Beach scenes.

So I was sitting there, brooding darkly.

I’d just finished reading a really good book, quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read, and as I sat, thinking about it (the book I mean) I watched some little dramas play out.

The surf was head high and glassy so all the surfers were out. I love watching their gracefulness but I don’t harbor any awe. I mean, ANYBODY can surf. Hell, even I can surf.

sorta.

OK. I suck, and maybe I should be in awe. But I’m not.

But while I was sitting and mulling I saw two girls, obviously BFF’s, on longboards out beyond the break, talking. Suddenly, one of the girls slipped into the water to wet her hair and in one long gorgeously lithesome move came back up out of the ocean and sat on her board like she was sitting on a chair. While she kept up her conversation with her friend she slowly wrung the saltwater from her hair. It was mermaidic and simply beautiful.

They paddled in and I cracked another beer and a young couple, kids really, came and sat near us. They were unremarkable in their plainness, their ordinariness, except for the girl’s remarkable desire. While her boyfriend/lover/husband/whatever/ relentlessly fucked with his iPhone, her want, her need, for him to pay attention to her, to somehow validate and return the bruising rawness of her love for him was hard to watch.

When they were leaving, he handed her his precious iPhone and she nervously dropped it in the sand.

I went for a swim, I couldn’t stand it any more.

When I got back and sat down the wind had changed direction and strengthened. It was blowing more off the water and it was getting a little chilly. Miss Carol and me were fixing to head home when a kite blew by.

Honest, dudes, I’ve never seen anything like it. The kite was flying all by itself, trailing a couple hundred yards of string- it’s little plastic hand thingie bouncing over the waves. I watched it out of sight. It was forlorn looking. I felt bad for it. It seemed lost.

So I said fuck this and stood up and collapsed the chairs and picked up the cooler of empties and as we were breaking camp, a couple walked by, hand in hand. She was a little too fat or maybe a little too pregnant to be wearing a bikini and he was fluourescently sunglass wrapped, gold chain luggingly his mid-life crisis over the waistband of his too-touristy board shorts.

And as they walked past I saw that he(?) had a tramp stamp(?)

Jesus.

C’mon.