The calm Friday before the storm of Memorial Day weekend.
Landing a trick
As I left OB today I spotted a sea lion lying down up the beach. I approached it. It eyed me, its hindflippers twitched. I could see its ribs retracting as it breathed. It was in trouble.
Before that?
It was a great session.
I kept thinking of an old comedy bit. I think it was Janeane Garofalo. I can’t find a reference to it online. Too old to find. Not transcribed.
Or I’m misremembering it. Or it’s in a movie.
The way I remember it Janeane was riffing about skateboarders. Incredulously wondering about 90s skateboard kids–practicing their ollies or kick flips.
“Do you EVER land a trick!?”
I guess when I’m riding waves I have invented a version of Janeane Garofolo in my head to obliquely question my waveriding.
I love to swim so much I don’t listen to Fictional Janeane. Fictional Janeane–who is part of me–must view riding waves as futile. “I’ll never be the best bodysurfer in the world so give up on it.” That must be the theory. Thankfully such perfectionism no longer has power to change me.
I don’t listen to Fictional Her.
I am content trying, and riding, no matter how inept I look. I am having fun. And I am 100% improving at riding waves.
How do you ride a wave to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
Back to the sea lion.
It twitched a little.
I called to it. “Hey buddy, let’s get in the ocean!”
“C’mon man, you’re close!”
He–I don’t know how to spot the sex of a sea lion. Maybe she. They struggled onto their flippers and barked at me. They barked again, taking two steps toward me.
I backed away.
It flopped down again.
I know better than to pester a sea lion. The Marine Mammal Protection Act says, in 16 U.S.C. 1361 (6) that marine mammals:
…have proven themselves to be resources of great international significance, esthetic and recreational as well as economic, and it is the sense of the Congress that they should be protected and encouraged to develop to the greatest extent feasible commensurate with sound policies of resource management and that the primary objective of their management should be to maintain the health and stability of the marine ecosystem.
Which means: don’t fuck with sea lions.
I had made myself a threat. And it used what little energy it had to tell me to back off.
Dammit.
I backed off.
I was powerless.
I walked back up the beach. A bitter end to a good time in the water.
I headed to the main lifeguard tower. In the window was a handwritten sign:
WE ARE AWARE OF THE SEAL: WE HAVE CONTACTED SEA WORLD FOR THE RESCUE.
thank you
I hope the people on the Sea World team can help.
I hope I didn’t see one of that beautiful animal’s last days on our planet.
I hope that critter gets another chance to land a trick.
I’ll be more cautious next time.
K O @ O B
PB Playground
Scuffle between hippies in the parking lot at OB today before I went out. Left me feeling weird before my session.
A Landscape of Things To Read
Tracy Durnell recently posted Browsing as Thinking:
I’ve been having fun lately browsing as thinking, as in, searching a broad category of terms and exploring what’s connected to that node, in service of the things I want to write about. Essentially, intentionally doing a “bad search” as a means of survey.
There’s a character in William Gibson books: Colin Laney.
His skill is sifting through lots of data and getting something useful–finding the “nodal points”–he was “an intuitive fisher of patterns of information”
I loved this character because I identified with his skill. It felt like I could survey data and inferentially come up with useful information.
Nowadays, we all do this in bits and pieces. At the extremes there’s a negative extreme–finding conspiracies and evildoing that does not exist–think: “Pizzagate.”
It’s one of the reasons I loved working at the library as a Library Aide. In taking an hour and being made responsible to sort books on the shelves, I was also surveying them. If I was sorting bookcases full of biographies I was learning the names of notable people. I was seeing which people warranted multiple biographies over time. Like walking around a neighborhood in an unfamiliar city, learning what’s there.
Aside
I still miss magazine stands and record stores, partly because by going through the stacks, I was also learning. I was absorbing facts about the set of books, and I did this for books, magazines, videotapes, large books, everything the library had.
I described my library job–at the time–as “ditch digging in the Information Age.” I was a weird 18-year old. It wasn’t just a job–it meant something. I’ve always been a little grandiose and philosophical and thinking about what things mean.
Surveying Sets Today
Online, we are usually denied the excuse to just look at lots of stuff without having banner ads and recommendations pushed at us. Lists of titles have less information. We browse Netflix or other streaming services and are limited to seeing maybe 24 things at a time. There’s no view of seeing hundreds at a time to see something interesting. There’s no way to spot the one more people have used and so their cover has more wear and tear.
This Post Is Really Just A Ramble
Funny enough, and unrelated, I learned yesterday that a photo I took in 2004 is in wide use on Wikipedia: This Flickr photo: flickr.com/photos/artlung/1625328/
It’s on the entry for Library. And many other pages.
I still love a library.
On Sensible Shoes
Jeremy Cherfas inquired about sensible shoe solutions in his post Sensible Shoes. I have an answer that’s not specific, but is something I feel may be useful and worth a read for others:
I don’t have quite the same level of shoe and foot troubles. But I have thoughts on shoes. I also am old enough to now know that despite a good activity level; age comes with bunion risk, joint issues, and the like.
Between the ages of 8 and 35: I don’t think I ever quite had shoes that fit right.
That changed when I went to a shoe store and found a highly attentive and knowledgeable shoe salesman. He was a bit older and asked me questions about my experience with shoes. It felt cloying and silly at the time. It’s just shoes. It’s just feet.
He asked questions about the wear patterns visible on my leather shoes. He asked about foot pain, back issues, what kind of work I did, how much walking I did and where. He also asked about my weight and whether it fluctuated.
That fella basically nailed down a diagnosis: I was wearing cheap footwear and cheap socks. I wore shoes that were too tight. I needed more cushion in the sole. The choices I’d made had led to terrible fitting shoes–they had inadequate give–that had no give and resulted in blisters if I had to do walking. He talked to me and steered me toward a way to judge a shoe rather than starting with “I like this style” and then choosing whatever fit.
He brought me options. He had me walk and pressed on the shoe with my feet in them to tell me how they ought to feel and how much give ought to be present. The only other experience I’d had like that was the times my grandmother made me shirts.
I left, and I walked out having paid double what I normally would pay. I think it was $90 for a pair of shoes I paid at a time I would have considered $40 overpaying. He had steered me to a slip-on black pair of Ecco shoes with a nice cushion and thicker heel. They didn’t look like me.
Is this useful to Jeremy? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t have advice to find a diligent shoe professional. But these days when confronted with an issue with off-the-rack items not quite doing the job they need to I consider what an experienced professional can add to it.
Mind you, when I walked out of that shoe shop I kind of felt ripped off. I was skeptical that maybe he’d been a hustler.
But the questions he asked, and the shoe that he steered me to ended up more comfortable, and lasted longer than any shoe I’d ever had.
I’ve been wearing basically the same style shoe ever since and they stand up to the most intense walking I do, at San Diego Comic-Con. They’re so good I wear out the soles and I’ve had them resoled even as I get new ones.
I was gobsmacked a month after that first purchase: I had inadvertently lucked into a good shoe experience
Good luck Jeremy!
lastly, a header from 2004:
I used to wear my shoes to the level of disrepair. Part of that was financial, but it was also that I’d made bad choices about shoes.
sun unguent
