Respect

This Week In Not Surfing

In my line of work people talk fervently about "storytelling." I myself have used the word dozens of times in professional presentations over the past few years.

And stories have become "meditations on violence" and explorations of human depravity. "Whirlwinds of anti-climax" and shotgun shells full of buckshot goose pimples.

And to think, I used to constantly make a joke about all sorts of things being "This Year's Full Monty."

And there was a time I assumed the inexorable march of evolution would be inherently positive, even maybe kind.

But now I figure one possible reaction to the realization that you’re about to die (really die) is to feel a momentary wave of relief that the suffering will end. This then will turn (almost as instantly) into the inconsolable realization of a life misspent not attempting to ease the suffering of others.
 
And the fact is, right now it would be nice to be anonymous in my own neighborhood, surrounded by the comforts of home and the added comfort of silence.

But our stories feel bloated and isolated - one offs damned to remain told only the once - and I don't know where I got the idea that evolution wears boots.

But there are waves somewhere in the world and thank heavens someone is riding them.

Happening : Between the Waters Mar 9–Jul 22

"This exhibition brings together artists from across the United States—Carolina Caycedo, Demian DinéYazhi´ with Ginger Dunnill, Torkwase Dyson, Cy Gavin, Lena Henke, and Erin Jane Nelson—whose work responds to the precarious state of the environment through a personal lens. Experimenting with form and narrative in painting, video, and sculpture, these artists address how ideology—as much as technology, industry, and architecture—impacts all living things."

This Week In Not Surfing

Recipe number one: a doomed quest to wear social inabilities as a badge of honor plus that wonderful child-like feeling when reading a fine piece of writing plus the tendency to sit on the right side in church, and in movie theaters, slightly left.

This abiding shame at having missed a day that didn't have to be missed.

A different recipe: Cat Power's rendition of Still In Love, California Girls by the Beach Boys, A Fantastic Woman by Sebastian Lelio, The Death of Stalin by Armando Iannucci, Final Portrait by Stanley Tucci, The Honourable Schoolboy by John LeCarré, a broken end table, a Cuban sandwich, a bad foot massage.

Come back to today's guilt at having woken early to surf only to instead brush the dog, blend up a banana cacao smoothie, sweep the floor and see an early-bird movie. Add in the comforting smell of a claustrophobic bookstore.

A third recipe: the Russian banya and a plate of pickled vegetables, herring and onions. A bottle of beer and Cliff Richard's I'm Looking Out The Window. A dash of Ahmad Jamal's Poinciana.

Come back to the unsettling, pursuant truth that surfing is not something you can just choose to do when you feel like it.