Revealed: Surfers love “the green room!”

The fabled space inside a barrelling wave!

So I’ve had the best ever literary ideas since Friday. Works of Pulitzer-prize winning art dance upon the strangely creased blue pills but I can’t move fast enough to scribble them all down and they mostly disappear. There was something about the First Lady of the United States that I was going to write in the style of Beowulf. An epic olde world poem that is mostly unintelligible but in that good “unintelligible because it’s real smart” kinda way.

There was something else about John John Florence and Gabriel Medina’s competitive relationship done up as a musical. Like Hamilton. And the dancing favela scene will be a showstopper but the quiet moment when John John is on a sailboat singing to the moon and Gabriel is in the shower shaving his pits but singing to the same moon is going to make the audience weep.

Two different worlds
We live in two different worlds
For we’ve been told
That a love like ours could never be
So far apart

They say we’re so far apart
And that we haven’t the right
To change our destiny
When will they learn

That a heart doesn’t draw the line
Nothing matters if I am yours
And you are mine.

Then there was something else about a surfer who gets a hip replacement before ever getting barreled but makes it his mission, post-op, to experience. This coming of age tale would be masterful but then realized that I hadn’t actually thought it up but read it in the UK’s Spectator underneath the greatest Percocet title ever.

It’s not a wave’s crest, but its translucent interior that surfers dream of.

Surfing has come of age. Like rock and roll, it was once strictly for young people, edgy and alternative and physically way too demanding for anyone over the age of 27. But those young people grew up and they’re still at it. For millennials it’s hard to maintain a sense of cool when your parents are heaving their boards into the same breaks and when, according to the marketing people, there are upwards of 35 million surfers worldwide, in a sector that’s worth at least $10 billion per year.

Iain Gately has also reached a certain age; he has had a hip replacement. The Secret Surfer is the account of his hobbling progress back into action, back towards the head-high face of a breaking wave. He had always been a competent surfer, but had never gained access to the green room, the fabled space inside a barrelling wave where — if you time it just right, if you position yourself correctly between the crest and the base — you find yourself enveloped in a translucent tunnel of water, zooming towards the shrinking light. It is one of those places on earth where lives are changed, like the summit of certain mountains, after which nothing else comes close.

Whoa. Buy here!