This Week In Not Surfing

1. It has been quite a month of mitigating sorrow with joy here on Long Island. The requisite guilt that comes hand in hand with scoring consistent hurricane swell has never been more poignant. Luckily there are things like the Stormrider Challenge that go a little way in sopping it up. But nothing apart from offering hands-on help ever feels properly positively complicit.

2. But this particular stretch of waviness has offered me a glimpse into what a surfing me might look like should a me who surfs show up more often. The picture isn't particularly pretty from certain angles (I have a lean to the annoyingly frantic when totting up my wave count) while from the other side I'm feeling more handsome (muscle memory consistently reminding me to paddle into any wave, no matter the consequence.) In both glancing cases I am left with the same brick wall that caresses my landlocked existence: I need more chill.

3. And in the grand tradition of recent confessional writing it need drift toward dramatic. Orgasms of cozy smugness, violent self reflection and terse disavowal; the ah-ha moment required preciously piquant; small disruptions of quotidian life writ allegorical. Or at least blow-upable. Literally mundane doesn't literarily pay.

4. So there is a big difference between looking at a building and knowing something is inside and looking at a building and thinking there may be nothing in there. This may sum up my habitual bias about the difference between New York and L.A.

5. But the waves. Oh the waves.

6. And while the social media appetite for requisite relevance is insatiable, I tend to hide my exploits in the water under cover of inconsistency and less optimal lighting conditions. I can only shabbily admit to wishing just once I'd be in the right place at the right time for someone to snap a photo of me on a big day, doing something interesting looking on a critical looking wave. But this has never been my forte, perhaps in either instance.

7. The Midlife Man's Dawn Patrol Mantra: "I'll poop when I'm dead."