Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

My Google search history for today includes “pink fleshy thing washed up on beach.” On a morning walk, the tide out at Hunting Island, I came upon a softball sized, roughly round chunk of meaty pink thing. I prodded the thing with my toe, flipped it over. No appendages that I could see. If you vacuum-sealed meaty pink thing and stuck a “Pork Loin $3.99lb” tag on it at the grocery store, not too many people would question it. This makes sense, since Google says it’s called sea pork. And the variety I was seeing isn’t the only type. It comes in different shapes and colors, all of them incredibly gross. They’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years. No one wants them.

So, can you eat it? I had the same question. I’m always looking to save a few bucks on food. But evidently it would taste briny and bland and rubbery. I’m surprised one of America’s fast food chains has not slapped it on a bun. 

I also came across a recently deceased horseshoe crab, just as ancient as sea pork, but quite a bit more terrifying. Imagine, if you will, an army of sea pork riding upon their horseshoe battle crabs, and you’ll reconsider the beach and ocean as places of serenity. 

Later in the day I went fishing. I have these pants that are also shorts, with a zipper that separates them at the knee. I can kick off the bottoms, wade out and cast, then return to shore and make them pants again, which I did, since it was a bit cool out. I really like highly functional clothing and other objects. As a kid, I remember being fascinated with the Swiss Army Knife and all its multi-tools. An appealing aspect of camping, for me, is all the design that goes into camping and hiking equipment. Things are made to save space, to have novel uses, to be durable and handy, not unlike myself. 

Now that I’m entering the stage of life where I’m less inclined to sleep in a tent, I find that campers are on a similar wavelength. A table and a small seating area, after some tetris-like maneuvering, become an additional double-bed. There’s ingenuity that goes into fitting nearly everything a house might have into, in my case, something half the size of even a tiny house.

Technically my camper is about 125 square feet, but a third of that is a bed. A better (more expensive) design would have made that bed a Murphy bed. A spork is another good example of a multi-tool. Phones are perhaps the best example, of course. It’s a phone, but it’s also a flashlight, a camera, a map, a TV, and a hundred other things. Some items I’d like to see included in this field of design: