Philosurfing Lite Edition: Winter Storm Orlena

Heya! I’ve been in a deep dissertation cave and not posting much on the blog. I did put this little edit together from Winter Storm Orlena back in February. We’ve had a pretty miserable winter since then with tons of high pressure ridges pushing swell away off our coasts. This, however, was a really fun snow surfing event. The video starts from inside the clubhouse where I’m watching The Search by Sonny Miller (1993) featuring the fantastic surfing of Tom Curren. This was my favorite surf video to watch growing up because Curren has such great form to imitate — the low compressed stance and impeccable timing for tubes and turns. I’m a goofy foot and have had zero problem integrating some of the insights I get from watching Tom (who is regular foot) surf into my own surfing. This is a bit of advice for everyone out there: the person doesn’t have to have the same stance or body type (or even gender — I love learning from great women surfers too) as you for you to get something out of their surfing. The thing you have in common with that great surfer: you’re both human beings, usually with two legs, two arms, two eyes, one nose, one set of hips, etc. Different surfers have developed different ways of placing these body parts vis a vis board and wave and some might appeal to you more than others. If it appeals to you, try it out! Try it first at home and then go plan to put it into practice in your own surfing. This has been my method since I was 12 years old and I can say in full confidence that it works.

On this note, the “surfing” in this video is GoPro pov. When you’re watching this think about what I’m looking at when I’m out there. You don’t see much of my feet or my surfboard except the nose because I’m always LOOKING AT THE WAVE. Or if I’m paddling back out I’m looking into waves frothing on seeing them come at me in their tubing formations. This is the best way to understand where to sit to take off and what to reasonably expect to find as you ride down the line. Remember that surfing is not about being in the moment — it’s about being ahead of time. Our brains, to use the words of the great philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, are anticipation machines (Consciousness, Explained, 2011). When they’re functioning at their best they’re seeing the road ahead and making moves that will benefit us in the short and the long term. In order to anticipate what any wave will do you have to be able to understand and see waves as rights, lefts, and closeouts, as fast, mushy, tubing, or sectioning. The more angles you watch waves from — the beach, the shoulder, the inside, the more patterns you’re uploading into your internal software to write the programs that will help you ride these suckers! Notice that I begin the vid with a good surf check from shore so that I can see what the possibilities are before I put on my wetsuit. Nothing mystical about it! Waves are what we study in order to read them well. So get to it!

Fuzzy still from the early part of the morning. That looks like a wave that probably won’t pan out super well unless you’re on the far end, which would be the middle of the beach. The peak breaking has a right on it that looks like it will run into the jetty and the first part of the wave will “section off”. It’s the section section going to the left that would be the ticket on a wave like that.

Introducing the Clubhouse Page

As most people know I’ve been setting up the CSC Clubhouse in Rockaway since this last fall. Covid has kept me conservative about blasting it out and filling it up, but things are starting to loosen up and the clubhouse is ready to go. By “loosen up” I mean many of us have had Covid, have gotten the vaccine, or are just so used to the protocols that we’re able to navigate life with them in place. I’ve set the place up so that it can be reasonably shared with others without any overlap. We’re pros at using text groups to communicate our moves — board pick ups and drop offs, co work hours, shower turns, wetsuit storage, etc. I’ve made a dedicated page on this site to read about the clubhouse, with links to products in the store.

Clubhouse

I experimented with a scheduling page for co-working but it’s too confusing and I’m going to stick with Venmo and text messaging for now. Scheduling stuff around surf and swells just requires a kind of flexibility that cloud computing cannot keep up with. As you’ll see on the page, we’re ready for overnights. Please get in touch via text or email before booking, but you should be pretty good to go with the way I have the forms set up on the site. I’ve also decided to rent out boards from the CSC Quiver. This is a great opportunity to try a number of different shapes and fin set ups before purchasing your next board.

Phenomenology of Surfing: 3 Sessions, 1 Morning

Here’s a 10 minute video that documents the last morning in February surfing around the Rockaways. I was coaching Brant Weil who is figuring out how to ride his 6’6” CSC x Barahona Potentia shape. I’m riding the same shape, but in 6’1”. The video contains voiceovers and slow motion. I explain some of the things that I consider while I am surfing — both in terms of overall conditions and particular thoughts and considerations that I have and make while riding waves. The filming is done by CSC student Emory Lee. Emory alternated between their Canon and their iPhone. Surf filming is a great way to get better at surfing, and I mention this in the video. I will be doing more videos like this one, but I will also do some that get into one particular aspect, say wave judgment, or the take off. Not all of these will go public. The best way to ensure that you get all of the content is to sign up on our Patreon page. Right now Patreon subscribers get early access to all content. For example current subscribers have already seen this video. There are some cool perks over there, so check it out!

Introducing the Philosurfing Series on the YewTube

Inspired by the fact that I finally launched the channel, I’ve posted another vid quick on the heels of the last one. This a day in the life style video. I will call all the day in the life style videos “Philosurfing” and will label them with the date. They won’t all have the same formula, but you can expect that there will at least be two things: philosophy and surfing. Here, inspired by the audiobook I had just finished listening to, The Four Horsemen, I discuss surfing, religion, and sport on my drive to surf in NJ. Then I have a surf session, over which I have done some voiceovers to help people understand better what to look for when entering a wave. Then I head back to NY, check the surf again, decide against it, go back to the CSC clubhouse, rinse the gear, and sit down to read Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, the preface of which we discussed in book club last night. I had thought I was done surfing for the day, but then I saw the winds had glassed off and that there was still some significant swell on the buoy. So I paddled back out and had an incredible session. Stoked and fortunate that CSC stalwart Emory Lee was walking their dog on the boardwalk and got some great iPhone clips of my last waves, which I placed at the end. There will be more vids of this sort, but the next few will feature more about the style of teaching and focus on some of my students. I’ll also do some more detailed gear review vids to get that process started. It’s fun to make these things. Likes, follows, comments appreciated!

CSC YouTube Channel Is Live: First Vid On the Conatus in Spinoza's Philosophy

At long last I’ve gotten the YouTube channel up and running. The above video is my first one. Not all videos will be of this deep of a philosophical nature, but it’s definitely a genre I will continue to explore. I plan to put up progress videos, testimonials, CSC backstory, vids about common mistakes, club surfing compilations, day in the life stuff, etc. I am still in the planning phase. I have not yet figured out how much will be completely free and public and what kinds of vids I’ll have a membership only function on. I’ll be figuring a lot of that out through the Patreon Platform where my page is www.patreon.com/conatussurfclub. My intuition is that people who pay in and support CSC the most should at the very least get early access, if not exclusive access to some content like inside surfing tips, gear reviews, and any promotional stuff that pops up. You can help in these early phases by simply going to the YouTube channel and subscribing. Also helps if you view, like, and share my vid and any subsequent vids I put up. Going to try to keep things fresh, interesting, and authentic to my vision of philosophy and surfing. Will update here, in newsletters, and on patreon as things become solidified.

Philosophy of Surf Fuel Pt 1

As I sit down to write this I am quickly realizing that I could author a whole book on food, my relationship to it, what it means for us as human beings, what it means to us specifically as surfers, recipes, pairings, ideas for stocking the pantry, for what to pack on surf trips, how to eat on surf trips, and of course epic pics of ingredients, meals, and waves. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate . . . still couldn’t hurt to put another iron in the fire. In this post I will touch on all the subjects above, but will undoubtedly not be able to do justice to them all. Hence calling it Pt 1. There will doubtless be more posts on this topic. I imagine we’ll also add a cooking component to the forthcoming YouTube channel.

We are what we eat. We are also what we drink and breathe and see and touch and who we know and what we believe. We are a lot of things. We are porous and changing and subject to entropy. Like the rest of nature we are energy converting beings. Our cells are constantly rearranging and dying and growing. It’s truly an incredible process. Food is not only physical fuel for us human beings, as nothing is merely physical for us. For we are the creatures that have this very particular and special relationship to language. Our lives are always wrapped up in meaning making. Food is one of the most important organizational phenomena around which meaning is made in human life. Every meal tells a story. Think about it. We have media outlets dedicated to food, scientific specializations for studying it, religious rituals concerning it, and complex economic industries tied to it.

My brief history with food runs as follows: breast milk (no formula here), homemade smashed vegetables from our garden, lots of omnivorous homemade meals by mom, divorce, two households, stopped liking vegetables unless mom cooked them, fishing for salmon before school with dad from 6-13 years old, lots of meat and potatoes and cereal, didn’t really drink water, read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in 1996, converted to vegetarianism, failed, started working in the restaurant industry in 1995, moved to Costa Rica in 1998, started drinking water, became vegan and the end of that year and stayed vegan until 2003, worked in casual fine dining off and on as a waiter from 1995-2012 (new American, Italian, French, and Japanese restaurants), had a stint helping my mom with her and her friend Katie’s organic catering company 1998-2000, continued to develop my skills as a home cook from vegan days onto today’s present omnivorous phase, pandemic hits 2020, I cook more at home than ever before. Obviously a million stories to tell in there, but them’s the cliffs notes.

I was a vegan in some of the most fundamental parts of my young life, from ages 18-23. It was in that period that I learned to love drinking water, eating vegetables and legumes, and preparing meals at home. I also did a lot of vegan baking — scones and calzones and cookies and pies — because although there were plenty of ready made offerings in Bay Area grocery stores and cafes by then, they weren’t that good. It was in this phase that my current sense of “comfort food” was established. There is nothing like hummus or tahini noodles with tofu — really anything with tofu, which I consider a junk food — or a big plate of fried potatoes or sweet potatoes, or a No Cookie cookie, or sesame sticks (my particular weakness). Oh yeah and fake meat Asian cuisine. Vegetarian Palate “chicken nuggets” anyone? Can’t leave out samosas (not fried in ghee) or greasy bengan bharta. You get the picture.

Our little garden in Rockaway. Leafy greens are life!

I’m not vegan any longer, although as I think I make clear, I am firmly converted to having a primary source of my calories derive from the plant kingdom. When it comes to animal by-products I’m one of those annoying bourgeois locally sourced farmer’s market only types, with the occasional exception of some sharp cheddar cheese for melting or half and half for coffee, if I can’t get to the market in a given week. The pandemic has radically changed my approach to meat, and I am pretty firm on just getting stuff from local farmers via the farmer’s market and stuffing it in the freezer for our 3-5x monthly protein spike. I like the long lasting energy and complex flavors that meat provides, but do not need it for every meal, nor do I need to eat it every day. I think there are farmers raising animals out there in a sustainable and careful manner, and those are the kind of people and practices I like to support. Yes, the animal dies, but places like Lewis Waite farms convert the whole thing into various products. We’ve purchased soup bones, leaf lard, and livers from them this year. Not only does it honor the sacrifice the animal made, but it also makes for more adventurous, flavorful, and exciting cooking.

I also understand that there are many people who rely on factory farms not only for jobs, but also for affordable protein, and who do not have access to the resources or the education that I do to see how it is imperative that we as a species move away from factory farming. Unfortunately, I do not think all the fake plant-based meat is the answer, although for now it seems to be the way the food industry is headed. Substituting what Sophia and I call “angry meat”, i.e. factory farmed meat, for fake meat to be eaten at every meal, is simply based upon the wrong-headed assumption that meat should be at the center of one’s meals and one’s diet. Don’t get me wrong, as I write above, I love fake meat, but I consider it a treat or an indulgence, not a dietary staple. I also think that the “old fake meat” — tofu, tempeh, soy protein bits, gimme lean, soyrizo, different wheat gluten things — was perfectly fine as it was. There is absolutely no need for fake meat to be any more “realistic”.

Another major result of my vegan phase, or my coming to an awareness of the importance of food in our lives, was an attention to how much packaging goes into groceries and just how much waste our food habits produce. Home cooking does not eliminate waste altogether, but it can radically cut down on the amount of trash produced per week. During the pandemic we have been baking so much more. Just ordinary stuff you don’t think twice about buying at a store like bread and rolls and crackers. If you make crackers for example — and they’re super easy! — you cut down on a plastic bag inside of a box and the box itself. I think you also save a ton of money, since the primary ingredients in crackers are flour, oil, salt, and water. They’re great with homemade hummus or any dip you like. I’m sure you could substitute all kinds of different flours, if of course you have a real gluten allergy. Don’t get me started with the gluten-free people. I’m not having it. You have body conscious issues/want to be thin for bad patriarchal society reasons, just say that’s what it is. Real gluten allergy, however, is a real thing, and very rare. Wheat and thereby the glutinous flour it creates is a miracle. And yes, like everything else, there are better ways to grow it, harvest it, and process it. But if you’re on a budget, simply want to save on packaging, and increase the yumminess of available snack food, there’s nothing better you can do than staying stocked on a few types of flour. But why stop there? May as well also stay stocked on yeast and a keep a starter in your fridge for breads and rolls too. Humans of all social classes have turned to bread as the “staff of life” since time immemorial. Like meat, you don’t need it every day, but our bodies do process it well, especially if you’re a surfer who needs a quick replenishment of calories after a three hour session.

Simple crackers: 1 c. flour, 1/4 c. olive oil, salt, some water. Make a smooth dough. If too wet add more flour. If too dry add more water. Divide into 4 balls. Roll super thin. Pierce with fork. Cut into squares. Put in oven at 500 for like 4-8 min. Voila!

King Arther Four Yeast Rolls. So easy.

When you buy vegetables at a farmer’s market you don’t need plastic bags. Even less do you need plastic bags if you can manage to find some space for a home garden. I think it’s really cool that vegetables come in these perfect packages, and that there’s so much of them that you can use. Take squashes for example. They last a long time out of the fridge — perfect for these winter months — and you can eat the flesh and the seeds inside. I will no longer eat any squash without also roasting the seeds. Squash seeds are a fantastic surf snack or road trip snack. They also go awesome on salads and to top savory vegetable pies.

Behold the perfect packaging!

Always roast the seeds!

Savory pumpkin pie.

This brings me to the basic philosophy of local and seasonal eating. Sticking to buying from local farms and farmers markets keeps you eating with the seasons. Sure, you don’t get to have as much lettuce and green vegetables as you would like in the winters, so instead you eat cabbage, squash, beets, and potatoes, and stuff that is heartier because it can weather the cooler climate. Of course I’m speaking from an east coast perspective. If you’re in Costa Rica, for example, the weather is not too changeable, and your diet there looks different. On our retreats at Rancho Diandrew we’re eating lots of fresh fruit — pineapple, mangoes, papayas, bananas — and locally caught fish. Funny enough the heartier cruciferous vegetables — winter veg here — stand up to the warm climates better than the more tender sorts of veg. So it’s a lot of cabbage and squash and beets down there too. California has a larger variety of produce available year round, which is why I have always argued that SF fine dining is superior to NY. That and the service is better because people are in the industry for the food, not to become actors. When I moved to NY the very idea that a place would require a head shot for a service job was preposterous to me. It still is. Either you know about food and wine pairing and you can articulate that to guests and multi task like a mad person or you can’t. Your face can make the delivery a little sweeter, but is quite peripheral to the actual skills required. That whole point is currently moot during the pandemic. Restaurants and their workers are fighting for their existences like never before. The restaurant industry has always been been a precarious kind of business, and now we know how susceptible to the adverse effects of a pandemic it is. Supporting restaurants and take out is a hard one for me because although they produce jobs, they also produce a lot of waste, and home cooked food just tastes better. It’s not a black and white thing of course. A lot of the techniques and the pairing knowledge I’ve gained for my home cooking comes from my 15 something years in the restaurant industry. It’s also nice to go out from time to time, and we’re all missing that right now. In general, however, restaurant food, including take out, is best limited to 1-2x a month.

I won’t ever buy the argument, “I don’t have enough time to cook at home.” First of all, we do not need too much food to keep us alive. Second, if you have a primarily plant based diet, vegetables cook quickly, and are satisfying and delicious. Third you can make one big meal or dish, like the pie above, and that effort provides for 2-3 more meals down the road, saving time, packaging, and thought. There’s nothing like coming home from a satisfying surf and doing nothing other to refuel than heat up a gorgeous plate of leftovers. Or maybe you had a slice of the veggie pie in the car for a snack after surfing so that you’re not ripping apart the cupboards when you get home. This has been a newer discovery of mine, which has been a huge game changer in my mood and my food habits: eat a snack directly after surfing. I’m on the fence about whether to eat before surfing. Some people hate it. For me it depends on surf conditions, weather, time of day of session, and how long I plan to surf. If it’s going to be firing from first light through the day, I’ll make sure to put something in the gullet to fuel me through morning. Oatmeal or a pbj or some roasted sweet potato. Regardless of whether I’ve eaten before surfing or not, I make sure to get something in directly after. This is why the pre-made crackers and rolls and veggie leftovers from dinners have been crucial, especially during the pandemic. You don’t want to go home so hungry that your brain can’t process what you want to eat or cook. Get a little fuel in there so that your brain can work well enough to make its next plan. As much as I try to keep my packaged goods minimal, things like Clif Bars, sardines in tins, and nuts are absolutely awesome for this purpose.

If you’re going to surfing all day and do off-the-lips into the sunset, you gotta have some good surf snacks.

Having a well-balanced diet centered around home-cooked, seasonal, locally-sourced, vegetable-heavy meals will keep you surfing better and longer. It will also keep you on the lighter side of your weight spectrum (all humans fluctuate in weight), which is always optimal for surfing. I have learned to become more accepting of the fact that there are many ways for healthy bodies to look, but overall it remains an objective fact that all people surf better when they are on the lighter side of their optimal weight spectrum. This becomes even more the case when you have to wiggle in and out of a 5mm wetsuit! But this doesn’t mean you have to be austere and not have treats and things that bring up sweet memories and create those rad dopamine sensations. This fall I got really into making apple cider doughnuts. Another thing that is surprisingly easier than you would think! I’m not making doughnuts every month, but they are certainly a great treat with a hot cup of coffee before or after surfing in the cold!

I believe that everyone can and should learn to cook! Follow recipes. For real. Just follow them. Get one or two cook books and make a bunch of stuff in there. Learn the cooking times of all the different foods that you eat. Once you know those, coming up with meals on the fly is a breeze. This is only the start to my posts about surf fuel. In the future I will share recipes and tips, and dig further into some of the details that inform my strong opinions about food and diet.