Sunbaked

i sat on the beach, surrounded by the scattered weekend families replete with umbrellas and ice chests and sand-castle-building equipment, having just returned from a swim out to the far buoy marking the swimming area and then along to the next buoy to the south and back to the shore, making a wobbly triangle in the choppy water that looked so pleasingly blue from the sand but turned a murky greenish-brown and revealed odd little slippery leaves of seaweed kept afloat by tiny pockets of air like a great undulating forest held upside down. my mouth swollen by the briny saltwater and my eyes stinging, i turned away from the sea and began jotting down, in a small notepad bound with false mahogany leather and gold corners, a letter i would later toss in the garbage bin in my room.

i stopped from time to time and glanced along the beach to the south, watching a middle-aged man sitting alone a hundred yards away, back from the water, staring at two young women, college students no doubt, sunning themselves closer to the waves, where the shore sloped up to a small roll where the high tide breaks and falls back. later, after i had abandoned the letter and lay spread over the large beach towel, another shielding my face from the sun, i heard muttering from that direction and began eavesdropping. somehow the older man had introduced himself to the women, who were, in fact, students at the nearby community college, and was now curiously lecturing them on a number of subjects, including microphone quality for music recording purposes, communications and accounting, which according to him is an easy fallback profession if you "just want to make some money."

as the conversation somehow morphed into a discussion of film, my enthusiasm for the discourse, and that i was privy to its meanderings, began to grow, and i started chuckling and snorting in disbelief, sometimes whispering to myself, "what the fuck is he talking about?" at the crux of the exchange, the older man launched into an analysis of the gladiator, russell crowe's roman battlefest blockbuster, with the clever observation that, "with this film, they have accurately portrayed, quite accurately portrayed, the world 2,000 years ago. so with film, you can travel back in time." in this moment of levity, doubtless for me and less sure for the two women, who aside from being subjected to these odd ramblings, also appeared to be of foreign nationality from the few accented words they managed to slip into the conversation, i felt the extent of humor to be derived from my clandestine spy operation had been met and exceeded long ago. nonetheless, i continued to listen, now shaking with silent mirth as he expanded on his view of film as a vehicle of nonspatial continuum with: "and with film, you can travel forward in time. into the future. have you seen the fifth element?"

at that point, i decided to abandon my mission at what most certainly seemed to be its apex and slipped back into the water for a quick refresher before i packed up my belongings, leaving the trio to further explore the ad infinitum cosmos of the silver screen.