“Master your craft, be nice and stay humble.” So says the great Dj Eric Morrillo.

Around 2001 Eric was a God in the New York City nightlife scene. His handsome smile and build and soulful beats radiated from the DJ booth. His appearance at any city club was an event. His singles and remixes were gospel. Running around the city as a house music devotee, with my prized band of misfits and outcasts and family, Eric represented taste and style, and a true master performing his craft. To us he was wholly devoted and demanded great respect. He brought us joy and connection through art and humanity.

As the great Kylie Minogue said “there’s no shortcut to learning a craft; you just have to put the years in.”

This is a lovely yet frustrating truism. No shortcuts if you gonna attempt it yourself. Hang your sign out, as the shaper Juan Diego once told me.

Shaping surfboards is an odd choice for me. I grew up in New York City, on the island of Manhattan, a long way from the islands of Hawaii or Polynesia, where surfing originated and flourished. As kids we were surrounded by concrete and skyscrapers, not sand and palm trees. We rode subways and buses, not in convertibles or pick up trucks. Surfers and their culture were exotic and allusive, relegated to California, which may as well have been another planet.

We had no access to the beach or ocean or surfboards. But we did have skateboards, and they were everything then.

I remember begging my mom for skateboards and comic books. All I wanted were skateboards and comic books. Didn’t want school or books or board games or cards or toys. Just skateboards and comic books.

On the weekends my best friend and I sold lemonade on the street in front of the brownstone building where we lived. Eventually we graduated to comic book sales from a fold up table opened in front of our building stoop. We spent all day out there on the sidewalk and street. Whatever money we made went straight to Big Apple comics on upper Broadway, or the revered Forbidden Planet downtown.

West 70th street was not a busy street at that time, so our prospective customers were rare, which left a lot of down time between sales pitches and lemonade pours. Mom set the boundaries at the avenues that bookended our block, so we could skate to either corner, then had to turn around. A few buildings up from ours had a fire hydrant in front, which meant two car lengths worth of open space. I spent many hours on that plot of earth, fruitlessly trying to olie a Mark Gonzalez or Kevin Staubb skateboard.

Surfing didn’t come around until later when I found myself working out in Montauk and my great friend Jonathan asked Chris and I if we wanted to try surfing. You may as well have asked if I wanted to fly, or visit the moon. Both attractive adventures but distant and seemingly inaccessible.

We rented long boards and wet suits at the Air and Speed surf shop and paddled out to an unfriendly Ditch Plains line up in mid May. A light went on inside of me. A memory perhaps.

Paddle over here, Jonathan said, motioning me over to the main peak line up.

Nah, I’m good over here, I told him, intimidated and self conscious.

This was, after all, surfing, a culture and activity reserved for pop gods and beach side locals. I’d seen this story in movies and on television: the muscular, blonde haired jock types effortlessly caught waves and ruled the parking lot. They slit your tires or broke your windshield if you weren’t local. They all had nick names and all grew up together and all dated the same hot girls and made fires on the beach to dry their wet suits at sunset. This was not New York City. This was entirely something different and I distinctly remember not belonging.

But then, sitting on a 9’1 longboard, my bare feet in the ocean brushing against the low tide kelp, my wet suit tight and warm around my body, and the sun calmly bathing us all, surfing felt like the most peaceful, most vibey, cool and liberating activity I’d perhaps ever tried. We were surfing. All of us at that cherished little Long Island beach break. I was apart of something. I felt apart of something.

A few years later in Indonesia I couldn’t find a surfboard big enough to suit me, so I Skyped around from the only cafe in Bingin that had Wi-Fi, searching for a shaping room and some tools. I had no idea. Naive and eager. How hard could it be…..? The boards I’d brought with me were short and thin performance style boards, fine for me. surfing California or Central America, but not suitable for my abilities on the bigger swells arriving at the Bukit Peninsula in July and August.

I had no idea.

People listened to my pitch over the phone and laughed. There were only a handful of shops with shaping rooms at the time, and they all basically laughed at me.

Who are you? They’d ask me.

I’m nobody really. I just want to shape a surfboard for me to ride.

Maybe you have some tools I can use? I asked them. I had no idea.

Fast forward a decade plus. Last night, while polishing an A Symmetrical surfboard for a young and talented Romeo Stone it struck me how fortunate to keep these hands busy. How lucky I am to have stumbled upon this foreign craft. How blessed to have direction and purpose for my hands and eyes. Keeps me out of trouble. The joy in making something tangible. Writing is great, but it’s a different kind of satisfaction. Actual physical craft provides texture and tactile simplicity. Less nuance. Power tools have a fabulous way of demanding presence and eliminating nuance.

Yvonne Chouinard told his son Fletcher he’d support anything he wanted to do long as he used his hands. The toil is plenty and the work is dirty and the money is shit and the security is allusive, but the art of craft and the privilege to create beauty in this fraught genre of surfing and this bumpy world continues to intrigue me. Takes a long time…..

I miss my dad. He got such a kick out of this. You’re from West 70th street, he’d tell me. Then smile and shrug, amused by my improbable passion and surprising obsession. How many surfboards can a person own? he would ask. How many surfboards can you sell? My dad grew up in the Bronx. Those guys surfing Malibu and San Onofre in the 50’s and 60’s were light years away from my dad’s small, tough world on Aurthur Avenue and the Grand Concourse.

Later in life I took him to Trestles, and we’d take that long walk down to the beach together, me with a fish under my arm and he smiling at the surfers going past on their beach cruisers. He would stand on the beach while I surfed Uppers and Middles in the early morning. He had his headphones on blasting Earth Wind & Fire, or Bruce Springsteen. I’d look back from the line up and he would just be swaying on the beach, distinctive and original.

Did you catch any? he’d ask.