A Journey To Uncomplicated

Loren Victory
as published by Burleigh Longboard Magazine

A weekend trip and only one clean pair of underwear.
Plane leaves in one hour, fifteen and it's forty-five to the airport.
What do you do?
Buy more once I get there.
Right.
I’ll be too drunk
and stoned
and lazy to actually do it and we hit the road once I land.
Won’t happen.
It’s looking like the same pair the whole time.

Think.

Think.

It’s early.

I’m late.

Three minutes tossing through the hamper scrutinizing worn pairs like fruit at the market.
Scratch.
Sniff.
Hold a pair up to the light.
Shake for pubic hairs.
How'd this get in there.
I don't think these have been worn at all.
That makes two.

No time.

I'll be surfing and in shorts all day.
Who cares.
Let 'em hang.

Fuck it. Gotta go.

Scrap about $5 in change off the dresser,
scope the ID and ATM card and pocket the lot.

All I need is the board.
Everything else can suck it.

Shit.

Except the car key.

Fuck.

Where.....are....my....
......check my pocket from yesterday’s jeans. Another $2 coin and the keys.
All good.

I don't remember the drive to the airport.

Just over 30 minutes.
How?

Driving by instinct.
The Force.

I could have killed six people or driven the wrong way on a one way and not known.
Check the news when you get home.

It takes me twenty minutes into the flight before I can relax. I was amped for the trip and the added adrenaline of waking up late and a high speed chase through dim-wit drivers had me passed eleven.
I was dialed up.
Only at altitude do I notice that the lady next to me is a full on soap dodger, or she’d been sleeping with farm animals for the last two weeks. I lean over into the aisle for relief. I notice a smallish man with the shortest arms I’ve seen, trying to put his carry-on luggage back into the overhead. He pushes it, hoping it will fall into place only to have it fall back into his childlike hands. Again. Once more. I notice the woman in the seat beneath unaware that her head is about to be crushed by two stone worth of ill-fitting clothes, cologne and pomade encased in cheap fabric and zippers that stick.

The short hop lands and the crisp air slaps me as I drag my board bag outside.
I don’t wait long before Gibbo pulls up in his abused Land Cruisier. His smile is massive.

“Haha, mate. You look like shit. Strap it on and let’s go.”

Taylor is in the back already, sleeping like a baby.

“He was up all night. Heaps of folks at his place since yesterday arvo and the girlfriend is not happy.”
“She never fucking is.”
That gets a nod and we go.



As we drive, I keep looking back at Taylor hoping he’ll rise. Fuck his sleep. Birthday or not. I love Gibbo, but he’s hard to take one-on-one for that long. He talks like a chainsaw and I need another pair of ears. When he’s on a roll, it never really stops. Just gears down as it finds the next log to chew on.
Raaarararaaaaraarara ...raa...na..na..na.... raaarararaaaaaraaa...raa..na..na..na.

Two and a half hours of road that hasn’t seen a maintenance crew in a decade and the last good bit through dust and shrubs. It’s country I love to see. I’ve never seen this much. Everywhere you look.
Nothing.




Gibbo delivers and we make the spot with enough time for a late day sesh. My ass is numb, my knees are locked and my back has me walking like a man of sixty. I gingerly follow Gibbo, who’s already half way down the sand. He’s always juiced. It’s infectious. Like having Red Bull on tap where ever you go. I love that about him.
The wind is onshore and it’s a bit messy, but nothing like getting hammered by tempermental surf to shake out the cobwebs.




“Sloppy, huh.” Taylor’s swollen eyes stare out the front windshield as we arrive back at the truck. The moppy hair and grin of a stoned puppy. He’s a head fake. Looks slow and dazed, but he is wicked smart and solid as. He’d do anything for anyone, but he’ll give you enough rope to hang yourself and walk away.
He also taught more about surfing in the last year than I learned in the last ten.

The sun is still high. I grab the fish. Half way out to the break I know I’m in for a fight. A strong rip and some serious wash have me punch drunk before I’ve been to my feet.
I get broken on two waves that curl over with no warning and flick me off my board like a spider from a piece of wood. I get bumped off a third that has vicious chop as I drop down the face. I’m starting to get riled. Just before my head pops through the white wash, I scream underwater, “fuck!!” and get back on my board. I’m frustrated that the water isn’t giving me what I want; one clean ride get me aligned, straighten my toes, bring me a smile.
It happens at times, doing what makes me feel most serene and at peace with life, I go the wrong direction and get all bent out of shape. Fighting the ocean, it’s energy, it’s life that is so much bigger than me.




But, it never takes me long to remember why I do this. Where I am. It’s so easy to see how the negative doesn’t fit here. It seems so out of place and never lasts long. It’ll come. Don’t fight. Like when you’re being rolled around in the torrent, the never ending washing machine, not knowing which end is up. Always relax. Don’t rush. Panic takes all your breath and leave you at the bottom. It’s always better to stay calm. Let the surface find you. It all works out in the end.





I get my wave and a few more. We are out of the water as the sun starts to sink into the horizon. No camp. No fire. We pull out our bags, find enough kindling near by and heat up food.

Big laughs, lots of tequila around a crackling fire under a cloudless night sky. We talk about nothing. We fart, pick skin off our feet, talk about women, define ‘crazy’, drink more tequila and beer, tell surf stories we’ve told many times before, discuss the plight of the Mentawais, ponder having kids, things we should have done, things we will.
Time for sleep.





My mind floats as I lay under the stars. It's cold, but not enough to keep me from a mental wander. I like the moments before I sleep. My dreams. My story. Not those of my demented subconscious. The body gets heavy. I can feel it. Narcotic. My pictures... moving. Sunrise, tomorrow. Perfect waves. I'm Joel Tudor. Then, I find her. Waiting. She is often there. In a hotel room, standing in the yard, falling from a bar stool, laying on a beach, covered in mud from head to toe. Don't go anywhere. Just like that. I laugh. Hear you laughing. It’s warm. Everyday. Then I'm out.



The morning is like once being blind and seeing for the first time. I was never conscious before now. This is the first day. My first day. It takes me a while to remember who I am and what I believe in. Like being reborn. It’s quiet. The rocks are beautiful, the sand is perfection, the light is delivered. Heaven is damp and tastes of salt. But, does not include Gibbo's bare ass staring at me from across the ring of stones.
"Put that thing away you freak."
"Bite me."
I can smell the last bits of tequila floating from my mouth.
I can see it on Taylor's face.
“Fucking lovely, mate,” he says slowly like it’s made of glue.
It certainly is.

We find ourselves staring out to sea. We hear her voice. She calls. She cries. She flashes her generous bosom and we get up for a closer look.
She’s peeling off thick four and five foot swells. Open ended like an uncurling flower and smooth as glass.
We stretch the sleep from our bodies and just watch the ocean.
And like that moment as you pull the sweater over a lover’s head, you smell the beauty in what you’re about to do, it fills you up and the certainty of it, the impending eventuality of it makes you feel alive.

For a moment life is distilled of madness, complication and all that which blinds us from peace. It’s like the non-baited smile of a stranger on the street. I don’t have a job, money is free, pain does not exist, I won’t get old.





Today will be a good day.
I wish they all were.

Get Your Finger Out of My Ass Before I Start Digging It

(an attempt at channeling/plagiarizing David Milch)

Mike slid the glass door closed behind him and cut off the tone-deaf orchestra of shits and giggles from inside. He stepped onto the concrete patio and stared at the pool illuminated bright blue, tiki lamps, weather-proof furniture and various ceramic and stone figures half disguised in shadow from a nearly full moon.
An audible sigh left his mouth, but his shoulders failed to comply and remained on tight strings from his ears.

"It will take you a while to localize and concede your true thoughts. I could offer you a cigarette, which may not present a healthy alternative, but may at least give you the satisfaction of focusing on something that you need not wonder on it's course of malignancy," a voice drew slowly from the shadows.

Mike turned his still un-dilated eyes on a man leaning against a short rock wall which seemed to complain and plead for sympathy at being all that stood between the house and a hill of dirt that rose up behind it.

The cherry of a cigarette moved like a cursor in the moonlight as he spoke.
"Or you could grab that statue of Buddha and find your way to the bottom of the pool."

"It looks a bit heavy for one man. Care to join me?" Mike suggested.

"Ah, I am too drunk and out of shape to be of much good. The cigarette on offer has the quality of being much less strenuous to serve the purpose. Though slowly, as Kevin Spacey to pussy."

"I've been drinking more than my share from a well of booze, but it has done little to make that wash down any easier," Mike admitted, gesturing to the revery through the glass doors that played like a scene from Valley of the Dolls, but with the volume turned low.

"An ocean of liquor could not make any of that more distinguishable from horse manure nor dilute it's smell, much less guard you from the corruption of rolling around in it for any length of time."

Mike walked closer to the voice and took the cigarette that was waiting for him between the fingers of an outstretched hand.

"Mike," he offered in return.

The man smashed the last of his burning cigarette against the wall and dropped it into a pile of butts, pulled another from the pack, then held out a flame after lighting his own.

“Mike, I might suggest another venue to whore yourself while in wait for the woman’s mouth to finish tending to dirty laundry and turn it’s attention to your more salacious appetites. There is a no less eager blow job than that from a woman already sated by the poor judgment and misfortune of others. I would suggest the more seedy yet less flawed watering hole just blocks from the bottom of the hill. A drunk starved for a refill of Scotch is sure to be more enthusiastic in sucking your cock than a woman preoccupied with the politics of inappreciable gossip.”

Mike sat down in a stiff chair and was immediately pained by the rubberish bands pinching the skin of his back.

Behind him in the bright light, hand gestures and gaping mouths, mock shoving like monkeys fighting over heights in the trees.

“Pussy was not necessarily my intention. Though, it crossed my mind in the most ass to mouth of arrangements. My original purpose was quickly lost as the truth is in church.”

“Religion is a dolt’s answer to self-loathing and lack of purpose. A lie agreed upon, pussy or otherwise,” came the reply.

Mike had yet to get a good look at the man’s face, but the occasional orange glow revealed the murky, sullen eyes of a man compromised by darkness.

The man continued, “this is my lot, young man. Avoid it as you would seeing your parents copulate as it will stain your conscious. I confess the folly seduced me to the point of paying admission. And I am never the same for it. I’ve seen eunuchs carved from better stone than I, and witnessed more misery in their moving to justify themselves than there is in those bent on doing murder.”

Mike felt a chill. “My years have seen me less friendly to looking past certain qualities in the delight of pussy.”

“That pussy ain’t looking for friends. The finger tickles and invites your consent, placing you in the delicate position of walking the market hoping you go unrecognized. Do yourself a favor and leave while you can and you are still the fine man I take you for.”

Mike let go of his cigarette and crushed it beneath the sole of his shoe. He looked up and the man had seemingly slipped into the shadows and disappeared. He checked his pockets for car keys and was relieved to find all he needed to leave. He took one look back into the house and the showcase of malicious laughter and false concern.

The side gate creaked open and as he walked the side of the house, he could feel the footprints of those who had left in the same manner.

Change Is The Tune We All Dance To

Loren Victory

I pace the apartment in loose fitting jeans and tight tee, simultaneously mouthing the lyrics to Velvet Underground’s “I Can’t Stand It” and thinking how I might keep my girlfriend in luxurious undergarments. Time is starting to slowly burn like doll-eyed plastic, mouth perma-fit for bottle, in a house fire. And, I can hear the dogs.

There are times in a week when I feel alive like Iggy on stage and the rest feels like gum stretching sneaker-to-street midday August in New York. The shift, punch-clock transition fucks with my head like six a.m. catatonia of post eight ball binges. Sleep or breakfast. I can’t decided, so neither. And I begin to look for it, not knowing what it is, and I pace the apartment.

The thing about change is it doesn’t reveal itself in any form or order. Rather, leaves hastily scribbled, broken English Post-its in hard to reach places. I can only re-arrange them (those at arms length or gathered from underneath unfamiliar armchairs) in any multitude of combinations in an attempt to break the Wehrmacht Enigma cipher, presumably typed out by some ghost in a Janis Joplin stupor.

Fuck or fight. The light from across the street is casting a long shadow of an open slat stair case on white siding and I know I have one more chance tomorrow, but now, I can only reflect on a morphine haze that maybe was an opportunity or may have been a coma well passed. I blink long ignoring the rich man’s daughter and trivial ‘must’ and ‘should’ that infest the air like forced anchorman smiles on morning television and instead try to focus on the lone dress that hangs in my closet, a reminder of fortune favoring the fortunate and why I’ve been lead to the edge of madness/brilliance.

It may be some fatal flaw that keeps me grasping firm on the freedom that I hang in each new place as some way to make the unknown and strange feel like home. It’s not drapery or some Kandinsky print or the scratch of London Calling on a freshly hooked up turntable that quiets the nomadic urge to push it’s shoes under the coffee table and throw bare feet up and sink in. It’s usually the slow comfort of freedom that peeks a head out from under the bed like a kitten newly arrived from a box in front of the market. Unsure of the surroundings and new smells and still damp with the reluctancy to uncoil the stored energy of springed tendons.

At every corner they’re selling comfort in three for the price of one, point of purchase, disposable, at your fingertips. I can hear Dr. Phil on the soapbox, shaking fat, tactless, new found wealth fists at fresh Einsteins and Vonneguts, spewing cereal box self-help like peppermint flavored vomit, conveying the wisdom of blind responsibility and the burning of freak flags. I catch myself listening and staring at classifieds in the pre-made, just add water section of the newspaper and after realizing I’ve brushed up too close to the collective hypnotism, I spend the next three hours tying to wash it off my clothes.

Her voice rings in my head, unexplored and luminous each time I hear it, and all at once, I forget and am reminded of everything. Happy. I wish I could play the tune from sleep to sleep. A soundtrack to drown out the noise of listening station pop and coffee on a stick and safety in what the next guy is doing, so I can solve the mystery of the Post-its and pull my freedom from the box yet to be unpacked, stretch it across the wall and go underwear shopping.