maybe you wont get it

General Discussion
21

I dont get it!!!

No time to ponder.

Gotta pick the kids up from practice’

oops, hold on gotta call on my really cool cell phone,

It was my stockbroker…given tips on the hot stock…is yours???

Id like to chat but Laguna is on and its difficult to drive my Hummer and talk…

unless Im on my cell phone…did I mention its really cool???

Well that was a really NICE poem…is that what you call it…Ambrose.

Sounds like you love California as much as me…Dude!

Perhaps Ill see you out in the water sometime.

Ive got really nice boards…really. They cost me $1,000.00 each.

I have three of them…a small, medium and large…y’know for the different “conditions”

So call me…on me cell…did I mention its really cool???

22

That one was a beauty, Herb. Mike

23

“…hollywood aint california…”

Au contrare…Hollywood IS California; the glossy dream built on a shakey foundation. Golden footings sitting on sludge and effluent. The Deal is king. Artist pitching their souls for the next project; doomed to repeat the past without ever learning from it. All the while sitting on the Boundary, the Pacific Plate grinding inexorably northward, dragging Baja with it. You can feel it twitching beneath your feet on Sunset Boulevard. Shock and awe, shake, rattle and roll.

Are the Californios crying? Their tears are dust along with the Missionaries, the Chumash, the Coolies, the Oakies. They made their marks, scratches in the dirt. But they are gone, almost without a trace. Like film in a digital age. Visit them in a museum…What have you done for me lately?

Can you turn back the clock? 10,000 acre rancheros with vaqueros rolling the tallow wheels to the pier to load the creaking wooden ships while glass waves crack and peel unridden down the points and reefs. Will you watch soundless black and white celluloid? Will you turn off your computer, grab a quill and ink?

Who is going to lock the gate, turn the tide. Is it Ambrose? Is it Herb? Is it Arnold? Who is going to ask 30 million people to up and go back to where they came from. What will you do if they say they come from California?

I have lived in California all my life. Both sides of my family have lived in California since the Gold Rush. I have seen the good and built some of the bad. I have raised my children in California but my California is not their’s. And their’s is not mine. And that is the way it has been since we came out of the trees 30 million years ago.

Nostalgia is great for the movie screen and a dream before sleep but I’m not sure it works as a lifestyle. So, enjoy the remaining nooks and crannies, make the most of every day. Just remember that the person paddleing next to you is out for the very same thing you are. You have choices, you just have to live with them…

24

they way I look at it or at least have been taught by my kupuna’s is that…

you are born into this world and then you die.

what happens in the time between is up to you

some leave their mark most don’t it’s always your choice the path you take no matter what you think.

time is always the great equalizer

it’s something none of us can really control although we try our best to.

we reminice from where and when we came but things change

they always do

only through memories do we really hang on to the past

but life still passes you by whether you choose to notice it or not…

25
Quote:

I’d leave for someplace with less clowns, but that solution to my pain would be becoming a clown and a pain to somebody else…

Nice one, doc. Go buy an old refrigerator and put it out there, just to give that prick a heart attack. Fortune favors the brave, and insolent…

Some places change faster and with more totality than others. With so many places in Southern California and the coastal U.S. it isn’t about driving by the old mill stream and not being a kid any more, it’s about drivng by the old mill stream and finding your worst freaking nightmare, with all your neighbors bowing down in craven worship of shit you would have ridiculed in other times…

If all the really good guy Californians moved to Hawaii with the best intentions of living quiet low profile lives, that place would become a hellhole as yet unimagined. Yet that’s what is happening to so many mainland locales.

Ah, well…

26

doesn’t it go kind of like this? (sarcastically that is)

for some crazy reason a bunch of folk get togethor to form a town

soon there’s enough of them to form a city

soon the city becomes a metropolis then a megapolis with all the problems of congestion due to all the people

so the rich leave for the outskirts and form suburbs

the poor are left behind and the city starts to deteriorate into a big ghetto

the suburbs start to clog up with everyone running away from the deteriorating megapolis that they inturn become towns too and encorporate.

But the jobs are still in the city so people have to commute

Soon they are commuting farther and farther cause the suburbs and suburbtownships keep growing but the jobs are still in the city.

Eventually the rich realize that it makes sense to move back to the city so they start buying up the deteriorated property and form rich communal tribecas in the heart of downtown forcing the poor into the streets.

The city starts to rejuvenate as the rich start to move back in shuffling the poor from one section of town to another and eventually out of the city altogethor.

The suburbs start deteriorating as the poor move in and the rich move out back into the city.

It’s Dawn of the Dead all over again and the cycle continues…

New York, Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Honolulu and elsewhere its been happening for a long long time…

LA will one day stretch from Fresno to Tijuana and beyond

San Francisco will include Vegas one day too…

Californians will eventually Califonicate themselves into Antartica, North Korea even Greenland that’s just how many of them there are…

Yup Starbucks, Jamba Juice and InandOut burger on every corner of the world along with a non-polluting gas station and local car dealership.

27

"if all the really good guy Californians moved to Hawaii with the best intentions of living quiet low profile lives, that place would become a hellhole as yet unimagined.

According to today’s maui news it has happened.

"WAILUKU – A few years ago, Maui: the Valley Isle became Maui: the Magic Isle. And now it seems the slogan could be changed to Maui: the Mainland Isle.

The number of Maui adults raised in the islands has dropped from 56 percent to 43 percent since 1988, while the population of Mainland transplants to Maui has leaped from 27 percent to more than 37 percent in the same time frame, an SMS study has found. Most newcomers to Hawaii are most likely to move to Maui, the report also concluded."

http://www.mauinews.com/story.aspx?id=15950

29

I bet these guys get it…

Evolutionsurf

…in the ass

Rio

30

California has changed immmeasurably in my lifetime.

I once thought that the “system” was evil, and tried not to be a part of it.

Later I thought that the only way to change the “system” was by working from within.

Now I am pretty sure the only thing you can change is yourself.

"It doesn’t matter, which of our fantasies fail…

“it doesn’t matter, which of our fantasies stay.”

31
Quote:

California has changed immmeasurably in my lifetime.

I once thought that the “system” was evil, and tried not to be a part of it.

Later I thought that the only way to change the “system” was by working from within.

Now I am pretty sure the only thing you can change is yourself.

Apparently in my earlier post I was rendered speechless, much to the acclaim of the masses I would think. Or maybe I was just tired. Seeing what Keith wrote there though…if we’re not broken, there isn’t much to fix. Practice random senseless acts of art for free and confound the weasels chewing on the turds of accelerated society. Encourage doc to get a refrigerator out back, perhaps with a stylish Swaylock’s sticker…

32

if we change ourselves, by one selfless act at a time, we may just change the turds way of being.

Doc, string some power out to that old fridge on the back 40 and put some BEER in it…

33

All that is wrestled from doubt’s dark den

is all that I salute.

The voices which they once more flower

after knowing silence’s ways.

Fish are mute. . . so one thought.

Who knows?

Is there not a place where the language of the fish,

in their absence, is at last common idiom?

34
Quote:

California has changed immmeasurably in my lifetime.

I once thought that the “system” was evil, and tried not to be a part of it.

Later I thought that the only way to change the “system” was by working from within.

Now I am pretty sure the only thing you can change is yourself.

So true…

The only way to change the “system” is to own it…

That what I’ve sadly found…

The more you know the more you wish you didn’t know

Sometimes there’s such a thing as blissful ignorance

Hawaiians called it living life one day at a time…

35
Quote:

The more you know the more you wish you didn’t know

Sometimes there’s such a thing as blissful ignorance

Hawaiians called it living life one day at a time…

During a particularly tense time, right before a full ISO audit of supposed life and death importance (to the company), I offered up “Ignorance Is Bliss” as a potential TQM motto, if not mission statement. I might as well have said “Live Free Or Die”. Once that “contract” expired I didn’t look back. I’m still friends with everyone who managed to laugh. I’ve since come to wonder if “ownership” is just another form of slavery. But enough of it for me- I say let’s go find “Bliss” and leave the "ignorance " for the rest. They certainly seem to enjoy it, and there is plenty to go around.

36

Many idealists would reply “pessimistic, you negative SOB!” Many realists would counter “implications are appropriate, accurate, in light of patently obvious trends!” Critical, consequential, thinking based on an awareness of history, and a degree of understanding of the nature of human-nature-under-stress, makes your thinking adequate to the occasion. Thomas Paine said “If there is trouble let it be in my day so that my child may have peace”. At 59, I fear it may not quite be so. As the Boy Scouts say, Be Prepared…it’s the most responsible thing I can do for my offspring. One can have too much hardware, but not too much software.

In large part prepared, secure in my belief that given God’s omnicience we appear to be no more important than the dinosaurs, my wife and I are heading to our Mel Beach place tomorrow. Should be some small but clean surf!

37

All that we do, we do for our children’s - children.

Hey, we almost got the number two Al Quaeda guy with one of those remote control/Sony Playstation Predator drones, is this what we will give our Grandchildren? Give me Liberty, or fly over me with your drone and feel the excitement swell in your gut as you watch me die on your TV monitor. Then for sure it will be an episode of American Soldier Extreme Idol.

Retirement is just the big paycheck that we thought was owed us from the first day that we started our career. Does that make us desire that the off-ramp MUST be built into the unspoiled wilderness, so that we can put up some more square footage, ultimate drop-jaw-abode, published in HomeAndGarden for the others to drool and wish for? Die little froggy. Or better yet, mutate another leg out of the top of your head, just so I can Armour-All the sidewalls of my spensive car into a shiny, black, meaningless, non-functional (or is it for wind resistance?) “new” tire look. Lah-de-dah. Log-in, and reconnect with your inner “bliss”. Read all about it. Take no prisoners and be free or die.

So we all end up waiting for our SAVE. Own it? You better be in the right group when the water stops flowing from North to South, or at least not in the front of the group when the new age techno cowboys start stampeding the rich and frail into their convalescent corrals to bleed the last of that Huell Howser - California Gold into the potholed streets. It won’t matter what your square footage is if you ain’t got the aqua connection. A baggie of water for ten bucks, Mexican brown or maybe Panama Red?

California surfers don’t surf after it rains. It pours you-know-what out of every man-hole in town. I’m saving up for the Boat to Hah-Why-Yee. You? Last one to leave, turn out the lights…

OM

38

I have a question about…Oh. Sorry, I thought I was in a surfboard design & Construction forum…

39

it’s not just CA, it may be stronger there but america is growing ill. the youth of our country, has become weak in mind and body, lazy and irresponsible. i go to school with them everyday. heal the earth then is will do the same for us.

40

I got it. But the problem is it only works for me. Now I know s0me of my fellow californians or cali ex pats have caused the origins of not getting it.

But lumping everyone from a certain area is a way of getting it?

Now once you get it, what do you do with it? And what if you are afraid of it. Or it is a clown that becomes a 3 fingered and clawed monster that you saw as kids and n0w as an adult must fight it.

My ex used narrow her eyes and say, you don’t get it!? Sure I do. I prefer to spend time in 3 foot surf rather than waste the sunshine in North County Fair watching you oogle over shoes for an hour. But I can see where she got it. Just different strokes for different folks.

It used to be those polo shirts with gator or the hat with the foreign legion flaps. Before it used to be bell bottoms and elvis shirts. One time it was thick full outlines with three fins. Now its quad shortboard shapes. It used to run around with spray cans and searching for the white subway car. It was LSD. It was green with a picture of Ben Franklin on it. It used to be powder wigs and Mozart.

Back to the original equation. I got it. But it only works for me. Well why? because I live my life. You can’t live my life because you are not me. Nor can I live your life because I am not you .

But I am I and I in I in you and I and you are you in I in I in the Great I Am? Now you get it. I would go into it more, but this is a surfboard shaping forum as 10-over found. I get it.

I must live my life. TVM for the interesting dialogue.