Spent the day at a beach in nearby New Jersey. Great for people watching, great for reinforcing people as sheep. Bah, bah, bah.
It’s riveting. You have the guys in their early 20s, cockily tossing footballs back and forth, sporting stupid tattoos and wearing their bathing trunks down to their asses (with underwear peeking out, inexplicably). You have the teenage girls with their belly rings (Writer’s note: If my daughter ever wants a belly ring, she won’t be living under my roof. Nose ring? Fine. Lip ring? OK. Belly ring? No way in hell. As I’ve said to my wife on this topic, “the belly button is the gateway to the vagina.”). You have old farts like me sucking in our guts and feeling ancient (I especially dig the guys my age sporting that barbed wire-around-the-forearm tatt from long ago. It screams, “I made a poor choice!”). You have, well, you have everything.
We actually sat near a 24-year-old woman with eight tattoos covering her body. I said to my daughter, “Never get a tattoo with somone’s name on it, because if you wind up hating that person it’s there forever.” She overheard the conversation, spun my way and told us she just broke up with her fiance, Kevin—whose name was tattooed under her right breast. Oops. I said, for my daughter to hear, “So you’ll never get another tattoo, right?”
“No!” she said. “I’m getting a huge grape vine down my side next week!”
Ugh.
She also had a cross tattooed beneath her armpit, which surely must violate about 8,653 Biblical commands.
But I digress. The beach also reminds me why I’m a heterosexual. Because while there are certainly good-looking man, the vast majority of us are gross, fat, hairy, smelly orbs from Planet Nasty. The female body is soooo much more appealing than the male, and no matter how many times my wife tells me I’m handsome (or any wife tells her husband/boyfriend/hookup) he’s handsome, I don’t get it. Maybe I’m handsome compared to Butterbean Esch, but if you hold the best-looking man next to the best-looking woman, well, there’s no contest.
Again, I digress. The beach is a wonderful place for kids, and a wonderful place for parents with kids. But the cleanup is the absolute worst. Sand up the ass, sand in the shoes, sand on food, sand in cell phones. Sand, sand, sand, sand.
OK, I’m done.
