Sometimes people need to learn to pull their heads out of their butts.
Personally, I’ve had to hold back this narrative of our last full day in San Diego because of how pissed off I get every time I sat down to write it. I’m just going to divorce myself from commenting on it in any detail.
The kids wanted to go to the beach. Fair enough, I’m told there’s one of those ocean things near San Diego, and in some places that sand stuff gets washed ashore. The children are not particularly strong strong swimmers in a swimming pool. In a moving body of water, they have to be considered strictly non-swimmers. A quick google looking for “best kids beach near San Diego” quickly hit upon something that sounded perfect. A beach with a man-made break water designed to make a calm, safe place for kids to go. Known as the “Children’s Pool Beach” – you couldn’t get a more perfect description of what I was looking for.
And so we went to La Jolla, where we discovered that a bunch of frickin’ seals, who apparently also think that beach is a great place to take their children thanks to the man-made breakwater, have taken residence in the area.
It seems that allowing those nasty human children on the beach (must I remind you? that was built for them) disturbs the seals. To help further the goal of breaking down the very fabric of human civilization, a group of dedicated crackpot, whack-a-loons…. (sorry, I promised not to editorialize)… concerned idiots… (nope, try again) fucktards (Yeah, that’s the word I wanted, “fucktards”) have seemingly setup a vigil to stop people from using the beach.
The city has been forced to put up official signs (I noticed the other beaches didn’t have them.) that say, in effect, “This public beach is for the public use at any time.” It has the same tone to it as the Los Angeles airport’s continual PA announcements that say, “You don’t have give money to any panhandling, religious nutjob organization begging for money in this airport at any time.” The signs are clearly in response to a chronic, ongoing problem with harassment.
You don’t have to look far to find it. The seal fucktards have erected signs all over the place, craftily worded to make it sound like you’re not allowed to go on the beach. Result of their efforts: No one was on the beach, not man nor beast, just lots of parents with their expectant children standing up at the top of the cliffs, looking longingly down on the inviting, yet stubbornly empty beach and the calm, placid waters beyond.
I have nothing against seals. I mean, what’s not to like about seals? They’re furry, cute, cuddly (until one decides to kill you) and they juggle and play the bicycle horn a lot better than I do. It’s seal fucktards I don’t care for. If a swarm of mosquitoes infested their children’s schools (assuming these people can even procreate) they’d demand them to be eliminated. (The mosquitos, not the children, although I wouldn’t put it past some of them to even get that backwards.)
If a great white shark had setup patrol in the children’s pool beach, they’d be all for getting rid of it. (Not because of the danger to children, of course, but because it might eat the seals), but apparently we can’t run the seals off from a man-made beach designed for children.
There’s a word for that kind of “conservationist”: (in addition to “fucktard”, that is) hypocrite.
And so we, and all the other parents, gave a small victory to the seal fucktards and moved on to another beach which wasn’t nearly as nice. (Bitter? I’m not bitter.)
(As an aside, I’ve done a bit of further research on this beach thing and have discovered that it’s quite a hot debate – go figure, some people have nothing better to do. They should start blogs instead. May I suggest blogs.fucktard,net? In any case, it seems the courts came to the right decision and ordered the city of San Diego to force the seals off the beach, but that’s been stalled by headline-desperate politicians, bean counters and… well, a damned stupid idea of dispersing the seals by playing recordings of dogs barking at the beach from sunrise to sunset for years to come. As I said, some serious head-from-butt-ectomies need to be performed.)
After a not-as-carefree-as-it-should-have-been day at the beach, we headed towards the Dumpling Inn, a somewhat famous local establishment serving northern chinese style dumplings, potstickers and the like. I could have eaten a couple more trays of their potstickers. They were really quite good.
We finished the day staying close to the hotel and a Cinderella carriage ride around the Seaport Village, which Michelle really wanted to do. Well, how could a father refuse his little princess such a small thing?