Beach day
Rhythms, cycles, revolutions, repetitions, are hard to conceptualize in concrete terms. Much easier to conceive is a loop. A short digital recording played continuously. But repetitions are harder to conceive perhaps because in each instance a degree of difference is present. No two Christmases are the same. No two beach days are the same. But rhythms and repetitions are the same in abstract terms because they are constituted by an abstract set of identical relations. Christmas is the same every year in the sense that the relations of dates are the same, it is every December 25th. But attempting to make the abstract notion of repetition more concrete, how does a repetition feel? Perhaps it feels familiar. Perhaps it feels like an opportunity. A familiar opportunity perhaps. But opportunities only seem to come once and when they’re gone they’re gone. So what is a familiar opportunity? The little knowledge I have of the death drive is a concept that is the failure to overcome repression, a failure to break past one’s limitations. An unconscious desire to relive a moment in order to overcome it. If any opportunity is new then there is no history to contend with. But a familiar opportunity contains within it a sense of history & as a result a sense of the future – a sense of incompetence to seize the opportunity. Or perhaps a feeling to live up to the great beach day of last year.
Every year as the earth rotates around the sun, summer returns. Stuck in traffic, the wheels not rotating, the familiar opportunity as a texture can be felt but hard to name. In the back of the car is a cooler of beer. The cooler like my bathing suit repels nature. But perhaps the bathing suit’s ability to repel water is a bringing closer of our natural state – nudity. Perhaps the cooler of cold consumable beer will bring me back to a pre-linguistic state. Perhaps the beach day is a returning to the primordial ocean of mother earth. On the beach as I open a beer to turn off my mind, I find others preferring a sober day of reading. I don’t know if I’ve ever read more than a page at the beach. But every time I attempt to I fail, a familiar opportunity with a familiar outcome. Looking out across the beach, the crowd of families, and familiar friend groups create a crowd aesthetic. The aesthetic of the crowd is both familiar and new, which I guess is a matter of focus. As a plane flies by advertising Jesus Loves You, I wonder what we look like to them. The impossibility of adjusting their focus to see the new in the familiar turns the crowd into a mass. Appropriate given the nature of advertisers to reduce individuals into data points. This ugly aesthetic brings my attention back. My friends are talking about how they hope so and so finds us since they don’t have any service. Everyone’s phone emitting GPS coordinates can paint a picture of the beach day. The text messages reveal the disappointments of being left on read, or the trepidation of asking a new acquaintances if they’d like to go to the beach. They reveal the presence of what I’m calling the friend economy. Inside of the friend economy plans are capital, they are created, sold, consumed. If successful the actors of the friend economy reinvest into new productions. The photos being taken and uploaded in sum measure the GDP gross domestic plans. The photos being viewed by anyone bored in the city might inspire them to do nothing not at home but at the beach. The general activity of doing nothing at the beach seems to challenge the idea of what boredom is. Perhaps it isn’t so much a lack of activity but a feeling. A feeling of being dislocated. We often think of the cure to boredom as doing something but perhaps it is really going somewhere even if it is to do nothing. And perhaps this is what the beach day is all about – about being where one should be, about a sense of belonging in the world, with nature, and with friends.
