What did you want to be when you grew up?
Our dear Michael Ciaramella posted a recent bit
where he exhorted us all to Watch: Our Competitor’s Film! I
wondered, when I read the headline who our competitor was, clicked
on and saw that it was What Youth. “But oh!” I thought to myself.
“What Youth is not our competition. We’re fellow travelers!
Just like Milo Yiannopoulos and the alt-right!”
And it is true. What Youth and The Surfer’s
Journal bookend all that is good in surfing. The boys stitch
together brilliant magazines, each and every one a treasure and
sometimes I get to come and play too. The below appears, in
full, in What Youth issue 17 which feat. the beautiful
Chippa Wilson on cover. It deals with career choices.
Buy the issue here! And read a little
taste here!
I once dreamed of throwing off this empty yoke. Of finishing
with surf and taking up only journalism and meaning something
again. I went to Ukraine right after Kiev’s population burned the
city center to the ground in protest of a government linked too
closely to Russia. An angry mist hung in the air and angry
Ukrainians manned make-shift bunkers, waiting to fight to the death
for what they believed. It meant something. It meant life or death.
It was important.
I chatted with Bernie Sander’s chief of staff as that
movement was cranking to full volume last year. He spoke of the
dreams, hopes, perils of America’s youth. He spoke of what could be
done, politically, to create a bright future or at least a future
the kids could be proud of. He spoke of fear, terror, health care,
free university education, music, art, literature and it was
important.
I interviewed with General David Petraeus on stage at a
hedge fund conference in front of millionaires and billionaires
waiting to invest trillions. He was once a general and once the
director of the CIA and had a widely reported affair with a
reporter. A journalist! And we went back and forth about China and
Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden and ISIS and gas prices and
security. The weight of the investing world hinged on our
conversation. Whole markets ready to rise or fall. It was
important.
And then I came back to surfing. To surfing journalism. I
left Ukraine, I didn’t even write up the Bernie story and I laughed
with David Petraeus. Why? To be honest I don’t really know. But
what is knowledge? I gots none! I feel there is some magic in this
absurd. In this surfing.
French Algerian author Albert Camus wrote so much about it.
He was not a surf journalist but wrote the absurd is man’s great
fight. That none of this means anything but it is our greatest
struggle to make sense of it.
He wrote about pushing stones up hills that continue to roll
down and we continue to push them back up. He wrote about the
emptiness. The terrible feeling that nothing is actually important.
He wrote, “At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike
any man in the face.”
But do you know what he also wrote?
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me
there lay an invincible summer.”
Now that’s what I’m talking about. Surf journalism. The
invincible summer.
Ha!
