Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Life's a Beach

You know what I like best about summer? Avoiding the beach. “What?!” you exclaim. “What do you mean you don’t like the beach, you pinko commie!”

I am not a beach person, and when I mention this, people assume it’s because I’m self-conscious about my physique. Well, you would be too if every time you put on a bathing suit you looked like a milk bottle with arms. The last time I went to the beach, I got arrested for “public ugliness”.

But my dislike of the beach has nothing to do with my progressively sagging torso. It’s because I don’t like all the packing, driving, schlepping and crowds. Plus I don’t feel like sitting among a bunch of half-naked strangers; if I want to do that, I’ll attend a Senate party.

Let’s look at a typical day at the beach. My family and I wake up at some ungodly cow-milking hour so we can get an early start. The house is a flurry of activity as we eat, get dressed, brush our teeth and pack the car, tripping over the dogs who unfortunately think they’re going with us.

By 9 a.m. we’re on the road, thinking we’re so smart because surely no one else is crazy enough to go on Saturday morning – all the beachgoers went on Friday in the after-work rush hour. The morons.

At 9:45 the toll booth is backed up for three quarters of mile. Where do all these people come from? Does every human being within a 500-mile radius have to go where we’re heading?

A half hour later we get through the bottleneck, and just as the stress begins to diminish, someone announces that they have to pee. Now, I won’t mention who has to pee, because I don’t want to point fingers at anyone. Besides, if I revealed this person’s identity, she’d probably divorce me.

Okay, a little after noon we arrive at the beach. And by “the beach” I mean “the main strip that’s kind of near the beach but where there hasn’t been an open parking space since before Earth cooled.” So we drive around for 15 minutes looking for a piece of ground on which to leave the van. Why did we think there’d be any parking spaces, when everyone in the tri-state area is here today? Luckily we find a lot, which will hold our vehicle for a mere $12. A bargain, when you consider that the alternative would be to drive back home and walk.

The sun is sweltering and the air smells like we’re standing between a fishing boat and a landfill. We schlep chairs, blankets, towels, food and drinks a quarter of a mile to a heavily populated desert, where we manage to find a spot on the sand. We spread out our stuff and help each other smear sunscreen, which, when mixed with our sweat, makes us feel, in technical terms, icky.

Okay, we’re here. Yay! Time to ... uh ... kind of just sit around. My kids run into the water and have fun, but I just want to relax. So I read. There are some attractive young women around, and perhaps I would look at them if I were single, or my wife weren’t sitting right next to me, but now that I have basically turned into Al Bundy, I figure that if they catch me looking at them I’ll scare them. So I spend the next three or four hours staring at a book, frying in my own fat, occasionally turning over so I get evenly cooked and expose as much of my middle-aged flab to carcinogenic rays as possible.

Late afternoon. All of us are tired, hot and burned. The sea breeze has deceptively kept our skin below the boiling point so that we are unaware of just how much damage Mr. Sun has done. We pack our stuff and head back to the van. Whew! What a long walk. Didn’t we park closer?

The van is hot enough to broil a steak, along with some nice potatoes and asparagus. I turn it on and run the A/C, thus adding to global warming. We head home, the kids dozing off and my wife making sure I see every vehicle that I’m getting too close to:

She: “You almost hit that guy.”
Me: “Honey, he’s two lanes over.”

Ah, home at last. Now all we have to do is get out of the van and ... Jiminy Christmas, how did I get so tired and sore just sitting around all day?

We bring in all our stuff, which has somehow doubled in weight during the ride home. The dogs are ecstatic to see us and strongly suggest that we walk them. Sitting outside all day has energized them, whereas we humans can barely make it upstairs.

So who needs the beach? I contend that there is nothing the beach offers that you can’t get at home. To prove this, every summer I simulate the beach on my patio. First I set up 5 boomboxes and tune each one to a different radio station. Then I invite friends over and have them throw sand at me every two minutes while I get sunburned. I also borrow my neighbor’s small children so they can shriek in my ear, and I direct my family members to periodically drop a volleyball on me. During lunch I sprinkle a little sand on my food (why do you think it’s called a SANDwich, anyway?). I get the full beach experience without having to drive and, more important, I can go inside any time I need to answer Nature’s call, get relief from the heat, watch a movie, etc.

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