Editor’s Note: Yesterday we released issue 3 of Fresh Hell, our monthly dispatch of accumulated entertainment. It’s surfing, art, thinking, music, food, drink, inspiration, cinema, photography and writing. All the things that make this life a bit more enriching and more enjoyable. Subscribe below and you get it delivered once a month, free. Below is the introduction to Issue 3 and if you subscribe we’ll send you the password to issue 3.

Lately, I’ve been bored. Overcome by severe, glassy-eyed staring at the sea boredom. Sitting through the longest of lulls. An old dog laying on the porch. There is no salvation from it. No phone, no restaurant bar TVs, no crosswords, no tweets, no Instagram or music to save me. It’s just me and my pure, errant, wandering uninterrupted and uninfluenced thoughts (remember those?). I must tell you, it has been great.

Oh, and I don’t mean I haven’t been busy and that my life is one mindless staring match with the sun. Quite the contrary. I’m peppered and pestered by more work and adult-life related alerts, scrolls, chats, slacks, tax men, insurance calls, e-hangouts, e-mails, ringing and dinging than Griffin Mill in The Player. We’ve really set ourselves up for idiocracy here on Planet America. I mean, if you wanted to, you could go 24 hours without a single original thought thanks to our pavlovian addiction to anything but boredom. We’d rather look at the trash on The Daily Mail than have a hiccup in time with nothing stimulating our dopamine receptors. But now, every day, I shut down the engines and get really fucking bored for a while. I let things play out slow, unwrap thoughts piece by piece until they reveal themselves as fully formed ideas thanks to the magic of boredom. It’s true hopefulness, romantic daydreaming stuff, but it’s become everything to me. To build complex, multi-layered, slow moving unexplained thoughts in my mind like a little kid.

And before I tell you how fired up I am on the clarity and peace of mind I’ve found in my daily boredom, know that the irony is not lost on me that we are essentially an entertainment brand designed to prevent boredom and provide inspiration for you. So stick with me, but what I realized in looking at all this “stuff” below in our third installment of “Fresh Hell” is that a lot of art, thinking, surfing and making is spawned from hours and hours of serious boredom. You don’t get to where Cheryl Humphreys is with her serene color palettes and prints without long stints of thinking and waiting. Or how disconnected from everything do you need to be to make your food beautiful? Or think to paddle up Waimea river to collect mud for a painting like Herbie Fletcher. Or shoot medium format surf photos like Ari Marcopulos. Or read or write a complex and engaging book like Multiple Choice or watch a subtle and cinematic film like Beau Travail. If you have the patience, the reward is as good as your very own set wave, the third one, the biggest, heading right for you with no one else around. Let the impatient crowd scramble for the first two, and watch as that third one comes right to you. Enjoy every paddle and coast into the wave of the day, all because you sat out there waiting, bored as all hell.—Travis Ferré

[Photo: Jack Kerouac by Tom Palumbo circa 1956.]