from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
The water formed a thin film of cold on my back as I slithered through it, judging the distances, ducking under the oncoming swell, thinking to myself – how much longer can I keep this up, how much longer? It isn’t really a question of physical stamina, more a question of mental fortitude, a stoical resignation to natures buffeting and insults. I scream fuck you to the ocean and she has no option but to reply, to not let me through, to keep me with the whitewash, driftwood and kelp, it’s in her nature.
We had been out there for two hours, at least, and my limbs were emanating an acidic cry of pain but my friends, doing their own thing five hundred metres off shore from me, didn’t show any sign of letting up. They careened down the faces of waves in, what seems to the observer, slow motion. When it’s you on the wave then it feels a lot different, faster than a car because the speed is more intimate, closer to your feet or stomach. I have never been able to go out as far as them, or stay out as long, and sometimes I blame my relative inactivity as a child for this deficiency of strength or daring. I cannot be entirely sure that it is a physical deficiency rather than a streak of fear that has permanently lodged itself in my psyche, obscure to direct analysis but always fundamental in my judgement and its consequent actions.
I can’t believe that I could think while being tossed around by an angry ocean, but that is exactly what I am doing when a wave much larger than the others hit me face on. It came as a surprise because of the sand bank that lay under water two hundred metres from me that would usually act as bulwark against the bigger waves, allowing them to break upon its trench and then slide across the waters surface as a bubbling swarm of whitewash. It could have been the backwash that bounces back towards the ocean from the shore, sometimes doubling a late blooming wave’s height, making it dangerous in its unpredictability. It could have been many things that allowed a wave of this size to find its way to me, but once it hit it no longer mattered what the reasons were because I was under and I wasn’t coming up.
There is a massive difference between surfing and swimming and it’s a distinction that swimmers cannot make if they have never surfed. When you swim you submerge when the desire to strikes you. It is a matter of choice, of finding peace from a surface world too noisy, too cluttered with screaming kids and the smell of sun block wafting off the surfaces of human icebergs. When you dive as a swimmer its silence and weightlessness, when you go under in surfing its because a wave has put you under. The only sensation that would approximate what it feels like is if you have ever had someone hold your head underwater against your will. There is no peace or silence or zero-gravity; there is resistance and struggle and the noise of blood rushing, of blood that every second is being de-oxygenated, being stripped of its life sustaining properties. There is no comforting sight of other swimmers legs pathetically waddling, kicking up soft little clouds of sand that intrigue you in their settling; there is darkness and disorientation. It’s what space would be like with gravity, with a stone pressing down on your chest.
It took at least half a minute for me to figure out that I wasn’t going to come back up. I was to far down and my will was down with me, where if I was to re-emerge my will would have to be floating somewhere above the surface, beckoning to me, giving me reasons to struggle, to live. It would have to be my lifeline, the rope I could claw my way up with, one hand over the other, but it was down with me, coiled around my neck.
What I was trying to tell you about swimming before, all that about peace, is true for drowning as well, but it’s more profound because there is something of the eternal about it. Not in the slow slip of consciousness and then ultimately towards death, but the way the seconds and minutes become one moment, one undifferentiated string that goes through your centre, turning your life into something tangible, the rosemary beads that wrap around your hand, coiling your faith, making it something that revolves and is.
Going under, realising that I was going to drown was all these things and none of them. The experience has its residence somewhere beyond these pages, outside of the invisible boarders that divide my recollection. The one element in common between the page and experience is that the boarders have no colour.
Someone pulled me out of both the water and the comforting musings that accompany a death through drowning. It was Adrian, the strongest of us, but I did not realise it was one of my friends until I was up on the beach coughing up water less than fifty metres from where I was filling my lungs with water. Up on the beach I was grateful that Andy had saved me. To drown less than 50 metres from shore would have brought shame down upon my death. I would have been the laughing stock of my school.
I looked up into Adrian’s face and it could have been one of those tender moments between prince and damsel, but, of course, it couldn’t be. We played football together, we fought and drank together, besides, he had one of the ugliest faces this side of the Sutherland shire.
Soon the rest of our comrades had crowded around me. First to see if I was dead, then to see if I was OK and then to throw around the gently hurtful insults that would turn this experience into something less that it actually was. Not a near miss of tragedy and tearful family members, but an opportunity for laughter and alcohol fuelled story telling. I could only relate the facts, like news reporting any embellishment would be frowned upon and seen as bad form. Whatever I have written in the preceding passages would have to be stricken from the record for being overly hyperbolic and for being, quite frankly, unbelievable.
Within two minutes there was the four of us. Adrian (the saviour), David. Milton and myself. The day was glorious again and it was still only morning even though I felt the first flutters of the inevitable northeasterly wind. Our days during the summer are never partitioned according to convention. No morning afternoon and night. Our days were divided according to the wind and the activity. Morning glass where we would all take the long train trip out to Cronulla, to our beloved Point, a rocky peninsula at the south end of South Cronulla beach and just north of the notorious shark island. Cronulla promenade looked over all of it, and it was on this walk way that we would stand in the mornings, squinting and shielding our eyes against the morning sun, feeling the wind on our backs, airbrushing the tops of the waves finding their destination in our delight or disappointment depending on their size, intensity and the direction of the wind. If they possessed any human characteristics at all they would have cursed our finicky requirements for the perfect morning, in the brevity of their existences they would have found joy beyond criteria, beyond the constraints of the measuring stick.
In my youth I found the ability to forget, to allow new moments the quality of erasure. One would overlap with and finally overcome the last. This is how my life would unfold and then fold back, convoluting, allowing selective amnesia to prevail, eradicating all those things without value, prioritised according to a fleeting taste and sensibility. After picking myself up, or rather allowing the others to pick me up with my lungs protesting in long, watery wheezes we started walking up towards the promenade picking up our clothes and backpacks that we had left in the stony recesses that pockmark the cliff face that that turns that stretch of Cronulla into a half ellipse stadium.
There was a takeaway store that we would always go after having our fun in the water. The bad food we got there would either celebrate the fine conditions or give solace for the disappointment that Neptune had decided to bestow on us on that particular day. It was unfortunate that the store was at least a kilometre and half away from the Point. It had rooted itself to a street corner two streets inland from a stretch of Cronulla sand called the wall. The wall possessed that name because of the impressive retaining wall made of hexagon shaped cinder blocks that formed a honey combed concrete slope that inclined up to the beach’s car park and beach front road. We would often amuse ourselves by seeing who could scamper down to the bottom and back up again without breaking an ankle or fracturing a skull from having one of our feet catch against the sides of the cinder block’s hollow centre.
Today was not a day for such amusement as I thought that I had had enough excitement and I did not want to add broken bones to an inventory that included over strained lungs and whatever creeping brain damage being held under water for extended periods of time could induce. So we walked to the takeaway shop and ordered what we always did – flavoured milk and a doughnut. We wished we could afford more but we couldn’t. Besides we could all gorge ourselves when we got home. All of us expect Milton of course. It pained me to think of him going home after one of our sorties to gorge on celery sticks and plain toast slices with thin layers of butter on them. The rest of us would have plates of party pies with great big dollops of tomato sauce or bread rolls filled with every conceivable type of cold meat and salads. There would be tall glasses of orange juice, condensation running down the side, glistening in advertisement purity. Milton would make do with a glass of water and the smell of dog shit that permanently permeated his house when his mother or sister had forgotten to clean up after the ancient, almost blind terrier that chose a catatonic state rather than face the last days of her life. Sometimes I would forgo the pleasantness of my home coming and follow Milton to his house next door so I would not have to suffer with every guilty bite and swallow, but what could I do, I was a teenager living of austudy, borrowing money clandestinely of my mother for the essentials – alcohol and what Adrian’s mother would call marriage-wuana and what the rest of us called weed or pot. We were all drowning in the unnecessary quagmire of the HSC and our more than common forms of relief, I’m sure, would come as no surprise to anyone.
None of this was to say that I did not take an interest in my studies. My interest in my studies, in the last two years of high school, had taken on a decidedly extra-curricula bent. My interest was piqued by the misanthropic rebellion of Nietzsche and the dense, at the time, incomprehensible dissidence of Chomsky. The poets of romanticism had also infected me, taking root in my adolescent inclination towards self-importance and self-significance. To my friends I presented my self as someone who abhorred the strains of studiousness, who would jibe the slightly mussed and fashion challenged students at our school who aimed their sights at university and careers in politics. Secretly I resented them for disallowing me my freedom, even though my freedom, or lack thereof, had very little to do with my friends but the choices I had made in friends. My criteria for friendship differed a great deal from all other aspects of my personality. I was naturally quite, my friends created a space for rampant extroversion. I loved the quite solitude of reading; my friends sought themselves in the company of each other, allowing little time for any reading whatsoever. The need to stick together was almost desperate. If I picked up a book they would look at me quizzically and question me on my loyalty to the group mentality. Sometimes the questioning would go as far as to imply that I was gay. This grated me greatly. I often felt the boarders of my personality shredding against the cage our little group had created for itself. I would wish, in moments between spoken sentences, that I could be on the outside, looking in. As it was I felt like a scientist who’s line of study was primate behaviour that had suddenly found himself in the study pen, stuck amongst his subjects.
We caught the train home, all of us silent, looking out of the windows watching the expanding Sydney suburbs unfolding, passing over Como bridge, over the neat patterns of the estuaries and the marsh like islands of Port Hacking river. David leaned over once on the trip and asked for a sip of chocolate milk, it was this way always, the give and take of high school friendships, a communal ownership that was a result of the monetary lightness of youth. It was a form of communication, a silent reaffirmation of loyalties. The sway and gentle push and pull of train was lulling me into a half slumber, a preview of the day to come until the party. Half awake, barely able to keep my eyes on the page of whatever book I was reading, the inevitable and unfortunate conversation/confrontation with my parents when I got home.
We started planning for the party that night. A hybrid of aspirations and far off boyhood fantasies – the girls that would flock to us, the amazing endurance we would display in our consumption, the revelry that would last until the early morning, a drunken celebration for a reason obscure and in many ways redundant.
There wasn’t that much to plan. People would show up and bring their own supplies. It was an assumption that we all held dear, none of us being able to afford a host’s hospitality and generosity. We would only provide a venue, a canvass, and get drunk and stoned enough to splash it with colours of all hues and aesthetic viability. We hoped for the unexpected, for the novel, mainly for sexual experiences that only moved in embryonic form within the hallways of our desire. If I actually did entice a female into anything that night I was not quite sure exactly what that anything would be. Fumbling was not a component of my fantasising but I suspected it would be integral to the experience.
I told the rest of them that somehow I didn’t think that I whimsical musings would come to fruition and they quickly turned of me, telling me that I had no faith in their all to obvious desirability. I tried to explain that what we considered desirable in other males is not exactly what the feminine species finds desirable in potential mates. Fart jokes and beer guzzling would only attract the lowest common denominator, women that my friends reviled but found they attracted on a prodigious scale. Their willingness to alter their behaviour to improve both the odds of getting a girl and improving the overall quality of that girl was non existent, or quickly dampened due to the almost automatic censure that existed both within our selves and within the group dynamic.
I finally arrived at home, dragging my legs behind me with Milton close behind, dragging the last moments of unfettered freedom behind him. We talked for a while over our common side fence, the type with palings that hinged on rusty nails, forming trap doors that you could swing upwards to gain access to each others backyards, his more than a little smaller than mine. We would hold ourselves at chin height with our elbows resting on the splintered edges. Speaking of the mundane and simple, desperate attempts at remaining outside a little longer, knowing that the attempt was ultimately futile, that sooner or later our hunger or boredom would get the better of us and pull us into our separate spheres of existence. Mine with a second language and a complex structure of isolation and conflict, his with the rage of a divorced, matriarchal household and a father that showed little signs of remorse or fatherly affection.
We went our separate ways as the sun reached its apex, burning the blue from the sky and the energy from our limbs along with it.
We had been out there for two hours, at least, and my limbs were emanating an acidic cry of pain but my friends, doing their own thing five hundred metres off shore from me, didn’t show any sign of letting up. They careened down the faces of waves in, what seems to the observer, slow motion. When it’s you on the wave then it feels a lot different, faster than a car because the speed is more intimate, closer to your feet or stomach. I have never been able to go out as far as them, or stay out as long, and sometimes I blame my relative inactivity as a child for this deficiency of strength or daring. I cannot be entirely sure that it is a physical deficiency rather than a streak of fear that has permanently lodged itself in my psyche, obscure to direct analysis but always fundamental in my judgement and its consequent actions.
I can’t believe that I could think while being tossed around by an angry ocean, but that is exactly what I am doing when a wave much larger than the others hit me face on. It came as a surprise because of the sand bank that lay under water two hundred metres from me that would usually act as bulwark against the bigger waves, allowing them to break upon its trench and then slide across the waters surface as a bubbling swarm of whitewash. It could have been the backwash that bounces back towards the ocean from the shore, sometimes doubling a late blooming wave’s height, making it dangerous in its unpredictability. It could have been many things that allowed a wave of this size to find its way to me, but once it hit it no longer mattered what the reasons were because I was under and I wasn’t coming up.
There is a massive difference between surfing and swimming and it’s a distinction that swimmers cannot make if they have never surfed. When you swim you submerge when the desire to strikes you. It is a matter of choice, of finding peace from a surface world too noisy, too cluttered with screaming kids and the smell of sun block wafting off the surfaces of human icebergs. When you dive as a swimmer its silence and weightlessness, when you go under in surfing its because a wave has put you under. The only sensation that would approximate what it feels like is if you have ever had someone hold your head underwater against your will. There is no peace or silence or zero-gravity; there is resistance and struggle and the noise of blood rushing, of blood that every second is being de-oxygenated, being stripped of its life sustaining properties. There is no comforting sight of other swimmers legs pathetically waddling, kicking up soft little clouds of sand that intrigue you in their settling; there is darkness and disorientation. It’s what space would be like with gravity, with a stone pressing down on your chest.
It took at least half a minute for me to figure out that I wasn’t going to come back up. I was to far down and my will was down with me, where if I was to re-emerge my will would have to be floating somewhere above the surface, beckoning to me, giving me reasons to struggle, to live. It would have to be my lifeline, the rope I could claw my way up with, one hand over the other, but it was down with me, coiled around my neck.
What I was trying to tell you about swimming before, all that about peace, is true for drowning as well, but it’s more profound because there is something of the eternal about it. Not in the slow slip of consciousness and then ultimately towards death, but the way the seconds and minutes become one moment, one undifferentiated string that goes through your centre, turning your life into something tangible, the rosemary beads that wrap around your hand, coiling your faith, making it something that revolves and is.
Going under, realising that I was going to drown was all these things and none of them. The experience has its residence somewhere beyond these pages, outside of the invisible boarders that divide my recollection. The one element in common between the page and experience is that the boarders have no colour.
Someone pulled me out of both the water and the comforting musings that accompany a death through drowning. It was Adrian, the strongest of us, but I did not realise it was one of my friends until I was up on the beach coughing up water less than fifty metres from where I was filling my lungs with water. Up on the beach I was grateful that Andy had saved me. To drown less than 50 metres from shore would have brought shame down upon my death. I would have been the laughing stock of my school.
I looked up into Adrian’s face and it could have been one of those tender moments between prince and damsel, but, of course, it couldn’t be. We played football together, we fought and drank together, besides, he had one of the ugliest faces this side of the Sutherland shire.
Soon the rest of our comrades had crowded around me. First to see if I was dead, then to see if I was OK and then to throw around the gently hurtful insults that would turn this experience into something less that it actually was. Not a near miss of tragedy and tearful family members, but an opportunity for laughter and alcohol fuelled story telling. I could only relate the facts, like news reporting any embellishment would be frowned upon and seen as bad form. Whatever I have written in the preceding passages would have to be stricken from the record for being overly hyperbolic and for being, quite frankly, unbelievable.
Within two minutes there was the four of us. Adrian (the saviour), David. Milton and myself. The day was glorious again and it was still only morning even though I felt the first flutters of the inevitable northeasterly wind. Our days during the summer are never partitioned according to convention. No morning afternoon and night. Our days were divided according to the wind and the activity. Morning glass where we would all take the long train trip out to Cronulla, to our beloved Point, a rocky peninsula at the south end of South Cronulla beach and just north of the notorious shark island. Cronulla promenade looked over all of it, and it was on this walk way that we would stand in the mornings, squinting and shielding our eyes against the morning sun, feeling the wind on our backs, airbrushing the tops of the waves finding their destination in our delight or disappointment depending on their size, intensity and the direction of the wind. If they possessed any human characteristics at all they would have cursed our finicky requirements for the perfect morning, in the brevity of their existences they would have found joy beyond criteria, beyond the constraints of the measuring stick.
In my youth I found the ability to forget, to allow new moments the quality of erasure. One would overlap with and finally overcome the last. This is how my life would unfold and then fold back, convoluting, allowing selective amnesia to prevail, eradicating all those things without value, prioritised according to a fleeting taste and sensibility. After picking myself up, or rather allowing the others to pick me up with my lungs protesting in long, watery wheezes we started walking up towards the promenade picking up our clothes and backpacks that we had left in the stony recesses that pockmark the cliff face that that turns that stretch of Cronulla into a half ellipse stadium.
There was a takeaway store that we would always go after having our fun in the water. The bad food we got there would either celebrate the fine conditions or give solace for the disappointment that Neptune had decided to bestow on us on that particular day. It was unfortunate that the store was at least a kilometre and half away from the Point. It had rooted itself to a street corner two streets inland from a stretch of Cronulla sand called the wall. The wall possessed that name because of the impressive retaining wall made of hexagon shaped cinder blocks that formed a honey combed concrete slope that inclined up to the beach’s car park and beach front road. We would often amuse ourselves by seeing who could scamper down to the bottom and back up again without breaking an ankle or fracturing a skull from having one of our feet catch against the sides of the cinder block’s hollow centre.
Today was not a day for such amusement as I thought that I had had enough excitement and I did not want to add broken bones to an inventory that included over strained lungs and whatever creeping brain damage being held under water for extended periods of time could induce. So we walked to the takeaway shop and ordered what we always did – flavoured milk and a doughnut. We wished we could afford more but we couldn’t. Besides we could all gorge ourselves when we got home. All of us expect Milton of course. It pained me to think of him going home after one of our sorties to gorge on celery sticks and plain toast slices with thin layers of butter on them. The rest of us would have plates of party pies with great big dollops of tomato sauce or bread rolls filled with every conceivable type of cold meat and salads. There would be tall glasses of orange juice, condensation running down the side, glistening in advertisement purity. Milton would make do with a glass of water and the smell of dog shit that permanently permeated his house when his mother or sister had forgotten to clean up after the ancient, almost blind terrier that chose a catatonic state rather than face the last days of her life. Sometimes I would forgo the pleasantness of my home coming and follow Milton to his house next door so I would not have to suffer with every guilty bite and swallow, but what could I do, I was a teenager living of austudy, borrowing money clandestinely of my mother for the essentials – alcohol and what Adrian’s mother would call marriage-wuana and what the rest of us called weed or pot. We were all drowning in the unnecessary quagmire of the HSC and our more than common forms of relief, I’m sure, would come as no surprise to anyone.
None of this was to say that I did not take an interest in my studies. My interest in my studies, in the last two years of high school, had taken on a decidedly extra-curricula bent. My interest was piqued by the misanthropic rebellion of Nietzsche and the dense, at the time, incomprehensible dissidence of Chomsky. The poets of romanticism had also infected me, taking root in my adolescent inclination towards self-importance and self-significance. To my friends I presented my self as someone who abhorred the strains of studiousness, who would jibe the slightly mussed and fashion challenged students at our school who aimed their sights at university and careers in politics. Secretly I resented them for disallowing me my freedom, even though my freedom, or lack thereof, had very little to do with my friends but the choices I had made in friends. My criteria for friendship differed a great deal from all other aspects of my personality. I was naturally quite, my friends created a space for rampant extroversion. I loved the quite solitude of reading; my friends sought themselves in the company of each other, allowing little time for any reading whatsoever. The need to stick together was almost desperate. If I picked up a book they would look at me quizzically and question me on my loyalty to the group mentality. Sometimes the questioning would go as far as to imply that I was gay. This grated me greatly. I often felt the boarders of my personality shredding against the cage our little group had created for itself. I would wish, in moments between spoken sentences, that I could be on the outside, looking in. As it was I felt like a scientist who’s line of study was primate behaviour that had suddenly found himself in the study pen, stuck amongst his subjects.
We caught the train home, all of us silent, looking out of the windows watching the expanding Sydney suburbs unfolding, passing over Como bridge, over the neat patterns of the estuaries and the marsh like islands of Port Hacking river. David leaned over once on the trip and asked for a sip of chocolate milk, it was this way always, the give and take of high school friendships, a communal ownership that was a result of the monetary lightness of youth. It was a form of communication, a silent reaffirmation of loyalties. The sway and gentle push and pull of train was lulling me into a half slumber, a preview of the day to come until the party. Half awake, barely able to keep my eyes on the page of whatever book I was reading, the inevitable and unfortunate conversation/confrontation with my parents when I got home.
We started planning for the party that night. A hybrid of aspirations and far off boyhood fantasies – the girls that would flock to us, the amazing endurance we would display in our consumption, the revelry that would last until the early morning, a drunken celebration for a reason obscure and in many ways redundant.
There wasn’t that much to plan. People would show up and bring their own supplies. It was an assumption that we all held dear, none of us being able to afford a host’s hospitality and generosity. We would only provide a venue, a canvass, and get drunk and stoned enough to splash it with colours of all hues and aesthetic viability. We hoped for the unexpected, for the novel, mainly for sexual experiences that only moved in embryonic form within the hallways of our desire. If I actually did entice a female into anything that night I was not quite sure exactly what that anything would be. Fumbling was not a component of my fantasising but I suspected it would be integral to the experience.
I told the rest of them that somehow I didn’t think that I whimsical musings would come to fruition and they quickly turned of me, telling me that I had no faith in their all to obvious desirability. I tried to explain that what we considered desirable in other males is not exactly what the feminine species finds desirable in potential mates. Fart jokes and beer guzzling would only attract the lowest common denominator, women that my friends reviled but found they attracted on a prodigious scale. Their willingness to alter their behaviour to improve both the odds of getting a girl and improving the overall quality of that girl was non existent, or quickly dampened due to the almost automatic censure that existed both within our selves and within the group dynamic.
I finally arrived at home, dragging my legs behind me with Milton close behind, dragging the last moments of unfettered freedom behind him. We talked for a while over our common side fence, the type with palings that hinged on rusty nails, forming trap doors that you could swing upwards to gain access to each others backyards, his more than a little smaller than mine. We would hold ourselves at chin height with our elbows resting on the splintered edges. Speaking of the mundane and simple, desperate attempts at remaining outside a little longer, knowing that the attempt was ultimately futile, that sooner or later our hunger or boredom would get the better of us and pull us into our separate spheres of existence. Mine with a second language and a complex structure of isolation and conflict, his with the rage of a divorced, matriarchal household and a father that showed little signs of remorse or fatherly affection.
We went our separate ways as the sun reached its apex, burning the blue from the sky and the energy from our limbs along with it.
