I've touched on my intense distaste for sharks here before, briefly, but believe it or not, they're not my greatest marine fear, and shouldn't be yours either. Every patch of salt water, no matter how minuscule, is a breeding ground for slimy, serrated, toxic Lovecraftian horrors and I want nothing more to do with it. The seas are fucked, and if I had my way I'd have every inch of them fired into the sun. That's not to say I approve of fresh water, rivers can and do hide this kind of goddamn thing, but I accept that we kind of need water, to make tequila and irrigate our fields of agave, to make tequila. But no amount of tequila could make me forget these reasons to move to a landlocked county, right fucking now. No time to grab your possessions or loved ones, just run.
***
Ok, so if you're reading this, you've made your first mistake by not listening to me. You may come to regret that. I'm going to assume you're sceptical, in which case, I'm also going to assume you're a cretin. Every second you don't spend screaming and firing a gun wildly into the water at your local beach is a second something in there spent plotting your end. But you probably didn't spend the last five seconds doing that, you spent it reading this. Saying that, I didn't either. The coastguard at Weston-Super-Mare took my assault rifle.
The thing is, people like the sea. They love going to the beach, even the British, and we're so safety-conscious we can't take a piss without an under-paid official patting down the urinal for switch-blades. And yet at the first sign of sunlight, the whole country drops everything and makes a screaming dash for the nearest stretch of grey, dismal sand or shattered razor-pebbles. Although, to be fair, we're mostly already drunk. Our first impulse when the weather wizards prophesise the two hours of sunny conditions we get a year are imminent, every off-license in the country sells out of Pimms and Gordon's within seconds. Then we head for the seaside. At least these ridiculous people I call countrymen understand the Second Law of the Oceans after: You Keep What You Kill: Leave Your Limbs, For They Are Mine Now, and that is - The warmer, brighter and more beautiful the sea is, the more prehistoric killing machines it contains. The British think the freezing, sewage-flavoured waters off Brighton beach are safe, and they are so wrong.
There's Lots Of It
Someone with far too much time on their hands said that 2/3s of the planet's surface is ocean. Clearly, the guy also didn't have much compassion. He might as well have said 66% of the floor around me is lava and the rest is covered in prison rapists with dossiers of all my childhood fears for all the good it did my sense of security. But tragically, I can imagine he's right. There certainly is a lot of salt water, which means the only marginally safe places on the planet's surface, other than my water-proof bomb shelter, is the Atacama desert and a shallow grave.
What that also means, is they're aren't a whole lot of physical barriers stopping every godforsaken creature in the depths from turning up in, say, Portsmouth. I know, why would anyone go to Portsmouth?
These Fucking Things Are In It
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| Ssssskkkkrrriiiiiiyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! |
And then there's this:
I know what you're saying to yourselves now: 'Will my good man, do you think me slow? That's clearly H.R. Giger's early concept art from the original Alien.' Well it brings me no joy to say that, no, unfortunately, you're quite possibly fatally, wrong. That thing is known to people with exponentially more balls than me, as a Black Dragonfish. Because screw it, you might as well be killed by something with a badass name than something that sounds like a passive-aggressive bitch, right? Aaaaaannnnd, smash cut.
No. No way. That cannot be a thing. That's a fucking Draugr if it's anything. A marine biologist might call it a Northern Stargazer, I call it proof that God wasn't paying much attention when he came to underwater life.
'Gotcha again, Mr Franklin. Those are budget voodoo earrings.'
I know it's hard, but try and look again - that's a squid with dentures. Or, what I will forever think of when I remember this.
As if the universe wasn't terrible enough without a jellyfish that's ten fucking feet across. And before you ask, yes, of course they're poisonous.
There Could Be Anything Down There. Anything. Yo. Anything.
Someone with even more time on their hands and even less compassion posited that we know less about the floors of the world's oceans than the surface of the moon. Granted, that's not saying much. The mind boggles at how much is not up there to know about. Lunar observation is a more boring job than trainspotting during a London Midlands strike. Space travel doesn't have the popularity it used to when Houston put a man on a low budget set in Michigan, but people are still content to be ignorant of our planet's soaking basement. And so am I. And yet, it seems like every month some intrepid team completely lacking any sense of basic self-preservation pulls another ancient monster from the depths:
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| Figure A. (for Awful). |
This monstrosity survived and far larger, but only marginally more monstrous things, didn't. That should tell you all any right-minded person would want to know about it and every other species older than a round million. Like this old-timer, and not forgetting the granddaddy of everything that ever crawled out of your nightmares to feed on your screams, the lamprey. And we don't even have a clue what else is down there.
Thanks a bunch, creationist God. Now that's sarcasm, Fringehead. Seriously though, fuck you both.
