You’ve wanted to learn to surf your whole life but you’ve been afraid to try it because in movies whenever someone tries to learn to surf all of the long-time surfers just try to stab him with switchblades they keep taped to the bottom of their boards. But you aren’t going to let them scare you.
You’ll swim out on your board (it’s got a yin-yang symbol on it, which you figured people would think is pretty cool). The other surfers will ignore you at first. You’ll do your best to stay out of their way. You’ll wait for a wave. You’ll wait and you’ll wait and you’ll wait while all the waves rise and break in the area where all of the other surfers are.
You’ll want to go over to their area, but you’ll know it will only cause trouble so you’ll just stay where you are.
After about an hour of waiting, your wave arrives.
“That’s my wave,” one of the other surfers shouts. He’s so far away it would take him five minutes to swim to where you are. This wave is twenty seconds away. There’s no way he could ride it. It’s yours.
“Ride that wave and you die,” the surfer shouts.
You look at him. Then you look back at the growing wave.
“No joke. Ride that wave and you die.”
The surfers, a dozen of them, reach under their boards and grab the sawed-off shotguns they keep duct-taped there in plastic bread bags so they don’t get wet. Twelve guns, still wrapped in plastic, are aimed straight at you. These guys really don’t like novice surfers.
You consider swimming into shore and saving your ass, but that’s the way you’ve lived your whole life.
With twelve guns ready to fire on you, you hop up on your board and you ride your wave with grace, with dignity, with experience far beyond your skill level. The surfers just watch, their guns still ready to fire, but no one pulling the trigger. Out of respect for the waves, they let you ride into shore.
“You got a lotta guts,” one of the surfers, the one who first threatened you, says. “We surfers have a saying: ‘Live to surf. Surf to live.’ You clearly understand that it’s better to die this morning on a wave than live another fifty years on a stretch of carpet.”
The surfer hands you a sawed-off shotgun, a Stroehmann bread bag and some duct tape.
“If you want to really surf, you’re gonna need these. Now let’s go catch some waves."
You and your new surfer friends run out into the water. You still feel the need to prove yourself, so the first time you see some novice surfers try to catch a wave, you shoot them both dead without even giving them a warning. They’ll be a teenage couple, a boy and a girl, just a couple of kids who picked the wrong beach.
Happy Learn To Surf Day!
