"I didn’t want to close my surf shops, shaping facilities, glass shops, warehouse and lay off dozens of employees, but I did. It's the law. Even if I may disagree and call Newsom and Diane Feinstein Communists."

It’s been a while since the Bear Jew, San Clemente shaper to the stars Matt Biolos, has come out of his cage to play.

For the past decade Biolos, who shapes under the moniker Mayhem, has crafted a new image as a statesman of the game, well-respected, successful, a man of the industry, a world away from his punk image of the nineties.

Of course, now that armageddon in the form of a poisoned gift from China, has finally arrived Matt can afford to loose those once-famous lips, or as you’ll soon read, those fingers.

A few days ago, Matt let it fly at out-of-towners who had brought the authorities’ attention to Lowers, San Clemente’s premier wave, by hitting the place en masse. He’d already shuttered his iconic surfboard company, Lost, at the behest of the state’s “Communist” governor Gavin Newsom and the possibility of losing access to his favourite wave was one bridge too far.

In a screed posted on Instagram he wrote,

Seriously,

Hundreds of people from all over So Cal showing up at Trestles. (In large groups even) all weekend.
Read the rules that the Governor sent out! It doesn’t say “ Drive out of town , up n down the free ways, and look for waves!”. I didn’t want to close my surf shops, shaping facilities, glass shops, ware house … ALL ASPECTS of my business’s AND lay off dozens of employees, but I did.

We did.

It’s the law.

Even if I may disagree and call Newsom and Diane Feinstein, Communists.

BUT many around here are not obeying. @lostsurfboards and @catalystsanclemente are. Much to the sorrow of my friends and workers, and to the quick demise of our business health. Read the mandate from the Gov. We are allowed to ride our bikes, walk, walk pets, buy food, exercise ( ie surf ). This means in our local areas. Beaches and parks close to our homes. To see the local beaches here still being invaded by hundreds of out of town surfers all weekend (which we put up with in normal times) who think this is a holiday!

The Police were taking photos of the scenes at Trestles today. If it doesn’t mellow out they are going to close the beaches. Maybe it doesn’t matter and they will close them anyway, but I was told my the multiple officers that Trestles is a problem. Please give us a chance to enjoy the outdoors in and around our town …and stay within a bike ride if your homes. Or…buy a home here, pay property tax, and support the local economy, business’s and school districts. And be part of the community. Please don’t ruin it for those of us who are.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-DYc5WnKFn/

He’s got a point, but so do the surfers who don’t, for whatever reasons, have a beach they can call home.

My history with Matt goes back twenty years.

He talks, or writes, I listen.

I don’t also agree, but that’s what make a friendship work.

In the French summer of 2000, I fell for his shapes following a five-nine fish I’d swiped off the racks at the famous Pukas factory, midway between Mundaka and Hossegor and very close to the area’s famous men’s relaxation centres.

The years passed, as they do, and we became friends, the connection surviving even the machiavellian dagger of a vengeful enemy.

I once asked Matt what he fucking hated about shaping and he said, “The grind, the battle of managing production and running the back-end and the financial strain of biz… I also hate that no matter how many great boards you make, no matter how many deadlines you hit or how many miracles you pull off, there’s always some one not happy or someone whose board got built wrong or took too long.”

Matt’s road to relative security wasn’t paved with gold. Lost had come close to the brink a few times and, at one point, after selling the license to make Lost clothes to a third-party he was driven so mad by the direction he hocked everything, including his dream house at Cottons, to buy it back.

This ain’t no billionaire getting rich on the back of the working man.

Like most small-biz guys, he’s thrown the dice, worked hard, networked, mortgaged the farm and spent plenty of nights haunted by the spectre of the ruination of his business.

Well, it’s here, thanks to the horror of China’s wet markets and the obfuscation of the mostly faceless Communist government.

From a piece in London’s The Telegraph,

Beijing may take umbrage at Donald Trump’s constant reference to the outbreak as “the China virus” or “the Wuhan flu”, but the American president is simply stating the obvious, namely that the worst public health crisis the world has witnessed in a century originated in a Chinese wild animal market at the end of last year.

Moreover, the slow response of the Chinese authorities in dealing with the outbreak, together with the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s initial attempt to conceal the true extent of the crisis, may well explain why it is Europe, and not China, that now enjoys the dubious distinction of becoming the pandemic’s epicentre.

One of the CCP’s guiding principles is that nothing can be allowed to undermine its supremacy. This would explain why, rather than heed the warnings of Dr Li Wenliang, the doctor who first identified the terrifying threat posed by COVID-19, the Chinese authorities denounced him for “rumour-mongering”, and either ignored or played down the risks until well into January.

So, don’t get Matt talking about a social order that veers hard left, as one commenter found out.

From:

@releepseveer
Your workers have paid a lot of their income into unemployment and workers comp for their whole lives just as you have. You don’t get a cookie for that. And you don’t have a greater right to use the beach because you’re rich enough to live closer to it. It would be cool to see you loudly supporting a massive worker relief fund (at least loudly as you are loudly complaining about people using a public beach that wasn’t closed).

Matt replied,

No cookie requested. Now listen, you can critique my treatment of our employees.( All of which were taken by us on all expense paid surf trip this summer, by the way) And you can preach your socialism ( which always has failed ) and claim your foam ball rides (when your actually in front of the tube) on your feed, I can re-iterate how the local government is telling people to practice safe out door exercise “within their own communities” on my feed. I won’t harass you and your idealistic ways, and you don’t harass me. and my horrible ways😂.

You can always simply in un-follow me and go ride your Asym in Cuba with the rest of the commies.

Then,

@releepseveer

Nobody is harassing you, I’m critiquing your gross classist derision of regular people who don’t own multiple homes or live by the beach. Also i’d love to go to Cuba, they have a longer life span than the USA. And thanks for noticing my asym, I made mine before Lost did lmao

And so on.

Now,

You hate the commie bastards, too?

The Indonesian jackboot comes down, hard…

If, as the saying goes, good news travels fast then, it must follow that the wretched moves with the swiftness of supersonic air travel.

In Bali, a Frenchman, seventy-two, has died while riding his scooter. Locals thought he’d had a heart attack. Covid.

A British woman, fifty-two, died in Denpasar hospital. Covid. The doctor who treated the woman is Covid poz.

At an Uluwatu guesthouse, paramedics were called when a young tourist from Kazakhstan was found wheezing and gasping for air. His wife, who had an abnormal fever, was also taken to Denpasar hospital.

So far only seventy-one people on the island of four million have been tested. And those tests have to be sent to Jakarta, with a week turnaround on results.

It ain’t a recipe for containment.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Hindus will be celebrating what’s called Nyepi or the famous Day of Silence today, pushing back against the Indonesian government’s call for social distancing.

The Bukit peninsula has closed for biz, the Uluwatu lineup resembling a 1950s version of itself, empty of surfers.

“Respect, go home or die,” is the motto from the never-shy-of-coming-foward Balinese.

(Who can forget the “anti-Communist” slaughters of 1965 when “Bali’s eagerness to kill was so great and spontaneous that, having initially provided logistic support, the Army eventually had to step in to prevent chaos.“)

And on the remote northern Sumatra island of Simeulue, which ain’t short of epic set-ups, surfers have been forcibly removed from resorts by masked soldiers and deported back to whence they came.

Alex Wakey, a one-legged surfer from Jersey (I know, I know, there’s a joke in there somewhere, a t-shirt to the writer of the best amputee gag in the comments), was staying at Aura Surf Resort when the army came “flexing their stupid lack of logic.”

“The world gets a cough so officials throw people out of places that are them fit and healthy, hypocritically tell us to lock ourselves away while they don’t,” Alex wrote to me while en route home via Qatar. “We’ve collectively used this planet as a bus bin and now wonder why it’s clearing the decks. People being all kind words and recipes online when we know they’ll go back to being selfish cunts the second they can walk the streets again. Nature is changing humans; just a shame it can’t change human nature.”