Double Yolks
The boomers at the next campsite lit their third joint since I got here, and I’m thinking about everything they should have been. Not cowboys, like the lyrics of the song blaring from their speaker, but rather stewards, advocates, or fucking fortune tellers. They should have been voices for the planet while they had the chance (the responsibility!), truth-sayers when the red flags were raised decades ago, because it was all right in front of them. Now the world is burning, and they’re driving their RVs from campsite to campsite to watch the flames.
The ass end of their friend’s Corolla is jutting into my campsite far enough for me to contemplate asking for partial payment, $20 at least toward the $75 I put toward this piece of dirt that’s squished between Highway 1, train tracks, a chain link fence, and the Pacific. Anywhere I go in this country, I feel squeezed out, pushed out, booted out by boomers who bled it all dry, burned it down, and now tour the ashes. I came here to get away from the bullshit, to be unserious and soft, as my dad says, only to have some stoney baloney neighbors yap at me about how great the sunset was last night, that I should have been here last night. I should have been here three decades ago, motherfuckers, when there was no smog and a clear view all the way to Tijuana, when beach camping was on the beach and not in a paved parking lot, when the eggs for breakfast were a dollar a dozen, not a dollar an egg.
You should take a walk on the beach, they say, and I’ve had it with their intrusive commentary about every fucking thing I’m doing with my life, so I pocket a beer and try to work my way down the disappearing beach, pinched between the rising tide and eroding cliffs. A ragged pallet is getting beaten by waves, and I’m tempted to throw myself on its boards and let it take me out to sea, and that soggy pallet would be a place of my own in the world, a place far from those campsite clowns, a place I would fight for, a place I wouldn’t let catch fire in these inferno times.
I’m just waking up after what felt like the loudest night of my life, a blare of shitty 80s rock songs, train horns, the tent flapping around in the rainstorm, and my irritability about it all pounding in my ears. The neighbors are already on their shit, telling me good morning and that they’re friend is leaving early so I won’t have to deal with their car in my site much longer. I could make like their bumper sticker and coexist, but I’m sick of working around them, of pretending like it’s not so bad, that this is all fine. Well, they can fucking have it all, I have a pallet to catch. I’m grumbling all of this as I put together my stove to cook breakfast, and when I crack my first one-dollar egg and the double yolk drops into the pan, and the second egg and third egg are double yolks, too, for a moment I wonder if it is all so bad, or if a dozen double yolks is just fine.