Can You Tell Me How To Get to Gunnison Beach?
The Lorax, who speaks for the trees because the trees have no tongues, and I are driving into Sandy Hook National Park to attend Gunnison Beach for a lazy summer afternoon.
For the record, Gunnison Beach is a Clothing Optional beach.
Neither of us have been here before, so when we pull up to the park ranger to pay the $10 admission fee, we confirm that this place does in fact exist.
“Um, so,” I say to the ranger, “how do we get to, um, Gunnison Beach?”
The park ranger smiles: “It’s four miles down the road, make a right where it says ‘All Beach Parking’.”
“Thank you,” I say, paying the fee and driving on.
“I hope he thinks we’re gay,” The Lorax says to me. “Because I don’t want him to think that we’re perverts.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’d much rather be gay, than a pervert, any day.”
”But you ARE a pervert,” I explain to him rather definitively, “and you’re NOT gay. And this is any day.”
Pause for laughter.
“OK,” The Lorax corrects himself, “I’d rather people think I was gay, than think I was a pervert.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s nothing wrong with being gay.”
“And there’s something wrong about being a pervert?”
No comment.
The Lorax’s Observations from the Nude Beach
“OK, dude, I just walked up the beach,” The Lorax says, “and these are my observations.”
- If you want to see hot naked women, you’re better off at a strip joint. This rule does not apply to the really hot blonde sitting at one o’clock from us.
- Seagulls are equally unimpressed with African apes draped in cloth as they are with African apes without cloth.
- Fat men seem to think that T-shirts obscure their fat. They are wrong. Also, making T-shirts on a nude beach without pants is weird.
“So the hot blonde,” I whisper to him so she can’t hear, “are they real or not?”
“Who cares? As far as I’m concerned, if I can see them, they’re real.”
“Amen, brother.”
Just then two men, still wearing their bathing suits walk along the beach in front of us. They are the first two people we’ve seen here that aren’t either completely nude, or a woman still wearing her bottom, which is OK with us.
But these two men walking around, still covered up, seem to me like voyeurs, which leads to this Socratic logic.
a. On a nude beach, the real perverts are the ones wearing the clothes.
b. Michael is naked as the day he was born.
c. Therefore, Michael is not a pervert.
I know, the logic is airtight. I amaze myself sometimes.
Women Have No Taste in Men
The hot blonde is hanging out with some guy who has more tattoos than brain cells.
“What’s wrong with women?” I ask The Lorax.
“Is this a general comment, or are you going somewhere with this?”
“All the time I see beautiful women dating really ugly, disgusting looking men. Why do they do this? My only conclusion is that woman have no taste in men.”
The Lorax clears his throat: “An alternate hypothesis would be that women aren’t shallow.”
“Yeah, right,” I say to him, “that’s why they call that hypothesis alternate.”
We left it at that. The Lorax was right. I wasn’t going anywhere with this.
What is this, Europe?
Someone told me that in Europe they have nude beaches, which is true, except all they call them in Europe are beaches. It seems that they are more comfortable with their bodies over there, which is a shame, because walking along the shore, the sun tanning my bare ass, I felt so nice and free.
I imagined myself having walked along the shores for millions of years and for millions of years more.
I could see the New York skyline on the horizon—a juxtaposition of the freedom of the natural with the highly regimented lifestyle of urban civilization—and I knew that I would return there that night, where I could not be nude again.
I could only be naked.
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