Creatures of the Deep

I was walking on the beach this morning, as I often do. Pantai Karang, which I guess means coral beach. I've never seen any coral there, but of course coral is farther out in the water along with all the alien looking sea creatures, fish with frowning, exaggerated faces, small fish and big fish and bigger fish looking like something one would not want to eat but rather to avoid. Fish of all colors and stripes, rock-grays and unworldly green and golden swirls. I didn't really know these creatures were there until I went snorkeling some years ago, and ever since then I've felt mildly haunted whenever I swim, an eerie sense of these slick, bug-eyed, many finned fantasmagorical vertebrata criss-crossing in the deep below me like pacing tigers.

I don't swim anymore, but that's not the reason. I'm just saying. 

I followed the path at Karang Beach to a point where it branches off to left and right and I took the right branch which leads atop a raised rock causeway over the water itself to a little open hut where fishermen often sit and dangle their lines into the deepening surf. And I thought as I walked away from solid land, What in the world am I doing here? Why am I here? How have I been here so long? Is there not somewhere else I should be?

What is the point? What is my point? What is the point of me? 

I stopped later in Sanur for coffee, and as I came out of the cafe, I noticed four numbers imprinted in the concrete of the walkway. 2009. Obviously, this meant that the concrete had been laid in 2009, thirteen years ago, a year before I came to Bali. And I thought not about that, but suddenly about walking to the end of our block with my brother--when?--1959?--maybe--and seeing in the concrete there, sometime in the century before this one that finds me in Bali, four numbers as well, 1913. Wow, 1913! we exclaimed. So long ago! Even before our father was born. Even before World War I. We may as well have discovered some ancient artifact, preserved over the ages in a concrete curbing on 28th Avenue. Come on, my brother said, let's see if we can find even more! 

Was that the day we saw the double winged plane flying over the neighborhood? I don't remember. But it was yellow, a sort of mustard yellow. I remember that. 

In the afternoon I turned on the TV, looked at the YouTube screen and selected a Three Stooges short that popped up. How did this happen to be on my screen? Not sure. It just was. As I watched, I found myself laughing, and I found myself as well somewhere back in the late 70's. I would stay up late at night in those days because I was writing a novel and then at 1 am I would turn on the TV and watch old Three Stooges shorts. My brother was up late too and sometimes he would call on the phone, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock in the morning. Hey, you watching the Stooges? Did you see what Moe just did? With the saw or the hammer or the wrench or whatever tool he had just used to assault Curly or Larry. 

Yes, I saw, Gary. 

I'm watching cable TV, a thousand choices, a thousand channels, and I'm seeing something from the late 70's, hearing a voice now permanently stilled, laughing the laugh I laughed in the 70's, albeit with the shaky voice of a 68 year old man. 

Is there not somewhere else I should be? 

Am I not there already?