About

Yerrrrrrr, this is Phil and this is my blog. 

My name is Philip Harder, and I started skating around high school, in my home city of Baltimore, MD. Due to my disillusionment with traditional organized sports, a lack of positive social relations, and an excess of free time with myself (to be frank I didn’t have many friends back then), I was able to completely dive into skateboarding in my early years. I immediately became obsessed with it.  I skated everyday, I watched every skate video that I could find, and I was always thinking about tricks and spots no matter what I was doing. 

When I graduated high school, I moved to Philadelphia for college. I found a great scene for skateboarding here and I met a lot of amazing people who I’m still friends with to this day. Having a community of skateboarders around me made it easy to start taking photos and filming tricks. I started making short skate films, designing boards and shirts, laying out zines and just creating whatever people in this community we’re ready to work on. 

It’s been about 4 years now since I moved to Philadelphia, and about a decade since I started skating, and a lot has changed. I barely watch any skate videos nowadays, I have a lot of other hobbies and friends and creative outlets that have nothing to do with skateboarding. But to a certain extent I’m still very passionately obsessed with skateboarding. The details may have changed but the underlying feeling remains the same. Even though I’m not able to skate every-day or watch every new video or learn new tricks very often, I still skate. And I could give you a million different little theories for why that is, but I don’t know if I could give you one good direct answer. And that’s why I’ve started this blog. It’s an attempt to justify an obsession. Why is a fully functioning adult obsessed with a little wooden toy with four wheels? The blog is an attempt at possibly unearthing a solution to that question but I would be lying if I told you that this blog will do anything more than barely scratch the surface of that elusive solution. So then this blog doesn’t have a direct purpose like most blogs do, It’s not about professional development, or vegan recipes, or traveling on the cheap. And it’s not even just about skateboarding shoes, or deck shapes, or skate films. It’s about a question. Why do I skate? Why do I continue to skate? Why write a blog about skating? Is there something more to skating beyond just doing tricks? Am I skateboarding just to skateboard, or is there some deeper, more unconscious reason that I skate? In this way, the answer to the question: “why am I writing this blog?” is the question itself. I’m writing this blog to find out why I am writing this blog. 

So this is my blog about… skateboarding…? I guess. To be clear, this is a blog about skateboarding, but it’s not JUST about skateboarding for skateboarding’s sake. This blog is about more than just skateboarding within itself, it’s about the broader structures and phenomena that permeate, and surround skateboarding. It’s about the give and take that comes out of those relationships with skateboarding. And it’s about analysing those relationships in order to uncover the unseen forces behind what drives skateboarding. 

Every skater at one point or another is a skate nerd, who is obsessed with the details of skating. They know the trivia of who did what trick, at what spot, in what video. Unfortunately I am not a skate nerd anymore, and if you are then I don’t think that this blog is for you (although there will be a fair amount of skate nerdery in this blog). This blog is for someone who wonders about why they keep skating even though they rolled their ankle doing it last week. This blog is for someone who wonders why it’s illegal to skate at public plazas in many cities. This blog is for someone who wonders what effect skateboarding being in the next Olympic games will have on the community. Once again I don’t claim to have the undeniable definitive answer to any of these questions. But what I do have is a brain that over-analyses and over thinks every piece of information that enters it. I can therefore offer an inroad to a dialogue for these questions that are more often than not, overlooked and under-analysed. If skateboarding is to survive as a progressive and worthwhile hobby in the future then we need to have discussions about questions like these in order to keep a forward looking evolution of skateboarding on track. And if that interests you, then please read this blog and engage with its contents.