Pool Days

When I was younger I used to be the most timid little person in the world. In all honesty I didn’t really come out of my shell until my senior year of high school when I took up skateboarding and found punk rock. Don’t get me wrong, I think that stuff is kind of douchey now, but it was a necessary evil to help me become the more outspoken smartass I am today. Since I was such a shy kid I’m often left wondering how my life would be different had I felt comfortable enough to speak out in certain situations instead of keeping my mouth shut and my head down.

After thinking about a couple of these situations I realize that a lot of them happened in or around a pool facility. I guess it makes sense that my maxed out sheepishness would come at a place that I was absolutely terrified of, for the most part. I know it seems like I’m invincible and couldn’t possibly be afraid of anything because of my extreme manliness, but I used to be deathly afraid of water. Just deep water, though. If I was afraid of all water I’d probably die of dehydration and I would have thought my penis was trying to kill me every time I had to urinate. Not a whole lot of people realized I was afraid of deep water, though, because I tried to play it off like I was too cool to swim. I was like “oh no, man, swimming in the pool is a child’s game. I’ll just tan on the side and try to score bitches.”

Anyways, the first situation that I remembered from the pool area is when I was a junior high-ish age. I went to the country club pool with my family. When I got there I was just doing my thing in the shallow end of the pool when I noticed a group of four girls kind of looking at me. I immediately looked in the complete opposite direction, almost snapping my own neck and drowning in water that was two feet deep. I clawed out of that son-of-a-bitching pool like I was getting attacked by a sea creature. Right then I knew it was going to be a long fucking day.

I didn’t know what these girls were up to. All I knew is that on average half of all girls are good and the other half are pure evil. So it was really a coin flip to whether this was going to be miserable situation, or an awkwardly miserable situation. Well as it turns out one of the girls, a rather cute one I might add, liked me. That’s all well and good, but I was shy and didn’t know how to handle it, particularly with my parents right there to witness it all. Some of the girl’s friends even approached my dad to ask what my name was. I had no clue what to do. I was a little too old to use the “girls have cooties” excuse. I also didn’t just want to end up dry humping her on the side of the pool in front of my parents. I simply managed by pretending I was playing hard to get with the girl, and acting like I was completely oblivious in front of my folks.

A few years later, when I was 14-ish I had another family pool outing… At the same fucking pool, no less. This time immediately upon entry a smoking hot life guard approached me. She started asking me questions and revealed that she thinks we went to elementary school together. Usually I have a fantastic memory for things like this and I didn’t remember her at all. I reduced it to the fact that she was probably just trying to pick me up so she could get a little bit of the Josh. The only problem was I had absolutely no fucking idea how to handle the situation. Again, I resorted to quick, short answers to her questions, making absolutely no eye contact and then just awkwardly walking away before anybody said “goodbye”… You know, the way most of my conversations with women are now.

Needless to say, I’m fucking terrified of going to pools now. All my memories of them consist of awkward situations with women and people begging me to jump off the diving board, followed by mental images of myself drowning like an asshole. After all, who would drown at a public pool except an asshole? You know you can’t swim, so why dive in, make a scene and ruin everybody’s day?

I guess the moral of this story is, had I been more comfortable in my own skin and actually talked and tried to date some of these girls it might have actually been a confidence builder. I would have broken out of my shell earlier and even enjoyed life more. Not to mention I probably would have gotten laid years before I did, which we all know is really the only important thing in life.

Category: General Posts