Beach Sand

When I was a boy, my family summered at the beach, where we ate peanut butter, jelly, and gritty sunblock sandwiches (PBJ&GS's). I thought the sand was why we called them sandwiches.

I have since learned that sand is not composed of magic, self-purifying crystals from the mines of Etch A Sketch. Beach sand covers up all kinds of corruption. Children may as well play Frisbee in a giant ash tray.

As a teen, I got so wonky on beer -- forced on me by the Bad Kids -- that I used the sand for a restroom, spelling my name beside that of my girlfriend. She did not find it charming as beer would have you think. So it goes.

At the beach, then, bathing suits may be less appropriate than, say, HAZMAT chemical splashwear. Here are just a few items that I've found lying around on the shore: car parts, cutlery, Pampers, hypodermic needles, a Tony-Robbins-sized marine carcass, and seaweed forming the face of the Virgin Mary.

Don't even get me started on the dog duker.

And how come we see dogs at the beach but never cats? You'd think it would be Kitty Paradise -- the biggest litter box ever! I would personally feel better if, once in a while, they swapped out existing beach sand for extra-strength, allergy-control, maximum-clumping Tidy Cat. Now that's a place where you can play Frisbee.

Every year the beach sees millions of half-naked men who spit as freely on sand as they would on a softball field. Five million spitters ... at least one urinator ... carry the y ...

Yet beach loogies are a trifle before the more wicked and unnatural phenomenon that we call seagulls.

When people say "eats like a bird," they are not talking about seagulls unless they mean "swallows anything up to and including an anvil." Seagulls will eat your fingers if you don't keep 'em tucked.

Sometimes seagulls stand around conspiring like Roman Senators: "They've got the bread, men, but we've got the numbers. We've got the numbers."

It's only a matter of time before the seagull population reaches critical mass and the coast becomes lawless like Manhattan Island in the movie Escape From New York and no one -- neither Kurt Russell nor Al Gore -- can stop them.

Is that what we want? To forfeit the beach to winged rats? Surely there is something we can do. We could order a Purell air strike. Bombing always fixes things. We could build footpaths in the sand and admire the beach from afar as one might a botanical garden...

"And this section smells like blueberry cigars with a hint of soot and compost."

Or we could just take a seagull home and work it into our diets. Surely it's no crueler than eating chicken. And I will have you know that a chicken is not, at this moment, hovering overhead with designs for your five-year-old's PBJ&GS: "She's got the bread, men, but we've got the numbers. We've got the numbers."