Summer Dreams

Would you rather see David Brooks in a Speedo or leather chaps?

Every year we go to the beach, and every year it becomes more obvious that beach vacations are a metaphor for the human predicament. For while in his soul the contemporary man seeks to realize the loftiness of his essential nature, in actual life he finds himself whacking a ball against the windmill arm in an eternal game of mini-golf.

Middle-aged man seeks the spiritual grandeur of a mountain vacation, but is trapped in the saltwater taffy of a beach vacation. He seeks to ride a dude ranch horse among whispering pines and timberline silences, but society is structured such that he finds himself in a piercingly loud ski-ball arcade surrounded by “Party Like a Rock Star” T-shirts and eating a funnel cake.

Not that there is anything wrong with funnel cake. It is the only food left that hasn’t been captured by the Alice Waters/Whole Foods set.

Nobody is making organic, locally grown, zero-carbon-footprint funnel cake.

Still, man seeks something more. And so I repeat my theme: No decliningly virile American man should be content with a beach vacation when a mountain vacation is more in keeping with his inner longing. No middle-aged man of a certain girth should be wearing bathing trunks around adolescents when he could be wearing riding chaps around livestock.

We all, you see, have two summer selves.

Our greater summer self is the mountain self, which is spiritually and physically robust, in a Robert Redford/Horse Whisperer sort of way. Our lesser self is our beach self, which is a banal bimbo-ized version of the person we think we are.

Our beach self munches on cheese fries while browsing through “You Were Better-Looking on MySpace” T-shirts along boardwalks that are basically strip malls of unnecessary objects. Our beach self suffers from sandzheimers syndrome, which is manifested by the tendency to spend hours staring at oncoming waves while making scientific observations like, “Here comes a big one.”

Our beach self is ruled by a spiritual Gresham’s law — every aspiration becomes three degrees trashier than it used to be.

Once, kids were lobbying for a pet dog. Now they are lobbying for a pet hermit crab.

Once, adults were hoarding blue-chip stocks. Now they are hoarding 4,500 video arcade prize tickets in hopes of getting a dayglo Megadeth poster.

[...]

Is this really the way we want to spend the summers of our lives? Am I going to spend every August of my declining years sitting on broiling sands feeling inferior to the lifeguards? In fact, probably.

It’s the human predicament.