Joaquin Pops out of the Oven Piping Hot

It's very very hard to get lasagna wrong. I think this claim can be classified a truism. If you've somehow made a slow-cooked casserole of cheese, flat pasta, tomato sauce and whatever spices and meats and vegetables you've added somehow inedible, well, you're a special sorta cook.

Last night over a plate of abnormally perfectly rendered vegetable lasagna, my wife admitted to reading this blog "every now and then." She went on to say that she really likes the way I write (!), using her peculiarly intelligent sort of vocabulary to describe my writing as "round, full, well wrought." Or something like that. In fact I think she made a few more adjectives out of geometric shape and spatial considerations as that's how she thinks. I think. But then she went just a touch further: "I really like it. It can be funny. But..." and here was the kicker, "it's always kind of a bummer. There's something about the way you say things that bums me out. Like, I dunno, after I'm done reading it, I want to push it away or something."

I could only laugh, shake my head, and laugh. She's right. There's a kind of sadness to how I practice writing and observing and commenting here. A sort of self-relegation to an unhappy hinterland. I wanted to point out that of course the name of the blog has "bummer" right there, and that the blog is just a compendium of feelings about the difficulties of maintaining a surfing life in this relatively surf starved place. How all the angst created by not having a daily discipline involving salt water and swell must find its outlet somewhere. But in the end I think what she is getting at is that there must be a dark, snarky, angry chunk of black coal in my chest that is weighing me down, spreading a diseased tar substance of dissatisfaction through my veins and and out through my fingertips, making my breath putrid and my body odor unfortunate. I think she's saying I've become a kind of dishonest crank, a scapegoat in my own internal battle of situational belligerence. I think that's what she's getting at. And dammit, she's probably right (and frankly, she's got a dog in the fight.)

So I vow to be better.

In the meantime, here is a video and a link that illustrate just how hard up New Yorkers are for real surf of a consistent kind. In each image, each frame of beauty and excitement, lurks that gross nugget of habitual dissatisfaction buried between the layers of self-congratulating hype.

New York can be a difficult and dispiriting place to live. The good times, and our maniacal celebration of them, only go to show how desperate we usually are.

And then of course, there's this...