Allow me to call to order the 10th annual meeting of The Society for Men Who Ride on Longboards While Wearing Sunglasses and Talking on a Cell Phone. This year, Stanford University has graciously provided the venue for our conference: the grassy knoll outside of Kresge Auditorium and a kickoff event (to follow this meeting): the 10:00-10:50 timeslot of Introductory Economics 1A.

Let me start by saying that there has never been a greater year to be a man who rides on a longboard while wearing sunglasses and talking on a cell phone. At Stanford alone, membership in our prestigious society has risen 4000% since last year. I would like to thank “T-Rock” in our advertising division for his ingenious plan to increase membership by calling other people who happen to be on longboards but not yet using a cellphone.

There was a time, however, when they said we couldn’t do it. When our organization first tried to get off the ground, in 1873, we were shot down in favor of The Consortium of Body-Building Men Who Ride on Comically Oversized, Three-Wheeled Bicycles with A Disproportionately Larger Front Wheel.

We lay in quiet rest for nearly a century as this other society swelled in size, only to fall to The Collective for Flower Children with Peace Sign-Shaped Necklaces and Largely Unwashed Hair, and later The Awesome Gang of Bad Dudes Who Wear Rollerblades Complimented with Rainbow Sweaters and Walkmen.

Yes, ours has been a history of defeat, of always coming in second. But this year, thanks in part to our Hollister-based recruiting tactics, the SFMWRLWWSATOACP has come out on top.

It is time for us to realize the lofty goals laid out in our mission statement, penned so long ago by our founder Tad McFaddington: “To inspire the youth of tomorrow to celebrate generic and meaningless trends; to pretend to surf and skateboard and then go out and get really high and forget about it later on a tri-weekly basis; and to...ah, man...I’m so gone right now.”

And I think this says something about us as a people. We are trendsetters, not trend followers. We are visionaries, revolutionaries, and anything but pretenders. As we ride down Escondido, our designer sunglasses glinting in the evening sun, the wheels on our longboards rolling in a plain and uninspiring fashion, we are the top dogs at Stanford.

We are a diverse family, to be sure, we men who ride on longboards while wearing sunglasses and talking on a cell phone. There are those of us who have iPhones, and those of us who have Blackberries. There are those among us who are White, and those among us who are White. There are those among us from Norcal, and those among us from festering piles of coagulating goo fabricated in a laboratory setting. But we have one thing in common: our shared love of pretentious ostentation.

And it is for this reason that I ask you all to raise into the air your tropical fruit-flavored vodka chillers, and exclaim, with one voice, with one song, “We and our ilk are the kings of the surf guitar and sloshball and gloriously unkempt hair and stuff.”

I must be exiting the podium now, to pass the torch over to our DJ, Jazzy Jeff II, but I leave you tonight with the great words of one of our finest and most representative members, a man whom I saw today riding past Mem Aud and uttering profoundly into his iPhone: “Dude, I just totally pulled a wicked spill a minute ago, but it’s alright, brah.”