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Effluvia Boss Kenny 
"I loved Three's Company. That DeWitt girl was sexy."
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08/15/2000 Grand Isle Renu contact lens solution, so I could wear my contact for the first time in several weeks: $3.99 A bottle of rubbing alcohol for current and future mosquito bites: $.99 A bottle of Coke for Sonya, water for me: $2.08 Time it takes to drive from New Orleans to Grand Isle: 3 hours Gas station sandwiches, snacks and drinks in Grand Isle: $16.53 Time it takes to drive back from Grand Isle: 3 hours Toll to cross the Crescent City Connection into New Orleans: $1.00 The brown sand beaches and brown water of Grand
Isle itself: worthless
It seemed like a good idea. I get every other Monday off, right? And since Sonya is still looking for a job we figured yesterday would be a great day to go to the beach. We had two choices, really: Grand Isle, Louisiana's only beach worth mentioning, and Gulf Shores, Alabama - where we have been before. It's beautiful. So we figured, "what the hell? Let's check out Grand Isle." The drive down was pretty cool, now. We took highway 1 - the only road to Grand Isle, in fact - and it followed Bayou Lafourche almost all the way there. Little fishing towns, shrimp boats chugging along. Postcard stuff. Then there's a long stretch of road where you're crossing the marshes that make up a great deal of southern Louisiana. Then, suddenly, a scabby little beach-town pops up and you're there. All the houses are built up on telephone poles and have cute little names like "Retirement Fund" and "Mammaw's Place" and "Lawsuit Settlement." Things like that. It was past noon and we were hungry, so we went to find some dinner. There was one open restaurant in the whole town. And it was full. We went looking further. At one point Sonya lost her temper and bit off my right pinkie finger. I immediately stopped at a gas station with the sign "Deli - Bait" out front. It turned out they made a fine burger and cleaned a mess of shrimp special for Sonya's po' boy. So, fed and with a bandage on my pinkie stump we drove to the state park and walked over the little bridge down to the beach. Very disappointing. Say you've got a beach scale of one to ten, one being gross beach with used condoms and syringes everywhere, ten being pristine white sand and clear blue water. Biloxi, with its glass-strewn sand and flat, murky water is a one; Destin and Pensacola and Gulf Shores are eights, nines and tens. Daytona is an eight. Grand Isle is a solid four. There are rock jetties out about a hundred yards from shore - these look like they should have signs on them that say "Drowning Station." A couple of miles out you can see oil rigs. Oil rigs! And the usual beach-breeze is missing; it was as hot on the beach itself as it was in the parking lot on the other side of the dunes. We splashed in the surf a little bit, wading and such, then we sat at a picnic table, looking disappointed. Then we came back to the city. It was a nice day, though, 'cause Sonya and I play
well together. Except for that whole finger-devouring
thing we had fun seeing the new scenery and listening
to tunes. And the next Monday I'm off we're going to
Gulf Shores.
Sunday night Sonya and I were watching Deep Blue Sea, last year's intelligent-sharks-hunt-humans movie. I won't spoil it for you, but at one point one of the main characters is giving a "we're not going to fight with each other, we're going to beat these things!" speech, and just when you least expect it a huge fucking shark leaps out of this pool of water behind dude and eats him, pulling the man into the water. "OH, SHIT!" Sonya and I both yelled at the exact same time, dissolving into laughs and clapping as the shark swam away with the man, tearing him to bits. It was a very effective scene. |
