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[gramgoessurfing]

Thoughts of a redhead in the ocean

I’ve decided to write about another trip because I had enough thoughts to fill up more space than a few tweets, I hope. This is about a 5 day surf trip I took down California in my 2010 white Toyota Camry, which isn’t exactly what a 25 year old boy dreams his surf car will look like. After shaming my family for retroactively making the wrong decision at the car dealership when I was in my junior year of high school for only this moment, I filled up my tank of gas and played tetris with my 5′9 surfboard until it fit diagonally inside my car. It wasn’t a good look. I avoided eye contact with all other drivers for the full duration of all red lights I encountered. If you read my last 2 blogs about my trip to Europe and Africa, you may have noticed the subjects of my blog are becoming less exciting and adventurous, both in activities and geographical distance from homebase. I’ve decided my next and last blog will be 2000 words about the uncharted territory of my studio apartment.

The way I planned this trip is that I didn’t. I had no idea what beach I was going to until the morning of each day, nor did I care as long as there were waves and sunscreen. I did not tell my mom about this strategy because she would have felt that she failed as a mother as to how I planned this trip and would have either spent years in therapy or bulk ordered those awful York peppermint candies she likes (again) to suppress her feelings, to which I don’t know what’s worse. I then proceeded to buy a book that’s above my reading level and took off.

My first stop was Santa Cruz, which is also my favorite town. You know you’re in Santa Cruz when you see most people longboarding their dogs barefoot down the sidewalk. There’s an appropriately named break called pleasure point where I like to go and surf until I either cant feel my arms anymore from paddling or I see the ugliest creature both in or out of the water that seems to linger around the area, the elephant seal. God made this animal to raise the self esteem of humans.

I started this trip on a Monday and hopped in the water around 2 pm. People who surf at 2 pm on a Monday are different than people who surf on a weekend. On a weekend, you look around when you’re out there and it seems obvious that the majority of people are just those with regular jobs trying to harness enough fun to get through the next workweek without an ‘incident’. Monday at 2 pm is different. There’s a different vibe. Time tends to slow down and there’s less clutter and you look around at the diversity of water lovers sitting atop a board waiting for the next set to come in and project what went so right (or wrong) in their lives that they are in the ocean at such a time. You can tell there are people out at that time who need to be; you can feel their pent-up energy likely from the aftermath of some type of job stress or gambling addiction crisis and they’re here because if they’re here they’re not causing domestic violence at home. Then there are the people on the other end of the spectrum, those who are either unemployed (like me) or retired and are searching for the high from the waves that inevitably comes with pleasure point at high tide.

My friends have told me when they’re in the ocean surfing or swimming their problems tend to go away. They’re not thinking about their job or what errands they have to run or that their girlfriend is mad at them for not waiting to watch the most recent episode of Ozark together. I don’t know if thats true for me. Yes, my problems that I usually worry about go away, but new problems replace them. Now I’m just on the constant lookout for any abnormal movement in the water to locate whatever seal or shark smells the blood of the small cut on my thumb from biting my nails during the most recent NBA playoff game, or worrying if my pale redhead self is going to need chemo sooner than later because I just wanted to catch 1 more wave while the sun gives me freckles that I didn’t ask for. Also, judging by the way wells fargo keeps bothering me about how I don’t have enough money in my savings account, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of their recently hired tellers put on a wetsuit and found me in the ocean to tell me the way I’ve been using my credit card lately doesn't match up with my ‘financial roadmap’.

Pismo Beach: This was the climax of the trip, and sorry for using such a word but I didn’t like any of the other options that  http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/synonym offered me so this is what I’m going with. Climax. I’m not sure what I did to deserve what happened this day. I don’t think I’m a big believer in karma but I was looking back at what I could have possibly done that morning to grant me such luck. Maybe it was the cadence in which I ordered my tall iced Americano at starbucks or the fact that I complimented my air bnb host on the layout of her bathroom before I left only to get a response that guests weren’t allowed in that bathroom. Whatever it was, I was in heaven for 90 minutes at Pismo pier and caught so many 6 foot lefts I would have still been smiling if someone threw a boba tea at me later that evening. When trying to park at the beach I took a wrong turn and approached a parking attendant who told me I needed to turn around to previous parking lot or I could spend 4 dollars to park on the beach. I laughed right in her face thinking she was making a joke only upon realizing moments later when I walked to the beach with my board that there were, in fact, cars parked on the beach. Strange place SLO is.

I need to take a quick break and dedicate a section to the things nobody wants to talk about: getting into a cold/wet wetsuit. There’s two type of people in this world: those who know what this feels like and those who don’t. Those who know have a certain look in their eyes and there needs to be more advocacy to address the victims. If you’re one of the lucky few who has no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll guide you through the experience. This is the part of this blog where I wish I recorded an audiobook, but bear with me: There’s a few ways you get stuck in this situation. Either you surfed recently and left your wetsuit in your trunk due to laziness or you surfed recently and left your wetsuit in your trunk due to stupidity. Whatever avenue led you to this point, there’s no turning back. First comes the shameful act of untangling your cold, damp suit while retracing the steps that brought you to this point. Nothing better than the 5 stages of grief perfectly describes the process. denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. All of those words have a place in this. You start to ask yourself if you even want to surf and if the 45 minutes it took you to get to the ocean could just be turned into a nice drive and back. You actually telling yourself things outloud under your breath like ‘it’s not the destination that matters but the journey’. But then you snap out of it. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the side mirror of your Camry and know you’d never be able to look at yourself again if you don’t grow a pair and put that fucking wetsuit on right now. So you do. You put one leg in at a time and pull it up your waist where it passes a particularly sensitive part of your body and then pull it up over your shoulders and by this point you realize the world isn’t a fair place and you go hop in the water.

Santa Barbara next. Gloomy, overcast, misty, Santa Barbara. I went out near a wetlands earlier in the morning on a break with small waves and the smell of methane gas surfacing up through the kelp due to the oil reserves nearby. It seemed boring compared to the day before but I always have a baseline happiness when I’m in the water regardless of what’s happening. After catching a few small waves, I peed in my wetsuit and got out of the water. Apparently somebody in Isla Vista took a break from playing snappa and decorated a concrete structure:

No matter what day or time you’re out though, there’s always that guy who thinks he either owns or has reserved the ocean for the day. I have devised a 4 step process as to how to identify who this person is and it is very easy:

1) paddle for and try to catch literally any wave

2) wait and listen for an extremely loud voice calling everyone else off the wave

3) watch the target person scream profanities/give evil eyes to anybody who was within 100 yards of him on the same wave as he paddles back out

4) watch him put his affliction t-shirt in the parking lot after he’s done surfing.

If you’re wondering, the answer is yes, this is the exact same person who tells you to stop being a bitch when you’re playing pick up basketball and calling your own fouls and call one on the guy who pushes you with 2 hands during a layup and you look back at him and he’s of course wearing a randy moss NFL jersey and what he thinks are basketball shoes but are really from the streetwear section of footlocker.

Los Angeles: After Santa Barbara I kept driving South and stopped in Ventura which I have no good content about except that its a perfect place and I would like to move there. After that I drove to spend the night in West Hollywood at an air bnb that ended up being a windowless bedroom in the back of a massage spa (healingpoint, see below). In my defense, I did not seek this out I just booked my room too fast without reading descriptions. I spent most of that night walking around in mandatory slippers and looking at different consistencies of massage oil that were for sale. I still haven’t finished unpacking the strangeness of this night, but I’m sure the effects it had on me won’t come out until later in my life, much like when your mom’s passive aggressiveness toward you as a child doesn’t manifest itself until you’re 22 and yelling at your significant other about how they got the wrong color shower curtain.