Peninsula Info, Pointers & Stop-off Spots
Called “the tip of the dangle, the head of the pin, & the pen at the end of the fingers,” the beloved Mishugunah Peninsula has been known by many names, depending on language, knower, namer, caller, time of day, specific location &/or particular map or eye-chart being stared at, pondered & read.
For a long while it was called the Unnamed Peninsula, and sometimes still is. Many texts refer to it as the Dang, Dangling, Irregular, Insular, Inverse &/or Perverse Peninsula. It was briefly called the Miss Nomer Spit, after Miss “Fanny” Nomer, best known by her married name, Mrs. Fanny Dangle, but later in life, Granny Fanny & Granny Dangle, the peninsula’s dowager spirit.
When Juan Donne wrote, “No man is an island,” he was presumably not thinking of a dangling peninsula. When his cousin Juanita wrote, “No woman is an isthmus attached only to herself,” she was presumably not thinking about Granny Dangling, or she might have reconsidered. Instead, she described herself as “a deep-bayed harbor with a warm welcome to thirsty seamen,” grist for Port Hole’s brochure-mills ever since.
“The journey must be worth its own time in pleasure, recreation, & sensational experience minute by minute at the time, because it doesn’t go or get anywhere, let alone leave you stranded in a foreign wilderness with no more than loin-cloth, pair of pasties, bamboo spear, & Fruitcake smart-card, good at any peninsula library for one free fruit-of-the-day, giving new meaning to both the Armchair Adventure & Couch-Potato Tango.”–Princess Pools Cruise Lines (“Set sail in a Princess Pool near you.”)
According to geological period, seasonal cycles, stage of the tides, time of day, phase of the moon, weather, & position of the particular breaking wave along any specific stretch of the irregular shore, the exact boundaries of the peninsula have varied considerably over time & space, & continue to vary–where land meets water, where water meets land, where water meets air, where air full of water meets land full of frogs, where the grunion hop, skip, jump & run…, where an occasional freak surge rises high above the last wave to reconfigure the beach-blankets, picnic baskets & grassy dunes.
Sometimes a piece of coast falls off, a cliff gives way, a cantilevered deck drops with its house of cards into a boomerang current, to land on other shores decades later, from surprising directions. Thus, the early explorer Hugo von Dare wrote in his log, with an unsteady hand, on stepping ashore, “The land moves, we move, bowels move. Nothing stays still here. Even the beach moves. I go….”
It turned out he’d landed on Sand Crab Beach, and it was indeed in motion, climbing up the inside of his pants, and traveling with him long after, proving just how hard it can be to precisely map of where places are, compared to where they were when you first met them. Such experiences, repeated many times by many people in different places & times, eventually led Sir Isaac Figg to formulate his Dislocation Hypothesis, sometimes called his “Theory of Everything’s Somewhere,” for which his membership in the Royal Scholars Hall of Knowledge Club was indefinitely suspended.
Sand Crab Beach National Recreation & Historic Site commemorates von Dare’s landing with a nightly “crab fest,” when campers (& resident sand crabs) discover who’s for dinner. “Eat what you love, love what you eat.” If you’d rather have dinner with the sharks, that can be arranged–the nearby Pool Shark Bar & Grill favors specialties like “Bar-B Q-balls in the Side Pocket,” “Catch Your Own Carp,” & “Cut Your Own Crap.” (But watch out for the “Sharktooth Soup,” which has been known to bite back.)
Wherever you go, and whatever you call it, the ____[Blank] Peninsula is sure to amaze & astound, with many specially designated National Recreation Areas catering to first, last & only time tourists, including aliens from other worlds like you. (Stay long enough for most of your organic molecules to cycle through & you’ll be as native as anyone else.)
From the wet & slimy tip of Far Tongue Spit to the wind-stripped top of Tippy Stone Peak in the remote Trippy Dippy Double-Scoop Range, down Seaweed Strait Gulch to the Mucky Marsh National Mosquito Refuge & Breedery, and back to the Voids (Middle, Upper & Lower–where the Big Crack of the Bottomless Gorge widens to accommodate many unforgettable scenic vistas & glass-bottomed overlooks), no place is just like any other.
This fact has prompted more than one literary critic to claim that Donne would have done far better with his geography had he left out, “No island is a peninsula, no peninsula an island,” since the __[Blank] Peninsula is both, depending on the moon & tides, spending a good part of its history disconnected from any larger land mass, on the one hand, yet ultimately connected to the earth’s tectonic plate & continental book shelf even so.
The historically & culturally minded will find more to marvel at than they ever expected, from Fort Arroyo in the south to Fort Fakakta in the north; pre-history in the east to post-history in the west; Periphery Center to Ragged Coast; wild fringe to civilized suburbs; natural history outside & unnatural inside–including inns, churches, temples, museums, galleries, performance spaces, theaters, stadia, planetaria, aquaria, libraria, etc.
The Peninsula is proud to call itself “home of the cheapest free press in the world,” with “more publications than you can shake your stick at,” from 24/7 Real Time Video Feed News (“exactly what’s happening locally right where you are”) & The M T Mirror-Times-Mirror to Literary Splinters Daily, The Port Hole Sun Telegraph, The Half-Court Guardian, & KNUMb Mime Radio. It is prouder still of its: peacocks, parks, pastries, pies, pasta, pepperoni, parades, pagan rites, pageants, panthers, panicles, pan-pipes, parallax, peas, palaver & people–past, present, & yet to be made up.
It is more proud still of its humility, composed of more or less equal parts of humidity, hominy, & humanity, “the humble species” (Homo humulus is generally considered a half-step more evolved than its arrogantly self-named cousin Homo sapiens, with which it could presumably still breed if it wanted to. If it wanted to, it would not be considered a half-step more evolved, however.)
You, too, may have heard that anonymous neo-neuro-scientists recently concluded, “If our brains were simple enough for us to understand, we wouldn’t be smart enough to.” It took a Bod Librarian to point out, “Since we don’t seem to be smart enough to understand, maybe our brains are simpler than previously thought.”
Coincidentally, the Mishugunah Peninsula is said to resemble the inside of a Bod Librarian’s brain, its Amygdala Cafe’ with Limbo Bar Limbic System inside an ivy-covered corner of the Hippo Campus Quad meeting a word-wide nerve-rich information network. Part of MU: Matchless University, the Hippo Campus houses all Hip College Hip Studies programs & the Hip-Hip-Hooray Business School (“a leader in school spirit, seminary & moonshine still research”).
No wonder the Peninsula loves its schools, colleges, universities, correspondence diploma mills, institutes, foundations, basement laboratories, & garage enterprises, as well as the stores, shops, merchants, treadmill makers, shakers & half-bakers who keep the economy going well enough to support on-going activities.
Assuming our activities continue, then, you can look forward to “More On the Mishugunah Peninsula” shortly or ASAP, whichever comes first.