Few of them shared the reason that I had for being there…We all went to escape from life for a while. We all went to be the bad people that we were told not to be the other fifty-one weeks of the year: we drank and smoked and smoked and fucked and otherwise debauched on the beach at the edge of the world. We gathered in groups of thousands and flailed the primordial dance of existence to overplayed rap songs and paid too much for beer in plastic cups and smoked cowboy killers and bummed cowboy killers from a stranger with long hair and dark eyes that looked at and through you with his intricate, recording gaze.

i contain multitudes…

By the hundreds, by the thousands, I watched them. I detached. I separated myself from the organism that was humanity. Hovering over the crowd, poised against a wooden railing that had seen the sun set into the emerald coast too many times to count, carved a palimpsest with the initials of the past spring breakers who thought themselves cool enough to brand their love forever on the treated wooden logs of the upstairs bar of Harpoon Harry’s before moving on to the Fountainbleau or the Reef or the Chateau for a night of refrigerator beer cans and horny sorority girls free for the week from the confines of relationships and morality. I peered over the edge down into the beast of raw abandon, people by the thousands engaged in grinding, undulating, dripping sexual frenzy, arms in the air supporting beer in plastic cups and beads ripe for the swapping of bare breasts or muff shots, sometimes even supporting smoked-to-the-filter cowboy killers bummed from the dark stranger watching from above, ashes poised eerily outward, defying gravity to the beat of the music.

I could have made an army of them.

Jolted from that realization, a weakness, a thin nosebleed and a smile. I smiled once. I bled more than once.

I watched from above. That frenzy. Detached. Not a part of it. My generation. Not a part of it. At all. I was the cigarette man. I had the Cobra long-sleeved t-shirt. I made people smile. People told me to “Smile! It’s Spring Break!” I watched from above. And felt alone in a crowd of thousands. It was not for me…none of it. It never was for me. I was a voyeur. I thought too much. About. Things. There. In the midst of thousands. I was. Lost.