Miles Masterson: The crowd rant

Screw Surfing. Yes, I said it. Screw surfing.

Why? Because what once was the pastime, nay waste time of the rejects, degenerates and fringes of society, is now a Mom and Pop and snotty kids trend. Surfing is no longer for artists and freaks, and whilst its commoditisation was perhaps inevitable, even preordained (and who is anyone to stop people sharing in its joy?), I sometimes wonder, what if?

What if one of the purest sports on Earth has been completely smothered in logo-infected wrapper, sold to the masses like a cheeseburger on a Friday night binge? What if the fabric of surfing has really been torn apart and its soul evaporated? What if it is gone, baby, gone?

Camaraderie, giving and taking a wave used to mean something. A gift from God, or whatever deity or devil you believed in, who created these unique aqueous pulses that we are privileged to ride. Stoke. It was once a rare thing. Golden. Special. Now it’s been diluted by every man and his log, SUP or bodyboard.

Even in the most remote stretches of Indonesia, surf camps ply their trade to hordes of eager Johns and their urethane erections. Self-serving, self-entitled, ego-encrusted ferals with scant regard for once sacred unwritten rules of sharing flaunt their Western wave-lust. Snakes and liars, delusional pricks and ignorant clowns, they stream up on your inside like ever-spawning parasites, to gorge at the depleting core of the once Sport of Kings.

Thanks to these charlatans, I feel as if the soul of surfing has left the world, my children, gone to better Nirvanas, where damned humans cannot reach.

Why? Oh Why? Because we screw everything. Relentlessly. Each other, the Earth; we impregnate with impunity, spreading selfishness, breeding generations of spoilt surfing brats who in turn will screw each other and the world, until all that is left is a stinking pile of excrement, only good for fertilising yet more dishevelled surf breaks. Places where the perfect swell lines - shaped to be caressed by the true faithful, the creative, reverent and respectful – are now ruined. Like the slowly decaying plastic bottles on the jungle floor – incongruous and unwanted - these interlopers clog Mother Nature’s being; obtuse and wrong.

There are clearly too many of us now, and I feel that surfing is royally stuffed. It eats at my soul, you can tell. Makes me toss and turn, scrunch up my sweaty sheets and swear and hate and cry.

At times like these I question why I even bother, as magical surfing moments, once attainable, albeit through decades of dedication and discipline, become more fleeting as the gluttonous moths swarm into the light, ignorant of the ocean, of its pleas. Wasteful Johnny-come-latelys who are self-inclined to take, take, take, and never give back. We roam the Earth with our toxic equipment and stamp our massive carbon imprint, our petrochemical plunder, paying lip service but oblivious or incapable of truly comprehending that surfing is a cracked mirror held up to the plight of the planet. Infected with capitalist consumption we want more and if you can’t beat them, you have to join them in the gluttonous frenzy on the shoreline, at the edge of the great creator’s table.

If you can’t and won’t give into the greed and are compelled by the gentlemanly decency that once defined our sport to wait your turn, you will be relegated to the back of the queue. No caves of blue light for you. No wondrous green walls of blissful serotonin. Just angst, frustration and desire unfulfilled. Ever the restless bastards, as places closer to home become more bloated with these idiot zombies, we look to new plains to decimate and become disillusioned when we find the hordes are already there. We can no longer experience in full the true rapture that riding cosmic wavelengths once brought.

Surfing. It’s over my friends, as we know it and as I announce it. If you don’t realise it, then you probably should. And although whilst I feel for you if you don’t, I also envy your blissful ignorance. Yes, perhaps best thing a true surfer can do these days is give it up, turn one’s back on it all, because the ghost is gone. Left the world until the next apocalypse.

Gone, baby, gone.

Scrawled in the black night of deep Sumatra after hours of reading Jack Kerouac under a weak light bulb, too many Bintangs, flu medication and a day of manifestly crowded surf. I don’t always feel like this about surfing, but sometimes, in my darkest moments like this one, I do. And though I won’t ever really give up, when I succumb to the provocation, to me it, right then, is true. Screw Surfing. Just screw it. Because, at one point or another, almost everybody else does.

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The crowd rant (text) by Miles Masterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.