Stephanie Gilmore Rides the Desert Waves
8-time world surfing champion gets stuck in the Arabian Desert. Luckily, there’s a wave pool.
The best surfer is the one who wins over and over and over again, and can’t stop winning
Don’t ever let her win at ping-pong, though
It’s been a few weeks, but there’s still a whiff of hotel lobby ambrosia from the Abu Dhabi EDITION on my long-sleeve shirt, my souvenir from the debut of Kelly Slater’s latest wave pool in the desert of the United Arab Emirates. How did I manage to get this golden ticket to the double top-secret opening of the latest “really big deal” in the elite inner circle of professional surfing on the far side of the world? The truth is I probably should not have been there at all.
The month before my trip I was mindlessly messaging an old mate on Instagram, one who happens to be the romantic partner of one Ms. Stephanie Louise Gilmore — the Australian professional surfer, eight-time world champion, and current defending champ. Her fella and I often share flat-earth/lizard-people/hollow-moon/quantum-entanglement memes while comparing notes on nano graphene, mud-flood theories, and …
Rodeo Champs
Some say 20-year-old rookie bareback rider Rocker Steiner is a punk-ass bitch for cursing
‘screw ’em, they’re stuck with my ass’
My pink Stetson was the cheapest hat in the store
Rodeo has been described by Forbes as America’s “fastest-growing sport.” After a recent Yellowstone-driven burst of popularity, it now draws 43 million people a year, which is larger than what both golf and tennis attract, and is even practiced by supermodel Bella Hadid, who is currently dating a Mexican-American cowboy from Fort Worth, Texas. Rodeo competitions can be watched live or via subscription to the Cowboy Channel, which is essential, since most rodeo fans live in smaller farm and ranch towns, especially out west, where Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA)-sanctioned rodeos are a real-world fixture of local communities, offering cowboys the opportunity to show off their skills.
The sport’s popularity initially peaked back in the nineties, before experiencing a slow decline that paralleled the struggles of rural America. Small communities found it difficult to maintain …
The Cabin
A father’s gift commands obedience in the here and now, and thereafter
There’s a cougar under the deck
My father takes the form of a bear and wrecks my dubious inheritance
Before my father even built it, he told me the cabin would be mine someday. It was an old trick of his: serving himself in the present in such a way that his action could be construed as a future service to me, thereby obligating me to him. In this case, he would gain a second home, a wilderness cabin in Montana where he could retire from practicing patent law to hunt and fish and learn to paint and so on, and I would someday inherit whatever was left of it while being compelled in the meantime to visit him there a lot and eat the game birds and venison he killed and help with seasonal chores such as dragging lawn sprinklers onto the roof as a late-summer fire-prevention measure. I would have done these things anyway, probably, being a good son who lived nearby, but the prospect of his eventual generosity meant I would have to do them on his schedule, promptly, without adjustment or complaint.
The cabin …
