Detroit Recalls 500000 Hungry Hungry Hippos

Would you trust this Sandpiper
at the wheel of a school bus?

Yesterday afternoon I was in Manhattan Beach walking around nude-footed at low tide (yes, there are weekday perks for the freelancer, outside the anxiety of worrying when work will pick up while you're out "enjoying" that free time). It was quite idyllic. The only thing missing was my picnic basket and a braided pony tail. I did skip along merrily, however... that I did. As I was saying, the tide had receded to a low point unprecedented to my recollection. The profile was a very wide stretch of pressed wet sand, and I noticed a few other tactile-enthusiasts out doing the barefoot thing.

It was as though someone had pulled the stopper on the Pacific Ocean and it was all going down a drain into the lava at the center of the Earth --this is an adult talkin' here folks. See, that's how myths are born. In this case, Neptune's cousin, some sort of perennial pool man god with Ray Ban shades and an El Camino truck stocked with chlorine and sweepers was draining the ocean to scrub out the scum. If only that were true, especially in the Santa Monica Bay area which has notoriously toxic water. Yes, it's pure crap but creates an effect that makes floating on your back effortless.

Being on the shore made me conscious of all the sandpipers --no doubt because of the song lyric with the singular economical word "Sandpiper" submitted by our friends from The Gold State. I'm sure many hundreds of Geritopia readers have been following that thread already, so I wont digress. Anyway, it was a bloody en-masse sandpiper feeding frenzy on the beach yesterday. Absolutely no obstacles between bird and prey. No more running up and down, back and forth between wave intervals. The sand was still soft enough for foraging beaks to dig around and suck up as much edible crud as they desired. The scene was so gluttonous, so devoid of table manners, I could barely watch the hordes of fattened sandpipers billowing and tipping off balance. It was disgraceful. And so is shameless anthropomorphic referencing of nature's creatures for cute effect.

I've heard a lot of schmucks cheekily ask, "where are all the baby Pigeons? Huh?... You never see baby pigeons!!!" and the government has spent millions proving that they exist. And yet the conspiracies of how pigeons are deposited here on Earth by alien "space seeding" expeditions persists. But the question forefront in my mind is : do Sandpipers have a night life? They spend all their time incessantly running back and forth (except at very low tide), expending millions of calories in pursuit of many tiny morsel calories, which makes them just have to work harder and harder for break-even results at best. So I can't imagine there's much of a social life outside of work.

OK, the end.