Getting Back Out There

It’s a new year! A new lap around that suspended, celestial merry-go-round. We are back where it all began, and where it will continue to begin, until it won’t. How are we feeling!? Personally, I was feeling a heck of a lot better before the coup. But what can you do, eh? Donny Boy is on the way out and we all knew it wasn’t going to be without a tantrum or twenty. 

Okay. Deep breath. Let’s resume that quiet journey through the sky. Keep moving forward, keep moving forward. Ah. Back to the blog. 

As I look forward through the lens of BambooBlister, I can’t help but get a little giddy. A little anxious, but unmistakably giddy. Like that set you see breaking further up the point, or at the other end of the bay– something is coming and you’re either catching it or getting the hell out of the way. 

BambooBlister, like myself, and, I’m sure, many of you, will continue to evolve and re-shape to the environment that surrounds it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it will grow, or shrink for the matter, but I have no doubt that things are changing (if you haven’t noticed the new user interface already). But as the world changes, lockdowns tighten, coups ensue, I want to focus less on me and more on us. 

I think that there is a potential here to be more than a personal blog of my own mishaps, epic sessions, and internal sad-boi dialogue. I hope to shift directions, just slightly, like a check turn, if you will, and push the spotlight outward towards the surfing world as a whole. Which, of course, means all of you. 

Now, perhaps, it’s a bit easier to understand my giddiness and anxiety. This idea (if you can even call it that) requires the contribution of those other than myself, and are thus greatly out of my own control. But the surfing world, that we are all so deeply committed to, is vastly different from person to person, wave to wave, coast to coast. 

Nonetheless, some unifying force keeps us all bobbing here, heads perched towards the horizon, both cheering for and snaking one another, waiting for the next wave, then the next one, then the next. We are individuals, with our own ideas, memories, and dreams, experiencing a single ocean (okay I know there are what, seven?) as a group. 

So as we dip our toes into the murky, freezing, and flat-out treacherous year of 2021, I’m asking all of you to consider sharing some oceanic stories of your own. Be it an anecdote of a session or a quick photographical portfolio of a trip down the coast, I’d love to hear and see your own stories about the way the ocean, and surfing in particular, has shaped, and continues to shape, the world around you. 

 And don’t worry (not that you ever really would), I’m going to continue my Wednesday night ritual of staying up for hours in bed waiting for literary inspiration and I’m going to continue my Thursday habit of putting words to paper with the ease of hiking up a sand dune after a full day in the water. I’m not going anywhere, whether you like that or not, and I hope to squeeze out a couple video reviews, ~pop culture~ commentaries, and even some local legend interviews as well. 

This past year was one for the books, and I mean that in the worst way possible. Somehow I’m still here and, if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you are too. Like this past weekend at Scott’s Creek, fogged in with triple overhead sets, the fear of the next inevitable long hold down and the memory of that last wipeout can become so overwhelming that you want to paddle in. But sometimes all it takes is that one set to clear everyone out, so you can pop up next to your buddy, scream, and get your ass outside to try again. 

2021, everybody. Let’s try and ride this next set, rather than get mowed by it again. 

Click on the “community” tab at the top of the page to get in touch and send in a submission. I can’t wait to give them a read and ultimately get them up on the blog.