RECENT STORIES

Seatoral candidate debate July 14 ( Southeast Business Partnership )
What I've learned about being nice ( Gail Kirkegaard )
ACC paralegal student wins Palm PDA ( John Scarffe )
Judoka wins second Olympic Trials ( Heidi Moore )
Linda Newell State Senate Campaign kickoff party ( Linda Newell )

share a story | more postings »

YourHub.com \\ Englewood \\ Stories \\ Travel \\ General Travel

This likely wouldn't have been my response

e-mail to a friend | print this | link to this

NEXT › ‹ PREVIOUS

Contributed by: Jared Keller on 7/12/2006

Where exactly does insanity come from? How can one possibly plumb the tortured recesses of the human mind, and arrive at a point - a single point - in time where disorder, chaos, and irrationality overwhelm a person's instictual drive for order and self-preservation, and shove him from the realm of the sane into the abyss?

Can one pinpoint the precise moment when a mind has snapped?

Yep. I think so.

All one must do is consider the following scenario, as well as the corresponding list of possible responses:

Scenario -
It's December 28th, 2005. You sit on the side of a bobbing vessel, anchored off of one of the Hawaiian Islands. The tradewinds blow gently across your face, and the deep azure of the sky makes the horizon - where sky and water meet - hard to discern. As you ponder the mysteries of life, a man pops his head above water, just astern and to the starboard of the boat. The fellow - treading water in a steel shark cage and clearly excited - shouts that he's just seen the biggest !#$@& shark ever, and several of your companions rush to edge to see the massive predator. At first glance, the huge creature appears, due to its sheer magnitude, to be a baby Humpback Whale. As you study its form, however, you see the distinctive coloring and shape of Carcharodon Carcharias - the Great White Shark. The shark - quite rare in this part of the world - brings to mind Roy Scheider's rather understaded reaction upon first seeing the maneater in Jaws: "We're gonna need a bigger boat." The majestic, but terrifying creature - maybe 20 feet long - glides past the boat, circling the cage, which has now attracted its attention. What will you do next?

1. Continue to watch from the boat. After all, somebody's got to document this thing for posterity, right? Right? We can't ALL go in the cage...

2. Scream like a little girl, and run to the hold, where you curl into the fetal position, and rock like Rainman. Quick...do we have any M1 Garands on board? Where are the oxygen tanks? Any of you losers named Quint?!

3. Jump into the cage, with the others. Hey - it's a once-in-a-lifetime deal, right? A Great White - and a BIG one - in Hawaiian waters? Unreal!

4. Jump into the WATER - sans cage.

If you chose any of the first few, you're sane, and I'm right there with you - up to, and including number 3. It's neat, it's rare, and I'm fascinated by sharks, so yeah, I'd get into the cage.

If, however, you chose number 4, there is something fundamentally, deeply wrong with you. You, like the captain of the ship in question, need your head examined. You may even need to have holes bored into your head to let the evil spirits out. Think I'm overreacting? Does the activity in the photo above (Courtesy Hawaii Shark Encounters)
look like the chosen activity of a sane man?

I think not.

Read about it, and see more pictures at Hawaii Shark Encounters' website.

In the meantime, let's remember a bit of insight from our friend, the very-tenderized Quint:

Bad fish. Not like going down to the pond and chasing bluegills and tommycocks. This shark, swallow you whole. No shakin', no tenderizin', down you go.

[Report this as objectionable content.]

SUBMIT COMMENT

Rate the above story

Talk Back : submit comments to the story

*Note: you need to log-in to add a comment or rating.

Thank you! Your comment has been updated.

CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Jared Keller

Littleton

Jared Keller has posted 450 stories and 62 comments since joining on 12/1/2005. Jared Keller 's average story rating is 4.85.

view profile » view other postings from Jared Keller »

SAVE AND SHARE THIS STORY

digg	Google
del.icio.us	Yahoo!
reddit	Newsvine

What is this?

STORY RSS FEEDS

All stories

All stories in Englewood

All stories by Jared Keller

WANT TO WRITE FOR YOURHUB.COM?

Want to see the stories you write and the photos you shoot featured in the YourHub.com Thursday print section available all over the Front Range and with home subscriptions of the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post? All you have to do is register, then post a story or column, start a blog or tell everyone what events are happening in town. We will print the best stories, columns, event listings, photos and blog entries in our print sections.

Loading Ad