Night Surf

April 26th. We headed out to Zuma around 5pm. The wind was blowing hard from the north and it was too cold to even bother. South on PCH traffic was jammed, one accident after another. We stopped off at Topanga. There was no surf. A bunch of ambulances pulled up. A helicopter landed. Some time went by while they worked on the victim. Once he was stable enough they moved him quickly into the helicopter. Even from a distance you could see blood on the sheets covering him on the stretcher.

We headed down further to little Sunset. High tide, mellow surf. Watched the sun set on our boards, and surfed into the dark. I didn't realize how cold I was until I got out and discovered I couldn't feel the ground. It took an hour before I got feeling back in my feet.


Topanga


Helicopter takes off with accident victim


Portajohn on PCH


Tere


Two boards


MS-13 has claimed this beach. From Pico Union to PCH - who knew they surfed?


MS-13 and the Mini Simmons


My Town & Country board


Long and Short: my Town & Country & Tere's Mini Simmons


Paddling out at sunset


High tide churn at night

Jose's New Teeth

I stopped in at the old corner grocery store next to where I used to live. Annie and Terry the Armenian ladies who run it were very glad to see me.

They said I got out just in time. My old building has been going down hill. No more single folks living alone in apartments. It's either families of 4 in a small one bedroom or groups of drugs addicts, rockers and party boys turning singles into crash pads. The police are out there regularly now.

Jose the building manager has been wasting away. He's lost a lot of weight on this latest tweaking binge, which makes those weird oversized false teeth he got in Mexico look that much larger. His wife has left him. I'm not sure if she took the kid. His beautiful truck that didn't run is gone, as is his motorcycle.

I'm not sure why the owners keep him on. As he goes, so goes the building. They set up a conference call between them, me and Jose so that he could tell me (in between smacking on his weird false teeth) how I'd stolen the window screens, the closet door, the light fixtures, the carpet, and everything else I guess he stole out of my apartment after I left so he could trade it in for crack...The owners weren't buying it any more than I was, and after he ran out of things to accuse me of and just started prattling inanely they cut him off, apologized to me, and asked if it was okay if they keep $50 of my deposit just to make him happy. I was cool with that, but when I went to pick up the money, in cash, from Jose, he tried to short me $200.



I wrote about Jose's new teeth several months ago, before his crack or meth use had gotten out-of-control.

Jose the tweaker manager of my ghetto apartment building has new teeth.

I'm not sure where he got them or why he has them. He's a relentless scavenger. Maybe a tenant left them behind after moving. Maybe he found them on the street. There seemed nothing wrong with his old teeth. They appeared to be pretty regular, which is to say unnoticeable because the only time you notice teeth is when something is wrong, like they are unnaturally white or they are rotten or they are seriously snaggled or they are really stained or several prominent ones are missing...

Jose's new teeth are very noticeable.

They were made for a head much bigger than his, and the weird effect is exacerbated because he seems to be shrinking, maybe due to all the speed. Because they don't really fit, his speech is a little slurred and he can't seem to get his lips to cover them, so what he does instead is the sort of freakish grimace that I think is meant to be a grin.

Whatever drugs he's doing, it's a combo that has him at his most agreeable in the 6 years I've lived here. He's not looking so good, but he's happier (in a manic way) than he's ever been...

Malibu

Early March at Zuma Beach.


I was still using borrowed boards. Tony Alva loaned me this.


Tere with his mini-Simmons. This board always gets a lot of comments.

Zuma Beach, March 1 2009, 11:00am

The Salton Sea

More from the set I did in February.

Rogues & Radicals

My friend and surfing buddy Tere Karabatos is doing a show (presented by Tony Alva) in the Alva skate shop this Saturday, 6pm - 10pm. Tere's work is encaustic painting, which has its roots in ancient Greek religious art, only his is applied to more modern icons and iconography -- a series of broken down and halftoned images of surf, skate and punk icons...one of which is based on a photo I took of Henry Rollins with Black Flag back in 1983.



Rogues & Radicals
Tere Karabatos & Tony Alva
w/ DJ Al G.
Saturday march 18 6 - 10pm at Alva Los Angeles
1086 South Fairfax Ave, LA CA 90019
323.954.7295

Zuma March 21 2009

This week's beach update splits between two weekends. The idea here is to try to convey what this experience is like for me...which is not about a bunch of macho young man's stuff in which one tames a wave and conquers nature and engages in Xtreme anything...it's more about the fact that you cannot conquer nature, you cannot will the ocean to do anything, it's not listening to you and really doesn't even know you're there. it's about some sort of sense of one-ness with the whole thing. It's sort of easy to get that feeling of serene awe when you are sitting on a board in the ocean with the dolphins swimming not so far beyond you, storm clouds building over the mountains...

It's like the Buddhist mindfulness/Vipasanna meditation, which is a meditation not of blissed out, what's-up-with-my-naval escapism, but of focus, concentration on specific aspects of the immediate here-and-now.


My board, Zuma, March 14, 2009


Tere, Zuma, March 21, 2009