So, I went to the beach this weekend. No, not the beach of my youth when we would go to the Jersey shore and stay with relatives, eat sandy french fries, swallow whole gallons of sea water, and get hosed off naked on the side of my aunt's house while everyone and their mother walked by and clucked their tongues...
No, it wasn't even the beach of my young adult days when I was fresh out of college, cracking a beer in the shower, doing shots with names like "the Blue Gorilla," "the Eyeball," and the "Heave Ho," and eating copious amounts of hot wings with my buddies while teetering on concrete parking slabs.
No, dear reader, this was the beach where my mom and her husband live. The mature community. Not a puking teenager in sight. It was quiet and sedate, with all the charm you could pack into a sandy lane; the cacophony of wind chimes spicing up the otherwise spacious silence.
And, somehow, I loved it.
Don't get me wrong. My days of summoning the Dark Lord in the name of boozing and chasing anything tan, hairless, and legal were grand days. Grand days indeed, fellow citizen. But, the bucolic nature of just turning the volume down - WAY down was much more pleasing than I anticipated. What can I say? I dug it.
So, there we were: Mom, her husband, my brother Dave, his wife, and two of their four kids, all huddled together and whooping it up as only lame white people can. Food was eaten, advice was given, and ice cream was sought and conquered. Let the good times roll. We all gathered together to watch a movie, which I promptly fell asleep on halfway through, and, several hundred hours later, woke up and hauled my crusty carcass back to my clinically antiseptic bedroom and passed out.
I was awaken a few hours later with what felt like a stiletto right beneath my shoulder blade. Apparently, it was an acid reflux attack. Let me tell you something, tough guy - I have a decent pain threshold, but I was not prepared for the fury of an acid reflux attack. I was in agony. I was twisting and writhing like a wash rag being wrung out by an obsessive-compulsive maniac. You simply cannot get comfortable. I started machine-gunning Tagamet down my gullet to fend off the nastiness, but to no avail. I sought out my Zen-center to will the pain away, but all I could do was envision the "Tao of Pooh" book that used to sit on the tank of my toilet in my old condo. Finally, the pain subsided, but it left a dark mark on my soul. I have met my enemy and he is a bastard.
So, there I was, two hours from home and The Simpsons starting in, yep, two hours. I gunned the engine, the car rattled like an epileptic Elvis impersonator, and I shimmied up the highway. Racing against the clock, I drove so fast that I actually went back in time. I looked at my Mohawk and rat-tail in the rear-view mirror and decided to slow down. I figured that I would make it back just in time to catch Danny Elfman's overture. I pulled in, grabbed my bags, raced up the steps, threw said bags in the air, raced to the television, turned on Fox, and...
It was a freaking NASCAR race. The screams of anger set off car alarms up and down the street. I HATE NASCAR, or any other kind of racing.
Yeah, and this coming from a person who was doing 100 on his way home. Think I'll go buy a wind chime.
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