Therapy

It wasn't until I heard silence did I realize I'd been without it for two months. It took me an hour and three trains to find it.

On Saturday, I went to the Rockaways, aka the beach in Brooklyn. I packed my snobby Hawaiian attitude (the water will surely be polluted and cold, the sand too crowded and the culture more "street" than beachy - though I'm not sure what I meant by street - Low riders? Spandex and gold chains? Fictitious Brooklyn accents I have yet to hear? ) Anyways, I was completely wrong. If you are someone who is die hard enough to spend an hour on a train to be near the water and/or surf, then you are not pretentious or uber-urban. This is not the orange tan and zebra-striped bikini parade of Miami Beach or Malibu. At 10 in the morning, on the first bright day of the summer, the Rockaways looked like a spot for people who simply like the ocean.

Oddly, the beach culture here in this pocket of NY is one of the most similar to that of Hawaii's I've come across (mostly in terms of style). Bathing suit coverups are simple tee shirts and shorts. The scene isn't a re-creation of every spring break movie with a row of bars wrapped in hula skirts touting margarita specials. Okay, so there are newly-built vacant condos lining the beach (but at least these aren't the couture shops or behemoth villas and shopping centers of Waikiki).

But the rest of the architecture could be out of North Shore or at least near the Alawai Canal. One- and two-story storefronts look sand and sun weathered and taco and sandwich shops (not to mention a stand of the east coast equivalent of shave ice--Italian ices) are literal shacks manned by friendly stoner types and that serve fresh, honest food. There's even a guy who sells gear and rents out lockers so city folk don't have to trek their boards back and forth all summer.

Like with any beach, there's the local surf spot (i.e. the one farthest from the train and closed off by 10 to accommodate for the kiddies)...

...and the one everyone else goes to (where novices piss off locals, and locals usually steal most of their waves anyway.)

But that's as far as my surf observations go. I'm a sunbather, or at least, I use sunbathing as an excuse to act like a sloth. Whenever I get near the ocean, I just stare at it, mesmerized by the tide going in and out until I lay on my towel and pick up my book, which after a few sentences, usually leads to a nap, followed by more staring. I like to think of the ocean as Prozac for my city-obsessive disorder.