else, the grandeur of our old buildings will be gone and people will only see 3 deckers in magazine articles about the past.
sucks for the new generation but i only halfass care cause i’ll be dead.
i’m upset that there’s a walmart where V-Block used to reside, still my favorite DIY spot.

Worcester is no Detroit. we usedta be like a mini-Cleveland when i was a kid but we’ve lost a lot of our beautiful urban blight to ugly modern architecture. that said, we’re still a city w/ 100plus yr old buildings, railroads, sidewalks and enough unique people and places that it’s livable. by livable i mean it’s not just a place to come home and watch tv.
i get depressed when i’m in a car driving past places w/out sidewalks, maybe cause i don’t drive but it’s just foreign and awful.
there’s no way to prove it and this could totally be ‘city mouse’ bias but it would appear that opening up our [Grafton Holler] doors to the suburbs expedited it’s demise. it totally could have been local junkie scrappers but w/in days of us letting the white man skate our property [that was anyone’s property] like Squanto and other innocent Indians before us, our lightpole is gone.
Worcester is full of buried treasure. we found a factory spot that comes w/ opposing slant banks so you can do lines. here’s a really crappy one but it shows the spot.

i’m not so sure we want to share this one. it’s most likely risking a day in jail so that should spook most tourists off and that may be our saving grace. in a city there’s sort of a rhythm that for every spot you lose there’s one you gain which may coincide w/ you only become observant by necessity but i’d rather not lose anymore if possible.
my sister and her husband are buying a house in Holden. i guess it’s a nice place to watch tv but i wouldn’t want to live there. there’s for sure more life in a tramp’s vest but it’s not gonna inconvenience me.
maybe someday someone will write the great novel humanizing and romanticizing the suburb experience and i’ll read it and relate. until such a time comes though, short of being a Dogtown type surfer territorial dickhead, i think we should close our borders.
Worcester spots for Worcester people.

the demise of grafton holler

this video doesn’t really do justice to the amount of labor that went into the place. especially since the last half of it is me skating an indoor park on my 37th birthday. asides the cement work that we did twice in order to make the rock skateable, we felled 2 lightpoles, one 20.5 feet and the other 17 feet of pleasure.
we built a cinderblock ledge that nek skated once then, warned off by surveyors, dismantled. i sank a polejam into the earth that i’d dug out w/ a pick axe. my gay ass republican brother in law who fruit boots wanted his flatbar back so we unearthed that too so basically the holla had seen a lot of different permutations, mostly over the winter.
come the thaw we attacked, mostly the 17 foot lightpole mounted on cinderblocks, just about the finest flatbar you’ll skate on this mortal coil.
the polejam was set into a downhill course [we built the whole spot on a holler, after all] and i for one found it awkward and rewarding.
we invited nate keegan just after he was bestowed the title of ‘pro skater’ and he had no similar problems. maybe it was just that nek isn’t much help battling a polejam but i did it close to 10 times and even pulled a few fs 180s out.
i joked to nek ‘one day we’re gonna show up and our obstacles will be gone. we’re gonna feel like victims of a burglary.’
sure as shit, yesterday i went on a solo sojourn and found the brown lightpole to be absent. w/ a head full of benzos i shrugged, tried to wallie over the plexiglass window i’d drawn ‘paul bearer’ on but my board landed primo.
i limped up the hill and battled the polejam. landed it and felt exhilarated but i prolly didn’t need to bail it 12 times first.
i climbed to the roof of the vacant restaurant who’s holler we’d been squatting and drew marker from pocket to color a sheet of aluminum into the vague idea of shrewsbury st and it’s rows of 3 deckers climbing the hill behind it.
i thought that trite after a while and wanted to commemorate a more personal moment so i looked down at the cinderblocks that once held the lightpole and started drawing from memory, the time nek and i boardslid the 17 foot bar simultaneously.
today we returned to the holler where i dug up my polejam, we snatched up the remaining 80 pound bag of mortar and headed to main south.
our potential new DIY site had some forbidding dirt mounds on it’s otherwise empty streetscape so i B & E’d the adjacent 5 story structure. if you saw the pole i shimmied up you’d think there were coconuts awaiting me. i punched out a window above a skeletal roof and tumblesaulted in. once inside i found scrappable radiators, miles of perfect flatground and some perfect slant banks.
erstwhile, on a loading dock we used to tag in our more delinquent days, nek bailed tricks, cussed and threw his board around. pretty typical for him these days, we all have our moments where skating raises our ire but statistically i think he spends more time angered than joyed from it. that’s gotta be the worst feeling, hating the activity you love most.
or maybe he really loves his wife and kids, what do i know?
not me, i just wish i had someone willing to break and enter in the interest of getting gnarly. i’m hesitant to share this spot before i get to film lest it follow a similar fate as Grafton Holler.