Showing posts with label roman noir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label roman noir. Show all posts

Sunday, September 4, 2011

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).