"It looked so fun in the pictures! Blue water, blue sky, bikinis all day — what a bunch of fucking lies!"

It’s low tide every day when I walk down to the beach. I assume high tide is still happening somewhere, but I haven’t seen it lately. Where did you go high tide? Where are you hiding? Please come back someday!

Low tide means that every session starts with a tiptoe dance through the rocks and the desperate hope that I don’t fall before I ever make it out there. This is probably all a metaphor for something, but I’m not sure what. The world is apparently trying to tell me something that might even be important and I’m not exactly getting the message. 

What I can say is, my feet hurt from the rocks. Even the dumbest, tiniest rock nicks bleed like a stab wound. I don’t know how this is possible, but it’s pretty gross. Please can my feet stop bleeding already, I would like to stop by the deli on the way home without looking like vampire bait. The answer is always no. 

I am vampire bait. There’s no escaping. Come and get me vampires! I am super tasty, I’m sure!

Nobody told me that surfing would be this hard. It looked so fun in the pictures! Blue water, blue sky, bikinis all day — what a bunch of fucking lies. I should be able to sue someone for, well, something. I am not the best at law things, actually. I hear laws exist, I guess? But I’m not sure how they work or what they have to do with surfing being very hard and dumb. 

It doesn’t matter, though, because I am stupid and stubborn and I do it anyway. Every day it’s low tide and the wind blows a different direction every hour. I did not know that the wind had quite so many directions, in fact. Also, all of them seem to be very bad. 

I have heard that the wind can be good, but I have yet to see it. And why should I believe what I can’t see. Who would even do that. Not me! The wind is bad.

I paddle my vampire feet into the lineup and the water is so cold. This is helpful, because I don’t really want to feel my feet anyway. They hurt! I don’t need my toes to work at all for surfing, so the whole situation should work out totally fine. I do many duck dives and get the worst ice cream headache ever. This makes me cry and say many swears. 

Once I’m out there, I notice many other people who are stupid and stubborn and trying to surf, too. They are all going on close-outs. So many close-outs over and over. 

I can’t decide if that is because the waves are bad or because the surfers are bad. Both feel about equally possible on any particular day. You just have to sit the deepest, just paddle past everyone and sit deeper. That’s all there is to surfing. It’s so simple. 

I shrug and look for a close-out of my own. It takes more work than I’d like. I get backpaddled by a midlength and burned by a longboard. Three dudes take off on my outside, and flail away at the thing, before failing to make the section at the last possible moment. Good job, dudes. 

I am patient. I am strong. A good wave will come to me. I like to tell myself these little lies. 

There’s a lull in the hot surfing action and when I turn toward the beach, I see a four-pack preparing for the big paddle out. There’s a yellowed shortboard, a mid, a longboard, and a Wavestorm. I can picture them pulling into the parking lot with their boards haphazardly strapped to the car’s roof. I shiver at the thought of them traipsing down the freeway.

Meet the casuals, you’re new lineup friends. They surf once a month, maybe. The yellowed shortboard has a Surfline account and texts his friends. Tomorrow’s the big day! We’re going surfing! And here they are, a potent mix of stoke, apprehension, and incompetence. I can hardly wait for them to paddle out. I’m sure we’re going to get along so well. 

But then the waves regain my attention. Like hello, surfing, remember? This isn’t sociology class. Save your analytical bullshit for some other time. It’s surfing time! Peaks! There’s peaks! And maybe one can be for me. 

And right then, there it is. Somehow no one else is looking at all. They must be so blind. Don’t look now. Please continue to ignore the peak that is coming straight to me. And I get it! It’s all mine! It’s not a good wave but it’s a wave and I do a couple little turns and make some cute spray. Hey look, maybe surfing isn’t that hard after all. 

I can’t really feel my feet now but I paddle back out anyway. I would like to ride another wave. It was almost fun! I’m not sure how this happened. 

I see one of the casuals lose his board and get munched in the white water. He’s super in the way, but somehow I’m not even mad. I’m going to find another wave, I tell myself. I’m definitely going to do it. I sing it to myself like a happy little song. 

And I did find another wave and another one after that. I was beginning to think that surfing could not possibly be fun and well, it sure did surprise me. I decide to keep surfing and it continues to not disappoint me all that much really. It’s low tide and the wind is going every which way, but somehow, surfing is fun? I think? This feels weird. 

I’m not sure my pinky finger still exists or any of my toes, so I decide that even though surfing is turning out to be fun, it is time for me to go in. I would like to go to the deli and get a sandwich. There’s still one more hurdle to go, though, because as I mentioned, and I wouldn’t want you to forget, it’s low tide. And low tide means so many rocks and even more turning into vampire bait.

But I must persevere. I can’t stay in the ocean forever. So, I tiptoe through the rocks and try not to bleed too much, and at last, I make it to the beach. Whew! Surfing is hard! But also, it might also be almost fun. 

Surfing is so far from perfect. Sure, my feet are gross and my hands are cold and I narrowly escaped decapitation by the casual’s Wavestorm. But it still works. 

It’s still that magical escape from the nagging text messages and that email you forgot to answer two days ago and the story that you didn’t finish and the pitch that got rejected — okay, that’s just me, I’m the one with the rejected pitch — and well, everything else that’s going on that isn’t awesome and makes you feel bad. 

We still have surfing and that’s pretty great. 

Surfing is far from perfect. But it still works.