I visited the beach yesterday.  A sign posted at the entrance point had four pictures on it – A crab, a cigarette butt, a sand dollar and a starfish.  It read: “Which of these things doesn’t belong here?”  My heart sank.  Have we really reached the point as a society where we’re banning crabs from the beach?  I was so disgusted that I threw my cigarette down and stomped it with my sole.  Just kidding!  I didn’t want the ember to burn my rubber Nike sole, so I bent down and crushed it into the sand.  Just kidding again!  (Author’s note:  I don’t smoke, except fictionally, as needed humor purposes.)

Say what you will about chain-smoking beachcombers, but if we don’t want people tossing their cigarette butts on the beach, why do we put sand in ashtrays?  Uh-huh?!

Enough about chain-smoking beachcombers. Let’s talk about drones. 

You can now buy a drone for less than the price of Taco Bell Chalupa.  As a result, every psychopath is now free to terrorize the neighborhood, or in my case, the beach.

It was cold and windy, so my wife thought this was the perfect time to torture me with a walk on the beach.  For obvious reasons, few people were on the beach.  Suddenly, I hear a whirling.  I look up, and a drone is hovering 20 feet away.  I don’t know much about drones, but it looked like it was spying one me.  There were two zillion square feet of vacant beach in all four directions, but this thing was hovering over me like a bee circling a flower.  (No, I do not think of myself as a flower, but the only other simile that came to mind was, “like a fly circling a pile of horse manure.”)  So, yes, a BEE circling a FLOWER.

I did what any other red-blooded American would.  I picked up a rock and threw it at the drone.  I thought, what are the odds I’d hit it?  Turned out, 100%!  Nailed it smack in the center.  It hung in the air for a moment, and then it spun out of control and crashed into the waves.  Except…

I didn’t throw the rock.

That’s because in real life, I’m a lawyer.  So, I just THOUGHT about throwing the rock, and then I thought:

1. What if the owner chases me down and pummels the daylights out of me?  (I was wearing Crocks for crying out loud!)

2. What if the owner calls the police?

3. What if the police officer is psychopathic drone owner?  (I put those odds at 93%.)

So, I did the next best thing.  I gave it the finger.  Just kidding again!  My minister, who for the purposes of this column, I will refer to as, “Steve,” because his name is Steve Hill, would tell me that would be the “wrong thing to do” (most of the time, anyway). 

So, like a said, I didn’t throw the rock.  The only thing I threw was my cigarette butt down at a nearby crab.  Wasn’t he banned from the beach anyway?