Life on the high seas

First off, we had a wonderful week. We spent time together and with Jami's mother, Gaby, her sister, Jennifer, and our niece, Grace. We ate a lot of food, possibly going over our weight watchers total allowance of points - for the week, but still within our allowance for the month. Just one day in the sun and my belly was horribly burned. I mostly wore a shirt the whole rest of the week. But the beach is a wonderful place, perhaps the only place, in America where you can wear just shorts and be socially acceptable. I felt like a kid again, barefoot, coursing over the dunes and into the waves, whistling the Sailor's Hornpipe (the Popeye theme) with variations in minor and modal keys and in odd syncopations of rhythm, keeping my eye eye out for the Kraken. Especially the notorious Kraken Jack, who'd entered in a kraken time, and might be mistaken for a kraken the pavement. A few tumbles in the surf, the mild surf of Kiawah, and I was Kraken up. Breakers, rollers, tumblers, crashing, sliding, sucking, swelling, slapping, lapping, pulling, pushing, left me in waters wracked, laced with foam, green and sparkling, jagged and eddying, but cool under the hot sun.
Of the ten beers I brought, I consumed all but two. The best beer was a kolsch. But I enjoyed an assortment of IPAs and ales.
Among the books I brought I really enjoyed reading Rabelais. I read him standing in the surf and sitting under an umbrella. The five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel are satirical classics without parallel. I wrote earlier in the year about reading Bakhtin's Rabelais and his World, about Bakhtin's take on carnival and laughter and the grotesque: how these practices heal and subvert. Out in the surf, I read Rabelais in pure enjoyment: his lists, the fantastic adventures, the humor (scatological and sexual), all amid the roar and race of the foaming breakers.
I wound up bringing 42 books to the beach and managed to touch on 20 of them in some fashion.
I drew some but was unable to do any water colors. I spent some time trying to get my remaining .35 mm faber-castell TG1-S technical pen to work: the nib and the central needle and weight were misaligned and ink wasn't flowing through the nib. Months before I'd dropped the pen on my studio floor. I finally broke the pen, the needle becoming dislocated from the weight. I have to order these pens from Germany now, and two should be on their way to me. One day, I will have to change pen brands or go over to a different kind of pen. I don't know what that day will be like. Sad and expectant at once.
Again I read Barth, this time CD IV.2. After being burned the first day, I determined to expose only one square inch of my body to sunlight at a time (as witnessed above).
The best part was being at the beach with the most beautiful woman in the world, smiling and laughing.