As vacation season heats up and millions hit the beaches dotting the East and West Coasts of our great nation, the Discovery Channel rolls out its "Shark Week."
Great.
Thanks guys . . . really. I can't think of better television fare to take in at a rented, beachfront condo than footage of divers getting mauled by this or that species of shark.
Next year, maybe you can follow up "Shark Week" with "Condo Collapse Week" or "Sand-related Injury Week."
Anyway, I digress . . . it struck me today that the onset of "Shark Week" would mark an appropriate time for me to write something about these great, majestic hunters of the sea. So here goes:
Anyone who knows me well knows that I have beef with sharks.
I don't like them one bit, and, for one reason or another, they bother me more than they should. I mean, according to research set forth in a recent article in the "San Diego Union-Tribune," one's odds of being attacked and killed by a shark are one in 300 million. To put that in some perspective, the same article notes that the odds of one dying in a fireworks accident is one in 1 million. And the chances of being killed by a dog are one in 700,000.
In other words, I'm probably more likely to be attacked by your grandmother than a shark.
But I know this. Yup, don't get it twisted, I know the odds--I've seen the data and read the articles in "Newsweek."
Still, despite irrefutable evidence as to the rarity of shark attacks, I am undeterred in my hatred of sharks. My argument is simple, if simpleton in nature. It goes like this: Sharks can eat us, so I don't like them.
That's it. That's the argument.
At its core, it's the same general attitude I'd imagine shrimp, cows, chicken, and all sorts of other animals that we eat would have about us if they knew what the future held for them at our hands.
Simply put, if something can eat you, and has been known to do so, it's not unreasonable to think that the eatee would harbor some level of disdain for the eater.
But, with humans residing comfortably at the top of the food chain for the last couple of thousand years, there's been very little that we've had to worry about in the "things that can eat us" department. Since the demise of dinosaurs, sharks have stood--or, more accurately, swam--nearly alone in the "Animals That Can Eat People" ("ATCEP") column. While many people assert that large, land-based hunting animals such as lions and tigers also belong in the ATCEP category, this contention is incorrect. Those animals, along with alligators and really large snakes, belong in the "Animals That Can Bite and Kill People" ("ATCBAKP") bin.
The distinction may be subtle, but it exists . . and, in my mind, is important.
For reasons that are purely anatomical in nature, sharks are very different from tigers and the like when it comes to eating people. That is, sharks mouths are much, much bigger. Whereas tigers are admittedly big and scary animals, and can indeed open their mouths pretty wide, there's no getting around the fact that those mouths, when compared to that of sharks, just aren't that big. The same goes for lions, snakes, alligators, and most other feared land animals.
Hippos are borderline and waddle along a gray area that separates ATCEP from ATCBAKP. They've got unusually large mouths capable of being opened extremely wide, and are known to be grumpy (data shows that they've killed more people in Africa than any other wild animal on that continent, and in most years kill more people there than all other animals combined). But their fatty neck and throat areas preclude the whole bite-and-swallow-you-whole thing.
Stick with me here . . .
In essence, I suppose it boils down to this: The biggest sharks in the sea have the capacity to literally eat and swallow you in a matter of seconds, while the biggest lions, tigers, and snakes can only bite you until you're dead and then initiate a fairly drawn out process of nibbling away at your carcass. And, even then, they'd leave your bones.
Sure, you die a grizzly death either way. But there's just something extra annoying about an animal that can actually make you disappear, bones and all. Plus, spiders, certain bugs, and poodles are all members of the ATCBAKP camp. And it seems to me that any killing category of animals that includes poodles and ticks cannot possibly be at the top of any list.
In contrast, the ATCEP crew is made up of sharks . . . period.
Well, to be fair, I guess whales could be added to the ATCEP mix. But most whales prefer plankton to people, and their tendency to avoid the shallows makes them far less dangerous than sharks. Still, those that could and would eat people--the orca, for instance--are a few notches above hippos, and right there beside sharks, on our little chart.
So, to sum up: 1) big sharks have unusually large mouths the likes of which other nasty animals don't possess; 2) due to their large mouths, sharks, and . . . yes . . . some whales, can eat people whole in a few swift bites, leaving virtually nothing behind; 3) 1 + 2 = sharks suck and I don't like them.
Moving right along . . . a few days prior to the advent of "Shark Week," i noticed this piece of shark-related news among the Yahoo.com headlines. The article discusses the death of surfer Bradley Adrian Smith, a 29-year-old Australian who died in earlier this month after a shark attack off the coast of Perth. Following Smith's lost battle with "one and possibly two" great white sharks, local authorities set out to hunt down and kill the offending fish.
While it's true that this attempt at exacting vengeance is both pointless and stupid ("I don't believe that Brad can be revenged by killing a shark," the surfer's brother said.), it's the response of those who've organized against the shark killing that I find to be more interesting.
According to Kate Davey, the national coordinator of the Australian Marine Conservation Society, these animals should be left alone and humans should do little more than respect giant, killer sharks. "Instead of pretending that the issue doesn't exist," she says in the piece, "what we actually need is a public education campaign to teach people how to live with sharks."
Huh?
Am I missing something here?
We need to teach people how to live WITH sharks?
What's next, teaching people how to live with anthrax and black widow spiders?
In my estimation, big, scary sharks are similar to guns when it comes to killing. That is, there's only two ways to preclude the occurence of death at their hands/trigger/teeth: 1) stay away from them, or 2) get rid of them.
Any intermingling of people and huge sharks will eventually result in injury and/or death, so I'm not sure that Ms. Davey's idea is all that sound. Hopefully she'll be watching tonight at 8 p.m. when Discovery kicks off its week of shark-related programming with "Primal Scream," the story of a veteran underwater photographer who after years of attempting to "live with sharks" suffered a brutal attack off the coast the Galapagos Islands.
Anyway, the article about the Australian surfer notes that, "In many parts of the world, great white sharks, which can grow to 23 feet in length, are listed as an endangered species." It also informs us that the sharks "breed at a slow rate," that they've "been targeted by hunters and accidentally caught in fishermen's nets," and that they often die as a result of being hunted for their fins.
My response to all this, despite the fact that on nearly all fronts I consider myself to be an environmentalist and a friend of the animals, is the following: Good.
The less 23-foot sharks there are out there, the better.
Dolphins getting caught in fishing nets is one thing--they're nice . . . they don't eat us--but don't ask me to tear up for a damn killer shark. Striped bass, bald eagles, koala bears, manatee . . . those things I can rally around. But sharks?
People, I implore you: If you held a rally in support of big, huge sharks and invited some sharks to the rally, they would show up and . . . um . . . eat you . . . right there in front of the press. And they wouldn't even feel bad about it.
Fuck that.
I don't know about you, but I prefer more traditional showings of gratitude to those that involve my being eaten.
Anyway, I know what you're thinking: This guy sounds like the G.W. of the animal world--kill them before they kill us, and all that jazz. And what about that line you always hear about how the mass killing of sharks will set the food chain out of whack and result in all sorts of negative ramifications on our oceans?
Um, let's just say I'm not averse to the doctrine of preemption when it comes to killer animals, and I'm cool with having more turtles swiming around in exchange for the fact that there are no more sharks eating people.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that my willingness to get rid of sharks en mass is a bit childish and shortsighted.
"Quiet," he yelled, palms open, arms flapping up and down in an awkward, reverse raise-the-roof fashion.
In isolation, it would've appeared as though he was in the process of giving a multitude of violent high-fives to an invisible crew of very short people. But in reality he was attempting to do something much more difficult. He was standing in the aisle at the front of a moving bus packed with eighth graders, doing his best to maintain balance despite not using his hands to grasp the seats surrounding him, and desperately trying to convince 40 or 50 enraged kids to calm down.
"Stop," he screamed, arms still waving around. "Now that's enough. No more."
Broglie was not a big man, and his appearance was anything but intimidating--in his capacity as principal of South Park Middle School, he fell much closer to the Principal Skinner end of the disciplinarian spectrum than the end featuring tough guys like Joe Clark or the mean dude from the "Breakfast Club"--but his gyrations and shouts on this occasion were surprisingly well chosen and non-dorky.
The problem was that only a small percentage of the children on the bus could hear what Broglie was saying, and even those who could decipher his orders were too caught up in their own rhythmic shouting to comply with his pleas for silence.
Unified and extremely loud chants of "STOP THE BUS . . . STOP THE BUS . . . STOP THE BUS" drowned out any words emanating from Brogile's mouth and served to transform his arm flailing into little more than a puppet show.
"STOP THE BUS . . . STOP THE BUS . . . STOP THE BUS."
I was 13 at the time of the anti-Broglie uprising, and had just finished pretending to be interested in a boring-as-hell tour of the U.S. Capitol building in D.C. I was part of a group of 100 or so students touring Washington over a weekend designated by my school as "The Eighth Grade Class Trip." Over the course of the previous two days my classmates and I had trapsed through the Smithsonian, did some assassination analysis at Ford's theater, gazed at the white house lawn, and . . . inevitably . . . purchased all sorts of junk with the words "Washington, D.C." emblazoned all over it.
The tour of the Capitol was our last stop before embarking on the four-hour bus ride home to Pittsburgh. And while our time on the hill was mostly spent peering into empty Senate chambers and listening to a congressional guide say things like "behind that door is where the arms services committee meets," and "that office belongs to one of your state senators," the fury we displayed on the ride back home had absolutely nothing to do with our lame Capital building experience.
We were, in fact, pissed off for a much more zany and non-education-related reason.
In short, we were anrgy because the vast majority of us still had money in our pockets and were not being given one last opportunity to rid ourselves of it.
Somewhere between the Capitol building parking lot and the exit that would take us out of the Metro-DC area, some rabble-rouser on our bus glanced out the window and realized that we were traversing past a seemingly endless array of street vendors and tourist traps.
"We should be stopping at some of these," someone remarked.
And with that, it was on.
We all had cash and we were going to stop . . . end of story.
"These places have great deals," we shouted. "Come on, man . . . stop the bus already."
The makeshift memorabilia marts we continued to cruise by seemed to be everywhere in D.C., and we'd come to rely on them during our stay for Washington-related necessities like: mugs, bumper stickers, novelty pens, snow globes, post cards, sunglasses, and, of course, T-shirts.
I recall purchasing a white Hard Rock Cafe shirt for myself and another for my younger brother. The total for both items was $10. To me, this was the deal of a lifetime. It was as though I'd run a scam on the tossel-capped old man who'd sold me the garments, and I was getting away scott free. It was not until a few weeks and wash cycles later--when both shirts unfortunately, but predictably, fell apart--that I realized I was not the scammer in that transaction, but rather the scammee.
But, again, details about the shoddy quality of merchandise peddled by street vendors in D.C. did not come to light until our crew of pre-high-school consumers was safely within the confines of Allegheny County. So as the bus mosied closer and closer to the outer limits of the capital, and past tons of places where we could spend money, the anger that would later manifest itself with respect to the hucksers on K Street was funnelled almost singularly in the direction of Broglie and the bus driver--both of whom were doing their best to quell a riotous atmosphere that seemed to be escalating with every lost purchasing opportunity.
"STOP THE BUS . . . STOP THE BUS . . . STOP THE BUS."
After about five minutes we switched it up a bit.
"T-SHIRTS . . . T-SHIRTS . . . T-SHIRTS."
By this time, and despite the frigid winter air that seemed to find its way into the bus via some gaps in the rubber that was supposed to provide an air lock on the door adjacent to the driver, Broglie was sweating. Precariously perched at the front of the vehicle like a pissed off school administrator on a surf board, he gradually realized that he was losing his hold over the masses.
Finally, after it became obvious that the chanting was not going to stop anytime soon, Broglie snapped.
"SHUT UPPPPPPP!" he yelled, this time making a seemingly conscious effort not to use his arms in any way. "STOP . . . STOP . . . SHUT UPPPP!"
The decision not to invoke any arms in this round of his battle with the boisterous bus riders, surprisingly, paid dividends. The students, myself included, assumed the possibility that the now non-waving Broglie was attempting to get our attention so as to relent to our demands . . . or at least to offer up some sort of compromise.
We were expecting something along the lines of a face-saving pronouncement notifying us of "a five minute stop," conditioned by language like, "And I mean it, people, five minutes and that's it . . . we're leaving . . . so make it snappy."
What we got, though, was simply more of the same.
"That's better," he proclaimed, in quintessential principal fashion. "Now, see here. We are not stopping this bus. Enough is enough. You kids don't need any more stuff. We have to get back . . ."
After speaking the word "back," Broglie kept talking . . . but he may as well have just ended it at that.
"BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
It was impossible to hear anything he was saying.
"BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
And, once again, he reverted back to his old arm-waving form.
Ten minutes later we were on the beltway, and, much to the bus driver's delight, had put D.C. in the rearview mirror.
After the passage of another five minutes, we'd all given up hope of purchasing one last memory of Washington D.C. Within seconds of our defeat, we returned to the business of eating Twizzlers to the beat of the Guns n' Roses "Appetite for Destruction" cassette tapes we simultaneously snapped into our respective Sony Walkman devices.
We'd essentially traded Mr. Broglie for "Mr. Brownstone."
In short, we got over the fact that we couldn't purchase everything we wanted to, and that we'd have to recall our stupid trip to D.C. with only our memories and the stuff we'd already been able to buy with our parents' money.
But it seems to me that we did so only to a certain extent.
Since the eighth grade, I cannot count the number of times I've attended a concert and felt compelled to shell out $25 for a crummy, poorly designed, screen pressed T-shirt that ended up stuffed in the far reaches of my closet. And up until the time I was 18, a summer vacation at the beach would not go by without me coming home with at least one T-shirt or hat featuring the name of the place my family was visiting.
As an adult, I've changed my tune a bit--I can't remember the last time I purchased a concert T, and recent trips to Hawaii, South Beach, Moab, and other assorted destinations resulted in the purchase of exactly zero items with the words "Hawaii," "South Beach," "Moab," or "Other Assorted Destinations Here" on them--and now, if anything, gravitate toward the position that money spent on "stuff" is better spent seeing and doing more things.
To wit:
Four T-shirts equals one parasailing ride.
Two framed pictures of rainbows and mountains equals one surfing lesson.
Three snow globes, a pen set, and a couple of mugs equals a ticket to go see Prince.
Make no mistake about it, maintaining this posture--where one favors personal experiences over the accumulation of stuff--in modern day America is no easy task. Capitalism has trained us to believe that an experience without a corresponding item or product is no experience at all. Our own memories, it seems, are not good enough, and are in some ways invalid. Without something we can touch, and hold on to, and look at 20 years later . . . the story goes . . . we've got, well, nothing.
To this line of reasoning, i retort the following two-pronged bit of advice: Buy less junk and do a better job of remembering stuff.
Use money previously spent on lame items to do more things, and work hard to burn images, thoughts, and feelings into your mind so that you can recall them for a long period of time, even without a scenic calendar or some crappy figurine.
Favor self-taken pictures over souveneirs, and personal experience over all.
Write.
Keep a journal.
Do whatever it takes to remember things without having to buy something. In doing so, you'll be forced to experience things more fully, and it's a safe bet you'll enjoy your experiences to a greater extent for what they are.
Don't get me wrong, things are nice to have sometimes. But there's more to life than "Aloha" T-shirts and All Star game commemorative pencil sets.
In the immortal words of Mr. Broglie: Sometimes enough really is enough.
