The night SaltDog spent in jail

Everything seems so simple when you are underway. All you have to worry about is nine other, sometimes volatile, egos. Weather the cook is going to make something you actually like to eat. You worry about how much work you are going to accomplish during the day, and weather the Bo ‘sun is going to let you complete the job the right way, so you don't have to re-do the job in a couple of weeks. And of course the weather, pirates and grievous injury from exploding aerosol cans in the burning garbage. The usual. When you are underway, everything is so small and compact and has it's own place that you forget how big and chaotic the world is back on the beach. You actually believe that when you get home you can actually tie up all the things you need to do in a couple of days and then sit back and enjoy weeks of nothingness.

And then you hit the beach to find that nothing could ever really be that simple and you spend weeks pulled in fifteen different directions. This has been the longest time I have spent at the place where the mail gets sent in five years. And I haven't accomplished a damn thing. The simple task of cleaning my apartment has become such a monumental task that find I'm simply moving piles of crap from one place to another. I have no place to put all this stuff. She took a lot of the furniture while I was in Africa. But I have been angry enough to throw a lot of stuff away and/or out the window. I mean I should really just rent a dumpster and throw everything away, really. Everything I need fits into my sea-bag after all.

So everything seems so simple and then you find yourself back on the beach and you are in a place that you can't run away from. My behaviour ashore has never been exemplary, but once I ran away to sea, it got worse. There is an old maritime expression that "the first turn of the screw pays all the bills" In other words, no matter what horrible things you did ashore, once you are underway again all is forgiven/forgotten. Provided you didn't get caught, that is. And that is why being without any wheels is driving me crazy. I want to get the hell outta dodge. The duchess is still giving me a hard time. Things with the Sicilian are going well, but I have lost the capacity to deal with even that wonderful wonderful feeling you get when you find yourself with someone who actually likes you. And there was the death, and the funeral. I seem to have become addicted to the anonymity that comes with every new port. Even as lonely and gut wrenching as it can get. It seems I have simply lost the modicum of social skills I once possessed. I've changed into something that even I don't recognize anymore. I have been walking around with a mantle of sheer anger around my shoulders. And I have never really been an angry person. Slightly pissed off, maybe, but not angry.

So I'm used to being able to behave as awfully as I want and then crawl back into the hull of my ship and have these really simple ideas about how things work ashore. How things work among civilized folk. I'm used to having the bills paid by the first turn of the screw, because for all my salty adventures I've never been caught. Well, almost. There was ( the night SaltDog spent in jail )