What else could we wish for?

The beach puts on a brave face - Santos, Brazil

16 km 

1:22:06 / 5:08 pace

Late afternoon, 27C, quite windy

It was another holiday today - in celebration of the Proclamation of the Republic, on November 15, 1889. I'm not sure what has improved in Brazil in those 128 years. Not much, that's for sure - and no doubt a lot of things are now worse - pollution, congestion, and urban poverty being the obvious things I wouldn't even have to check, given that they are creations of the modern age. Well done, Progress. We have air conditioning and wifi everywhere, so that's something. 

The beach was teeming with people, most of them walking around in a kind of zombie daze, taking selfies and pictures of each other looking at the sea in studied calm. These pictures were no doubt immediately posted to social media pages with a caption about gratitude or love or something more esoteric. 

I can mock all I want to but the joke is on me. I am one of these people. I am as guilty of walking around like an idiot on the beach as any of them. It is the perfect place to do just that. It is, in fact, the greatest thing about living near a beach. Stuck for something to do, go and walk around aimlessly on the beach, gawping at the horizon and thinking of nothing. You are doing nothing but it feels like you are doing something that's good for you, and if it feels good, it probably is good. Later, when asked idly about your day by someone who has no interest at all in what the hell you were doing with your time anyway, you can say, "I went for a walk on the beach." And that's you in the clear. You have done something. It achieved no more than if you'd stayed at home and watched TV but it has way more heft in the endless game we all play called Filling Up a Day. Beaches are brilliant for this, for the lazy, like me, who don't really want to do much at all but are somehow aware that doing nothing all the time is just kind of wrong. 

So I can't take issue with people on the beach. Not really. But they do get in the way, like the pigeons and vultures. It still gets my goat that I was fined R$ 320 this year (about $100) for taking my dog on the beach. Vultures? Swoop this way, settle down and tear some carcasses apart with your mates. Dogs that are better behaved than 99% of the people on the beach? An environmental crime. 

I digress. I ran 16 km this afternoon at a pace of 5:08, thus comfortably beating my target pace of 5:13. And this was with a terribly slow start, hindered as I was by the human traffic around the beachfront. It was a good run and I felt great except for a few minutes at around the 7 km mark when I had a stabbing pain in my right foot. You can't run through stabbing pain - it is one of the non-negotiable pain-based obstacles. I winced a bit, slowed down, altered my footfall and was lucky. It stopped and from then on I got faster and faster each kilometer. I normally run the 'back' part faster than the 'out' by force of habit. It's certainly easier to run faster when you are counting down. 

The thing that struck me as I wove in and out of beach zombies taking photos of each other was how camera phones filled a need no one knew they had. I'm always thinking about the vast changes I have witnessed in my life and I enjoy such thoughts. They make me feel like a Time Traveller. Of course, we are all Time Travellers, but when you get to my age and have seen five decades of technological change it really hits you. When I was a kid we used to go out without much at all, other than - say - a stick to hit stuff with. No one fretted because they couldn't take photographs all the time. We had cameras, in the family, at least, and they would come out and blind us with explosive plastic cube flashes at special family gatherings. They would then be put away in a drawer until another opportunity came around to finish off the film and then there would be a delay until someone remembered to take the film to the chemist to be developed and another delay until the photographs had been developed and picked up and paid for. 

That was the kicker - payment. We had to pay to develop photographs of fingers across the lens and blurred snaps of people with bad haircuts and sticky out teeth and ears, standing awkwardly in primary-colored Crimplene shirts. Once fashion, haircuts, dental care and plastic surgery improved, all we needed was free digital 'images' and we were away. We had no idea that's what was missing in our lives, but it was. It must have been. Look around. All you see are people snapping themselves and each other. I find it interesting to see people instantly switching to Photo Mode, smiling sweetly and enthusiastically for a picture then instantly falling back into Life Mode with a blank expression and no visible interest in existence at all. The only reason to be cheerful is for a picture, to show how cheerful we are. What else is there?