Every year, Discovery shows a week’s worth of programming dedicated to the torpedo-shaped beauties known as sharks doing all kinds of incredible things, like swimming, chomping, and what summer was made for (having a kickass time at the beach). But one thing has been curiously absent from Shark Week’s 30-year history: a depiction of sharks dating nice guys like me. And that’s because there’s no recorded instance of it ever happening.
I am a very nice man who has treated sharks with nothing but respect. Even at aquariums, I am very careful to not objectify sharks. Instead, I celebrate their beauty and empower their right to feel sexy (and even though some sharks deserve more right to feel sexy than others, I champion them all equally). But no matter how nice I am to sharks, they still refuse to let me be their boyfriend.
Discovery Channel’s silence on this matter is deafening.
The guys that sharks are always interested in are dudes like Quint from Jaws or Jacque Cousteau. Douchebags and peeping Tom’s who have one thing in common; they’re not me.
Most recently, I did something that I didn’t receive enough gratitude for: I posted a tweet about how I would only vote for a president who was a shark, since it’s high time we had one to clean up the mess humans have made. Yet in the wake of my bombshell tweet, not a single shark fucked me. Which, of course, wasn’t the point, but if I were a shark, and I had the choice to fuck someone who DID tweet that versus someone who DIDN’T, I’m going to choose the guy that did, every time.
To me, one of the saddest things imaginable is when I watch a shark have sex with another shark. Did you know sharks bite their mate during sex to hold on? I would never do that. Instead, I’d buy the shark jewelry, flowers, and tickets to concerts for bands that I love but they’re only vaguely interested in. If a shark is having sex with another shark (AKA an asshole), that just means they don’t respect themselves enough to have sex with me. As an aquatic ally, I find that heartbreaking.
I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my life. When I was 2 years old, I had a very lucrative job as the spokesperson for Dollar General’s short-lived clothing line aimed at toddlers who wanted affordable clothes, but didn’t want to skimp on style. Then 9/11 came around, and I made some public comments that the company determined were “inappropriate,” and I was fired. With only the huge sum of money I earned for the minimal work I did while employed, and my extremely wealthy parents to support me, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps to become the man I am today.
I’m currently working towards getting my degree in marine biology, but I have a problem: every time I see a shark (or a fish that looks like a shark from far away), my eyeballs shoot out of my head and my pupils turn into little hearts. It really messes with my goggles, which any scuba diver will tell you, are actually very important.
Once, my diving partner almost died because I saw an 11-foot-long absolute smokeshow of a mako shark and my eyeballs burst out of my skull with such force that they struck my dive partner and knocked him out cold. (I saved his life by returning to the surface and saying, “Oh, he’s still down there,” when my instructor asked where my partner was).
Then of course there was the ultimate hardship I faced when I entered a chili cookoff and the judges deemed my chili “spicy, but not especially flavorful.” Truly traumatic.
It may not be fashionable to admit this, but sharks and humans have very different brains. Humans are able to use logic and reasoning to make rational decisions divorced from emotions. Sharks don’t work that way. 70% of a shark’s brain is dedicated to the sense of smell because they’re always looking for their next meal, and they don’t care whose heart they break along the way.
Maybe they should try smelling the cologne I bought to impress them, even though my dive instructor begs me not to wear it since it pollutes the water. I keep telling him, “I know there’s a slick, rainbow-colored film that fills the ocean from my cologne, and dead fish are floating to the surface within a 5-mile radius of me, but I’m too goddamn horny to consider the environmental consequences of my actions.”
Knowing full well that Discovery Channel would never address the fact that sharks won’t fuck nice guys, I decided to rent out a submarine, borrow my little brother’s Flip Video, and go deep into the Mariana Trench with one goal; to make a documentary about romancing, consummating, and marrying the megalodon. If I can make a 3.6 million year old shark be my girlfriend, then maybe that will show all sharks that it’s okay, even cool, to be the girlfriend of all the nice guys out there.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a 60-foot-long shark to neg.