And you are a noble savage flipping the bird to
conformity! No, wait…
You are a sheep.
You have no individual thoughts or instincts. And just because
you’re here, at BeachGrit, a corner of the surfing world
lit by a dim, flickering light of awareness, you’re not
special.
Everything you think and do is unoriginal. You’re just an
accumulation of clothes, music, attitudes and ideas that you’ve
arranged around yourself, in an effort to have an identity, in an
effort to get laid.
If your memory were erased and you found yourself naked, blank
and innocent on the shore of the hip surf zone you currently
inhabit, would you view those jeans you’re wearing as anything but
an absurd encumberance?
Would a skirt not be more comfortable?
And what of that beer brand you favour? The one that denotes
your taste, place in society, even the state you live in? Would a
green tea not be more refreshing and useful?
Of course! But don’t worry! You’re not alone! Nearly everyone is
the same as you. You are made of your history. Only one in a
million will possess the necessary intellect and strength of
character to break the shackles of their past.
And those that do are usually considered mentally ill. Or
actually are.
For the love of absurdity, does this not make the surfing life
even richer in paradox?
Freedom! Individuality! Expression! At heart, the qualities that
all surf brands trade off. The idea of surfer as noble savage,
flipping the bird to desk-jockey conformity and riding off on a
pure wave of creativity and enlightenment.
A pure wave of bullshit!
It’s an idea perpetuated by a few isolated moments of weirdness
in the 1960s and early 1970s which were in themselves just
following the hippy fashion of the time. Surfing is as mainstream
as breakfast TV and surfers in general are as incapable of free
will as any other herd of humans.
So what should a surf brand do?
In between binges of cocaine and self-loathing, advertising
brand strategists sometimes use a thing called “Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs” to give a veneer of academic rigour to an occupation that
is otherwise as intellectually bereft as a night spent shelfing
Xanax on the Gold Coast.
Prof Maslow said that once humans have their basic essentials
covered, they head up a pyramid of needs leading to
self-actualisation: “What a man can be, he must be.”
And with a sour, trembling hand, our advertising brand
strategist will point to the need for a surf brand to find a role
in the collective mind of the human herd in order to better sell
boardshorts and other non-essentials.
And what role have they found? What do they stand for? The
freedom that does not exist! The independence that is not possible!
The creativity that is not original!
There isn’t even the fleeting satisfaction of irony. The Xanax
has worked its way through the colo-rectal tissue, a warm dullness
has spread.
So what should the modern, enlightened surf brand do to better
help the human feel self-actualised through their fashion
purchases? If you’re still following these terrifying spasms of
logic, you’ll be with me when I suggest that it’s time for the dim,
flickering light of awareness to blaze a little stronger.
If the herd wants to buy the idea of freedom, show them
authentic freedom! Show them a freedom that is not shackled to
history, but a freedom that confounds, a freedom that unsettles, a
freedom that makes a man see himself for what he is!
It’s time for Rip Curl to sponsor Westerly Windina’s audacious
gender swap! It’s time for Volcom to host feminist poetry slams on
the North Shore! It’s time for Quiksilver to use only the blackest
Africans in every photo shoot!
It’s time for surfing to jerk vivid rainbows of anti-cliché into
the collective unconscious.
Those would be boardshorts I can believe in.
