Stoke.

I'm not sure what kind of father I am.  On Sunday, my five year old had one of those crazy five-year-old meltdowns that beggar belief. Tears and pouts and blubbers.  Really put a damper on things.  And boy did he get it as a result.  It's a difficult thing to instill an idea of consequence when real consequences seem so far away from daily life. Later on in the afternoon, my son, after some more ribbing, broke down again and cried, "I know why I acted that way this morning! It was that ice cream I ate yesterday!"  Wow.  Maybe I need to ease off the sugar-is-the-devil rhetoric a touch.
Spending more time with Tyler Breuer is a bit like spending time with this clip.  You get a heavy dose of stoke wrapped up in a neat little (er, big) nostalgic package.  The guy has more good vibes than three average goofs put together, and that's not just because of proportions. Saturday night we spent the evening tending coals and trading stories culled from years of Surfer mag reading.  The phrase "whiff of a chance" got the mnemonic juices going like crazy.  The way my history goes, I was reading surf magazines long before I was surfing, so it all has some sort of warped, wrinkly bit of my brain wired just so.
Becoming a man after being a boy isn't easy.  And I think it may be getting harder.  There just aren't the sort of rites of passage there used to be.  Every life epoque seems to smoosh into each the next these days.  There are plenty of people who claim childhood doesn't even exist, that adolescence is nothing more than a recent construct that gets in the way of self-knowledge.  Die broke.  Never grow old.  Yesterday I actually told someone that surfing is some kind of "fountain of youth."  What a bunch of hooey.