entry nº 61 // 20190811

at some point this past summer i got a late-night call from manabe-kun saying, yo, let’s get up real early and go SNORKELING tomorrow. of course you say yes to that kind of thing right off, unless you hate snorkeling or the ocean or manabe-kun or whatever, which i certainly don’t, so it’s off we go. but first, wait, hold up a sec, shit i don’t have a snorkel. do you have an extra one i can borrow? wait, manabe-kun, you don’t even have a snorkel either? well then. i guess that means – it being like 11pm on a friday night or whatever it was – that we gotta roll down to our local don quijote (this kind of, i guess you could maybe describe it as a wal-mart type of place, in terms of the selection + quality of items sold there, but also maybe in terms of the societal position it occupies, and also in terms of it being really the only viable option for certain items you might find yourself in need of outside of traditional business hours), get some fuckin’ snorkels, and make sure we’re geared up right for the following morning. shoko + maaya-chan, manabe-kun’s wife, were up and around so, just like that, we four were out on a little late-summer-night car trip, teenager-style, windows down, warm soft air swuffing through the hairs on my arm hanging out the window. top-notch, that kind of stuff. like, when i think back warmly on my suburban teenagerhood, it’s exactly that kind of memory right there that we’re talking about. it’s comforting and amazing that that feeling is still out there, available, if you know where to look or happen to be in the right place at the right time. 

so, next morning, it’s a 6am-ish slow roll in manabe-kun’s car out towards keya beach, which is basically deserted when we get there. (i have to point out that manabe-kun drives reeeeeal slow, and man it was really doing it for me. slow roll on a sunny summer morning?! unstoppable. it encouraged a handful of aggro-rage-passes from certain other drivers on the road, which one one hand it’s like, chill out, but on the other hand, can’t blame ’em, if they’ve got someplace to go. no skin off our backs.) but that keya beach, once 9pm or so rolls around, the place becomes packed with people at these beach shack-type places where you pay some money to get in and they blast shitty pop/hip-hop and provide showers etc., and you just kind of have a beach day, i guess. which, i have to say, makes for quite a contrast between the total calm when you get in the water early in the morning, and the noisy homo sapiens ruckus you emerge back into when you return. 

anyway, it’s a real fuckin’ sense of adventure out there, snorkeling. it’s gorgeous. you feel like you are in a magical wonderland  straight out of like your imagination and shit. seriously. basically just a straight up realm. super clear blue water and colorful fishies and sea anemones and big ol’ super mario-style sea urchins and all sorts of other stuff. these little narrow needle fish that i found out later on google that are actually quite dangerous because if they get freaked out they’ll like, dash, possibly right at you, and they can actually pierce straight through your body? yikes. i mean, they seemed to just kind of quietly hang out down there, and i guess like as long as they’re pointed away from you when they go off, as it were, you should be good? i think i even spotted a sea cucumber or some relative down low in the sand, or maybe it was even a cuttlefish? i dunno. doing whatever those things do down there. 

but yeah, felt like i was in the movies or a video game or something, for real. we swam through these little rocky narrows teeming with life and came out next to these boulders jutting up out of the water, and of course climbed up there to scope out the panorama. swimming underwater through some rocky narrows and then climbing up to the top of the bouldery outcropping?! might possibly not get much better than that, at least as far as this subdivision of life is concerned. 

one thing i have to say about snorkeling is, man, i don’t know how many times i had to pee while we were out there? like, seriously. i started to wonder if something was maybe like, wrong with me? but did some light googling a few weeks later when i finally remembered, and it turns out it’s just some thing that has to do with your body, i guess. nothing to be alarmed about, so that’s good. just don’t go sipping that ocean water from anywhere around me when i’m snorkeling, though. you know who you are. 

we went back a second time, later in the summer, but at that point it was well into jellyfish season, and while yes, there certainly were quite a few little jellyfish swimming around in there!, after some initial cautious sting-free steps in the water, we declared it “okay” and headed out. they were small, almost translucent, seemingly harmless to the touch/brush. should be fine, right? but man, after we got across the little bay and climbed around on the rocks on the other side, we went to get back in the water and swim towards home, and those little guys were everywhere. jellyfish dream land. or, alternately, jellyfish hellhole terror land, depending on, well, your perspective, and their capabilities, far as stinging’s concerned. manabe-kun and i expressed our reservations: should we walk back, instead? yes, yes we definitely should. manabe-kun googled those jellyfish after we got back to the car, and yikes, very poisonous, according to internet sources! yikes indeed.