Survivors of getting absolutely flogged at The Wedge now meet Tuesdays in a church basement

Satire from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

Hello, My Name Is J.T., and I Took It on the Head

NEWPORT BEACH, CA — A local surfer who was caught inside by a twenty-five-foot set during this week’s historic swell has founded Caught Inside Anonymous, a support group for those who have stared up at a feathering lip from the worst seat in the building and lived to describe it inaccurately at parties.

The founder, who goes by J.T. in keeping with the group’s tradition of anonymity and surf journalism’s tradition of never getting full names, said the idea came to him somewhere around the second wave of the set, while he was being recirculated through the impact zone like laundry. ‘The first wave humbles you,’ he told the inaugural meeting. ‘The second one takes attendance. By the third you are having thoughts about your choices that no man should have alone. That is why we gather.’

The Twelve Steps, Heavily Modified

The group’s program adapts the traditional recovery framework for ocean-specific trauma. Step one requires members to admit they were powerless over the set, and that their positioning had become unmanageable. Step four calls for a searching and fearless inventory of every time they told someone the wave was bigger than it was. Step nine involves making amends to anyone whose board they ran over while scratching for the horizon, except when to do so would require admitting they saw them.

Meetings open with the Serenity Prayer of the Lineup: grant me the calm to accept the waves I cannot catch, the courage to go on the ones I can, and the wisdom to know that the difference is usually about fifteen feet of positioning. Coffee is provided. The doughnuts, members note grimly, are a closeout shape.

Membership Surges With the Swell

Attendance tripled during this week’s event, which packed The Wedge with spectators and sent hazard warnings up and down the coast as a powerful South Pacific storm delivered the year’s largest surf. The National Weather Service maintained beach hazard statements through Thursday, and lifeguards performed rescues at a clip that one guard described as cardio with paperwork. Each rescue, J.T. notes, is a future member.

New attendees this week included a bodyboarder who spent so long underwater he claims to have seen the sandbar’s mortgage, a stand-up paddler whose board returned to shore forty minutes before he did, and a tourist from Ohio who insists he was just wading. The group accepted him anyway. ‘The ocean does not check intentions,’ said longtime member Doreen, sixty-one, who got pitched at Brooks Street in 1987 and has discussed it weekly since.

Mental Health Professionals Cautiously Endorse

Sports psychologists say the group fills a genuine niche, since surfers are famously incapable of processing fear through normal channels, preferring to convert all emotions into either stoke or a story where they come off slightly better. ‘Peer support works,’ said Dr. Alana Trough, who studies risk athletes at the American Psychological Association‘s sports division. ‘Though I note their literature describes panic as an inside-out duck dive of the soul, which is not a clinical term, and their treatment plan for trauma is, quote, paddle back out. We are monitoring them.’

The paddle-back-out doctrine is indeed the group’s most controversial teaching. Critics call it avoidance. Members call it Tuesday. J.T. himself returned to the water the morning after his twenty-five-foot education, a decision he defended at length. ‘If I do not go back, the set wins,’ he said. ‘Also it was still pumping. There were like four guys out. You do not heal on a day like that. You heal in September.’

The Closing Circle

Each meeting ends with members standing, joining hands, and reciting the group’s credo: It was bigger than it looks on the cam. Then they file out into the Newport evening, past the berm where a thousand spectators gasped at their suffering, toward trucks with racks and homes with patient spouses, carrying the one truth the ocean teaches free of charge to anyone who lingers in the wrong spot: the horizon is not a forecast. It is a warning with good lighting.

Caught Inside Anonymous meets Tuesdays, swell permitting, which members acknowledge undermines the entire schedule.

The Literature Grows

The group has begun publishing pamphlets, including the popular titles It Looked Makeable From the Channel, Your Leash Is Not a Life Plan, and Letting Go of the Rail: A Grief Workbook. A youth chapter is in development for groms, whose caught-inside experiences are complicated by the additional trauma of their fathers filming it. ‘Dad posted my flogging before I reached the sand,’ one twelve-year-old testified. ‘It has nine hundred likes. My wipeout is more popular than I am.’ The group is drafting a step for that.

Plans for a national network are underway, with sister chapters forming at Ocean Beach, Pipeline, and one defiant outpost in Lake Michigan whose members insist fresh water counts and whose stories, members admit, slap surprisingly hard. J.T. envisions a future in which no surfer suffers the second wave of the set alone. ‘The ocean will keep teaching the class,’ he said. ‘We are just the study group.’

More gentle nonsense at https://www.thehardtimes.net.

SOURCE: Satirical Journalism