Well, then.  It’s the  bloody cyclicality of all things. What goes around, comes around.

It’s the dealer’s patter in five-card stud:  round and round and round we go, where we stop  nobody knows.

Freediving is a stern and seductive mistress, dear readers and only friends. Resilient, too, like Gunga Din.  Though I’ve beaten and I’ve flayed her, by the living God that made her, she’s a better man than I am – and she always wins in the end. You think the rules don’t apply to you? They do.  “Hello, your name is [insert your name here] and you’re a freediving addict.” That’s the first of twelve.

I’m back. Tail between my legs, braying under her balcony. And she’s let down her hair.

Again.

We humans have a deep need to know the reason for things. On this day The Plunger cowers before the chill winds of this winter’s severe global warming, well-bundled up in his study, staring out over a shallow brown Floridian lake but a stone’s throw from the vast wilderness we call the Everglades. New digs, and thanks to all that splendid googlographical technodrivel Plunger has selected and settled in a location about as far from the ocean as can be before one starts getting wet again, in the swamp.

Peaceful. Serene. Old Florida countryside, and then – eek. Goddam freediving does a pop-in to a lovely stream of consciousness painted in watercolor,a flotilla of wild ducks patrolling in perfect vee. Ducks, I say. Try it yourself. Picture the ducks, a glassy smooth lake…nice…and then longbladesbreatheupsfrenzelsreversepack… It’s like a sex thoughts pop-in to a perfectly pleasant daydream about golf and securitized mortgage obligations. Icky to the nth degree.

A year and a half in recovery, but The Plunger is back. One man’s recidivism is another man’s indominability, eh? Dive Hard VXIII: Not With A Vengeance, no, but with that little grunt we elderly make getting up out of an automobile.

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned. Sometime during the summer of 2008 I realized that I really, really hate freediving. That freediving is the perfect polar opposite of all that I love and cherish.

Odder still, this wasn’t the first run of that particular epiphany- oh, no. If we reel the tape back to the grainy black-and-white years of the mid-Twentieth century, and then fast forward, we’ll see this scene played out many times before the first mobile telephone appears (in color, by that time) in someone’s hand.

Different places, different reasons, maybe the same reason – I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist. Wait – I am a psychologist. No, wait – I bailed on that profession, and never relapsed. But this freediving business? The old love-hate thing? Lord, no, it’s the solidly traditional hate-hate thing. Much cleaner. There’s no getting away from it. You figure it out , send the bill to the DeeperBlue.com suits on The Plunger’s expense  account.

There’s doubtless one or more psychological explantations of it, but enough of the pseudosciences. Back to the freediving thing. Should have stayed out of the bloody swimming pool is what poor Plunger should have done.

They tell recovering dope addicts to avoid contact with the people and places associated with narcotics trade and culture. Recovering drunks are  warned to stay the hell out of pubs, aren’t they? Everyone knows that, so why-oh-why couldn’t The Plunger stay the hell out of swimming pools? One thing leads to another, and…

…next thing you know you’re there with your new buddy, a graduate of Bob & Irving’s Academy of Freediving and Poodle Grooming and a first-rate safety asset, banging out those, um, hypoxic swims (not dynamic apnea, that would be wrong) that are NOT repeat not a gateway drug to the hard stuff…not…

…and now it’s too late. Again.

I keep trying to get out, but they keep pulling me back in, pulling me back in…. Freediving? It’s like mobile telephones. Mobile telephones were great back when nobody had them. Now, they’re a total bloody nuisance. Freediving was great when it was skin diving  and nobody was doing it. Now the unwashed masses have it and are savaging it like a nun in a mosh pit.

Worse yet, my checkbook reports that I’ve paid for a series of courses, to be endured next month on some east-light-your-farts rock in the middle of the bloody Pacific.  Courses? Where are my bloody glasses, maybe it says “curses”. The receipts establish that your Plunger gets spit out the other end as some sort of diploma’d freediving instructor. So, not just a user. A dealer. A trafficker in the stuff. To support his habit. Dealing.

Picture old Plunger cruising with the other instructors. Massive predators lurking beneath the baitball of nervous wannabees, lazy cold eyes selecting an outlier, closing with a powerful stroke of massive fin and…

No.

Freediving Instructor Plunger’s marketing strategy and advertising message to the market is this: I’m going to run as fast as he can, but if you can catch me,  I guess I’ll have to teach you. Go away! He also pledges to work long and hard on this journal, making it hostage to his sloth. If you want more and better Plunger to read, leave him the hell alone to write it. May the market rule wisely.

But there are unopened shipping boxes all over the house, and Plunger knows there are items of freediving hardware in each of them. Plunger has hit sandy bottom. The only way from here is up. Perhaps that’s  Step 1? And the next eleven?

And then, there’s Project X.

Love to tell you more. It’s freediving, it’s art, it’s science and technology: it’s huge. Plunger is not at liberty to say another word. Not yet.

You know how sometimes you have headaches with pictures?

The Plunger

Tags: addiction, blog, couch potato, elderly, Florida, Freediving, lazy, martini, plunger, return