Decompression

He dropped down from the rock-and-roll floater, tail two feet below the nose of his board, hands at 12 and 6 o'clock, feet cross body, front knee to back elbow for the recoil from the drop. Andy Irons taildrop body english was etched in my mind. I could hear Perry Ferrell covering the Stones in that last great ...lost video, Lost at Sea, "Please allow me to introduce myself..." Just a bunch of friends who ripped and lived life to its fullest.

That's what I imagined before the sun set, October 10th, 10-10-10, paint brush in my hand, negative space shadows of figures in the barrel, airs, mist blowing out the back of the waves, painting before a crowd of strange, energized people, on one of two pieces of plywood my friend and I worked on from noon to midnight, under the freeway in San Francisco. I drew Andy right over a barrel like it was that same wave at Lance's.

The Mermen jammed out electronic fuzz and high octane 64th note delays, surf guitars on acid, and I was dressed like Hunter S. Thompson painting on chocolate covered mushrooms...it felt like my scene. Billy Shatner had run off into the crowd after his muse, down by the sculptures, closer to the techno. I'd paint for an hour, feigning some kind of structuralism, overly intellectual, cryptic lazy scrawls, some homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat, "Don't ever be sad", "I have a strange anthropomorphic bent", then Shatner would come back, the wild-eyed, dialated Aquarian, absorbing drama from his girl's intense feminism and paint fluorescent green over my shadow figures and waves I worked so hard on, Pollock splashes with the paint water, hand washes over psychedelic pastoral moment I imagined, gone forever. "He's so subtle," I heard earlier. The hippy girl in the half-vest snuck up behind me at one point and shot video, so subtly I didn't have time to think about her--curly brown locks, caramel skin--a moment of synchronicity, then she was gone.

I'm painting surf scenes stage left while the Mermen plug everyone into the air. Vanity strikes: First wave stood on, 1987, Lindamar Beach; surf, punk rock third wave, Mission gentrification opens the door to masses with tech money, bio, computer, hipsters in waves, 2000, the Albion becomes Delirium, 2007, Member's Only jackets, nylons and bicycles, Valencia looking like Sunset Blvd...live music, Frieda Kahlo parades on Dia De Los Muertos, playing a cello as a bass 23rd and Folsom, banging a floor tom with Ghost, 24th and Bryant, and the sun is setting, the Giants are about to win the penant, I had my first Giants hat when I was six. I was there--inside my head I'm screaming at Billy "SHE SAID SHE WOULD PAY $500!!!!! STOP PAINTING ON IT!!! WHY DID YOU PAINT OVER MY WAVES!!!!!"

I would wander off through the crowd for an hour while he painted, then we'd switch. Toward the end of the night he was quickly leaving for another world, his eyes the only thing to read. Hurt, worry...the muse is still open, his dad is still sick in the hospital...The sea is swirling, fluorescent, pagan, electric, tribal, weird shit is happening everywhere. They wanna look for more drugs. They're gonna wander down the block. The boys are young, talented, we're all friends. We're just looking to have a good time, she says. The look says, don't take her away. Don't take him either, not now.

I remember this, I swear. We're all in this together. Let's have another drink. Smoke a J. Furry hats and jackets, topless girls with face paint. None of that matters. That lady wasn't gonna buy the painting anyway. The money doesn't matter. We'll probably never see her again. It's not about the money. She was drunk off her ass...Let's get this shit done. Let's get you home. Yeah, I can drive. She's already there...

It all washed away. The moment was eternal, maximum. The sun set like a wave crashing. Two weeks later a parachute drew fire by the sea, in the rain, under a full moon. The Giants won the World Series on Dia De Los Muertos in Texas. Andy Irons died that same night in Dallas. Everything was different after that. I don't know how, but it was. The gates had opened. Now, sometimes I just don't wanna go to sleep...

So...

The coincidences led me forward. Yes, in a hippy-mystical way like James Redfield's book, "The Celestine Prophecy"...synchronicity leads you forward in a moment of indecision when you don't know what direction you're life should go. The higher power in whatever form shows you signs that you just need to be ready for, awake, alert, conscious: you've been thinking about going to Mexico and suddenly a commercial comes on TV to visit the Yucatan or you overhear a conversation where someone just got back from Cabo. You wonder whether you should study biology and your friend asks you if you want to go to the zoo.

But let me get rid of any vanity of being destined for something, even if it could be true. I've been drifting because I'm lazy, not because of a dizzying encounter with a chasm in my life. Yes, I do believe in the void, but it's ruined many a moment where I should've just put my arms around a girl instead of dragging her to the edge as if she didn't know that the dark existed.

In the last six months, where my sanity has been in question, I had moments roaming around San Francisco, drunk, stoned, with a guitar occasionally, trying to figure out where to go. I worked at Whole Foods for five years up until last June. The work paid just enough to keep me from complaining, but not enough to really ever get ahead. My coworkers and I shared a sort of entitled bohemian existence where nights out drinking helped ignore the question of whether we or not we deserved better then working in a grocery store. It's easy to say "yes, of course. Fuck that, I know..." But this question is deeply political and sociological. What is this better life we deserve? The tech nerds are rich and they can afford to shop at a place like Whole Foods. Their occasional displays of class conscious arrogance are the bain of many a charming artist jockying a cash register when they want to ring up a case of twelve bottles of champaigne in the 8 items or less express lane. They can afford to go out whenever they want and numb their brains with alcohol and drugs much more frequently and with better taste then the struggling Joe.

I don't know. I cannot wrap my head around this comparison. But I can say that their materialism is not going to change the world. That's all. Some of my good friends genuinely want to change the world, even if it's just their own.

In any event, there was synchronicity, strange conversations about the collective unconscious, characters that seemed out of the movies, so strange, sharp and genuine that I believed what they said. Some checked out online. Others I'll have to wait and see if they show up again.