The Beach

I recently got a digital camera at Wal-Mart for less than $100, just a couple weeks ago. It's a Kodak EasyShare C813. I hated it at first, because the instruction manual is just a 'Getting Started' kind of manual, instead of a complete, thorough, detailed manual (which can be downloaded from their website, but I haven't gone there yet). So I had to find out how to operate it by using the 'What does THIS button do?' method, which is always a little scary, because you might mess something up and not know how to fix it. And it was very difficult to figure out how to download (or upload, or whatever) the photos to my computer. And it didn't work with Windows 98, so I had to use it on my laptop instead, which means I'm burning pictures onto a CD-RW to put them on my PC, since I had to abandon the struggle to make a connection between the two computers... it's a long story.

I'm going to use Flickr for my photos like my brother in Arizona does. His pictures are of anything he notices, things that are beautiful, weird, unusual, entertaining, or different from what he knew here on the east coast. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/zombieite) Now that I have a camera, it suddenly turns out that there are a lot of interesting things that I want to show people.

I never wrote about the beach trip yet, but it would have been the perfect moment for my digital camera that I didn't have yet. I am taking pictures of bizarre and unusual animals and bugs and beautiful flowers and anything else that seems at all interesting. Normally I would have just seen things and said 'Hm, that's neat,' and then gone on with my life. Now I can say, 'Wow! That's neat! Get the camera!'

Every little thing is amazing. There's a line from a song I love, from years ago: 'Throw your arms wide, embrace all things, from small to tall, from fat to thin... Catch them all, toe to chin, and lose yourself in the wonder of things.'

I hadn't gone to the beach in years - not since college, in the mid 90s - but when Mom-Mom died I acknowledged her death by celebrating my own life for a day. So after I got out of Six Flags, which I already wrote about, I then headed towards the coast instead of going home. I had wanted to go to Cape May, but it seemed really far, and I was tired. So I just went to some random town, Avon Something, which is the first town you reach if you go directly to the ocean from Six Flags. There were a couple towns there, and I got so badly lost, I didn't know which town I was really in, so it might not have even been Avon Something. I just looked at my map afterwards, and saw a bunch of towns in the general area I was in, and the only one I can remember was Avon Something. Now I'm curious to check the map again but it's in my car. Darn it......... Okay, it's Avon By The Sea. Now that I found that out, it seems obvious.

When you get to Avon By The Sea, you are on a main road, and eventually you have to leave the main road, then just keep going straight towards the horizon and have faith that you will soon see the ocean. The main road doesn't have a big sign that says 'Ocean, this way ->.' I got off the main road and got onto a smaller road that went through some houses and small shops, and it was only a minute or two before I could see the ocean.

I felt shy and anxious. I didn't know if this was an area where you had to pay money or ask permission or tell somebody, 'Hey, I'm going to the beach now.' I didn't know if you could just walk right up to it. So I drove my car around for a few minutes just looking at everything. You had to pay for parking in some places, so I avoided those areas. There was plenty of room to park everywhere else.

I left my sandals and socks in the car. (Yes, I've been wearing sandals and socks. A long time ago we made fun of people who did that, but then it became a popular style. And I'm doing it for a reason, having to do with problems in my house, but that's another story.) It was around dinnertime. It was still warm but the sun wasn't directly overhead. I was already badly burned from being at Six Flags all day.

There wasn't much to notice on the way down to the water. However, if I'd had my camera, there would have been a lot more to notice. There's a reason for that. If I see something interesting and don't have the slightest idea what it is, I can take a picture of it and examine it more closely later on. The camera helps me get a better detail view of things up close. And I can think about them at a more convenient time, or look up a picture on the internet to compare it to whatever I'm looking at. So I would have been picking up the tiny crushed pieces of shells and the little clumps of seaweed, maybe, and taking pictures of them. Maybe I would have been able to find out their species.

The ocean itself is mostly flat and grey, to look at, so you don't really look at the ocean hoping for anything exciting to happen. There were a few boats out there, but they were not very interesting. I would have liked to see an old sailing ship from hundreds of years ago. Something like the Mayflower. (That made me laugh a lot, but it's true. I just pictured a bunch of immigrants coming over from Europe on one of those old sailing ships, and actually, that would have been amazing.)

This has to do with my recent interest in primitive tribes, self-reliance, and doing things that normal people can't do because those activities have been monopolized by the government (like aviation, which I'll write about sometime). A long, long time ago, if you felt curious about the ocean, you had to be responsible for designing your own boats that were strong enough and big enough to make it all the way across the ocean. I've heard that the waves are dozens of feet high in the windy areas, when the wind just crosses the ocean uninterrupted for hundreds of miles. The ship has to be the right size and shape to not get drowned.

(Oh no. This is going to be one of those situations where everything I say has a double meaning.)

Actually, those old sailing ships were still kind of 'monopolized by the government.' I remember Columbus was asking the Spanish government to give him money for the trip. I don't remember how the Puritans and all those people got the money for the trips when they went. I'm guessing they didn't actually OWN the Mayflower. The boats have always been really expensive. But I've heard stories about people who tested small, 'primitive' boats that successfully crossed the ocean in some places, although it might not have been all the way across the Atlantic.

I just don't like the idea that you HAVE to have some impossibly expensive ship which can only be bought with borrowed money or government money. I like thinking that if I absolutely had to do it myself, somehow I could. Not just me alone, but a relatively small group of people, using less money, making our own design, without any government regulations.

I had on my ordinary clothes that day, so I just walked in the edge of the water. Along the edge there were these things that looked like thick round pieces of glass. I would have taken pictures of them. They were all over the place, lying out on the sand. Why would round pieces of glass be everywhere? They were about the size of the bottom of a glass jar. I thought that's what they were. So when I touched one with my finger, it was totally unexpected. It was a squishy jelly thing, not glass. I jerked my hand away and was afraid it would start stinging, but it didn't. It was some kind of jellyfish but not the type that stings. I couldn't see any 'moving parts,' no legs or tentacles or whatever moves a jellyfish through the water. I guess they were dead.

I walked along for a while and it was peaceful and refreshing. I let my ankles and legs get soaked but I didn't want to drive home in soaking wet clothes. (The herbal contamination disaster made everything more complicated than it used to be. It really is a terrible situation. I actually have to be cautious about things like wet clothes touching the fabric of the car seat, and it's really hard to explain these things to anybody. It makes me wonder about other people who have attempted to grow dangerous herbs indoors - how many people experienced anything like what happened to me?) Next time I go I'll be more prepared.

There is a constant wind that blows in from the water. I took meteorology class and I used to know the reason why that wind blows all the time. It's perfect for flying kites or testing your primitive, homemade glider, which I was fantasizing about. (The P-word, 'primitive,' is going to be everywhere, for a while. That's the new focus. Primitive tribes, primitive tools and weapons, and so on. The idea is 'anything you can make, by yourself or with a few other people, out of materials in your own backyard, without spending money.)

I wasn't alone when I went to the beach. I still heard voices. I'd like to go someplace where I didn't hear them anymore. I'd like to just hear the silence of my own mind. I'd like to think my own thoughts and feel my own feelings. So the beach wasn't as peaceful as I would have liked it to be. They wanted me to show off and go swimming, so that I would be interesting to look at. But I didn't.

I walked around behind a couple fisherman, so that I wouldn't walk under their fishing lines. Nobody caught anything while I was there. After that, I reached a sign that said you had to have a 'badge' to go on the beach there. I didn't have a badge, but I walked through anyway, and looked around at everybody else to see what the badges looked like. I only saw one or two people with badges. But it was much more crowded there, and I felt self-conscious, and eventually I just turned back.

A couple times I dug into the sand, hoping to find the tiny little lavender colored clams that dig down into the sand after you expose them. They're very small, just a couple millimeters. But I didn't see any of those. I remembered them from a long time ago. You can actually watch them quickly burrowing back down to hide.

I looked for seaweed too and found some. I was afraid to touch the seaweed, but I touched it anyway. I thought it might be poisonous. Nothing happened though. It was dark green and had air sacs, round bubbles to make it float. I don't know enough about seaweed to remember whether it's supposed to be anchored down someplace, or whether it just floats around all the time. A lot of them stay attached to rocks. I'd like to know which kinds are edible, but I don't know if there's too much pollution in that area to eat the local seaweed. It didn't LOOK very polluted.

After a little while I went back to my car, and I was covered in sand which was clinging to my pants. It got all over the floor of the car, but I don't mind it. Then, I struggled to escape from the town. That was the hardest part of the whole trip. Well, not as difficult as getting past Philadelphia on the way back. But I just could not get out of that beach town. I kept trying to get back to the road I thought I was on, and couldn't find it. I went in circles over and over again while being nagged by and arguing with 'the voices.' They said I must be deliberately trying to evade my followers, and I explained that no, I was sincerely lost. Hopelessly lost, and getting angrier and more frustrated every minute. I was sick of driving in circles through that town trying to find the main road. Every time I got on a main road, it took me miles in the wrong direction before I decided that this wasn't it. The map wasn't detailed enough - I could kind of see what I had to do, but there was one little area where I had to just guess.

This 'getting hopelessly lost' phenomenon is actually a new thing. It didn't used to happen to me very much in the past. It has happened a lot lately, and it always involves a lot of arguing with 'the voices.' In the past, I would get briefly lost and then find my way to wherever I was going relatively easily. I'm becoming suspicious that 'getting hopelessly lost' might not be entirely my fault.

Well, I finally made it back to the main road. The rest of the trip home wasn't really interesting enough to write about in detail, except for the Philadelphia problems. I knew that 'getting hopelessly lost' in the Philadelphia area was not a good thing. After the difficulties at Avon By The Sea, I knew Philadelphia would probably be a disaster. It was tricky on the way in, on the first trip, when I was trying to find the hospital my grandmother was in, and I got stuck in a big traffic jam. So, on the way home, I wanted to avoid the worst of it.

I pulled off the road before I reached Philadelphia, and set out to deliberately, carefully plan the route I would take. This upset the voices very badly. They got angry and started zapping me and interrupting me while I was carefully focusing on the map. I got out a piece of paper and wrote instructions for myself, as detailed as I could make them, and I even drew a little picture of which roads were where.

The voice arguments, when I was driving, would cause me to get lost, because sometimes they would tell me things that were true and accurate, and other times they would tell me things that were inaccurate, or not detailed enough, too vague and confusing, or just wrong. Since I am in a first-person view, and they seem to be in a satellite view (I assume), it must look easy to them. I can't just listen to their instructions and trust that if only I drive twenty miles in some direction, I'll get where I want to go. I have no idea whether it's going to be twenty miles or twenty feet, because they're never very specific. They'll say stuff like 'You're going the wrong way' without saying which is the right way. Is it 180 degrees behind me? Is it 90 degrees to the right or left of me? Which one of a thousand different possibilities is it? There are infinity ways to go wrong. Just telling someone that they're going the wrong way isn't very helpful. It just makes them anxious and confused without providing any information.

It's possible that humans use a magnetic compass in their brains, in their bodies, like other animals do. There are magnetic structures in the brain that do, in fact, get attacked and used by people who are doing electronic harassment. I don't know the details of it - it's been a long time since I read about the exact method of interacting with the magnetic structures in the brain. I remember that I used to just feel a vague sense that I had to go some way. Nowadays, trying to 'just feel' anything at all is impossible. If I silence my mind and pay attention to feelings and sensations, I get zapped and interrupted within seconds, almost immediately.

So in that way, while the trip was enjoyable, I still never completely got away from the things that are bothering me.

So I struggled with the map and my instructions. I was careful, and I concentrated as hard as I could, but I kept getting interrupted. It turns out that there was this green line, which was hard to see, since it didn't have much contrast with the other background lines on the map of Pennsylvania, and it actually went underneath the fold in the center of the book on the New Jersey map. The little green line, 276, which I totally overlooked, was the line that I really needed.

I made this plan for how I would avoid Philadelphia by going up north around Trenton. It was all going to work perfectly. I was sure I had everything right. But I was supposed to get on the little green line, and I didn't, so I went looking for other roads instead. And I ended up going all the way down through Philadelphia, looking for some way to get on the road I wanted. I saw a couple of opportunities, but I thought they were wrong, because I didn't understand something. For instance, one sign made it look like you could get on a road that went east, but not west. I wanted west. It was the right road number, but the wrong direction. So I didn't get on that exit. I skipped it. The voices complained that I had missed three (I think) chances, so far, to get where I wanted to go. They had told me 276 was what I wanted, but I didn't think so, because I thought 276 was going parallel to me. Since they can't REALLY read your mind all that well, they never seem to understand WHY you're doing what you're doing. They can talk, they can complain, but they never really understand you very well. So nobody was able to argue with me, or ask questions, and find out that I mistakenly believed 276 was going parallel to me. All they could do was tell me that I did the wrong thing, and then nag and complain for a really long time. If somebody had understood that I was imagining 'parallel,' then we could have worked it out, and said, 'Oh, wait a minute. No, it's not parallel. It goes directly west to 76.' This is one reason why the mental phenomena really do waste a lot of my time and energy and cause a lot of stress. They know how to complain, but they don't know how to understand. But I don't believe that the voices are there to make my life BETTER.

I went all the way down to Chester, where I finally got on 476 going north. The whole plan had been ruined. If there had been no voices telling me to do things, I might have tried some of the roads that I slightly suspected were going where I wanted to go. If I had been able to concentrate while reading the map, I might have noticed the little green line saying 276. And even if I had made mistakes or done things imperfectly, there should have been no 'imaginary audience' criticizing and disapproving of everything I did. There should have been nobody there but me.

Aside from those conflicts, the whole trip overall actually was a very happy, special time. I never go on vacations or do much of anything entertaining. I wondered whether there was anything inappropriate about going on a fun adventure because my grandmother died. But when I told people about it at work afterwards, most people responded with something like, 'Wow, that's cool.' They didn't say 'You shouldn't have gone to Six Flags and the beach after your grandmother died.'

There really is a mental 'cage' around me most of the time. (See this link: http://www.working-minds.com/WMessay70.htm and http://www.working-minds.com/WMessay30.htm) I don't know how much of it I created myself. I don't know how much of it was created by other people. The cage said I couldn't go do anything adventurous or entertaining, especially if it costs money.

The New Jersey trip got me mostly out of the cage for a while. And now my new camera is doing the same thing. So I'll mention it when I'm ready to put the photos on Flickr. (Sorry to disappoint everyone, but they're just going to be family-friendly, G-rated pictures of ordinary things. In a way, it's nice to have pictures of ordinary things in contrast to all the scary, difficult, traumatic things I write about in my blog. The pictures have a much happier feel to them.)