Doe-eyed Yago Dora “rich in all the ways a man can be rich”

"Pundits and pros basked in Fijian luxury on Fijian government dime that most Fijian natives will likely never experience."

This is not a Finals wrap. I’m sorry if that’s what you came here looking for but this is not it.

I’m not sure entirely what it is yet, but maybe we’ll find out together if we reach the end. I have a new practice, you see. I intend to write some things in one single draft, in one single sitting. Mistakes be damned. Mistakes me human.

Rage against the algorithm.

It’s not that I couldn’t write a Finals wrap if I really, really wanted to. Except I have been trying to write one for the past four days and haven’t been able to. So maybe the previous sentence was a lie. And I tried to write a Teahupoo report and failed at that too, even though it was one of the best comps all year.

AI wouldn’t have failed you. AI would’ve turned in cracking sports reports bang on time.

Fuck, if you wanted a little flavour you could even prompt it with “in the style of J P Currie”. Personally, I’d go for “in the style of (Longtom-era) Steve Shearer”.

Trust me, it does a gut-wrenchingly good impersonation.

Or maybe that’s an unpersonation.

B u t

Fu ck IT

I’ve been. e x p e r i m e n t i n g. With lots. of. fUCKED up and funky and possibly downright. Awful. sentences

What else to do? Let our language be co-opted and cannibalised by LLMs? Fed back to us as the reconstituted hacked-up gruel of things we once thought for ourselves?

Strings of words arranged in a way known to please us.

All the nutritional value of puked up Haribos.

Please, sir, may I have some more?

In the worst kind of industrial farming (stiff competition) the dead are fed back to the living. This is what writing on the internet is becoming. An industrial farm for language.

You know what an algorithm can’t do?

It can’t watch its life disintegrate.

It can’t act like a loathsome, dishonest cunt who lashes out at anyone who actually loves him, yet bathes perfect strangers with adulation and empathy.

It can’t sprint bare-chested down a foreign street at 4.14am, pupils wide and black, spittle white at the corners of its mouth, trying desperately, so fucking desperately, to stop consciousness leaking through, like water spilling under a shut door.

It can’t reason: grit your fucking teeth and take another pill, son. Just don’t stop. Whatever you do, don’t stop.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

You may well ask.

If you are lucky, if you are one of the few who’ve conquered the myriad of universal human failings, then you do not ask yourself often.

Perhaps you just don’t question your lot. Perhaps your mind works not endlessly on the Whys and Whats of this tenuous life of ours.

Congratulations.

And although you have likely abstained from many of life’s deepest pleasures, at least you have contentment.

You may have traded ecstasy for equilibrium, but you’re happy.

Probably.

But if you are the majority, like me, you might well ask yourself: am I doing enough? Is what I am doing right?

And it might well leave you, like me, on a sideless raft, on a blackened ocean on a breathless night. Not even drifting, but just turning and turning in the current’s gyre, with little sense of what begins or ends you.

Fuck It. We’re all going to die. You may well think.

It’s easy, of course, in this predicament, to indulge solely in languid pleasures of the body and mind. Those soft curves of vices that envelope you in their dark warmth, coax you into corners, leave you heaving and wordless.

It’s easy to walk on air, against your better judgement.

But it can’t last.

You will never see the world at the bottom of the well. You’ll never set the darkness echoing.

So when I look at Griffin Colapinto’s cherub face, or Jack Robinson’s rattish handsomeness, or Yago Dora’s doe-eyed bliss, or Jordy Smith’s baw-faced contentment, or even the any-day-now ecstatic vascular eruption of Italo Ferreira, I just think: Yes.

Yes.

No wonder you are content. No wonder you can find your centre, make peace with your present, savour the moment. No wonder you can talk some kind of shazam, some kind of hocus pocus, some abracadabra magic.

For you are surfing. For a living. In the best waves in the world. Surrounded by like-minded souls, acolytes, and Kelly Slater.

You are rich in all the ways a man can be rich.

You are the damp deities of modernity. And you’d damn well better be grateful.

It took an age for Finals to start. Pundits and pros and hangers on basked in Fijian luxury on Fijian government dime that most Fijian natives will likely never experience.

Meanwhile, I went to an artist’s retreat to try and write. To try and eke language from my gutted soul. I stayed in a wooden cabin with wide windows framing spilling sea lochs far below. Sheep croaked and bleated and butted the cabin all night, but apart from the birds and the wind it was gloriously soundless.

But the juxtaposition of the place jarred me. The retreat itself is perched high in the middle of a peninsula that falls through farmland and wooded slopes on either side. Below, not two miles west, the UK’s nuclear warheads are stored in concrete bunkers built into the hillside. Three miles east is where the nuclear submarines are housed and exercised. Barbed wire and aggressive signage threatening DANGER and DEATH decorate the peninsula like a ghastly christmas tree.

I met some other artists. I felt ever so plain.

There was Hugo, a Mexican who lived in Iceland. He performed a one-man show about the intersection of politics and bread-making.

No, I’ve got no idea either.

And there was an American girl whose name escapes me now. She was a painter. But she bent my ear for an hour about how astrology was real and Mercury being in retrograde. Or something. Then she told me she could feel what wolves feel. Very pleasant, though.

It was a bit too much ART for a simple, failing writer like me.

I’m back at my classroom desk now. I’ve managed to spunk a whole year of not teaching down some grubby drain. I’ve got as much to show for it as the metaphor suggests. And now I sit here again. A class has just left.

It’s been a grim week. Last Friday morning we arrived to the news that three boys in their final year had been killed in a car accident around two am. The car had plunged through a metal barrier and onto the shore, where it exploded. The bodies could not be retrieved. The charred remnants of the whole thing have been taken to Glasgow for identification.

Two of the boys were sitting in my class not so long ago. Their classmates still sit there, expressions starched, under the hung cloud of death’s grim reality.

I keep picturing the faces of the dead boys, sometimes still in their seats. I keep thinking of our interactions, trying to discern if there was some sign, some flicker of a life destined to be foreshortened.

What forces dictate that you will cease to exist at seventeen years old, blown beyond recognition in a car with your pals on a Thursday night?

Yago Dora is the world champ.

I hope you’re happy.

I hope you’re human.