The Gel Lab – Flatspot Longboards

There is a Gel Lab either currently existing in your city, or its just waiting to happen. Underground creative skate communities are everywhere, you just gotta sniff out the one closest to you!

The Gel Lab is a crew of skaters from LA that come together on a weekly basis to skate garages. They also collaborate on music. So as a locally oriented shop here is Vancouver, why are we even wasting our breathe talking about these fellow kooks? Because they are doing it right, as MANY groups across north america are. They recently caught a moment on the youtube spotlight, so now is as good as any to talk about this. And by “this”, I mean weekly garage sessions.

Weekly garage sessions happen in just about every major city in north america, and have done so for just over a decade now. For Canada the primary two are the Old School Night Shreds (OSNS) in Toronto on Wednesdays, and the Parkades Sessions in Vancouver on Thursdays. And groups like NoBull, the Skate Invaders, Team Pizza and the Gel Lab have all coagulated around these empty parking lots and birthed a healthy underground culture of hooligans.

So basically, the take home message from this blog post is: if you have a weekly garage session in your city, attend it, it will provide joy and added vitality to your life. If you don’t, you may not have found it, look harder. If its really not there, pick a day of the week, and go skate garages with a friend. Do this every week until the session happens even if YOU don’t show up.

This article is dedicated to Jacob Furlong. The man the Toronto police were after for starting OSNS. The name is a pseudonym, and is still used 10 years later while the actual founder is literally flying high somewhere far away.

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