There's more to life than surfing

I used to believe that. That statement is a large part of why I live in New York. After I gave up trying to be a pro-surfer, after I gave up trying to conceal myself within the surf industry, after I allowed myself to grow as a human being, I felt like I had to let something go, to shed a skin, molt, in order to fit new things in. Surfing was my life--exclusively--until I was 15, when I made room in my schedule for hardcore bands. Even then though, surfing drove my decisions, it controlled me. As I got older and the world didn't end up being as wonderful as I hoped it would be, I resented surfing for not preparing me for the real world. I blamed it for me not having healthy relationships, for me not having a true high school experience, for me not writing novels when I was fresh out of high school, before all the cynicism left me paralyzed and desperate.

I posted something a few weeks ago about leaving nothing behind, about burning everything in your tracks, leaving no trace. Surfing was one of the things that I burned. I have not allowed myself to honestly enjoy surfing like I did when I was 17 for a long time now, and I want to. I want to go surfing and not carry any of the egotistical, competitive baggage with me.

Pete and I surfed the other day at Rockaway. Elle st on the beach and watched, even came out and took one in on her belly fr a bit. Even playing around in the Rockaway slop, Pete surfing in cut-off jeans, our backs pasty and covered with a layer of winter-skin, it still felt like we were trying to prove something. I knew that Pete and I were by far the best surfers in the water. We usually are. That's something the 18 year-old Pete adn Ashton hoped for, something we strove to be. But, it doesn't make Pete or I happy anymore. Pete talked about how when he surfs with our friends from NY, who don't surf as well as us but who enjoy surfing so much that it is contagious and pleasant to be around--they are like grommets, but thirty-years old and have wives or kids, etc.--because he feels weird surfing aggressively when they are around, like it will kill their enthusiasm.

I ate this for lunch/breakfast. It was good.


Anyhow, what I am getting at is this:
I want to have fun when i paddle out again. And I plan on doing it more often.

Elle and I have discussed our plans for December, after I graduate. We still don't know what to do, but there is talk of going somewhere I can surf more often. There's also talk of China. And New Zealand. And Australia. There's talk.

I always dreamed of being with someone who at the very least considered my ridiculous idealism(sustainable NZ ranch with dozens of dogs, Nova Scotia cottage, Australian point surf via Vespa's, European stays, houseboats, sailboats, etc.). To be with someone who actually suggests ridiculous ideas like Elle does is quite wonderful.

And, you should see how good looking she is in a helmet on her bike. Hot damn!

I've surfed three times in the last 10 days. It feels good, being back in the water. I'm slowly getting it back. Pete and I have been getting some fun ones at Rockaway. Pete has been blasting the fins off the back on his new whip. Elle even took a few to the shore on Saturday. The water's warm, we're staying in a loft in SoHo for the next two months, my new log is perfect, my girlfriend still wants me around all the time, my bike will be built by the weekend, and life is very very good. I am a lucky young man.

As if I didn't miss home already, what with Kayla, Jack, Pops, and Little Girl being there together for the summer, the surf being fun at North Jetty, and me trning 25 without them, Jack sent me these today:

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

It would, and presumably will, take years for me to pen how much love I have for my dad. Mark Goggans is a father like no other. He was a natural. I'm sure he would tell you how hard raising the three of us little hellions was, but it never seemed to faze him, or, at least, he never let his stress show. He taught us and every one of our friends how to surf. he coached our baseball teams. He turned off the TV. He gave us books and lit fires under our asses. My dad stands above all other people to me. I love him with al my heart and miss him dearly, though I know he thinks of me everyday when he wakes up to my dog licking his face, or comes home to my dog's poop on his bed. I love you dad.

Elle is sleeping

So I thought I would write a little something.

I had a pretty lovely birthday. Jon, Pete and I drove out to Long Beach and surfed just west of Lido with Dutchie, China Ty, and FM Borroughs. Dubstar even made it out towards the end. The waves were decent sized, glassy, and super consistent. We surfed for almost four hours, sharing waves, dropping in on each other, listening to Franco regulate (excerpted conversation: Franco: Alright, lets spread out a bit. We're getting a little too clustered together. Pete: We're the only people out, Franco), and watching Ty and Dutchie give their childhood stomping grounds a going over.

We headed back to BK after stopping for coffee and a fritter at Star(five)bucks, and a bagel place. Bless got a ticket for "almost hitting a kid" while blowing past a stopped schoolbus (strangely, the bus was stopped in the left lane of a divided road, like in the middle, and the kids were getting out to cross the median, and, according to most state laws, you only have to stop for a school bus traveling the opposite direction if there is no median or divider, thus making it seem like a literal death trap for the bus to be dropping kids off in the median), but the guy let him off for a seatbelt violation.

I got home and rode to DNA to pick up Elle and ride our bikes back to her house for some R&R. We ate some hummus and crackers and cheese, and took a nap for an hour. We decided to meet everyone at Mollusk 'round closing time for beers on the deck and then headed to Fiore on Grand street for some fettilini al fruti de mare. Ben and JT came and represented SRQ. Pete pedaled his skinny ass over. Jon and Monia came and brought me Lance Arstrong's book and a bar of decadent Godiva. Jesso and Ilan came followed by Amanda S. Franco had to take a shower and comb his pomp and met us a little later at Fiore for a glass of White and a big slab of steak.

It was really a great day, mellow as it was. It was the first birthday I have not spent either out of the country or with family in a long time.

Jack sent me a video of Lemon swimming into the middle of the intracoastal, chasing a tennis ball with a caption that read : Happy birthday dickhead.

Jack is lucky, getting to lay around the romping room with Little Girl all day, getting lifted with my dad around the BBQ grill or the fire pit, helping my sis bake shit in the kitchen. I miss them quite a lot. Lemon has apparently maxed out at 32 pounds, which is almost twice the size she was when we were so blessed with her arrival into our lives almost a year ago. Little Girl is big now. When she jumps on the bed in the mornings it will hurt. As well as having very little comprehension of Other People's Space, she has very little understanding of her own physical presence and strength.

So, that's all for now.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I have existed on this earth for 25 years. My lifetime is at the very best 1/4 of the way over. And that's fine, I guess. You can't live forever.

I have been doing too much thinking lately. Mainly about the past, about my past, and have come across a lot of strange forgotten things. When I was younger I was all about hardcore bands and read each band's lyric sheets in full. I always loved the Don't Look Back attitude that hardcore seemed to deliver.

But, I don't listen to hardcore anymore, not really. And I constantly look back.

But thinking about my past these last couple weeks I have discovered something about myself that I am not sure I'm proud of:

I burn everything in my tracks--not just bridges, everything. I change my mind, set a match, turn and go. Until recently, I never really looked back at all.

Anyone who knows me well will also atest to my unwavering devotion to Ernest Hemingway. I think "Snows of Kilimanjaro" is one of his best stories, which makes it one of the best stories of all time, if you ask me.

In the story, Harry is dying from gang green. Death sits at his feet and breathes upon his neck. His lady is with him, trying to make him comfortable while the wait for the medical plane to arrive. He resents her, resents the people he has known, the life he has led. He is determined to ruin everything he can before he dies, to take all the good with him:

"Is it absolutely necessary to kill of everything you left behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and burn your saddle and armor?" she asks.....

"Do you think its fun to do this? I don't know why I'm doing it. It's trying to kill to keep yourself alive, I imagine...............I don't like to leave anything," the man said." I don't like to leave things behind."

Does anyone else feel this way? I know every girl I have ever gone on a date with, or dated for a long period of time-- actually, pretty much every girl I've ever known-- would recognize the sentiments in me. And I don't know why I do it, really.

I used to consider myself a misanthrope of sorts, justifying my actions by call ing them intellectual rebellion. To quote Shai Hulud:

"I am the wayward son of man, my fathers have darkened what was the warmest
heart the world would have ever known, relish in what you have created.

deprived of life a formless shadow deprived of life
set your body ablaze!"

So, what i am getting at is that I want to break this habit. I want to move on, to stop being so angry at the world. It is going to kill me, the anger.

The rehearsal dinner was held at Greg and Janina's house, just south of them a ways. Their house was too perfect for words, and was tucked away in a little bay, overlooking these beautiful little islands and points. Ezra made a big bucket of decadent pulled pork and we all sat and ate and drank and watched the sun set. As darkness fell (it didn't get dark until almost 2200 hrs), Greg made a fire out back on the water and we all sat around and talked or stared silently at the profound beauty that is rural, coastal Nova Scotia at dusk. Someone grabbed a guitar from inside and Glen Hansard--of "Once" fame--and their friend Sam Amadon played a bunch of songs. It was really quite lovely.



Elle and I headed back to where we were staying at the Lighthouse Motel in pleasantville and tried to wrap our heads around the beauty that we had been a part of that day. it was a good day, I'll leave it at that.





The wedding was at this tiny fisherman's church on an outer LaHave island, tucked away down a gravel road, and overlooking another one of the picture-perfect bays. The church has stained glass in all the windows of lighthouses and was built in memory of several fisherman and locals who drowned at sea. The building looks like the skeleton of a boat's hull from the inside and smelled of rich pine. The afternoon light draped over the 30 or so of their close friends and family. The pictures will do the event justice more than words, but I will transcribe something that I said to Ez and Hill during the service.

"I have spent a good part of my life afraid that themost important moments of my life, the most sincere emotions, were cliche and sentimental, ripe for parody, afraid of being called naive for believing in things like love and beauty. But as I have gotten to know Hil and Ez, the life they have made for themselves, the people that surround them, and th love they share, i can't help but feel that it is genuine.

Their love is nothing to roll your eyes at.

And that makes me happy. Like soul-deep happy"



I thought I was going to throw up when I sat down.

Anyway, the wedding was incredibly beautiful and I couldn;t imagine a more appropriate way of celebrating two of my favorite people in this world's wedding. It was incredible. Glen played an Al Green song before they gave their vows, Sam played a song of his appropriately titled "Wedding Dress" as they walked down the isle together. Their vows were traditional Celtic vows, which as with everythng else, were perfect.


the photos that follow were taken by Elle on her pop's Pentax.

Last week Elle and I flew north for the Caldwell-Nanney union in the LaHave Islands of Nova Scotia.

We flew into Halifax on Thursday and arrived early in the afternoon, rented a car, and drove three hours south-west(I think) across the peninsula (make sure you don't call it an "island"; people there are very quick to correct you and apparently very proud of being "connected to the rest of Canada" and when correcting you usually make some sort of comment about how "Americans know nothing about Canada," though a young friend of Ezra's who lives there, when we told him this story, said, "shit, it's pretty much a fucking island") to the Bay of Fundy.


The Bay of Fundy claims to have the most extreme tidal shifts in the world. A combination of bottom contours, currents, and a Viking curse or something, causes the tides to fluxuate tremendously, leaving boats that once were sitting pretty in 20 feet of water high and dry at low-tide.

We had reservations at the Thistle Down Bed and Breakfast and were pleased to find it actually on the Bay and as pretty as the pictures made it seem. The B&B was owned by a guy named Mel whose eyes never fully opened and whose dry sense of humor and creepiness combined to cause a slight case of paranoia in Elle and I when we found the room furnished with a stuffed white teddy bear which I quickly examined for a camera or other recording device.


We spent a day and a half there eating scallops (in everything!--scallops in our omellettes even), relaxing, and driving around the area. We hiked to Balancing Rock, drove out the the furthest part of the peninsula, took a bunch of ferry's, and checked out some lighthouses.

On Elle's request I had been growing a beard for the two months prior to this. It had gotten a little grizzly and she seemed to have changed her mind about it (when we first started dating I had a beard but shaved it very soon after we became serious--very soon, as in ON our first real date, which is another story entirely--and she wanted me to grow it again). I brought ONE disposable razor with me to shave the thing off my face. It took 45 minutes of hacking at my poor, sensitive face to remove the bulk of it. I left this:


We left Saturday mronig and drove back across the island to the LaHave Islands for Ezra and Hillary's rehearsal dinner in Petite Riviere. It took two hours of driving through empty pin tree-lined roads to get to the coast and another half-hour weaving along the most beautiful rocky coastal roads before we found the island.

Hillary and Ezra have been telling me about Nova Scotia since I met them. They spend a good amount of their summers there and are always eager to share it with their friends. They decided the wedding was the perfect way to share such a special part of their lives with their closest friends and family. Seeing where and how they live up there was incredible.

I will follow with a post on the wedding, which I am still trying to do justice, and a bunch of photos.

Summer: A (tentative) schedule

Summer is here. School is finally and thankfully over. I got good grades, chopped a few years off my life not sleeping and sweating cliches. It was a rough semester, but a good one. I'm ready for a change.

Elle invited me down to her parents in CT for a long weekend. I was psyched on getting out of the city, being done with the semester, hanging out with Elle and seeing her home town, etc. We left Thursday afternoon from Grand Central. It was my first time their, strangely. It is really quite a beautiful place, though I think the clock should be bigger. I had a strange feeling sitting there watching people walk by, scuttling to and from obligations, that I didn't have the faintest clue what made any of these people feel joy. As a writer, someone interested or obligated to understand others inner-feelings, this is an issue. But sitting there, watching these stiff, cold people file past each other, I felt very alone. This is not the point of the story, though. The last thought is one that requires more than a quick blog post to dive in to.

Elle, her mom, and I got in to CT around 5ish and drove to where she grew up, stopping to meet her dad on the way for a steak dinner at Chute Gate.

Their home is truly beautiful, in the way only authentic New England homes can be. Crisp edges and trims, effortless landscaping, surrounded by lush green grass and foliage.

We were there to hang out with her BFF's Cara and Meg. Meg has been in Australia for a while finishing teaching school and living with her well-traveled BF, Brett, who is a class act. We basically layed low, went to Meg's BBQ at her nascar-watching family's, pillaged Salvation Army and Goodwill, and were treated like royalty by her mom and dad. It was a good weekend.

Elle, her mom, and I got back this morning and went to our respective jobs for the day. I came home and moved Nolan into our apt., and gave him a pretty fantastic haircut. Him and I ate pizza and are about to head over to Reggie's for his going-away-for-the-summer-to-teach-Shakespeare-to-children party.

Thursday, Elle and I head to Nova Scotia to take part in the Nanney-Caldwell wedding. We're staying on the Bay of Fundy for two evenings, then in the LaHave Islands for two, then somewhere else, possibly Lunenberg?, the last night. It is going to be quite a good time, staying in bed and breakfasts and enjoying the company of good friends in a new place. I'm pretty psyched, and couldn't be more excited about it being Elle and I's first real trip together!


Having just finished school, just finished all academic requirements for the next three months, I have set myself a goal to read a shit-ton. Shit-ton.

In the last 5 days I read:
Consider the Lobster
Oblivion, both by David Foster Wallace
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Name of The World by Denis Johnson

So, I am planning a 3-month binge, reading with the following books:
in no order:
Infinite Jest (again)
The Corrections
White Noise
Invisible Man (again)
Rabbit, Run
Rabbit, Redux
Rabbit is Rich
Rabbit at Rest
American Pastoral
(maybe) Against the Day
The Girl With Curious Hair

I'll keep you updated.