A much needed break from reality today.

A trip with Neil to Tablerock beach in Laguna. 

We arrive in the morning, the perfect time to get there. Not a single soul in sight. Neil sets up his fishing gear while I carouse around the shore, arranging shells and climbing rocks. I can feel the age of the beach, in the moss and the waves crashing in a Cambrian sense. There's something healing in the ocean. 

I am going mad, I can feel it... I envision myself as a basket case, internalizing my anxieties to the brink of mental exhaustion, but when I'm solitary, I feel resolute with a heightened sense of things. It seems I'm cursed with an over-sensitivity to nature, without the proper faculties to understand or manipulate it. In many ways, I envy both the idiotic and the genius, because I seem to be somewhere in the middle, not smart enough to master any particular field of knowledge, but not dumb enough to be apathetic about it. 

So, I sit and think about the beach, about how long its been there, how dwarfed we are in the wake of the planet's age, and I begin to wonder what it must've been like to be early man, what early human feelings must've been, how primitive yet resonant those feelings were to them. I envy our ancestors for their ignorance. 

I watch Neil for a while, his mastery of fishing endlessly fascinating me. 

He is an intense man, full of energy, with deep regions of knowledge that, after knowing him for fourteen years, I have no idea how he accumulated. Each fish he catches, he can easily identify and describe, mentioning the best times to catch what fish where, when and how, with what bait and in what climates. He expresses absolutely no fear, parading around the beach as if he has been doing this in a hundred prior lives. I long for that kind of confidence, that kind of joy. He teaches me a bit about tobacco pipe mechanics, and we smoke for a while, enjoying the solitude around us. He and I are our best in this particular place and time.

We are who were are supposed to be when in nature: Unbridled, flawed, mortal, and ultimately cyclical, like the mythical Ouroborus depicting the serpent devouring its own tail.

I subbed an outdoor p.e. class today, and at one point, while walking back to the locker rooms, I stopped to listen to a massive flock of birds in the trees causing a commotion. I had my neck craned for a few minutes before I noticed a large group of kids laughing at me, I think the same dumbshits who- earlier- asked me if I was a famous musician. I told them I was a backup dancer for Beyonce, and one girl actually believed me. Seriously, I need a new line of work...