New Day #276

Here's another way this project has changed my life: before leaving Seaside, I took a walk on the beach, taking advantage of the rare confluence of sun, heat and no wind. This hardly ever happens at the Oregon coast, where the weather could charitably be described at Wuthering Heights.

And then I see this guy with a metal detector. Now, even though I could not be considered inhibited by anyone's definition, I don't think I would have gone up to him were it not for this project. Somewhere on the road to middle age, I became more, I don't know, respectable?

It made me think back to the summer I was nineteen. I was living at the beach with friends, drinking beer on the beach every night after work, lounging on the sand all day. The one break we took from this idyll was when one of us scored some tickets to a Yankees game and we made an excursion into Manhattan. While we were there, we passed a construction worker on the street using a jackhammer. Because I was nineteen and a lot less respectable I asked him if I could try it.

It felt like my brain was rattling inside my skull like a nut in a shell.

So I'm grateful that forcing myself to do something new every day has re-ignited that youthful kind of freedom. Even better, I tried the metal detector and detected...a desiccated beer can from someone's beach party.


Seemed fitting.