A short self-examination you can do at home…

Who can forget Dane Reynolds’ effortless sweep of everything bad from last week? According to Reynolds, cities are soulless voids, Kelly Slater is too serious about a bat-and-ball game, the WSL’s Instagram exploits surfing and so on.

(Click here for the film.)

Dane is a great champion and while he isn’t surfing’s golden pet anymore, his opinions on surf do cut heavily.

Toward the end of his little short, he defines a kook as this:

“I hate…kooks. And I don’t mean that, it has to do with your level of surfing. I define ‘kook’ as a lack of awareness, someone who is utterly unaware of their surroundings, unaware if they’re cutting in line or being obnoxious or annoying people around them. That’s a kook.”

This definition is an overhead smash, I think.

And it made me consider other behaviours that define a surfer as a high-level kook.

These include:

1. Still arguing the point that rotations must be counted exactly as per the geometric scale. Air 360s instead of 540s, 810s instead of 720s. If the science of climate change is settled, as is common opinion, we can now say the same for airs.
2. Examining the judges sheets at a local boardriders’ event and claiming your threes should be three-fives etc.
3. Behaving as if the world has suddenly fallen off its axis if a beginner tumbles off his board near you.
4. You say there are surfers at your local beach better than guys (and girls) on the WCT and that a surf industry conspiracy keeps ’em out of the spotlight.
5. Going leashless on a crowded day. “I never fall off.”
6. Turning sessions at remote reefs into some sort of WQS heat, paddling for everything, sighing at people missing waves, grunting etc.
7. Like the princess and the pea, you say you can feel even minute differences in your surfboard.
8. An obsession with personal surf shots.
9. You self-identify as a “surfer”.
10. You refuse to travel anywhere unless there’s a coastline with rideable waves

Are you a high-level kook?

Where do dreams go when they die?

Well son of a bitch if I ain’t very boozed with two Americanos thrown on top in order to throw the Islamist boarding agents off my tail.

Yes, I’m headed back to the Middle East and it has been far far far too long. Very far too long but it feels like yesterday that I was doing this same exact dance.

I can’t tell you why I’m going, not to be needlessly secretive, only that I am and only to apologize.

The Middle East used to be my rising and setting sun. Now it is only part of my past with surf replacing.

But do any youthful passions ever actually get replaced? Where do dreams go when they die?

I don’t know.

If I did I’d be in that dream graveyard sleeping the dreamiest sleep. Feeling accomplished instead of failed. Living the unencumbered life exactly like Garrett McNamera or Erik Logan.

Well, c’est la vie as they say.

We are surf journalists now and proud but the past, rearing its head, can’t be ignored and that’s why I apologize to you because maybe it should be ignored. Probably it should be ignored but I ain’t nor will I ever.

Middle East über alles though I will catch you on the flipside, hundreds of thousands of miles from anyone who cares.

So long and God bless. Viva the youthful passions.

(Editor’s note: Chas will be writing when he can from Cairo and surrounds where he has been called on urgent personal business. Hopefully, all will, or can, be revealed in a week or so.)