Burns, Buttcracks and Boobjobs

A southern California beach on the first warm weekend of the year is surreal. I always say the southern California way of life is not real life and no where is that more evident than at the beach on a warm, sunny day.

The crowded beach is filled with all kinds of umbrellas shading even more kinds of people. Tattoos, piercings, scars, fat, skinny, old, young, black, hispanic, asian, white and inevitably buttcracks. Any which way you turn you see buttcrack because, for some reason, once the bikini bottoms and board shorts reach a certain level on the hips people lose all awareness as to where their buttcracks are in relation to their clothing. Not to mention the hundreds of people at the beach wearing bathing suits that don't fit correctly and therefore flashing all sorts of things you never wanted to see. There are the surfers, paddle boarders and boogie boarders out in the waves, who get a scary surprise when they see dorsal fins about 30 yards away, until they realize it is a pod of dolphins swimming by. There are the kite flyers, football throwers and volleyball players. On the boardwalk, there are the bike riders, skateboarders, runners (with their shirts off, of course) and rollerbladers. There are the pasty white (myself included) who you can see actively turning red before your eyes from the strong sun and there are the overly tan who either spend all of their time sunbathing or paid way too much money to be sprayed with the orange elixir that southern Californians thrive on. There are boobjobs everywhere you look and you can make a game out of who can spot the next boobjob to walk by first. And keeping watch over it all are the lifeguards in their lifgaurd towers and lifegaurd trucks that drive down the beach straight out of Baywatch (we even saw a lifegaurd in his red shorts carrying his red flotation board while running down the beach. It doesn't get any more Baywatch than that). Despite, or maybe because of, all the unreality of the real southern Californian beach, it is a wonderful place to spend the day and we can't wait to go back.

Long live burns, buttcracks, boobjobs and the stereotypical southern California beach.

The mass of people who flocked to the beach on the first hot day on the coast.

Good times at the beach. You can tell my forehead is getting a little toasty.