Thar be monsters

This is a super-stressful week at work, the sort of week that makes me zone out on videos of kittens and unchallenging American sitcoms just so my brain can untense enough for me to be reasonable with the F-word and then fall asleep. But instead, last night, I watched Coast and then, from the same provider, a BBC documentary about lake monsters.

Coast is a cute show. I don't know if I'll watch the 2 to 4th series, though, as they get rid of the skinny geographer host whose endearing manner reminds me of Geoff the First Time Cottager and put pretty Scottish longhair Neil Oliver on the marqée instead. If I want hot, I'll go ogle the chef at my favourite pizzeria, thank you, when I go to the BBC I want pure fucking geek. Also my part of the coast gets covered in the first series, and now that it's behind me I find myself not caring as much anymore.



We'll see.

The monster one was great. I have a thing for people who spend loads of time and money hunting lake monsters. There's something really sweet about it, almost as sweet as it is silly, but I also find it annoying, as there are so many really phenomonally beautiful and interesting things in the world that actually exist, and why not gawk at those?

But since I started kayaking alone once in awhile, I understand the psychology of sightings a little better. When it's silent and the water is dark, and shapes loom out of it occasionally, and the sounds are odd and once in awhile the way the waves hit your boat sounds like a big solid thing brushing against it, all that shit could be anything. I nearly screamed once on the La Vase when I spotted some bizarre bladdery water weeds because I thought they were a corpse - it took seconds of frantic reasoning with myself to keep looking at them instead of paddling away like a madwoman, and realize they were bladdery water weeds. Also once in Scotland I saw a seal playing on the surface of Loch Lomond, and the way those wee animals swim around, weaving up and down on the surface of the water, looks like all the classic bumpy monster descriptions.

Anyways, here's the documentary, it's good for the evenings your brain hurts and you want to hear the funny way people from Vermont and upstate New York talk.