Thursday, May 19, 2011

let's go surfboarding

somewhere along the way the middle of surfing was gutted, knife through belly, guts of normal persons spilling out into the road pulled behind some kind of over done yellow sport utility machine or cherry vintage woody topped with thomas campbell and his heavy quiver of $1400 dollar heavy logs or some 14 year old kid from san clemente living out of his mom's 2 bedroom apartment feigning poverty in the name of surf videos so that yet again they can suck dry the last juices of surfing's soul...
here and now it feels as though the middle of surfing is sandwiched between aging men who have withered beneath the weight of 401k's and keepingupwiththejoneses hauling prisine epoxy takayama 2+1 machine tooled longboards out of double garages onto shiny cars reminiscing about san-o 1963 how it used to be and now it's all so cheesy, fading sunlit backgrounds with bad jazz and hypercontrast in the footage and nostalgia puking on itself like no-one's business...
or else it's those 13 year old towheads from so-cal so broke and stokened that they had to make a movie about it wherein they patronize homelessness and panhandling and the utmost limits of purely incredible naivete under mom's wing, that blessed wing that never stops sheltering, naivete that allows for the belief that surfing in southern california and making silly movies with bruce brownesque narration will somehow redeem all the other self-centered nonsense that surf culture somehow fosters.

the quiet majority sits tonight, this morning, tomorrow, in un-cool cars looking through old binoculars at unknown waves, or overcrowded waves, feeling the frustration of real life creep in from time to time, and yes, still, there is time to surf. there is always time to surf without the bad jazz or the ironic tee shirt or the newest oldest vintage mollusk board. yeah, the oil needs to be changed. the dogs need a walk and the laundry is drying on the rack. there are whales out there tonight, and there is time.

3 comments:

pranaglider said...

well.done.

karmic voyager said...

medium-rare.

Anonymous said...

Very cool, very true.

Stay excellent!