A Sea of Poisonous Jellyfish (Think Jello with salt and translucent stingers)

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Today is the June 10th, Sunday - five days before I have to start
teaching. It has been 8 days since my bout with a box jellyfish in
Penang, Malaysia. I recently looked up online what type of jellyfish
reside in the coastal regions of northern Malaysia and found the box
jellyfish, one of half a dozen jellyfish that can be fatal, is a type
that is common in South East Asia. So most likely, the beast that
suctioned its tentacles to my neck, chest and back was of a breed that
has killed humans before and I was lucky.

not to say that I've had any near death revelations, but certainly I
am trying to be more careful so I don't die out here. Well, let's get
right down to it.

A couple days after I returned battered and mangled to Chiang Mai, I
called my sweet chocolate-chip cookie makin' mother and told her the
story. She wanted me to relay the message to all you lowly chums as
she has some twisted intention to forward the message to distant
relatives living out near where our sweet nation's beaches are tousled
my the Atlantic.

I had taken the 2.50 Ringett bus to Batu Ferringhi, briefly mingling
with a female Muslim university student of architecture. She wanted to
stitch clothing for a living while her mother had hopes of her as an
architect. To date, from my encounters, it seems many women are
interested in creative pursuits that are not based as a financial
decision in benefit to the family such as fashion design and
landscaping - I think this is a significant sign of the wealth in
Malaysia - that students are progressively freely choosing their
majors.

I got off the bus and found a 40 ringett hostel to keep my stuff and
prepped for a walk on the beach. Camera, book, sunglasses, lose the
undies. I grabbed one of those wood mats you see hippies with and
found a great spot between sections of shade after surveying a myriad
of multi-racial hotties who (I think) returned looks in their
well-fitted clothing. I peeled off my shirt, tightened the strap on my
shorts and jumped in. I thought of Gattaca and after spewing salt
water from my nose and mouth after a shallow dive, I had an eerie
feeling as I often do of the lurking threats under tan and green
waves. As the only swimmer outside of five feet from the beach line, I
felt a rush of ego-driven joy and a sense of total freedom, imagining
multicolored jewels of stranger's eyes following my strokes from the
scalding beach, watching with fascination as a pasty white boy
effortlessly moved through various techniques such as doggy paddle and
back stroke.

It was like I thought for a moment that the blurred figures in black
hijabs dotting the coast may never realise the freedom that lapped
their knees, with thick black cotton that obscured their golden skin,
floating atop the continuous lathering waves.

I had just switched to backstroke when I was stung back into reality.
Immediately I felt a sharp sting pulse from my ankle and toes, a
sensation somewhere between the initial prick when doctors test the
iron content of blood to the sting of a wasp.

I might have thought of the microscopic stingers that nibbled on my
thighs in ko-lanta but I was quickly zapped, stung, gagged, wrapped
and poisoned by some unseen, nearly invisible full grown jellyfish.
It's razor tentacle stingers fitted with poison ducts hang from a
mindless gelatinous translucent head with beautiful drapes that give
the swimming effect. These needle embedded strings wrapped like wet
seaweed around my limbs, shoulders, chest and back. Shocked and struck
by sharp stabbing pains all over my body, I tried to forcibly push my
body from the several foot-long prehistoric executioner, kicking deeply into the murky waves. I pried it from my neck and doggy paddled away. I tried to casually exit the water. Salt gnawed at my open wounds and as I slumped onto the beach, I came up to a group of film students, the same female group as had been a focus of my pre-jellyfish attention. In my most unfrightened and sincere voice, "I have just been stung by a jellyfish and wonder what I should do," I said (quoted loosely) They suggested what I already knew - get it checked.

The red lashed marks of elevated skin had white spots where the
stingers had stuck to my arms, chest, neck and back.

(Even now as I write this 10 days later, I scratch at my collar bone,
where I can feel stingers, now without poison, still jammed into my
flesh. It feels like a razor burn coupled with a mosquito bite).

I quickly grabbed all my stuff on the beach and tromped back to the
hostel as inconspicuously as one can being a bare chested foreigner in
a nation of Muslims who looks as if he's just been whipped by the sea.

I found my hostelier as he had been, laid out on one of several chairs
that lined the small beige colored door less entrance. His eyes had nearly succumbed to gravity until my Italian-made leather-bound flip flips slapped his cement floor. I had forgotten to take my flip flops off
and as he startled to consciousness, he immediately chided me for
walking inside his portico with my sand covered thongs.

He told me first it wasn't fatal usually, then after giving my
upper body a look as I had been too scared to do, he asked if I
had trouble breathing.

Evidently I have large passageways because whether it's corn mottled
with crop dusted chemicals or sometimes fatal jellyfish attacks, I
don't seem to need any artificial breathing tool.

He said he had toothpaste and vinegar. In a somewhat aggravated voice I said,
"whatever works." I was beside myself with gum drilling pain. I wanted to
punch everyone within striking distance, drink a bottle of whiskey and pull my hair
out. The exact-o- blade slices all over my body burned intensely like bubbly acid in
waves that were constant and undiminished for hours. I stood pulling
my hair, pacing, trying to read 'Heart of Darkness' as I clenched my
teeth. He came back, some 40-something year-old over-weight
indistinguishable Malay, and rubbed Colgate blue toothpaste into my
bubbly, irritated skin. He said it was very bad and that if it didn't
get better in an hour or so, he would put the vinegar on. I had long
since submitted to his experience yet asked in a wavering but chesty voice,
trying my damnedest not to sound weak, if there were any doctors.

"No doctors, it's a government holiday," a fact I had known. He said
multiple times that the tattoos that wrapped around my flesh like bows meant I have sensitive skin. "it is not fatal," as if repeating it for himself.

Once the toothpaste felt insufficient to the egregious burns, or
basically 15 seconds after he put it on in globs and rubbed like mad
while I bite my finger, my towel, clenched my teeth and fists we
waited for 5 to 10 minutes and put the vinegar on.

He took me to a little brick wall that surrounded a water-logged
garden of dead plants and a hose used for cleaning feet near
the portico. After he rubbed the vinegar, pouring it onto my arms,
chest and neck, I paced the front of the hostel, quietly cussing to
myself while a pear-shaped European that seemed to think he'd entered the
earth with some innate knowledge of the world, said he'd gotten
stung before but that mine were the worst he'd seen. His remark
was not unique as I heard it many times over the next days.

Standing in front of the hostel, hardly an advertisement for swimming, a group of Malays walked by and I talked to several of them.
I tried to go upstairs and listen to music. I wrote a tormented second
and final section on a postcard to my parents. I walked half-naked to
the mail box down the street and also tried to get some food while
every family at the restaurant, man, woman and child, stared in curiosity or disgust.

Later I threw on a shirt and met up with the group of university
Malays. Even though I had nothing to say and the wounds still burned
with an intensity they would never know, with one even asking me if I
was bored, I thought to myself as I looked on the water that had for a
time looked so appealing, "am I that ego-centric that I need to tell
me whole story to everyone? Can I not think of questions to ask these
unique people that have lived as long as me? Do conversations
involving me have to revolve around me?" So I sat at that open
restaurant, at the head of the table closest to the water and leaned
back. My steel chair's back legs sank into the sand and I looked left.

The violent waves simmered and a thick, green leafed tree arched its
curling branch towards the ocean, stretching outward to hang just
above lounging customers. The tree hanging over the water
reminded me of the rhododendron gardens in Portland or The Thin Red
Line, a classic.

Later on, a group of guys and I went to get some food while their
beautiful female friends slept. I got some amazing shots of a sunset
and found a cone-shaped sea shell for one of the girls, Di Di.

Anyway, this story could continue but the sun is going down here in
Chiang Mai and I still need to get some food and walk through the
Sunday market.
I'll talk to my parents tonight and see if this is what they were looking for.

If any one of my friends actually reads all the way through, impressive
job. I am not sure how great the writing is, some is over-the-top and
other details might be totally arbitrary. If you want, you could even
send grammatical corrections... I am not really sure if I used
egregious correctly, I think not.


But I am very early in the process one must engage to eventually be
able to call himself or herself a writer.

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