The Monster Children Guide To Having Enemies In The Water

I’ve been doing this thing recently where I quietly turn on surf movies while I do some work.

I have a very specific set of background music conditions that need to be hit for me to actually get work done, is the thing. I will not work in complete silence because that’s beyond psychotic. It helps if it’s not beyond distracting too, however.

So, I can’t listen to music because I’ll start paying attention to the lyrics and hearing one sentence, repetitive or not, while also trying to write another sentence gets tedious. Podcasts are out by this measure then too. I can do music without lyrics and, like, the ambient playlists are really good but there’s only so much South American psychedelic rock, UK garage house, Japanese Jazz, and Aphex Twin radio before I feel like I’m in an actual early Gran Turismo video game. 

That was all a big roundabout way to say I was sort of, kind of paying attention to Jack McCoy’s The Occumentary (1998), which has now overtaken Oceans Twelve (2004) as my favourite mid-day movie to half-watch, at two in the afternoon last Tuesday. Surf movies you’ve already watched dozens of times, by the way, are perfect for just tossing on. Especially if you need to get work done but also need something minimal going on in the periphery so you’re not just pottering about in the void. 

You've already memorised the soundtrack. You know what parts you don’t care much for and what parts are going to make you look over the top of your laptop for two to three minutes. There’s really not too much thinking going on in general, in fact.

Anyway, there’s a section in The Occumentary that’s old news footage of Occy and Tom Curren in an interview together. Media manufactured as that rivalry was, there is one astounding second when Occy cuts Tom off, right after he was specifically asked a question by scratching his very-upper pant leg and launching into endless surf talk drivel. Curren turns and makes eye contact, gives up, and then pivots his head 90 degrees and just stares straight ahead for the rest of the time in that, mate, it’s always the fucking same thing with this guy way.  

It made me think: when was the last time someone notably full-blown, hated someone else in surfing?

We had our rivalries, sure. Kelly versus Andy, Hobie and Velzy, and surf media gossip versus surf media clickbait. Those are all fine and good and are always fun to read printed archives on. But, like Occy and Curren, are all just the result of a competitive streak that just gave us something else to talk about in the lineup for once. Is it bad to have a personal, straight-up antagonist in your life? 

I reckon it wouldn’t be. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that not having an enemy is bullshit.

If you have made it this far throughout life without generating some sort of enemy or enemies, you have done it wrong. Sure: it is nice to be nice to people. I’m always waving the flag and jumping up and down for nice. However: has someone ever just done something in a certain way that makes you hate them? And you can't really say that, that you hate someone. You can't say you hate someone just because they rush between the left and the right peak on a completely fine, shoulder-high day, back-paddling everyone and then making a scene the one time they get dropped in on by one of the lifeguards who has had enough. But I feel that: I feel that you can hate someone for doing that.

You were always told behaviour is everything, weren’t you? And that’s why you were ever well-behaved. You were a polite child, a hand-up-to-ask-the-teacher-if-you-may-go-to-the-restroom child, a calling your friend’s parents Mr. and Mrs. as a kid and still calling that friend’s parents Mr. and Mrs. as an adult. You knew not to be hyperactive in public, learned not to punch your brother in or throw your toys around, and had to sit on the stairs if you couldn’t quite get it right. Still, you were also hitting 15 and going to the beach for your first real dawn patrol because you're at the age when your friends are finally driving so you’re sitting passenger and then the park ranger is opening the gate as the car wheels slowly roll forward, turn to the left, and the headlights spotlight a guy changing from out of the back of a perfectly kept six-figure-worth truck, Tomo (snub nose) in hand, and he waves excitedly in your direction and you just hear your friend driving go, ‘Fuccccccccccccccccccccck this guy,’ under their breath. Get out here last night, he’s asking you both. ‘No, yeah,’ your friend quickly mutters as he shuts off the car. ‘Yeah, went out in the evening. It was alright.’ No mate, no. It was epic, is the thing, he’s telling you while you’re trying to get your still-wet towel from under a pile of wax and extra leashes. ‘Yeah, no, mate don’t normally see you out here,’ your friend cuts back. ‘Usually you stick to your zone a few breaks down south a bit more.’ Yeah, well came here to meet some friends, he’s saying as you then look around the small parking lot and realise you recognise every car there, but you’ve never met this man in your life. By the time your booties are on he’s already paddled out to the dead centre of the lineup and is contesting every single right and left that comes through and that’s when you have your first conscious realization that, wait: I don’t need to be polite, because I also hate that guy. Behaviour doesn’t matter. Behaviour is history’s greatest lie. 

You can just hate someone for being overly friendly. You can fully hate someone for being the way they are. You can, also, just hate someone because they’re an early 40-something tech transplant who has been run out of one wave and is soon going to be run out of another because they can’t stop surfing your local two-foot sandbar like they’re in a heat. People are obnoxious nuisances, and trying to be all diplomatic about it gets you nowhere.

Surfing is good for cultivating little one-sided hate affairs. From the lineup I grew up surfing and still surf quite often and from the lineup I’ve been surfing now for the better part of a decade I can think of two people I actively hate. There are also three people I’m not exactly keen on and four others I’m still on the fence about.

Mostly it’s because they upset rules, regulations, and the balance of the lineup in such a drastic way I feel like society’s eroded into dust. I am normally quite on guard during my normal surfs. It’s a tight ballet as is paddling between groups of people, pirouetting around nature, and trying to bend the very-specific energy that comes from either two hyper-massive underwater rocks rubbing against one another or a storm so severe it killed a group of fishermen before travelling thousands of miles across the open ocean to my exact will a couple dozen or so times over an hour-and-a-half span. Upset that agenda and you’re out, mate. 

And there are a lot of ways to do that. Dropping in on me and everyone else, for one. Not respecting the lineup rules and regulations, as well. Being just a little, obnoxious shithead knobhead dickhead, for sure too. 

Now, healthy mental practice dictates that you should let go of a lot of your anger. Holding on to bad energies, rifts, and grudges leads to increased stress levels, high blood pressure, and really just exasperates that general feeling of panicky, restlessness apprehension. What you really should do is forgive all of those who wronged you. You should move on with your own life in a healthful and focused way, and realise your success and happiness is not dependent or in violation of the wrongness of others.

However: if you’ve never experienced the pure elation of getting one over someone you hate then I don’t know what to tell you other than I’m sorry for you. It's feelings like that why basketball rewards and celebrates dunking. It’s the greatest feeling in the world. 

This is why having not just a rival, but an enemy, is good. It’s good because it pushes you to do better, because you can’t be worse than your enemy. There’s no better motivation than the threat of being worse than your enemy at everything. Do you know how embarrassing that would be? That can not happen. That will not happen.

Oh, that guy who drops in on everyone but always also freaks out a local actually just says, ‘Fuck it,’ and snakes him? Nice backside snap just then, mate. I just did one and my fins came out. Oh, look at this fake-out paddle for an imaginary set and of course you’re chasing it. Your Slater Designs sucks and your Pyzel before that sucked and your JS Monsta Box before that sucked too. Let me just fake left and fade right real quick idiot and, oh, you bit on it. You rube, you philistine. You’re paddling in circles, pal. You’re drowning out there. And bang I rip a perfect one that even bowls up after taking me all the way through to the inside. You lose. You’ll always lose. You didn’t start losing the day you first moved here from Utah and decided to be a kook at my home break, you lost the day you were born.

Only I am the centre of the universe, so stop doing frontside airs a little bit better than me now. I’m the protagonist of reality, and that won’t do.