At such close proximity to my grandmother’s stylish and well-mannered world in Cocoa Beach existed another world, on the edge of the parking lot in a salvaged school bus but that could energetically explode and appear anywhere, sliding unexpected into carefully guarded zones of everyday life.  My encounter with skateboarding's subterranean contours shares traits with heterotopia, a concept proposed by Foucault. In finding Sloan's bus and reading my first issue of Transworld I had discovered unexpected slippages in my own adolescent world concomitant with energetic acts of insurgency by skaters at the fishing docks of Yaizu and countless other unnamed moments of architecture. 

I faintly comprehended the hyper-intense collision of the local and global through terms of youth and practice and as such the topography of the possible and my relations to a diverse community of practitioners took on globalized significance.  Having been born and raised on military bases since 1972, “global networks” and the transmission capacity of hegemonic U.S. culture were completely familiar.  My father was an airborne infantry officer which meant working for possibly the largest transnational operation in history—the U.S. Army. Unexpected juxtapositions defined the space just outside any military installation despite the rigorous attempts at uniformity within. The contact zones of difference were profound and diverse and often depressing in their flimsy facades intended to serve long enough for one troop rotation. Military presence was perpetual, just not permanent. Moving inside to outside and back again was common routine growing up and it shaped my understanding of borders, control, and hybrid space and subjectivities produced through mobility, globalized national hegemony, and attempts to create “normality” at the family level as a border-crossing fiction. Already thrilled by the unexpected world in the skateshop-bus emerging at such close range to my grandmother’s world, my imagination was stirred by the article on Japan picturing Americans street-skating in startling proximity to far-away spaces by means of a familiar improvisational use of locally immediate, if foreign, architecture.  Not only did skating create an immediate knowledge about the surfaces of the space “over there” but it also provided the social tissue for exciting relationships with those who lived in those spaces but shared in a global “lifestyle” capable of compressing or overriding cultural interference in the transmission.

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