...

Okay that is all for now. You will have to convince me about crab butter. I tend to think that crab is one of those things best enjoyed without any interference.

Did I mention we had seacock, recently?

The body (the cock-ish part of the beast) was served sashimi style. We ordered it in a Chinese seafood restaurant somewhere in the Sunset. Maybe the Chinese have a long tradition of serving sashimi but it was a surprise to me. Seacock is pretty mild of taste and has just enough of a rubbery texture so that you'll notice it. I could imagine it being good paired with something (other than wasabe) but with what I'm not sure. It would almost be worth opening a seacock pairing restaurant just to see what you could dream up and what people would eat. Seacock and grapefruit; seacock and plums; seacock with roasted red peppers; seacock and pork cheek.

Speaking of pairings, if you're ever in town and thinking of going to a restaurant called Limon — don't. It is hard to imagine how you could fuck up foie gras resting on a bed of scallops, but they did.

Anyway, we got a whole bloody boat of the stuff as you saw in the photos. No one was going to order the thing(s) which were all cocked up against one another in the aquarium one level above of the manic depressive fish that had given up on being anything but being served as dinner and lay passively on the bottom of the tank waiting to plucked and finally killed.

I was curious but too tired to really want to try. I was working up the energy to order one mostly because not doing so seemed Just Wrong ™ when Simon told the waitress he'd have the geoduck. I have considered writing something about the evening, ever since, only so I could title it Simon and the Seacock.

The head, which is what sits in the shell (I never did ask why the shell needs to be kept on with rubber bands) was diced and served deep fried so it tasted pretty much like all deep fried fish. The exception to that rule being deep fried oysters which I ordered and which were terrible, oversized and filled with what I only imagined as being the green stuff found in lobsters.

Some mornings, I stop at a little coffee place to have what passes for a café au lait before going to work. It's actually the only decent place to get coffee on the peninsula and a reasonably pleasant environment if you ignore all the Yaletown wankers, in their Toronto-girl track pants, who come in ordering triple-shot low-fat soy drinks to go.

It's run and staffed by a gaggle of Japanese; some obviously Canadian others doing what I'd guess to be some sort work/ESL stint. It's a small space but they've got the Italian thing on which means stylish yet strangely comfortable leather chairs bolted to the floor and butting up against one another.

I couldn't help glancing at the laptop of the guy in front of me when I went to get my coffee.

Eat cock, prick! Did you see the tits on the chick from Team Seven?

You mean to tell me that people actually go to the trouble of writing screenplays for this stuff? I wonder now whether the laptop's owner was writing the script or, shudder, just trying to learn his lines. At the time it seemed like a good way to ruin my morning so instead I indulged myself in the National Post which manages to redefine stupid on a daily basis.

Trisha leans over Steve, her enormous breasts pouring out her shirt.

I know. I know. I should have just made dreamy eyes at the woman behind the counter or shot daggers at the fashion wench in his/her mock army cap. Anything but look at the screen.

Anyway, today has been almost everything I hoped for. The weather has been gorgeous going on seven days, now. The other day I suddenly remembered that the sun sets in the West, I live in the West End and am barely fifteen minutes from the water.

All week I've been thinking that if it held I would take the bus to UBC and go sit on the beach, listen to the waves and read.

When M. and I went out in February I realize now that we were all of 10 feet away from the path down to Wreck Beach but instead walked in the wrong direction and eventually ended up on Tower Beach. I didn't yet know this when I got out there today and so I walked a good clip in the opposite direction before finding a sign for Wreck Beach. Maybe that is the name they give to every path West of University and Marine Dr.

I didn't really have any burning desire to go to Wreck, per se. The nude beach and pot smoking are fine, I suppose, but I really just wanted waves and sun and for people to leave me the fuck alone to read. But whatever, I am only here for another six weeks so why not?

You can imagine the flood of disparaging thoughts that went through my mind when I got down to the "water" and saw a landscape barren of waves, made up entirely of marshy muck, beachcomber-size logs waiting to be milled and barges full of saw-dust. Maybe the hash helps ease the pain or maybe the beach is some ways past all this and I'll just follow... which one... this path.

For all the queer-eye bullshit you keep hearing about I have to tell you that a sizeable slice of Vancouver's gay community needs to be sent back for fashion deprogramming. It's one thing to walk through the woods naked wearing your flip flops or, maybe, hiking boots. That's fine and since all the Canadian stereotypes you've ever heard are born this side of the Rockies it seems almost fitting.

But socks? Dude, you went to the trouble of taking your pants off and you're walking around with your pecker crawling back into its sack for fear of the cold muck underfoot and you're worried about...foot odor? The same goes for the ball-cap, t-shirt, cock, shoes look. You can't possibly expect me to believe you're wearing the shirt because you're cold.

Around the same time that I crossed paths with ball-cap and cock-ring guy I decided that if this was the infamous Wreck Beach then people really do smoke too much pot and, more importantly, I wasn't going to find waves any time soon. Not to mention the fact that I had apparently wandered into a 50's pulp novel where around every corner lay a look of naked middle-aged desperation, a cock-ring, or both.

Are all men this desperate, regardless of their sexual preference? It is, what do you say, unattractive.

So I turned around and made my way back to the path and hiked another stretch of over-weight hairless men burning unevenly in the noon-day sun, through the stench of low-tide. Towards the big stone jetty, I'd seen from the other side in Febraury, where I knew the water lay.

And lo, this is where the beach that you hear so much about is hidden.

It is not actually a particularly nice beach but you can get there on the city bus and it was warm enough today that people were swimming. For most of the afternoon I sat on a rock, with my back to the crowd, and read until the tide forced me back on to dry land.