Revelstoke, B.C., Canada, photo courtesy of Sami Lingren
Since April 2012 I've been researching paranormal stories from my hometown of Revelstoke, B.C. with an eye toward publishing them as a book. These stories range from simple ghost stories to eyewitness accounts of unusual lights in the sky to strange combinations of the two which defy conventional explanations of both.
Just as they did last year, the Revelstoke Current will be running one of my stories a week, beginning today, in the lead-up to Halloween.
My first draft of the manuscript was completed in October 2013 and submitted to a number of publishers. Llewellyn Worldwide, a Minnesota-based publisher of all all things paranormal, has expressed interest but requires the manuscript to be longer and so I am now back knocking on doors. In fact, I will be in the Revelstoke area in the second week of October and if you have any experiences you would like to share, please feel free to contact me at the below email address.
The index below is not a complete listing of the stories which will appear in the final version, but represent a sampling of what to expect.
Thanks for reading and should you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me at bren(at)largelythetruth(dot)com
My contentious relationship with the sun was established on a summer day in Kelowna, BC when I was four years old and overheated to the point of having a seizure. My memory prior to the seizure is vague; we were at the now-shuttered Kelowna Grand Prix "family fun centre" and so all I recall is seeing a row of refrigerator-sized arcade games before the brown patterned carpet rushed up at me. However, my post-seizure memory - waking up in hospital a tub of ice - is still vivid and I have spent my life since then avoiding the possibility of a repeat performance, and thus the sun, whenever possible. You could say I'm a bit of a night owl. While this means I'm useless at the beach and in the early morning, it does allow me to see a different side of the world around me, a perspective my Lonesome Creepy galleries are aimed at capturing. In this particular batch of photos, I've decided to focus on one particular location - my home of Victoria, BC. Seeing the city at night has given me a deeper appreciation for a place many people - myself included - dismiss as picturesque but bland. Many, if not all, of the below photos have appeared on my Instagram feed, albeit in cropped form under the tag #yyjatnight. If you're on IG, please feel free to use that tag and show off your own view of night time in BC's capital. Click here to find and follow me on Instagram. All photos taken with an iPhone 5s
On September 24, 2013 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.
Along the way, my friend and I decided to look into local ghost stories and ended up with one of our own. This is part 2 of that story.
A look at Google Earth
shows the area to be dotted here and there with houses but on the ground, in
the dark, the turnoff to Angel Canyon Road from Highway 89, some six miles into
the desert north of Kanab, felt so remote it may as well have been the far side
of the moon. After leaving the highway
we followed the road down a small rise, past low shrubs and patches of scrub
grass, to the start of the 350-acre Best Friends Animal Sanctuary.
Best Friends is noted
as being America’s largest sanctuary for companion animals, recognized for
their commitment to their “no-kill mission”; they believe that 90% of shelter
animals are adoptable, or could be with the proper care and treatment.It seemed a bit grim, then, that the sole
reason we were in the neighborhood was on the off chance of seeing someone
wearing a fur pelt and firing pellets of ground-up human body at their enemies,
but that didn’t stop us.
On September 24, 2013 I returned from a two week vacation during which I flew to Texas and ended up taking a 3600 mile road trip across six states, along the way visiting four national parks and catching up with a friend I hadn't seen since the first time we met five years ago, when I threatened his life over a card game in Morocco.
Along the way, my friend and I decided to look into local ghost stories and ended up with one of our own. This is part 1 of that story. If you've already read part 1, click here to be taken to part 2
Those of you who read this site
regularly will recall that I don’t find the desert to be a particularly
exciting place. Apart from the odd
dramatic vista and infrequent lightning storms, the many hours I've spent
driving across the desert have mainly consisted of scanning radio frequencies looking
for something – anything – to distract myself from the agonizing pace at which
the miles on my GPS screen tick down.
Yet, like so many things I claim to dislike – CostCo, social gatherings,
Las Vegas – I find myself drawn back to the desert again and again.
The reading I’ve done in “paranormal”
literature since beginning to write my book of ghost stories, and - oddly
enough - the blog for dating site OK Cupid would like me to believe I’m wrong,
that there is a great deal more happening in the desert than I thought but it
took my road trip to the Grand Canyon last September to convince me.
If you grew up in North America in the 80s you know damn well who this is
That I
grew up spending my Saturday mornings watching WWF wrestling is not something I
advertise. It’s not that I’m ashamed of
it – I suspect that a lot of guys (and gals) my age spent their Saturday
mornings the same way – but the experience, or the knowledge gained from it, is
not easily introducible to an adult conversation:
“We’re expecting our first baby! We are SO excited!”
“Oh my
God that’s great! This is like when Hulk
Hogan bodyslammed Andre the Giant at Wrestlemania 3!”
“I’m
sorry?”
“I said,
‘Lovely! When are you due?’”
“We
really must be going.”
High praise indeed
Consequently,
I am more likely to tell someone about the times in my life I have been
accosted by shadowy paranormal entities than I am to describe my heartbreak at
Hulk Hogan’s momentous Wrestlemania 6 loss to the Ultimate Warrior.
Welcome to my childhood
At this
point it should come as no great surprise that I am not invited to many dinner
parties.
With Halloween fast approaching (and because I finally had ten pictures to put together) it's time for another Lonesome Creepy photo gallery, wherein you see the world from my point of view. The locations presented here yo-yo from Victoria to Austin, Texas and back again, with one or two points in between. As always, all photos have been taken with an iPhone 4S unless otherwise noted.
Once you're done, check out my post "A Strange Little Place" to catch up with the true ghost stories, authored by yours truly, currently running in the Revelstoke Current.
Reading is for suckers. Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:
During my drive to Las Vegas, the Veteran’s Memorial Highway brought me through a handful of Indian Reservations. I’m not particularly educated on the state of Indian-Government relations but I’ve read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and I’m a fan of Ward Churchill so I have at least a baseline understanding of the savage, locker-room rogering that was Manifest Destiny. All the same, actually seeing the Godless stretches of sun-withered rock that the government assigned to its defeated enemy really drives the point home in a way that books can’t. Though I know full well that the Indian people had no voice in the decision I imagine that the U.S. Government, having thoroughly won the American Indian Wars, called forth a representative from the surviving tribes when it was time to assign living space: U.S. Government: That is some lovely property you all were living on, wasn’t it? Indian Representative: Yes, that is why we liked living there. U.S. Government: Well, we need it Indian Representative: For what?! U.S. Government: Stuff. Indian Representative: What stuff? U.S. Government: Jamba Juices, hockey rinks, hot dog stands. White people stuff. Indian Representative: But what about us? U.S. Government: That’s what I wanted to talk to you about! Using the most scientific methods currently available we have located the absolute worst parcels of sandblasted hell in America Indian Representative: Why? U.S.G: Because we want to give them to you! Indian Representative: I’m sorry? U.S.G.: So you can live there, silly! All of you. Bring sunscreen. Indian Representative: I have a few reservations about this. U.S.G.: Great! That’s what we’ll call them. Now get out of here you crazy kid. Remember what I said about sunscreen. Indian Representative: But I don’t…is that a shotgun? U.S.G.: I said get Since NPR liked to disappear on me whenever I got interested in a subject, thoughts like this were all I had to keep me company. I’d given up on country radio after hearing Tim McGraw’s “Indian Outlaw” three days running. It’s a catchy song and I’m not particularly sensitive but every time I heard“You can find me in my wigwam /I’ll be beatin’ on my tom-tom / Pull out the pipe and smoke you some / Hey and pass it around” I wanted to throw up. A mild diversion came when I saw a sign advertising a Wildlife Viewing Area. The last several hours of driving had brought me endless vistas of windswept hardpan and I was a little sceptical as whether any wildlife not existing solely at the microscopic level could possibly thrive here. A tour guide would have to be a Zoloft-popping mixture of cock-eyed optimist and Spalding Grey to sell that particular Wildlife Viewing Experience: “Here in front of us we have some rocks, heavy ones by the look of them. To our left if you look closely you can see more rocks, one of which looks like an anvil. Oh! Look! Just over there I thought I saw…no, no…that was a rock too. Isn’t this fun? Who else could go for a Jamba Juice?” Night had fallen by the time I got close to Vegas and traffic had fallen off to almost nothing. As Highway 95 slipped by beneath the moonlight I had a look at the map and realized I was driving parallel to Department of Defense land. Then it hit me – this wasn’t just any DoD land – this was the Nevada Test Site, formerly Nevada Proving Ground, one of two nuclear testing sites used by America during the Cold War. Hey, I read books. From 1951-1992 over 1,000 nuclear devices were tested on-site, often resulting in fallout that insisted on ruining the day (and genetic material) of anyone who happened to be downwind. These blessed souls are cheerfully called “Downwinders” by those who take an interest in the subject – I imagine this is because “Boy Howdy, You Are Boned-ers” is too much of a buzzkill. Over the years there were a number of settlements paid out by the government although the official figures are apparently well-hidden. Scenes from The Hills Have Eyes came flooding into my head and in desperation I reached for the radio. Even “Indian Outlaw” was better than that.
Reading is for suckers. Click the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones.
The last thing I did before leaving for Nevada the next day was wash my car.It’s not that I thought it was going to stay clean on the drive to Winnemucca but I wanted to make sure I washed off every trace of John Day before advancing further. I was going to burn my laundry too but my car has suffered enough without the added indignity of coming into contact with my bare ass.
See you in Hell
Fittingly, the car wash was the second worst I’ve come across. The soap smelled like the chemical development team had started off aiming for “lilac” but given up somewhere around “How long has this sandwich been behind the radiator?” It did the job but only after the investment of six dollars and about a dozen passes with what may be the western world’s feeblest foaming brush.
I hit the highway at speeds that would have made the protagonist from Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” look like he was driving a float in the Tournament of Roses Parade. Trees, mailboxes and hitchhikers whizzed past as I desperately tried to out run whatever white trash Wendigo haunts that town.
This haste was to blame for the lives I took – for my becoming a murderer. A mass murderer, really. In my defense it’s hardly my fault – these hapless victims should have known better than to wander directly into the path of a man recklessly fleeing a Mayberry so awful that Andy Griffith would have eaten Opie at birth as an act of mercy.
The victims in question were hundreds of small white butterflies that swarmed the road at several points in the Malheur National Forest. At first I thought there were tiny balls of fluff bouncing off my windshield, then I looked closely and noticed they had wings.
I do not know how many of them I killed but should there ever come a day when butterflies rule the earth I will be the first against the wall.
Crossing into Nevada was a relief – not only was I able to put Oregon’s weak-kneed speed limits behind me but I was pretty sure that the Wendigo’s house-arrest anklet would stop him from crossing state lines.
I have no more affection for the desert than I do any other climate that will kill you without taking the slightest notice but I concede that it has a grandeur all it’s own with jagged outcroppings of rock silhouetted against the sky and the way shadows of clouds lay across the mountains like drop cloths.
It’s not all grand, of course. Much of it is, as my Saskatchewan-born grandfather once said of his own home, “as flat as piss on a plate”, and driving through it can become wearing over several hours. At one point the boredom became so acute I found myself listening to finance shill Dave Ramsey‘s radio show and being deeply concerned about the fate of those calling in. I actually teared up after one caller confessed that her husband was adamant about keeping their new truck, even though the prohibitive monthly payment meant they would lose the house they currently shared with their children.
The shedding of a tear not related to immediate physical injury or the loss of a sporting contest shocked me out of my stupor and I snapped off the radio. To reclaim my masculinity I turned up the CD player and sang along to “Sylvia’s Mother” until I arrived in Winnemucca. Before you talk smack about Dr. Hook all I have to say is this – there is nothing more distinctly male than trying to talk your way past a woman’s mother.
My hotel room at Winner’s Casino would have been unremarkable under normal circumstances but after the Little Pine Inn it felt like the Taj Mahal - ”I can walk around in my bare feet? I don’t need to sleep in my clothes? I have arrived in life.”
Reading is for suckers. Click "play" on the video below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:
It was late afternoon by the time I arrived in John Day, Oregon via highway 395. The light had taken on a beautiful golden tint you sometimes see at the end of the day – the kind that can make a garbage dump look like Venice in the spring.
395 turns into John Day’s main street, with most of downtown lining either side. Signs welcoming home 3 local boys from their tours of duty in Afghanistan were up in every window and there were yellow ribbons around the trees. Unlike Fox and Dale, two down-at-heel hamlets I’d passed through earlier in the day, John Day, seemed like a pleasant, welcoming example of Small Town America.
The first crack in that facade came when I pulled into my motel, the Little Pine
Looks nice, right?
Inn at the far end of downtown. On the outside it looked no worse than anywhere else I’ve ever stayed. Sure, the rough-looking woman who checked me in had a voice like Captain Beefheart and the only other guest was a bearded man who claimed to live in the mountains but I wrote it all off as part of being in a blue collar town well off the beaten track. Then I saw my room.
Where is your God now?
“Lived in” is one way to describe it, “I expected to find Bob Crane’s tenderized corpse in the bathroom” is another. The brown shag carpet was long enough to hide a marijuana grow-op from passing helicopters, several of the lights didn’t work and everything was covered in what is best described as a thin film made up of equal parts dirt and neglect. When I looked in the bathroom what I saw made me wish I’d found Hogan’s moldering corpse instead. Radiating out from the toilet’s base was a thick ring of accumulated dirt (I refuse to believe it was anything more) and nothing, from the sink to the shower stall, was quite what I’d call clean.
Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!"
After dropping my luggage and vigorously washing my hands I set off down Main Street to find dinner. The sun was now almost fully set save for a pink band where the mountains met the sky. The downtownthat had, not two hours before, felt like a living advertisement for war bonds now felt like a small seaside town an in H.P. Lovecraft story right before something tentacled rose from the sea and caused everyone to require fresh underpants.
The Mayberry facade cracked and fell apart when I noticed that in many of the windows – right next to the signs welcoming home John Day’s troops – was another sign forbidding entry to anyone displaying neo-Nazi apparel or tattoos. They warned that in the eyes of the community everyone was created equal and hate would not be tolerated. Suddenly I regretted shaving my head before leaving home.
Just then, as if to drive the point home, a scrawny twenty-something with a shaved head and swastika tattoo on his bicep rode past on a bicycle. I guessed John Day, like a lot of towns that have seen better days, was having a hard time keeping its young men occupied when work ran thin.
Dinner was beer and pizza in the Dirty Shame Saloon, not far from the motel.
And I'm pretty sure the pizza
gave me food poisoning.
It was your typical small-town watering hole where the menu incorporates the entire nutritional pyramid (pizza, hamburgers, chicken, deep-fried) and the locals eye you up as you walk in.
Ever paranoid I sat with my back to the wall and ate while a fat woman in a tie-dyed T-shirt sang along with the jukebox. To distract myself I set my mind to figuring out whether the mullet-sporting person who kind of looked like Meat Loaf in the video for “I’d Do Anything For Love” and was stood at the far end of the bar was a woman or a man. After 20 minutes I failed to come away with an answer.
When Aretha was done at the jukebox I could suddenly hear a group of middle-aged tourists at a nearby table discussing “The Celestine Prophecy”, a 1993 novel full of New-Age hooey. The conversation was more literate than I was expecting, given that the book has less intellectual value than “Go Dog Go”. Then one of the participants said, “I’d rather read a list of quotes than an entire book” & I realized I wasn’t listening to people, I was listening to organic tape recorders.
Then I heard “Where love rules there is no will to power” and decided it was a good time to head back to the motel.
Where I was murdered. The way my stomach feels right now I only wish I was joking.
Reading is for suckers. Click "play" on the Largely the Truth logo below to have the article read to you in my dulcet tones:
It's been almost a year
since my last post and you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd run out of steam. In
fact there have been times in the last 9 months where I've thought that myself:
thought I'd become one of those past-it types you see in coffee shops, the ones
wearing skinny jeans and hoping no one notices they're twenty years older than
the girl they're hitting on.
Then I snap back to reality and remember that
since I never had "it" in the first place there's no way it can have
passed me by. Sure, I spend a lot of time in coffee shops but only because
there are fewer TVs there than in bars. I certainly don't use them as pickup
joints - if I ever tried my lovely wife would tear a hole through the fabric of
space and time and boil my testicles with her heat vision.
So where in the hell have I been? It's simple -
last year I set two goals for myself: bench press 300 pounds and write a book.
Not at the same time. These goals, along with life and my first steady
job after 4 years of temping, have eaten all the time I once devoted to making
up dirty limericks about restaurants.
Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport, widely considered to be the
safest in the world, uses a sophisticated passenger screening system headed by
college graduates who coolly screen travelers for “micro-expressions” which may
hint at nefarious intent – by contrast, the U.K. Border Agency (and the TSA in
America, for that matter) employs a network of po-faced ungulates still
seething over not being invited to prom.
So don’t take it personally when, upon your arrival in England, the U.K.
Border Agency treats you like you’ve just arrived from Malawi with several
sticks of T.N.T., a pound of cocaine and eight undocumented immigrants concealed
somewhere on your person. Or like you're Madonna.
For this edition of Lonesome Creepy I have a collection of night shots. As with previous Lonesome Creepy posts the following photos were all taken with an iPhone 4 unless otherwise noted.
The focus of this assignment was dialogue - we had to write a conversation between two people where both were hiding something. The assignment scared the hell out of me at first - fiction had been hard enough but creating speaking characters? Eventually I had to force myself to sit down at the computer and wing it.
I couldn't stomach the idea of writing about some kind of domestic discord or tragic medical diagnosis so I reached into a different place. Being raised Catholic I've always been fascinated by the struggle between good & evil so for this assignment I decided the two should have a conversation.
"Shadows and Light"
Except for a single light burning atop a worn desk
the room was in darkness. Behind the desk sat an old man, his broad shoulders
slightly stooped and his thick hands criss-crossed with the marks of age. His
eyes were fixed on the desk, on an object at the fringes of the light. It was a
globe — the world in miniature — the green land freshly charred, the blue seas
newly boiled away.
God stared at the scale model of destruction and
sighed. This had been his world, its inhabitants his children and his children
had destroyed themselves. “Not for the first time,” spoke a voice inside him.
The old man cradled his head in his hands as the unbidden emotions of a life
long ago burst forth — the joy of creation, the wrath of wounded pride, and the
ache of separation.
For this, my third assignment in the Times Colonist "So You Think You Can Write" competition, I was tasked with creating a character in 500 words or less. Descriptive writing was not something I often did and so this was an intimidating assignment, although it was easy compared to the one that followed.
"Juliette"
Gliding between Formica tabletops, her slender fingers around the handle
of a coffeepot, Juliette remembers when John would take her dancing and, when
the diner is quiet, she can almost pretend it’s still spring 1967 and the air
smells of gardenias in bloom.
She closes her blue eyes and remembers the summer before John was drafted:
drinking iced tea on the porch with her parents before sneaking away to make
love by the banks of the Atchafalaya Basin. Juliette trembled in the moonlight,
a tall, slim girl even then, and he handled her like something precious and
rare.
For the second assignment in the 2011 Times Colonist "So You Think You Can Write Contest" we had to tell the story of an item about which we have ambivalent feelings. This is largely the truth (groan) about an angry time in my life and how I came to possess a handmade knife.
The Knife
The drawer to the left of my kitchen sink contains a bizarre inventory
of items: there are Ziploc bags filled with wet naps, ancient elastic bands,
and various foreign coins left over from vacations past.
At the very back is the centrepiece of my little collection: a homemade
knife. The pockmarked blade was machined from industrial steel; the handle from
plastic cutting boards. It’s worn and without practical use yet I’ve taken it
with me every time I’ve moved, from house to apartment to house, for six years.
I keep the knife because even though it represents a miserable part of
my life, it’s also a reminder of the lessons I learned from the man who gave me
it to me and how his sadness helped me to let go of the anger that had come to
define me.
This isn't a review, it's a public service announcement. The Fresko Cafe at 642 Yates Street, between Douglas & Broad, formerly the site of Great Cannon Pizza and several other unspeakably bad pizzerias, is offering a $3.99 ham, eggs, hashbrown & coffee breakfast special. You read that right - $3.99 for a greasy spoon breakfast in the heart of the Garden City.
The Fresko is a small, low-budget affair but the food is perfectly serviceable and the menu extends beyond breakfast with hamburgers, omelettes ($5.99) and donairs, to name a few. They're open until 3am on both Friday & Saturday night although you're not going to get late-night breakfast unless it's a slow night.
Check it out before it's gone. Not that the special is a limited time offer but rather it's likely to soon be replaced by a condo, ladies-wear boutique or maybe a timeshare made out of fair-trade coffee beans.
This year I decided to participate in the Victoria Times-Colonist's writing contest. The first round was a free-form submission (poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction) of no more than 500 words, due by September 9. From the pool of entrants, judges would select four finalists who would be given four assignments over the next month (1 per week). Each batch of assignments would be judged weekly and the winning entry printed in the Sunday Edition of the Times-Colonist.
My entry was a story about two brothers growing up in rural Tennessee, a fictional piece I put together the night before deadline. Fiction is new to me, so it was a challenge but the characters had been rolling around in my head for about a year so when I finally sat myself down to the work it wasn't as hard as I'd expected.
Almost immediately after this my trip down to the Olympia Weekend in Las Vegas (article forthcoming) and I more or less forgot about the contest. Then, while at a truck stop in southern Nevada on my return journey I received a call from Denise Helm, acting Editor-in-Chief at the Times-Colonist, informing me I had been selected as a finalist!
My first assignment arrived immediately and so I began work while making my way home, using my voice recorder to take notes while driving during the day and transcribing those notes in motel rooms at night.
As of today the contest is two weeks in and my third assignment was submitted yesterday. The judges notes will be sent back Thursday and I'll know by Sunday whether or not my piece was chosen out of the four on offer.
Readers are allowed to vote for their favorite piece on the newspaper's web site and the author deemed "Reader's Choice" wins an iPad classic. Overall winner receives a trip to a writer's festival next year on the Sunshine Coast.
The oceans are vast, cold, unknowable sirens that have called to men
since the day we left the garden and as with all distant maidens we are drawn
back each time in the vain hope that they will soften - that they will show us
and only us some tiny token of affection.
Instead of affection, however, all the oceans have
ever provided are krakens, tidal waves and a place for barrel-chested fishermen
to avoid their wives, sometimes permanently.
It wasn't affection that I was after this past
weekend as I stepped into the sea at Vancouver Island's Long Beach for my first
day of surfing. Instead I was trying to figure out exactly how I had ended up
in that spot, with my considerable bulk squeezed into a wetsuit, a rented
surfboard under my arm and the vicious expanse of the Pacific Ocean before me.
Though I own a gym membership my day to day
fitness regimen consists mostly of walking back and forth between the sofa and
the fridge, so when my friends enticed me to join them on a surfing holiday I
was apprehensive.
My first concern was the wetsuit - after all, a
260lb man in a neoprene body condom was the sight for which the word
"ridiculous" was devised. And I did look ridiculous as I stood there
on the beach, the hot Tofino sun beating down on my shiny pate, but then so did
almost everyone else. Unless you're built like Armie Hammer the wetsuit will
seek out your every imperfection and broadcast it to the
Don't look directly at it
world whether they
want to see it or not - like ugly people making out on a Jumbotron.
My other, more pressing concern was the sea itself. In addition to being an ardent H.P. Lovecraft
devotee I have seen Wolfgang Peterson’s The
Perfect Storm several times and reason that if something can be both home
to mighty Cthulu and executioner for bands of rugged seamen led by George
Clooney then maybe it’s a bit beyond me.
Perhaps, I suggested to my friends, the surfing experience could be approximated
by covering me in cling film and having me sit in a tub of cold water.
The suggestion was pooh-poohed and I was accused of being “dramatic” but
my apprehension remained and every time the sea hurled me end over end like a
discarded cigarette butt I wanted to scream, “See what you’ve done, you
bastards! It took Swooney and now, for
my hubris, it will take me too!” That I
survived is a testament not to the mercy of the sea but to the pleasure it
takes in toying with its prey.
The capriciousness of the ocean was confirmed when, once I’d gotten the
hang of walking my board against the current and even managed to catch a wave
or two, I noticed that my friends seemed to have swum a great distance away
from me, and, strangely, so had the beach.
After a great deal of furious paddling failed to remedy the situation I
realized that I had been caught in a riptide, which sounds like a sea-faring G.I.
Joe villain but is actually an ocean current that pulls hapless idiots like me
away from the beach and into Cthulu’s clutches.
I don't know how but it looks hungry
I vaguely remembered being told that if you are caught up in a rip tide
the worst thing you can do is try to swim directly towards the shore, against
the current, and so, clinging to my board I tried to move diagonally towards a
patch of ocean not intent on my murder.
My frantic movements brought me no closer to safety and the coldness of
the water slowly gave way to icy tendrils of panic that worked their way up my
spine. Every mouthful of seawater became
harder to expel than the one before it - hoisting myself up on the board was
only a temporary solution because the movement of the waves and my total lack
of balance meant I could only stay atop for a few moments. Suddenly I regretted paying in advance for
two nights at the hotel.
It was then the sea tired of its sport and I felt a wave pushing me
towards shore. After reaching an area
shallow enough for my feet to touch bottom a warm wave of relief washed over me
and I heaved a great sigh standing there in the waist high water. I was still standing there when the sea
delivered one bracing final bitch slap and I decided to break for lunch.
Afterward I hesitated to go back into the water but eventually realized
I didn’t have much choice; the final wave had knocked out one of my contacts
and without it I couldn’t eye up toothsome young bathing beauties without closing
one eye and squinting the other so I that I took on the aspect of a lecherous
pirate. Defeated, I pulled out my other
lens then hauled my board and bulk back into the waves.
The jealous, frigid sea had made sure she was the only woman for me.
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