The New Hotness

 Well, today we're taking part in a trial run of a new product being floated by one of the bunker suppliers thst feeds the US East Coast.  A new, more environmentally friendly component is being blended into the fuel.  Big E loaded the base fuel componant last night in 4 of our cargo tanks, leaving them slack, which is to say, partially loaded.

     At the moment we're under way to go load the fancy foofoo cutter stock into the same tanks, at a different terminal, and I will meter and blend the new product into each individual cargo tank, mixing it well, thereby creating magic a blended fuel with pleasing qualities for the delicate and fragile, and also Europeans I suppose.

     It's performative nonsense, a better, more sustainable and socially responsible way to pander to a bunch of screeching scientifically illiterate IMO Luddite autists   be good stewards of the earth, yo. Namaste and shit.  

I could go on but I am after all, the goof they chose to deliver this baby. I'm like a big, hairy, kinda otherwise retarded  savant in this one job... doula. 

Yes.  I am now the bunker doula. You may admire me now

 *scratches testicles*. 

     Ok, semi-serious now.  I'm not flattered that I was chosen to oversee this job but I absolutely am gratified. After all,  we're experienced, competent and really do take the process seriously on here. even when I'm cynical when I play games and assign meanings (that probably aren't there) to the people who actually matter in these things. Also, the HQ was available, and we really are the seniormost bunker crew in my employer's NY fleet now in terms of experience. In that respect I really am aware that I am here to represent the owner's interest in doing a job correctly, safely and efficently. My blog, online sarcasm, that's just my id taking a crap, in the exact same meaning and for the same reason a body does so.  

      As I am fond of saying, I don't give or expect credit for plans, just actions. Best I go be on about it then.

    

Please don't make me give a shit.

 I'd been finding it very peaceful not to engage in soapbox speeches or the online culture war, especially given the horrors of this past week. But I've dipped my toes in this week, which has left me with that same feeling I get when my hands are dirty and covered with grease, and I don't use enough soap to wash them off.  That feeling almost exactly, but the thin dirty grease layer is soul deep. 

    The young deckhands at work are circumspect about it, but want to talk. Many of them weren't alive for the September 11 attacks and this is one of their first encounters with humanity at our worst with a resultant cultural upheaval. 

Zoomers who choose to work on boats are politically tending to be conservative. These are kids who are afraid to speak their minds for fear of getting ostracised. They seem to be in need of fellowship more than anything. Kids who I've already taken the time to break the ice with, to get them talking about themselves so they'll listen if I can say or show them something to make them better seamen. 

Quiet at first. And underneath... so hurt and angry. 

 It's already happened 3 times.  A kid starts to talk topical, and trails off, leaving me to either pass on the elephant in the room or engage.

     Best I can figure, these kids, who live online in a way I do not, saw a mask slip on some people they liked, showing a lot of hate towards a dead guy they agreed with on some things... and then realizing how much the same people of course hate them too. It's not a stretch to see someone blood dancing online over a murder, and to realize that you'reseeing them for once, for who they truly are. Once that mask slipped off, some have not yet put it back on, either... and in a very clear way, a pussy apathetic disclaimer, which is even more common and less respectable, has widened the gap. They saw psychos and the enablers of psychos. 'Murder is wrong but...' 

       Murdering someone over words and ideas. If that's OK, when does it become ok to do so over politics and religion? 

    I've made peace with not speaking my mind. Rule 1 of good seamanship: One hand for you, and one for the boat. Rule 2: No politics and no religion in the galley. 

 I know the benefits of finding and focusing on things other than politics and religion. As a result I have several friends, some quite close, who don't share my politics OR my religion... all are people whom I care about deeply.

No buts are coming here. My point is these young guys have gotten a masterclass on the power of hate this week... and whether they're more scared or hurt? I dunno.  It sucks, to feel a sense of betrayal. It did for me when I realized I really didn't share some of the most important values, ideas and principles with nearly as many people as I thought I did. 

 I have my nuclear family, and my blood family. I have my extended family. I am deeply fortunate to be loved, even beloved. I have my faith, and I have friends, who I love as well, because we know each other, and despite that, they still like me anyways. 

   The hate?  I have hope they'll see they've put up an umbrella that's a hell of a lot bigger than what they maybe thought they were putting up. I'm certainly catching shade from surprising places... despite not being targeted, how can you not be, when realizing the same person would say the same if it was you dead, and they didn't know you? 

     'Murder is bad but I'm not sad he died.' 

     'Murder is bad, but my definition of what a nazi is is anyone who doesn't support the things I support.' 

      Translation: 'Murder is not bad, but I'm not saying it out loud so don't @me.' 

 

        I already retreated as far as I can, to be friendly, to keep friendships without being false. I'm ok with it, but I have a line I won't cross, and my heels are on it. No further, not one step. Not because of this week, but because I have everything in the world already, wouldn't gain by refusing to judge, and I already got enough shit to think about. 

       Not being a dick is a relative matter. I work with some real assholes, and I don't think anyone I work with who I dislike remains unaware of it... and I'm ok with that. I'm ok too with people who dislike me making it known provided we can still all go home at the end of the tour with a paycheck safely.  

     

    I've been sitting on this post all day, and have gone to delete it a few times but stopped. NOBODY comes here to listen to my thoughts. It's the dick and fart jokes and the job, and for some reason I've been picking up some extra hits daily lately. Wonder if I just kilt that off. I broke Rule #2 after all. 

   

I still don't know what to do with the young guys. We've been chosen to be the inaugural guinea pig in a new trial of cargo blend later this week.  I'll have extra tugs, and extra bodies, coming and going all week. You can only talk about the weather for so long. 

Better

 With all the horror this week, and America going mad, a light in the darkness got lit here on the HQ. Big E's home.  

      The HQ is unique in that we have no master aboard, no senior tankerman assigned as being The Big Cheese. We have 3 VERY senior tankermen, instead. B, 27 years in, Big E, 17, and me, 25, 17 of those here. 

   As to the why of that, having a fairly large talent sink, we get odd jobs, and the HQ, while small, can carry more grades of oil simultaneously than most while maintaining cargo segregation.  As such, redundency, utility and maintaining flexibility is one of those 'you can only have 2 of these' exceptions, as the HQ has been heavily modified several times. She's a good girl. 

...and E was out recovering from surgery for a lomg time. More than half a year.  Part of the reason I've been here for over 3 months now, and also why I can go home next month, finally.

 B and I hosted a couple of fill-in guys. It wasn't great. One of them was cool, but only there very briefly. The others? Either much too green or just some absolute short-bus seat warmers. 

But E is back and we're all right here.  Aside from being great shipmates working together, we're also all very good friends.  One of those things, and we all know it's almost impossible to make friends as an adult male... and yet here we are. So the company keeps us together because we keep our shit together. It's not like we're irreplaceable, after all, but why mess up a vessel that gets shit done right? The HQ was already Big E's when B and I arrived 6 years ago.  B and I have worked together for 15+ years, as we got matched originally when my company first established a remote operation in NY and they wanted 2 good guys to work overlapping, so one of us was always on board...and that's been our M.O. since. 

  I'm really happy to have my friend back. The OT was nice but we need rest, and it's good to ve able to sleep soundly, knowing the other guy 100% has your back and knows the job just as well as you. 

I don't need a soapbox

 Sure I have opinions on topical things. 

...and nobody who doesn't share blood or a bathroom with me cares. It took me much too long to figure that out.

     Now, having said that, a wonderful thing tangentially related to the savage and poisonous events that have happened recently has popped up. 

 Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife started shooting with me a couple of years ago. It started basically with her wanting to tweak the noses of her family back in Brazil, some of whom are far, far left and horrified at the thought of her with a gun like some American cowboy, and others who enjoyed the idea, her going full American Stereotype. 

      She's become a decent shot and range days have become fun days for us... plus she knows I'm more likely after to not wail and gnash my teeth if she wants to make a stop 'too queek' to look at a dress or ridiculously priced heels somewhere. 

        So this week my wife asked me to enroll her in a concealed carry class for when I'm home, and I'm just as proud as a hen with a new egg to hear it. 

        Only downside is I gotta find a nice set of Louis Vuitton grips for her Christmas present this year.

 

It happened at the crossroads

 

Grub run

 The larder is pretty bare here on board in terms of everything that isn't protein or caffeine. 

 In other words, I'm fine for now, but it's time to get groceries and stock up. 

  In the nearshore and coastal brown water merchant marine, we use the old school low class term 'grub' for food... because we're old school. And low class. 

    But yeah, grub's pretty light. Oh, we've got about 10 days' worth of chicken, rice, meat and coffee/soda, but we're well into the last bag of frozen vegetables and long since depleted the fresh stuff. 

    Yesterday I emailed the loggie boys and asked them to find us a berth in Red Hook in Brooklyn to get grubbed up in between jobs on Friday (today). We're presently underway for Brooklyn, about an hour away, which works out well, as the foofoo grocery store I like doesn't open until 0700.  

 I don't love the foofoo grocery store's prices, as no bullshit they're DOUBLE what they are at home because New York is awful, but shopping there is more about how bad every other store is moreso than the fancy store being good. 

 By the time you actually buy vegetables and meat and chicken in NY, the stuff's pushing its sell-by date before it even hits the shelves. So 1-2 days after we buy anything, the greens start becoming the browns, beef turns gray and chicken gets that fermented sour smell that we all know and wonder about. 

 No, the foofoo place we get 4-8 days of green, and the chicken/meat can get portioned out and frozen before it starts to smell. 

 People smile when I say New York is now a 3rd world city. But I'm not smiling when I say it. 

     Now, there's a Trader Joes and a Whole Foods not that far away, so I don't have to deal with the white guys with dreadlocks and their blue-haired hairy-legged womeneither at the foofoo grocery store, praise God. They've got their own places to buy their matcha-flavored toilet paper.

 But yeah, so today we'll get all fast, I'll jump on our assist tug to get a ride to our home pier, hop in a taxi, grub up, hop in ANOTHER taxi, do a bag drag down the pier to another tugboat, and get back to the HQ, hoist our grub up on deck, do another bag drag in the house, and stow the grub. All this so we can eat salad. Plays merry hell if you can't get the fiber in middle age and there's no way on God's gray earth thst you can have a nice day after 50 if you can't take a decent shit at some point. 

    

Big Doings in the US Merchant Marine

It's been an exciting month for those of us in the seafaring trade... But first the bad news with a side of digression. 

  

       There's a private equity company that got into the Jones Act shipping (US coastal trade) trade by doing the shell company game the way that Private Equity does, with a twist that this company is just rotten with a layer of beltway insiders on top of it... has failed. No matter how many layers of company titles you have, you still gotta produce, and if the shell company staff don't get along... things implode. 

      Marshals came and turned the lights off for most of the units they bought at auction from Morty the rich asshole. 

    For background, Morty's story is that he's a bad person. A shit born with daddy's checkbook in hand who himself rode his father's tug and barge company into the ground. Morty is a foul human being and is hated by everyone...and is a spoiled little tyrant degenerate who got what he deserved, which is to lose everything... that being said, his former employees, toxic themselves, some of them, but mostly decent people living with PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome from exposure to Morty, are victims. There were plenty of middle aged guys working who had to start over somewhere else very late in life when the company cratered. It's really hard to Rise And Grind to reestablish yourself when you're at the tail end of a career that is enormously wearing, physically.

     

      Strangely enough, my employer, who also runs a multigenerational family-owned shipping company, is doing just fine. Being a decent human being and having a family policy where every son starts out by sweeping floors, cleaning toilets and taking their turn working their way up from deckhand to management has something to do with that.  

       But, sadly, this batch o' bankers and investors is in a bad way at the moment. Infighting and what seems to be a contest in backstsbbing and who can fuck each other over more. At least it looks like that from the outside. As a result there's some skilled mariners headed out hat-in-hand looking for work this week. 

     So, the bad is bad. I hope one of the bigs with actual shipping experience rather than a combo of investing and lobbying experience will either buy some of these big boats or get hired to right the ship. 

    I just don't think it's possible to own a maritime business without longevity being the first or second priority.  If, as the saying goes, the purpose of business is business, than making MORE money over time, vs short-term gains, tortoise v. hare style, isn't antithetical to good business practice.  But good luck explaining that to the scumbag circus out there. 

 

     Now the good.  But first, more bad. 

 US shipyards are in a bad way. Obsolete tech, minimal automation, insane labor costs (a moderately experienced shipyard worker is at least journeyman-level equivalent in 2 or more skilled trades and thus can just work in one of those trades, so they need to be paid!). It costs 3-5x more to build a ship in the US than it does in Asia, but ships that travel between any US ports MUST be American built and American crewed, per the Jones Act, our cabotage laws. 

      This is done because we NEED to know how to build ships as a nation (we currently suck at it, which is a massive gaping nightmare), and we REALLY NEED people who know how to crew them.  We're currently about 100 fleet oilers (ships to run fuel for military use) short of what we'd need in a major war just to keep the lights on and bellies full. The beltway neocons, scumbags like senator Mike Lee, are screaming bloody hell because our present admin was able this year to put 10 civilian tankers on retainer as willing to jump in if ordered to help.  Senator Scumbag wants to import 3rd world foreigners and foreign companies to move all our oil, food and goods, internally and externally, including taking over our military's logistics, and getting the US out of moving things by sea as a trade. 

  Imagine just the 1000+ tugs on the Mississippi and connected rivers, moving oil and goods into the midwest and grain and beef out, all controlled by Europeans and Asians along with ADM and a few big ag companies that want to fly in Indonesians, Indians and Pakistanis, and hand over the keys to our food and energy so they don't have to pay lower- and middle-middle class wages to American mariners, or buy boats from American shipyards. 

 

Yeah. That's not even the least bit exaggerated. It's that fucked up. No security as a nation, whatsoever. No knowledge of how to build a ship.  A bunch of foreigners, some of whom are hostile to our interests, in charge of our oil and our food supply. 

 Globalists, lobbyists for big ag, and scumbag politicians, like that feculent shitbag senator Mike Lee, like and want America to be weakened, because it's profitable for them and their buddies and they LOVE the destabilizing effects. 

     So, that's the bad part of the good part. 

    

Now, the good part: with our shipyards being in a bad way, in conjunction with the present presidential admin's goals of improving our maritime security, one of the Korean megashipyard conglomerates, who can build damn fine ships damn fast, bought the Philadelphia shipyard, one of the only 3 (!) American shipyards that can build merchant ships. 

 Well, for values of 'American.'  It was owned by a billionaire family of Norwegians as one of their several shipyards globally, then spun off with the usual shell games that bankers get all on about... but still owned by Europeans, titles aside. Like most of our shipyards. Newport News is BAE, the Brits. Great Lakes has Fincatieri, Italian. Philly had Norway, now Korea. You get the idea. 

            But, Hanhwa Philly, now, is looking interesting. They're almost done with building 5 schoolships for our maritime academies, which double as disaster relief ships at need. After that I think they've got a couple of containerships on order for the Hawaii/ Alaska and Puerto Rico Jones Act service. 

    Hanhwa, on sealing the deal, is gonna throw 9 figures into modernizing and expanding the yard, which means local jobs and vocational training for Americans, and immediately put orders for over a dozen ships on the books, including building the infrastructure and training to build Liquified Natural Gas carriers, something the US currently can't do. They've already ordered 3 of those, so you're talking about over a billion bucks already. 

 This is huge. 

       Now, I have no idea if any of these ships will enter Jones Act service, although I assume some if not all will. More than anything else, it's the institutional knowledge that is the treasure here. Hanhwa is going to have to fly in experienced people to teach, and I'm ok with that. Aside from the international relations aspect, which has something to do with Korea wanting to cement ties and placate president Trump, it's also a good way to keep America invested in Korea's security too. 

 I hope Japan is watching.  

Anyways I'm much too retarded and willfully ignorant to really discuss such things at length. Still, it's a big step forward, and if we can put a boot on the insanely anti-American neocons' necks and press until our feet touch dirt and enjoy the music they make trying to breathe, perhaps we'll be ok.