Beach Day

I made a trip to the beach yesterday. The beach is where people go when they want to be pooped on by seagulls and observe dead sea lions wrapped in kelp. Around here the beach shares time with the Pacific Ocean, which is supposed to be teeming with fish, but I’ve never seen any. It could be full of fire breathing sheep. If there are fish, they keep their distance from the beach. That’s fine by me. I saw a fish once. It was covered with spines and lived in a tank at the pet store where an employee fed it smaller fish. The employee was really excited about his job to the point where he got really sweaty and bug eyed while the fish was eating. I quietly backed out of the store once he started panting. If I saw that fish at the beach I would leave immediately in case the pet store employee was lurking nearby in a Speedo.

Anyways, I didn’t go for the fish. I went to see girls. Movies and television programs always show the beach chock full of bikini clad girls dousing each other with oil before heading off for drinks with below-average guys. What the cameras fail to capture, is the homeless men drinking malt liquor shirtless and the overweight gingers trying to skim board. Neither is much fun to watch. All the attractive girls must have discovered this a long time ago, and now they just tan on movie set beaches.

The trip wasn’t a waste though. I found a clam shell in the sand. Since I love a good carcass just as much as the next guy, I tossed it in a bag with the dead raccoon I found on the side of the road. The clam was a great find, because I’ve always wanted an animal trophy to decorate my wall, but wasn’t willing to invest all that money in bullets, gun racks, and mustache scissors. Originally I was going to mount the raccoon, but the taxidermy costs associated with the clam were a lot lower. All I needed was a tube of Elmer’s Glue and my neighbor’s address plaque. I did have to scrape the numbers off the plaque before gluing down the clam shell, but I already had a flat-head screwdriver from the time I swapped license plates and VIN numbers with the same neighbor in order to park at the airport for a couple of weeks. If I were a professional, I might have added a coat of shellac and a pair of googly eyes, but I opted for an austere look.

The two halves of the clam are still joined at the hinge, and it’s open halfway. I think this qualifies it as an “action-pose” clam and likely raises the value exponentially. I once saw a similarly posed clam for sale, but the bottom half was clearly from an oyster and had been affixed to the top with rubber cement. Even the brontosaurus people would have been embarrassed to be associated with it. My clam would look, dare I say, imposing over the mantle alongside other specimens like Holstein cows, feral cats, and articulating worm dioramas. I intend to put it up for sale on Ebay.

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