Intro tread

Awesome, a free surfing board? You can't put a price on that! Plus, my health insurance should cover the therapy...

 

Ho lee fuk that dude writes a lot of words. Definitely not me. By page 4 of that one treade it already vastly exceeds my career internets wordcounte.

 

Thanks, LBCrew. I am definitely a Surfing Kook. Well... a Kook, anyway. Who likes to float around on a surfbort. I've always really enjoyed your posts, partly for geographical reasons but also just in general. I debated whether to post the following anecdote cause it's gonna get all weird and man-crushy for a second, but... I can't remember if it was you or someone else from Monmouth Beach (or maybe north LB) but there's a random poste from... maybe 2011ish(?) that's always stuck in my head. I'll attribute it to you since you've been around herre since back then and generally seem like a pretty awesome dude. It was in a treade over the summer about the mass benny exodus every sunday evening, and you (or whoever) wrote something along the lines of "I'll be hanging out on my back porch relaxing on Sunday evening, having a couple beers and grilling" or something like that (it was more poetic though, or maybe I just remember it that way). Something about reading that sort of just snapped everything into focus and I realized that basically all I wanted in terms of big picture life goals was to own a house in Monmouth County within a couple miles of the beach with a wife and kid(s), work at a job I didn't hate and earn enough for myself and my family to live comfortably, and otherwise just chill and live a simple healthy life and surf as much as I could.

At the time I was living in MD about 2 hours from the closest break but spending most summer weekends at my girlfriend's place in Belmar (thus I was part of the weekly exodus, albeit not the northbound one, but still tough to stomach having grown up as a local), surfing about 5 times a year, in lots of credit card debt with no savings to my name whatsoever, and with absolutely zero short-term prospects in my career field in this immediate area. It's been a bit of a journey, with a stretch of a couple years while living in CO during which I surfed maybe 5 times(?), but I can literally say every part of my vision above is now reality. I'm sure that won't last forever, at least that it won't always be so simple and picture perfect, because life happens, but it feels pretty fvcking good right now.

Again, I've no idea if it was you or someone else who posted that, and no idea if you even have a back porch or how close your actual family/real estate/financial situation is to the scenario I described, but if it was you, thanks for the life inspiration. And if not, thanks anyway for all the stoke you've posted on here (and all the surfbort medical advise, not that I've read or taken any of it yet, but I hope to in the future). Hope to see you in the water someday. In spite of what I said in my intro, I'll try not to drop in on you and I promise to never throw your sh!t in the water.