What to do against SCUBA Withdrawal

Scuba withdrawal is real. Thousands, if not millions of divers around the world are kept from diving during these covid days. This is a serious mental health issue, with the well-being of many diving enthusiasts dependent on submerging near a nice coral reef. What can you do now, when stuck at home due to pandemically caused travel restrictions, or when landlocked due to local diving bans? A few options come to my mind:

Shoot Terrestrial Critters

One aspects of diving I personally really miss is underwater photography, especially macro underwater photography. It’s fascinating to seek out critters underwater, approach them carefully and take a shot with a good macro setup. Once back on dry land in front of my laptop I often discover really unusual structures on the bodies of these small animals. Monsters lurk in the macro size range! What I did during recent weeks is to photograph small animals on land, such as spiders and mollusks:

 

Garden slugs are great terrestrial macro subjects: They look creepy and don’t move very quickly, so it’s easy to get impressive shots. I like this one:

 

If you want to really impress, simply play with that blandly colored slug a bit in post-processing, and you get something which rivals the most fancy-arse nudibranchs seen anywhere between Dauin and Lembeh. It doesn’t look anywhere near a real nudibranch that, but it will garner likes on Instagram like a chick in a skimpy bikini in front of a waterfall in Bali. It’s crass post-processing what I did here, but not much tackier than the common “double exposure in-camera” images which make it look like a photograph of a sea slug in front of a sunburst.

Simply Shred and Burn your Money

Do you have too many American Dollars or Euros? Are you keen to lose some (British) pounds? Are you eager to give a hundred-and-fifty Euro a night to a diving resort owner to stay in a simple hut built with third world labor costs? Missing overpriced dives from sardine-stacked dive boats? Are you missing spending exorbitant amounts of money on dive gear? I have a solution for you:

Withdraw some of your money in small banknotes. Take a pair of scissors, and cut it up into small pieces. Take the fragments, and burn them. Take the ash, stir it into a small bowl of olive oil, and rub it into the hair on your head. Done.

You will have not have dived after doing all of this, of course, but the monetary aspects of  this procedure and a dive trip are pretty similar.

Not Seasick Enough?

There might be more than one aspect of scuba diving which you are missing: the critters, the weightlessness underwater, the camaraderie with other divers, and the seasickness during the aforementioned overpriced boat ride. A solution to reproduce this feeling is this procedure:

Take a can of corned beef, put it on a plate, let it sit in the sun for a day. Then eat it quickly, on an empty stomach. Feels very much like sea sickness, at a much more affordable rate.

Get Waterboarded

Finally, one for our friends the freedivers. Are you missing the thrilling sensation of not being able to breath? There is a highly adventurous alternative to actually freediving in the ocean.

Grow a big beard. Travel to the US. Go to a public place. Take a big knife, and swing it around (no need to actually hurt anyone). Put a black flag with some Arabic writing on a pole, and take it in your other hand. The writing doesn’t have to have anything to do with ISIS, since almost no US cop will be able to read Arabic (I can’t). It can be the first paragraph of “The Origin of Species” if you like. Yell “Alllah al akubahr!” or something like that. You have to make sure everyone understands you are not part of the current chaos over there, but something else, more sinister. A kind of retro-scare, at this point.

The ‘Murican authorities will arrest you, and put you in a place called “Guantanamo Bay”, a part of Cuba which they have been occupying for a long time now. There they will “waterboard” you, torture you by putting you in a state of near-drowning (for some reason the public outcry over these atrocities has died down a long time ago?). What the torture boys don’t know is that as a freediver you like to not breathe!

Epilogue

When I started this blog I primarily did so to write about scuba, underwater photography and travel. I thought that my thoughts on these topics would find an audience, and the things I wanted to communicate were too long and multi-media heavy for social media posts. Since then I also posted about marine biology for the popular science reader, and I wrote a few parodies. A lot of things are in an urgent need to be made fun of in this day & age.

I noticed that the last time I had posted a parody was in 2018, and I am wondering why that is. I am having the vague impression that times have become less humorous, with an unsympathetic undercurrent taking over Western civilization. Dead-serious moralizing is suffocating senses of humor. Folks in higher-up positions, especially in Anglo-Saxon academia, will have to think twice, three and four times before making any but the most bland jokes in public.

I can’t take any political movement or societal current which lacks a sense of humor seriously. It’s not Dionysian enough to deserve my respect. Educated adults are supposed to have a developed sense of irony.

A collateral of this recent culture-wide lack of humor is that a lot of recent events are self-parodies. A recent favorite is this call to rename all birds which had been named after white people, during a “bird renaming week”, in the name of some twisted notion of social justice. It’s hard to beat these people parodistically, even more so since an article meant as parody suggesting something similar now reads as an insufficiently subtle parody in retrospect.

So is it this competition by an increasingly bizarre real world which has made me almost quit as a parodist? Possibly.