The Barely Adult Category (not a wise choice)

Aged anywhere between sixteen and twenty-two, members of this category are generally featureless and extremely hard to distinguish individually or when observed in a group.

Too impatient for intelligent decision making, the barely adult category have a predilection for putting themselves into extremely perilous situations where they have at the time only a reasonable chance of achieving some passing local infamy, or at best a small mention in any one of the myriad magazines that sport themselves as surfing bibles but are in fact nothing more than low voltage masturbation enhancers and Chinese Made Clothing Catalogues for Major Corporations.

This category has an appetite for carnage and enjoys whatever inebriant is on offer at whatever time of day it becomes available.

Not known for appreciating the subtle nuances of flavour or aroma, they drink beer and vodka from the neck of the bottle, eat food from their hands, swallow pharmaceutia by the fistful and smoke anything dry enough to light.

The category have an indisputably strong feminine trait apparent in their makeup that is made all too evident by their vapid subscription to whatever is the current fashion, whether it be in clothing or hairstyle.

They wear coloured wetsuits.

Similarly, they have a masochistic disposition to the wearing of sharp pointed metal trinkets on, or in their ears, eyes, eyelids, tongues, cheeks, noses, fingers, navels, nipples, toes and genitals. Buttocks for some unfathomable reason have remained free from such mutilation.

Perhaps it doesn’t hurt enough.

This category has drunk deeply at the well of Narcissus and lingered there meditatively in a slow and weighty reflection. They have bodies that do not age, minds that will never founder, hair that is permanently upright –  teeth that will always be held firm and wallets forever thin.

They acknowledge neither parent nor sibling in public; they comb their own backgrounds ruthlessly and expunge from memory and subsequent recollection any event that may be used by others to denigrate their social standing, such as excelling at school, or playing the piano, or attending church, or having a liking for accurate works of historical interest.

The men wear ink, in fact they have the travelling disposition of an albino Maori warrior on hard times and their women look to have been doodled upon by a roomfull of delinquent infants.

They do not wear spectacles. They all have the complete portable array of current generation electronic play and communicative hardware either in their pockets of inserted into their person, providing there is some space available.

Their vocabulary – their dialect – at times indicates an unconscious and therefore possibly vestigial remnant of an untaught theory of Dialectical Materialism that remains faintly resident in their self-suffocated intellect –  i.e. Matter Before Thought, or in simple terms – if it doesn’t matter then they don’t want to think about it.

Not quite as Karl Heinrich intended, but a philosophical second place result for Marxism nevertheless.

Occasionally one of their luckier numbers will be randomly selected by the commercial clothing importers and wholesalers or their generic magazine publishers, under the guise of a few industry sponsored competition wins in California in the off season, as a replacement for any ageing professional surfer who has fallen for the seductive siren call of the nine-hole golf course or has succumbed to the venereal and possibly bi-sexual pleasures of Southern Thailand.

This blazing ascent to the Heavenly Surfing Hierarchy is budgeted to last about eighteen months and release prize money of about $57,987.98. Most of which he will see only as it passes him by. The surf clothing industries will of course realise many millions from his brightly imaged sponsorship of their entire range of cheaply made and expensively sold fashion items. Young girls will admire him and he will be made to wear clothing that he would never otherwise consider owning.

The Management Agency he will be convinced to engage will also win substantially from his Arc of Triumphs’ commercial successes. Agencies run by, in the main, unsuccessful real estate agents and insolvent financial investment brokers who wouldn’t know a reef break from an inside suck-up. Personable and fast talking young men who exist on the fat margins of others’ earnings and a fair knowledge of the local distributorship and mark-up of benzoylmethylecgonine.

And one day The Barely Adult will wake up to the call of the kookaburra and chuck it in, head north, raise chooks and make a nuisance out of himself out at Lennox Head on the big days.

That, ladies, is when you should tag him.