Pet Cobra

Greg Noll

Running through the low tide, the sun is beating down, sweat is running into my eyes and the ocean has a blue-green, decidedly Caribbean tint to it. Past the chokepoint of the parking lot, where the beachgoers pile up on the sand, languishing like torpid elephant seals.  Out along the stretch of beach that most people can't get to, and there are a few guys out, sitting on their boards in a decidedly flat sea, scanning the horizon for waves that aren't coming. The song "Fisherman's Blues" by The Waterboys in my ears, light in my head, and I think of Greg Noll, of all people.

Da Bull, the man whose back we see in the most famous surfing photo ever taken. It's our flag raising on Mount Suribachi, and the interesting thing is, he's not even surfing. Just watching. Looking for possibilities.

That's what we do, really. Surfing means living for possibilities; the clean takeoff, the carving bottom turn, the perfect wave on the perfect day. At some point we really how few and far between those perfect days are - indeed, they may never materialize. And then we get older and we really that maybe the possibilities are enough; that merely knowing that what we imagine for ourselves might have happened, or may still happen, can sometimes be enough to keep us going, trying, striving. 

PC On The Radio

So you may know that I've appeared as a guest twice on NuPoppa Radio. Apparently, I passed some sort of Top Secret Audition; the show's founder and host Doug Zanger asked me if I'd like to be the new co-host, and of course I said yes. In my best Kasey Kasem voice. 

I do have a background in radio. That background consisted of approximately two late night stints at San Diego State's KCR; my friend Matt and I filled in for our friend Brian, who I think was studying for a test or writing a paper or whatever it was that responsible college students did back then. Our comedic stylings consisted of Cop In, Cop Out (we'd call our local 7-11 and ask if there was a cop hanging around trying to use his badge to score some free Slurpee action; of course, when we called and the guy working the register said "no", we didn't really have much of a bit); we also played some music (I distinctly recall playing some Flying Burrito Brothers and Fishbone). Then MTV was invented and we were all out of jobs. DAMN YOU J.J. JACKSON. (I'm aware that I was in college in the early 90's, some 10 years after MTV was invented, but I still blame the MTV people - I also think that they assassinated Art Bell and replaced him with a computerized simulacrum, but I have no actual proof - yet.)

You can listen to the show every Thursday at 11:00 AM PST. 

The Cover Shot

The days have been like what people who dream the dream of The Surfing Life envision while they sleep: a ocean tied-dyed with blues and greens under a sapphire sky, all manner of surfers on all manner of surfcraft, noserides and tailslides. 

Glorious.

My shoulder is nagging at me, can we take the day off, but no. Surfers are an obsessive lot and I've become obsessive. My little 6' 4" contains secrets that I've yet to be told and I'm trying to force them out of it, an interrogation by means of hours of paddling, duckdives, dropping in, repeat. More often than not I end up going ass over teakettle. But I keep going.

The obsession with riding waves is born of hidden knowledge. What you see in the magazines and in the videos is a fiction. Those moments - standing up in the barrel, ten toes over on a glassy peeling left, grabbing the rail while soaring ten feet over a thundering closeout - are as obtainable to most of us as a ride into space. What we're given is the real life of the ocean - onshore winds that level the surf, currents that create mixed-up slop, and the occasional storm-spawned giants that keep us on the beach, staring in awe and more than a little fear. Most of the time, surfing is waiting. Those cover shot moments - snapshots of perfection - probably won't happen to us.

But they might. And so we keep going.

40/40: Shaken, Not Stirred

This one came about as a result of a groin injury. I've never had a groin injury before - lucky, really, what with the rock climbing and the rugby and the surfing and the running. It took me a couple of hours of "what the hell is this new pain?" to realize what it was. I don't even know how I got it - my guess would be from surfing the day before. The sad part was that I didn't even surf, not technically - I took Beth out, and sat on my board, giving her some coaching while she tried to catch some waves. (It was mixed up, with a pretty nasty south-to-north longshore current that made paddling a bitch; impossible for even a good surfer to do much.) My first groin injury came at 40 years of age. That's something, I suppose.

I hobbled around for most of the day and once the kids were asleep, decided that we needed to finish off the day with a couple of cocktails. In one of those happy confluences of events, Beth had picked up a container of lychees from Trader Joe's. Lychees are one of those weird foods that you'd never think of buying...unless you were entertaining the possibility of making lychee Martinis. 

Captain America, F*ck Yeah!

This seemed appropriate. Or not. Anyway, happy 4th.

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