photo by Ed Fladung
Jim Moriarty is the CEO of Surfrider and writes a blog called Oceans Waves Beaches, which has tons of good/interesting/thoughtful content. Jim is totally dialed-in online and uses serious social networking skills to build “onramps” for people to learn about and support the clean-water initiatives Surfrider are fighting for.
Earlier this week Jim posted a little something about me and my photography. He compared me to Charles Eames, probably the best compliment I have ever received. Ever. See the post here: If Eames surfed… he’d be Ed Fladung
The photo above was featured on Jim’s post. The person in the photo is a guy named Gabe, who works for a large sneaker company up near Portland, Oregon. I met Gabe through Chum, when they were down here on a surf trip last year. I sent him a link to Jim’s post, with the subject line “Almost Famous”. This is what he wrote back:
Ah, that Mex trip seems like a very distant dream sitting in my cube buried under an ever-growing mound of emails.
Wish I could follow my folly like mister QP and “quit my job, sell my car, rent out my house and move to Mexico.”
Until then I’ll live vicariously. Thanks for the stoke,
G
And this was my reply:
The grass is always greener.
Sometimes, as I sit here, sweating profusely, at my computer in the 90% humidity, trying to hussle up some work, I think to myself, shit it would be so awesome to work for someone else, a large sneaker/lifestyles brand and collaborate with other people in the office and kick off work at 6 and go grab some thai or vietnamese food and a good microbrew stout beer… sometimes I even miss the smell of the low-pile industro carpeting and off-gassing of plastic cubicles.
and then a friend calls up and says let’s go surfing, and the world is right again.
keep in touch. saludos,
// Ed
Though the tagline of this site reads: “I quit my job, sold my car, rented out my house and moved to Mexico.” That line is essentially a very dense and layered subject boiled down to an easily digestible one-liner. It works great to get the immediate message across – it’s good marketing. But behind it lies a more complicated truth. And though I’m hesitant to talk about it much here, it’s important to show that side.
Life is hard, no matter where you rest your head. It helps being in a warm, sunny, (occasionally) surf-filled little mexican town, but even that has its own complications. When you trade latitudes, longitudes, cultures and socio-economic structures, you’re essentially trading one set of good and bad things for another. After a year or two, you’ll start to miss the good things and a few years after that, you’ll start to forget about the bad things. The real juice in life, is learning how to combine the good things from both places and minimize the bad. Not exactly easy but not altogether unattainable.
I really appreciate it when people write in and say they dig my photography and live a little bit vicariously through me. And I admit I live a very blessed life. I had the opportunity to change my life and take a different path, one that altered my life irreversibly (for better or for worse). It helped that I had my family here to support and encourage me. But I would like to acknowledge that Mexico hasn’t always been the easiest. In ways it has been much harder than the slightly more predictable trajectory of my old life. On a daily basis, I consciously choose to keep it positive, rather than trying to grab on to the negatives and write about them, I just them float by. Sometimes the negatives are almost too easy to dwell on. They make for impassioned, juicy writing. But after a while the negative current envelops you and you begin to forget the good things about the place where you lay your head.
In A Brokedown Melody, Gerry Lopez sums it up beautifully and eloquently: “all ya gotta do is just keep paddling… simple.”
He’s so right.
