Turn, turn, turning onto 81 S., Garden State Pkwy.

As with the end of any season, there's always regrets, mine namely being that I would most likely remember this as "the summer I watched the entire series of Oz on DVD", and that I had a terrific new bikini that had yet to be exposed to sunlight. Knowing that nothing short of a time-space wrinkle could undo the amount of assfucking and heroin snorting that I've witnessed in the past couple of months, I decided to work on the second, and so my friend Lee and I decided to rent a car and drive down to the NJ shore beach house that my friend Jess had rented. Knowing that Saturday was going to have bad weather (I believe the term "hurricane" was bandied about, but as the only time I left my apt was to purchase a bottle of vodka for the trip*, I'm just going on hearsay), we planned to leave Sunday morning.

*It's funny how events that some people would call "personal low points" can be other people's "personal high points".

That's actually considered a pretty nice little Saturday in Russia.

Anyway, the trip was a breeze (for anyone in the area, 95.5 FM- All Bon Jovi's "Bad Medicine", All the Time), and the weather at the Jersey shore this weekend was unreal, with the dreary grey Saturday followed by two days of perfect sunshine and angry, tourist-fucking waves. Being a fairly active person at the beach, I can usually spend hours boogie boarding to and fro, but after one particularly violent ride in which the ocean floor politely reminded my c5 vertebrae who was running the show, I decided it was best to stand in the shallow water with the rest of the masses and just enjoy wading around.

What followed was three hours of horror, in which I actually heard a wave break the sound barrier, and found myself closer to God on several occasions. If one made it out past where the waves were breaking, and past the bodies strewn across the shore, it was actually quite pleasant, and I even found myself in a few "We're all in this together" type conversations with strangers similarly enthralled to find themselves still able to walk. At one point, two 11 year-old girls targeted me as a potential confidant and asked me to tell them if there was really a Santa Claus, and following my refusal to tell (with some bullshit not-quite-comfortable-being-an-adult dismissal like "I'm sworn to secrecy" and a twisting of an invisible key in front of my mouth that was so fucking lame I actually heard my 13-yer-old self making fun of me to other kids), they conferred briefly and countered with "Are you able to tan?", at which point I decided that I'd best risk the trip to land before I found myself taunting preteens about their virginity.

Maybe if you weren't so harsh on her, she wouldn't have wanted to sell her tongue. Did you ever consider that?

Poseidon was having none of my high road, however, and after inadvertently showing my breasts to several unimpressed starngers, I ended up in a face plant somewhere nearish the shore, and at some point a grain of sand somehow got trapped in my eye socket (well, I assume it was from the weekend's beach time, but it could also be a the little plastic neuss that comes in the Clue box). It's an odd feeling to sit at a desk in front of a spreadsheet with facial lacerations, knowing that you look far, far more hardcore than you actually are, and for those who have never had the particular pleasure of something stuck in your ocular cavity for an extended period of time, it ranks on the Annoying Scale just above oral surgery and just below my mother*, but all in all, a good time was had.


*On a follow-up note, my mother informed me last night that she now weighs 140 pounds, and although I'm happy for her, she's getting dangerously close to my own weight, and I'd rather not have to commit suicide.