Oel ngati kameie, motherfuckers.
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See this douchebag? The guy in the photo below? Okay, well, if you live in, or are passing through, Watch Hill, Rhode Island this guy is how you know that Taylor Swift occupies the huge-ass mansion (41°18'29.12"N, 71°51'19.40"W) towering above East Beach. I wanted to ask him if I could meet Courtney Love, but Spooky wouldn't stop. Spoilsport.
(Photograph Copyright © 2013 by Caitlín R. Kiernan)
So, yeah, after utterly failing to work yesterday, I asked that we leave the House, and so Spooky drove us all the way to Watch Hill, which is a tiny place on the RI/Connecticut state line. Sadly this time of year it's drowning in tourists. A slightly better class of tourists than you see in, say, Misquamicut (the trashy tourist destination in southern New England!), but tourists all the same. And it was very hot. The sun off the harbour was blinding. Teenagers everywhere, and almost every single female among them had her face glued to the screen of her "device," oblivious to the world about them. The real world. The sights and sounds and smells and the taste of the salt air on their privileged tongues. Last night, Spooky called them "teenyboppers," and I said no, they're "teenytexters." Teenies don't bop no more.
I saw the Aphrodite, a yacht I have loved from afar since I first saw her at Watch Hill back in 2004. I spotted a fishing boat named Platypus (and have photos to prove it).
We had ice cream cones at St. Clair Annex. Yeah, I paid $3.25 for an ice cream cone that would have cost me about fifty cents when I was a kid. When I was a kid, we could afford ice cream, and if we wanted to use the phone, we had to go inside (or find a pay phone). Anyway, Spooky and I walked down to the carousel. We watched a cormorant fishing. I took some photos, which I'll post later. Probably.
Afterwards, we headed to Moonstone Beach. And I was an idiot for not being prepared to swim. The beach was hot – which it never is – and the surf was amazingly calm, waves no more than ankle to knee high (they're commonly waist and chest high). The ocean was flat, like a mirror for the sky laid down between Moonstone and Block Island. We lay beneath an umbrella for, I don't know, maybe forty-five minutes, then I got tired of the sweat bees.
We made it home around 8 p.m. And the trip, sadly, did nothing to help my mood. I went to bed so angry I couldn't fucking sleep, not even after a dose of the Pill That Renders Elephants Inert. I was awake until sometime after sunrise. Fuck you, psychiatry.
And now I have to contend with today.
Contentious,
Aunt Beast
