Cold Sessions and Freedom

I went out for a session on Saturday. It was cloudy and windy, with an air temperature of no more than sixty degrees and water temperature of 58. Quite cold. Waves were maybe two feet and it was mid-tide, dumping on the inside and mushing on the outside. I was out for almost two hours and caught one decent wave. Frozen to the bone when I finally paddled in. Not a very memorable session. The next day, yesterday, I felt completely done in and could hardly keep my eyes open. I had a sinus headache that made me feel nauseous when I stood up too abruptly, and I found myself obsessing over thermoreactive, thermosensitive microbes living in my nose and activated by my cold session.
I was dissatisfied with most of the things in my life and yet, as usual, unwilling to think about change. Then it occurred to me that change is one path to spiritual growth, if looked at in the following manner:
When our circumstances change, we necessarily change also. A new job brings new scenery, new co-workers, new worries and preoccupations, new goals, new definitions of success. Since we identify our “self” with the thought-streams in our minds, our narratives, a new job can make us feel as though, in many ways, we have become a different person. And this difference, this new relationship with oneself, can perhaps in a small way free us from the tragic meta-narrative of some essential, ego-driven “self” that must be preserved throughout our lives only to die in the end and be utterly lost.

I thought about all the vacations I’d taken, all the times when I had to make some big move in my life, and those times, in retrospect, have a kind of glow about then. It’s when I felt most “alive.” Maybe that’s because, in those times when my internal narrative had changed I was free from the burden of self by virtue of the fact that my ego had not yet appropriated and integrated this new narrative. Of course, in my instance, the changing of my internal narrative is always accompanied, at least in the beginning, by fear. But when the fear subsides, there is freedom. Perhaps that explains the saying, “Go fearward to go forward.”
It’s that way in surfing, too. The longer you surf, the more you begin to secretly long for the big, gnarly, dangerous days, the kind of days when you think to yourself that there’s no way you can possibly paddle out, and that there’s no way you can make those drops. But you do it. You hurl yourself into the waves that scare you, and come out exhilarated, free. Or, you don’t, and you paddle in later full of regret.

Little Herb Make the Waves Nice

The other day, Saturday, I went surfing with a neighbor of mine. He’s around my age, but wisely spent his early twenties and mid-twenties buying real estate in blighted areas. Now that those areas have begun to gentrify, his property is seeing a great rise in value. He no longer works; he derives a livable income from his various rentals, and he owns all his property outright, from what I can deduce, so his cost of living is rather low. From all I’ve just said, you may get the impression that my neighbor is a wise person. Well, I don’t know about that. He’s savvy, that much I can say, but I don’t know how much wisdom one can accrue when they’re constantly baked out of their gourd.

What I haven’t told you about my neighbor will help fill in the picture a bit; he plays in reggae band (bass) and he’s got this wild mop of curls which blows all around his head. See, if you’re stoning, it’s important to have either long hair or sunglasses, something to obscure your eyes so you don’t look so totally baked to everyone else. Our boy takes care of this problem with a spectacular lid which eclipses all his other features. When we’re out surfing and the water pulls his hair back from his face, you can see that the guy is handsome, almost movie-star handsome, which is actually plausible, as his brother is a working actor in Hollywood. But our boy is an ardent and faithful follower of the bud. Ganja uber alles.

So everything in his life from his friends to his music to his fashions choices is dictated by how well it meshes with a state of constant and supreme bakeage. By his own admission he smokes at least twice a day, and on getting to know him a bit you do get the impression that he’s not exaggerating. His house is in a constant state of disrepair and dishevelment, but I’m not sure he even sees it. I would like to know what it is he sees, how he experiences his life; it would be an interesting exercise.

But the neighbor, despite his constant tokeage, does have a plan for the future. When prices get high enough in the real estate market, he’ll sell out and move to Costa Rica. He’s got other tokemaster friends who have taken this path and are already set up in a villa near some killer break, running a Bed and Breakfast or some other touristy concern centered around surfing and the tropical lifestyle, which, I’m sure, includes the cultivation of a few acres of danky buds somewhere in the rainforest. Yes, the neighbor dreams of Costa Rica and why not? A person could dream of far worse things. I wouldn’t mind living there myself, only without the benefit of constant stoneage, I might get bored. I remember clearly that getting high makes things much more interesting. If I were baking, I could move to Costa with one DVD and an old Nintendo system with one game and be fine. I’d bake up in the morning, go surf, come back, take a couple of bong tokes, watch my DVD of “Turner and Hooch”, and play a nice game of Mario. Every day. Never changing. Every day blowing up on some deep Pacific pulses. You know what? Forget the weed, I’ll take that life sober.

I surfed with this guy on Saturday. The wind was blowing hard offshore and the waves were not over a foot and a half, breaking six or seven feet offshore. Mini-tube shorepound. Hardly worth paddling out. But we get out there, my neighbor and I, and he’s going on and on about how “epic” it is, about what a “treat” it is. I watch him take off (he only rides longboards, natch) into one of these little schroffers, and he ducks under the lip, rides about ten feet, and comes paddling out yelling, “I got tube!”

I hardly knew what to do. I was so amused by his attitude that I decided to try to have fun with the little waves, too, but I was mystified by his constant declarations that we were really getting a “treat” out here in the waves today. Finally it hit me – this is what it’s like to surf when you’re baked. If < 2 feet is epic, what’s it like to paddle out in a pumping swell? I can’t even imagine what it would be like to get stoned and paddle out into triple overhead reef break.

Anyway, we surfed for an hour or so. I ducked into some minitubes and of course I had fun (there’s no such thing as a bad session – well, unless you break something or get bitten by a shark). When we were coming in the neighbor invited me to go see “Brokeback Mountain” with him and his girlfriend. Total non-sequitur…just said this out of the blue, as I was leaving:
“Dude. Want to go see Brokeback, dude? Me and my girl are going. Brokeback. Want to go see Brokeback, dude?”
I declined. I hope my neighbor decided to re-bake before he went.

The Upside of Doubling

There’s a woodpecker rapping on a palm tree somewhere nearby. He raps fast and lightly and then goes quiet again. It’s impossible to tell where he is in terms of distance and general direction relative to myself. Last night when I was walking with the wife and dog there was an owl up high in a tree. We could hear his voice but could not find him up in the branches; we had some idea of his distance and general direction relative to us but there was a streetlight glaring down and we could not see upper portion of the trees. Our dog did not care; she was busy setting up and delivering a tinkle at the base of the lamppost. Now, if there’d been another owl nearby, something to use as a point of comparison, we might’ve deduced the tree where the first owl was sitting.
As I was writing this a pounding began outside. It is quite regular, slow, and powerful, like a giant, sluggish woodpecker. But I know what it is; I can identify it as the sound of the bridge construction in the harbor. They are pounding in the footings. If I were to hear the woodpecker again, because I know the direction of the second pounding, I could fix the position of the woodpecker more accurately, or at least know where he isn’t. Doubles can be helpful in this way.

Here’s another example. Inspired by Chatterton, I wrote an offensive, lurid, sensational story that was almost totally ripped off from other writers. The last quality is what interests me the most; I felt that there was a healthy emotional distance between myself and the story (because it was a double). I took it to my writer’s group last night and read the first seven pages aloud; the reaction ranged from outright negativity to hopeful mystification. There was an intense young fellow in attendance who ripped into the story with great vigor, even going so far as to identity me (the writer) with the first-person narrator of the story. I reacted to his criticism with anger; I felt defensive. I thought I’d never met a person as annoying as this fellow. Then I realized that he reminded me of myself and I realized that I was reacting to his perceived defects of character as if they were my own.

I’m interested in group dynamics. I don’t believe we have complete freedom to choose our role within a group. So, until the arrival of this new fellow, I’d been the intense one, the one who sometimes went a little too far in his critiques, who was often overzealous in the pursuit of some minor observation. I was often mystified by my own behavior, as it didn’t seem consistent with my personality as it manifested outside the writer’s group.

Then, eureka! I recognized this young fellow as my double, and it occurred to me that he could take over the role of “angry young man” and that I could be left to pursue a new role in the group. Doubling as a means of liberation.

I’ll give another example that might illustrate this. When I was twelve, our family took a friend of my older brother’s into our home. He had come from a dysfunctional situation and was certainly grateful to have a nice place to stay; however, he was incorrigibly bad. He would crouch on the side of the house and smoke pot, he would ride his moped around town, looking for trashy girls, and he was a fan of heavy metal rock. He was a source of shock and dismay to my mother. However, upon his arrival, my experience in the family improved dramatically. Until that time I’d been the “bad child.” My older brother was studious, courteous, obedient, and quiet, and I was none of these things; consequently I was usually the focus of any corrective or punitive measures taken by my parents. Then along came my brother’s friend, who was in some ways my double, and I found new room to explore my identity. I was not the focal point of negativity; I was freed.