The Beaching – KKUURRTT

July 16, 2020

Right there. Like two blocks away from your house. Spread of sand followed by the vast blue ocean of unending possibility as long as that possibility is drowning or dying of dehydration or developing gills and finding a pack of dolphins to join and swim the blue in sync with creatures far more in line with your own brain power than the people in your life. Only to be swallowed whole by a shark with a scar along his face and the same cold dead eyes your mother gave you every year when you told her you hated the beach. Forced through childhood into a beach vacation and now you live there. You don’t know if that’s Freudian or not, but you think it might be.

You never go though, as if those two blocks are an eternity or the smell of the sea wafting your way is enough to justify your overpriced rent. The wafting of water air is enough, you don’t need to experience the real thing to know that you know what you’re missing out on as if excuses pay your rent and not the job you waste the best hours of the day at. Sunsets are vastly superior to high noon anyways not so much of a sacrifice. Some of the people who live at the beach never seem to have to work a day in their life. This is the dream, no? Would you spend more time at the beach then? You’re unsure, but unbothered because this is life on your terms and not someone else’s.

So pack a lunch with friends because today is the day that we sit in sand and screw off for enough hours that we’re drained of our energy and have to go back to someone’s house (we all live close) and snort a couple of lines of cocaine in order to keep throwing back white claws which has become the de facto beverage of choice for the beach crowds. But the sun don’t let this time be all precious memories, it scorches the skin, a reminder of the price you pay for nature, the price you pay for rent. Flesh singes, saying maybe you were right this whole time and the beach ain’t nothing but a trap for people with nothing better to do.

That big brain got too much thinking to participate in casual day-drinking and it’s far better suited to suffer the heat at a desk writing about the beach instead of actually participating in it. We can dream up shells that contain other universes and jellyfish with personality disorders from two blocks away than on the uncertain ground. Take a notebook and jot down notes. Maybe there’s a poem or two worth of fine metaphors created out of the air of relaxation, or maybe there’s Sylvia Plath literally and figuratively trying to down your woes in the space with nothing but a reminder or our mortality.

You feel, after coming to terms with negligible childhood trauma that perhaps living by the sea (ocean, strait, river, tributary, lake, pool, pond, puddle) offers the same perspective that one is faced everyday in living across the street from a graveyard. How ghastly. A constant reminder of where we’re all headed. Back to the sea, back to the everything, particles of sand floating in the ether of unknown horrors and beauty until they’re picked up by a message in a bottle and treasure by pirate captains named Steve. This isn’t to say that you don’t forget that every once in a while and that the smell is enough to keep you in check without standing on the precipice of land and not thinking about walking out and never returning. So you stay home this weekend, shut the doors and lock the windows and repeat the phrase ‘the beach is not my unending, the beach is not my unending.’

It works for a while.