8 days since Savanah. I know because i looked at the calendar.

There always comes a moment of wakefulness during 24-hour ops when you wake up and expect it to be four in the morning instead of 1600 and you walk out into the galley in your boxers and Portuguese fisherman's shoes and the bandanna you have affected around your neck, like a cowboy; and you find all the scientists and crew are sitting down, waiting on grub. And you stand there, dazed, blinking, wondering why everybody is up at 0400 and weather you can make it to the day box for a diet coke before anyone notices the half-naked state that you are in. Then you realize that you can't. You realize that it is 1600 and you are either wearing the boxers that have the entire crotch ripped out of them, kinda like raggedy chaps, or you are wearing the white ones with the huge stain all around the fly after the night you ended up in the alleyway back in the warehouse district of New Orleans. You know you are wearing one of these two pairs because they are the only ones you own.

So you retreat into your berthing area to shoot two different types of insulin into your thighs that are mottled with black spots because CVS gave you hundreds of short "junkie" insulin needles instead of the long ones that can penetrate that subcutaneous layer of fat that bruises so easily. Shoot up and pull on you filthy jeans that you have been wearing for six days. You know it has been eight days because you looked at the calendar. Six days since you woke up on the 02 level in a puddle of stagnant sea water and melted Call a Cab from Wet Willie’s down on River Street. Not that you remember actually being in Wet Willie’s. You know that you had been there because you have the overturned take-out cup lying next to you lying on the 02 deck in the humid early morning savannah sun in your favorite pair of jeans with a giant hole where your left back pocket was the night before.

The night before you wake up in savannah, you went out for "a couple of beers" after you went to the CVS for syringes, cigarettes and sunflower seeds to last you a couple of weeks out at sea. The couple of beers ended up being a few, and when your good sense still remained, you set out for the ship when the sun was still shining. But then, your hazel-nut sized bladder threatened to burst and you find yourself ducking into the first bar you can find to slap a five down and shout for a Bass on your way to the head. And when you are pissing, your eyes adjust to the light inside the room and you realize that you are in some type of dressing room. Well, the first thing that runs through your head is that you are in a really, really dumpy Powder Room. You've run into the women's room before, so you know that you have to be very careful not to piss on the seat...

But then, when you exit, you see that it was a dressing room and that you are in a strip joint. Before the dancing begins. It's just you and two "retired" strippers and the bartender. All of whom show intense interest in you and your story. So you tell them. And you buy a round. A round of three cokes and a bass that comes to close to thirty dollars. When the bartender asks if you want to buy them all another round, you laugh with honest gusto. You laugh because it is funny that they don't think that you know you are being swindled by "b" girls. So you laugh, and they laugh and the matter is dropped, but the attention of the bartender and the ugly stripper is dropped as well. The busty, platinum stripper keeps talking to you though. She is interested in hearing all that you know about "The Foxy Lady" because you are from Rhode Island. Because the Foxy Lady is legendary on the stripper circuit. And she doesn't believe you that you have never been there because you generally don't go to strip clubs. She doesn't believe you because you are sitting in a strip club.

After that things get murky. Your good sense has exited at some point, long before you take your leave of the b-girls. You tried to meet your shipmates at this pool hall, but got side tracked by the need for food. You first try to eat at a fancy contemporary Italian restaurant, and they ignore you at the bar for so long that you open your back pack and start unloading all its contents on the bar. Starting with the giant box of syringes. You figure if they don't give you a beer by the time you get to the bottom, you can always lift your shirt and give yourself a fix in the beer gut, sitting right there in the fancy bar. People don't like needles. Especially in public. Especially in fancy restaurants. But it doesn't come to that. They tell you that they aren't serving dinner yet, but you insist on having a beer because they have started to seat people already. And when the beer comes, all the gear goes back into the bag. Then from there, and you aren't really sure why, you end up in the bar next to the pool hall. You are drinking sierra Nevada and the cute brunette sitting next to you is biting your shoulder and rubbing her head on your chest. You are drinking Sierra Nevada and enjoying the smell of freshly washed hair and the feel of a small head nuzzling you, even though you know the nuzzling isn't really supposed to be for you but for the guy sitting on her other side of her, with the same color hair as yours, the one not noticing the biting and the nuzzling. But when he does notice, they quickly leave. So you end up talking to the blind man for fifteen minutes before you notice he is blind, and you only notice then because he asks you to hand him his cane so he can go to the head.

And when he returns, you get the brilliant idea to ask him, the blind man, to take you to the pool hall, because by now you are so drunk that you don't remember that the pool hall is right next door. It takes the two of you twenty minutes to find the place. The blind leading the blind drunk. Of course by that time your shipmates are gone, and you sojourn on with the blind dude to the bar they are now drinking in. And the murk gets deeper. And then you wake up on the 02 deck sticky and wet, missing a large piece of your jeans. A large piece that covered your left ass cheek because you aren't wearing one of your two pairs of underwear.

Late that day you find out that you (A. Skipped out on your bar tab, and (B. left the blind man in the bar with no way to navigate his way back up through the twisty alley-ways and stairs that lead him to the more familiar "City Market" area that he can navigate by himself. You feel like a heel. But you console yourself that the ship will be leaving soon and that "the first turn of the screw pays all the bills". But you still feel like a heel.

So the day that you wake up and think that it is early morning instead of late afternoon, you realize that you are at the point when you have to look at a calendar to take stock and get your bearings. Your mind is addled from a combination of detoxification and fatigue, your back aches from working out on deck and every pore of your body is plugged with that microscopic sand that you have been dredging up from the ocean floor for (what you discover has been) eight days. Pores plugged because you haven't showered, you haven't showered because of fatigue and because you can't untie the knot in the bandanna you decided to wear around your neck like a cowboy or something. Somehow, getting that knot untied is daunting and somehow, the sand chafing even your most private of parts is much less problematic than the knot is. Somehow, the bandanna around your neck has become an albatross. Only not as obvious. Not as obvious that you are wearing it to torture yourself with the (lack of) memory of that last night in savannah, and the horror of what you may have done in the hours between leaving a blind dude sitting at the bar asking for you when you were already blocks and blocks away, already drinking Grain Alcohol in frozen kool-aid while slurring you way through a Karaoke rendition of "brandy". You might have done nothing worse, but maybe, just maybe it was worse. The bandanna is the same as the time you woke up in the morning with six hundred dollars in your pocket, when your bank card wasn't working, and you only had one hundred when you went out. The six hundred that didn't come from your bank account, because you checked your statement, the six hundred that made you wonder if you were capable of actually mugging someone, or something even worse than that. The bandanna is the same as that mysterious six hundred because you carried those bills around in your pocket for weeks, face flushing whenever you reached your hand down and rolled the bills between your fingers. That was Philly in the summer. And after that you had been doing so well that you actually eventually spent the mysterious six hundred, of course, on drinks and smokes mostly. Now it is late October and your face flushes whenever you are aware of the bandanna around your neck.

You have to wonder how long you can take the sand working its way into your mouth when you chew gum, working its way into your most private of parts. What doesn't occur to you is that because the bandanna is static, it is painfully obvious to the shipmates, the scientists that for whatever reason you are not putting a high priority on personal hygiene. What doesn't occur to them, as you stand there in your semen stained boxers, Portuguese fisherman's shoes and bandanna; black thighs and beer gut, sunken chest and never-quite-made-it-through-puberty sprigs of secondary hair wispily erect in the ship's air-conditioning on the Mess deck, what doesn't occur to them is that you got bigger problems than showering, or permanently stained boxers. 'Cuz for the duration you can't really sleep (and when you do you find yourself ringing carillon bells with hi_voltage of all things...) and you hate this sand, and there is the knot. In the Bandanna, in your chest. In your throat so you can't even really swallow very much. They don't see that sometimes, when your whole existence is fueled by sugarless gum and nerves, hygiene just ain't that important.

And by saying "you" you really mean "I"