Space Aliens Have Infested My Gym Pool

There’s no other explanation for strangers talking to me

It was a quiet day when I arrived at the pool. Two of the three lanes were empty and the third occupied only by a single older woman placidly backstroking from one end to the other.

A peaceful pool gives me pleasure. When not surrounded by other pool-less proles I can imagine that I’m Elon Musk enjoying a morning swim before a day of plotting and X-posting.

A few minutes after I’d begun swimming, my reverie was interrupted by a stout, pasty, man in his fifties entering the pool and parking himself directly in my path some twenty feet away. He stared at me blankly, as if he’d forgotten why he was there and was shocked to find himself standing in three feet of water.

Perhaps this confusion was why he chose to encroach on my space; I can’t say. I grimaced and ducked under the rope to the empty centre lane.

But the worst was yet to come.

As I glided with the grace of a hairless otter toward the end of the pool where he was bobbing like a greasy bloated cork, he accosted me.

“Have you been a member here long?”

“What? No, about five months.”

“Do you like it?”

I did until now. “It’s fine. It has what I need.”

He nodded glumly. “Yeah.”

Taking advantage of the pause, I turned and plunged my ears, along with the rest of my head, underwater and paddled away.

But he was patient. On my return to his end, he was waiting with another conversational sally, eerily similar to the first.

“So, do you like this place?”

“It’s ok,” I said. Was he trying to trick me into changing my stance, and if so, to what purpose?

“Do you go month to month or contract? It’s what, fifty-eight dollars a month?”

“Month to month,” I said, wondering if he’d ask to see my bank account statement as proof.

“That’s about two bucks a day.”

I nodded. His math checked out.

“I just use the treadmill, mostly,” he said.

Oh my God what is this conversation? “I use the weights and the pool,” I said, gesturing vaguely in all directions. ‘So, yeah.”

He seemed stumped for a response, so once again I took the opportunity to slip away underwater. For the rest of our joint presence in the pool, I was careful not to surface when he was within shouting distance.

My point is this.

In the six months that I’ve been a gym member, no one on the floor has ever spoken to me except to ask if I’m using a piece of equipment, which is exactly how it should be.

The pool, however, is a different kettle of chlorinated fish. People are constantly engaging me in random, unnecessary, conversation. Some of these events I’ve already written about — my life is not that interesting — like the cheerful woman who dug my vibe and may have been selling Amway.

Others I haven’t regaled y’all with, like the dude in the Speedo who asked me where to buy goggles, although I was the only one of the five people in the pool area not wearing goggles. Pal, how do you not see that I am your worst possible source for this information? Also, Amazon ffs!

There are other stories, each one duller than the last, but building incrementally to a mass of aggravation that could eventually lead to pool-based PTSD.

There are a few possible reasons for this aberrant behaviour.

The first is that since the pool is an enclosed environment with a small number of users, some people are uncomfortable unless they interact socially with their lane mates. I don’t understand this, but I accept that not everyone can be as misanthropic as me.

Another reason might be that when wet I radiate an ineffable spiritual quality which compels strangers to approach me in the hope that my aura of calming water-based wisdom will rub off on them. It’s probably not this.

The most likely answer is that these chatty “people” are actually cetacean space aliens who’ve been stranded on Earth, and like their Terran cousins, require complete immersion in water at regular intervals to stay alive. While friendly, they are still learning the social skills necessary to interact with primates and prefer to practice in the environment where they’re most at home.

Farfetched as this theory sounds, you and I both know I could pitch it on YouTube and acquire thousands of monetizable believers in a few days. That doesn’t make it true, but it would make it fun.

In the meantime, I’m studying whale speech online (humpback, sperm, and blue) and once my whistling and clicking are fluent, I’ll test it on the next person who speaks to me in the pool.

I’m looking forward to their response.