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.