My Inner Fundamentalist

Started off the morning with a run to Lantern Bay Park above Doheny and back. It is a crisp and beautiful sunny morning.

After some household chores and hanging out with my foster son, I left for the beach at about 10:30. Some more cloud coverage has come in and it is not quite so sunny and bright but it is still nice.

When I get to the parking lot, the water is the smoothest I have seen all week.

As I walk down the stairs I try to keep my mind focused on the sights and sounds around me and not think about the coldness of the water. Just as I am close to the sand, a mom is asking her son to run up and check to see if the funicular is running. I try to tell them it is not but I don’t think they heard me. The sign up top says “Temporarily out of service” but I am beginning to think someone has a very liberal view on the definition of “temporary.” It has not run since July and that was a very brief run since its prior outage. You would think they are waiting on some part but I wonder if that part is a car, track or both.

I check the water with my feet. Still cold. It looks like the patch of rocks that was in front of my pack stashing spot yesterday has migrated about 15 feet south.

I walk out into the water. Not too far from shore I come to one of the many troughs that are usually not too deep. I quickly find myself in over my head - literally. I guess now is when I start swimming. Eventually it gets super shallow again and I resume walking. I push through a couple waves and then begin the swim in earnest.

I swim and swim and swim and try to stay with the cold. It’s easy to try to get ahead of the cold and wander into thoughts like, “will it get warmer?” or “will it get colder?” or “will it overwhelm me?” or “how will such overwhelm feel?” or sometimes even getting lost in analyzing the cold as it feels now. If I can just stay with the cold - that is the experience of being in the cold right now - then everything moves along upon its own course.

Today I try to release my mind of the internal dogmatic arguments I have been having with my inner fundamentalist. I’ll tell you one thing: my inner fundamentalist does not care for my welfare. He just wants to be right. He likes to judge my own opinions (or lack of opinions) against his and tell me when I am wrong. He says he is “speaking the truth in love.” Big liar.

I get into these debates with him and I can’t even believe I am having these arguments. We argue about the second coming of Christ or hell or what people wear in heaven. He thinks everyone is dressed up in first century middle eastern garb. Oddly he loves 100% polyester pants. Anyways, I have to pause and wonder, why the fuck am I even arguing with someone about hell? There was a time not too long ago when I thought this was so far in wacko land that I would just walk away or brush off such a conversation. Now I argue and feel this pull into some vortex where heaven, hell, sin and atonement are all real things. I find myself lost in this jungle of religious accoutrements and symbols where the symbol is more real than what the symbol points to.

So in this water I choose to release the debates and the symbols. If they only lead me into a fog of confusion and conflict and make me feel bad about myself then I’m pretty sure these symbols are pointing to something they were never to point to in the first place.

It’s a good swim. I feel really good in the cold. The last 15 to 20 minutes are the most challenging, but here I am! I made it.

On the way home I listen to Tina Malia’s Hare Krishna. When I hear this song, I just hear the voice of someone reaching for God. There is no care for what God looks like or the style of throne he is sitting on. Rococo? Dada? It’s all good either way. My inner fundamentalist says “reaching shmeaching…sounds like the voice of someone on their way to hell to me.” Well I tell my inner fundamentalist that maybe he should tag along and tell him to leave.

After my hot shower, which was fantastic, I get a text from my mom with a link to a Wall Street Journal article about wetsuit shaming among San Francisco bay swimmers. Apparently some of the non-wetsuit swimmers (not all) think that the wetsuit swimmers are wusses. My inner fundamentalist loves these wetsuit shamers.