Penny boards are stupid. And Cal State Northridge has a huge penny board problem.
All of your professors will remind you on your first week of class that CSUN right now can only handle like 35,000 students and 42,000 are here right now taking classes. As a result, parking is nonexistent: every lot is clogged and overcrowded, people will stalk you in their cars hoping for your spot, and then after you get your spot, some mongrel in a modded 1998 Honda Civic will nearly run you over because he wanted that spot. You either become the Road Warrior or you park in an off-campus overflow lot.
So let's say you park in an off-campus lot, then you have to walk a few blocks to your campus, and another few to get to your class. That's when you start running into penny boarders.
A penny board is a short, stubby little board, usually made out of colorful plastic, with long board trucks and wheels bolted onto the bottom. They're not good for anything besides making your entire college campus hate you. You can't hop up or down a curb with them, you can't pull any sweet tricks on them, and you can hardly ride them as it is. Every person on a penny board I've seen around CSUN looks like they're almost completely out of control on their little plastic baby-board. That's because they're technically long boards (they have long board trucks and wheels) so they're not meant for tricks even though penny boards are usually only two feet long. You can hardly fit both of your feet on these stupid things.
But they don't have any of the practical qualities of most long boards like "stability" or "control," or "quality." They're called penny boards as an homage to their cheap yet playful nature, but in my opinion they should be called twenty-deep-in-debt boards, because that's how much it's going to cost you after you crash into a crowd of students trying to Bart Simpson your way across campus and break your hip and give someone else a concussion.
These boards are always flying out from under people's feet and ramming into my ankles. Okay, only happened once. But penny boards aren't like skateboards or long boards where they have a set of skilled hands and feet operating them, kick-flipping up and down stairs and carving up giant hills like a Thanksgiving turkey. Penny boards are fashion accessories, like those Herschel Supply Co backpacks that are too small to carry most books. The difference between them is that there aren't dangerously uncoordinated nimrods rolling around on Herschel Supply Co. backpacks.
Maybe they're fun. I've seen penny boarders with huge grins stretched across their face as they zip through crowds of people with inches to spare between them and a complete disaster. Yeah, that's a lot of fun, isn't it? Bring everyone shambling to class to a dead-halt and skirt directly through someone's conversation so you can look like an asshole. Cowa-bunga, dude.
It's not like penny boards are alone, though. Plenty of others are aspiring to be the next penny board. "Morons on fixies" and "chumps on Huffys" are two close runner-ups. Riding a bike as hard as you can through an overcrowded college campus with no gears or shifters or brakes? What a great idea. Almost as great as riding a penny board.
