Fall on the third coast is a strange time of the year. Summer has generically passed, but the cool change of the seasons isn't quite fully developed and there's still scorching south wind and brain dissolving, crippling sun. In the fall, the winds don't know whether to blow from the north or from the south, and one day the water is chocolate milkshake brown, the next day, azure blue.

It's a time of the year when people can't quite seem to find their balance. A truncated season of schizophrenia and neurosis. People fight and bicker, usually with little or no reason or purpose. I always want to sail away this time of the year, escape to the coast of Mexico, some place like Papantla or Tuxpan, where nobody knows my name.

Then there are the characters who populate the boulevard like so much flotsam and jetsam tossed up on the beach by the indecisive waves to slowly ripen in the waning summer heat, characters like the cussing man.

The cussing man drifts up and down the street all day long from the Bahia Mar to Isla Blanca Park, a distance of about seven or eight miles, borne along by some unseen current, some internal rhythm. He's always dressed in a pair of blue jeans rolled up to the knee, like knickers, without shoes or a shirt except in inclement weather, when he breaks over and puts on an old faded gray hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his head, cinched down , eyes always on the pavement, slowly shuffling along.

Every now and then the cussing man stops at any one of the local businesses, appearing to be another engineered and designed fixture, like maybe a wooden display case or a decrepit lamp poised just behind the legitimate customers, the yuppies and tourists who come here this time of year to escape their own gathering paranoia. Once inside, he rarely says anything at all, but when the medication isn't working, or maybe the moon and tides are in just the right phase, he has an uncontrollable penchant for letting out melodious, unctuous strings of profanity. I guess it's something like tourettes syndrome or some other disorder du jour, but to me, it's an art form. I marvel at a well executed sailors tongue, disorder or not. Sometimes I wonder where the cussing man came from, what his history is, what storm deposited him on our beach.

The cussing man is completely unbigoted about who he cusses out. Once he cussed out a tree on the main boulevard.

Sometimes the cussing man hangs out at George and Scarlets Nature Center over by On the Beach, and George and Scarlet being the gentle people they are seem to keep him in check while he's there. They have to because they often have school groups, families and the requisite Red-Eared northerner milling around in the center, viewing their collection of marine life and photos, who might not find his flawless recitation of profanity as interesting as I do. At least I've never heard of any antics that the cussing man has performed there.

Les from over at the lab, tells me the cussing man lives on some kind of pension or disability. He thinks the cussing man just fades into the endless dunes or under a boardwalk when the sun goes down. Les knows a lot about folks. He assembles these facts like bits of madness on cocktail napkins for later reference when he sobers up.

Lately I think I might have contracted tourettes syndrome, or maybe some other cussing disorder. I figure now I can just unleash profane outbursts with impunity, blame them on something beyond my control.

So now, I can just go up to people who get on my nerves, mealy mouthed politicians, administrators and the like, grumble things like: "#$%* PIECE OF ^%$*!! MUTHA$%## ", and just walk away, smirking......blame it on some disorder de jour.