Toobs.com

	Wisdumb
	Bounty from the Sea, Part I (1-18-03) Living by the ocean has the obvious perks such as living by the ocean and being able to visit it quickly when the surf gets good. Some of the benefits aren’t always obvious until you step barefoot in them like a well-hidden pile of dog poo in a park lawn. After storms hit beaches in front of urban centers such as Los Angeles, all the filth that has built up since the last storm gets the monster-truck flush right on to the beach. All that garbage eventually ends up on the shore and provides hours of entertainment for beachcombing or curious disgust. One such day, Glenn, my brother and I are down on the shore admiring the excesses of human rot after some storm and come upon a discovery of boat parts from some sunken dinghy. We find pieces of wood, seat cushions, shards of fabric and other boaty parts when we finally hit pay dirt. Among all the litter and drift wood we start finding un-opened beer cans. Now this might not sound like such a big deal as a ‘mature’ adult who can easily go to the store and pick up a sixer straight to the head, but to a couple of teenagers in high school, this is about as good as it gets. We begin scouring the beach for more beer cans. It is like Easter in winter but while the eggs are brightly colored with corporate logos, they are filled with beer and not yolk or delicious nougat. I find two and then another! Glenn finds a few and so does my brother. I promptly confiscate my (younger) brother’s cans. Being the theoretician, I theorized that the sailors drank too much beer and couldn’t find the harbor. Maybe we would find one of them amongst the foam cups, cigarette butts and lemons, one hand poking up out of the wet sand. After finding lots more cans, I revised my previous hypothesis. Maybe they tossed the beer overboard to go faster to the safety of the port in a futile attempt to outrun the storm. While there were no giant suction cup marks on the cans or wood, I could still not rule out a Japanese-based sea monster squid that had a taste for human flesh but was ‘on the wagon’. My proposals fell on deaf ears as the free-beer from Poseidon hunting action heated up. When all was said and done, we made bags out of our shirts to covertly carry our booty back to my house. In all, let’s say we had 13 beers. Since it was about 2 PM by now, we figured that a pizza would go nicely with our beer. After some victory dances, the pizza arrived and we opened up some of the cans. To enrich the experience, I chose a tall, clear glass and started pouring. The first thing I noticed was that the beer had a distinctly cloudy nature to it. Since it wasn’t one of those fancy beers with the crud on the bottom, my suspicions were raised. The beer didn’t taste that great but we were unsure if it was because it was some crappy beer or if it had aged too long at sea. You would think we would just pound it on principle but we were exercising caution for some reason. The next can opened without a hiss and only 8 ounces came out. We opened a few more, and decided that the crappy beer was likely full of dissolved aluminum and seawater and would not be good with anything except cyanide pills or kerosene. With the new strength from devouring the pizza, we took the remaining cans and threw them off our 2nd story porch onto the street below to get them to blow up. That was the best we could come up with. We hosed down the area, recycled the cans and sat down for some cartoons before my mom got home from work, technically sober, but higher than hippies on kites from all the excitement of another day at the beach. more stories >>