I strap on my new flippers stepping in gracefully with the veteran diver's graceful clown shoe shuffle. It's another marine biologist convention, pretty standard fair. I ask the first guy I see on the floor, wearing a gorgeous tan and gray mottled wet suit with matching snorkel complete with an automatic water backwash bail mechanism on the intake... a very pricey item for those in the know. So anyways, I ask him what he does for a living, turns out he's in finance, go figure. Economy's so bad he had to take up oceanography on the side, go out doing 32 months of field work so far out in the Pacific the ocean just spans the horizon in an arc about your person, nothing but waves and after a while, he says, when high pressure systems swing by and the clouds get lost it's blue and the water's blue become the same shade after you sit out there on deck just staring at it for so long. He was getting a bit misty-eyed so I offered him my handkerchief, saying, "It's all right, brother, mother nature is an awesome thing, it really gets to me sometimes as well, the joy of the untamed wilderness and the great unknown."
"It's not that exactly," he said, gladly taking the bit of proffered fabric, "I just really hate it so much, *sob* it just totally sucks man... I just want to feel the joy of basking the in the dead glow of flickering florescent bulbs on the back of my neck with a double set of spreadsheets out in front on a dual lcd monitor set up, left hand at the key pad, my right at the calculator, a classic HP model, now discontinued... you know they don't really make them like they used to, the keys don't give you that nice plush 'push click' feedback, like it's really pressing back at you, and that's why calculators are better than people you know, man, they alway push back no matter what, they just push back... not like fucking whales..."
He trailed off, clearly upset and inebriated. At a second look, I checked the snorkel again, and could see that it was actually currently rigged to dispense vodka shots just straight into the guy's mouth, wouldn't be surprised if the guy had filled up those "oxygen" tanks on his back with vermouth, a working stiff will always find a way to get his perfect poison on the job, no matter, ingenuity flares up quick when boredom and the promise of surreptitious intoxication are mixed just right, just like that perfect martini mixing right that instant in his mouth, the liquor piped in through the snorkel and the ventilator, stirred with the tongue, not shaken, a perfect dry vodka martini on demand, couldn't down 'em any faster if it was on an IV drip, well, you get the picture, I'm rambling.
So I take him by the shoulder and give him a gentle shake saying it'll all get better, that the majestic and beautiful animals he is forced to work with probably don't like it any better than he does, someone's got to do it, you know, so don't feel bad, you know, your day will come, when you no longer have to sit out on the deck of a yacht all day languidly relaxing in the sun during your time off, eating freshly caught swordfish steaks all day and butter fried dungeoness crab legs for dinner. Things'll get better and you sure seem like a swell guy, so buck up... and all that bullshit. He didn't take it well, he got set off into one of those drunken rants slurring, "Man, you dlon't really know what it's like, you just haveta BE there man to know how SOUL CRUSHING it is to just see those goddamn humpbacks sidle up right beslide the boat and wink at you and then just playfully slap the water with a flipper... goddamn whales got no respect for land dwellers and they don't make any effort to conceal their contempt for ya, it's speciesism really and in my opinion it's worse than racism or sexism or WHATEVERism, humpbacks give less than a shit about you than klansmen do for blacks..."
Well, believe you me, I stopped him right there in his tracks and tried to set him straight on the subject, that maybe he just shouldn't talk about things that he doesn't know about, not wanting to make a scene. But that backfired because it turned out he was black, I just couldn't tell with the mask and wet suit and everything, but just as he was about to go off on me for that little faux pas I finally got a break and played the one card I knew would always work in this situation, "Well, I apologize, but I'm colorblind you know."
He was all contemptuous, saying something like, yeah, everybody says that, but how do you act towards minorities, huh? What do you do other than perpetuate the white male party line?
To which I replied, "Don't know what you mean, I mean that I'm actually colorblind, I can't see colors and I'm sick and tired of running into color differentiators everywhere that just fucking take it for granted and shove it in my face all the time telling me 'blue this' and 'purple that' like I should know what the fuck they're talking about, have some consideration for non-chromatic vision, for the perceptually handicapped..." I went on in the manner for 15 minutes or more, boy was his face a slightly darker shade of gray by the time I was done with him.
I stormed off and set up camp near a tank where I ran into an old dolphin friend of mine and we whistled and clicked boisterously to each other till the convention petered out around midnight, but we were down to keep the lamp burning, and so, peering shadily side to side to make sure everybody looked "cool" we rolled up a fat spliff and passed it back and forth, lips to puckered blow-hole, with one and only one unspoken rule between us, as it is throughout the entire animal kingdom: Puff, puff, pass that shit, my cetacean!
Word.
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