In The Wave Strike

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‘In The Wave-Strike Over Unquiet Stones’

the brightness bursts and bears the rose
and the ring of water contracts to a cluster
to one drop of azure brine that falls.
O magnolia radiance breaking in spume,
magnetic voyager whose death flowers
and returns, eternal, to being and nothingness:
shattered brine, dazzling leap of the ocean.
Merged, you and I, my love, seal the silence
while the sea destroys its continual forms,
collapses its turrets of wildness and whiteness,
because in the weft of those unseen garments
of headlong water, and perpetual sand,
we bear the sole, relentless tenderness.

Pablo Neruda

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Dire Straits, Sultans of Swing (quite a jam session)

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The Gaza Surf Club On Earth Day

These Palestinian youth are members of the Gaza Surf Club.

The powers that be pollute their world with war and other forms of human sewage, however, these surfers struggle hard to survive all the human garbage on Earth Day anyway, choosing to enjoy what is still available on the good Earth.

These surfers are the beneficiaries of an elderly Jewish fellow who did them well and left the garbage somewhere in the past:

Mr Paskowitz, who is Jewish himself, decided to personally hand deliver 15 new boards to Gaza in 2007.

But when he arrived at the Erez border crossing, the main Israeli checkpoint into Gaza, he was told by Israeli security officers he was not allowed to pass and the Gaza surfers were not permitted to cross the border to collect the boards.

"I said to the Israeli soldier 'I came half way around the world, 12,000 miles, to deliver these boards. Would you let an old Jew fail?'", says Mr Paskowitz.

"I said to the guy, these guys are 50ft away. Are you going to let them come through here and get these boards?"

Mr Paskowitz describes how he leant over and kissed the Israeli border guard before the soldier eventually allowed the Palestinian surfers to come and collect the boards.

And on the beaches of Gaza, those boards, now a little worse for wear, are still being used today.

(Gaza Surf Club). These surfers have felt the injustice of the MSM garbage as well, but try to get through that too:

"Palestinians are people like in any other country," says Mafouz Caberetti, the club's president.

"We love life. We like sport and surfing, but the problem is the media which portrays Palestinians as just terrorists and bad people but this is not true."

(ibid, emphasis added). One Dredd Blog blogger who is a surfer understands how society can misunderstand because once upon a time in the U.S. surfers were persona non grata in many places.

For no valid reason!

Guest Post: Randy Whited

Hi, I am Dredd Blog blogger Randy.

In the photo to the left I am the one standing up with hands on hips, with sunglasses on, but no shirt.

The photo was taken in my youth during an economic revolution of sorts. At that time the world economic headquarters of surfing was of course California and Hawaii. The west.

A couple of years before the photo was taken I had moved to Florida to finish my last year of high school. I was on a surf team out of Mission Beach, California (Challenger Surfboards), so I received respect from the Florida surfers.

I even convinced a pal Fletcher Sharpe to join our team for awhile. Before he went bigger time. Another of our team members won the US Championships in Santa Cruz as well.

We really knew and understood the art form or sport of surfing.

Anyway, after living in Florida awhile and observing the east coast scene I expected the economics of surfing to switch from the west to the east coast.

For whatever reason the east coast young Americans had not been all ablaze over surfing as the west was. But I could not help but notice how that was changing.

When that change was at full power years later, ten to twenty boards were sold on the east coast for each one board sold on the west coast and Hawaii.

I returned to Mission Beach and convinced Tinker that we should move the production to the east coast. He had been a rocket scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena before I met him, and it did not take him long to figure things out.

We were the first California surfboard company to move production from the west coast to the east coast. We chose New Jersey because of its proximity to population centers and its good waves.

Dale Dobson, Jimmy Dalton, Carl "Tinker" West, and I built a surf truck that winter (later called the 'White Whale') which carried about 20 surfboards on its specialized racks. We travelled in it to the east coast, going from New York to Florida showing off our surfing skills and surfboards.

It paid off because we picked up dealers for our boards on the east coast. We decided to move our surfboard factory to New Jersey the next spring.

The photo is a picture of the motley crew that was a bit ahead of the curve. We were incredibly quality conscious, had that reputation in the industry, and worked hard at our craft.

We learned that radical waves of change can and do take place in our nation. Like the ocean waves in New Jersey or like global climate change.

During that time we also experienced a change in rock and roll music. We made friends with Bruce Springsteen, a local rocker there in New Jersey, who was about to make some changes too.

These days I paint, do software, hang with my grandchildren and children, hang with Christie and our cats, and blog with you folks.

PS, I still have a surfboard in our garage.