SDK History Pt. 3
Today is part 3 in the weekly series about the history of SDK. I’m going to talk about something that I’ve never talked about before and didn’t think I ever would. But after thinking about it for a very long time I have decided that it is necessary if I am going to include the most important pieces of our history and how it all became what it is today. First of all I want to say that looking back I am genuinely remorseful and apologize to the people that it affected negatively and to the people that I hurt. I wish it didn’t happen the way that it did but I can’t change the past, so here we go.
After the summer of 2003 we had become a very close group of friends, and although I appeared to be homeless, I was actually renting a home that I hardly ever went to because it was about an hour long bike ride from the skate park. Sometimes a group of us would party there for days and days in a row. One of these nights things got really out of control.
We were all drinking and smoking in the living room watching graffiti videos when I went outside to get something from the garage. I was only gone about five minutes but when I returned one of the guys had painted an entire wall in my living room with spray paint! I was furious!! This was the first time I realized the type of people I was hanging around with could really negatively impact my life.
I don’t know why I did this but instead of a fist fight, I told the guy that he would have to get all of the best graffiti artists that he knew to paint something over it. A few days later they arrived. I didn’t know some of them at all, things got out of control very quickly. The door to my house was literally kicked opened before I could get to it by a guy named Big Miles. I had met Miles a few years earlier when I was looking to buy a large amount of weed but the deal fell through after we got into a heated argument about the quality and the price. I was shocked to see him again and in my kitchen of all places. The next hour was a blur of chaos.
Instead of just painting over the living room wall, they started painting every wall in my house, I was in complete shock and out numbered so I just let it happen. When they finally left, my house looked like a graffiti covered skate park as you can see in the photos. I just stood there alone in my house wondering what to do next. I knew that if my landlord saw this I would be kicked out with nowhere to go. My house smelled very strongly of spray paint for weeks, it was hard to sleep.
To be totally honest I loved it, it was the craziest thing to look at every day and I had always been a huge fan of graffiti so I just left it. My plan was to paint over everything one day before I moved but that day never happened. About seven or eight months later there was a knock on my door and it was my landlord, he had been doing some yard work and happened to see one of the paintings through a side window, he was furious! I knew I was busted so I let him into the house. He went into every room and then he went into the basement.
A few years earlier I had attempted to grow weed in my basement but I was inexperienced and it didn’t work out very well so I gave up. But the stupid thing was I didn’t take anything down so all of the equipment was still there, he left and he called the police. This was an elderly man that had no idea what he was looking at but probably thought it was a drug lab and that’s what he told the police. I was living on the USA Canada border and a few months earlier my neighbour was caught with a drug tunnel going from Canada to the USA (google Aldergrove Drug Tunnel)
I didn’t know the guy but my landlord had seen us talking several times and I think he thought it was all connected somehow.
About half an hour after my landlord left I heard a very loud helicopter so I walked outside to see what was going on. Immediately I heard a loud speaker tell me to put my hands in the air and walk backwards away from the house. That was when I noticed that there were two helicopters and a line of police cars coming up my driveway. I was arrested at gunpoint and my house was raided. The police found nothing illegal in my house and I was just about to be released when One of the cops said I had an outstanding warrant.
I totally forgot about my court date because I was always so fucked up, it wasn’t for something serious but since I didn’t show up to court I had an arrest warrant. I was only in jail for 24 hours but when I was released I returned home to find it completely empty. My friends and family thankfully came and got all of my stuff. I was not allowed back on the property. After living on my own for seven years I had nowhere to go, so I moved into my parents basement. This was the lowest point in my entire life... I will continue the story next week with part four. Thank you for reading, see you then.
-Q