I’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:
( <i>No americans for thirty years...we write this in the books for the history...</i> )
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:
( <i>No americans for thirty years...we write this in the books for the history...</i> )