Half-a-million fans excepted at world's biggest surf contest!
Today is the official opening day of the US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, CA, or it might have been yesterday. I don’t exactly know since I’m still in Copenhagen, up early with the summer sun, eating avocado on rye bread with rhubarb, tomato, mint, olive salad in the side, swimming everywhere.
Copenhagen is a dream and Søren Kierkegaard was smart to be born here and not Huntington Beach where the dirty feet of sex-crazed inland empirians kick up so much dust during the US Open of Surfing that lung cancer rates sky rocket.
I have very mixed feelings about the US Open of Surfing and I tried to work through them in the book Cocaine + Surfing.
I watch a dirty perverted teenaged boy with the words “Sexx Simbol” scrawled across his chest try and slap the ass of dirty perverted teenaged girl with the words “Slap dat” scrawled on her lower back. Giggling from both parties ensues as he swings and misses and almost runs into a three-hundred-pound man riding a motorized chair with off-road tires featuring many Vans and Volcom stickers.
Here is my ode:
And if Agenda, in Long Beach, is a tri-colored mural of the five-year surf apocalypse then the U.S. Open of Surfing is its taste. The decayed flavor of good times turned very bad. A Mad Max-esque dystopian mess where God has officially turned his back and allows for mankind to swallow spoonful after spoonful of putrid filth.
I watch a dirty perverted teenaged boy with the words “Sexx Simbol” scrawled across his chest try and slap the ass of dirty perverted teenaged girl with the words “Slap dat” scrawled on her lower back. Giggling from both parties ensues as he swings and misses and almost runs into a three-hundred-pound man riding a motorized chair with off-road tires featuring many Vans and Volcom stickers.
A Monster Girl holding a T-shirt cannon watches too with a blank expression. I wonder if she ever fantasizes about shooting people in the face. I wonder if she could please just shoot me in the face. It would be a fitting end and my grave stone could read: “He died how he lived—like an asshole.”
Maybe I would even get a paddle out. Have you seen one of those? Where surfers paddle out on their boards together when someone dies and sit in a circle and splash water in the air and sometimes wear floral leis?
Ugh.
The U.S. Open of Surfing is like an unfortunate paddle out on land for an elderly and very bad horrible performance longboarder who died of a coronary or something. Much to everyone in the surf industry’s chagrin it is the biggest event of the year, and by far. Thousands upon thousands upon hundreds of thousands of perverts drain into Huntington Beach for one week near the end of July to make a mockery of decency and of my career. There are art exhibits, some skateboarding (maybe), some BMX (I think), free industry garbage like Hurley Frisbees and Mayhem temporary belly tattoos, underage drinking and a World Surf League qualifying tour event in the worst waves imaginable.
There used to be live music, but it got cancelled after the 2013 U.S. Open of Surfing turned into a riot.