An Exercise in Existing, Part Two

 
At the beach it's windy, the promise of storms both onshore and off that congregate here. Some 400 miles to seaward, out in that great expanse of bluish foam lurks a storm that churns and sends waves, these waves that I see, the ones that surfers desperately paddle toward in order to reach and surmount and ride into the sandy link between ocean and land, that obliterate themselves on the spit without thought or regret.

We come here to exercise our need for diversion and to watch others and the forces that birthed us. Women in bikinis with fat asses jiggling. They squat or lounge or repose and they cover their sunglassed eyes with brown palms as they look up to and speak with impeccably hair cut Marines with paunchy-ish bellies and rounded deltoids from the work of pulling up. They should be the ultimately ripped specimens from recruiter's ads but the reality of swilling beer to avoid the grimness of the Marines' situation necessitates the deposition of brown adipose at their midsections. The women speak. The Marines look down, lustily, on the women's sunburned meat sacks.

A ginger couple clad in matching green jerseys of some team walk, hand in hand, up the planks of the pier. Some odd expression of Ireland chugging toward me while a charbroiled and bearded man stands on the sand and holds aloft his child's kite. The kite is an elaborate thing, in the shape of an airplane, with an airscrew front and a longer one at it's terminus. The thing takes flight. The bearded man moves off and consults a likely warm can of some undecipherable beer. The child watches the kite lift. I watch them and their group and they never know. 

I rise from my observation and walk on, toward the end of the pier and the touching of the open ocean. The planks are smooth, weathered, but not moldy. Garbage of the organic kind litters the pier: nondescript bait, shrimp hulls, the gutted offal of a catch. All the food of human passing seems to be devoured. The pier is lined with fishers, but their fast food wrappers are meticulously deposited into padlocked trashcans that dot the linear expanse of wood. The gulls have little reason to linger here. There is a starling, black bodied and sleek looking, as if it could cut through time, that hops on the pier railing and pecks out the carcasses of shrimp and others that languish in the open sun and wind of the obliquely tilted planes of the upright railings. It eyes me. I open my palms to show deference but it takes flight. I shrug at its passing and walk on.

 I stop at the railing and watch. Gulls float in the thick beach haze. Trailers and vacation rentals dwell at the lips of a sea, turquoise and grey tinted, that hurls itself against the land in some erosional foreplay. The shore is there and the sea too. I'm sure it's a metaphor for something but one of those that is only apparent to the observer and any attempt to describe it falls flat as the above one does. In the distance, water towers and hotel high rises lift out of the sea. Beyond is the horizon with its murky and unknown and ever shifting reality. I get my fill of the unknowable and walk back to a more beach-ward perch.

I am up here with the old men. Loners sipping coozied beers of indeterminate brand. We are the purveyors of the flesh below. There is a woman who bends at the waist, exposing her ruffles of her bikini'd ass as she wipes the sand from the backs of her thighs with a towel. A few yards on, a sandpiper bathes blithely in the surf. The man with the kite and his group have gone home. I decide to do the same.

An Exercise in Existing, Part One

 

(Note: The following comes from a free Saturday I had courtesy of Felicia and I totally stole this writing technique from Craig Childs who is a much better author than I.)
 

Upon entrance I pass men in khaki shorts and button down tops, bald with sunglasses and brown skin. The place is nice and smells of deep fried sea bounty and cornmeal but high class. I walk through the wood and lacquered floors to my table behind a stick thin blonde hostess in a black button down shirt and shimmery slacks. 

My seat is next to windows and my waitress is a shorter and chunkier, dyed redhead that I ask for recommendations. I order beer, an OBX (i.e., shorthand for Outer Banks, NC) on tap, in homage to the ortgeist of the water, choppy and brown, and the shore. A light-medium wind, up from the barrier islands and open ocean beyond, shoves in toward me, brackish, and even indoors, the smell and breeze relieve the heat of the day. Gulls hold station 20 feet from my window, flapping into the breeze. Chunky waitress informs me that OBX is out and so I get her recommendation, UFO, and I order food. She brings the glass, golden beer bubbling up the sides and smelling of crisp lightness and lemon zest, a feeling, an alive-ness in the heat. The taste does not disappoint.

Brown-skinned delicacies out on the patio late lunch/dine early with wind tousled hair. The motion of their hair somehow makes them more delicious while behind me an unseen gay man raves about crab cakes to his companion. Gay man is a teacher. He says, "It's too hot here to exercise outside," and further complains of his job and how he gets no breaks. It's exhausting. They order an appetizer, the crab cakes, and it comes and they descend on the food. Gay man talks and though I can't see him, I know he's holding his hand over his mouth as he chews and talks. 

The beer is easy to drink, dangerously so. Shrimp boats sit across the water, gulls float, and triangles of water rise and fall amidst the eating noises and the hum of air conditioning. One could be alive here, I think. A new dock or pier is under construction outside my window as the food arrives on my table: pesto with scallops. Four scallops (the two large ones are cooked perfectly but the two smaller ones are chewy with over cooking). The pasta is a little larger in gauge than I prefer and cooked a shade longer than I like but the pesto is this explosion of butter flavor and basil tossed with fresh tomatoes and pine nuts. A simultaneous freshness and heaviness in the palate, a completely accomplished mixture that produces a film of sweat on my forehead and in the small of my back.  I foolishly order a second beer in order to cool off. Throughout the meal, a silver and blue variegated and color shifting pigeon observes me through the window glass with his yellow eyes that are at once accusing and hopeful and stupid. The pigeon lifts off as I finish the plate and doesn't return. 

A man on the water in a small sail powered craft cuts figure eights before a wooded spit of sand mid-stream. The water is technically a river, but waves still wash in as if it is simply an inlet for the ocean's thrusting. Clouds gather and encroach from the north. I pay my tab and leave and something in me calls me out to the beach that lies some miles distant. I get in the van and heed it.

(To be continued.)

The Numeral 8 Being Lazy and Laying Down is the Symbol for Infinity, Right?

Home Improvifying.

When you are married for eight years, you talk about a lot of shit. Especially if you move across the continent twice, live in abject poverty, and decide that one of you is some kind of artiste who needs a bunch of me time to read books and scribble unsubstantial whinings about his horrible existence as a well fed flaneur. Also children. 

There is much dialogue, about almost every subject. You'd think it'd involve all kinds of serious philosophical, religious, personal, passionate give and take about all the things you fear and hope for and wish to accomplish in this once round theater that is your life. You would be wrong.

Lately, I've had some kind of mysterious rash that has founded a colony and written a treatise on Manifest Destiny and set about pacifying the great expanse of my skin. I don't know from whence this plague has come, but I've narrowed it down to: poison ivy, grass allergies, some weird reaction to herbicides, eczema, too much fabric softener, or West Nile virus. It's itchy. I wake up clawing at my arm. I slather the affected area in isopropyl alcohol for relief. I contemplate heating irons in the blue gas light of our stove so that I might cauterize the nerve endings of my skin and thereby annul the itching. It sucks.

The Rash has assumed primacy in our discussions. "When are you going to get rid of that shit?" "I think it's getting better." "You should go to the doctor." "It's probably from the new detergent." "Holy shit, this is getting bad." "Stop scratching already." "Maybe it's not so bad." "I might need to go to the doctor about this." "How are we going to fuck with you all rashy?"

For two weeks.

The point is, you live with someone and you become them and all the things that you could discuss or ponder or argue about become this thing that consumes everything and it all happens before you know it, as it's happening, and the only thing that matters is that you're there in the moment with the dialogue and all the other shit recedes and you end up standing in your kitchen making dinner and talking about each others' work for the day and you realize, as you stir the ground beef for that night's tacos and look across the steam at your spouse, that you're right where you need to be.

I love the fuck out of that woman.