Surfing, still, remains the best addiction to grow old with…

We’ve all seen Trainspotting, the 1996 Danny Doyle masterpiece which details the poetry, romance and degradation of a bunch of Scottish smack addicts.

Begby, Renton, Sick Boy, Choose Life, I chose something else and all that.

Classic, classic scenes which illustrated lyrics from Jarvis Cocker’s Common People about the underclass: “You will never live your life with no meaning or control and nowhere left to go.”

Danny’s 2017 sequel to Trainspotting, T2, looks at the logical conclusions of the drug addict life twenty years down the track.

It was not a pretty sight. Smack-addled Peter Pans do not a happy ending make.

It did make me think of the comparisons with the life committed to surfing and the whole emerging genre of Quit-Lit, which seems to slither out of the swamp of diminishing returns as one ages or becomes entwined in domestic concerns etc etc.

Trainspotting and T2 posit smack addiction as an alternate path to dreary consumer lifestyles, something which the mainstreaming of the opioid crisis has made impossible.

surfing, which walked hand-in-hand with the drug lifestyle for long periods of its history, is now dished up as meat and potatoes to the mainstream. It ain’t rebellion from anything, least of all the trappings of the post-modern capitalist surveillance state. Still, it remains a far better addiction to grow old with. The best ever.

Smack can’t be a rebellion anymore when they dish it out at every pharmacy. The melancholic consequences of that gig are still profound. Doyle said he wanted the film to smack people in the face with their life choices, or words to that effect.

Likewise surfing, which walked hand-in-hand with the drug lifestyle for long periods of its history, is now dished up as meat and potatoes to the mainstream. It ain’t rebellion from anything, least of all the trappings of the post-modern capitalist surveillance state.

Still, it remains a far better addiction to grow old with. The best ever. The consequences of the choice to give it a proper go, a minority of Californian media barons excepted, are mostly positive.

Let me get to the Point.

After consideration, I renounce quit lit. Quit-lit, quite properly belongs to the real drug takers. The smackies, the tweakers, the drunks and chronics. Our opportunity costs are much smaller, negligible even in the modern world.

Crowds are the great bugbear, at least in this part of the world, but my thinking has changed. I remember the day it did. I’d been contracted by Surfer to write a profile on Derek Hynd. They weren’t keen on me because I called them kooks in solidarity with Christian Fletcher over some insignificant matter.

Hynd advocated for me and I got the gig.

Which took me to Noosa Heads on a Saturday morning with head high surf at Tea Tree. Top five crowded wave in the world. I’d avoided crowds like that for twenty years.

First surf minus fins, a hundred people out. Sitting wide and down the line and the set of the day comes in. Took the drop, put the board into a flat spin and put a full body hit on a plumber from Coolum out enjoying a Saturday morning paddle.

If that was you, sorry pal.

A few fun peelers followed. Why should I avoid this, I thought, in favour of headbutting beachbreak closeouts? I went back to the crowds. The better waves. Began to rack them up again. My thinking now: why should we cede the space to the VAL hordes?

I know not everyone thinks that way. But you ain’t going to find solitude in the tub either, if that’s the escape plan.

I look around at the old guys, especially those who quit the gear and kept surfing. Jeff Hakman, Owl, Tommy Carroll; many others.

Those who never got on the gear. Hynd, Greenough, Rusty Miller. Even Old Baldy, despite the farcical displays of hubris. All still shredding.

In the face of that a defiant pessimism seems more anti-depressive, a more triumphant melancholy. And if you get on the end of one, like a little bump now and then, want to expand the horizon with some psychedelics, no judgement either. Thats what we do.

Am I saying quit-lit is dead? It is too me.

Am I saying being a lifelong surfer is a better choice than being a drug addict, even if the life of a drug addict, ipso facto makes for a more “interesting story”.

Why yes, I guess I am.

Thoughts?

"You sold your flagship companies to corporate raiders, your peak governing body to a New York billionaire, the very experience of riding waves to those celebrities and moneyed types who can cough up $80,000 for a day…"

Hi everybody, I’m a bodyboarder.

Remember me, I’m the guy you used to make fun of and hate, before you hated longboarders, hipsters, SUP riders, foil-boarders, SUP foil-boarders, VALs and anyone else you deem not as surfing core as you.

I started bodyboarding as a kid in the early nineties, right at the time in Australia that a non-surfing, now disgraced surf photographer stopped just short of calling for open violence against what was essentially a bunch of kids, because they were beginning to crowd up the lineup.

I copped the insults, the derision, the board flicks or “delayed” turns, the occasional punch or slap. Nobody, but nobody, was as cool as surfers in the eighties and nineties. And nobody but surfers were to be allowed into their self-nominated cool kid’s club.

You would sell the ideal and the image to non-surfers, confident that surfing itself was too tricky, took too much dedication, required too much skill and patience and daring and bravery and all the other glorious adjectives you assigned yourselves, for the poor exploited suckers you were marketing to too ever actually take up surfing itself.

The cool kids club mortgaged their image, their style, their language, and their culture out into the mainstream world, and grew rich and successful of the back of it.

Jimmy Slade on Baywatch, Quiksilver in Times Square, surf stores in Wagga Wagga.

You would sell the ideal and the image to non-surfers, confident that surfing itself was too tricky, took too much dedication, required too much skill and patience and daring and bravery and all the other glorious adjectives you assigned yourselves, for the poor exploited suckers you were marketing to too ever actually take up surfing itself.

They would have to make themselves content to just ape the aesthetic and hope that some of the cool kid’s club cultural credibility would rub off on them.

That was one of the big problems you had with bodyboarding. It let the masses short circuit the narrative, skip the years of skill acquisition and dedication required to join the lineup.

It gave those masses outside the cool kid’s club the opportunity to open the door and come in.

And you tried to push it back closed with the mockery and violence.

You sold your flagship companies to corporate raiders, your peak governing body to a New York billionaire, the very experience of riding waves to those celebrities and moneyed types who can cough up $80,000 for a day at your biggest identity’s wave park. You created Luxury boat charters for doctors and lawyers.

Now, the financial good times didn’t last forever, but the economic beast you’d created to fund your lifestyles still had to be fed. Maybe if you opened the door just a little and let only a select few, preferably with money, from the outside into the cool kids’ club, it would be ok.

So, you sold your flagship companies to corporate raiders, your peak governing body to a New York billionaire, the very experience of riding waves to those celebrities and moneyed types who can cough up $80,000 for a day at your biggest identity’s wave park. You created Luxury boat charters for doctors and lawyers.

European backpackers can own a little piece of replica heritage with longboards and fishes copied from surfing spiritual heyday for $1500 each.

And the cream on the top? You get to go to the Olympics!

But, here’s the thing.

Now that the door is open just a little, the masses of aspiring surfers you created by selling the cool kids club aesthetic want in.

The weight of numbers has become too much. They’re crowding up your favorite breaks, they’ve gain control of your governing bodies, they’re diluting and reshaping your culture, and recreating the cool kids’ club in their image.

The surf school graduates, the #Vanlife influencers, the VAL’s, the ELO’s, all those exploited but previously excluded, WANT IN.

The weight of numbers has become too much. They’re crowding up your favorite breaks, they’ve gain control of your governing bodies, they’re diluting and reshaping your culture, and recreating the cool kids’ club in their image.

They’re telling the world, “This is surfing now”.

You whored out your culture and identity for money and now it’s being taken from you.

The masses are coming for you again, but in this new age, you can’t respond with open mockery and violence against their assault anymore.

So, you wring your hands, try to give credence to “grumpy locals” as the only true voice of the cool kid’s club, create silly performance pieces about satirical insurgencies.

You’re trapped in a nightmare of your own making.

And I’m over here, watching all this unfold, reflecting on the choices the surfing world has made, the actions and the behaviours that have led you to this point, and thinking to myself, “He who laughs last, laughs longest”.

Enjoy your future, cool kids.

And to hell with you, dirty ol muckraking Hillary Clinton!

Here’s something like an Obama-in-2007 moment.

Two weeks ago, Ain’t That Swell podcasters, Jed Smith and Vaughan Blakey, spent forty-five minutes on a Skype call to the wanna-be democratic nominee for the presidential race, Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard is a surfer, lives in Hawaii, loves to shred.

Vaughan woke up one morning to a DM saying, “Hey guys, love the show, love to come on sometime.”

Vaughan’s nostrils were almost fatally distended by the presidential perfume.

He replied,

Tulsi didn’t reply for a couple of months.

Vaughan thought he’d blown it.

Then, when he was putting together a “Power Women” show, featuring Jodie Cooper, he figured he’d give it another shot.

“She didn’t flinch, said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it right away’,” says Vaughan.

Couple of weeks went by while the call was set up (“I got the vibe they were checking me and Jed out to make sure we weren’t complete psychopaths”) before they connected.

Listening back to the interview, Vaughan says his voice is a whole octave higher than normal.

“I was fucking gushing, it’s hard for me to listen to,” he says. “Did we handle it well or not? It felt unfuckingbelievable that someone in her position, running for the job she’s going for fucking had a sense of humour and wanted to be part of what we’re doing.”

Tulsi performs well, she references other episodes of Ain’t That Swell and patiently remains silent as the broadcast is diverted by Jed on his many wonderful little rants.

“I got off the phone buzzing off my head,” says Vaughan.

The beauty of the interview, he says, and beyond anything, is the acknowledgement that there’s still a filament that connects people who surf.

“That accessibility to someone like her, it sounds weird to say, only came through surfing,” he says.

Listen here.