Excerpt from "$12 Surfboard

I'm working on a book based on my adventures with my $12 surfboard, the one you see me holding in the masthead picture. Its the story of how I started surfing and how our life, or at least my life, takes the course that we choose for it. The book is based on writings from my two other personal blogs, and I plan to occasionally re-post them here. I sprained my ACL skateboarding Thursday night, which gave me three solid days with nothing to do while my leg healed except for read, write, and watch TV. I'm actually pretty stoked that I spent most of the weekend off my feet polishing and fleshing out the introductory chapters. So stoked that I felt like posting a short excerpt that I think starts to represent the book conceptually. here it is:

I had always wanted to be a skateboarder. My first boyfriend even built me one for my sixteenth birthday, but I lived on a steep hill on a gravel road and never learned to ride it. Eventually, my heartless mother sold it at a yard sale when I was in college.

Everyone has things like that, things you always want to do and never get around to. Everyone has owned things that represent dreams that were never realized or goals that were never achieved. Eventually, most of those precious but unused items get sold at yard sales or given to thrift stores by parents or spouses who are tired of tripping over them. We try to console ourselves with the possibility that the toy we outgrew, the instrument we never practiced, or whatever it was that we never really finished or committed to went to someone who would do exactly what we didn't. Thats the hope anyway, that the dream we had gets passed on to someone who can use it and treasure it the way we wanted to, the way we always thought we could.

Or it could just wind up in the next person's closet or garage gathering dust until the next parent or significant other disposes of it.