Summer is just around the corner, or would be, if the year was a city block, and each season was a street, and you traveled forward through time by walking around the block, and it was May already. Perhaps you're starting to think about a warm-weather vacation. Whatever you do, don't fucking go to the beach, are you crazy?
The beach is one of the most terrifying places known to man. As you scuttle meekly through life, you are probably almost always fewer than ten steps from death, but nowhere is this more apparent than at the beach. Yet motherfuckers keep on abeachgoin'. It's probably because people have always found the sea morbidly fascinating, and beaches are the closest you can get to it and still be on land.
Many beaches are covered with sand, which is made out of the same stuff as tiny pieces of broken glass. As you probably learned in physics class, stepping on a single shard will cut your foot open like a metatarsal pot pie, but you can safely walk on a bed of crushed glass. Check it out, you have only just set foot on the sand, and already you're learning about physics and anatomy! Truly, the seashore is the place where science comes alive! You could probably learn all that "velocity equals frequency divided by time" shit about waves here, too, but it's not recommended.
So anyway, the sand itself cannot cut your feet, unless someone compresses it into a King Cobra bottle and breaks it, which you would probably notice happening. But there are lots of things in the sand that are dangerous as all get out! These include bottlecaps, hypodermic needles, driftwood, broken bottles, dismembered crab pincers, safety pins, sharks' teeth, ant lions, and (on the Planet of the Apes) little rusty pieces of the Statue of Liberty.
Littering on public beaches is a huge problem. Kids especially will toss Snickers wrappers, popsicle sticks, and shopping bags from the Dollar Store to and fro, willy-nilly. One in every ten beachgoers under 12 is directly responsible for the death of a sea turtle or manatee, according to marine biologists.
Ironically, one in five of these unwitting murderers will grow up to become a marine biologist, according to the children themselves. (Of the remaining four, one aspires to drive a dump truck, two more expect to become basketball players, and the fourth will be a princess ballerina. Don't listen to those gloomy prognosticators who forecast our national economy's collapse! Trust in the growing basketball and ballet industries!)
The single most destructive piece of litter is the six-pack ring. Fishes swim into them and get stuck, which constricts their growth. It's like a fishy corset for fishes. It also fits exactly over the can-shaped nose of the bottlenosed dolphin. Any dolphin to thusly snag itself will starve to death, because all the superintelligent brain power in the world can't help you reach your face with one of those stubby flippers. Ooh, another bad one is the plastic shopping bag. Drifting in the cerulean deep, it can be easily mistaken for a jellyfish by a passing sea turtle. It's hard to see down there; they've always got salt in their eyes. Anyway, as everybody but sea turtles knows, BAG IS NOT A TOY OR JELLYFISH. Unable to swaller or cough it up, a turtle will gag on the bag, it's a drag.
Litter-wise, smokers are another problem. People are always planting their smoldering butts in the sand, and not in a good way. Plus, there's used condoms! Besides all of this, the sand is motherfucking hot. Unless you have Bedouin-style callouses, maybe you should just leave your shoes on.
Once you stake out a towel site, you may want to leave everything else on, too. The beach is teeming with humanity, and no one wants to see your bared flesh. Do you have varicose veins? Chicken skin? Beer belly? Back hair? Farmer tan? Sunken chest? Overbite? Pigeontoe? Knock-knees? Psoriasis? Third nipple? Ass fat? Monobrow? Dandruff? Runny nose? Strip down to your inaptly-named "bathing suit" at your own risk of humiliation.
(If your beach of choice is at Coney Island or Rockaway, substitute "ewemiliation.")
Even if you are attractive, it's best to stay covered up, or some pervert will probably videotape you with his secret duffle cam. And even if you are an exhibitionist, another good reason not to get out of thy tog set is the omnipresence of thieves. Beach thieves are the distant, pathetic descendants of pirates. They wait for you to take off your watch for a dip in the sea, and then yoink! Your family heirloom becomes a stranger's pawn ticket. Valuables left unattended may also be pilfered by beachcombers -- sad, lonely men who search for shallowly-buried treasure with metal detectors. For days on end, they comb the sands, but man, they ain't found shit. They'll be all over the wallet in your doffed slacks like yo momma on Hydrox.
Why would you want to put your body in the ocean, anyway? Did your boat sink? Cap'n Jack Cousteau once said that "when you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain." That dude knew what he was parlaying about. For example, if you dip your toe in the drink at Jones Beach, even a tiny cut on your foot -- say, from a couple heroin users' shared and discarded syringe -- can leak more than enough blood to attract sharks from as far away as Amityville, where Jaws lives. Sharks go crazy for blood. It gives them "the frenzies." Once they get a whiff of yours, they will never rest until they dine of your flesh. They will follow you for years and years, over land and air, and through time itself to carry out their objective. And underwater, no one can hear you get et.
The Great White shark has thousands and thousands of teeth, which constantly regenerate. New ones grow in and old ones fall out. This process takes place over the course of the shark's entire 200-year lifespan, and so quickly that a shark can bite you five or six times with new teeth while only closing its mouth on you once.
A shark has basically no weaknesses. Sometimes nature books will recommend that if one attacks you, you should stick a thumb in its eye or punch it in the nose "to confuse it." I guess you might as well. It's not like you've got anything better to do with these last, short, horrible moments of your life. And how many people can say they've punched a shark? You'll probably meet some of them where you're going.
Another mean sea critter to look out for is the barracuda. It's lying so low in the weeds, I bet it's going to ambush you. It'd have you down, down, down, down on your knees, now wouldn't it?
Jellyfish cannot eat you, but they can administer a painful sting. If you think you see a jellyfish, first make sure it is not a discarded bag from the Dollar Store. Once you are certain it is a jellyfish or "man-o'-war," pee on it. Now that will confuse a critter! Because whaaaa?
If you escape all the vicious (and, in the case of jellyfishes, viscous) beasties of the sea, you may not yet necessarily make it safely back to land. There's tsunamis and rip tides. If you get caught in a tsunami, there's really nothing to do but belly-surf it and try to shoot the radical curl. Sayonara!
Rip tides will drag you out to sea, where you will eventually drown from the lack of land. Most people struggle against them in vain, trying to swim straight back to shore, which you cannot do. The way to survive is to swim parallel to the coastline until you get out of the seaward current, and then you can swim back to land and begin a new life wherever you end up, completely free from debt. But you can never contact anyone from your former life, or you will get caught.
Finally, you should be mindful at the beach of overexposure to the sun, which can give you first-degree burns, sunstroke, skin cancer, and a creepy Wayne Newton look. You can protect yourself from excess ultraviolet radiation by slathering your skin with high SPF-ing goo, and wearing a hat with a wide brim, like maybe a sombrero. The hat will also guard against sexually transmitted diseases, as no one ever sleeps with anybody who wears a sombrero.
In conclusion, we forgot to mention that a sea gull will probably shit in your eye. Don't go to the beach. And if you do? And if you get an oil spill on you? Don't come crying to
seriousdanger.