I’ve come to write on the beach. I suppose exams are over, and this place feels like an anthill of teenagers. There must be some medicine that cures adolescence. I mean, something other than baseball bats. I’m typing these lines between two cliques of young people. To my right, girls. To my left, boys. They all look like they’ve fallen out of a TikTok dance. To the north, two friends are tearing a third one apart while she’s gone to get an ice cream. To the south, two idiots are trying to hit me with a beach ball, and they succeed. On the third hit, the iPad flies out of my hands, arcs through the air, gives a seagull a heart attack — it flees shouting “Martians!” — and finally lands in the sand. I look at them. I pick it up. I wipe the sand off the screen with sand-covered hands. They laugh. That teenage laughter that sharks seem to enjoy so much. The younger one comes over to my towel for the ball. Without looking at me, he picks it up and turns away. I instinctively reach for my beach bag, hoping to settle the matter, but no luck: those damn Smith & Wesson deliveries are taking longer and longer.
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I don’t remember the insolence, the one-night stands, or that insatiable need to behave like a drunken hamster.
The beach puts me in a good mood. My problem is people. And in particular, adolescence. I didn’t have an adolescence. I went straight from 2 to 44. I don’t remember the insolence, the one-night stands, or that insatiable need to behave like a drunken hamster. I left all that for my 40s. And if I do remember it, I’ll deny it. When my 15-year-old friends turned into idiots and started chasing girls like in a National Geographic documentary, I dedicated myself to writing songs and smoking. My greatest act of rebellion was smoking in all those places where it was forbidden. My feat: crossing the teachers’ lounge at school with a lit cigarette in my pocket. Vibrant emotion. Vibrant ovation. Vibrant hole in my pants. Vibrant slap from Mom.
Adolescence used to be like it used to be. Before, almost everything was like it used to be. Now everything is like it is now. It’s unbelievable. These teenagers around me on the beach are strange. The boys are like James Dean after an overdose of strawberry milkshakes, but they dress like that idiot, Bad Bunny. The girls are like the ones from that ’90s show starring Pamela Anderson, but they’re far more sexualized than those Baywatch lifeguards ever were. And it’s impossible to tell their age until they open their mouths, at which point they shrink like Arctic glaciers on some tiresome environmentalist’s Twitter feed. (RELATED: The Collapse of Courtship for Gen Z)
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I was watching one of them a while ago. Spring in her blue eyes, blonde hair, and the radiant youth of her smile. With her slender figure, her soft-rock style, and her mannerisms, I would have placed her somewhere between the early maturity of her 30s and the naive delicacy of her 20s. She jumped to 13 in an instant, climbing onto a lamppost to announce to the entire beach that she was about to spit northwest at another boy. Suddenly, she went from being Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life to Miley Cyrus — but Miley Cyrus just out of bed and after her first taste of marijuana. Ah, adolescence.
I read, if they let me. These days, they make ultra-modern books for reading on the beach. Instead of carrying them on some device, you can hold them in your hand. And unlike screens, the more sunlight there is, the better they look. They’re made of the chemical compound of the future: they call it “paper.” When I take out my Michel Houellebecq book, a hush falls over the boys. One of them opens his mouth and points at it, clutching another with a panicked expression, as if I were aiming an M60 Patton at his face. I suspect the closest thing to a book they’ve ever seen is McDonald’s napkins.
I close the book. I write. I stare at the horizon. The sun sets, and nobody is leaving. The pretty girls, the silly boys. Everything stays the same. I had forgotten the magic of adolescence. It’s not so bad. Now, when the moon rises, the boys will bravely wade into the sea to show the girls they’re 13 now, and that they can withstand the cold even with frozen balls. And then a shark will eat them. Not bad at all. In a newsroom, everything is much more boring. I miss that fleeting stupidity. When being a complete idiot actually meant something. I’m quite an idiot now, but at 44 it’s useless, except perhaps to make my ex-girlfriends say, “We were right.”
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