Sand on my ass

If you ever get the chance to spend nine days in Cherry Grove, NY, do so. At your earliest leisure. It's a primarily gay community (read: entirely gay) on Long Island's south shore barrier beach, Fire Island. There are a bounty of pleasures to be had from such an experience -- deers, rest, sunshine, tits, cocks, sunburns, charcoal grillerie, alcohol, meth-fuel asslove on the dunes AND MORE!

Me and the missus have made a habit of going to the beach for a week every summer for the past four years... it's our one reliable annual vacation from the hurlyburly (apologies to David Rabe) at the exact right time. What's really fascinating is to visit a place out in the hinterlands of Long Island and realize that everyone to the left and right of me are all Manhattanites -- the very situation that I used to be irritated by, standing out on the outside, back in my blue-collar school days in the Hamptons. What's also fascinating is to be the only straight couple anywhere within three miles, counting the communities of Cherry Grove and the neighboring (and more famous) Pines. There's something reassuring about being in the sexual minority, but it's hard to say what.

No, scratch that -- me and the wife feel queer-approved out there, a status we both yearn for.

A homo-beach might lead you to draw the obvious conclusion -- plenty of nude sunbathing, because there aren't any straight mouthbreathers (besides me) to scare chicks into stringing their tops back on (sorry, no file art). Even after years of grownuphood, I'm still not entirely cool and collected around the publicly-displayed, unadorned female figure, even one that is sapphic in its leanings. In fact, it's tough for the Ball'n'Chain when I can't walk more than eighteen yards without saying "OHMYGODDIDYOUSEETHESIZEOFTHOSE?!" Maybe one of these years, when Evil Bill has eaten enough saltpeter to sink the Bismarck, I'll be cool enough to let it roll on.

Of course, there's like 71-times more naked dudes swinging their tanned weiners in the surf, so that's a bit of a buzzkill. And what's with all the show-ers, anyway? Are the grow-ers a dying breed? *weep*... That fucking Atlantic water is cold!

When the sun sets, Evil Bill loves to grab a Stella Artois and the camera to shoot deer laying low in the dunegrass. Sunsets are the magic hour on Fire Island -- time to chargrill, roll a fatty (for all wife-al members of the contingent), and start to feel groggy from sunpoisoning.

Now that real life is ticking on back in the Windy Apple -- and my watch stopped Monday morning, as if to punctuate this fact -- it just serves to reinforce that all time spent working in an office, showering, feeding cats, designing newspaper pages, and wearing shoes is time spent in HELL, serving dark, sulphurous masters for baleful purposes whilst you stub your spirit out like a poorly-filtered Pall Mall cigarette.

I learned this from the stack of "National Geographic" magazines from 2004 in the shitter.