Jimmy Page Did Not Understand The Ocean

This is a long post.

Her: I like you.

Me: Uh huh.

Her: I mean, I think I've started liking you a whole lot.

Me: Hmmm.

Her: I mean...I know you don't believe in love...

Me: It's not that I don't believe in it. Define it and I'll believe in it. I just think people really shouldn't be banking their life on some word they don't even know what it means.

Silence as the boat founders on the reef. Small compartments begin to flood as the boat creeps away, oblivious to the damage. The conspiratorial murder of the boat, murdered by the cooperative effort of the captain's negligence and the reef's indigent nature, is a slow poisoning by seawater. Somewhere out in the sackcloth night, the boat slows as the drag of salt water tonnage drive her keel down into the resisting of the Sea. The draft drags lower and lower until the first wave drives over the gunwale in a lackluster charge of a bored army and its hydrological friends start washing over and under the deck. Brine seeks its own level and finds buoyancy to be a personal insult. The Sea, forever dead and lovely, claims the victim of negligent homicide, chewing up the last gasps of the floating pulchritude as it capsizes and gives the Sea its empirical tribute and right-of-way.

The flotsam drifts away and all hands are lost.

One time one of our birds with a good man in it hit the water doing an aggressive nose-down maneuver (this is fancy aero-speak for he fucked up and flew straight into the ocean) at nearly 900 miles an hour. Somewhere on the bottom of the Indian Oblivion, there is some crushed aluminium and bent titanium. They never found the aircrew; at that interface speed hitting the water there would be nothing to find. The Ocean breathes salty, won't you carry it in. In your mouth, in your head in your soul. All that was left was an oil slick for a memorial. Maybe if we're lucky we might both grow old. I can't help but hope so.

Bullet 104. For your sake, I hope heaven and hell are really there, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

The ship sank forever into the big, big ocean, the men married in the wedding supper of the plank to her hull went with her.

I always thought it was funny that our ideas of the ocean are so terracentric. We name oceans and seas as if there were borders on it unmarred surface. We name them after the arbitrary political divisions of the land. The great undiscovered country, and no--the term did not originate on Star Trek, rests on the face of the earth with only the occasional break in its monotonous beauty for smudges of dirt and growths of life. Life clings in little concentric rings to the shelves of our dirt smudges and we cling like amoebae to the lighted slide of the beautiful edge of the Ocean.

Bullet 104 and the fragile, mighty ship I use euphemistically are somewhere under the raging main. They are memorialized in the slicks and debris that are dispersed to all corners of our Earth.

I'll miss them both, though I had no agency in either. These stories are not my own. That is that and this is this, tell me what you want and I'll tell you what you get. You get away from me. We talked for hours before that meeting about life and our disparate circumstances of existence. As I told her of my cold wife with the briny heart and tried to explain Davey Jones and the gold and quicksilver sunset of a Persian Gulf sunset, she loved me. I saw it. At least I saw the pupils dilate and her ideas of commitment form. I tried to dissuade her softly with personal narrative of a time when I killed and fucked and drank my way around the World. With every story, she felt she knew me better, but she did not. Love and knowledge are mutually exclusive states of being. She loved the thought of my blood and sand and sea, but she did not know that it was not a phase. It was not a temporary change in my life.

The sea is who I am.

And if I die on the raging main
Davey Jones will bring me back again
Give me some
PT
Good for you
Good for me
Kill 'em all
Spill their guts
Napalm, napalm sticks like glue
Sticks to the mamas and the babies too
etc...

So, we have to part ways. That is that and this is this, when I asked her what she saw in my stories and she told me what she missed. When the Ocean met the sky. She missed the part where time and light shook hands and said goodbye. It is not her fault or my fault, and blaming the Sea is like trying to swallow the moon.

I'm leaving in June.


The Ocean Breathes Salty; Modest Mouse
Random Violent Bullshit Poem; Traditional Navy Cadence

I am not dying

I have a lot to celebrate today. A bottle of Bushmill's will suffer terribly. As for that girl, well, she didn't suffer exactly. It is nice to know that I will live long enough to make some legendary mistakes.

So, how can you assist the party? Well, the next motherfucker going through a duty-free better cough up some of this.

Rambling Bullshit

I walked out into the cool of the morning to see the sun cut new shadows into the raised Precambrian and Jurassic temple of all things passed on. The Wingate cliffs burned orange and showed the cracks and fracture of enormous pressure pushing them skyward and rolling them up like a scroll. The Precambrian metamorphic partial melt is thrust out of the ground looking like the corpse of someone’s ancient virgin bride, the skirts of her folding in on themselves in a display of granitic modesty giving the gold light of morning a place to play. She is a bride. She is your origin. Mine, too, but I prefer to think that my genesis was something a little darker than the purple skirts. I prefer stardust and comets tails colliding with a burning planet washed over with caustic HaCL and silica and carbon billowing over the face of the deep. I don’t think God meant “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” to be depressing or a reminder of our short and anticlimactic lives. To be the dust and to be the rocks is indeed a beautiful thing. It was a little too warm for me in the store; I hate heat, though I have functioned admirably in temperatures up to 135. Anything after that number and I start to whine. My record for exposure to a hot day fell sometime in August out in The Gulf, 160 degrees of absolute atmospheric misery compounded by jet exhaust and arduous work. If I remember correctly that loadout was one of the heaviest sorties pre-9/11 ever locked and loaded. The cool of the day would mean the temperature would soar down to around a buck twenty and the swamp fans running in the berthing couldn’t quite keep enough air moving to draw out the smell of men living close and dirty. It was not a good time. That is a lie, it was a great time. IYAOYAS! And so forth.

Now God walked down in the cool of the day and called Adam by his name. He refused to answer, he was naked and ashamed.

Tell me, who’s that writing?

So who cares if John of Patmos is John the Revelator is John the Apostle or not? I read the book of the seven seals as a reassurance to a small and embattled minority facing death and some gruesome torture. When people wonder how the Catholic Church got as bad as it is, I remind them of the men like Eusebius who were absolutely thrilled to see the Roman Empire become the Holy Roman Empire. If you’d been getting genitals burned off with hot plates of iron in front of thousands of spectators, a little guvie love would indeed seem the promised Kingdom of Heaven if you’re writing to the Jews, Kingdom of God if you’re writing to the Greeks. In fact, Constantine’s conversion was seen as the fulfillment of The Revelation. Apocalypto for all you Papists. So then the Turks took their shit back. Holy shit, another thousand years of terror for the Christians who thought they owned the rest of eternity. Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople. Call me crazy, but I don’t believe in the End of the World. Unless you’re talking red giant vulcanization. That shit is a fact, bitch.

I need whiskey. Or a woman. Women. Women and whiskey. Or maybe a walk through the Garden in the cool of the day. If I was God, I would stroll around in that hour before the sun is high enough to truly light up the sin and murder of humanity, but after the chill of the cobalt early morning. I would boast to the rocks that they were mine and I would be glad to share rocks and glory; that I had formed them with little mathematical fun things and physical playtoys I had given the Universe. I would bask in mornings like this. I would be happy to share of my abundance.

I miss faith, faith more beautiful than wisdom or knowledge. Knowledge leads to more questions, and Sophie was kind of a bitch, most goddesses are, though I miss the ones I have loved in the past. A kind parent is Faith who quells the monsters of random under your bed and in your head with soothing words. Faith can protect you. Faith kills worry, which has been an issue lately. For what man can add even a minute to his lifetime by worry? I wish it could, with this much worry in my head I could live forever in extra minutes. I don’t have a happy home. A sweetheart I cannot find. I’m not looking, so that might be a source of the famine of femininity. The only thing I can call my own is a troubled and a worried mind. When my earthly trials are over, which may be soon, cast my body out into the sea. Save yourself the undertaker’s fare, let the mermaids flirt with me. God in heaven or in the Earth, or on it and in me and you, however that crap works, I hope is there. Send a band to to gather around me and stand, and when the time is right, bear me away on their snow white wings to my immortal home. The kingdom can have me, I’m tired of all this self-agency. And I’m tired. And maybe ruined. Things are not going well.

Did God create the heavens and the Earth? Well, I can’t prove that he didn’t. I can pretty much prove it took longer than six days. Then again, I like to think the Universe took a little effort on his part. Twelve to fifteen billion years of creative non-involvement or public crafting could yield a work of exquisite beauty. So, I might not be atheist. I can admit it.

Long story short, it’s a beautiful morning, Idaho sucks.



John the Revelator; Traditional
Let the Mermaids Flirt With me; Mississippi John Hurt
Oh Come, Angel Band; Traditional
The Thing About Worrying; Jesus

My Curse

An aspect of my person that conduits unnecessary frustration into my life is my ability to stay in good health. Half of it is my fault, the other half lies blame on my genetic history. I come from some pretty strong stock.

So, the half that is my fault accuses from one corner of the universe where chocolate, especially the sickening milk variety, does not garner preference over oatmeal. I love oatmeal. I eat it in serene bliss, the fiber and nutty goodness of steel cut oats suspended in boiling water with a small pat of butter and a touch of honey taking me to places I assume donuts take the overweight. I don't mean to be healthy, but my meal plan on a typical day involves salads, lean proteins, and a good shot of greens. Keep your snickers, hand me the blueberries. So, what is the big deal?

People hate me.

I recently made my way through the trough on the conveyor belt to pay for some groceries and the woman celebrating some fairly unkind decades who ran my food over the laser had all kinds of commentary. Her flappy jowls kept time to her tirade, wobbling fore and aft, her skin was yellowed and crumpled in smoker's jaundice. "Wow, what the heck is 'hoomis'? How do you eat these pita deals? That's sure a lot of celery, what you trying to live forever? Hey everybody look at this health nut here! Oh and you rode your bike? Boy, I think you're missing out on life. You trying to look pretty? I never ate any of that crap. I do fine."

I held my tongue, the line of dusty Carhartt jackets behind me shuffling back and forth try to get a good look at the garbanzo eating bitch. I said, "Well, ma'am, I don't want to live forever or even past your age, I just don't want to look like you when I get there."

That was brilliant and cutting. I only said it in my head, though. I'm a bitch.

This morning I had to get a checkup from the VA. I filled out my little form saying that I drink way too much, I eat like a horse, I have PTSD out the ass, and I am in danger of killing myself with some high risk activity (i.e. mountain biking, river rafting, etc.) imminently. When my name was called, I walked into the little room where an aged but beautiful silver haired woman told me kindly to sit. While she reviewed my clipboard of papers, she pointed to a scale. My feet touched the pad and LED numbers began to swirl. 197.5. I returned to my chair and my arm found itself in a cuff. An old man with a dusty ballcap modestly emblazoned with the black and white ribbon of a POW walked in and took the other chair. Judging by his gut, he knew his way around a case of beer. And judging by his eyes, he knew his way around some terror and unconsoled tragedy.

He was near my weight. We talked a little about the Connie while the strap grabbed on to my arm and caused a brief panic to shoot through my veins. I am claustrophobic. The machine beeped and the titteringly helpful woman, who I noticed flirted a little with the POW, looked over my shoulder to the infernal machine with its grip of death tunneling my vision. Her eyes rolled back and a look of contempt shot through her graying eyes. "111 over 73."

The words fell in a pile of lukewarm poo on the floor. She was angry at me. She met the eyes of her assistant and they both coughed out snide little laughs.

I can not vouch for any basis in reality past this point.

"Looks like we got ourselves some type of damn athlete."

"I'm sorry," i said, "did I do something wrong?"

Then she slapped me and told me to go out and run a marathon or some shit. Her words, not mine. The POW rose to come to my aid but the vicious Valkyries beat him back into his chair and slapped the blood pressure strap on him, it tightened and held him down. The swaggering woman smacked my knee with a mallet, harder that Hippocrates would have liked I might add. My knee jerked with immediacy. "Wow, I'll be goddamned, Champ Bailey, you made any touchdowns today?"

"Champ Bailey is a corner back, he rarely..."

"Shut your mouth, health boy." Her cold eyes searched me, "You got any healthy shit in that backpack of yours?"

"I...I don't know."

We both lunged for my bag, but my superior speed was defeated by the iron grip of her BP/P torture device. She ripped my bag from the floor, a bag of unroasted almonds falling from the open pocket.

"I swear I only eat them covered in milk chocolate and sugar!"

"Ha! You lie like that goddamn Kraut I 'interrogated' back before your parents were born. You a Kraut, boy? Or does kraut have too much sodium for you, sissy boy?"

"Um...no."

"Oh," she turned off the lights plunging our little room into darkness, "I think you may have a little Nazi in you. Health Nazi. You drink coffee this morning?"

I heard her booties scraping the cold tile floor. "No..."

I could hear her lips pull from her teeth in a sneer.

"...I mean yes! I drank four cups for breakfast. Five, and I drink eight for lunch. I don't even like water, I swear!"

The strap on my arm cinched tighter and the sound of cold steel filled the room.