Respect

That fateful day my hand drifted along the drugstore newspaper rack from the magazines of the nascent snowboarding industry to the magazines of the full-bloom surfing industry. Among few others, this man has facilitated a great amount of joyful masochism.

Today's Thought

HAPPENING TOMORROW : IT DOESN'T NOT WORK

Click the pic for the Surfer magazine article where I swear and inexplicably reference Dave Rastovich and Ty Breuer sounds like a grown up.

Respect

Photo courtesy of ©Christopher Anderson.... Click the pic.

THIS.

"The most challenging aspects of surfing? Possibly accepting the loss of surf culture as a pursuit of contrary to social norms. The goons of Dora’s nightmares have evolved to both un the game and buy the product and shape the generational script. Accepting that surfing is the most conservative sport on the planet and yet feeling great to be a surfer is challenging. Maybe the way I’ve gone Stage Left is a product of wanting to run a mile from surfing’s bullshit."

I have had the pleasure and terror of hanging out with Derek a number of times over the last few years, an odd and unforeseeable honor. His cranky, acerbically honest spitfire writing was one of the things that initially yanked my attention away from other pursuits (read mountain stuff) in the late 80's early 90's. He is that voice of my own private surfy generation. 

"It’s humbling though, you see these people riding some of the best waves of their lives every day. Despite the low level there’s the redeeming nature of other peoples’ pure stoke which is generally contrary to the ‘meat head’ spots where bad manners and sense of entitlement reigns in the higher performance lineup"

Read Michael Adno's whole Indoek article but these two moments feel like they sum up a whole bunch.

Respect

It was the early nineties, Ian and I were regulars at Toes Tavern's hand shuffleboard table, specifically on Wednesday night's "Big Wednesday," when if you brought in your official "Big Wednesday" plastic cup, beers were half price. I had long, wild, shoulder length hair, a slight beard and a Central California mid-winter tan and over the course of a few weeks I felt the eyes of one beautiful blonde repeatedly scoping. At some point I got the courage to saddle up to her and after a few Wednesdays I had casually implanted the somewhat misleading story into her British expat student's mind that being from Seattle meant I grew up with both Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell, having spent summers fishing off Aberdeen when I wasn't surfing Westport. Let me be clear: she was out of my league. Not only did she seem slightly smarter and certainly prettier than me, but she was far more forward, and my embarrassment at having no place to take her at night (living in a Christian College dorm was not a sexy, or plausible, destination) eventually scuppered our budding non-relationship.

A year or two later, Ian and I would live together in a cabana in the hills of Montecito, working and surfing together and playing music. I remain a poor musician, but my ability to plunk out the baseline of "Hunger Strike" fueled more than a handful of jam sessions at various parties where the lyrics were changed to riff on the topic of Hushpuppies.

Today's Thought

This Week In Not Surfing

1. I stare at the keyboard.

2. I tell my wife I've finally figured out the title to the book I'm writing about emotional partnerships. "Studies in Comparative Satisfaction Economics" or "How to Guarantee Success in Dissatisfaction" or (the French title) "Un Peu de Merde." She is stone faced for a moment, then smirks, then is very quiet, choosing her words particularly and slowly hissing them out in a kind of staccato squeeze, "Pedantic, pandering, boring."

3. I am routinely thwarted at gas station air pumps. They never seem to work, stealing my precious quarters with impunity. And I don't have a pressure gauge.

4. We are living, it seems to me, within the near universal embrace of a delusion of degrees. To the left of me I see conservatives, to the right of me, conservatives. The outrage is outrageous, poured out in opinionated, soft bellied opprobrium that shoots past any reasonableness with which it may be too impatient to contend. Hypocrisy is evolution's wiliest gift.

5. Plastic bags stuffed in plastic bags, waiting for a purpose, haunt my kitchen.

6. The Lyft driver has a Turkish sounding name. He is Kurdish. He teaches us: "Tchoi," how are you? "Abashu," well. "Spas," thanks.

7. A woman in my neighborhood sings a song by Radio Head to the trees in the park across the street from my house. She twirls a piece of braided twine ritualistically as she shuffles from tree to tree.

8. WFMU "Wake & Bake" : look it up. A morning salve.

9. I meet a friend for lunch yesterday and we talk. I see him so rarely, I always feel like I have more to ask him without enough time. After we part I wonder that I forgot to ask him five more burning questions. There is rarely a silent beat in our conversation and I question if this exhausts him. I wonder if I am exhausting. No, I am exhausting.

10. This opinion article appeared in the New York Times. As Lentini is quick to point out, "It's far easier to surf than not surf. Not surfing is the hardest thing in the world." I'm not sure you shouldn't read into that statement further than perhaps you are. I don't take it the way perhaps you are taking it.

11. On that note, may I grow old in the sea.