running riot

in shriek of the mutilated, a guy in a yeti costume and a cannibal indian kill their prey by scaring them to death. the innocent girl gets tied to a tree and then the yeti jumps out occasionally ... rar! ... she screams, flips out, and dies.

jaws goes after the kill in a much more direct way: the innocent girl paddles around in the surf and all of a sudden ... gulp! ... gone. and no one has to break out the electric knife.

today i read an article about an "experienced sailor" who was knocked off his boat in lake erie and swam for 13 hours to get to shore. (i won't even get into the reason behind life jackets.) the way i see it, this is like open water without as much desperation, so it may not make it to the big screen.

however, the image of the guy stranded in that ugly brown water is stuck in my head and i keep thinking about how things would have turned out for me if i found myself in his situation. i've come up with two possible outcomes ...

scenario #1
upon regaining consciousness and realizing where i am and what i don't have, i totally panic and drown almost immediately.

scenario #2
upon regaining consciousness, etc., i panic for a moment but manage to calm myself down (whew!) and decide in which direction i'll swim. for the first couple hours i beat myself up psychologically about the whole life jacket thing and worry about having to tell people about the stupid thing i did.

in that time, i plan the lie that i'll tell when i reach the shore so that no one knows what actually happened. i run my lines a bunch of times and try them with improvisations to make sure my story is believable and repeatable, but not exactly the same every time.

with that straight, i sing american pie in my head a few times because it's the longest song i know. then i go thru a few wrest favorites and get thirsty, which is natural. it's a good thing lake erie is fresh water. it's not such a good thing that it's chock full of e coli.

bored with singing, i decide to run through the dialogue of the movies i have memorized. my brain thinks "we're gonna need a bigger boat" is funny and ironic, but it's actually the catalyst of my demise because now i only think about sharks and i wonder just how big walleye get. do they eat people?

now i'm freaked. all i want to do is get out of the water because i'm convinced something is circling beneath me. i can hear it ... it's one of the tremors monsters that's gone marine!

something brushes my leg. in reality, it's probably a boot or a mattress or some other kind of garbage, but i think it's a water-bound yeti.

finally, i succumb ... it's a shark. there's no possible way it's a shark, but there's no possible way it's not a shark. i brace myself for all of the biting and am so worked up about it that my body just can't take it and everything goes dark. my fear has killed me.

the conclusion
i might as well have been tied to a tree.

ugh.

so, congratulations guy who spent 13 hours swimming in the bacteria-infested waters of lake erie! i commend you and hope you don't have salmonella.

i clearly need a stronger grasp on reality.