Latest Update: March 1 , 2001 by Ben Marcus

THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 2001. 16:03. ALEX JOHNSON'S KITCHEN.

Weird. Today I was in the Mavericks Roadhouse Cafe talking to Katherine Graham-Clark. (I call her Graham-Cracker). I was thinking about a scene I wrote for my movie, Water on the Brain, in which a group of Mavericks locals heckle the four surfer/protagonists while eating breakfast there.

While that was going through my head, Katharine Graham-Cracker was cradling a baby that belonged to another young woman, and she was talking about the babies' health problems. "He has a softened fontanelle and suffers from encephalitis. You know, water on the brain."

Things that make you go, hmmmm. Just one of those situations. Remind me to tell you my "Plate of Shrimp" story one of these days.

Anyway, I was in the Mavericks Roadhouse Cafe eating the lovely salmon plate after spending a couple of hours working with Eric Nelson and Curt Myers on their next Mavericks production. These guys are holding the good footage, I'm just trying to help them come up with a structure and some interview questions and also help them find music.

I gave them a CD from a Norwegian band called Yelp, who just happen to make perfect Mavericks music. I found the music on a BASE-jumping video called 1st.BASE, which I saw while on the Valhalla SURFER trip to Norway. The music is thick and moody to go with guys hucking themselves off 5,000-foot cliffs in Norway. The music is perfect for Mavericks, too. We used some of it on the SURFER Magazine Norway TV show, and I'm trying to contact both the artists and their record company. The music is perfect, kind of like Stone Temple Pilots, all about "falling" and "doing it for the rush" and "the thrill of being crushed." Hopefully they can get it for cheap or free. Music is always a big problem with surf videos, and I may have given them the hook up.

I gave them a title, "Whipped" which plays on two things: guys getting whipped into waves, and there's the "pussy whipped" connotation, that guys who get too used to catching waves with Jet Skis get spoiled and start behaving in ways they shouldn't.

Anyway, I gave them a title and a comic opener and a story structure and interview questions and maybe some music and I'm also trying to get them footage from Jaws and Cortes Bank to round it all out. I'm trying to help out as much as I can. They have great Mavericks footage from land, boat and helicopter and I'm hoping they'll do as a good a job of packaging it as they did on Year of the Drag In.

The real drag is that they sell very few of those videos, no matter how good they are. Not tens of thousands, barely even thousands. It's barely worth the effort, but this is history.

Oh well.

After leaving the Roadhouse Cafe and driving south back to Santa Cruz, I turned on the radio and Chris Carter was being interviewed on NPR about his new TV show, The Long Gunmen. He was talking about working at Surfing Magazine and I was thinking: Those Surfing Magazine guys are all a bunch of no-talent boobs. If some Surfing Magazine dingaling can do it, I can do it.

Oh, my mom told me that I got a nice letter from the Big Australian Screenplay contest, who gave Water on the Brain an 83 out of 100. That's pretty good. Wonder why I didn't win. I coulda used the ten grand.

This morning I woke up at 3:00 in the morning at a friends' ranch up Green Valley Road in Watsonville. I've known Scotty and his wife forever and they are doing well. Scott was a hard-working surfer/landscaper for many years, but now the 20 acres he has been developing all that time is planted with 3000 apple trees, it's fully paid for and it's worth over a million dollars. They are in effect retired at 40, which is the way to go.

They left for Mexico this morning at 3:00 AM and I had to leave with them. I was hoping to rent Scott's little side house to get some work done, but they had someone in there already. Oh well.

Looks like my options here have run out, so I'm going to head for Washington.

This morning I drove all the way from Watsonville to Tiburon and retraced the path the doomed heroine of the murder mystery is going to take in the first chapter of the Strangers on the Internet. She does a five-mile run from Mar East Street in Tiburon and all the way up into Belvedere, a spectacular run during which she drools over all the fine, expensive houses along the way. This woman loves her husband but she loves houses more and it is her pure real estate lust which motivates her to have her husband killed.

The plot is very Marin County. Tiburon is quite a place. It was perfect there this morning. Blue skies, dead quiet and still, with San Francisco and the world rumbling off in the distance.

On the way back from Tiburon I borrowed some books from Matt Warshaw. I have to write a 4000-word history of Hawaiian surfing for David Brown and his website for the Surfing for Life video. Turns out Matt flowed the job to me because he is too busy with his Encyclopedia of Surfing.

I have to finish that and also a piece on Matt Warshaw's Encyclopedia of Surfing project for Swell.com. Evan just cut my retainer by two/thirds because I wasn't really producing anything. Turns out he was pissed because he'd been sending me lots of e-mails since January 26 but I hadn't received any of them because AOL blocked Swell.com e-mails for some reason. I would send him an occasional e-mail and he thought I was being a smart-ass. I wasn't and he got angry.

No big deal. I'm surprised I'm still being paid at all.

Swell.com is gearing up for the XXL Awards sometimes in March. I've got the inside scoop on who is leading. All I can say is I think Flea should win. The video angle from land of Flea's wave, shot by Curt Myers, is the clincher. That wave is fricking huge. Hard to believe waves even get that big on the west coast. I showed it to Scotty last night and he blew his top.

I also called Steve Pezman today from Ocean Beach and asked if he wanted to publish that History of Tow Surfing book.

Chronicle Books turned me down, and I'm thinking Pezman might want to do it. I also got some names off the spines of Matt's book collection for possible publishers. I'd like to write it for anyone, but I think Surfer's Journal would do the best job of gathering photos and laying it out. We'll see about that one. Pez said they were all pretty busy, but he was intrigued. I think it would sell.

Umm. What else? My ATM/credit card expired so I can no longer use it to buy goods or services. The van desperately needs an oil change. It's way overdue. I'm blowing it, but I'll probably wait until I pass through Sebastopol and the place I bought it.

I'm in Santa Cruz right now, mooching a phone line in my friend's kitchen. Yesterday and the day before were Spring Spectaculars in the Monterey Bay but it's back to being gray and gloomy. The surf was good at Steamer Lane an hour ago. I stopped by the Lane on my way back through Town and saw a guy named Robert Waldemar, one of the rowdy crew from the old days. I had given a video of 70s-era skateboarding to Mike Locatelli to give to Waldemar and I wondered if he's seen it. He had.

I'm also looking forward to writing a big Santa Cruz story for Surfer's Journal, but that's off in the future.

For now, it's the Warshaw thing for Swell.com, the history of Hawaiian surfing for the Surfing for Life website and then I'm up the coast, past Greg Noll's and into earthquake country.