Biological Dawn Patrol
It’s just before dawn. The sky is lightening outside my window, showing the silhouettes of the palm trees. Get ready, I’m going to drop a cheesy “poetic” line here.
“The palm trees against the gray backdrop of the pre-dawn sky were like explosions of shadow.”
Ah…I feel much better now. The buoy is up from yesterday’s 3.0 feet to 4.3 feet, so I think it’s going to be a good Dawn Patrol session. Even the tide is cooperating with the idea of a DP, because it is low right now and filling back into high. Last night I was surfing with my friend DG and I asked him if he wanted me to call him for a DP, and he said he would like that, but only if the winds were lighter than 5 knots and the swell was up above four feet. Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Some surfers like to sleep in. JM, the best surfer I know, almost never makes a DP session because you can’t get him out of bed. If you try to get him up (this was attempted in Costa Rica) he will snarl and snap and try to roll over and go back to sleep. Shrug. That’s all right. This is one of the things that makes a DP so nice…if half the surfers feel this way, you can bet the lineup won’t be as crowded in the early morning as it will be later.
I’m supposed to be going to visit “the biological” (Shaq’s famous term for the absentee sperm donor) in Orlando today. He lives in Washington State and has come to Disney land with his sweet (and possibly dying) wife. I’m not sure if their trip to Disney is one of those “last request” things or not. The biological is being rather cagey about it, and I don’t blame him for that. All I know is that she’s got some kind of lump on her liver.
The biological was nothing but a concept, a representative figure, as I was growing up. My mom divorced the biological for beating her up and kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant with me (I’ve got Bruce Springsteen beaten here. First hit you took was when you hit the ground? Oh yeah? Well the first hit I took was in my mother’s womb!), so I didn’t actually meet him until I was 31. By then, what was the point? He’s a broken down ex-alcoholic, a diabetic, he’s got Crohn's disease, and he seems to have an obsession with the effects of nuclear radiation on living organisms, particularly cockroaches, which he believes will outlive us all since in his experience cockroaches always respond to radiation by growing bigger and stronger.
So I was supposed to go meet him today and go to the Epcot Center, but I think I’ll go surfing instead. Is that terrible? Ah. By the time I catch my first wave I’ll have forgotten to worry about it.
I’ve just called DG. No answer. He’s going to miss out! I know better than to call JM. He won’t pick up. The only guy who would be an absolute lock to surf a DP in the winter is my friend AB, and he’s living in San Francisco now, dropping bombs at Maverick’s. See, even he might find it hard to get motivated for today’s surf. More for me.
“The palm trees against the gray backdrop of the pre-dawn sky were like explosions of shadow.”
Ah…I feel much better now. The buoy is up from yesterday’s 3.0 feet to 4.3 feet, so I think it’s going to be a good Dawn Patrol session. Even the tide is cooperating with the idea of a DP, because it is low right now and filling back into high. Last night I was surfing with my friend DG and I asked him if he wanted me to call him for a DP, and he said he would like that, but only if the winds were lighter than 5 knots and the swell was up above four feet. Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Some surfers like to sleep in. JM, the best surfer I know, almost never makes a DP session because you can’t get him out of bed. If you try to get him up (this was attempted in Costa Rica) he will snarl and snap and try to roll over and go back to sleep. Shrug. That’s all right. This is one of the things that makes a DP so nice…if half the surfers feel this way, you can bet the lineup won’t be as crowded in the early morning as it will be later.
I’m supposed to be going to visit “the biological” (Shaq’s famous term for the absentee sperm donor) in Orlando today. He lives in Washington State and has come to Disney land with his sweet (and possibly dying) wife. I’m not sure if their trip to Disney is one of those “last request” things or not. The biological is being rather cagey about it, and I don’t blame him for that. All I know is that she’s got some kind of lump on her liver.
The biological was nothing but a concept, a representative figure, as I was growing up. My mom divorced the biological for beating her up and kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant with me (I’ve got Bruce Springsteen beaten here. First hit you took was when you hit the ground? Oh yeah? Well the first hit I took was in my mother’s womb!), so I didn’t actually meet him until I was 31. By then, what was the point? He’s a broken down ex-alcoholic, a diabetic, he’s got Crohn's disease, and he seems to have an obsession with the effects of nuclear radiation on living organisms, particularly cockroaches, which he believes will outlive us all since in his experience cockroaches always respond to radiation by growing bigger and stronger.
So I was supposed to go meet him today and go to the Epcot Center, but I think I’ll go surfing instead. Is that terrible? Ah. By the time I catch my first wave I’ll have forgotten to worry about it.
I’ve just called DG. No answer. He’s going to miss out! I know better than to call JM. He won’t pick up. The only guy who would be an absolute lock to surf a DP in the winter is my friend AB, and he’s living in San Francisco now, dropping bombs at Maverick’s. See, even he might find it hard to get motivated for today’s surf. More for me.
posted by Cod Cuddleston at 4:08 AM
1 Comments:
You had me laughing out loud and sort of crying at the same time. (I was feeling very low when I started reading your blog.) Thanks for the fascinating account of your visit with your biological. It brought back many memories. You are a sharp observer and put your observations into the "must read" category.
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