July 26, 2025 
I’ve turned melancholic.
I sit in a chair facing the sea, unmoving like a sentry. I spend long minutes, maybe hours, watching the water and trying to find words to describe its colors—sometimes it’s an amazingly deep blue, sometimes it’s silvery with dark sharp waves, like shark fins, sometimes, like now, it’s a gray that fades into the horizon and merges with the sky.
In the distance are rocky islands and some with ancient forts, walled. I think that if I stayed here I would become a poet.
It’s a lonely landscape, one that, with the vastness of the sea and jaggedness of the rocks and the wide beaches, eats up all sound, so that even the loudest scream seems cut off and muffled, lost in the air just as you begin to hear it.
All of this appeals to me tremendously, and I imagine myself like a rock on the shore, sometimes exposed to the air as the tide goes out, covered with seaweed and mussels and green slimy things. They dry in the sun until the tide comes back and I’m submerged again.
How stupid! To imagine oneself alone when I’m at a resort filled with people. It sits on the shore like a beached cruise liner, all decks and terraces and nautical decor. Hardly anyone wears clothes, which surprises me, preferring to populate the place in their bathrobes. Everyone is identical in their white, hotel-provided robes. I keep imagining they’ll fall open at some point.
The first thing they ask you when you check in is do you have flip flops? They are very worried about foot fungus, apparently. There are precise instructions on entering the pool in the flops.
I haven’t even seen the pool yet, much less entered it. I generally do not like pools, unless I am drunk. My rule is: natural bodies of water only unless I am very, very drunk. Being very, very drunk makes you forget how boring a pool is, how skin-drying the chlorine is, how much like a trapped fish in an aquarium you are. That froth is not bubbles from the jets, that froth is the accumulation of dead skin cells from all the other swimmers. I must be very, very drunk to forget all these things.
There is show jumping here in Dinard, France, a little bit inland, a ten-minute drive from the hotel. The ring is a large, ovalish green field with uneven ground and jumps jumbled all around in it. It’s ringed with pink which makes it very pretty.
I try to watch the 5* classes, but hardly anyone seems to be riding competitively and I grow very bored. The classes are mainly D-ranking classes with 28k Euro in them, and most are loping around schooling. There was a two-phase schooling and a speed schooling and this one is a jump-off schooling.
Around the grounds are a lot of signs, dozens and dozens of them, telling you to keep your dog on a leash. These proliferated after a dog got loose and chased Henrik von Eckermann in the two-phase, forcing him to cut short his round. It didn’t really matter, though, because he was schooling. He was a good sport about it.
The thing the people making the signs didn’t take into account, however, is that the dog WAS on a leash—it was trailing behind him as he chased von Eckermann. The signs wouldn’t have helped this situation at all.
I nab an invite to VIP. The VIP has no whiskey. Guess I won’t be going to the pool.
This part of the world is beautiful. There are many, many people on holiday. They go to the beach and eat at charming restaurants in the towns that line the coast. There are a lot of striped shirts in blue and white, there are a lot of woven baskets with provisions. There are children on the shore with pink buckets. I saw someone walking their boat down the sidewalk.
The houses are tall and strong and made of gray stone. They are surprisingly tall. I imagined that houses here would sit low and cling to the land as protection against wind and rain. Now, every day dawns sunny and warm, but you can feel in the land and sea what it is like most times. You can feel the history of wind and rain and cold. Against this, the houses stand tall and strong.
There is a profusion of flowers. Huge, colorful bushes of them and nothing is more beautiful than the way they cascade over the gray stone walls.
The circus has come to town. There are adverts everywhere. The same advert repeated, which shows the head of a clown. It is a rather mediocre-looking, uninspiring clown. Nowadays, there is not much to a circus, because humane concerns have eliminated the animals and the human freaks. You can’t run away to join the circus anymore because they no longer take freaks. You gotta be a freak by yourself in your house, no one wants to see that in public anymore.
You gotta stay hidden away in your hotel room, staring at the sea.
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