Message in a Bottle

I’m wondering what the modern day equivalent of a message in a bottle might be?  And whether people still do that–put messages in a bottles and toss them into the sea.  I suppose it would be environmentally unacceptable these days.  Where would one get a glass bottle within cooee of the sea, anyway?  Soft drinks mostly come in plastic bottles, and tossing one of those into the ocean would be a big no-no.  And who in the world would ever pick up a plastic bottle that had washed up on the beach?  Never happen.

I just read an item about a young surfer in Croatia who found a bottle with a soggy message to Mary, sent by Jonathan 28 years ago from Nova Scotia.  It’s a sweet story–the sort that makes the more sentimental amongst us go “Awwwww,” but it just made me think, “what do folks do today?”  It’s the stuff short stories are made of, but I suck at writing short stories, so I’m urging those of you who do have the knack to have a go writing a story about a message in a bottle.  I’ll publish it right here on MM.

Meanwhile I’ve been cogitating on what might be the possible modern equivalent of the message in a bottle.  Nothing I can think of seems feasible;  I reckon it would wind up in the Spam file.  Admittedly, I occasionally have emails and texts go astray, not arriving until days later, making me look like a goose, but I just can’t imagine an email, or SMS, or even a blog comment taking 28  years to arrive.  Lets face it–28 seconds is plenty long enough to wait for a message!

Here’s something else to ponder:  I reckon that with all the advances in forensic science, a person who decides to risk the odium of being identified as an environmental polluter could find himself hauled up by authorities in Miami who find the plastic bottle in the throat of the poor dolphin who tried to eat it and they track him down on the other side of the world by identifying the type of paper and ink used in the note and then they narrow down the list of the only places where both of those are sold and the store that sells them both which is in CapeTown and they match the handwriting to a credit card signature and finally his DNA is found in the saliva on the lip of the bottle, and if being arrested for animal cruelty, littering, and pollution of the ocean isn’t  bad enough, he finds out that the Love of His Life, to whom the message was written,  is now dead from food poisoning which she got from the last meal they had together.  Which he cooked.

On further consideration, I don’t think that’s likely to happen.  Hardly anyone uses paper and ink anymore.      MM