A Lil Trip South

Just Looking At Waves

I went down to Santa Cruz this week to visit my brother. It’s been a month since I had last seen him at our family art show and in that month so many minute things had shifted and magnified themselves that seeing him and Jenny and their dog, Tule, was a balm to all the shifts that had been occurring around me. It was short, but damn it felt good.

(Also, a quick aside: I’m going to keep this post brief, and probably the next few as well. I’ll be in the middle of moving so it’s going to a be a bit harder to keep up with these.)

The morning after I got to Santa Cruz I woke up late, grabbing the cold coffee from the kitchen Wyatt left me, and got lost trying to find him and Tule on their morning walk to Pleasure Point. The fog was thick and cooling and the waves at Two-Six beach looked head high on the small sets. But the wind was calm. I didn’t feel any rush to think, or to move, something I in general have a hard time doing. Eventually Wyatt called me to see where I was. It turned out I was at the wrong beach.

I didn’t really feel the need to go seek him out quickly in the way I normally might. I just wandered down the point, knowing I’d run into him eventually. 

Writing about it now, it’s easy to see that, away from my day to day life and spaces, I was free to fuck off in any way I chose. Vacations are meant to teach you that, to remind you of this—that there is no set time or destination for anything. There might not even be, when you get into atomic physics, something so explicit as a thing. Shit’s just weird and we’re weird in it. At least, we get to enjoy that in those moments of rest.

That’s what vacations and weekends are there to remind you: that you’re alive—interpret that absurdity as you wish from there.

Wyatt and I eventually met up with our friend driving up the coast from a bluegrass festival in Joshua Tree. He recently had eye surgery so it was our first time ever seeing him without glasses in the decades we have known him (shouts out DJ ♾ % aka Connor aka Connie Miggs). We sat with him and his friend and watched the shortboarders take overhead waves at Pleasure Point. Connor said, once he’s all healed up, he wants to learn to surf. 

Eventually, Wyatt and I got into the water at Jack’s where the waves were only just overhead—something I’m still not super used to. I got into two smaller waves around belly high and called it. The sets were just a little too much, especially with the high tide. When we got out, we found a smoothie spot and watched the water some more. Then I got a coffee. We headed back to Wyatt’s house and I quickly got back on the road to Oakland and heavy 880 traffic and obligation.

What strikes me now, as it has for the past little while, is how that feeling cannot be incorporated more into our moments of the everyday. Why with the rush that we have? Yes, to stay afloat in the race for capital to just keep on living “well.” But why not just have it be easier? Why have we not reached what Keynes predicted to be the two day work week? That dude was a gnarly capitalist, and even he was pumped on the idea of a minimally working society. 

Until that happens I’ll just need to take more vacations when I can, I guess.