Working perverts the sensibilities. A day at the beach becomes a weekend event rather than just something you do when you please, as you feel the impulse to do so, as if. You return to work on Monday and consider the consolation of having had some free time, any at all, and the resources to do as you wish for a day. You can afford almost anything that can be done in a day, or perhaps a weekend. Beyond that, you might as well be homeless; at the beach every day until they force you away with uniformed authority.
An advantage of working, of course, is taking the occasional day off. There is the feeling of being naughty, playing hooky, of running into the ocean.
It is both restful and exhausting, the beach, one of the few places in which you do not feel increasingly puzzled by your surroundings. Nothing there has changed in millennia. There is the circling knowledge that you must return the following day to the world that is now changing faster than you are. It does not invite you to stay for long. In everything it does it reminds you of returning.
The waves appear as individuals, lost in the finality of that sole expression, returned meaninglessly to the water. Little evidence of sand collected or constructed lasts until the morning of the next day. Waves advance the impression of futility simply by vanishing tenderly. They can be chased, to a point, like most things. How absurd and comical it can all become, as if it must. In this, the beach is ideal.
No surprise, that the beach evokes thoughts of pleasant sex and certain death, the arching over of the waves as they break. What else is there - the sound of the surf, the impulses, the breeze and the warmth on your neck. In the end there really is very little, almost nothing at all, that doesn't disappear. The sun and the sky, the inability to fly.
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