A black humorous wave of nostalgia

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

 Hector tells Zoyd, “this is a real revolution, not that little fantasy
handjob you people was into, the wave of History.” [27] “Our dream is to
locate a legendary OBSERVER-PARTICIPANT from those times, Frenesi
Gates-and bring her up out of her mysterious years of underground
existence, to make a Film about all those long ago political wars. [51]
Why does Hector want to “make a Film about Frenesi Gates, the
observer-participant, of the fantasy handjob, in “which th’ ultimate
message will be that the real threat to America, then and now, is from
the illegal abuse of narcotics?” [51] How does “the big Nostalgia Wave”
Hector’s trying to catch, obviously a Right, any surfer like Zoyd would
recognize as a “20 year cycle,’ rise out of the Lefts our “legendary”
Frenesi observed and participated in? How did she observe and
participate in that “soft focus shot” of “the Mellow Sixties, a slower
moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by
television?” [38] A time when Zoyd was stupid enough or innocent enough
to ask her, “do you think that love can save anybody?” [39] A “20 year
cycle” Zoyd could catch “straight up through the third eye in his
forehead, now and then, when moon, tides, and planetary magnetism were
all in tune.” Those were the early swells, mellow, predigital, when the
fact that Zoyd’s “Educated pussy” “was Pregnant” was only a “topic of
debate.” [41] And, even after Prairie came ashore, for Zoyd, “the years
had kept rolling, like the surf he used to ride, high, calm, wild,
windless.” [39] “But increasingly, the day, the necessary day,
presenting its demands, had claimed” our Goofy-Footed idealist, as those
Lefts got sloppy and that “soft focus shot” became semi-and full
automatic, with a dangerous undertow that betrayed legendary tube riders
and Weed and the whole big beautiful College of the Surf.  Now, Hector
the Comet, “in the service of the ever-dwindling attention span of an
ever more infantilized population”[52] is sitting on a long- board
trying to catch a big Right, in that boomerang swell from the sixties to
the eighties.

A black humorous wave of nostalgia for surfing in the sixties,

Terrance