Surfing Erases All Guilt!

And therefore, eventually, you turn into a selfish tool. Is true?

After upsetting a number of people with suggestions that they should forget the world and take a horribly selfish and nihilistic approach to things, I felt bad. Had I gone too far? What was I becoming? Where did the person who worked so passionately advocating a better understanding of the mentally ill and disabled go?

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So much soul searching, and such an existential crisis.

I considered penance in the form of masochism and asceticism… my default settings for life.

I usually exercise far too much, starve myself and get around in ragged clothes. But it wasn’t feasible with my work responsibilities this week, or with having a girl who cares about my well-being.

Nor did it help that I got exceptionally good waves over the weekend in a place that’s never that exceptionally good.  The memories of those sweet autumnal tubes soothed me to sleep. Whereas, if the surf had been shit, I would of spent the night locked in my head chastising myself over my insensitive jests.

Surfing seems to erase all guilt or mitigate the worst of it.

Now I’m not one for equating surfing with having mystical powers. That just seems kind of fraudulent. I kind of see the notion of communing with the sea/ocean as strange. In my experience of angry Western seas, the sea seemed anarchic, brutal and out to get you. This makes it an interesting game of cat and mouse. Perception, I guess.

If not quite as  dark a view as  above, I find the ocean is a giant jigsaw puzzle to solve and I like puzzles. Each wave becomes a game of what you can do and where. I get wrapped up in that game and I forget myself and everything else.

It becomes like that most terrible of clichés: a mild opiate.

And I guess like all good drugs, you eventually turn into a cunt. You start out dabbling, having a good time. You then start relying on it a little too much. You then need it to have a good time. You starting blowing off responsibilities to chase wind-blown slop. Then you get to a point where you just deliberately isolate yourself so that you can wallow in your habit. Unfortunately, for me, my father started me out young.

Hmmm… then again, maybe I’m just a selfish fuckwit; the result of being a firstborn.

But don’t worry BeachGrit readers, karma has caught up with me for my flippant remarks. I agreed to paint over graffiti this Sunday at a local park. Turns out a little gem of a right and left right I know of is set to fire that day… the agony, it burns my selfish soul!

Oh well, as the police here say… “safer communities together.”