Perfectly Present

Greetings

Much like Mikey Ciaramella escaping shirtless from his bunker, I’m here to free myself from the vicious claws and public scrutiny of the ODDS AND ENDS fanbase. I’ve been chased with pitchforks and torches from El Porto up to Topanga trying to explain to the paparrazi what I think about the new Faye Webster album, or if I’ll ever do anything other than a layback. I don’t know, leave me alone.

I’ve been pondering the last couple weeks over a bunch of different topics, but have found it doubly as hard to dive deep enough to put such thoughts into lengthy writing, so welcome to the first and probably not last; brief summary of everything I’ve been silently commentating and especially yearning for.

1. Perfection

Perfection is a strange thing. It’s a good piece of the reason why I’ve yet to release much writing on ODDSANDENDS. The older I get, the more complicated my relationship with perfection gets. What I often used to refer to as a friend in younger years, has increasingly become a pain in my ass. Whether it’s with any art, projects, surfing, or music, perfection has staked its claim as the enemy of anything great, more often than not leaving me with nothing.

Striving for perfection, restricts from putting out great work on a more consistent basis.

However maybe it’s the striving for perfection that makes such work great?

I’ve been grappling more with the terms of the expectations in my head and the reality in the product, which has allowed me to start to take a step back, release all the things I’ve done up to this point, and especially take everything much simpler.

Anyways, this isn’t supposed to be about me, but rather reflect what exactly we are striving for in our own work and whether or not what we’ve built up in our minds has created a barrier for us to produce great things. I would highly consider watching Van Neistat’s video titled “Is PERFECTIONISM a form of COWARDICE?” in which he more articulately explains our deep and often toxic relationship with perfectionism.

2. Waves

Specifically in memory. How many waves do you think you’ve ridden in your life? Now how many do you remember? Recently I’ve been going for surfs and especially when surfing alone, I’ll catch a wave, then after a couple more, completely forget about the one I just caught. I’m talking wave shape, size, maneuvers, it goes completely blank.

However what I do remember is the feeling, the feeling of knowing I did something I’d never done before, the burst of speed, or the adrenaline that comes from a big wave. This raises the age-old question that any sponsored out grom with an ebike in San Clemente doesn’t have to answer, “if it wasn’t filmed, did it happen?”.

As an average surfer who only gets filmed when Denton takes a little bit of shrooms and meows into the mic, I’d like to think it did happen, but it’s scary to think about how many fun surfs and good turns we’ve had that have completely slipped our mind.

I guess this could be said about anything in life, but with any other artform, surfing feels like a progression and you’ve got to remind yourself that although you might not remember them all, younger you would most definitely be stoked on that session that you just claimed was your shittiest yet.

3. Water Laws

There are none. Seriously. Nothing pisses me off more in the water than people that get pissed off in the water. As soon as you start yelling you’ve lost. I don’t care who you are, even if you just got burned back to the stone age, if you start yelling in the lineup you're just a pain in the ass. It’s one thing if you want to have a conversation and tell someone to stop burning you, but realistically, and ponder on this, they actually don’t have to. It’s fascinating to think that we’re all just standing on little blocks of foam in the water and that if my piece of foam goes three feet in front of you, you're going to beat the shit out of me. I’d love to see someone try to explain that to the court. But your honor, he burned me. Okay? What the fuck does that mean, most people are burning muggles.