Two Piña Coladas

He said “I’m telling’ you
that science has proven
that heartache is healed by the sea”

I’ve gotta say
that I’ve gotta stay
’cause this is feelin’ more and more like home

We have been trying to go to the beach or the pool every morning before school. It’s not a big ask. The six pounds of sand that we bring back to the apartment in our swimsuits is worth it.

You might think that, when moving to a tropical beach, this would be obvious. I think that the reality would be a little different than the theory for you. It was for us. Imagine smoking for 12 years, then moving to a different country and expecting to just quit cold turkey. Sounds preposterous. Now replace “smoking” with “being stressed about fucking everything”. It’s not a switch. You kind of have to fight off those old feelings. The big stressors are gone for the most part, but the urge to stress about something is not. We keep catching ourselves slipping on that anxiety like a pair of old comfy shoes. It’s not difficult.

My thinking about this case had become very uptight!

We finally were like, “Man, we have still been grumpy about this stuff. This place is full of good and soft things. We should embrace them”. It is not exactly that easy, of course, so we go to the water daily. I find that chucking my 7 year-old headfirst into water does wonders for my shoulder tension.

A couple points of interest from our first week of mas agua:

1. If you go out for an hour each day, you don’t need sunscreen. We are probably shortening our lives this way, but let’s see you put sunscreen on 3 fair-skinned females in any reasonable amount of time.

2. You have 3 options in the ocean here:
– Burn on the beach
– Get fucked up in the often brutal waves
– Tread water just past the waves and run with the devil

3. Our Corgi Barbara is an absolute monster in the ocean. She doesn’t care at all about her own safety. Her 2-inch legs are not long enough to keep her safe from waves, so she is often swept out to sea. She just does her best tugboat impression and chugs back to shore. She also drinks a lot of ocean water. We can’t go back to the house until she barfs it all up. One day, I hope she learns this lesson.

4. Harold, our 90-pound Golden Retriever on the other hand, is a pussy. Waves frighten him a great deal. If I was drowning, he would watch it happen. I would like to think that he would be bummed about this for a while. He would probably say something like, “I tried my best”. “It was beyond my control.”

5. Harold prefers to poop in the ocean to the grass. Every time we go to the beach, he sprints to the water and squats. Sometimes these poops take a while, and he will get ass-blasted by a wave while he is working on it. This brings me great pleasure, and I laugh a lot.

6. Taige prefers the calmer water, but is afraid to swim to it. You can’t touch there. As a compromise, she stands in the shallow water and gets thrashed by big waves. Sometimes this ends in what they call a “scorpion”. This is where your face is down on the ground and your legs are above the back of your head like a scorpion tail. This also brings me great pleasure, and I laugh.

I believe the beach would be more enjoyable with music, but our bluetooth speaker is currently on a boat in the Atlantic with the rest of our home goods. Hopefully it gets here someday. In the meantime, we’ll keep scorpioning and barfing and shitting and getting future skin cancer with only the tunes in our heads:

Oh now I’ve gotta say
that the wind and the waves
and the moon winking down at me
eases my mind
by leavin’ behind
the heartache that love often brings