3:25 PM, So it’s Tuesday and the heat has lifted up and away. The light outside is bright and crisp. Depeche Mode, Ultra is playing on the stereo. The beach is a silken sea foam dream, now -- scattered images and sensations: The rough tan warmth of sand, floating in a shimmering bar of reflected sunlight, watching the sun and the moon, together in the same azure late-afternoon sky...
I lounged and drifted for two weeks, reading, swimming, staring at the sea. At times I scribbled thoughts in a Mead composition notebook, wrote little reviews of the stuff I was reading. Mostly I just switched into sensation mode and left the thinking to the wheeling sea gulls.
If today were a transparency, the Outer Banks would lie just behind it -- still visible but growing distant...
1:45 AM, 7/15/99: Well, somehow I’ve managed to get sun-burned on a day when the sky was totally capped with steel-tinted clouds for as far as the eye could see. A few wan rays barely managed to filter through that thick cover -- and then, only for a handful of moments. The wind was constant, however: a bulky insistent animal, full of edges and speed.
Appraising the situation with my keenly-informed knowledge of sun and surf, I decided that sunscreen was not needed.
Now, of course, my face, neck, and legs (from the lower thighs down) are glowing a tight hot pink. Sigh. I must be a vampire or something; the next thing you know I’ll be getting moon-burns. Sheesh...
John’s Speedy Vacation Book Reviews:
Hannibal by Thomas Harris (ISBN 0-385-29929-X). Disappointing. Bad people doing bad things to other bad people (for the most part). Some legitimate "creep-outs" with the descriptions of Mason and in Dr. Lecter’s culinary excesses.
It was two-and-a-half days of windy, rainy weather followed by days that just got better and better. I’ve been going to the beach for over two decades now and I love it again every year.
Today is nice too, though. I’m back in an exercising groove, feeling a bit hungry, and have just discovered that the tape I was making of the previously mentioned Depeche Mode CD has gotten a bit screwy. Time to try that little project again...
--- JWR, 8/3/99
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