The Tale of the Millenials

I saw him often walking along the seashore with a bottle of rum. He could recite the Latin poets with perfect clarity and diction. And - you know, I've never found anything as pleasant as drinking a glass of water. When I've been drinking alcohol, I brush my teeth, and drink a glass of water and it's the freshest feeling in the world.

I started drinking with this fellow on the seashore. He was lonely like me. I'd seen him for years walking up and down by the rip. We found a tentacled monster on the massive beach that juts out and stretches for miles. "It's more beautiful than any human," he said. And he gave it the kiss of life but it was dead, long dead.

We would listen to music together. Pan pipes sounded as we strolled on the desert. We found upturned exoskeletons of crabs. One day he went out swimming when the tide came in and he almost drowned, I pulled him out, he wasn't a great swimmer. I came to the conclusion he had fibrosclerosis or some such malady, after reading a Webster's Medical Encyclopedia.

One day while we were walking he drew a symbol on the beach with his foot, and chanted something in a language I didn't understand. I felt scared and tried to hide the tears forming in my eyes. When I told him I didn't finish school he said I was a polymath and I laughed. 

I bought him a biography of Ernest Hemingway and he became furious upon receiving it, I even saw him spit as he shouted out that the man shot himself. I laughed mildly and grabbed him at the shoulders. Becoming placid he then kneeled down and put the book on the pavement by the road of cars, the cars that always drifted by the beach, and he said, "Someone will read it, you know. If we leave it here, someone will read it."

We didn't vote in the election. He said he'd lost his card. As for me, I don't know how to get one. I got him to watch an episode of 8 out of 10 Cats. He said Jimmy Carr reminded him of his headmaster who made him weep. So we didn't watch another. I took my guitar out one day and tried playing a song with him by the ocean but neither of us could keep a rhythm and he became restless. 

With regret when I checked my bank balance today my mother hadn't yet transferred a loan she had promised to make me. I was surprised this morning when at his house I found at the back of his wardrobe some oil and watercolour portraits he had painted some ten years hence, and he reminded me of a French impressionist. While I ate skittles and span around like a dervish he took two of the paintings out and said, "I'm going to throw them into the sea."

We were walking on the beach at 3 in the morning, it was dark, we could hear the roar of the waves, feel the embrace of the wind, and we sat down and watched as oil rigging boats shone their lights on the whooshing wilderness. There were not many cars now. Even the spiders that gathered in great clusters on the grass that had taken over some of the beach were nowhere to be seen. The stars were clearly visible in the sky.

I liked how little movement there was. It was peaceful. I've always wanted peace.