if lassie was around, I wouldn’t have had to eat her in the first place.

Lassie truly hates me.  She hates me because I almost never listen to anything she says. I believe that this not my fault because she only speaks to me in the car when the radio is turned all the way up.  Then in between songs she will start speaking again, this time very quickly as though she is making up for lost time.  Of course at this point I have to ask her to slow down and start over from the beginning.  This only gets her immensely frustrated so she usually just gives the whole thing up, says it’s to late now, and just starts talking about something else.

Despite her becoming so easily frustrated with me, I keep her around.  Mostly because a car trip just isn’t the same when I go alone.  Even if we can’t have a full on conversation because of the radio or the fact that she is mounted to my dash and has an electronic brain, she at least knows how to get from the city to the beach, or wherever it is that I might be going, and this information proves vital when I can hear her.

Though our trips always seem to entail some sort of entertainment, our trip to the beach this past weekend was notable for four distinct reasons. 

1. As we were leaving NYC via the midtown tunnel, Lassie mentioned to me that we should be arriving at the beach by 2:15 that afternoon, according to her calculations.  On the freeway there was a bit of traffic, and since I was listening to the radio, a bit of a communication breakdown occurred between Lassie and myself, resulting in a missed turn or two.  Lassie became more and more annoyed with me over time and as she did I began to notice that our projected time of arrival was continuously rising.  2:22, 2:23, 2:24, 2:25, 2:26.    At first I thought it was because of the traffic or the mix-ups, so I started following her direction intently to avoid any further problems.  I even sped up and began weaving through lanes, but still, our ETA kept going up.  We weren’t going to arrive until almost 2:40 now.  How is it possible that I was actually getting further away from my destination while I was heading towards it?  2:50 now. It was as though Lassie controlled a sort of space-time continuum that she could exercise only while pissed.  It didn’t matter how fast I drove, as long as she was annoyed Lassie could turn up the amount of time that I had to spend in the car before I got to the beach, or wherever it might be that I would need to go in the future.  I contemplated the physics of this and thought that it must be impossible for her to have such powers at her disposal and only use them for this. 2:56 Then I contemplated the option of a dash mounted GPS unit taking offense to my inability to pay attention while listening to the radio, and then deciding that rerouting me to a slower route was the proper punishment for not listening to her when she spoke.  This seemed equally unlikely, but the facts were all there.  Either Lassie had taken on a life of her own, or had always had one and was secretly controlling all of space and time. Now scared to death, I drove on trying to pay much better attention to Lassie.

1. I now sat at a Red light across from the beach parking lot, I looked to my left and saw a very large middle age man across the median riding a small gray unicycle in wobbly circles.  This amazed me so much that I just stared at the man, my mouth open, as his circles got tighter and tighter and faster and faster until eventually he had to jump off and the bike crashed to the ground.  When he did, he looked up to see me staring at him, to which he responded by pointing at the board on top of my car and saying “You think surfing is hard?  You should try this.” in a rather frustrated tone.  Then he jumped back on his unicycle and started wobbling his way down the sidewalk in the other direction.  The man only made it about six yards before he ran into some trouble.  He quickly tried to regain his balance by flailing his arms around in giant circles as if he were rolling down a set of windows in an enormous car, leaning back and front in quick succession like someone might do on a tight rope.  Finally he shifted his weight forward so hard that his momentum ejected him from the unicycle, arms waving, into a hedgerow that was running parallel to the sidewalk demolishing a variety of small shrubbery.  My mouth dropped even lower and my eye brows shot skyward as I remained stopped in front of a now green light.  When the man stood up off the ground and began dusting himself off he saw that I was still staring so I asked him if he was alright.  The fat man paused for a moment contemplating this, tilted his head to the side, and then he gave me the finger.  I sat in shock as the fat man just walked off down the sidewalk with the little unicycle under his arm, shaking his head.  The light was red again so I turned to my GPS and asked if she had just fucking seen that, in an attempt to take her mind off of being annoyed with me.

1. Once I unloaded the car and got into my wetsuit, I ascended the peer and headed down to the beach.  As I looked up and down the beach for a good place to set into the water, I noticed that an already rainy day was turning quickly into a very foggy day as well, and realized that I could only see a few blocks down the beach.  This was not really a cause for concern so I paddled out into the line up to take advantage of a 9-12ft hurricane-swell that had been working it’s way up the coast that week.                                                                                                                                As I rode, the fog slowly came on so thick that soon I could no longer see the hotels on shore a few hundred yards away.  Then I noted the disappearance of the beach-front condos, and finally, the thick gray cloud swallowed the entire eastern seaboard. This wasn’t really a big concern in a navigation sense because it wasn’t as though the waves were going to suddenly start heading out to sea, it’s just that now everything seemed like an all to scripted scene from a shitty “B” film about a giant shark that eats unsuspecting surfer people, and as such I began to get just a little bit creeped out.                                                                                                  I had been out for awhile now, and decided that since the waves were getting hard to gauge as well, I might as well take the next one back to shore.  To no surprise, just as I promised that the next wave would be the last, a massive wall of water appeared out of the mist and swallowed me whole.  This experience alone wasn’t all that a-typical of surfing, but if you combine all of the other elements along with the fog and the creepy factor, I wasn’t a fan of what was happening.  I pondered this as I was thrust about under the water becoming disoriented and struggling to find the surface. When I broke the water hacking and wheezing I did not recognize which way the shore was, and thought immediately about peeing my pants as I took giant breaths.  This contemplation continued until I realized that I was in fact wearing a wetsuit, which would no doubt trap the pee inside of the suit, which was pretty gross, so I decided against it.  I also thought this whole “pee suit” scenario was hilarious, which took my mind off of the rest of it and I got my bearings and paddled back to the beach to pee under the peer.  As I did so I looked to my left and saw a hand painted sign that read “Save the environment.” “Fuck the environment.” I thought, “It just tried to kill me.”

1. I met Jack while walking from the parking garage towards my apartment.  Jack was a homeless man with a few more years on his back then I, but had a similar build and look about him that, from a distance made me feel as though I could be looking into a dark future should I forget to keep my Karma clean.  When I arrived at his side I glanced at his sign and read “hard times, please help.” Considering the Karma concerned thoughts that I was just having, I decided to.  Jack thanked me for the dollar and asked me where I was headed. When I said “Home.” he interrupted and said that there is no such thing as “home,” only where we are going at that point.   I asked him if that was really true, and he said of course it was and proceeded to tell me all about it.                                              Jack had lived the high life, jumping from island to island when he was young, from world to world, living a bandit’s life and taking advantages where he could.  Things had been good.  Eventually the adventures all ran together though and slowly luck began to fade.  One day he got old and found himself alone and alive long after he thought he would have died tragically in some sort of heroes ending.  I wondered if his adventures had all been because he had nowhere to go home to, and then I wondered if any of us really did.  It was a hell of a story though for a paragraph, and decided that I would try to help Jack a little bit more because I have a weak spot in my heart for great stories.                                                         I told Jack that I had gone to school for advertising and that we had once done a study on how much money the homeless make in a day according to what their sign said and their location. I began to think of something he could put on his sign that might speak to the high brow people of New York a little bit more then what his current proposition did, and I was inspired by my recent encounter with the environment from earlier that day.  I felt a little bad about wanting to fuck the environment, so I flipped over his sign and on the back I wrote “Help me put some green in this gray environment.” I’m no writer (who is really) but I figured this would be better than what he had.  I also mentioned that Jack should sit in a higher traffic or touristy area of the city where people come by often that don’t see the homeless everyday, and are more likely to give. “Teach a man to fish.” Jack said, and then smirked at me. “Good luck getting home kid.”  And I walked off down the night.

As I walked I thought about the last time that I had gone to the beach before I had moved to the city.  It had not been this eventful but I did enjoy thinking about walking down the warm Carolina coast in the heavy sun and wading in the tidal pools that sat and waited for the low sea to come back and retrieve them.  I recalled a conversation I once had whilst sitting in one of these tidal pools with the sort of girl you can’t stop listening to no matter how nonsensical she gets.  The conversation went something like this.

“What would we do if we were in a plane crash and this was our desert island?”  The girl said, to which  I just sort of tilted my head.

 “How long would we survive?”  

I felt like I had just entered a conversation with Daisy from The Great Gatsby.

“Why does the plane have to crash?” I ask. “Why can’t we just get to where we are going?”

“Because the pilots get lost and our plan runs out of gas in the middle of the ocean.”

“That would never happen.” I said, but she insisted that it could.

“We wouldn’t survive.” I said  “We would die in the plane crash.’”

“But what if we didn’t?” 

“We would drown.”  I said.

“But what if we didn’t. Hypothetically, what would you do?”

“I would try and find one of the life rafts and the survival bag that is tied to each of them, turn on the emergency transmitter, and sit tight.”

“But what if the transmitter didn’t work and we got stuck on an island.”

“Your saying we just survived a plane crash in the middle of the ocean, found a life raft, got the survival gear, made it to a desert island, and the emergency transmitter doesn’t work?”  “I would find the irony in it hilarious, and then sit right down on the beach, have a good cry and when I was done I’d look for some water.”

“Ok, can we build a house on the beach?”

“I mean, I guess.” 

“And what would we eat?”

“Plants and animals.”

“What if there weren’t any plants or animals?”

“Then we would die, and surviving the plane crash, and finding the raft would have been pointless.”

I was starting to get a little agitated at this point, but her eyes were disarming and when she asked again if there was something else we could eat that lived in the water I said simply.

“I would just wait until you died, and then eat you.”

She looked shocked.  Her face sat still for a few moments and waited for me to change my response. She hadn’t caught the sarcasm.

I told her it was only in the interest of survival and that I wouldn’t enjoy it at all. She still didn’t like the sound of it. “You would really eat me?”

“I wouldn’t just sit there and die.” I thought I was joking. She looked at me sadly and the conversation was suddenly over because she had taken me seriously.  That is the exact moment in time when I learned the important life lesson to never be honest during a hypothetical scenario in which you survive a plane crash with a woman.

As I reflected on my scenario the oddest thing was that all I could think about was that if only Lassie had been introduced into the equation somehow using her space-time super powers, she would have guided the pilots home, and I never would have had be in a plane crash to begin with, or ever would have had break the heart of a disarming girl by explaining that I’d have to eat her to survive.  Had Lassie known about this all along, and avoided the situation purposely using her powers?  I didn’t want to know.