Recent Entries

• Skateboarding Made Me Stop Apologizing for Taking Up Space

  by Dez Fontaine May 16
  I never thought about space until I stopped having it. Growing up in a cramped apartment where your bedroom was half the living room and your mom could hear everything, you learn real quick to make yourself smaller. Quieter. Less. You learn to apologize for existing in the way that kids from tight s...

• The Concrete Doesn't Care Who You Were Yesterday

  by Dez Fontaine May 16
  I been watching something happen to skateboarding that nobody's really talking about, and it's been sitting in my chest like something I gotta say before it gets lost in all the noise. See, skateboarding used to be the thing you did when nobody wanted you doing anything else. It was the rebellion th...

• When a Neighborhood Stops Being a Place and Becomes a Person

  by Dez Fontaine May 15
  I been living in the same three-block radius for almost eight years now, and I just realized something that's been sitting in my chest the whole time. Neighborhoods ain't really about the buildings or the streets or even the people technically. They're about the rhythm. The actual heartbeat of a pla...

• The Invisible Architecture of a Block That Actually Breathes

  by Dez Fontaine May 15
  There's this thing that happens when you're not looking for it. You walk down a street you've been down a hundred times and suddenly you notice the way light hits the fire escape at 4 PM, or how the bodega guy knows to have your order ready before you ask, or the exact moment when the neighborhood s...

• The Coffee Shop That Knows What You Want Before You Order

  by Dez Fontaine May 15
  I used to think neighborhoods were just geography. Like, you live on this block instead of that block and that's it. But nah, that's not it at all. A real neighborhood is the people who remember you. It's the rhythms you fall into without thinking about it.There's this spot three blocks from my plac...