Friday, June 29, 2012

Communication Issues: Updated

I know that I’m not a normal person because things like this keep happening to me. People will come up to me and say things like:

“Hey Adam, you want to go to Florida and hang out on the beach with us?”

See, I know that to them, what they’re trying to say is:

“Hey Adam Jones, you want to go somewhere nice and do something fun with us?”

But what I hear is more akin to:

“Hey Adam Jones, you want to go to the inner city and let an AIDs riddled whore spit in our mouths?”

My reaction is this:

“What? No. GOD, no. Why would I… wait, is that something you want? That’s awful. Have fun with your garbage and disease.”


I have absolutely no desire to go to the sweltering crotch of America and roll around in its detritus. I’ve been all around this great big country of mine and the place that I loathe the most is Florida. Not even Texas, and that’s where guns and racism come from.

I have not hated my life exactly once while I was in Florida. It was the winter of 2009. I was on a job in Orlando on the week between Christmas and New Year’s. It was a beautiful 70° F, that’s about 21° C for my international readers. In the middle of winter. Tomorrow’s heat index is predicted to be around 105°F/40°C. Did you know that it’s around 34°F in Christchurch right now? Try harder, Florida.

You might be tempted to say something like “But hey, Adam Jones, aren’t you being a hypocrite? It’s already 105 in Atlanta, and at least in Florida there’s the beach.

The beach is exactly the problem. Do you know what the beach is? It’s crushed rock and dead things. When shellfish die, their shells don’t decompose, their flesh rots out or gets eaten, but their gross outside-bones just get smashed up and a lot of it washes on shore where it’s fashioned into misshapen castles by excited children. What fun.

It’s not just the psychological component, either. Sand is physically awful, too. The scorching hot debris gets caught in every crevice and orifice of the human body and proceeds to be more obnoxious than children in a movie theater, or a restaurant…

Or a beach. Children are pretty terrible in the best of circumstances, but when you gather a couple hundred of them and let them do whatever they want, they’re monsters. Loud, squealy, disgusting monsters. It’s not just them, either…

Do a quick image search for beaches and you’ll end up with something like this:
Fucking gorgeous, right?



If that were the beach, I could probably learn to love it. That’s not the beach, though. This is the beach:
The swell of humanity disgusts me.




Why not throw a couple hundred adults in on top of everything else. They tend to be a little less squealy, but no less loud or disgusting. I don’t like crowds to begin with, but no one seems to give a shit about basic humanity at the beach.

Oh, and that’s not to mention the 18 hours round trip with three people and one giant in a 2-door Yaris.

However, I’m trying to be more social and less judgmental, so I decided to go. Who knows? This may be the best trip ever. This may be the one experience that changes my mind about beaches forever. I may fall asleep for the rest of my life wishing I were back on those sands…

But right now I just feel like David Tennant in his last few seconds as the Doctor.