A FREAKIN’ HUGE SHARK

Attention! This is a Rafe Khatchadorian Public Health Warning!

Don’t be like me. Don’t listen to the voices in your head that tell you things will turn out okay. They won’t. Above all, don’t be dumb enough to go surfing. Trust me, it will end badly. Very badly.

This is because surfing absolutely sucks.

1. SURFING SUCKS SO MUCH THAT YOU COULD STICK A HOSE ON IT AND VACUUM YOUR WHOLE HOUSE IN SIX SECONDS FLAT.

2. SURFING SUCKS SO MUCH IT COULD DOUBLE AS A BLACK HOLE.

3. SURFING IS THE LITERAL DEFINITION OF SUCKOSITY.

4. AND SURFING IN AUSTRALIA IS THE SUCKIEST OF ALL BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS TO GET MAIMED, INJURED, DROWNED, GOUGED, MOCKED, GRAZED, SLICED, DICED, AND ICED.

Listen and learn from my mistakes.

This is what surfing is really like.

The first thing I noticed was that the waves were much bigger close-up than they looked from the shore.

They were, in fact, ginormous.

The second problem was that getting a massive wall of plastic (a.k.a. the surfboard) past the huge breaker waves was almost impossible.

To make matters worse, the thing was strapped to my leg with a rope, so the board would snap back and smack into my head over and over again.

And by the time I did eventually scramble my way past the crashing white foam, I was a total wreck. I worked so hard to get to that point that I swear my eyeballs were sweating. My eyeballs! I didn’t even know eyeballs could sweat.

And all of those problems were accompanied by another, bigger fear—sharks.

The entire time I was getting knocked around by the waves and gulping down lungfuls of salt water, there was the constant terror that somewhere beneath me was a FREAKIN’ HUGE SHARK.

I swear I could hear the theme from Jaws playing over the sound of the waves.

Whatever huge monstrosity was down there could probably throw me up in the air like it was tossing a marshmallow. At the top of my arc I would, just for a second, hang in the air above the beast—did I mention it was HUGE?—and see people on the beach running around like ants, screaming and panicking like you would if you’d just seen a FREAKIN’ HUGE SHARK.

And then I’d be falling down, down, down, right into its gaping red maw.

Of course, since I’m still here writing this, you’ve probably already guessed that I didn’t get eaten by a FREAKIN’ HUGE SHARK. But surfing that morning on Bloodspurt Beach was, hands down, the worst hour of my life—worse than getting beat up by Miller the Killer before our truce. Worse than getting expelled. Worse than the worst thing you can think of times six. I think I swallowed about 8 percent of the Pacific Ocean. It was like being trapped inside a giant washing machine set to Spin. The ocean played with my rag-doll body for an hour and then spat me ashore like a gorilla spitting out an orange seed.

After all that, you’d think I’d be grateful to be back on dry land, and I would have been, except that when I did finally get back to the beach, I was unconscious.

As it turns out, that was the least of my problems.