Category Archives: Humor

Day 73 9/6/13: You Ain’t From Around Here

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Calico, California My friend Jennifer and I went to the desert so she could do some research for a novel she’s writing. Somewhere between the sterile outlet malls of Barstow and the kitschy rustic  ghost town splendor of Calico, we stopped by an RV park to ask some general questions about weather, water rights and desert life. The sign indicated that visitors should park on the road. We did, but wandered in the far entrance, toward the little trailer marked OFFICE. The silence of the desert is so startling to me that everything felt a little dreamlike.

Anyway, the suspender-clad bespectacled guy running the Shady Lane RV Court seemed cordial.

After a perfunctory greeting, he indicated that he’d already walked out to the road and checked out my car.

“I have to make sure I know who is walking around here or the guests get nervous,” he explained.

I didn’t see any guests, and attributed his zealousness to boredom, although I had told Jen on the way up the 15 Freeway that the desert seems to nurture a particular kind of paranoia. I don’t know if desert paranoia is different from swampland paranoia, or deep woods paranoia, but my friend Helen and I had experienced a few examples of desert “eccentricity” while visiting a Mojave wolf sanctuary last Christmas.

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Day 68: 9/1/13: SeaWorld Protest

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Driving down to the Seaworld, I stopped just south of the weird double-breasted San Onofre nuke plant to take in an ocean view.  As I pulled into the rest area, I saw what looked like the Partridge Family’s multi-colored bus dominating the tiny beachside lot.  Unlike the Partridge’s squeaky clean pattern, each of this bus’s colored squares contained a crazy religious messages:

WHO HAS NOT MOLESTED THEIR SELF PRIVATELY? DON’T LIE TOO.

RICH PEOPLE HIDE THEIR SINS JUST LIKE HOBOS

The prophet/ driver soon appeared at the driver’s side window, shirtless under his overalls and sporting a long, slightly stained white beard. He thrust a Ritz cracker box toward me.

“Donations fer picture-takin!”

I threw a dollar in. “Thanks PJESUSBULBrecious!” he exclaimed, withdrawing into his mobile temple. I have to admit, it’s been a long time since anyone called me “precious” and perhaps the subsequent warmth I felt wasn’t simply the blinding California sun.

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Day 65 8/29/13: Ron Burgundy & The Politics of Captivity

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Ron's SportsCenter audition.

Ron’s SportsCenter audition. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While editing my shark syllabus,  I realized I ordered a textbook for my class penned by OCEARCH supporter Greg Skomal. Ugh. The only positive is that the  chapter on shark tagging, replete with pictures of sharks being landed on decks with no running water over their gills, and assorted disturbing “research” shots–one of which shows a a live sandbar shark being held upside down with a pipe down its throat–gives me a perfect way to explain the “fishermen posing as scientist” mission of OCEARCH and hopefully encourage  some student action. Sigh.

Signed a petition asking the producers of “Anchorman 2” to nix footage of Seaworld from their new movie. Apparently in the sequel, Ron Burgundy’s career has sunk to such an abysmal low that he’s become an announcer at Seaworld.

I loved “Anchorman,” and appreciate that at least that stupid hellhole is the butt of a joke, but why give it any publicity at all?

In related news, I RSVP’d to a protest at SeaWorld San Diego this Sunday. Can’t wait!

Day 62: 8/26/13: Yum-Yum Yellow

by in Diving, Humor, Memory, Shark Trivia and tagged , , | 2 Comments
Swimfin Art Installation 99

Swimfin Art Installation 99 (Photo credit: Blue Genie Art)

If  I’m ever going to do something useful like count sharks for Project Aware, I’m going to have to get advanced diver certification.

Considering my innate spazziness with all things sport, this could take a while. But I invested in my future today by purchasing a pair of amazing swim fins from my dive teacher Greg Tash, at Aqua Adventures.

They’re split fins which means you can swim super fast without a lot of effort.

“What color do you want?” my dive teacher asked.

“Not pink,”  I said. “Not–”

“No yum-yum yellow?” he quipped.

Greg had read my mind as easily as he’d measured my foot.

I hadn’t heard “yum-yum yellow” since the 70s, when a popular theory proposed that sharks like brightly colored bathing suits, rafts, etc. This color-coded wisdom burned itself into my consciousness as did the following commandments:

Don’t swim at dusk or dawn

Don’t swim when menstruating

Don’t urinate in the water

Don’t swim near a sewage run-off (that one was pretty easy to manage)

Don’t swim alone

And if you do swim with a friend remember: You don’t have to swim faster than the shark, just faster than your buddy.

Check out Greg’s white shark cage diving video here.

Day 60: 8/24/13: Channeling Richard Dreyfuss

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It’s no wonder I dreamed of Richard Dreyfuss the night before my first dive lesson. The weirder details of the dream escape me, but I remember Richard Dreyfuss saying how tired he was of people yelling out lines from “Jaws” when they saw him on the street. This prompted me to say something helpful like, “Maybe if they said more obscure bits of dialogue it wouldn’t be so bad.” I then recited  a few fragments from the autopsy scene like “partially denuded bone remaining” or something like that, but this didn’t seem to improve his mood.

Today I channeled Hooper/Richard when we learned how to handle our air tanks. “If you screw around with these things they’re gonna blow up!” etc. When I spit in my mask, I remembered Hooper descending in the shark cage, with a nervous dry mouth, “I got no spit!”  Trying to adjust to the weight of the tanks and controlling my buoyancy, meant that  I tumbled ass over tea kettle (as they say in New England) in the deep end trying to achieve that elusive floating sensation.  Breathing underwater sometimes felt natural, and other times, as when I tried to clear my mask and ended up with water up my nose, I had to surface and gather my wits.

Above the pool, framed by an old rusted brass porthole hung a picture of a great white’s gaping jaws.

I don’t know why, but the image comforted me.

Day 55 8/19/13: 10 Things I Did Instead of Studying My Dive Manual

by in Activism, Diving, Environment, God, Humor, Marine Conservation, Meditation, Shark Attack, Shark Conservation, Writing | Leave a comment
Shark!

Shark! (Photo credit: guitarfish)

1. Read about the swift but gruesome death of abalone diver Randy Frye in the waters of Northern California.

2. Watched a mini-documentary on technical diver David Shaw who died trying to retrieve the remains of another diver from the depths of a dangerous cave.

3. Meditated for 20 blissful minutes that were occasionally invaded by thoughts of decompression chambers.

4. Felt less alone after reading several articles criticizing OCEARCH’s machismo and brutality.

5. Marveled at Denise Levertov’s briskly paced poem The Sharks. 

6. Tried to do the dishes mindfully, but spaced out and started worrying about August almost being over, a reverie broken occasionally by hummingbirds.

7. Ate fruit

8. Thought again about Thom Knoles–of the failure of the stressed out intellect and how the expansive silence of meditation feels so nurturing, so full of presence.

9. Wondered for the trillionth time about the basic goodness or evil of mankind.

10. Marveled at the ability of writing to redeem boredom and to reveal the miraculous within the ordinary.

Day 54: 8/18/13: Everyone Should Read This (and I don’t mean that as arrogantly as it sounds)

by in Activism, Education, God, Humor, Inner Turmoil, Marine Conservation and tagged , , , , | 6 Comments
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Beatles and their c...

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Beatles and their companions posed on a dais, image by Paul Saltzman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thom Knoles is a funny, grounded and warm meditation teacher who studied with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1960s, I think he may have overlapped with the Beatles’ tenure in Rishikesh. I felt like too much of a Beatles nerd to ask when I learned Vedic meditation from him last year.

Learning to meditate  was one of the greatest decisions I ever made.

Thom opened the lecture with this anecdote about speaking at the G8 summit. “I was the only one there wearing beads,” he laughed.  “Everyone here is suffering from chronic brain failure,” he said to the assembled leaders of the world. “Nothing’s going to come of this summit. Any questions?”

I don’t know how the G8 leaders reacted to that, but the crowd at the Santa Monica Marriott really dug it.

In a metaphor I remembered from the meditation class, Thom compared the human brain to an overloaded iphone that can barely process any new information. Decisions made using 2% of the stressed out overtaxed human brain are never going to solve terrorism, global warming, etc.

That’s where meditation comes in. And dharma. And karma.

Dharma is our personal role in the evolution of the universe. When we are living in dharma, doing what we’re meant to be doing at any particular moment, living is effortless and expansive.

To understand what we need to do, to know our dharma, Thom says we must learn to recognize and be receptive “in our least excited state”(meditative) to what “charms us” and to recognize what we have an aversion to.

Karma, on the other hand, is not the word plastered on tip jars in coffee shops. Karma is, according to Thom, “an action that binds.”

“The universe is not angry with us,” he explained. “It’s not punitive. It’s just hoping we figure things out.”

Unlike dharma, karma is restrictive. It is what we experience when we base our decisions purely on intellect and inaccurate assumptions. For example, “If I just keep doing this work (that I don’t really love) it will become something I love.” Or “I will repeat  the familiar even though the familiar makes me unhappy.” Karma is that corrective suffering that happens when we refuse to take risks, when we cling to the known world, when we are not courageous.

And like Thom’s brief address at the G8 summit, today’s talk at the Marriott was ultimately about courage:

“Find out what you should be doing. Embrace potential. Is it enough for you to continue eating, sleeping, pooping, taking up space on the earth? We must make our existence relevant. Urgently examine what you’re capable of giving to the world. Be courageous.”

Day 53: 8/17/13: Ruminations on the Dive Manual

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The good news is Sharksavers has responded to initial inquiries from concerned activists confirming that they don’t have any plans to collaborate with OCEARCH. I have my letters at the ready just in case.

When I am paranoid about learning something, I tend to over study. I am reading my diving manual like some gripping but arcane novel, whose premise pulls me in but whose language is at times elusive and complex forcing me to backtrack. I tend to remember the morbid facts: that a tight-fitting dive hood can cause a person to faint, or the symptoms that indicate that my lungs have expanded beyond their human capacity.

My lessons start a week from today and my mind is a tumult of childish anxieties: Will I ever look as ecstatic as the toothy, neon-suited dive friends high-fiving each other on the cover of the book? What if my “buddy” hates me?

As I said in a previous post, what I like about diving is the emphasis on breathing–which is what I like about meditation. An activity that keeps me in the moment.  Many people have assured me that the initial anxiety of diving in the ocean for the first time is soon eclipsed by the beauty of the water, the kelp forests.

It’s extraordinary that I am even considering doing this. Kayaking in New Zealand several years ago freaked me out so much that my legs shook and banged inside their plastic prison and I could barely navigate the little lagoon. Everyone laughed at my shark paranoia, but the next morning the cover of the newspaper featured a picture of a giant fin following  a man in a kayak. The picture had been snapped just up the coast from where our group had leisurely paddled.

I loved the ocean as a kid back in the 70s, even in the shadow of “Jaws,” but my paranoia grew as my shark dreams increased. Yet now I see those dreams in a different light–as assertions of kinship, not foreshadowings of my grisly demise.

(BTW: That last sentence would make a bittersweet and ironic addition to my obituary or any news article following my untimely death by shark attack).