Let him eat sand!
Let him eat sand!

Exciting new surfing World Championship Tour rookie Morgan Cibilic alleges: “I still haven’t received prize money for WQS finishes!”

From, like, years ago.

How did today’s stock market plunge affect you? Or is it effect? Did your heart drop while your children’s futures were wiped clean out? Or is it whipped?

Did you smile, laugh and mumble “eat the rich?”

Unaware?

Well, maybe the stock market plunge into bear territory is a blessing in disguise for exciting new Australian men’s surfing World Championship Tour rookie Morgan Cibilic seeing as he still hasn’t received his prize money for a third place finish at the Pantin Classic Galicia Pro, a 10,000 level Qualifying Series event completed September 2, 2018 and worth…

…I have no idea.

$5,000?

$12,000?

Morgan speaks about the theoretical rip-off on a recent Lipped podcast and you can/should/must listen here while also subscribing for future episodes…

…but back to the matter at hand. However much he should have won, it might be a wonderful gift to have never received for the smart move would have been to drop that money into the markets which no longer exist.

It’s over.

A wrap.

Blue Monday.

People are eating each the rich’s faces off in Paris.

Or maybe that’s just touristy steak frites.

Chewy etc.

But, once again, back to the matter at hand. Is this how the World Surf League is paddling its bottom line? By allegedly not paying debts?

Very wise.

More as the story develops.


My fountain, my beret, my boulevard, go home."
"My fountain, my beret, my boulevard, go home."

Inspired surfer-father teaches young daughter “The art of Localism” as Coronavirus Zombie Apocalypse grips Europe!

Locals only.

After reading yesterday’s news that toilet paper is selling out in America, that Europe is gripped in a panic so severe the entirety of northern Italy has been completely walled off all over a disease manufactured in a Chinese factory, working just as well as other things manufacturers in Chinese factories, I knew I had to take my seven-year-old daughter to Ye Olde World and at once.

There was no other option. We needed to shred this Coronavirus Zombie Apocalypse in a place actually fun as opposed to San Francisco or Washington D.C. or Wuhan.

The price for hand sanitizer may be through the roof. The price for direct flights to Paris decidedly not.

We drove to LAX too early, as the I feared mass flight cancelation. The Bradley International Terminal was save random Koreans in surgical masks and a smattering of Western Europeans also wearing surgical masks but extremely self-consciously.

Since I am a surfer, I booked us on Air Tahiti Nui. The pastel, sexually ambiguous carrier of our dreams

The flight itself was uneventful. Daughter slept. I wept rolling tears while watching the World War II film Midway starring Woody Harrelson, Ragnar Lodbrok’s eldest son and Joe Jonas who delivered the stirring line, “Who knows how we’re gonna die so might as well not care.”

Maybe it was Nick Jonas but, in any case, true. Except I know how I’m not going to die.

The Coronavirus.

Exactly like I know how a Huawei dishwasher will crap out in 1.5 years.

“Northern Italy has been completely walled off…” I tell my daughter after we clear customs at Charles de Gaulle, catch a cab then stroll the directly to The Louvre all jet-lagged while a cold grey sky begins to spit. “We used to be brave, damn it. When we got smacked by foreigners from the East we used to smack back.”

“Did you drink beer on the plane?” She asks.

“I drank inspiration.” I holler.

“Inspiration?”

“Never mind about that. I can’t imagine there are any Chinese left in Paris but we need to keep those northern Italians out. Them and their Coronaviruses. This is our chance to not lose our minds alongside the rest of the world but pretend we’re Paris locals. It’s the best thing surfers do, claim a strip of beach as theirs, however dubious the claim, and scare everyone else away. If you see a northern Italian you must find a rock and throw it while shouting whatever French you’ve got. ‘Oui merci beaucoup’ or some such.”

“How will I know northern Italians?”

“They wear Prada, Valentino, Miu Miu, Armani, Missoni and drive Fiats”

Beat it, kooks.
Beat it, kooks.

Localism really is a thing surfers understand and employ better than all comers. A gift I can give my daughter alongside anything she chooses to be in this life.

We walk up to the glass pyramid with only ten other confused people around but a sign reads: To prevent the spread of Covid-19 the Musée du Louvre is seeking to limit its attendance. Only visitors already in possession of an e-ticketwill be permitted to enter the Museum.

Well that’s lame.

A rock whizzes past my ear and spin around. My daughter is standing there wearing a new violet beret.

“You’re wearing Moncler…” she says, nonplussed.

She’s right. Fine form and a quick study.

More as the story develops.


"If I can't have you no one can!"
"If I can't have you no one can!"

Watch: Great White Shark driven absolutely mad by “sweet tang of human flesh” attempts murder-suicide on diver in cage!

Love is a many splendored thing.

Spring is almost in the air, in the northern hemisphere, and it can be felt as much as seen. Boys and girls walking hand in hand under budding cherry trees. Heart beats that quicken with a look across a garden party festooned with tea lights and tulips. Great White sharks falling so madly in love with scuba divers that visions of murder-suicide dance in their heads like an interspecies re-imagining of Romeo and Juliet.

And here we witness, via Brazilian big wave surfer Thiago Jacaré’s Instagram account, this very wild, beautiful, passionate dance.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9Y9T0fBp4R/

In his caption, Jacaré writes:

Amazing how human beings terrorize animals, yet another White Shark loses his life due to the exaggerated greed of humans. Sad ..

Oh how love hurts with all its many exaggerations including greed but also lust, jealousy, possession, heart-break and fear.

Fear that the passion won’t be reciprocated. That it will cool in the other or disappear entirety.

The horror, the horror.

But have you ever been rejected yourself or fallen madly in love only to get your head stuck in the proverbial cage?

Part of living, I suppose.


Celebrate: The Mentawai Boat Trip is an erotic Gay-Cation for closeted straights!

Come for the waves, stay for the delicious sweets…

The boys went on a Ments trip last year. FukkYeahThaBoyz.

I’d been invited but thought bugger it, the Ments is shithouse, I’ll stick to my usual dose of wobbly garbage at Curl Curl.

Maybe the island chain dancing off Sumatra was golden back when Slats was forced to bunker down with Hoyo, Quikkie’s most inexplicably bizarre barrel-hunting duo, while being ferried ‘em all over from one insane set up to the next, Hoyo yelling out fuck yeh non-stop and Jimmy Slade eyeing off the camera, in between weaving fifteen-second jungle tubes.

That was then.

This is now: you get wedged in with a bunch of international deadbeats from Australia to Japan to Hawaii to Merika to Brazil to France to Finland, all fighting and flaring for the wave of their life, man, while you’re trying not to do too much unnecessary bark-scraping on the Surgeon’s Table or get yelled at by the steroid-jacked Paraguayan boogieboarder who thinks cage fighting to the death is art mate.

Nah, not for me.

The place can get stuffed.

Well, luckily there are finer steeds than I still keen and willing to tackle the place and they always seem to report back they bloody loved it.

Fair enough.

What sparked my interest, while being inundated with the pics of this odyssey I’d avoided, was just how extraordinarily gay the trip looked.

Not gay as in lame. Gay as in Athenian Olympics, Greco-Roman wrestling, Aristotle, Socrates and Oscar Wilde, the Village People getting chock-a-block at the YMCA, Tom Hanks succumbing to High Five in Philadelphia, Ricky Martin He Bangs HE BANGS, he looks like a flower, he stings my ring piece. Gay.

Fit lads, all tanned up and shirtless, getting grogged and hugging, sweating all over each other, hollering I luv ya, I luv ya, I luv ya, no females within a few hundred k radius, minimum.

Super gay.

And I love gay.

My father’s gay. My son’s gay. My husband’s gay. I love the gays. I love the gayness. I’ve seen the future. And the future is really, really, really gay.

Yet surfing culture is trapped precariously between the staunch manliness of a bygone era and the armpit-shaving regimens of our current crop of elite stepfather-approval-seekers.

Are surfers ready to face up to how intensely and wonderfully and perfectly gay surfing is?

We dedicate our lives to tight rubber and boardshorts, to smearing sunscreen on each other’s backs in the carpark, to splashing cutty waffle in each other’s faces in the lineup, to watching barely grown men prance top to bottom, bottom to top, on glassy lumps of ocean blue.

We gayz wistfully to the horizon, bore non-surfers to tears with Point Break quotes, travel to the emptiest corners of the earth surrounded exclusively with each other’s testosterone to camp under the stars, cuddle up close in the roar of a romantic fire and fall asleep with sweet, sweet dreams of deep, juicy pits.

*Liam Carroll is the author of confessional roman à clefs Slippery and Sweet Dreams of Fanta, which you can buy here. He’s also a commodities trader, physiotherapist and massive kook.


Surfer-father (left) and daughter pictured in Paris. Theoretically better days.
Surfer-father (left) and daughter pictured in Paris. Theoretically better days.

Breaking: Enterprising surfer-father takes young daughter to Europe so they can “shred the Coronavirus Zombie Apocalypse!”

(Or how I learned to stop worrying and love worldwide pandemics.)

Let’s all just admit, once and for all, that surfers are almost entirely worthless. We, each and every one of us, are carbon spewing, grouchily territorial, poisonously caustic, generally white, male and well-enough fed.

Starting boutique beer labels in our ample spare time etc.

Slightly re-tooling tail pads etc. (buy here)

Contributing the very last things this overheating world needs and staying almost entirely worthless while so doing.

Almost.

The almost relates to how we travel and in that one regard we approach genius or at least “interestingly touched” levels of autism.

Mark a wave anywhere, in any country, going through any crisis and surfers will travel there. Will travel through wars and civil wars, corruption and vice, hell and high water to surf it.

Which brings us directly to our current, developing Coronavirus Zombie Apocalypse and whoa.

Wow.

Are you watching? Keeping up? Can you believe?

SXSW cancelled. All college classes at Stanford University cancelled. Toilet paper sold out everywhere. People in completely unaffected regions self-quarantining. China shuttered. Cruise ships circling the oceans with no port willing to take them, states of emergency declared all over these United States.

But better, Europe in sheer panic, airline prices falling, the Champs-Élysées deserted, croissants rotting in the streets, shattered Hermes storefront windows gaping, begging for ginger little fingers to pluck camisoles then stroll down that deserted Champs-Élysées itself while whistling Champs-Élysées.

No crowds in front of the Mona Lisa at The Louvre.

No reservations needed at Girafe.

No busloads of Chinese tourists.

I’m looking at my angelic seven-year-old daughter, literally right now, across the table blonde head tilted down, watching From Russia with Love, her second favorite Bond film after Goldfinger, on her phone.

“Baby girl…” I holler “…wanna to go shred the Coronavirus Zombie Apocalypse?”

She looks up, says, “Yes…” before looking back down.

We’re flying to Paris tomorrow morning.

More as the story develops.