It's a presummer night's dream, as we trip down the uneven wooden stairs. The smell of the ocean permeates the forest. Pause in the woods for a moment, because there's a fantastic sense of irreality - the gross order of Properties estates above (and surrounding) contrasts the high entropy of the stony oyster-ridden sandy cove below. Not to mention the still black void that is the ocean, the ocean rimmed with the peninsula of the West Side. Faint gridlines of orange streetlights where the land slopes towards us, way over there.

Around the beachfire all that city dissolves and our microcosm evolves and revolves. Shane throws a bottle down in the low tide. The starfish, the starfish! But he makes seaglass. This is where it comes from. All my mobiles and pocketfuls.

A revelation in the smokey spinning night: the meaning of my constant need to gather those frosty green-brown-white chunks. It's the meeting of man and nature, of laughter and ocean, of life.