I Love to Swim by Rita Goldberg

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I Was Downloading Songs Before Downloading Songs Was Cool*

I wish I loved the beach.

I can’t imagine living somewhere that doesn’t have water, I love to drive by and “make sure Lake Michigan is still there” but beyond reconfirming its existence, my love affair with the beach ends.

Let’s break it down.

Maybe it is the sand that really gets to me. I get cramps in the arches of my feet when I walk on sand. Those are probably the sneakiest of all cramps because they usually spring up later when you aren’t expecting it and then you have one of those flashback moments like Oh crap, I forgot all about walking on the beach today until I got these horrific cramps!

The sand can hide bad news. And by bad news I mean glass, knives, guns, bodies, etc. Well, mostly just glass but glass is dangerous enough and the other stuff was thrown in as an attention grabber.

Sun + sand = intense pain. My brown eyes burn, my pink toes burn, and the intense sunshine bouncing off the gugajillion specks of sand cause my white flesh to burn, hence pain is produced.

Sand can also show up in places I never anticipated. It is bad enough to have sand in between the crevices of my toes, but I end up with sand in every crevice. Even the crevices that haven’t seen daylight in decades get sprinkled with sand. Everybody knows at least one kid that can’t eat a teeny tiny chocolate chip without ended up with a brown face, well that is me with sand.

To me, sand is beautiful at a distance. In fact, I guess I feel that way about most things Mother Nature has to offer. I consider it to be drive-by beauty giving my life some curb appeal.

Now, another irritating thing about the beach is the water. Sand plus water equals beach so I understand that both are key ingredients but let us pick apart the water for a few moments.

Water, as beautiful as it is, can kill. Read that sentence again because truer words were never spoken. And unless the fish carcasses that are offering to caress my lily white ankles are victims of the swine flu … well, water routinely kills fish and lays them on our sandy shores as evidence. Sure, the fish might have died from old age, aqua palsy**or even something genetic but let us stick to the ol’ “the water killed ‘em” theory because I haven’t got time to math out the statistics regarding this ectothermic phenom right now.

You can never judge a lake by its water.

Still waters run deep.*

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down, enough said.

Moon River, wider than a mile.

How do you make Holy Water? Boil the hell out of it.

Do you see where I am going here? Although water can render you squeaky clean or partially blessed, it also has a dark, mysterious side to it.

As further proof of the hypnotic seduction provided by water, I offer the guitar riff from Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water.

If you aren’t familiar with this early seventies anthem, you can take a look at the guitar riff here but you can’t steal it because it belongs to someone. Wikipedia describes that philosophy better than I do so when you are looking at it you should stop bangin’ your head and read why you can’t steal other people’s audio.

Back to the water. Let me enter a quick disclaimer, today’s post is about my dislike of the beach. Please don’t let me persuade you in one way or another. I couldn’t convince people to vote the way I wanted them to so don’t even let me convince you that beaches are evil. Bitches, however, are often evil but that is another day, another topic.

My favorite thing about the beach, actually is this song by First Class, Beach Baby.

Why? Because I was going to Sheboygan North High School during the seventies, Mrs. Lorenz was my shorthand teacher. I worked on improving my shorthand skills by using a cassette recorder to tape songs as they were played by Bob Berry from WOKY, 920AM, a radio station out of Milwaukee Wisconsin. Beach Baby by First Class (above) and Badfinger’s Baby Blue (below) were the first two songs I downloaded …

… and by downloaded I mean I stole them from the radio and had to make sure no one spoke during my recording session or it would totally screw up my shorthand!*

*Please note that I very rarely use exclamation points when writing so when I do use them be sure to give them the respect they deserve!

Beach Baby made the Sheboygan region of Lake Michigan’s beach seem romantic. But I am older and wiser and more discriminative now that I am fifty years old. I don’t need to have algae embedded in my pinkie toenails. And let me point out that I have almost non-existent pinkie toenails except for the one time I was seduced into entering Lake Michigan and hauling out some green foamy growth with a baby alewife carcass attached to it via my almost non-existent pinkie toenails.

In conclusion:

Swim at your own risk. 

Shorthand might make a comeback.

I was downloading songs before downloading was cool

First Class is still first class (to me, anyway).

 Badfinger equals cool music multiplied by three decades.

The Statute of Limitations has hopefully run out regarding radio-theft.

* originally written May, 2009

** I invented the term aqua palsy, don’t even bother googling it.