I STARTED A BLOG AT THE BEACH

I wrote the first blog by hand at the beach. Not the warm kind of beach, though. The stormy and wild kind of beach. The kind of beach a pensive character in a movie goes to when questioning their crumbling life. It’s windy here and people are flying kites. It’s never summer at this kind of beach. The devastating beauty of the tree-lined cliffs and huge rocks that jut out of the sea in a metaphysical type of way are forever shrouded in a gloom. This kind of beach laughs at you with its cloud cover that ends a hundred yards from the shore. A beach that doesn’t feel like paradise is quite cruel. Paradise feels close enough that you begin to think this might actually be hell. I came to the cold beach just to stare at some big rocks. I’m a Sisyphus of my own making.

I think I write too metaphorically sometimes that it’s hard to find my meaning. I’m working on that. I’ve always prided myself on having a strong writing voice. Do you think that’s true?

The beach always brings up some psychological drama within me. I feel things deeper here. Unconscious patterns and desires make themselves clear. My first real memory of fear happened at a beach close to this one. I gained consciousness during a fevered hallucination at the age of three. I imagined bees were chasing me. My feverish vision was fuzzy and I thought the gray dots that swam around in front of my eyes were bees. The bees wouldn’t stop chasing me. I see them hiding in the corner of the tall ceiling. The ceiling must’ve only seemed tall because I was a toddler. The memory seems indistinguishable from a dream. In fact it’s something I may have dreamed up last night.

The sun came out so maybe this is paradise. When I’m by the sea I feel closer to the love I’ve always been promised. I’m also thinking about my American identity and the emptiness of it. I’ve always yearned for an ancient and predestined love. Something that feels so separate from the reality of my Americanness that it threatens to forever remain a fantasy. Until it finally happens. Believing is seeing, I’m told. The answer to the question my soul has always asked. We may go to war. Some things never change. Another ancient certainty.

I’ll have a sense of the past to transmute to my children. I guess I’ll try and transmute it to whoever reads my work too. That’s the goal, anyway. Tell my story as it takes shape, not only as a recounting of the past. Telling this story doesn’t have to be hard. It’s actually the easiest thing I’ve ever done. My thoughts will never be corrupted by 9-5. By political instability. Or by fear. My words will persist. I will share my truth. And I don’t really give a fuck if no one reads it.

That’s a lie.

I do care.

A little.

☆