along comes mister oysterhead, or: found in translation

my main chore yesterday was cleaning the house in anticipation of company. my friend from home, S, will be joining me for work & play over the next 3 & 1/2 weeks. i'm excited to have some human interaction around the house on a more regular basis. i mean, it's cool talking to a cat, but most responses end up like 'mrreow?' i know this could mean lots of things, bu i think it usually translates to, "yo, hook a sister up with some kibble, or what you oddly refer to as 'mushy num-nums.' " and at least once a day it means, "lemme inside, dude! i am preparing to sleep in the computer room for the next 10 hours. also, more kibble! and don't you dare skimp on the bits that look like little fishies!"



Mrreow?



as you can see, i could use some more healthy human interaction in my diet.



so after i cleaned up for a while and set up a room for S, i decided to ride to the beach. as soon as i get there this dude yells 'oye!' and waves me over to him and his group. when he waves he does that sort of mexican wave, which looks like he's airing out his armpits, as opposed to the american wave that i'm used to which has more of an allure of old school fisticuffs, Notre Dame Fighting Irish style. Wait, isn't "Notre Dame" "Our Lady" in French?



Mrreow?



with all of these cosmic reverse hand gesture shenanigans going about, it's a good thing we didn't try to hi-five, otherwise i fear we would've slapped each other on the knee caps.

anyway, what he and his buddies are up to is just chillin drinkin tequila and getting ready to scarf down some big oysters, or some other such creature that has an inverse relationship between its tender insides and rock hard outer body. like a forlorn bodybuilder. so naturally, after i said yes to the tequila offer, i figured i had to say yes to the oyster offer. in my travels, i've found it very rude to refuse an offer of a communal dish in other neighborhoods.

that said, i think i'll continue to let oysters to continue to do their own thing, which, from what i can tell, does not involve voluntarily jumping down my throat like a sandy squish ball of... mushy num-nums?



Mrreow?





I thanked the boys for sharing and as my oyster-loving friend started kicking The Cranberries' Dreams out of his car speakers, i knew it was time to jump into the ocean. so i hummed the lines to the song as i made my way to the waves and dove in. the waves were rolling and pleasant, so i let them wash me ashore and beach me like a whale. when i opened my eyes i saw two dogs barking around me, ostensibly warning somebody else that timmy had fallen down the well. but i got up and thanked them for their concern and they trotted off to go sniff something in the sand, ah! the sand! so beautiful it is, peppered with little flecks of gold. be they real gold or just pyrite matters not to me (though i assume the latter since no one is rushing this place like '49...1849, that is) - what i like is the aesthetic possibility of a gilded beach, and therefore, gilded sandcastles. i decided then to build a castle, since i wasn't dead, like the dogs had assumed, and was feeling rather alive instead.
so i gave my castle the obligatory flags (read: broken sticks and weird green beanpod), built up some walls, even placed a little plastic blue turtle i had found on the front of the castle to guard the place, and i sat. i sat and i waited for its utter destruction. i had also written in the sand with a stick: WORLD, THIS IS MY CASTLE, with an arrow pointing from the word castle to the actual castle-object for clarification.

while the first big wave immediately erased this declaration, along with the castle's main breakwall, a woman in her 30s, thin, dark hair, rolled up in a golf cart that was tricked out as a mobile ice cream dispensin shoppe.

she smiled at me and my castle and i said triumphantly, "behold! eso es mi castillo! mira: tengo banderas. y aqui, hay una tortuga quien lo cuida quando no estoy aqui."

she laughed and asked, "y el agua lo va a destruir?"

"si," i replied, "como todos."



Mrreow?