Surfing Ruined My Life

I woke this morning on my little love seat still in my suit from last night’s Gay Prom at the Wild Cat covered in crumpled up nachos and a head ache that felt like someone shoved an ice pick through my ear.  Does this sound familiar?  That is pretty much what went down every night since Thursday.  I sometimes wonder what my shitty new roommate thinks of the pathetic mess I must look like when she is leaving for work at 8 am.  Then again she is a selfish bitch who just screwed me out a good deal of money leaving me literally broke so who fucking cares anyhow.  She is lucky I don’t hit her in the head with a mallet then piss in the hole I just smashed in her skull.  In all seriousness  I think I had $35.83 in my checking account last time I checked.

At 31 years old I expected so much more out of my life by now.  Well, maybe I hoped for more.  As we all know I am a bit of a pessimist and a cynic.  This being the case things probably have worked out exactly as I expected.   I’m divorced, penniless, juvenile, absolutely alone, stuck in a dead end job and a total and utter drunk.   I feel depressed, dejected, frustrated, confused and alienated.  At least I have my health and my beauty, yet one cannot beat father time.  They say the first step is to identify the problem.

Am I depressing you?  I’m sorry, here is a picture of a cat in a top hat to bring back up your spirits.  While we are at it lets go off on a momentary tangent on why top hats became unfashionable.  I mean they are dank as hell.  Look how dapper Mr. Peanut looks in his.  That’s it I am bringing it back.  I declare that this New Years Eve I am going to wear a top hat out and from there on in 2013.  The top hat revolution has begun.

And now back to the misery that is my life…

The Summer of Alf ended some time ago now.  It was a wonderfully splendid spring day back in May when I came up with this great list of positive changes I was going to make and things I was going to pursue in the blog “Of Things to Come“, which will be referenced here and then was later defined in “The Summer of Alf” blog.  If your a steady reader then you know I make these futile proclamation blogs every so often when I feel rather ambitious.  Always forgetting how it was ambition that brought MacBeth to ruin: ” I have no spur, To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, And falls on th’other “.  Of course in the end I find myself more of a whiny bitch like Hamlet.

About a week ago I posted a poll on the most recent Power of Ten blog to see how  you folks thought the Summer of Alf worked out.  12.5% called it a flop, 25% a success and a whopping 62.5% claimed they had no idea why they wasted their time reading anything written on SurfingRuinedMyLife.net.  Let me tell you why you read: for self affirmation.  When you have a bad day or feel like a failure all you have to do is open a web browser, type http://www.surfingruinedmylife.net into it and you are guaranteed to feel better.  Its like “man I know I am messing up, but I wonder how bad Chris is blowing it right now”.  At the very worst you can see that you are not alone in your suffering.  We can cry together thanks to the world wide web and way too much time on our hands. Just because I don’t blog every day doesn’t mean I have not written some ridiculous thing in the Surf Log.

Lets see how I did on that list:

Proclamation 1: Get Back into Music

You ever notice how many pictures I have of me wearing this t-shirt. I have owned it for almost 7 years now. Fuck it has guns all over it making it pure awesomeness! I am going to be really sad when it goes thread bare and I end up using it as a rag to clean my toilet with.

Ok this one is sort of a push.  I actually spent a good deal of time woodshedding and getting my fingers back into shape.  I started ripping on some licks that had me very stoked.  These days I have been favoring my alto and soprano more then my tenor.  On the flip side of things I did not make any real attempt to play out at all and even turned down on more then one occasion a chance to perform.  My friend Meat Cat says it’s because I am a male diva.  No points…

Learn to Speak Italian
This was a fail.  But then again who the fuck was I kidding.  I barely speak English all that well and if not for spell check would be a complete illiterate.  What made me ever think I could brush up on my Italian?  I did pick up a bit more Spanish though.  -1 point

Go Surfing as Much as Possible
I am going to have to call this one a half success.  I did manage to make the most out of the meager conditions on offer and lack of swell.  I surfed mostly local, broke two boards and had some really good barrels. When it was flat I took to skim boarding for some exercise. On the down side I still missed a few too many days as a result of too much drinking and party. One thing is for sure when I did get in the water I had a hell of a good time.  Half point.

Read More books
I  somehow found the time to read three books in the duration of the Summer of Alf and acquired some new cook books that I cooked up some fun recipes from.  Thanks to strange late night drunken finds, thrift stores and the Ventura swap in all its jankyness my collection has grown immensely.  Win +1

Write More
Well I am going to have go with a push here.  I may not have wrote a ton, but I felt the quality of the text was much better then it ever has been.  I came across some blog randomly today and the guy was using cell phone short hand.  I was blown away.  One should never use “u” in place of “you” or “r” in place of “are” anywhere but on a cell phone text.  No wonder the world is falling apart.  No Points

Explore the Greater Santa Barbara Area
This one not so much.  I sort of had a routine and stuck to it all summer.  There was not much of the explorer in me.  -1 point.

Finish the Coffee Table
Nope, unless one is to include spilling a host of liquids and alcoholic beverages on it an improvement.  I guess I am slowly staining the top of the table with red wine and rum and cokes.  -1 point

Drink and Party Less

Big Pimpin’ at the Wild Cat

If you read the surf log then the answer to this one is apparent and no.  One thing I must say is that I partied really fucking hard.  As a matter of fact I think the night after I wrote this list I went out and got black out drunk.   The Summer of Alf brought about the largest number of black outs I have ever had in a four month period and maybe even my entire life.  I woke up in pink seat pants  not knowing where I was, woke up all over my apartment, got locked in my own bathroom.  Did countless activities I could have more or less lived with out.  I hit it hard on solstice, carried it through to fiesta.  There were some drunken Tuesdays in the mix and plenty of sloppy family dinner Wednesdays.  Lets just say I did the opposite here and went hard. -1-hey at least I did not get injured seriously or end up in jail.  Did I mention I also got fired from the produce market as a direct result of my drinking.  That is a first for me.

Other notables
I spent some time in San Francisco at the very start of the Summer of Alf.  You can read about those adventures in “Taking the Bay Area by Storm“.  I got fired from two jobs subsequently causing me to go on unemployment twice.   Alfie still has fleas.  I got passed up for Sous Chef at work for a less capable person who has barely been there three months let alone my three years.  I managed to do absolutely nothing of any substance or value and if anything went into a retrograde.  

My final take on the Summer of Alf was that it was a total and utter failure as per usual.  So be it.  If I succeeded in life then I most likely would not be the fun character I am to read about.  Who wants to read about happy things.  No one! Cause when things were going well for me I had the lowest readership ever.  I’m done trying for the fall.   Fall 2012 is going to be deemed “The Fall of My Malcontent”.

I am not making any proclamations, declarations or aspirations.  I am just going to live and see where that takes me.   My entire life I have always had a zest for living and an agitation for planing.  At the moment maybe that is what has brought me to this dismal point, too much planing.  For the next three months I am going to live by the seat of my pants, throw my chips into the air and see where they lye.

I am going to wake up everyday, take a deep breath and live.  No regrets, no cares, no worries cause what ever happens is going to happen and in the end it will sort itself out regardless.  For the record “I was perceptive,  I always know when someone is uncomfortable at a party”.