Special Feelings
“Society is full of rules,” said Craig Kelly, in a 1998 interview with Japan’s SNOWing Magazine. “I use the time I spend in the mountains to free myself of all constraints… Now that I’ve recaptured the feeling that made snowboarding so special to me, I’m not about to give it up.”
Of all the wisdom, reflection and documentation Eric Blehm packed into his 2024 book The Darkest White, this passage struck a chord. It highlights the fluid, rebellious nature of standing sideways on a plank of wood, and that special feeling Kelly refers to, though impossible to define, feels rooted in subjective experiences that are ever evolving as we glide through life.
Let’s start in the early 2000s—when Holden kept it tight, Technine loosely gang related, Special Blend horizontally bold and Analog punk-rock. Like most young adolescents navigating this fair-game, fad-fueled era, I dabbled in them all. And tasteful or not, it felt cool as hell standing out—prematurely valuing creativity and individual style—even if I was a 10-year-old kid rolling into the park at zero degrees Fahrenheit who couldn’t feel his fingers in a pair of Misfits-inspired Grenade pipe gloves.
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