The Beach!

The Beach!

  4:38 AM    Unknown

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A Salty Review of

The Beach!

There are a lot of things I don’t understand the fascination with.

Fidget spinners. Horse racing. NASCAR racing. Drag racing. Watching golf. Nose rings. Lip rings. Indoor pets. Designer sunglasses. Jam bands. Wallet chains. Having children.

But there’s one particular fascination that particularly bewilders me. And no, I’m not talking about cell phones or even decorative cell phone accessories, which are dubiously troublesome in their own right.

No. I’m talking about the beach. Why do people love the beach?

Y’all realize that sand is just fancy dirt, right?

People who will spend hours each week cleaning every speck of dust from their homes, who would never dare to sit around their house in their underwear, will go to the beach wearing next to nothing and park their bottoms on smelly, hot grime. You know that just because something is splashed with water, it doesn’t make it clean, right?

And the water! If my bathtub water looked as disgusting as ocean water, I’d find some Liquid Plumber or an exorcist quick. Ocean water is a piquant broth of dead fish, pirate’s tears and whale pee.

And do you know how dangerous the beach is? Ignoring that the worst disaster in recorded human history, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, harmed exactly zero people who had the good sense to avoid nasty beaches, oceans are filled with the most dangerous creatures on earth, even if they aren’t technically “on” it.

The most venomous snakes and largest crocodiles all inhabit the ocean. All of the man-eating sharks, all of the jellyfish, all of the Portuguese men of war are waiting to greet you with something less refreshing than a wave gently lapping at your toes.

Then there are the not as deadly but somewhat annoying creatures like crabs, cawing seagulls, arrogant pelicans, gnawing sand fleas and sand gnats, and nibbling fish. Do you know how many friendly beasts are waiting to see you in the ocean like a happy puppy greeting its master? None!
(Except maybe dolphins, but they’re supposed to be smarter than us, and who needs to be reminded of how dumb we really are? We have politics for that.)

So you know what happens to you after sitting for a few hours on filthy sand, battling maddening critters, while occasionally risking a water-logged death in water I wouldn’t use to boil a bone for my worst enemy’s least favorite dog? You get sun-burned.

Have you ever been so sun-burned you actually blister? Your body festers with actual bubbles. Sorry, the only time I want something to be pink and bubbly is when I’m chewing Bubblicious or listening to Katy Perry.

Actually, listening to Katy Perry is worse than the beach, so never mind.

But the beach is fairly disgusting, and while all you crazy people are taking your coolers of Corona to Panama City or Mexico Beach or Daytona, I’m going to be sitting in the filth and grime of my own living room getting eaten by zero sharks and getting nibbled by regular South Georgia gnats looking at pictures of all of y’all enjoying the beach on Facebook.

And as I see y’all basking in tepid pools, toasting your margaritas, and putting your “Salt Life” stickers on the back of your 1999 Ford Focus, I’m going to wonder why it is I feel bored enough to write curmudgeonly stories like this one.

Cats can

I saw another something disturbing on Facebook. A cat had cancer. I think that’s sad about the cat, but what I found disturbing is this:

We live in a country where many human beings cannot afford medical care, but some cats can.
(Ironically, the cat’s owner afforded a CAT scan for the feline.)

I’ve come to love cats because they have the funniest videos on Facebook. Seriously. Nothing makes me laugh like cat videos, and I don’t even like cats all that much in person.

Sure we live in a world where the penalties for animal cruelty are sometimes worse than those for child abuse, but I still think human rights are what’s most important, and I believe we have a right to quality health care.

We need to decide, as a people, that we care enough about each other to ensure the lowest among us at least gets the same treatment as the highest cat.

The Beach Revisited

I was talking to someone about my review of the beach, which appeared in this week's edition of The Ocilla Star. Another, more serious reason that I dislike the beach came to mind.

It reminds me of the impermanence of it all.

The ocean is ever moving, the tides ever changing, unlike the soft tranquility of the surface of a calm pond or lake. The beach itself is a flurry of frantic activity with beachcombers running about and swimming and fleeing the occasional shark. I prefer the mountains, resolute and unmovable in their titanic majesty.

The thing I enjoyed most about the beach when I was a child on summer vacation was making sand sculptures of dolphins or sharks or mermaids or even the somewhat unoriginal sand castles. I would create these, to me, sand masterpieces, and everyone seemed to like them.

But then either the tide would come in and wash them away or some dope playing football would trample through it or my family would simply go home and I'd never see my masterpiece again.

It reminds me of how fleeting the joys of life really are, how fleeting life is, and how the highs make the everyday seem low by comparison. Maybe that's why I aim for contentment more than joy because while joy is often reliant upon others or circumstances, contentment is always in steady supply, if you let it be. If you let it be.

'The Filthy Ocean'

I often name instrumental songs after whatever's on my mind at the time I compose it. I started this song the night I wrote the story above, so it was dubbed "The Filthy Ocean." And even though it has nothing at all to do with the ocean or the beach, enjoy, if you will, a video of horrifying sharks with hopefully slightly less horrifying music.