So I’m finally sitting on the beach late on Sunday afternoon after working forever and I’m watching the waves and I’m watching Miss Carol nap and I’m wondering, WTF?
Is this beach life thingy all it’s cracked up to be?
I mean, during the “nice” summer months when the beach is supposed to be the place to be, it’s so frickin’ hot you can fry eggs on your cooler. No wind, no breeze, just relentless heat and unrelenting humidity.
Add to that the daytrippers and tourons, and shit dude, sitting packed on the beach cheek to jowl with thousands and thousands of pasty-ass strangers is not really high on my idea of fun.
(Which, by the way, brings up something totally different- how is it that in AUGUST white people can still be sooooo white they start to burn just sprinting from their cars to their condo’s? I mean, I know not everyone has a beach, but surely everyone has sunlight, right? Are these people captives or something?)
Anyway.
So then the sultry summer season ends and it’s time for hurricanes and their endlessly wearisome, worrisome, constant weather tracking and boarding up of windows and writing of names and SSI#’s on arms so officials can positively identify our bloated dead bodies when we wash up somewhere, sometime, after the storm.
Whew. Then.
Frothing and snapping right on the heels of the hurricane fun is Papa Winter with his constantly icy winds and rain whipped nor’easters and sometimes, lately, even sleet and snow. At the beach? I love you Papa.
And then the spring awakens with her flirty lightness and we’re deluged with soaking rains and flowers that try but drown and die. And then we’ve made that short trip around the sun and it’s right back into another sweaty summer.
Fun, right?
So I sat there and I tried to think why? Why do we stay? Why do we endure season after season? Why not move on to some place where the weather isn’t so viciously predatory- maybe like a quiet lake in the mountains or somethin’.
Oh shit. Wait a sec.
I remember now.