Surfing, calcified as personal ritual…
He looks out the windshield of his poorly maintained
2014 Toyota Tacoma PreRunner, eyes aimed, blankly, at the
horizon.
He sees the waves breaking down the cliff, solid and glassy
four-foot runners. He should probably go out, he thinks.
He’s already driven all this way, might as well, except that he
doesn’t feel like it, not wanting to drag the albatross that is his
self-consciously bulked body and unceasingly diminishing mind down
the cliff trail.
It would be easier to go home and watch TV or sleep.
He sits in his truck, unable to decide whether to go out. On the
one hand, sinking even further into his mental quicksand, he just
doesn’t want to, on the other, there hasn’t been decent surf in two
months since he last surfed and it’s good now.
Thinking that there was potential, however small, that a session
could produce maybe one ounce of joy, he decides he’s going to just
do it. More likely, it will be a story he can talk to his mom about
next time she calls in order to make her think he’s fine.
He parks his car and pulls his performance five-fin convertible
shortboard, which he’s going to ride thruster because he doesn’t
think the setup actually makes a difference, from his board
bag.
He holds it out in front of himself, looking at it with
disgust.
“This board fucking sucks,” he mumbles, oblivious to the other
beachgoers who stare at him as they walk past.
Truth is, the board doesn’t suck, he just wants something to
complain about. He actually surfs it better than any other board he
has in the last eight years.
He makes his way down the cliff, opting for trunks and a top
because he didn’t want to hassle with his short-sleeve full-suit he
hates because it has a back zip.
All the way down he can’t stop thinking about all the lippers
he’s planning to do, but probably won’t be able to, because he
sucks, trying to temper the thoughts of the fat-assed black girl he
saw in the grocery store the other day.
He makes it down to the beach and counts fifty surfers out all
down the beach. There were only three or four guys out when he
first started checking.
He should have known.
Every white-collar young professional douchebag being able to
work from home these days, the beach is infested, every Bryce,
Aiden, and Connor trying to break off a piece of the surf
lifestyle.
He gets mad and angrily puts on his leash. It’s his own fault,
that fucking asshole.
Again, he should have known.
He walks into the water.
“Fuck that’s cold!”
He stops for a few moments, considering whether or not he would
be that guy who doesn’t even paddle out and just leaves, but
decides against it, because it would be embarrassing to walk back
up dry. He shuffles in the water up to his waist and then jumps
over a wave and starts paddling.
It’s usually a breeze for him to get out into the lineup, but
today he is struggling. His arms feel stuck in molasses, weighed
down by the past two months of inactivity. After a dozen minutes,
which feels unquantifiably longer, he makes it out to the inside
lineup.
He is out of breath.
“Why do I still do this? I never have any fun. For something
that was so great and provided so much joy to me, as well as many
great memories, this fucking sucks. I should just quit,” he thinks,
in between those thousand other non-sequitur thoughts that race
through one’s head at all times, in his case now, mostly “Big
butts!… baby back ribs!”
Such is the hackneyed facile life of a nobody who lacks
imagination and cannot even tempt himself to try at anything new,
his hobbies retained, calcified as personal ritual, in spite of
their staleness.
“Maybe I just need something different… god I’m
pretentious!”
Suddenly, he sees a set coming on the outside.
He’s not going to make it, it’s going to break before he can
lazy, faux duck dive with his knees under it, so he paddles for the
preceding pre-full set inside left and somehow catches it.
He takes off, bottom turns and hits the lip hard backside, his
tail, astonishingly, getting above it.
He plays with the wave’s lip, flicking its edges and producing
jets of spray with his jittery stick, until he rides it to
completion with one final cutback into a foamy, whitewater
explosion on the deep inside.
He thinks, “Whoa! Where the fuck did that come from? That
was fun!”
Feeling jazzed, he looks back out to the water and decides
against paddling back out, figuring that was the best he was going
to do. He notices a man on the beach taking photos of people in the
water who happens to keep glancing at him. Standing near the trail,
he’s going to have to pass the guy back up to the car.
“I wonder if that guy got that one?… Probably looked shit. I
mean, it will be embarrassing if he did, right?… yeah, of course….
Oh well… Maybe?”
He walks past the camera guy.
Nothing.
The guy ignores him, instead aiming his camera towards some
college-aged, young professional (he can’t tell how old anyone is)
kooks, snapping photos of them surfing their foamies on the
inside.
“Douchebags…”
He makes his way back up to the car, the thoughts about maybe
getting a new board and surfing more occupying his thoughts halfway
up the trail disintegrating in the morning air.
“Fuck me,” he says to himself, thinking about the effects of
childbirth on Nicki Minaj’s
implants.
The inertia of his cliché life decays any further thoughts of
him quitting… until the next swell at least.
