There was a time when a beach vacation made a lot of sense. Before the availability of air-conditioning, I can imagine the relief of taking a steam train to the coast and lounging on the hotel’s veranda while a cool sea breeze almost made me forget I was wearing a wool suit and would later masturbate to the fleeting memory of some harlot’s naked ankle.

Fast forward a century and beach vacations are not only anachronistic, they’re fucking moronic.

And if you decide to go the Outer Banks of North Carolina like I did, prepare for an extra special slice of hell while you wait in a five-mile long traffic jam to cross the only goddamn bridge that leads there.

And after you arrive, there are a whole host of new problems.

For one, I’m white, and that angry yellow orb in the sky loves nothing better than frying my pasty ass a nice shade of burgundy. That’s why we wear clothes the other 358 days of the year. Not at the beach though. Here we get practically naked and dare it to fuck us up.

And not to be too alarmist here, but even after greasing myself and my three stupid kids with sunblock and carrying the five tons of shit down to the beach my wife decided we needed, my reward was to go into the only part of our planet where actual honest-to-God fucking monsters live – the ocean.

The only bright spot of the whole week was watching some fat guy freak out when two dolphins decided it would be fun to swim right up to him just to see if he’d crap his swimsuit.