The Beach Diaries #2

Previous entry here.

* Passing old lady conversation snippet:

“…he put some slime on the end of it…”

* Like the back of the school bus, the first section of the beach, next to the river, is always taken up by the most attractive (ergo, most popular?) beach goers. Girls in their late-teens and early-twenties who look made to be showered with beads on Mardi Gras balconies, and their shirtless, preening jock-men, strutting like farmyard beasts in perpetual mating season. School was a long time ago, and let’s be honest, I’m pretty awesome, but part of me thinks I’ll get a back splattered with wadded spitballs should I have the temerity to stray onto the Cool Kid part of the beach, from my usual dogs-and-people-reading spot at the opposite end of the prom.

* A bench-load of cheery elderly folks laughingly comment on the bouncy boobs of a woman who has just passed. The lone old man occupying the bench was looking elsewhere at the time, and the old ladies describe to him the boobies that he missed. “The bounciness! They were going everywhere.”

“That’s disgusting…” he says, jokingly standing and lunging in the direction of the bouncing woman like he’s going to follow her. In his defence, I was shamefully mesmerized too. My first, internet-addled instinct was to stand and yell “Did anyone make a gif of it?!”

* Momentary pang of jealousy for a blind man, feeling his way along with a white stick, free of that grinding worthlessness you get when surrounded on all sides by women who are way too hot for you. This will become a tiresome theme of the Beach Diaries. The odd duality of the beach is that it’s where I most feel – 1) At home, and 2) Like the Phantom of the Opera, diving into shadows and bellowing “Don’t look at me! I’m hideous!” at all the eights, nines and tens going about their business, hotly.

* A nervous looking emo-boy with ridiculous emo hair draped over his eyes moves gingerly down the pier with less spatial confidence than the blind man. If someone had leant across with a pair of scissors and snipped his fringe so that he could see, he’d probably be so grateful that he’d grant a wish, like the fable of the lion with a thorn in its paw.

* Saw a dog called JJ, which is a name that requires an obnoxious, Jack Russell-sized college football jacket. JJ conjures images of star quarterbacks, keg stands and date rape, not waggy tails and jaunty paws clacking along by the river. Somebody else calls after their dog. “Abed,” they say, “Abed, come here!” It’s the greatest dog name I’ve heard for a while, if it’s a Community reference. They call again. It’s not Abed, but Abby. I am surprisingly disappointed, but remain uplifted by the very idea of a dog called Abed, which there surely are.

~ by Stuart on April 19, 2011.