The Right Equipment

Last week I found myself with an open morning, a silver Audi A4 and an invitation to surf Pt. Dume with Jamie Brisick. See, there's this car rental place in L.A. that has a fleet of silver fancy cars and you can rent one with the touch of a screen from their app. You touch down, take a bus out to a parking lot and a smartly dressed gentleman meets you with the keys to your spectacular, silver ride. My business partner wouldn't have it any other way. And I've never felt snazzier making my way to Malibu. Never felt less out of place jockeying my car into the parking spot across from Sean Penn's, Pretty Woman's and Jackass' houses. I'm not a fancy car personality, but there's something in the anonymity of a well-turned out appearance in certain locales. A safety perhaps.

Jamie lives in one of epicenters of world celebrity-dom, in a guest-ish house that looks like a main-ish house and is one of those lucky concurrent gems of overlapping habitude betwixt dweller and dwelling, Jamie and structure offering complimentary gauzy yet clean lines.

I've only surfed with Jamie a couple times and it is the standard fare of feeling like your just not measuring up. Not in an unpleasant way necessarily, but the scent of the the overly competent mixing with the stench of a particularly lesser performance wafts heavy around requisite bobbing shoulders. Actually, the surfing-with-someone-so-much-better-than-you scene is an ultimately relieving one. That core gnawing knowledge that your own skills are in permanent state of arrested development is not something that has to be managed when surfing with the very good. You get to just accept how truly short you come instead of fighting for some shred of delusionally self composed self respect. It's a lovely way to spend a morning, just trying to impress that person who has not asked to be impressed.

This all popped into my head because Brian Wengrofsky recently posted this on the Aquatic Apes Facebook page, making me feel like there is a swath of fin-ed-ness that is widely ignored: the twin fin longboard. Sorta like a long fish, kinda not really like a glider, kinda sorta like a long board with no middle fin. I've surfed this astounding set up more than a few times. Some in Carlsbad, some in Santa Cruz and most recently on the low tide speedy semi-walls of Pt. Dume with the aforementioned Mr. Brisick. Every time I've had a ball. And so my latest fascination has begun. So long big pink soft top. Hello china-pop-out mush 9' fluffbox twinny. Slidey like a snowboard, uninventive like a kookbox.

See you in the water soon.