Life's A Beach And Then You Fry

Yesterday was a momentous day, and one I look forward to with such keen anticipation every year that I am compelled to vent my eagerness by running around, for hours in advance of the great event, in little tight circles of glee until I get dizzy and smack my face into a wall and rupture a sinus. It's the first day I get to the beach.

The beach is by far my favourite place on earth. When I die, I don't want to go to heaven. I just want to go to the beach.

Settle down, the multitudes implore me. It's only the Burlington beach, they chant. Sure, but you have to understand that I'm from Sudbury. The beach up there is made of rock, without any water. Comparatively speaking, this is paradise. (Mind you, compared to my hometown, so is a sucking bog.)

I love everything about the beach strip here in Burlington. The promenade by Spencer Smith Park is beautiful and growing nicer every year as new playgrounds and lookout places, etc., spring up. (I'm enchanted by the tornado machine in the Discovery Landing pavillion next to Spencer's restaurant. I like sticking my hand in it like a seven-year-old because that's about where my maturity levelled off early in life.) People walk slow and smile at each other like they have all the time in the world. When I stroll along that lakefront every day in summer, I'm not a teacher. I'm just a guy with no earthly responsibilities. It's all I can do not to break into frolic every few steps, like a springtime lamb of joy on valium.

I've been walking the beach here for twenty-one years. I like to saunter all the way to the 'lighthouse' and try to time it so a ship is passing through the canal as I get there. It's an awesome and almost eerie experience to watch a big ship go by a few feet away. I always wave at the people onboard. Sometimes they don't wave back and I'm depressed for days.

They're working on an amazing new pedestrian pier that looks futuristic and breath-taking in the drawings they've posted on the big walls that keep the pedestrians out. The sign says it's scheduled for completion in Spring of 2008, which, in that it has already passed, seems unlikely now. But then, nobody believed that deadline anyway. Everyone knows that all construction projects' completion predictions are a big, fat, odious tissue of lies. But it had better jolly well be finished soon, or I'm going to grow very bitter and go down there daily and hurl abuse at the workmen until they cement me into one of the support pillars like my will stipulates anyway.

The water's polluted. That truly sucks. It's surreal, that's what it is. Idiots. Did you know they used to pour raw sewage merrily into the lake? To this day, mystery beach mucous collects at the edge of the water sometimes, in vast, vile quantities, and then is gone mysteriously the next day. I don't want to know what it is and I don't want to know where it goes. There's a whole separate level of hell for the numbskulls who allowed the lake to become so polluted it was forever bespoiled, along with the savages who insist on playing rap 'music' from big ghetto blasters on the beach when I'm trying to lie on it.

But still. That beach, somehow, regardless, sure is nice. Again, compared to Sudbury. At least the water isn't orange like in the 'stream' that ran around the park by the highschool I attended up there.

I have far too much work to do at the moment to go beach-walking as often as I'd like, but if you see me in a few weeks, ambling blissfully along at the water's edge, iPod playing cheery tunes, soaking up the rays, take note. You are seeing that rare thing, a completely present-moment-centered, entirely happy man. I'll be grooving to the waves, and I'll wave back if you do as I nurture a tan that never did seem to dry my skin to sandpaper consistency and cause giant tumours to sprout from my pores like the 'experts' said it would. You'll see a human being for whom all is well in his world. And that's something you can tell your grandchildren you glimpsed with your very own eyes.

Yes, life's a beach and then you fry. That's my motto of life. It works for me and it can work for you. But don't tell anybody else, okay? It's just between you & me and the sand.

And that ampersand.