How cool is it that when there’s a king tide and you happen to visit the beach at the right moment, the pilings under the pier reveal themselves to be teeming with tens of thousands of barnacles and mussels?
A secret abundance of mollusks? Their whorls and queer intelligence lurking just out of sight, just below the waterline, beneath the utter consumerist mundanity of the Santa Monica Pier? A good reminder. (Related: the sex lives of mussels.)
