"At the baths I usually run into Oden Wharton, an octogenarian who had the good sense to quit a hundred-thousand-a-year job, as executive of a steel corporation at the age of forty-five. And do absolutely nothing! Oden has been doing it perfectly for almost forty years now and his conscience doesn't trouble him in the least. You wonder, when you talk to Oden, would the world really go to pots if we chucked everything and lived like the lilies in the field." --Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch (1957)
Today started off with a beautiful early morning wake up with the view from my bed beckoning me to the beach:
Finally a chance to get some long awaited work done..on my tan! After a massive breakfast of calabrese and eggs, I used my little lady-brain and got my umbrella and chair set up all by my lonesome with the clever digger doo-dad and I was ready to spend the day lounging on the beach:
I did nothing and I did nothing VERY well, I think. I walked a little, swam a little, read a little, and napped a little and found a new kind of crab and watched him/her dig his/her crab hole, another camo-champion:
Can I please stay here forever?
I went up to my apartment for a bit of lunch and then did more nothing but with beer:
At about 2:30 in the afternoon, in an instant, I began to feel uncomfortable and unable to escape the sun under my umbrella, as if the rays bouncing off the water were gonna git me no matter what. All day I had felt that I had really only spent ten deep long breaths lying on each side in the sun doing my rotisserie tanning technique. Apparently the sun runs deep here. I had been applying sunscreen unevenly all over my sandy body and my inner thighs began to feel like sandpaper, my beer was getting warm, the flies began swarming the mouth piece. The sun was chasing me around my umbrella as the tide was rising very close to my chair, my upper thighs, who haven't seen the light of day in a year, began to look all splotchy and red and very unhealthy, the skin of my abdomen all of a sudden becoming incredibly tender. At one point, as I was moving my chair around the umbrella trying to find the shade I sat back down in it and it collapsed on me. I said out loud to myself: "Things just turned aggressive real fast". I packed up and could not get out of the sizzling sun fast enough and wished I could just leave all my shit on the beach and retreat immediately to the indoors where the sun couldn't get to me. All of this happened within the span of 3 minutes... beginning with that feeling of uh-oh... this is bad. To any onlookers I probably appeared to be dancing frevo but with a giant, hefty and burdensome umbrella, like Jesus hauling the cross up to Calvary, rather than the typical tiny little colourful ones that look light and cheerful.
And disappear I did to another unromantic afternoon/evening in this incredibly romantic place that included drinking water and wine, eating chips and popcorn, watching a smutty British TV show, while applying copious amounts of moisturiser to my poor, boiled and burning lobster-coloured upper thighs and buttocks. I eventually passed out around 8:30 pm to a restless, burning sleep.
Today started off with a beautiful early morning wake up with the view from my bed beckoning me to the beach:
Finally a chance to get some long awaited work done..on my tan! After a massive breakfast of calabrese and eggs, I used my little lady-brain and got my umbrella and chair set up all by my lonesome with the clever digger doo-dad and I was ready to spend the day lounging on the beach:
I did nothing and I did nothing VERY well, I think. I walked a little, swam a little, read a little, and napped a little and found a new kind of crab and watched him/her dig his/her crab hole, another camo-champion:
Can I please stay here forever?
I went up to my apartment for a bit of lunch and then did more nothing but with beer:
At about 2:30 in the afternoon, in an instant, I began to feel uncomfortable and unable to escape the sun under my umbrella, as if the rays bouncing off the water were gonna git me no matter what. All day I had felt that I had really only spent ten deep long breaths lying on each side in the sun doing my rotisserie tanning technique. Apparently the sun runs deep here. I had been applying sunscreen unevenly all over my sandy body and my inner thighs began to feel like sandpaper, my beer was getting warm, the flies began swarming the mouth piece. The sun was chasing me around my umbrella as the tide was rising very close to my chair, my upper thighs, who haven't seen the light of day in a year, began to look all splotchy and red and very unhealthy, the skin of my abdomen all of a sudden becoming incredibly tender. At one point, as I was moving my chair around the umbrella trying to find the shade I sat back down in it and it collapsed on me. I said out loud to myself: "Things just turned aggressive real fast". I packed up and could not get out of the sizzling sun fast enough and wished I could just leave all my shit on the beach and retreat immediately to the indoors where the sun couldn't get to me. All of this happened within the span of 3 minutes... beginning with that feeling of uh-oh... this is bad. To any onlookers I probably appeared to be dancing frevo but with a giant, hefty and burdensome umbrella, like Jesus hauling the cross up to Calvary, rather than the typical tiny little colourful ones that look light and cheerful.
"The Sun is such a lonely star. Whenever he comes out to see his friends, they all disappear."- Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 1
And disappear I did to another unromantic afternoon/evening in this incredibly romantic place that included drinking water and wine, eating chips and popcorn, watching a smutty British TV show, while applying copious amounts of moisturiser to my poor, boiled and burning lobster-coloured upper thighs and buttocks. I eventually passed out around 8:30 pm to a restless, burning sleep.
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