The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G. O. P. universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. [. . . ] Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.
Surfing and climbing are both useless sports. You get to be conquistadors of the useless. You climb to the summit and there is nothing there. And you could hike to the top from another direction. How you get there is the important part. It's the same with surfing.
You climb to the summit and there is nothing there.
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador