No more idiotic memes, No more phony living the dream, No more false information, No more intermediation, No more fake news, No more dishonest reviews, No more pathological liars, No more wallowing in the mire, No more twenty-something experts, No more billionaire perverts, No more ignorant rants, No more foolish occupants, No more chefs who never went to culinary school, No more using social media as a manipulation tool, No more Internet chain letters, No more sycophant abettors, No more fake go fund me pages, No more provocation that enrages, No more glorifying lawlessness, No more doomscrolling aimlessness, No more rampant hatred, No more becoming alienated, No more racial intolerance, No more religious ambivalence, No more shallow influencers, No more flashy necromancers, No more algorithms, No more collectivism, No more tracking, No more hacking, No more curated advertisements, No more unsolicited chastisements, Because I smashed my phone today, I should have done it yesterday, Or perhaps two weeks prior, As the negativity raised my ire, Now that it is finally done, I can see what is truly going on, Now that I have finally set myself free, I have the time to simply be me.
Between 1979 and 1984, Bluffside Park was the unofficial local name for South Weddington Park in Studio City, and it was the “secret” place where all of the hip cool young people from Studio City, North Hollywood, and the Hollywood Hills would meet up to find out the answers to the many important questions of the day:
Was there any good weed to score?
Does anyone know where to score some cocaine?
Where were the weekend house parties?
Were there any good bands playing at the Starwood, Gazzarri’s, or Phases?
Does anybody have any clove cigarettes?
Good weed was relatively easy to obtain around Los Angeles most of the time and some strains were vastly better than others—some of which would knock you on your ass—but getting your hands on some decent cocaine required knowing a guy who knew a dealer and trusting that the blow wasn’t cut with too much lactose or mannitol. Ultimately, you just had to trust the system and weren’t going to get ripped off.
The curious thing about cocaine is that while it impresses people as a classy drug used by sophisticated individuals such as artists, musicians, poets, actors, and writers—ergo, sophistication by association—it simultaneously drains your bank account at $100 per gram. That was a lot of money back then, especially for a low roller like me making only $5 per hour as an electricians apprentice. Indeed, a spare Benjamin was hard to come by but all too easy to spend foolishly in an attempt to impress friends and love interests. Although I did enjoy getting high on cocaine, I could only indulge in it occasionally because I needed to make rent on a regular basis, which was unlike some of the young adults in the neighborhood who were still living with their wealthy parents and always seemed to have a vial or two of cocaine in their pocket.
As it was, Bluffside was one of those local impromptu gathering places where sometimes only a handful of people would show up and at other times the small dirt parking lot was completely full of cars and anticipation. There was always a good chance that you would run into someone that you hadn’t seen in a while which would give you the opportunity to catch up on things, exchange phone numbers, and maybe get high together.
Unfortunately, the locals living in the Bluffside enclave hated the sometimes-noisy crowds that occasionally blasted the KROQ soundtrack of the day on the Blaupunkt radio installed in their parents BMW’s or Mercedes-Benz’s. Apparently, music by The Clash, The Dead Kennedys, The Police, the B-52’s, and Iggy Pop violated the collective sensibilities of the well-heeled neighborhood and so they would call the L.A.P.D. regularly.
The cops arrival would disburse the crowd remarkably fast when they rolled up because they were easily spotted due to the park being accessible only by two streets: Bluffside Drive to the east and Valleyheart Drive to the north. The park boundary was wedged between CA 101 to the west and the concrete L.A. River (a.k.a. “the wash”) to the north, and it was easy to ditch the cops along the verge of the 101 or the verge between the wash and the residential houses in the tony little neighborhood.
The unofficial yet generally accepted schedule at Bluffside was to meet on Friday night after work, disseminate and absorb all of the critical information, chose your adventure, and then meet again on Saturday night and repeat the process. By Sunday night, the talk was mostly about the disasters, misadventures, and the highlights of the previous 48-hours. There were also plenty of casual conversations revolving around music and food and books and movies and sometimes a bit of juicy gossip would creep into the conversation about who started dating, who broke up, and who was having sex with whom.
The legendary house parties were absolutely wild. There were many wealthy families living in the area who worked in the automotive, aerospace, music, television, or film industries, and some of them lived in these fabulous hillside houses that had large swimming pools some of which included detached cabanas or pool houses. Often, the parents would go on a lengthy vacation and leave their eighteen-year-old or so offspring at home by themselves because there is nothing more tedious and troublesome than traveling with adult children, the term of which appears to be an oxymoron.
Leaving an unsupervised eighteen-year-old “adult” at home was analogous to leaving an arsonist with a five-gallon jerrycan of gasoline and a match: At some point combustion was going to happen. One phone call to one friend would start a chain-reaction of other phone calls to other friends, and exponentially, the news got around quickly. Soon, hundreds of random people—some known, others being perfect strangers (if there is such a thing)— start showing up on a Saturday night to party their asses off like there was no tomorrow because, frankly, at that age most of us were living in the moment which was all that truly mattered.
The age span between eighteen and twenty-one is like purgatory because you are considered an adult and are of legal age to vote and engage in contracts or join the military or buy a car or borrow money from the bank to buy a house, but you can’t buy alcohol, one of the great privileges and pleasures of true adulthood. When you are stuck in this underage limbo, the only way to get alcohol was to know somebody who was old enough to buy it for you, or you had to resort to “pigeon” for it. To pigeon was to hang out in a liquor store parking lot out of sight of the store clerk and ask someone who was going inside the liquor store to purchase your alcohol for you. At best, the odds were 50/50. Circus Liquor in North Hollywood was my liquor store parking lot of preference because it was close to where I lived. Indeed, the only way to get your fifth of Cuervo Gold or a six-pack of Bud tall boys was by proxy. There were other, more nefarious ways like shoplifting, but I always considered theft one of the lowest forms of human conduct and refrained from engaging in such a lowly act.
This was a pre-GPS era, so unless you had a Thomas Guide in your car and knew the street address of the house party (of at least the general vicinity), you would often pile into the car of a guy who said that he knew where the party was, and along with your plain brown paper bag of beer or tequila, you drove off to parts unknown. We would often get lost and missed out on many house parties with this method. The surest way to find the house party was to convoy with a bunch of other cars that were following the guy in front who did have a Thomas Guide and snake your way up into the narrow streets of the Hollywood Hills.
One of these house parties was near Laurel Canyon Blvd and Mulholland Drive, overlooking Hollywood. The house was stylishly furnished, replete with leather couches, crystal chandeliers, marble, and all manner of artwork. There was a better than average live rock band playing under a cabana on the pool deck. There were several kegs of beer on ice in plastic trash cans that were lined up along the back wall of the house. Drinking Heineken from a keg is not the same as drinking Heineken from a bottle—it was considerably better, and so it flowed endlessly into my bottomless red cup. The house was jam-packed with partygoers and marijuana and clove cigarette smoke permeated the air. People were smashing out their cigarette butts on the hardwood floors and spilling their beers all over the house. Some people were snorting cocaine from the marble countertops in the kitchen.
As I was bumping my way through the crowd toward the band, Tom Armstrong, an old hooligan friend that I hadn’t seen in a while, spotted me from the opposite side of the pool and yelled out my name. We acknowledged each other. He was there with his friend Duke. Tom said something in Duke’s ear, and then they started walking briskly in opposite directions around the pool toward me. This could only mean one thing: They had conspired to throw me into the pool. Not tonight, boys! I spotted some Italian cypress trees at the far edge of the pool deck and decided that I was going to hide behind them. The thick crowd of people slowed them down considerably and I bent down as low as I could while winding my way through the thicket of people toward the trees hoping that Tom and Duke would lose sight of me.
When I got to the edge of the slate pool deck, I briefly glanced back to see Tom and Duke closing in on me. I took a step beyond the deck thinking that it was a planter bed where the Italian cypress trees were located, but it wasn’t…it was the ledge of a concrete retaining wall. I stepped off the ledge and fell down about twelve feet into the darkness and almost landed on a couple who were making out on a bench in the planter below. I hit the dirt hard on my right side. It knocked the wind out of me, and I was sure that I broke my right arm and maybe some ribs. The guy on the bench jumped up and said, “Dude—are you okay?” I couldn’t talk yet because I was still struggling to catch my breath, so I just nodded my head, slowly stood up, and limped away holding my arm and headed back toward my car to drive myself to the emergency room. On the way to my car which was parked way up the road, I ran into my friend Mark Flaata who had just arrived. By then I had recovered considerably in the miraculous way that one recovers quickly when one is young. My arm and ribs were definitely not broken, but my confidence definitely took a major hit. We went back into the party and stayed until the cops showed up around midnight and shut it down.
Meeting back at Bluffside the next night, we heard many other stories about the same wild party. It’s funny how people can be at the same place at the same time yet not run into each other while also having a completely different experience. Drama, comedy, run-ins with law enforcement, breakups, hookups, philosophical conversations, religious conversations, swearing off drinking alcohol or doing drugs, passing out on the front lawn, and musings about the meaning of life were all part of the various storylines that were told. In those moments, we represented our fleeting wasted youth in the truest form possible.
This was all part of an earnest—although ultimately futile—effort to stave off the requirement to get serious about life because no young person wanted to end up like their parents working long hours in jobs that they hated and being stuck with all of those serious adult responsibilities like insurance and mortgages and car payments and the multitudes of problems that seem to accompany them.
No matter our purest intentions, time marches forward mercilessly regardless of how tenaciously we try to hold it back, and most of the once fierce, invincible, carefree teenagers eventually become another cog in a massive, indifferent, mindless system that strips them of their soul and spits out their bones when it is done with them, repeating the infinite cycle of modern society.
Luckily, some of them survive with their souls intact. These are my kind of people.
This is an AI generated image that looks remarkably like the Lifeguard Queen of my youth.
Story 42 of 52
By M. Snarky
Late summer, 1974, North Hollywood, Calif. The walk from our apartment at 5342 Cahuenga Blvd to the North Hollywood Pool was about a mile, and for 25¢ you could swim all day. With only our towels in hand and one quarter each in our pockets (Grandma Opal Hess would say, “two-bits”), we walked directly west down the dry and dusty Union Pacific Railroad tracks that paralleled Chandler Blvd to North Hollywood Park, and then turn left at Tujunga Ave where the pool was located on the west side of the street just beyond the public parking lot. When the temperature rose above 100-degrees, it was like walking through the sweltering heat of a desert, but it was always worthwhile because I knew she would be there.
I had just turned 13, my younger brother Scott was 11-1/2, and our younger cousin Chris was 10-1/2. The three of us were accidentally representing the poor white boys of North Hollywood with our holey T-shirts, cut-off jeans, knee-high tube socks with holes in the heels and the toes and our worn out Keds and Converse sneakers. We had no food, no water, no sunscreen, and usually no extra money – not even a nickel for some bubble gum. Our parents were so broke that we would often have to resort to scouring the neighborhood for returnable soda bottles to collect enough money for the pool entry fee.
Whenever we did have any extra change, we would stop by the Winchell’s Donut House near the corner of Lankershim Blvd and Chandler because it was on the way to the pool, and we would have been foolish not to pick up a few 5¢ donuts.
At the front counter of the pool house, you handed over your hard-earned quarter to the attendant for a ticket, then you took the ticket over to the men’s side of the pool house where there was another counter. There was a hand painted sign above that counter that said, “No Cut-Off Jeans!” and, “No Swimming in Underwear!” and “No Urinating in the Pool!” There was another hand painted sign above the door that exited to the pool deck that said, “Rinse Off Before Entering Pool.” Being the ignorant youth that I was, I would have argued that the no cut-off jean policy was dumb and that the no swimming in underwear and no urinating in the pool rules were obvious, but why do I need to rinse off? But rules are rules, and in a public space they must be posted…and obeyed, that is, if you want to avoid getting kicked out.
There was this persistent rumor going around that there was a chemical in the pool water that turned bright red if you peed in it, which signals to everyone in the water around you AND the lifeguard staff that, a) you are a rule breaking savage, and b) you will be promptly removed from the pool, Pissboy will be tattooed onto your forehead, and you will be escorted off of the premises by two burly lifeguards, and banned for life from entering any of the Los Angeles County Parks & Recreation managed public pools. I will tell you unequivocally (although not without some level of embarrassment) that this was indeed just a persistent rumor that I believe was likely propagated by the lifeguard union.
Anyway, you gave the male attendant your ticket and they would hand you a mesh bag with what I can only describe as a large diaper pin that had a number stamped on the end of it which matched the stamped metal number tag attached to the bag. The first time we went to the pool I had no idea what I was supposed to do with the mesh bag or with the pin. After observing what the other men and boys did with them, I quickly figured out what to do, so I put my beat-up shoes, tube socks, T-shirt, and cut-off jeans in the bag, attached the pin to my swim shorts, and handed the bag over to the young man behind the counter who promptly hung the bag on a rack in numerical order.
Scott, Chris, and I, after rinsing off in the remarkably cold water (why was there never a hot water valve?), walked out onto the pool deck like we owned the place. Around the entire pool deck, about every ten feet or so, painted in fire engine red, was “NO RUNNING!” in huge, stenciled letters. More rules. So, with our towels draped around our necks, we briskly walked over to our favorite spot on the deck near the far southeast corner of the deep end where I could observe the high lifeguard chair from afar, which was the throne upon which my Lifeguard Queen sat.
She was a tan, brunette beauty with hazel eyes, wearing Ray Ban Aviator sunglasses, a white sun visor, and the iconic red one-piece Los Angeles County Lifeguard issued bathing suit. Being an official lifeguard, she also had the shiny metal whistle on a lanyard around her neck and a large megaphone by her side. She was a magnificent, powerful sight to behold, and I was crushing hard.
Mind you, I was not creeping on her or staring or ogling – I would simply glance over at her every now and then, hoping that one day she would notice me and smile and maybe wave at me. I had no idea what I was going to do if she ever did acknowledge me like that, but I probably would have suffered a heart attack.
I was comfortable in the water and thought that I knew how to swim, but I truly didn’t know how to swim well. You could say that I only knew how not to drown, just like most other recreational swimmers, I suppose. It wasn’t until I took professional swimming lessons decades later at Los Angeles Valley College for Ironman training with my wife Kim, that I realized how bad I was at swimming. How bad? It went something like this: On the first day of training, coach Stuart directed us (about three-dozen people) to self-seed ourselves along the pool coping thusly, “Advanced swimmers in the right-hand lanes, intermediate swimmers in the middle lanes, and beginning swimmers in the left-hand lanes.” I considered myself an intermediate swimmer and lined up in the middle lane.
Then coach Stuart said, “Okay swimmers, we’re going to split lanes for this drill in a clockwise direction, so we don’t swim into each other. Tom, Frank, Lisa, and Caroline will demonstrate this for you.” The four of them jumped into the middle lane and with a “Yip!” command from the coach, they started swimming in single file along the left-side next to the pool lane divider and when they got to the far end of the lane they turned around and came back along the right-side pool lane divider, passing each other without crashing as they swam in opposite directions.
Coach Stuart continued, “Does everyone understand this?” and we all nodded our heads in acknowledgement. “Now I want everyone to swim a few laps to warm up – Yip!” And with that, we jumped into the water and began swimming as directed. When I got back to the coaches side of the pool after a couple of laps, coach Stuart signaled me to the coping and asked me my name. “Okay, Kent, move down a lane to the left.” I moved down as directed. After a couple more laps, coach Stuart signaled me again and said, “Brad, move down another lane to the left.” I complied. By the time the warmup was over, my name was Norman, and I was standing in the wading pool.
But back in 1974 at North Hollywood Pool, I felt like I was channeling Olympic Gold Medalist Mark Spitz, and I was positive that I caught the queen’s eye once or twice as I swam by her elevated throne.
On the opposite side of the pool from the lifeguard chair were the two glorious springboards – one set at 1-meter, and the other set at 2-meters. These were our favorite activity to do at the pool. We got pretty good at doing jackknifes and swan dives (or so we thought), but big fat cannonball and cherry bomb splashes were our favorites. We mostly just goofed around doing boyish things like belly flops, lazy forward flips, mostly out-of-control back flips, and “Change-your-minds” where you acted like you were going to dive straight into the water but tucked into a cannonball at the last second.
On the last August day of the summer pool season – which was coincidentally also an extremely hot day – a Speedo wearing whale of a man swam right into the diving lane impact zone as I launched myself off of the springboard. I was in midair when I heard the whistle blow, but I didn’t see him until it was too late because I was looking across the pool to the Lifeguard Queen of all my dreams who was blowing said whistle. I collided with him upon entry of my almost perfect starfish belly flop, the impact of which knocked the wind out of me. I involuntarily inhaled a lungful of water which burned my lungs like fire. I began gasping uncontrollably for air under the surface of the water as I started sinking. The last thing I remembered was hearing a muffled splash next to me as I was looking up at the blazing, shimmering sun through the rippled surface of the water.
When I came back to my senses, there she was, smelling like Coppertone coconut tanning oil, leaning over me with the bleach scented chlorinated pool water dripping off of her face and hair and red swimsuit, giving me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the warm concrete pool deck. Her lips tasted like cherry flavored ChapStick. She was even more beautiful close up. Was I in heaven? I looked into her stunning hazel eyes and smiled. She pulled back and asked, “Kent, are you okay?” She knew my name! THE LIFEGUARD QUEEN KNEW MY NAME! Wait! How did she know my name? What happened? Never mind – let it happen! I started to say, “I love you, Lifeguard Queen!” but before I could say anything, I was rudely awakened by a big splash of pool water. Alas, it was all just a very vivid dream, probably intensified by the heat, hunger, and dehydration. But it seemed so real.
On the way out through the pool house that day she was working the front counter. We made eye contact, and I bashfully looked away. She said, “Cool Tee-shirt!” I was wearing a classic white Coca-Cola Tee-shirt with the red arm and neck ringer bands. I blushed. Then she said, “Have a nice day – see you next summer.” My heart skipped a beat. In an awkward, broken voice, I barely got, “See you next summer,” out of my mouth. At that age, “next summer” always seemed such a long way off and it would never come soon enough.
Summer, 1975, North Hollywood, Calif. This year we had secondhand BMX bicycles that we pieced together to get to the pool faster! On opening day, we raced each other down the railroad tracks from the apartment to the pool. All along the way we kept trying to one-up each other to see who could bunny-hop the highest or ride a wheelie the longest – this turned into a serious competition! Breathless, we locked our bikes to the rack at the pool and rushed to the front counter to get our tickets. The three of us; Scott, Chris, and myself, breathing heavily and dripping with sweat, didn’t even register with the attendant who just smiled at us as he took our quarters and handed us our tickets.
The singular thing that was occupying my mind was the Lifeguard Queen.
This time, the cold shower before entering the pool area was appreciated after riding our bikes so hard in the summer heat. We speed-walked toward our regular corner when we heard “Slow down!” coming over the staticky public address system, clearly directed at the three of us. We complied and slowed down – barely. As we briskly walked behind the queens throne I glanced up to get a brief look of her highness without being too obvious, but this time, the occupant of the throne was not the queen, instead, there was an imposter in her place: the throne was being occupied by one of the male lifeguards. Noooo! Where in the world was my Lifeguard Queen? Wahhhh! Sadly, I never saw her again. The pool days were never the same afterward. I felt an emptiness in her absence and became less enthusiastic about going to the pool.
Although I didn’t learn what her real name was, I imagined that it was something regal like Elizabeth, Genevieve, Catherine, or Margaret.
The summertime always reminds me of those carefree days at that pool with my brother and cousin, but mostly, I wonder about the Lifeguard Queen.
January 1983 was a historic month for monster waves in Southern California. My close, very talented friend Bobby Doran (IG: @bobbydoranart) and I were in the thick of it with our newish state-of-the-art yellow topped, slick black bottomed, Morey Boogie Mach 7-7 bodyboards. The pejorative term the surfers used for these was “sponge,” but what the surfers didn’t appreciate was that we could get deeper inside a barrel and get more quality time in the green room that they ever could imagine on their fiberglass surfboards, granted that the bodyboards were not as fast. The animosity between bodyboarders and surfers is legendary, but that is a story for another time.
Our usual breaks were at Leo Carrillo (Primo’s), Point Zero (“Zeroes”), Staircase, and Drainpipes. Drainpipes is located at Free Zuma on Westward Beach Road in Malibu, just northwest of Point Dume’, and it was one of our favorite, most frequented breaks. Also, the parking was free (hence the name, “Free Zuma”), which was great for young broke dudes like us. Drainpipes was a fast, hollow shorebreak that broke both left and right due to the contours created by the huge boulders that were scattered around the sandy bottom. It was also notorious for riptides, but we knew the break and the beach well enough to avoid them. We were living the classic SoCal weekend warrior beach bum life.
When we heard that Drainpipes was pumping at 20-feet, we knew we had to go. Neither of us had been on such a big, heavy wave, and this was our chance to get a North Shore experience in SoCal, albeit without the warm water, reef sharks, sharp coral, and cute island surfer girls. The biggest waves we had surfed previously were double overhead, or about 12-feet.
Being that it was still winter, the water was super cold (mid 50-degrees) so we brought our thickest O’Neill full wetsuits to fight off the chill. We knew it was going to be a short session by default due to the cold water and drizzly, thick overcast weather, but a short session is better than no session.
At Drainpipes, you don’t usually see the waves breaking from Westward Beach Road as you’re driving in from PCH due to the downward slope of the sandy beach, but on that Saturday morning, we saw these glassy walls of water lining up and peeling off. We looked at each other with our jaws agape without saying a word. We pulled up to the beach and there were only a couple of dozen or so people hanging around, mostly watching the three or four surfers that were already in the lineup at the outside break. We got out of my beater, primer gray ’69 Chevelle Super Sport and took cover under one of the lifeguard towers to watch. The waves were absolutely massive, and the ground shook with the pounding of the breakers. The surfers were pretty good as we watched them carve it up. We assumed that they were either loco Malibu locals or maybe some pros.
We were also counting the wave sets and their timing to get an idea of when and where we could paddle out. After about 15-minutes we knew what to do and went back to the car to get suited up. The gawking onlookers couldn’t believe that we were going out into such big waves with our sponges and Viper and Duck Feet fins. We were the only guys on bodyboards. It was a battle to get out, even on the smaller sets. The whitewater itself was 15-feet high. After what seemed like an eternity (but in reality, was maybe all of 10-minutes) we were outside the break and could rest for a few minutes. The thing about gigantic waves like these is that the incoming swell itself moves you up and down so much that it sometimes feels like you’re on a roller coaster.
After a few minutes of rest, we paddled into the lineup. Bobby was to my right, and he found himself in a perfect spot to drop into a right breaking wave and I watched him slide down the face, carve hard right, and disappear behind a thick wall of water. I watched the back of the wave for the telltale signs of closing out, but it kept on peeling, and by the time Bobby flew up and over the back of the wave ten feet above the water, he was about a hundred feet away from me. The smile on his face, and the fist pump, and the loud, extended WOO-HOO were all I needed for some additional motivation.
My first wave was a left, and the exhilaration of sliding down so fast on such a steep face for so long will never be forgotten! I pulled a hard left bottom turn, trimmed up my bodyboard about mid face and carved sharp top and bottom turns a few times inside this incredibly massive, almost perfectly round, hollow wave. On a bodyboard, you are much lower and closer to the water than you are on a surfboard which provides a very different wave experience, and to me, it’s a deeper connection. I could hear the wave closing out behind me and felt the rush of air, so I accelerated across the face and digging hard with my left rail and shoulder, went vertical and punched through the lip for a nice airborne landing on the back of the wave where I slid down for a little bit – it was like getting a little bonus wave at the end!
Bobby and I caught several more individual waves and also a couple of “Party Waves” where we both dropped into the same wave and exchanged top and bottom turns as we crisscrossed each other – our wake looking like a DNA double-helix.
Then Bobby started to show off a little bit, so, naturally, I had to show off a little bit too…but then I got cocky, as young twenty-somethings do with their boundless hubris. I decided to go for a late drop-in and paid the price for it: I got pitched out over the falls, dropped headfirst at least 20-feet in midair, got pounded to the bottom, which knocked some of the air out of me, and then got sucked up the back of the wave and ended up inside the most extreme rinse cycle that I ever experienced – I was basically a spinning human-sized starfish. I could not sense which way was up. My leash wrapped around my neck, and for a brief moment, I thought I was going to drown – this was not your typical hold-down! But then I pulled myself together, detangled my leash and reeled in my bodyboard with it, grabbed the rails of the board with all of my strength, and popped up above the churning foam gasping (choking, really) for air.
But now I was caught on the inside of the break, which is the worst place you can find yourself in big surf. At this point, you only have two choices: Paddle back out, or ride the churning foam in. Make that three choices; the third of which is to die! I decided that I had to get at least one more wave, so I did the paddle-battle to get back out into the lineup. In the meantime, I spotted Bobby tearing it up, which made me both happy and slightly jealous.
When I got back into the lineup, I was cold and exhausted and had to take a break to catch my breath. By the time I caught my last wave of the day, my feet were numb, I was shivering, and my teeth were chattering. That’s when I found myself in the perfect take-off zone and dropped into the most glorious wave of my life. It was a perfect, glassy, seemingly endless left. I tore it up until it started closing out behind me. I turned hard right and let the fast, foamy whitewater push me back to the sandy beach where I was stranded momentarily like a beached whale. I jumped up with still numb feet, which was not a pleasant experience with the pins and needles sensation shooting through them, and struggled to walk up the steep sandy shore with the heavy pull of the retreating water from the massive waves trying to yank me back in. I fell forward a few times in my battle to break free. It was as if the ocean didn’t want me to leave.
I tossed my board down on the sand and plopped my totally spent ass on it, and as the saltwater, sand, seaweed, and maybe a very small sand crab or two drained out from my nose and ears, I watched Bobby take his last wave of the day and shred. He was so good; I truly think he could have gone pro.
As we were walking back to the car looking like a couple of wet stray cats, one of the onlooking surfers asked, “You guys were pretty good out there; are you pros?” Bobby and I looked at each other and smiled. I replied, “No, man, we’re just a couple of rank amateurs; can’t you tell by the holes in our wetsuits?” as I pointed to a hole in the knee of my wetsuit. We all laughed. Someone passed a joint to us. We inhaled deeply.
My old car did not have a working heater, so Bobby and I, exhausted, shivering, and half frozen, drove back to the Doranch in the Valley (another story for another day), listening to KROQ as we drove along Kanan Road toward the 101. We amused each other with the retelling of our epic wave session and what the experience was like on such a terrifying yet magnificent wave. We planned a surfing safari for the summer where we would hit all of the famous SoCal breaks all the way from Malibu to the Mexican border, and maybe plan a trip to the North Shore of Oahu. It was a good day to be out in the water.
At this precise moment, if you are reading this, you are a human being, and you are alive. You should celebrate this with every fiber of your being. Why? Because the odds of you being born are astronomically low – like 1 in 400 trillion – so you really need to consider yourself as more than extremely fortunate.
You are also on an ancient planet called Earth that is spinning at 1,000 miles per hour that is in a swirling galaxy named the Milky Way that is traveling through endless space at 1.3 million miles per hour. Is it not also wondrous that your body is made out of the same elements that are found in this galaxy? You are stardust.
By being alive, you have also found yourself on the ride of your life. There are many twists and turns and ups and downs on this ride that oftentimes leaves you feeling completely disoriented and out of control. This is actually good. Why? It is good because you feel something. You are alive.
This ride is both terrifying and exhilarating and will leave you breathless and bewildered and brokenhearted at times, but you can’t slow it down. In fact, it goes faster as you get older. Don’t fear it: hang on and embrace it. Enjoy it.
There is only one true way off of this ride and death will come soon enough, so don’t throw it away or rush it or force it or waste it or complain about it. Feel it. Fight for it. Live it. Feel the sunshine on your face. Watch a sunrise. Listen to the birds. Smell the flowers. Drink the wine. Eat the food. Immerse yourself in the wonder of it all. Love the living things. Love people. Love yourself. Amor fati.
msnarky 