A Salty sea Tale of conspiracy theories

The rain slammed against the fogged glass of the seaside diner. Inside, the booth was warm, smelled of burnt coffee, and vibrated with the kinetic energy of a gossip session in full swing. Sarah and Susan were talking, as they always did on Tuesday afternoons, though today the conversation had veered far off its usual track of neighborhood drama and drifted straight into the absurd.

"You are telling me you have never heard a salty tale?" Susan asked, leaning across the sticky formica table, her eyes wide with the theatrical excitement of a seasoned storyteller.

Sarah shook her head, clutching her thick ceramic mug with both hands to warm her fingers. "I know who Sergeant Salty is, because everyone who grew up around these docks knows the old man, but I always assumed his crew was just an urban legend made up by the local fishermen."

"Oh, they are as real as the barnacles on the pier," Susan whispered, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial murmur.

"Sergeant Salty and the misfits were the absolute menace of the entire harbor back in the early two thousands. And the night I am talking about? That was the night the whole gang blew sky high over the wild, untamed madness of a home brewed conspiracy theory about nine eleven."

Susan set the scene with painstaking detail. It was an autumn night back in the year two thousand four at Ye Olde Large Lad, a sprawling, dark timbered tavern down on the lower wharves. The pub was named after its proprietor, a man so impossibly wide and imposing that locals swore he had to walk through double doors sideways just to get into his own kitchen. The tavern smelled perpetually of stale ale, wet wool, and ocean brine, serving as the undisputed sanctuary for the town's most bizarre inhabitants.

Sitting in the back booth under a stuffed mounted swordfish that had seen better decades were the four regulars. There was Sergeant Salty, a grizzled veteran whose actual rank and branch of service nobody could ever confirm, clad in a faded navy fatigue jacket with mismatched brass buttons. To his left sat Whizzley, a twitchy and hyperactive sparkplug of a kid who spoke at three hundred words per minute and was currently vibrating in his seat after downing four cans of cheap energy drinks. Across from them slumped McFinleyyy, spelled with three y letter endings as he vigorously insisted on any document including his driver's license, a man whose eyes were permanently widened in a state of existential panic, clutching a thick accordion folded leather binder stuffed to bursting with newspaper clippings, polaroids, and red string.

"So what was McFinleyyy's big breakthrough?" Sarah asked, taking a quick sip of coffee.

"What was not his breakthrough?" Susan laughed, leaning back. "McFinleyyy had been locked in his attic for six weeks straight with a shortwave radio, three rolls of copper wire, and a stack of printouts from early internet message boards. He slammed his leather binder onto the sticky table at Ye Olde Large Lad so hard it knocked over a pitcher of beer, declaring that the official report on the September eleventh attacks was a massive cover up."

"Jet fuel and steel beams?" Sarah guessed.

"Oh, if only it were that simple," Susan said, shaking her head. "McFinleyyy was on a completely different planet. He claimed that the Twin Towers were never actually office buildings at all, but massive, disguised resonance transmitters built in the nineteen seventies to keep a secret giant deep sea entity asleep off the coast of New England. He believed the entire event was engineered by a cabal of rogue offshore drilling barons who wanted to wake the creature up so they could harvest its ancient hyper dense blubber for quantum fuel! He had hand drawn diagrams, Sarah! Diagrams in bright neon highlighter showing ocean floor anomalies, hidden elevator shafts, and thermite charges shaped like ancient trident symbols."

Sarah snorted into her mug, nearly choking on her coffee. "That is completely, utterly unhinged."

"It gets better," Susan continued, warming up to the narrative rhythm. "That was when Sergeant Salty jumped out of his seat and started shouting about animated cartoons. 

Salty swore up and down that The Simpsons predicted the whole cover up years before it ever happened! He was slamming his heavy fist on the table, ranting about an old episode from nineteen ninety seven where Bart holds up a magazine advertisement. Salty claimed that if you freeze frame the television screen and invert the colors, Matt Groening was sending top secret naval distress signals to warn the public about the deep sea creature and the offshore drilling rigs. Salty was convinced that the show writers were high ranking naval intelligence officers dropping cryptic hints through Homer Simpson!"

"The Simpsons?" Sarah burst out laughing. "Sergeant Salty was using Bart Simpson as classified military evidence?"

"He absolutely was!" Susan giggled. "Salty kept yelling that the cartoon was the ultimate proof because the government always hides the truth in plain sight on prime time television. Whizzley was hanging on every single word. Whizzley starts pulling out tangled masses of circuit boards, copper coils, and salvaged radio parts from his army surplus backpack, shouting about how he could construct a low frequency receiver right there in the tavern using a twelve volt car battery and the transformer from the neon sign in the window. He was convinced he could intercept the entity's heartbeat if they calibrated the antenna according to the broadcast frequency mentioned in that Simpsons episode. Meanwhile, Sergeant Salty was taking the whole thing dead seriously, treating the cartoon like a sacred tactical field manual."

"Tactical?"

"Oh, absolutely," Susan grinned. "Salty was barking out orders like they were preparing to storm the beaches of Normandy. He was telling McFinleyyy to secure the perimeter, ordering Whizzley to prime the frequency modulator based on Homer's line of dialogue, and screaming that the booth was compromised by government listening devices hidden in the salt shakers. He had them organizing an immediate covert midnight recon mission to the outer harbor lightship because he convinced himself the Coast Guard was using the cartoon signals to coordinate with the drilling cartel."

For nearly two hours, the misfits transformed the back corner of Ye Olde Large Lad into a frantic war room of high paranoia and escalating absurdity. McFinleyyy paced back and forth across the sticky floorboards, dragging his thumbs under his suspenders while laying out bizarre timelines connecting historical maritime weather patterns to animated television plots and shadow government cabals. Whizzley was furiously soldering wires together underneath the table, occasionally emitting a cloud of foul smelling rosin smoke that began to set off the tavern's primitive fire alarms.

The chaotic crescendo was finally reached when Ye Olde Large Lad himself, the six foot eight inch tall, four hundred pound landlord, decided he had endured enough. He lumbered out from behind the mahogany bar, his heavy boots making the floorboards groan, and stomped over to the booth. His massive hands rested on his hips like two granite boulders.

"He stood over them, looked down at McFinleyyy's sea monster diagrams, looked at Whizzley's sparking pile of junk, and then stared right at Sergeant Salty, who was currently standing on top of a bench attempting to attach a coat hanger to a portable radio," Susan described, gesturing wildly with her hands. "And Ye Olde Large Lad just growled in that deep foghorn voice of his, telling them they had exactly two minutes to pack up their government secrets and cartoon prophecies and get out of his pub before he threw them all off the end of the pier."

"Did they leave?" Sarah asked, thoroughly captivated.

"Leave? Sergeant Salty tried to court martial him!" Susan cackled. "He stood straight up, gave Ye Olde Large Lad a sharp military salute, and accused him of being an unregistered foreign agent on the payroll of both the deep sea drilling cartel and the fox broadcasting company. That was the absolute last straw. Ye Olde Large Lad picked up McFinleyyy's leather binder in one hand, grabbed Whizzley by the collar of his denim vest with the other, and practically carried them both out the front door into the pouring rain. Salty marched right behind them, shouting naval jargon and threats of a military tribunal all the way to the curb."

Sarah shook her head, laughing softly as the waitress arrived to refill their coffee mugs. "So what happened to the grand theory?"

"The rain turned McFinleyyy's maps and Simpsons printouts into soggy paper pulp in the gutter," Susan sighed contentedly.

"By the next morning, Whizzley had forgotten the whole thing because he found a discarded riding lawnmower engine to take apart, and McFinleyyy moved on to a new theory about how the moon is actually a giant hollow egg. But if you go down to the docks today and ask Sergeant Salty about September eleventh, he still lowers his voice, looks over both shoulders, and asks if you have watched any old animated reruns lately."