Every great moment of social change was once a confirmed impossibility. People's determination in the face of overwhelming odds has, time and again, triumphed over what seems impossible. This is what you tell yourself.

We live in specific places. We are marked by a place.

Surfing is sensual. It's a real-time engagement with the forces of nature, which happen to be echoes of the past (which after all, is all a wave really is). Briefly we defy gravity and ride the energy of storms from elsewhere. We are intensely alone as we do it and yet completely swallowed by something larger that enforces a sense of perspective and connectedness to the natural world. It's an experience we yearn to repeat so we go searching for it again and again and we spend years sitting in the water waiting for these radiating lines to come in across the event horizon.

I just sit here and tell the story as though I can't help it. There's always something in the day that reminds me, that sets me off all hot and guilty and scared and rambling and wistful, like I am now.

I can't make something 'useful' to me in a writing sense for a very long time. I don't have any journalistic instinct. And I do keep a journal, but it's neither very revealing nor fruitful for work. Stuff just bubbles up from the swamp later.

People are fools, not monsters

When you're surfing you're not thinking about where you parked the car or what you're going to do when you grow up or what you're going to buy when you've got lots of money. You know, you're just there. You're in the moment. And I think in a contemporary world, that's a rare privilege.