"No matter what the writer may say, the work is always written to someone, for someone, against someone." —Walker Percy, quoted in Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own.

Got ice cream tonight at Fat Boyz, our chosen replacement for the ever-extorting island Dairy Queens. $5 for a Blizzard? That money's staying upside-down in my pocket, thanks. I treated myself at the Boyz to a Hot Fudge Brownie Delight and didn't miss Dennis the Menace one bit.

What was disappointing was the Fat Boyz shorts. Last year I saw them briefly in the display case and considered buying a pair. They were red and had FAT BOYZ written on them in big white text. But my money went toward a T-shirt at the Cahoon's convenience store instead. Cahoon's and us, we went way back.

This year, with Cahoon's out of the way, I returned for the shorts. "Do they still have those shorts in the case?" I asked my cousin. "Yeah, but they're women's shorts," she said. "Usually only women's short have writing on the butt."

She had a point. Men's short have traditionally not drawn attention to the butt area.

But I figured these shorts might be different. Over time, fat men have carved out a niche in American society, creating a class of celebrated obesity and hilarious antics (the belly cheer, for one). With such a level of prestiege, I thought perhaps these shorts I remembered would pay tribute to their girth pride and commensurate ice cream-eating abilities.

I stepped to the case to see the shorts for myself. And they were … women's shorts. In addition to the butt lettering — which on my hips would have enjoyed the comic achievement of a wide-load sign on a Geo Prism — the shorts also possessed an unexpected cut. They were not even across the bottom.

The shorts were slanted upward. As if to provide for maximum thigh exposure, a goal I didn't really have in mind. The shorts, I admitted to my eager wallet, were not men's shorts.

Washington Post, June 25, 2003: "If June 25 is your birthday: You're clearing out skeletons. On a psychological level, you're being taken to the cleaners, and your spiritual nature is being transformed. This year you can achieve the impossible as you embrace new responsibilities and make a major transition. Throw limitations to the wind; they're only in your mind. The undertone is honesty and behaving correctly. Love and money is October and November."

Washington Post, June 25, 2004: "If June 25 is your birthday: You should plan a special treat for Saturday. The focus of importance in your life has been making changes this year, and you are still in the process of altering your life in major ways. If your birthday celebration seems a little dull, know you have a lot of excitement to look forward to later this year."

I've gotten his fan mail. Maybe he's gotten mine. Comedian Pat Cooper, enduring tradition, received a round mocking from Friars Club members in honor of the Club's 100th birthday.

Writes the AP: "We don't look the worse for wear after all these years," said Freddie Roman, the club's dean for the past 35 years. "OK, well maybe Pat Cooper."

Even the usually serious Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on hand to declare the day Friars Club Centennial Day, joined the act.

"We have some of the funniest people in the world here today — and Pat Cooper," he said.

In the ocean today, I discovered a new game. I took an inflatable raft out beyond the waves and sat myself square in its middle. I was perpendicular to the five tubes of the raft's width – my legs on the plane, my trunk up the vertical axis – and the vertical weight began to make the balancing difficult.

For the literally imbalanced, such as myself, one's own top has a terrific chance of proving the heavy in top-heaviness. Add water and there the game begins.

Out a ways, I began to kick myself back to the beach and get the waves more birthed and rolling underneath. The raft took more pitch and in more shallow water I kicked sideways to turn and find the rockier yaw. (The sea was angry that day, my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli.) The crests built up and started to tip the sides, but I kicked in a little further.

The wave rode me up, taking the raft faster into the beach, then out from under my back and over my head, tumbling me once with the wave, twice into the sand, and tumble three into a splayed back float-bump over the ground shells, along the shore edge for a return to light and back in the undertow a few yards to get smacked around by the baby waves coming in next. One hand held onto the raft, the other to my bathing suit, both hands moderately successful, leaving my head free to fill with water and sand, the grains of which I'd now certainly be taking home in my ears.

After picking myself up, I trudged in again to spit and get back on the raft. Wash, rinse, spin and the morning was filled. I kept coming back for more and, not surprisingly, so did the sea. The Atlantic has really established itself with its persistence. Eventually leaving the water, I decided I would be the perfect person to start whatever you would get if you crossed Stephen Crane's The Open Boat with a fantasy sports camp.

"Where the land meets the sea and where pleasure meets pain, come get your jollies at Jolly Rodgers' Raftorium, where we put the real in realism and raft in Raftorium…" or something. Maybe our ad agency would even find mermaids to sing a jingle. Maybe "sea only comes when sea's on top" if I appealed to James' maritime spirit. (You know what would make that Ikea lamp really sad, James? "Crustaceans complaining 'bout the noises above.") The jingle mermaids could be beautiful women dressed as mermaids, ugly men dressed as mermaids or even actual mermaids dressed in their native mermaidwear.

Because today was, if anything, marketable. You wanted something to sell at the beach? You could have gone and sold your damn T-shirts. Sucker. What I found out there in the waves this morning was gold, the kind of wet gold that makes old men wet and young women wet too. Water, baby, here there and everywhere, and the natural forces of Earth and I made it all happen.

I've got the badges too. The cut on my right thigh, the shell line on my neck, the bruises on my back. Light injuries all, but signs of the sea nonetheless. These Wednesday markings match the bright red sunburns on my arms and knees – Monday's sunscreen forgetfulness celebration – but are products of a more inspired stupidity.

Pre-written

In cleaning out my room today, I found the June 2003 edition of Delta's Sky magazine, saved for likely no reason. But the issue did contain a good article about bread. Given the continuing debate over bread and the number of people with whom I've discussed bread recently, I thought it deserved a link here.

Also found — a magazine pull-out poster of the slender loris. What is a slender loris? See one here.

The Baltimore Opera Company puts the metaphorical Tony in its soprano and makes a beautiful demographic play in its latest mailing.

Blurbs, verbatim:

"You've gotta know when to hold 'em. Know when to fold 'em. And know when to cheat if it means saving your lover's neck. La Fanciulla del West is the original spaghetti western, complete with cowboys, Indians and a horse, of course!

"Love means never having to say you're sorry. But when you leave your bride-to-be at the altar (albeit to save the Queen) you better do something to make amends. I Puritani is a major bel canto opera set in Plymouth, England during the English Civil War.

"A match made in heaven is headed straight to hell unless Figaro can keep a creditor off his back and the Duke off his bride-to-be. The 'prequel' to Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Le Nozze di Figaro feature one of the world's best-known overtures.

"It's better to have loved and lost, unless you're Hoffman. Then it's better to get drunk and warn your friends about the girls that stole his heart and other necessary body parts. Les Contes D'Hoffman is a serious masterpiece by the undisputed King of the French Operetta."

When the convoy drivers come home from Iraq, and when the world more comes to know the sweet and coursing water that is Krispy Kreme, the contractadors of Halliburton will pilot the doughnut trucks.

Only then will the glazed fabric of life and dough be safe from the masses rampaging at the roadsides and intersections. The crowds will charge and fire and drool, but the drivers will not be impeded. Neither snow nor rain nor Hell will stop the green-and-red trucks from their appointed rounds; the drivers know there will be safe harbor and a cup of coffee on the other end. Doughnut people treat doughnut people right.

Such high standards have always brought me to doughnut people. Growing up, I'd read about Homer Price and his doughnut machine. There were other aspects to his stories – bizarre ones, like his massive ball of twine or his Levittown troubles – but that machine was what held my attention. It churned out so many doughnuts that the people of the town didn't know what to do with them. Looking back, maybe part of the problem was a lack of glaze. Drawings of these doughnuts showed them to be long and doughy, like spaghetti-os in enlarged and fatty and doughnut form. Who would eat those?

Getting a little older, I found myself falling for doughnut girls. One year in high school, I dated Tim Horton's daughter Sue (yes, Horton rears a Sue) and both of Mister Doughnut's twin teens, Dephelia and Daphne Doughnut. My friends teased me about them a little bit, but I deserved as much for dating into an industry so suggestive. There was a lot to be said for trading grammar for vocabulary. In stickier situations.

But what brought me where I was this morning was a sort of conversion. A slow but evident grasping of steps known and unexpected, all first initiated by outside forces yet then taken, convected and served out to the waiting.

I grew in time to appreciate but be able to resist the doughnut girls. They got all low-carb and crazy, and I felt like I hardly knew them anymore. So I took my filling shooter and sprinkle shaker and headed on down the way was sun was falling.

When the warmth rose again, I was standing at a crossroads. Along came a green-and-red truck flying from the fields and I blocked its path. The driver rolled down his window and I introduced myself as the Devil.

He squinted and I gave him more. I was the Desperate Devil, I told him.

"Desperate Devil," said the driver, "would you like a doughnut?"

"I'm not really the Devil," I told him.

"I figured as much," said the driver. "The desperate need the doughnuts most of all."

Climbing into the cab that day, I knew my life was changing, and in many ways I already knew the changes were for the better. These doughnuts were ones for the asking. They ran as far as they could, and when they ran out you'd never doubt whether they'd return. With so many things in life needing a fight, these doughnuts were a part of life where you could find peace. Not that they wouldn't require a struggle every now and then, of course – all good things do. But they would most times provide for easy consumption, the kind where glaze would drip onto your fingers and you wouldn't worry a thought.

That desire had me on the highway early this morning to Nags Head's lone Krispy Kreme outlet, conveniently adjoining the Grits Grill in the strip mall down the main drag. I ordered the Kiss My Grits special at the Grill ("NO GRITS NO GLORY") – two pancakes with the butter packets melting on top, some strips of bacon, a bowl of grits and some scrambled eggs. I got my grits done with the "gourmet" style they touted in their menu. They melted cheddar cheese on top. They also did up my eggs with the cheddar and apologized, but that was no problem. I'd walked in there carrying the latest issue of the New Yorker among the early-risers; I had no room to criticize.

The extra flavor too helped cover the dishwasher taste of my orange juice. At 6:30 in the morning, accommodations needed to match the rising sun for degrees. All the folks working were pleasant enough where that was easily done. Over by the Krispy Kremes, they were the same. Did early smiling come from not having to leave the beach at the end of the week or weekend? I didn't know, but they were wearing their doughnut gloves and standing by smiling as a family pulled dozens of doughnuts out with bare hands.

I maneuvered around the family, got my dozen and returned to the highway. Half an hour earlier, the green-and-red truck driver from Virginia Beach would have done the same. I imagined where that driver would go next, maybe over to the mainland and Elizabeth City or back north to the Tidewater. As I ate, the driver would be making the appointed rounds, covering the long bridges between the islands and never doubting a person or two would be waiting at the crossroads.

"Desperate Devils," the driver might say, and they would know they had found a gift and not a trade.

Sheridan Square, just above South Boulevard, according to Patricia Bosworth's biography. Brando was about six at the time; read more about his years in Evanston.

Fine, I've already left. Consider this vacation po-mo.

But before I do, enjoy the developers of my favorite spam of the week: We-buy-used-robots.com.

On other topics, News.com's Michael Kanellos praises the survival of the handwritten letter. What else could such persistence encourage? "We might even see the return of the three-martini lunch — or even lunch itself."

As linked on Digital Shapiro and elsewhere, an Australian man is recovering from an unfortunate run-in with the showcase wheel on that nation's version of The Price Is Right. Great stuff. To learn more about the American edition, read my profile of Patrick Vukovich's winning day.