l'etat des choses vs. l'etat des ames

The state of things vs. the state of souls

What about the soul behind the thing?

What about the people behind the postcard?

Alicia and I are at Cinema Plus, working again. It's slow again, because it's Thursday again and we're drinking White Zinfandel (on the house) again. Everything as usual. The wine is so terrible and cheap that we feel like we do the place a service by drinking it since no one else will.

Alicia scrunched up her face after a giant gulp: I'd rather drink the dishwater than more of this. You know, I tried to dare the Nacho Guy and his wife (regulars) to drink it and they wouldn't even consider it.

Well, it is free. The fact that we're showing Spring Breakers is annoying and sort of meta, which is probably why it's annoying. If you want to have "Spring Break in Florida" then walk outside, that's where we are. It's like when people go to the beach and take a ninety degree turn straight into a hotel's swimming pool. 

Chill out, the theater isn't that beachy. It's just a coincidence. The movie is pretty popular right now. 

Yeah I guess. Ever hear the term I need a vacation from this vacation? That's how I feel. I feel like I'm supposed to be living in a vacation but I just want a break from it. What even is a vacation at this point? People who vacation here would rather watch a movie about a vacation here than have their own.  

I think you're over-thinking it. 
She turned back to her wine as if that was less offensive than my company.

Closing always meant hearing the loose threads of belligerent bar band funk music lazily floating on the salt in the air, disconnected by the darkness, tangled in the drunkeness. I curse Jimmy Buffet, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the whole reggae genre individually each night for what they have done to my hometown. The image of old people dancing with their shoes off and generally trying to get their swerve on with one another has been a trauma for more people than just me, I'm sure.
I turn all these things over in my head on my walk home.
I wonder about how many souvenirs the tourists bought here that they didn't need, what it's like to unpack a suitcase full of plastic "good times" that someone made just for you to buy. Reducing a place to its attractions, building an economy off of impulse buys, booking bands that sound like worse versions of already shitty bands, bands that don't even pretend to be anything else, validating an existence by how many pictures you have of it in different lights and at different angles.
A lot goes into that fetish. A lot of lives, tons of alcohol, and too many beach-related puns.

The state of things vs. the state of souls

Fast, moonlit bike rides along the sandy road next to the beach. The water is visible in pieces, a massive geographical feature that plays peek-a-boo with anyone sober enough to notice or care.
The measure of an entire ocean offered to you in the holes between each resort.

If I wanted to get my gears sandy tonight (and I don't) it would be a romantic moment. The moon casts several different spells on the sea, and I'm not a sea creature so I don't know the extent of most of them, but what I do know is that it changes all the water into silver on the right kind of evenings. 

One giant mirror poised to swallow its reflection. 

I used to get pretty spiritual about that.

How could anyone hate the ocean?

I used to ride here at night, float on my back in the dark water, and pretend I was in space.

Water so dark it was opaque.

 I would swim at dawn; watch one old couple walking along the shore holding hands in soft January rain.

Now I get about as spiritual as I've got time for at a stop light. 

Riding home along the beach part is the nice part. Strange things come into my head, and although Deleuze and Guattari weren't writing about the ocean, the quote always comes back to me: "attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity." You could throw all these buildings, all these people, all these subjects with all these names, into its gaping mouth and that would be what's left: the trace of an intensity.

But you know, that's a stop-light's worth. 

In down-town, beach art and bad murals pass as about the only meditation on the issue, and riding through down-town is inevitable at this point in my life.

Ride past the graffiti, bottles scattered in areas below neon paint, and there's definitely more to it than the beach art, and there's probably a little more to it than the anagram I left on the theater board last night.

To each his own, to each his own.