it's a sad and beautiful world: august montauk

for my last birthday i had to get out of town on a kind of retreat. matt came along after he called my bluff when i told him he could come, fully believing he'd never wake up in time. well, he did and we caught the train from jamaica station to montauk. we took an $8 cab from the train station to the montauket, a weird kind of place with a nice dining area, an attached dive bar, and 4-H club like accommodations upstairs. this is where we were staying. having no idea how far we were from town, we decided to walk to town which was a few miles. we rented these shitty mountain-hybrid bikes to ride around town. we hit up a bar and had a few shots, a couple beers, a burger and fries, and fish and chips. then i stupidly decided it was time to head to Montauk Point. aside from being a pretty off-time to fish out there in the Mecca of striped bass land (our original plan was to roll up there on a tandem bike), my aforementioned lack of distance-awareness made me think it would be like a 15-minute ride out there, judging from my memory of the trip Susan and i made out there last year for my birthday, by car. i also didn't realize that matt hadn't ridden a bike in something like 15 years and that the bikes we had sucked really bad. it turned out to be 6.5 miles each way on a winding, hilly two-lane road. the ride back to town was in pitch blackness, no moon, no street lights, cars flying past us at 70mph. only a headlamp, which actually saved our asses. before we left the lower lot i told matt, "before we die tonight i want you to know one thing: i never liked you." just some black humor for the way home.

this is the second year i've made it out to montauk for my birthday. the fishing isn't so good around this time, but it's good to see the ocean and wash away the year's sins and sorrows. part of the reason i came back is because the burden of memory of thinking "the last time" was getting to be too much for me and i needed a new memory, a new last time. i once had an idea of remembering and cataloging all the last times so i could replace each one in turn, but of course that's impossible.