(no subject)
The important thing to remember is not to go to pieces when everything goes wrong. Screaming until your head explodes might seem viable, but as a practice it is overrated. I have my own personal worst case scenario: the USS Indianapolis. I joined the Army to avoid the Navy; by avoiding the Navy I stand a much better chance of never being eaten.
The worst case scenario goes like this: The shark swims about 40 feet below the surface of the water. It is beneath you when it decides. The shark rockets up to the surface, tons of muscle with teeth at the front end; invisible. If you were to look beneath you into dark water at just the right moment you might be able to make out a dark figure moving fast, upward. Then you would see teeth. It is huge and alien in a way that predators on land can never be, with great black eyes that are white in the moment its jaws slice through you. That high scream choked with sea-water and blood is yours; but you don’t realize that yet. The immensity of the animal that just boiled out of the sea is terrifying in the most primal way. The skin of the shark as you slap and gouge in panic (before that awful wrenching thrash of its head as it swallows your meat) is sandpaper. Then that huge shark vanishes beneath and you start to cloud the water red. The shark is waiting for you to bleed to death before it comes back, or maybe it just swims away to let you die. You won’t know which until it happens.
If this seems irrational, it is. The statistics suggest this is a very unlikely event. Every time I look at the ocean I look for a fin. It was probably “Jaws” or the nature shows that show them gliding beneath the water, graceful as gods, and in the next frame they are ripping something to a red ruin.
I have this dream where the water is glass-smooth and there is a line that divides the blue from the crimson and riding that line, sliding between the two with a black eye upturned appraising me is the Great White Shark. It is as indifferent and merciless as it is beautiful and awe inspiring in the way gods, hurricanes and volcanoes are. Whenever shark week comes on I’m glued to the television. And yet, I do not swim in the sea. Few know why.