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Hey, I’ve got some news about tentacles! There are more of them in the local waters than you might have let yourself believe when you said, hypothetically last Sunday, “Sure, son, let’s go play in the waves I mean it’s not like there are Portuguese men-of-war out there or anything!”
Indeed, it was recently reported that the Portuguese man-of-war, an preposterously named blob of stingable goop, had been spotted floating in Lowcountry waters, washing up on Lowcountry beaches and, very likely, lurking in Lowcountry offices waiting to hear about the Heritage. (Little-known fact: Portuguese men-of-war = big fans of Brandt Snedeker.)
If you are like me, this news is causing you to either squeal like someone who just scored NKOTB reunion tickets or begin inventing reasons to tell your 7-year-old about you won’t be setting foot in the water at the beach this weekend. (Leading candidates: “Allergic to kelp,” “Saltwater causes tongue numbness” and “I am descended from the the sea-god Triton and no one must know my secret identity.”)
Of course, one should never be surprised to re-learn that when in the ocean one is cavorting with countless creatures who have much better reasons to be there than you, your SPF 75 and your recently obtained Wal-Mart boogie board. (Weeks ago we came across a teenage shore fisherman who was showing off to anyone wearing a bikini within a 3-mile radius a foot-long baby shark, which was cool, but not quite as cool as returning later to find him showing off a 3-foot-long sand shark to a notably larger crowd of people wearing bikinis. I was torn between wanting to show my son, and getting out of the way of this kid’s best-ever Sunday.) The men-of-war don’t usually vacation in sunny Carolina, but it’s not like they have a lot of say in where the Gulf Stream points them.
I have longstanding issues with jellyfish-like critters, due entirely to their primal, fundamental wrongness (though, to avoid getting hate mail from angry scientists, the man-of-war isn’t actually a jellyfish but a siphonophore, or a cnidarian animal, and, wow, spellcheck hates this sentence).
They are without the things we identify with animals, such as heads, spines and grudges; they are creatures that are when they clearly should not be. They’re absurdly old, 600 to 700 million years or so, which is three times as ancient as dinosaurs. They’re known mostly as gooey, shimmering and brainless (although recent research, as reported in the New York Times, indicates they may be smarter and less passive than we think).
Well, good for them. Still gross. Last month, I received the same jellyfish-invading-Florida story twice on my Facebook wall from friends who I immediately called out because THEY POSTED A STORY ABOUT JELLYFISH INVASIONS ON MY FACEBOOK WALL, which is pretty much the most direct path to getting Unfriended by me, beating the previous winners, Frequent Videos From Your Child’s Many Recitals and Political Columns You Have Recently Found Interesting.
Now, obviously we live by what history textbooks will one day refer to as “the ocean,” but I’d be lying if I said my interest in going for a refreshing dip — even during July, when barely a week goes by without one of my lunches bursting into flame — has been dramatically reduced of late. I am looking right now at a photo of tentacles, next to a description that likens them to — and I am quoting here through clenched fists — “loose spaghetti.” If you learn nothing else from me today, promise you won’t eat any spaghetti you find in the water.
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