Stories from the beach (Fort Tilden)

I've been reading a lot of really heavy non-fiction lately, so I decided to grab a good old roman noir based in Berlin in 1934 and take it to the beach for some light reading. So there I am, engrossed in my book on the beach at Fort Tilden, when I hear Michelle Hel deadpan "There's a hipster doing yoga on the beach. I'm instructing him from my beach towel! Oh, he just missed a move and fell over in the sand!".

Let's just say the hipster-doing-yoga-on-the-beach was by far not the weirdest sighting I was to have today... No day at Fort Tilden is without a little excitement and/or strange encounter. Take the man who had dug himself a little sunbathing grave in the sand, wearing just a red sock on his penis. I don't know if he was channeling RHCP circa 1993 or if he just felt like the Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer in the summer was a look for him, but it did produce a few chuckles from my end. Especially when he got thrown about in the waves and I started to bet on him losing his little sock of dignity.

The yoga dude didn't grasp my attention, I mean when DON'T you see hipsters doing yoga on the beach?; it was Michelle Hel's deadpanning that actually made me raise my head from my book, and lo and behold, what did I see a little to my right? A young, tall, skinny, blond and very naked guy just chilling on the sand, not a care in the world. Look, I know Fort Tilden is lax about the wearing of bikini tops, but I have no idea when it actually became a nudist beach. Someone should have seriously warned us because when the guy got up and jogged, yes jogged, down to the water I nearly choked on my coffee I was laughing so hard. Must have been Russian. I can't think of any other reason for this.

And to top it all off, on the way back home, on the subway, as soon as I sat down a very scary hippie-devil type man, with crazy long blond hair and round red-tinted glasses, a big fat tummy and spike bracelets tried to shake my hand and then told me several times to "Fuck my God".

I'm so glad I have the whole of September still under the cold weather comes - this beach-side entertainment makes for a multitude of memorable moments (and stories).

(The book I was reading is called If The Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr

Excellent stuff).