This web site is a massive cope. It’s a “screw you” letter to the thing I most liked doing in my life — surfing — which now represents an oppressive chore, a pool of guilt, anxiety, and regret. Why? First, because I’m well out of my prime, and racked with injuries. It kind of sucks to be bad at surfing when you were competent at it for decades. So at this point, all I can do is try to exact some petty revenge.
Now, about writing. Surf literature is predominantly sunshiney. It stays out of the gloomy coastal caves; Gollum don’t surf. But—plot twist—as it turns out, Gollum used to surf. Now the idea of hiding out in a deserted, chilly lair to guard and nurture my burning coal of resentment (my preciouss) holds some dark appeal. There have to be loads of other people in the same situation. All sitting in their quiet little canoes, in the winding passages of this watery cave.
Topics: the relation between surfing and death; surfing as obligation or debt; the role of melancholy, the inherent narcissism of surfing. Gloom, gloom and doom, gen-x, alas, woe. But the underbelly does exist and it is shunned. Sometimes the B side is better than the hit. The commercial surf media’s elevation of blissed-out athletic young superstars, adrenaline junkies, and sepia-tinted flashbacks to the surf heroes of yesteryear, aims to distill the best moments from the surfing experience. And maybe it does, but it doesn’t get everything.
All the things that happened to me in my life–the exhilaration, the paralyzing fear, the novelty waves, the new spots discovered through exploring (through trial and error, thinking outside the box, not from a guide or a magazine or a webcam), the near-death experiences, the weirdos and the rippers and the NPC’s in the lineup–are more significant and resonant than any footage of a teenager boosting a massive air on a North Shore reef wave, or some psycho dropping into an 80-foot Nazare death bomb. Not because my experiences were more awesome, but because they happened to me. If you’re reading this, the same is probably true for you too.
I sometimes wonder what surfing means to other people. For how many people is surfing just something to do? Or simply a way to stay fit and healthy? How many people feel that communing with nature has anything to do with it? What about tribal bonding? Who feels that surfing is anything akin to a religion? How many others have used it as a way to confront their own mortality, or contemplate the divine? And at the end of it all, was surfing a meaningful use of your time spent in your one and only life? Or was it just something to do?
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