Screaming Papal Address: Salutationes veris

Innocent X (Velazquez)

Hope springs eternal and with the onset of spring and summer there’s the perennial belief that staring out at the vastness of the ocean will bring some kind of insight, inner peace or simply relief. Such thoughts should immediately be banished from the mind. No one has ever profited from walking along the silky sands of some windswept beach. Such experiences produce little more than a desire to smoke pot. You find the intelligentsia in left bank cafes but you find another demographic on these beaches and that is THE IMPENETRABILIA. These are the folks who respond “I can’t complain” when you ask them how they are. They are either so emotionally traumatized or self-satisfied that they offer no access to their inner lives and are condemned to spend their remaining days on earth lying on beach blankets with their Styrofoam coolers, employing the ever diminishing list of superlatives that are used to describe cresting of waves or cloudless skies. Spring is also the time of year when people start to eat in the growingly ubiquitous outdoor cafes. Beauty is again the Scylla and Charybdis on which these unwary travelers will run aground. Sitting in some expensive outdoor restaurant and fecklessly hoping that lusty thoughts will be reciprocated is a cardinal sin. Such behavior is cause for immediate excommunication.