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saltdawgI’m hiding. Hiding in my cabin, with my radio strapped to my hip, just in case. I’m hiding in my cabin because there is no work to be done, and we are eight degrees north of the equator on the Indian ocean. No work to be done because we are in force nine seas, with blue water coming over the bow. Blue water shooting up and over the foremast, fifty or sixty-odd feet above sea level.
When I was young, real young, I was convinced of the inevitability of my fame. That was a long time ago, and I know it isn’t really a unique thing to think. Or to desire. When you are young, at least. I never really gave it much thought as to how exactly I would become famous, I simply believed it was going to happen, because that’s what you do when you are young. If I wasn’t so completely mediocre in the best aspects of my person, I would have realized that there really isn’t anything all that special about who I am. I would have realized that I lacked a certain focus of passion necessary for someone mediocre and unconnected to overcome those obstacles. If I was a smarter person I would have found something to really focus on, something that would set me apart and buoy me to the heights that I imagined were my destiny. I would have learned to act beyond a high-school drama club level. I would have learned to play an instrument. But I didn’t. I let myself drift along on the currents of mediocrity, eagerly gobbling up faint praise as a taste of greater things to come. Drifting along and getting caught in the eddies of temporal pleasures, which only diffused my (lack of) focus even further.
As I got older I realized the impossibility of my earlier notions. I understood that I had to actually do something in order to be recognized outside of the circles of acquaintance I moved in. But, still, with that same youthful naïveté, I thought that the way to become recognized was by writing. I deluded myself that I was unique enough that it was a given that by simply processing my discreet vomit through a typer, I could be the next Raymond Carver, Bukowski, or, failing that, a B-grade Vonnegut. And if you are reading this, you know well enough that I fall well short of the mark in all of those cases. Despite my very best efforts, and those efforts came few and far between.
You see, I have problems with marshalling myself and disciplining my behaviours. Though I long ago decided that the only legacy I want to leave for this world would be constructed out of words and feeling, rather than just another sloppy insemination experiment, I have a great deal of difficulty focusing on anything other than the temporal and immediate. I fear I never really progressed much past Freud’s oral-fixation stage of development. I suck on bottles of booze, cigarettes and stuff my face with food. Thankfully, I got sick on chewing tobacco early on. I chew a lot of gum and do a whole lot of not really thinking about what is really going to come next. When I write something, I am so careless that I rarely revise, rewrite. After I write something, after the moment passes, whatever puke I processed in the typer disgusts me and I abandon it. And quite often, I do so in this orphanage, this foster home of anonymity in cyberspace. What I write disgusts me and gets abandoned because I realize that good writing comes from an author’s natural understanding of universal truth. And I am so firmly entrenched in my own fucked up sense of truth, that any universals I may expose are simple happenstance. And I lack the artistic reach to distill those truths, much less recognize them.
So. I find myself, I delude myself, that the life I lead is my ultimate work of art. I still have the fundamental need to separate myself from the hoi-poli, in some not-so-small way, but the scales have fallen from my eyes and I realize that fame just isn’t in the cards for me. No historical figure I. Nothing special here, only the larval soul of a human in a middle-aged boy’s body. I’m fond of telling the people that I once called my friends that everybody needs to know at least on drunken sailor and I do my best to live up to that credo. I do my best because that is what happened to me. The sailor part, I mean. That’s the only thing in my life that separates me from all the other dime-a-dozen drunks you or I know. Instead of drinking in the same place every night, I travel for thousands of miles to find the best dives in the world to get drunk in. If anything, the ‘sailor’ part of my drunken sailor paradigm is the only thing that props up my delusion that, somehow, the manner in which I live my life is some sort of artistic expression. When, in fact, it’s only a marker I have managed to exploit to make my life into a sort of cautionary tale. An exemplar of the fact that it’s possible to ruin any promise anyone ever believed in you, even if you’ve seen places they have never, ever heard of.
So I’m hiding in my cabin. Avoiding busy work and sporty weather, with nothing to do but type. I’m hiding in my cabin with something inside my chest that I want to write down, but I’m too dull to be able to articulate it. I’m hiding in my cabin with all the implements of fame at my fingertips. A typing machine, time, and this restless feeling in my chest that needs release. But the thing is that hiding in your cabin a couple of hundred miles off the coast of Somalia is the last place anyone got famous. And even though I can’t articulate the cryptic messages my soul is tapping out in heart palpitations, I at least know part of what it’s trying to say.
The U.S. cut off trade, at least maritime trade, with Libya in the mid seventies. We pulled our embassy in ’80, and things went steadily downhill between the two countries after that. My memory may be off, but Quadaffi declared his “line of death” at 32. 20N across the gulf of Sidra around ’86, and there were a couple of rounds of massive air strikes to the country after that. I remember Tom Brokaw reporting the bombings on the TV when I was a teenager, and I remember being terrified that there would be a war, and a draft, which would of course lead me to bleed out somewhere in the desert, truncating and trumping any grander designs I may have had for my life. But, as you probably well know, since Mr. Bush’s war on “terrorism”, Libya has been quite solicitous and contrite towards the U.S. and things have improved between our countries.
I was surprised to see the port of Benghazi, Libya on my list of ports o’ call for this hitch. I was surprised to see that my ship would be going there even though I knew full well that trade sanctions had been lifted a year or so ago. I was just surprised because it wasn’t one of the typical ports for the ships in our fleet to discharge cargo. And when I arrived back on the ship, there was scuttle-butt that we were going to be the first US vessel into Libya since 1976.
Of course I dismissed the rumors. You tend to hear a lot of crap like that out at sea. There isn’t much to talk about, and being separated from real people and society for such large chunks of our lives, seamen tend to grow less informed gullibule and, well, stupider, the longer we spend on the water. Sure I believed that we were one of the first ships into Libya, but the actual first US merchant vessel to cross the ‘line of death’ and discharge cargo? I was dubious to say the least.
But as we grew close to the line of death, it became apparent that we were certainly a novelty, at least, for the Libyans. We just missed the dusk cut off for mooring in the harbour in the evening of the fifteenth, and anchored off the coast. The next morning, I was on watch when the Pilot boarded the ship shortly after dawn. As we were getting underway, I escorted him up to the bridge and I asked him if it was true that we were the first Americans into the country since the embargo was lifted. I asked him and you know what he told me? He said:
No Americans for thirty years…We write this in the book for the history…
After I deposited him on the bridge, I scrambled down to the fantail to man my mooring station. It was the second mate and my watch partner out there, and I told them the news. I told them that I had actually confirmed with the pilot, who would be an authority on such things, that we were indeed the first US merchant ship into Libya in almost thirty years. They looked at me and without saying anything at all they made me feel the wallop of a giant “duh!”, as if it hadn’t even occurred to them that there was any question the rumor wasn’t gosple truth.
So we pulled into the harbour without any fanfare. No tugs spraying multi-coloured water fine on the bow. Momar wasn’t standing on the quay in flowing robes with gifts of frankincense for us. Just some stevedores and representatives from the world food program. But you better believe that when we lowered the gangway, I was the first one to scramble down and jump into the dirt and filth of the dock to help position the gangway and set the safety net.
I jumped down into the dust and filth and into history in a very anonymous but personal way. Despite what the pilot told me about the books for the history, I know that our discharging of 7,000 long tons of sorghum on July sixteen and seventeen, back in aught-five, won’t be recorded in any special or specific way. There won’t be any record of the name of my ship in any place other than bureaucratic files. The shipping company I work for won’t garner any international recognition for finally bringing a concrete resumption of maritime trade between the states and Libya after thirty years. And there certainly weren’t any reporters from CNN or al-jazera clambering to record my name or take my photograph. If I’m lucky, ENCARTA will revise their 'Libya' section in a year or two to include a sentence that “trade between the US and Libya resumed in 2005.”
I know that being the first Merchant Marine to set foot on Libyan soil in thirty years really isn’t of interest or note to anybody but myself. I’ve been trying to live my life into a work of art for lack of any real talents or abilities, and at the same time I’ve been destroying my ‘greatest’ work of art as a cautionary tale. I know that by being selfish enough to want the rights to the private boast of first landfall, I haven’t proven anything to anybody. Not even myself. It doesn’t prove anything, and it isn’t historic in way, except in my own languid imagination. But maybe, what I’m feeling in my chest, what I need to write about, but am too stupid and inarticulate to recognize, is the fact that I’ve finally realized my personal goal of…well certainly not fame, but an accomplishment which is above and beyond anything anybody else could ever lay claim to. And maybe, just maybe, by realizing that, all this tension, all this disappointment and failure is starting to dissipate. Maybe that three and a half foot jump from gangway to pier was the discreet ‘artistic’ gesture I needed to make in order to move the fuck on...Move the fuck on, and start working on something with a core made of something other than selfish personal significance.
Or, more likely, it’s just another sea story I’ll blather about at the bar after my fifth drink. Just something else the people I used to call my friends can call a bunch of self-important bullshit after I tell them. After my back is turned, so I can move on to my sixth vodka gimlet.
When I was young, real young, I was convinced of the inevitability of my fame. That was a long time ago, and I know it isn’t really a unique thing to think. Or to desire. When you are young, at least. I never really gave it much thought as to how exactly I would become famous, I simply believed it was going to happen, because that’s what you do when you are young. If I wasn’t so completely mediocre in the best aspects of my person, I would have realized that there really isn’t anything all that special about who I am. I would have realized that I lacked a certain focus of passion necessary for someone mediocre and unconnected to overcome those obstacles. If I was a smarter person I would have found something to really focus on, something that would set me apart and buoy me to the heights that I imagined were my destiny. I would have learned to act beyond a high-school drama club level. I would have learned to play an instrument. But I didn’t. I let myself drift along on the currents of mediocrity, eagerly gobbling up faint praise as a taste of greater things to come. Drifting along and getting caught in the eddies of temporal pleasures, which only diffused my (lack of) focus even further.
As I got older I realized the impossibility of my earlier notions. I understood that I had to actually do something in order to be recognized outside of the circles of acquaintance I moved in. But, still, with that same youthful naïveté, I thought that the way to become recognized was by writing. I deluded myself that I was unique enough that it was a given that by simply processing my discreet vomit through a typer, I could be the next Raymond Carver, Bukowski, or, failing that, a B-grade Vonnegut. And if you are reading this, you know well enough that I fall well short of the mark in all of those cases. Despite my very best efforts, and those efforts came few and far between.
You see, I have problems with marshalling myself and disciplining my behaviours. Though I long ago decided that the only legacy I want to leave for this world would be constructed out of words and feeling, rather than just another sloppy insemination experiment, I have a great deal of difficulty focusing on anything other than the temporal and immediate. I fear I never really progressed much past Freud’s oral-fixation stage of development. I suck on bottles of booze, cigarettes and stuff my face with food. Thankfully, I got sick on chewing tobacco early on. I chew a lot of gum and do a whole lot of not really thinking about what is really going to come next. When I write something, I am so careless that I rarely revise, rewrite. After I write something, after the moment passes, whatever puke I processed in the typer disgusts me and I abandon it. And quite often, I do so in this orphanage, this foster home of anonymity in cyberspace. What I write disgusts me and gets abandoned because I realize that good writing comes from an author’s natural understanding of universal truth. And I am so firmly entrenched in my own fucked up sense of truth, that any universals I may expose are simple happenstance. And I lack the artistic reach to distill those truths, much less recognize them.
So. I find myself, I delude myself, that the life I lead is my ultimate work of art. I still have the fundamental need to separate myself from the hoi-poli, in some not-so-small way, but the scales have fallen from my eyes and I realize that fame just isn’t in the cards for me. No historical figure I. Nothing special here, only the larval soul of a human in a middle-aged boy’s body. I’m fond of telling the people that I once called my friends that everybody needs to know at least on drunken sailor and I do my best to live up to that credo. I do my best because that is what happened to me. The sailor part, I mean. That’s the only thing in my life that separates me from all the other dime-a-dozen drunks you or I know. Instead of drinking in the same place every night, I travel for thousands of miles to find the best dives in the world to get drunk in. If anything, the ‘sailor’ part of my drunken sailor paradigm is the only thing that props up my delusion that, somehow, the manner in which I live my life is some sort of artistic expression. When, in fact, it’s only a marker I have managed to exploit to make my life into a sort of cautionary tale. An exemplar of the fact that it’s possible to ruin any promise anyone ever believed in you, even if you’ve seen places they have never, ever heard of.
So I’m hiding in my cabin. Avoiding busy work and sporty weather, with nothing to do but type. I’m hiding in my cabin with something inside my chest that I want to write down, but I’m too dull to be able to articulate it. I’m hiding in my cabin with all the implements of fame at my fingertips. A typing machine, time, and this restless feeling in my chest that needs release. But the thing is that hiding in your cabin a couple of hundred miles off the coast of Somalia is the last place anyone got famous. And even though I can’t articulate the cryptic messages my soul is tapping out in heart palpitations, I at least know part of what it’s trying to say.
The U.S. cut off trade, at least maritime trade, with Libya in the mid seventies. We pulled our embassy in ’80, and things went steadily downhill between the two countries after that. My memory may be off, but Quadaffi declared his “line of death” at 32. 20N across the gulf of Sidra around ’86, and there were a couple of rounds of massive air strikes to the country after that. I remember Tom Brokaw reporting the bombings on the TV when I was a teenager, and I remember being terrified that there would be a war, and a draft, which would of course lead me to bleed out somewhere in the desert, truncating and trumping any grander designs I may have had for my life. But, as you probably well know, since Mr. Bush’s war on “terrorism”, Libya has been quite solicitous and contrite towards the U.S. and things have improved between our countries.
I was surprised to see the port of Benghazi, Libya on my list of ports o’ call for this hitch. I was surprised to see that my ship would be going there even though I knew full well that trade sanctions had been lifted a year or so ago. I was just surprised because it wasn’t one of the typical ports for the ships in our fleet to discharge cargo. And when I arrived back on the ship, there was scuttle-butt that we were going to be the first US vessel into Libya since 1976.
Of course I dismissed the rumors. You tend to hear a lot of crap like that out at sea. There isn’t much to talk about, and being separated from real people and society for such large chunks of our lives, seamen tend to grow less informed gullibule and, well, stupider, the longer we spend on the water. Sure I believed that we were one of the first ships into Libya, but the actual first US merchant vessel to cross the ‘line of death’ and discharge cargo? I was dubious to say the least.
But as we grew close to the line of death, it became apparent that we were certainly a novelty, at least, for the Libyans. We just missed the dusk cut off for mooring in the harbour in the evening of the fifteenth, and anchored off the coast. The next morning, I was on watch when the Pilot boarded the ship shortly after dawn. As we were getting underway, I escorted him up to the bridge and I asked him if it was true that we were the first Americans into the country since the embargo was lifted. I asked him and you know what he told me? He said:
No Americans for thirty years…We write this in the book for the history…
After I deposited him on the bridge, I scrambled down to the fantail to man my mooring station. It was the second mate and my watch partner out there, and I told them the news. I told them that I had actually confirmed with the pilot, who would be an authority on such things, that we were indeed the first US merchant ship into Libya in almost thirty years. They looked at me and without saying anything at all they made me feel the wallop of a giant “duh!”, as if it hadn’t even occurred to them that there was any question the rumor wasn’t gosple truth.
So we pulled into the harbour without any fanfare. No tugs spraying multi-coloured water fine on the bow. Momar wasn’t standing on the quay in flowing robes with gifts of frankincense for us. Just some stevedores and representatives from the world food program. But you better believe that when we lowered the gangway, I was the first one to scramble down and jump into the dirt and filth of the dock to help position the gangway and set the safety net.
I jumped down into the dust and filth and into history in a very anonymous but personal way. Despite what the pilot told me about the books for the history, I know that our discharging of 7,000 long tons of sorghum on July sixteen and seventeen, back in aught-five, won’t be recorded in any special or specific way. There won’t be any record of the name of my ship in any place other than bureaucratic files. The shipping company I work for won’t garner any international recognition for finally bringing a concrete resumption of maritime trade between the states and Libya after thirty years. And there certainly weren’t any reporters from CNN or al-jazera clambering to record my name or take my photograph. If I’m lucky, ENCARTA will revise their 'Libya' section in a year or two to include a sentence that “trade between the US and Libya resumed in 2005.”
I know that being the first Merchant Marine to set foot on Libyan soil in thirty years really isn’t of interest or note to anybody but myself. I’ve been trying to live my life into a work of art for lack of any real talents or abilities, and at the same time I’ve been destroying my ‘greatest’ work of art as a cautionary tale. I know that by being selfish enough to want the rights to the private boast of first landfall, I haven’t proven anything to anybody. Not even myself. It doesn’t prove anything, and it isn’t historic in way, except in my own languid imagination. But maybe, what I’m feeling in my chest, what I need to write about, but am too stupid and inarticulate to recognize, is the fact that I’ve finally realized my personal goal of…well certainly not fame, but an accomplishment which is above and beyond anything anybody else could ever lay claim to. And maybe, just maybe, by realizing that, all this tension, all this disappointment and failure is starting to dissipate. Maybe that three and a half foot jump from gangway to pier was the discreet ‘artistic’ gesture I needed to make in order to move the fuck on...Move the fuck on, and start working on something with a core made of something other than selfish personal significance.
Or, more likely, it’s just another sea story I’ll blather about at the bar after my fifth drink. Just something else the people I used to call my friends can call a bunch of self-important bullshit after I tell them. After my back is turned, so I can move on to my sixth vodka gimlet.
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Fuck that!
Date: 2005-08-03 12:14 pm (UTC)But more to the point, that rules, being the first merchant marine off the first boat into Libya in 3 decades. Even if you don't go down in the history books. I'll try to get your name onto wikipedia.
Rock on!
Re: Fuck that!
Date: 2005-08-03 02:30 pm (UTC)(And I don't need a good editor, I need a freakiing surgeon...)
Saltdog: The Book
Date: 2005-08-03 02:52 pm (UTC)=====
And the schoolchildren shall sing out:
seriously
Date: 2005-08-03 02:52 pm (UTC)Re: seriously
Date: 2005-08-04 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-03 04:25 pm (UTC)and your writing is readable... and coming from someone with the attention span of a gnat, that is a compliment. i look forward to your long posts. they're always the good ones.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-03 04:42 pm (UTC)The hard part about being famous from writing is getting your work out there. I think you have talent, but I'm not sure the traditional route of publishing agents and editors appeals to you.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-03 10:28 pm (UTC)"Maybe that three and a half foot jump from gangway to pier was the discreet ‘artistic’ gesture I needed to make ..."
You just need to back yourself into a corner or work yourself into a state so you can squeeze the words out is all. Dammit! Go adventure you freak, get out there and see what there is to see and find adventure for all of those tied to things that they cannot leave. We yearn for your freedom, while that which ties us down is our comfort. No one has a perfect ride, that's the way it is, grass is greener etc.
Go out into the streets and bring heroics to the people. They will bring their dilemmas to you, you know it. It's the adrenaline that makes you feel alive, the newness that makes your prick your ears, and strain at the leash. If you were one for the same old, you would have kept at a desk job, but you do not. Free yourself, and walk the world, mate. It's yours.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-04 02:38 am (UTC)