What it means to Surf the Rockaways

a 'lil wholesome switch up

Here’s what it means to Surf the Rockaways:

From second ave, I can either walk up to the A and take it directly, or, I can take the F to Jay st - Metrotech. I prefer the A; there are usually empty seats where I can sit down and read. 

Ride the A to Rockaway BLVD. Disembark, hurry down the stairs and take a left and then right to the Q52 stop. Take a moment to collect yourself: the trips almost over. Wait for that big blue to roll into its red landing pad. 

The bus, while more difficult to read, gives you the joy of watching the montage occurring outside the window. Urban to the marsh. Marsh to the urban. The urban and coast, entangled. Avoid the fantasy of distant lands, tropical beaches deserted. A simulacrum of purity. Sublime Brain-rot can only mistrust purity; They are born enemies. Sublime Brain-Rot eats at purity until its plastic barrier disintegrates, muddying the idea of it. The Rockaways give fertile feelings to the practitioner of Sublime Brain-Rot. 

Walking the path from the train to the shore brings me past sand dunes wrapped in scruffy grass brings me back to the vacations my extended family took to Hampton Beach. We spent full days at the beach, hot, tired and hungry. I remember wanting nothing more than to walk home and play Pokemon with my cousins. We would sneak away, bare feet tip-toeing across concrete that simmered with heat. The front yard of the house was filled with patches of the same scruffy, sharp grass that borders Rockaway Beach

I let the rockaways swallow me whole; I Pause and I Sniff, pulling in the icky fecundity, the life that originated in the ocean. Life that still persists, life that still rots.

Take the time to inhale that pulsing, vibrant smell; let rubber and pavement mingle with the tang of the sea. Synthesis is inevitable, but this isn’t the synthesis of similarity. The Rockaways corrupt binaries: we no longer have the slime of the city and the pristine, unspoiled coast. Sit in the lineup and watch planes descend into JFK. Watch the fog spool around the wings like cotton candy. Immersion: a plane-fog hybrid, the borders indefinite, offering no division. Sirens rush along a nearby road, the red and blue blurry in the haze. 

Neither urban nor natural, it begs for rhizomatic thinking, graciously offering lines of flight. 

…

Call it vibrancy or thing power: just know it is an assemblage: the wind, water, tides, and sandbar: it creates a smooth, calm wave. Before moving to the east coast, my friend Blaine told me that, after surfing in California, east coast waves would feel gutless. Gutless, yes, but also inviting. People chat, laugh, drop in on each other, share wave. Its a pleasant contrast to the feral competition of California. 

I rent a mid-length, cruise, slip into small barrels, and laugh whenever I wipeout. The soft curl entices a leisurely cruise. Under the right circumstances it opens into a rippable face, but these moments are few and far in between. Pick up some volume, cruise in an easy line, pull into the barrel, grab your rail and on the smallest days you can burst through the curtain of water, making the next section with time to spare. 

The jetties create a unique wave. The primary peak forms around the jetty to the open space left. Crowds flock to this quasi point; etiquette is suspended at the Rockaways and the crowd makes for stressful surf. Instead, I surf to the left of the jetty - picking up a peak that forms on the cusp of the groin created by the jetty. This cavity creates an open face with enough space to turn. It requires some control: fuck up the exit and you’ll wash up on the jetty.

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Step out of the 4th St. station, the sun and salt lingering on your lips, and the city unfurls like a rhizome. Lines of flight present themselves as so many currents to follow. 

Listen up, ya goblinheadz, I’m about to let you into a little secret. Nature, that pristine out-there replete with crystalline streams and elk grazing idly at a field of flowers, it only exists in the ideal. The ideal, which is nothing more than a fancy word for bullshit.

Nature, the true wild (or what Thoreau called the “wild”) doesn’t exist out there: it always exists in here. I’m not talking about parks or the trees planted with tags advertising the C02 sucked up in their green bits; I’m talking about the icky, sticky, pulsing vibrancy of matter meeting. Its the rat snaking fry from your table, or the pigeon pecking pile of bread, that tangible buzz of contact. The perpetual hum of movement, the flow that never quits, it comes together and falls apart in motley constellations. 

Like I said, ya goblinheadz, the Rockaways are a sensory stimulant for Sublime Brain-Rot: visual, audible, odorous and haptic. It pulls you down from plastic dreams of a pristine place in the distance. It stimulates a sensory state of acute awareness of the compels here. No different from what Anna Tsing called passionate immersion: a ceaseless vigilance, indefatigable awareness of matter never keeping still; a way of noticing its deviant combinations, that mercurial process being what the lesser minds call “nature.” Nature is always here, never there. 

Sit with this like a kid playing Pokemon. Share it like you trade a Pokemon that can only evolve via trade. Send it to a friend, invite them to this crazy lineup, might key ‘em into something they miss: that lack, the object you forget until you’re miles away from home. Hit that MF like button and expand the goblinheadz community.