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