How mainstream is surfing now?

It cracks me up that surfing gets the "happy relaxation" treatment. When in reality it can often be the most frustrating s#^$ ever.

 

When I saw the Lords of dogtown for the first time I thought "holy crap someone captured a little of the edginess of the surf scene of the 70s". It wasn't the clean, safe marketed thing that it is today. It was dangerous, it was about being abused by the older surfers and fighting back to gain a little respect, dirty water, dirty beaches, and struggling to fit into that group of outcasts. in some ways it was miserable other than the surf and the romanticized memories everyone who lived through it carries with them today. I'm glad I lived through those years, there were a bunch of close calls but its fun to look back now.

 

Check out "Dogtown and Z Boys", a more raw, less produced, more edgy version. It is sick. Amazing we all lived through that era (well, not all of us did).

 

Bro, I never said your youth was wasted. Sounds like you did it right 100%. I said you would accuse the youth of today of wasting their opportunities for good times, sex, and making money. Which in many cases they are, in many cases they are crushing it.

Dora, well, he is Dora. The rebel without a clue. But he does have many valid points and was a key instigator against authority, commercialization (yes, he made money but gamed the system). A sad demise indeed.

 

Reading the Miki Dora Rebel book now, recommended on the surf books tread. It's a good book. Sounds like he did invent localism, which i'm glad is not a big thing on the EC, though i hear it a bit in FL and supposedly in Jerzey. He put in a lotta years for being a ahole to so many peoples, i'm quite impressed so far. think i got 50 or so pages left

 

Lords of Dogtown was really good.

And I wish someone had told me I could get all the points I need by just owning the boart and wetsuite. Would have saved me a lot of trouble.

 

I remember back when I was a kid we didn't have cutoffs, or even pants. We used to take our pillowcases and cut holes in those and wear them. Of course we didn't have belts or string either, so we would cut the tails off horseshoe craps and weave them through the waist as a belt.

And we didn't have boards. At first we just took our mattresses off our beds and surfed on those. You'd have to leave them out after about 4pm so they'd dry out before bed time. Unless it was good. I tell you, during hurricane season there were weeks when I didn't get a dry night's sleep! But then one dude actually took the door off his bedroom and surfed on that and we all thought that was tits. Dragging that thing uphill to the beach, and then uphill again back home kind of sucked, though.

Man, that was livin'.

 

One time this skinny beach rat kid took a door off a refrigerator,
and put a skeg on it and
rode big Juno Pier, he jumped off the end so he didn't have to paddle out.
It was epic, he flew down the double OH wave face as it was cresting,
penetrated the bottom of the wave, kept going...
towards the bottom of the ocean, then
miraculously the extreme buoyancy of the refrigerator door
caught up
with gravity and the refrigerator door,
with the kid with his arms wrapped around it,
in a death grip, popped up like a champagne cork
aboot 8 foot above the surface,
it looked like a giant tarpon on the hook, gleaming in the sunlight.
The cops met him on the beach.

 

Whelp, I don't know about that nonsense, but I know that back in Jersey we didn't have no stinkin' cigarettes and beers and such. No way, man.

See, what we used to do was go scrounging around for medical waste. This was back before those tractors would groom the sand and grab all that stuff up. That was gold for us. Mr. Belmar can back me up, I'm sure.

Now, if you found a bottle with a pill in it, you were stylin'. If you found a full bottle of pills, you were a God.

My friend Kenny, though, he was crazy. He used to take those found syringes and shoot em. He died mysteriously a few years ago, not sure what of, so the details are hazy. But I remember us all thinking he was tits crazy.

Then again, might have been brain damage from water ice freeze. Confusing sometimes to remember it all.

But the pillowcases, I remember those like it was yesterday. Jersey man. It gets in your blood.

 

Is New Jersey in South Park, CO?

 

True story... Fishermen in and around CM used to haul weed and hash. Occasionally they'd be getting close to getting busted, and dump everything overboard, and occasionally, it would wash up on the beach. When somebody found some, they'd dry it out and call it "sea weed." It tasted nasty, but did the trick... or so I'm told.

When the authorities did bust somebody with a large quantity, they'd take it to the Coast Guard Station and burn it. You could see the smoke for a mile...

 

It's known as "Square Grouper" down here.

 

#too mainstream