All-time surf great Kelly Slater pulls best retirement prank yet!

Do you need me to fawn over Ethan Ewing’s rapier rail work? Should I pontificate on the future of John Florence and his persistent self-flagellation?

Last night, at quarter past midnight, just as my eyes were closing, competition was called on for the Margaret River Pro.

I squinted at my phone screen, casting pixels of pre-dawn light all the way from Western Australia in the shape of Eli Hanneman, Imaikalani deVault and Barron Mamiya.

It was not inspiring. Nor, given the forecast, had I expected it to be.

Any wave you must milk into Achilles depth water in an effort to score arbitrary points is hardly worth watching.

Dutifully and regardless, I wanted to watch. But today was my first day back at work after the Easter break. There’s a crucial week ahead. Next week my seniors go on study leave, and some I won’t ever see again. They’re set free, cast adrift of timetables and assignments, free to dictate their own lives from this point forward.

And I’m struck dumb by a sense of helplessness. Inert in the raw light of day.

I want them to succeed, and in that there’s always a pervasive uselessness. I’ve told them all I can at this stage. Now it’s up to them to practise. Some will, some won’t. There’s nothing I can do about that.

You always feel inadequate in this job. My senior classes are fifty-five individuals, all with their own complex web of needs and wants; strengths and weaknesses; tribulations and tragedy.

You can never know them all, let alone account for what they need.

Teaching is a job that never feels complete. Everything feels like a light skim over a very rough surface. You want to perfect it. To spend time building the layers, allowing them to cure, then smoothing them again and again.

You want the finished product to be flawless, but it never can be. After all, you’re flawed yourself.

This is why I’m quitting my job in a couple of months. Why I’m giving up a guaranteed salary, mortgage repayments, support and security for my family.

To chase something that might not exist. Contentment, maybe. Purpose, certainly. Perhaps perfection in impossible contexts.

Also, because I want to exert control over my own life. I don’t want it to be dictated by ringing bells and working-time agreements and bureaucracy.

I want to confront my flaws, to see if I can do anything that slows my desperate gasps, that helps breath come a little more steadily.

A self-inflicting, self-medicating gambler betting on himself.

Betting on a polythene bag of ideas, stretched and bulging in fragile suspension.

What could go wrong?

So this is the context in which I lay my head each night and wake each day.

And last night, in the half-world between consciousness and sleep, I heard Richie Lovett say something diminishing about the conditions. And that was it. I gave into a restless night, walking periodically to check scores and glimpse waves. I didn’t make much of it.

But in the netherworld of dreams I did meet Gabriel Medina.

He was fishing with bait and float, reclined against a rock in the glinting sun, as relaxed as a man can be. He wore trousers, rolled at the ankles like Huckleberry Finn.

It was an odd image, certainly. There was no fire, no fury. Just a sun-drenched man on a riverbank, squinting at his float bobbing and drifting in the dappled flow.

He did not speak to me, nor I to him.

He did not wear a cowl, nor ask for coin to pay my passage across the river.

I have no idea what it meant, but a large bet resting on Medina’s success might tie in.

Some time around three am I woke to see Medina’s silent dream confidence had been well founded. He’d dispatched Jack Robinson and Deivid Silva. No worries. Just fishing in the stream.

Though his 8.50 was…curious.

Surely it was a panicked flapping from the judges after he questioned them at Bells? Like gulls trapped behind glass.

There were other dreams, too, but they detached like bubbles at the break of day, drifting airily out of semi-consciousness and into the harsh, grey light.

There was snow this morning on the hills above me. Below this, raw silence. Wind-blown rain braiding panes of glass.

And so I write this now, dear reader, admittedly having watched precious little of the opening round from Margaret River’s imaginatively named “Main Break” and unsure whether it matters.

Yet still I’m eager to give you something, you slack-jawed, slavering hoards. Your gaze is blank and pitiless as the sun. And rightly so.

Do you need me to fawn over Ethan Ewing’s rapier rail work?

Should I pontificate on the future of John Florence and his persistent self-flagellation?

Must I lay Kelly Robert Slater on the pathologist’s slab, douse him in UV light and slice a fine blade from sternum to groin?

Does it matter? Do you care?

Does anyone?

The forecast’s better for tomorrow, though. Maybe I’ll endeavour to watch.

Or maybe I’ll just take peyote and go on a spirit walk with Deivid Silva.