One of my favorite things to do is people watch. It is like the ultimate performance art! People are just fascinating. When God created Adam and Eve, he must have said "Let's create an infinite number of possibilities and variables so I'll never be bored or lonely again!" (Hope that didn't cross the no-religion guideline!)

A group of 20-somethings are here and, of course, since 20-somethings own the world, they've been bringing glass beer bottles to the pool, driving when they shouldn't, and causing the first stress I've seen from the management since my stay. They brought their own music, and played it louder than the nearby music from the restaurant, as if staking a claim to the air. They swarmed by the Tiki torches all night, drinking and smoking and telling war stories of their escapades. Passing time by laughing about what they did earlier to pass the time. I'll be honest now and say I sure do miss when life was like that!

It was wild to sit on my balcony between the party to my right and the diners to my left.

I've seen several people here walking around with parrots on their shoulders! This one fascinating couple rents boats a few feet from my balcony. They bring their pet parrot each morning and bring him home at night. They manage to work together in a tiny open shack in all this heat, then they collect the parrot and go home to spend more time together. I have not spoken to them, I don't know what their story is, but they are like heroes to me, somehow, for who I imagine they might be.

Families rode in on boats now docked in front of the hotel. They work together hauling ropes, setting sail, doing whatever it is that people do to go out for the day in a boat. I see a remarkable lack of teen-age eye-rolling and mortification at being with parents in these boating families. The twenty-somethings in these boating families don't seem in a rush to find a substance-induced fog.

At night, one family sat with their late teens and twenty-somethings and rushed to finish a puzzle before it was time to go home. Maybe owning a boat is like some team-building outward bound that glues people together somehow.

This hotel pretty much sits on stilts, making tunnels where cars park or drive through. A drunk staggered out of the bar late last night and poured himself into a pick-up. As he backed up, I realized he'd have to get around the beams that were holding the floor of my room up! I thought of the irony to be taken out by a drunk driver while sitting in my hotel room, but he must have been well practiced because he did fine.

I spent my summers growing up on the Jersey Shore, but this seems like a whole different ocean!

I have one of those lives that is all about people. My job, especially, requires me to get people to do more of this, stop doing that, think about this, stop obsessing about that, stop moving so much, move more, hold it this way, let go of that, listen to this, but try NOT to listen to THAT, hold your head up during table-work, watch where you are going, speak louder, use your inside voice, don't run with those scissors and FOR GOODNESS SAKE keep those fingers out of your nose! Sometimes if I make the wrong choice, if I misinterpret something or don't respond properly, I could end up getting hit, kicked, or worse, so I can be quite vigilant. When I am on, I can be a finely tuned people reading machine!

Today, though, each person is just like a pretty color. Like the bright fish that I saw at the reef while snorkeling. Like the cranes that sleep in the little island across the way or the sea turtle that spent several minutes with me, then disappeared into the abyss. They can be who they are and I can be who I am and I don't have to worry about them and they don't have to worry about me! (Well, as long as the drunk does not hit the beam holding up the floor of my room with his pick-up!)

The Boss, in Jungleland said "The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be." That is the attitude to take when you people watch in LargoLand!