Back Tail Stall to Backside Flip in.
SEQUENCE by Brayden Olson
50-50 from below.
Photo by Kyle Kim.
Switch Frontside Big Spin into a haggard bank.
Sequence by Brayden Olson
Crooks off and down.
Photo by Mike Deleon |
Words by Rory Parker
Sometimes life can seem like one long dice roll. No matter how hard you plan for the future, how much you strive for security and a happy place in the world, we’re all really just one or two bad throws away from destitution, loneliness and despair. Daily we’re presented with decisions we must make, weighing happiness versus security, freedom versus companionship, with no real clue of what the true consequences of our decisions will be more than a few weeks or months down the road.
Occasionally it may seem like too much, like the only real option is to give up and give in. Find yourself a suit and tie job, plop your self down behind a desk, and use your constantly growing ass to count the years like some sort of fucked up set of tree rings. You can play it safe, because even though a bad stretch may lie just ahead, when things go wrong you don’t have to take responsibility for your predicament.
“I did what they said,” you can cry, “I played the game by their rules. It wasn’t my fault the economy took a shit, the CEO embezzled my retirement fund, that my wife got fat and slowly learned to hate me. I thought this was how things worked.”
And then you can find sweet solace in a bottle, bundle up your bitterness, and count the days until death’s embrace.
Of course, you could just as easily say, “Fuck it, I’m doing things my way. Sure, one day I may have to pay the price. But things could work out too. And, even if, one day in the future, everything goes terribly pear shaped, well, at least it’s been a hell of a ride.”
Don’t get me wrong, we need the white collar worker bees. Without the drones there would be no twenty four hour drive through windows, no one to toil day in and day out to keep our infrastructure from crumbling around us.
So thank god for the worker bees, they keep the hive humming along. And thank god for people like Josh Mohs, who are willing to risk it all and remind us that, despite all the drudgery and misery, life is magical and truly worth living. If, that is, you’re willing to bet against the odds on occasion.
Josh Mohs has three kids (two boys, ages eleven and three, and a little girl, age six.) He runs two skateshops in Washington state, just turned pro for ATM at thirty years old, and has a spectacular beard. The beard has nothing to do with anything, but it’s wild and bushy and awesome and I felt the need to mention it somewhere in this piece. I’m in awe of guys who can rock sick facial hair, because even though I’m turning into a hairy freak as I get older, I can’t stand to go more than two or three days without shaving. Josh, however, just powers it out, and the end result is a glorious plume that would scare away a wild grizzly. I don’t know if there are any grizzlies in Eastern Washington, but I’d bet if there were they’d have all been scared across the border into Canada at the first sight of Josh.
But I digress, the beard is irrelevant. The point I’m trying to make here, if you can ignore all the shit about bees and bears and dice, is that Josh took a shot, and it seems like shit is going well.
Josh’s daughter was born in October 2002. In January Josh went on tour for a few months, returning unemployed to a new baby girl, a stepson, and the need to scrape together enough money to keep them from freezing to death and being devoured by bears in the Washington winter. Well, it probably wasn’t exactly that dramatic, but things were dire enough to force Josh to find himself employment at a cookie factory.
Now, you’d think that a job at a cookie factory would be pretty kickass. In fact, it should be second only in awesomeness to scoring employment with Puppies and Candy Inc. as Head Puppy Cuddler and Peanut Brittle Tester. But, life likes to throw curve balls, and according to Josh it was pretty much, “the worst job ever.” Stacking and counting cookies, all day, everyday, was not working out, so after three days he quit, and moved back to his hometown to open up his first shop, Mosaik.
Not that things necessarily got easier from then on. Running an independent skate shop is not an easy thing to do. There are bills to pay, employees to harass, rent, taxes, and any other number of tasks that can easily suck the life out of you and turn a shop owner into an unhappy, fat ass who never skates anymore. (This is not necessarily true of all shops, but it’s pretty common. )
Josh avoided this pitfall in a remarkably simple way. Instead of just seeing the shop as a cash cow, to be milked for all it can be, he uses it as a facilitator.
“Having a shop allows me to do what I love to do,” he told me over the phone, “Which is skate.”
And skate he does. At an age when most of us are slowing down and letting skating become more of a hobby than a lifestyle, Josh is still at it, stronger than ever. After six years of riding for ATM Click he was recently turned pro, “…a lifelong dream come true,” though he’d be the first to admit that, “Turning pro isn’t a huge change. It’s a little more money, which helps, because (with the weak economy) the shop ain’t doing that great.”
When asked if he saw anything strange in the path he took, having kids, opening a shop, and then turning pro, a path which is pretty much the complete opposite of the typical skater, he replied, “I kinda think I got to where I am the wrong way. Most people, 18, 19 years old, that’s your dream (turning pro.) Most people strive to have a family and be secure after skating. I kind of think I started out at the wrong end and worked backwards. But I’ll keep skating as long as I can. It’s working out for me.”
Which it is indeed. But I’m a writer, and I have to be a dick sometimes, so I pushed a little harder. Do you ever wonder, I asked, if you made the wrong choice? Trying to support a family on two skate shops and a professional skateboarding career is not the easiest path to take. Don’t you ever look at yourself in the mirror and think, “My god, what have I done? I should just get a real job, give up my dreams. I’m a dad now, I should be going in to work in khakis and a button down shirt, slaving away at a job that, though I may hate it, has a better chance of helping me provide for all the material shit my kids will want down the road?”
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s a question I struggle with everyday. But that’s just not who I am. Obviously I’m not making a ton of money. Being pro is really just more an honor at this point.”
But even though the doubt may lurk in his heart sometimes, he’s still going ahead full bore. Which is probably for the best anyway, because what good is a new car to a sixteen year old if the dad who gave it to him resents the sacrifices he had to make to provide it?
“Basically,” Josh said toward the end of our conversation, “regardless of what happens, well, never give up. Do your thing, be positive, and things will go your way. Look at me, I’m thirty years old and I just turned pro.”
Watch a Day In The Life With Josh Here. |
