Nick - True Stories About Jellyfish, Part 3

We went to Virginia Beach a couple years ago, my family and I. Age 16. We stayed with my aunt and uncle, who had two kayaks. (Kayaking is and always will be one of my favorite activities.) They also lived directly on the beach.

One morning I was building a sand castle, and there was a group of little kids freaking out, so we headed over to see what was up. When we got close, there was this huge ol' jellyfish just swooshing around in the shallows where people swim, and the kids were all scared / intrigued by it. So my dad gets our net and fills our bucket with sea water (we're experienced with catching sea animals) and he puts the jellyfish in. The kids all gather round to check it out.

"What are you going to do with it?" one kid asks my dad.

"I guess I'll bury it in the sand," said my dad, "because I can't let it go here where people are swimming."

So the kids watched it for a few more minutes, and then they sort of lost interest and went back to playing.

"Don't worry, I've got this." I said to my dad.

I went and got the kayak.

I filled the jellyfish bucket with more water and then strapped it into the back seat of the kayak with those stretchy cables that people use in cars. Then I set out.

I battled my way out for more than half an hour, way past the pier. I was so far from the shore that I had no idea where I had set out from; the entire stretch of beach I had ever explored was just a short line on the horizon.

Then I put the bucket on my lap, and looked in.

"Goodbye. Stay out here, okay?" I said aloud to the jellyfish, and then dumped it into the water.

It danced around in the sunlight for a moment, as if to show me that it was really grateful, and then it disappeared instantly beneath the water. I started heading back toward shore. It's way harder to go back than to go out. I thought about my new jellyfish friend as I began the very, very long kayak ride back to the beach.



A couple minutes into the trip, it hit me: I had forgot to ask its name.

-Nick.

Nick - True Stories About Jellyfish, Part 1

For a three or four year period in my childhood, my family would rent a house and vacation in Seaside, Florida for a few days out of every year. It was a nice location, the beach being only a block away, and we would spend our time hanging out in the water and finding creatures.

I was probably about 10 years old the year that we saw the dolphins.

They were out a ways from the shore, and we could see their dorsal fins popping out of the water. Of course, the natural thing to do was for me to try and convince my dad to swim out there with me.

So we swam and we swam. Turns out the dolphins were quite a ways farther away than it had seemed from the shore. I got tired and my dad carried me on his shoulders. Finally, we started to close in on the dolphins.

Understand that, at this point, my dad is swimming with a large child on his shoulders at an incomprehensible distance from the shore. (I don't know how many or what fraction of a mile it was because I have no concept of distance in the ocean.) This is when we learn why the dolphins are out there in the first place.

Slowly at first, and then closing in before we could move, the water in front of us begins turning pinker and pinker, the bright color encroaching on our location.

"What's that, dad?" I ask.

Before he has time to answer, the shapeless pink mass reaches and surrounds us: jellyfish. Thousands of jellyfish. Square miles of jellyfish, so densely packed that they simply look like pink sea from above.

So densely packed that I couldn't find a comparable image on the internet.

So my father, still holding me on his shoulders, swam through a swarm of jellyfish so densely packed that they rubbed against his skin on all sides for probably half an hour before clearing the gelatinous armada.

Not a one of them ever stung him, but imagine how horrible it would be to be stung by even one jellyfish at that distance from shore, let alone a whole fleet of them.

My dad said that they irritated his skin where he had just been brushing up against jellyfish for half an hour, but I think we got out of that one pretty lucky. Anybody else would have hurled me from their back and swam for their life.

Until next week,
-Nick.

Whoosh, as heard from the spiral's midst.

There's some things that give me trouble every day.


1. Whether I'll be good or not:

there's so much concern to be had about one's own image, that it's logistically hard to completely look out for oneself and be confident in what one is doing throughout each and every day to successfully reach out positively to all the people that one would want to reach out to and avoid flirting with those who would not necessarily want to talk to. In short, it's a tough business, putting oneself out there. And thus, I appreciate those who do that daily without giving any shits. It's a really hard thing, because no matter who it comes from, the words "not that good" will stick with any writer until the day he puts the pen down (Tony Kornheiser) for good.


2. Whether I'm qualified —

It's been tough, being a collegiate prospective journalist. There's a lot of me, and all of us went through high school in roughly the same time frame, seeing and reacting to the same things, and grasping the same concepts year in and year out as me. In short, each one of these mofes has had the same experience as me, wants the same job as me and so: it's up to me, literally, to be better at experiencing life than all of my peers. Fuck that responsibility, it's just, frankly, too much. I can't be expected to be better at living than anyone, and I fully expect any of my peers to be able to come to the same conclusions as I am, to be able to make the same rational judgments, and to be able to think the same way about sports as I am. There's a lot of pressure about the competition of being a prospective sports journalist, and having to maintain yourself to David Aldridge-like standards. There's so much to every game that we don't know, and yet, here we are, responsible for putting together a paper.

A newspaper.

Every single day. And, among those of my peers who plan to do this with their life, it seems as though I may be the one to have to lead this boy brigade of sportsjournalistic fools who wanna be righteous and sports journalists in their own lives. It's really hard to commit yourself to the prophecy of interpreting and successfully analyzing sports. And, yo, and.....

I hope you saw my sports column today. I wrote about the consumption of sports, and how it's SO much different than being a sports fan in any other era. It's really hard to be able to accept whatever ESPN tells us, and even harder to — what? — question that and be able to compile counterevidence against that. And be able to prove ESPN wrong. Though, multiple times, it's able to be done, with the slightest bit of fortitude.

It is on us; the new'ns. The ones who can be in college anymore. ;;; to question the media emporiums of today, and say 'hey, maybe you're wrong, media' and prove them so.




I'm just a little bitter. that's all. Sometimes sports minds are restricted by the current standards, and that only leads to consecutivity and continuous bullcrap. ...

3. Whether it's worth it

Oh my. This is the big one. You see, my life is headed down a road of sadness and poorness unless I become rich, which seems obvious, but isn't as much as you'd think it would be. I'm in college, which runs about 27 G a year, most of which is straight up debt waiting to happen, and so I have to be willing to commit myself to missing out on money. Which is fine, so long as I'm able to make good on this college degree business and be able to churn out a job that'll pay for that hefty bag'a debt n crap.

Debt sucks. But it's, at a certain point, the only way to get ahead, as if it's a loan of experience. May society grant you this expensive endeavor, sure, as long as you can learn from it and make it worth their while for the future. And that's the responsibility.

The responsibility. The pitch, the idea behind it all.

The whole notion of investment. And it's so interesting that peers of mine had been invested in.

It's so interesting, the journey to pay it all off. And so, yeah, what it ends up being about, yeah, is the process of becoming enough of a worthwhile person so as to make it worth society's while for throwing money to you to spend to improve yourself; giving you the opportunity to improve.

You better make it worth it: to yourself, to your surrounding folks, to society. To every thing.

You better take yourself, put it to the grindstone, and turn yourself into something fucking cool.

That's it. Are  you worth it? Or are you a waste of time?

Being somewhere in the middle of this equation is, possibly, the most exhilarating part.

Oh, yeah.
--Eliot Sill