Ice Cream Headache Sans Ice Cream

I leave about 11:30 this morning and I’m pretty excited about getting in the water. I’ve gone four days without swimming due to lots of work and avoiding the peak of a larger swell earlier in the week. As I watch the webcam of the strand this morning, I swear I hear it calling my name even though I’m pretty sure the video feed does not include audio. Southerly wind has been forecasted to pick up mid morning but it looks pretty mellow from what I can tell.

It’s overcast outside and I’m not really holding out any hope of seeing the sun before I get back home. I only see one cyber truck on the drive to the Strand which one may nobly argue is one too many but an improvement from the two I saw on my last swim. I enjoy the drive nonetheless.

As I drive through the parking lot, I’m happy to see that the water still looks relatively smooth. I exit my car and head down the stairs. The warmth comes and goes. It’s about 60 degrees out and I’m wondering when we are going to get on with Summer. It’s memorial day this weekend but I’m not sure I’m ready to pull my white pants and shoes out of storage.

I’m near shore and it looks like construction has ended on the ramp. The concrete has been filled back in and it’s as good as new. In fact, now that I’m reminiscing about this, I didn’t see any tractors working on the rocks. I’m trying to think if the maintenance sign was still down there. Perhaps they have totally completed all the work? I’m guessing they probably were aiming to be finished before the summer beach crowds - not to mention the jr. lifeguards.

It’s high tide and it looks like we have lost some sand. The beach looks pretty much the same as last week but there is an 18 inch drop from the end of the ramp to the sand. I put my feet in the water and it’s not exactly warming up but it doesn’t feel like it has dropped much either. Surfline has adjusted the temperature here to 60 earlier in the week and this afternoon they brought it down to 59. I wouldn’t say it’s 59. I see brown discoloration in the water washing in to shore. It looks like red tide. I’ve been hearing that the red tide has been pretty thick in San Diego but so far I have not seen much of it here.

I head out into the water. There is some surf but I’m not seeing anything that matches that one set I saw Saturday morning. Supposedly that swell peaked on Tuesday and tomorrow it’s gonna be pretty much history. I take a picture of a wave just before it breaks on top of me and I’m excited to see how it came out. Spoiler alert: not so great. The wave looks like it is 20 feet away and just a kind of bump in the water. No, that pic will not be making it into the new store I just setup on this site.

Once I’m past the surf, I feel a mild ice cream headache lingering. The sad part about these is that I never even got to eat any ice cream. Well, I did get to come to the ocean and walk into it and swim with fish and stuff. The majority of human beings on this planet will never get to do this and many dream of these things. I do it multiple times a week. I truly am fortunate. I’ll gladly take the ice cream headache.

The water feels cold at first but still nothing I would classify as “freezing.” It is still liquid after all. Soon I pass through some warmer spots which come and go fairly frequently over the entire swim. It’s really not too bad out here. My head is full of these thoughts and feelings that are less than pleasant but not horrible either. They kind of match the temperature of the water.

Lately I’m having a hard time not thinking about church and not really in a good way. Over the last several years my spirituality has evolved into a sort of life of its own that I truly find vibrant and meaningful. I feel a new connection with this thing that I believe runs through all things. More recently I came to a place where I believe that Christianity (along with other faiths) hold this kernel of truth which helps us settle into our humanhood. I have this curiosity, even fascination, with what the stories of the bible are telling us. I see it like an epic poem that illustrates our deepest thoughts, fears, and wisdom. So I started going to church again a couple years ago.

I attend a somewhat mainstream evangelical church even though it’s theology is pretty far right of my own. In some ways I wanted to return to the same flavor of Christianity that I left and look at it with a different pair of eyes. I feel no obligation to believe every word spoken from the pulpit (our church has no technical pulpit). I enjoy the general spirit of the community there and their passion to be close to God, but over time I just get so annoyed with the sermons and it feels like it is getting worse.

I used to talk about this fairly often in these posts but I stopped because I don’t find ranting about it valuable and I want my spiritual path to be one of looking forward and creating something new rather than looking back on what was said or done and wanting things and people outside of myself to be different. However, my thoughts are dominated by this over the swim today and I just can’t not mention it.

This all got super triggered about a month ago in a sermon covering 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9 - “He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” I don’t want to go on about this. I feel like I could write a book about this that no one should ever read because it probably wouldn’t say anything new. Let’s just say that the pastor takes this very literally, which is a fairly orthodox view in this particular flavor of Christian tradition.

This triggers something deep in me. I refuse to believe this literally because if that is how the universe is organized then God help us. I guess that is part of the punch line of the passage - God wants to help us but there is something twisted about this God and I’m not sure I want his help. Like many passages in the bible, I think this is pointing to some deep truth. We long for a time and a state where the world will be set right. I think that is hard wired into our humanity. It’s important to consider this passage comes immediately after Paul talks about the church being persecuted. So he is basically saying, “don’t you worry, those people who are torturing you will have their comeuppance.” We all want justice and I feel like this passage represents that yearning via the vessel of a first century Jewish mind. Oh…oops…I forgot. I’m not going to exegete on the passage.

Anyways I am swimming here and feel like a 16-25 year old adolescent (I’m almost 56) telling my pastors in my head, “your not the boss of me and my thoughts.” I get angry and frustrated because I feel like I have come to a place where Jesus and the bible feel more precious and real to me than they ever did even in my gung ho ultra-conservative youth. I have found this space that I think lies between literal history and imagination and it is in that space where I touch something I cannot see but feels very real. Then something is said in a sermon, which feels like every sermon nowadays, and this space closes in on itself and is replaced by this cartoon or comic book worldview that feels unrelatable at best, wacko in the middle, and dangerous at worst.

So I’m feeling the red tide of my icky thoughts in the water. As I raise my arm to take another stroke I can feel the water rinsing off the grimy feels and the sun provides warmth and helps to carry me forward. I’m swimming against a current and it feels like this film of this thing that I am and want not to be just won’t wash away but I know if I just keep swimming and surrender these thoughts to the water, I’ll eventually find myself back in that space between raw matter and imagination.

Now this feels like a good place to stop but I can’t go without mentioning the sun - one of my favorite topics. As soon as I am past the surf, I’m looking to my rear as I raise my head for breath and see unmistakable blue sky. This expands over the course of the swim. I’m not sure we ever totally came to what one would call “sunny,” but if you kept your head gazing northwest then yeah - it was sunny and delightful.