Our Town in our lives

There are a few really poignant scenes in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" that have always stayed with me since reading the screenplay when I was 15. I had to play George in a school play. It was hell for a boy who's overweening goal at that point was to slip through the cracks and emerge by choice into social life when I was good and ready.

 Even so, it got me to read the screenplay, and it was my introduction to more metaphysical thinking. Later on, struggling with the awful bullshit of English Lit at college, I damn near gave up on this sort of thing when the old queen who taught the class would wax orgasmic about Thoreau and the transcendentalists.
 I hate Thoreau. He was a self-aggrandizing, preening, effeminate failure of a man who's life's work could be summed up by the image of a manlet pouf spending 30 years watching himself masturbating in front of a full-length mirror and then expecting to be thanked for it. Walden had it's moments, I'll admit, but that's about it. Moments.


 Yeah, I read. My dad was wicked smaht, as we say where I grew up, so I could always ask him when I didn't get what the hell I was reading. Just because I speak and often act like a lout, and am one often enough, doesn't mean I'm not a self-aware lout.


 Anyhow, Our Town, if you've never seen it, well, you probably won't. It's a depression-era play that would be unwelcome in our intensely intolerant 21st century. Discussions and expositions on the need and desirability for stable marriages, examination of the role of age on the practice of sin and good and bad habits, and a message of the hopeful joy to be found in daily life in a small town...
  That's the sort of shit that gets that midget little shite Jon Stewart to foam at the mouth. Fucking better clingers, amirite?


 When I first read the story, I knew I was reading something that was partially going over my head. A 15-year old, I saw the value of what I was reading, and enjoyed it far more than I expected. 40-something me, I realized that Our Town was a gateway story for me, something that opened my mind a bit and matured me as I read it- I knew I wasn't getting everything I could out of the story, and I also knew that eventually I would. It was a cool moment, there in some English class I barely remember at a time in my childhood where joy was thin on the ground.

 Our Town is a 3-act play that follows central characters in a small town through the arc of their lives within the town, focused on key moments in the main character's lives... and I thought of it today when an adult from my own childhood commented on a picture of my wife and I on Facebook, of all things.
        Not really my fault- there's a great passage there about the passage of time in a small community, where so many things stay the same, but the people who experience it slow down and age more than the background, and treasure it for that reason, too. 

        I had a core group of wonderful friends who I am still in contact with. I'm in constant contact with several guys I went to Kindergarten with. Their parents played an important part in my childhood- they were authority figures and role models who weren't my own parents.
   To 7 year old me, the grown ups were grown ups. As I grew up, they looked the same. My memories of these people stretch as long as my friendships with their kids- I'm 42, so we're talking 35+ years. It's only now that I see them as they are- when we were kids, they were the age we are today. We've experienced the same key moments in our town, and while we experienced different aspects of them, we share the commonality of it.

      The picture I put up today shows my wife and I together- I see the heavy crow's feet around my eyes, and the damage from being in the sun for much of my life, and the hairline receding, and my beard is now only half red, with white overtaking it... and I'm OK with that. It makes me think of what my son will think of in 30 years, when he sees himself at the age I am today.
         Some of my childhood friends visited my mom a few months ago. She's elderly now, and frail, and I don't know if my friends realized how happy she was, but they did see that she remembers everything, and treasures the memories.
       I'm very aware that my mom is coming towards the clearing at the end of the path now,  there to rejoin my father, and while I hope we have more time yet, I don't think she has much in the way of real regret- and for my friends' parents, some who have already gone before, some who are still with us, I think, and pray, they have that in common.

       Weeks before he passed away, my dad mentioned a quote from something he was told when he was a kid: 
As I see you now, so I once was,
As you see me, so shall you be. 

  I love the duality of that quote- the frailties and complaints of old age juxtaposed with the marks of a life well lived and loved.

 Well, blame it on Our Town. At the time, people thought the play a sappy reaction to the shitty world of the Depression era. To me, the message is that the grand moments are worth valuing in the present even more so than in the past, but either way, both will have lasting impact, not because of the place or even the events themselves, but because humanity itself has value.

nnnnnnnnaaaaaaaa naah... naaaaaaaaaa naah

dude...what?

So, between working on a maintenance project here on board the HQ  and having a particularly good book to read, I spent a couple of days out of touch, more or less, from the mass media.

 Nothing of note happened. Well, nothing of note to me. When I finally sat down and got caught up on the 'news' (scare quotes intended), I realized that I had just wasted 30 minutes on updating myself with minutia and noise.

 Fuck me. Thanks, captain Obvious, right?

    Well, sort of. The world turns, regardless, and my career choice already predisposes me to being able to narrow down my focus of concern into a boat hull-shaped space and tune out the extraneous.

 So it goes. It was pretty peaceful, really.

  Anyhow, back to it. 9 Days to go. And counting.

the book of everything

I've got two cloth bound notebooks that I use for keeping maritime-related notes. The Class Book and the Dirty Book, They're each about 20-25 years old. The Class book has notes on everything I've ever taken a class in for work- everything from marlinespike seamanship to celestial navigation, cargo handling and damage control,  to clamping off a cut blood vessel and calculating dosages for medication.
 The dirty book is just that- it's a smaller pocket-sized book with coffee and oil stains, paint, handprints, blood, all sorts of contaminants on it- it's a book with notes for reference when I'm doing dirty work, which includes GPS and LORAN coordinates of bottom features in Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay, the numbers and bearings between buoys to get into several ports (for navigating in fog with a stopwatch and compass and no electronics or maybe just radar ), lists of taxi companies, the better sort of nudie bars in various ports, the phone numbers of people I've met over the years, directions to stores from docks all over the world, as well as notes on how to mix paint from scratch, start an inert-gas generator and troubleshoot the same, strip high viscosity oil from a ship using Framo pumps and nitrogen, valve sequences to isolate multiple fuel tanks across a mixmaster manifold, a list of bookstores all over the world, the numbers of different dockside phone booths, from the days before cell phones, the names of bartenders and managers at restaurants, things like that- the sort of knowledge that you need right away when you need it at all.

 Combined, this represents the  sum knowledge of reference-worthy knowledge that I've learned after 35 years of messing around in boats.

 ... and now I'm starting to make a 'clean' copy, something written neatly, and it's hard. 

 My hands ain't right, and they haven't been right since my early teens. Between getting my hands utterly Borked at 14, and both hands having a deep and persistent infection for 25 years (I am deeply allergic to fish oil, (yay, contact dermatitis!) and the resultant split open skin from being exposed to it all the time allowed for an infection that stayed with me, up until about 3 years ago and took over a year of hard work on the part of a doc to fix).

Well, anyways, my dashed hand-modeling career aspirations aside, I'm really unhappy with the discomfort when I write with a damn pen. I type very fast, up there with what a good secretary can do, which has been a great way to forget that writing sucks for me. Good training, anyhow.
   'Good training' refers to anything that sucks at work. "Dammit,the shit tank is overflowing into the bilge, and the shut-off valve is behind a waterfall of poop water!"  "That's some good training, there."


    Still, all in all it actually IS good training- as a result of my taking up the mantle of scrivening my own work, I'm reviewing rules, tricks of the trade, laws and skills, many of which I no longer use in my current job- skills and minds rust as surely as metal.

 Some head scratching too, from my notes. Why the hell was I so worried about rules regarding lighting on Dracones?   What the fuck is a Dracone?

         Well, there's some stuff like that. I can only guess that it was related to something we were doing in class.

winding down

The last 2-week tour of this voyage is underway. Tour #5 since I last saw my family.

 I don't have channel fever or anything like that, but I'm VERY aware that I've been away from home for too long. After 7 years here, I'm no longer able to contemplate 90, 100, 120+ day voyages dispassionately. In fact, after I think 8 months of not working any extra, I've absolutely gotten used to that. I can see why coworkers think I'm fucking nuts to be out here.

 Something I've noticed, where working extra can mean between $5,000 to $30,000 more income per year;  at the end, I don't have all that much to show for it- the intangible benefits are there, but the cost of not being home eventually outweighs the benefits to the nuclear family.

 I see that now. So I tend not to work extra. But it happened that I wanted to make some extraordinary purchases this summer and fall, so I sought out the extra work and am grateful for the opportunity.

 Now that the money is in the bank, and I'm down to like 12 days to go, I wish I had just gone home.
 It seems I'm not longer fit for my self-appointed role as workhorse. I'm not hungry enough anymore.

     Mostly, getting older thus far has meant aches and pains and very slightly diminished capacities that weren't there before. Thank Christ, some Wisdom has finally manifested. I'm absolutely cool with that.


It's interesting, though, that so many little changes have happened for me to notice this voyage. OT, part time Hulk and our new full-time crewman, has made me realize how much I took for granted the gestalt of living and working here on the HQ, including how I contribute while I'm just doing the things I do the way I like doing them- having to have a conversation about how I never like having more assistance than I need was... sublimely retarded.
          Anyone can understand that some people just enjoy and prefer working alone where and when possible- but having to tell a perfectly nice and perhaps even better-socially-adjusted person NOT to volunteer to come help me and not to feel guilty about it was a pretty hard sell. I'm pretty sure the new guy thinks I don't like him. The truth is that Big B and I have optimized the HQ for our own maximum efficiency given the idiosyncrasies of the HQ's deck layout and the operations that we carry out. There are times when having two PIC's (Persons In Charge) is more efficient, and those times we will call out for help when needed. But mostly, so long as it doesn't cost time, big B and I like working on deck solo when and where we can.
 I was warned before I took this job that being a tankerman can make you more of a loner, and 'a little fuckin' weird' was the phrase used.   It's held out to be reasonably accurate, but I was a little fuckin weird long before I was a tankerman, which may be why I'm so comfortable with the job.

The things we did, and the things we do

A series of facebook posts by New England Waterman  focused on his family's visit to one of the more remote and beautiful hidden gems of Cape Cod, a locals-mostly spot that was shown to me back in 1997, when I had just returned from working in Scotland on my first real grown-up independent study to take up residence at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, which is pretty much the Graceland, Harvard and Bedlam of ocean sciences. 

 The spot I'm talking about is a stunningly beautiful glacial drumlin that stretches out into the ocean. Lovely place. Just as it was introduced to me, I brought my fellow techs, interns and assorted underpaid geek friends there on the regular with my piece of shit truck. Woods Hole and nearby Falmouth, MA, where we all lived (Woods Hole being much too expensive for anyone short of a tenured professor, of which MIT had many living in the damn community). MIT are the owners of the Oceanographic Institute, which is a separate organization from the Marine Biological Laboratory, but which shares the same area and often the same poor employees and interns like yours truly. It is to the credit of the Falmouth police department that they never once pulled me over when I had 10-20 people in my truck, mostly in the back. We were a very law-abiding bunch, though, even when drunk, which was often. 

       It wasn't just the cops who were cool. My neighbors were, too. 6 of us rented a gorgeous summer house, and I know of at least one current university professor from CalTech, and another from UGA who passed out drunk and spent the night sleeping on my front lawn to be woken up by early beachgoers who walked down my street to get to the gorgeous and somewhat famous beach at the end of it. Not one complaint from the neighbors, minus one guy down the road who did complain that my motorcycle was noisy at 5am, when I headed out to the lab on early days. Since I was fishing back home on weekends, I brought him live lobsters a couple of times, and he made nicenice after that. 

      Even the Coast Guard was cool at Woods Hole. When I accidentally misread a formula for making tracer dye for measuring turbulence in flowing water (this is a thing), which was supposed to be something like .1 grams per 5 gallons of water (in my defense, the stained and faded card said 'add 1  to 5gal, injected at 5 ml/min' so I added one 10lb can to 5 gallons of water, used only about a quart's worth for my work, and dumped the other 4.75 gallons into the seawater systems' drain, and it dyed the estuary around the outlet pipe bright red, including the plants, the gelcoat on the many sailboats anchored there (Woods Hole is a tourist destination, as well as being the transit port to go to Martha's Vineyard), and also the concrete and wood of the decks of the local restaurants and yacht club and marina. 

       Well, they found me because a helicopter spotted a fire-engine red streak of water miles out to sea, followed it back to the Eel Pond estuary, figured out that my lab building had a drain for our seawater pumping system, and burst into my lab in the basement, giving me a lecture and a warning, but no more than that. 

That's it, off to the right. Bright. Red. Also florescent, if anyone had a black light. 

             
        There was a lot of that shit. Being dumb and often lazy, some July mornings, I'd ride in on my motorcycle in shorts, a tank-top shirt, and flipflops, and kept a change of clothes in my lab,  under my giant flume tank, a 60ftx9ftx6ft aquarium tank that I used to do things like learning how lobsters use their sense of smell and current flow to find food. The tank was elevated because the piping and pumpworks were underneath, and there was a great spot there to keep a backpack full of clothes, not to mention a refrigerated seawater tank used to house rare deep-sea creatures behind my flume, that cohabitated nicely with bud light and diet soda cans in the tank. Icy cold on hot days. 

 The Food Buoy, the local deli/convenience store, had a girl there that wore nothing but daisy duke shorts and tiny t-shirts. I learned quickly which sandwich items were located deepest in the food cases. I was in my early 20's after all. 

               The Captain Kidd was a bar that my dad used to drink at when my parents lived in Falmouth. My father worked for "The Oceanographic" for years, when they were doing the real new, badass shit with the ALVIN, their submarine (the one that found the Titanic in later years). The Kidd tolerated a lot of BS from the  interns and techs, but by no means was a college bar. It was a townie bar, exactly the kind of bar I like and have always liked. Even so, I had to keep a low profile and didn't go in there for a while after I dyed their back yard bright red. 
      I once talked a friend out of a fistfight there. Guy has 2 doctorates, which he got at the same time, and was one of the most mild-mannered people you'd ever meet, but someone got his Irish up, and I got to defuse the situation, which ultimately got me laid with one of the interns from Estuarine Ecology, so, win-win, I guess. 
    I packed a lot of living in just 16 months there. I also figured out that I wasn't happy as a scientist there, but it took me a couple of years to get it through my thick skull. 

grrrr...

Yesterday was one of those days where just nothing went right at all. Some frustrating setbacks unrelated to work, too hot to even go for a damn walk around deck without incurring diaper rash, and every single cargo movement came with breakdowns, delays, paperwork snafus, etc.

 Just a bad day, you know?  Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife nagged some details out of me, where normally I just summarize and tell her I'm having a shit day, and while she's sympathetic, she's also pretty good at getting a laugh out of me. "Honee, you hev you period today? I think so, yes."

 If that was my period yesterday, I'm looking forward to male menopause.

 Today dawned bright and early- at 2345 last night, really, when I got on watch. My turn for the midwatch. We're loading up a car ship, and while mooring alongside this particular ship is a shit show, the crew are a bunch if nice, friendly guys, helpful. Hearing guys laughing while working together to wrestle my diesel hose in place was pretty soothing.

 I don't tend to stay in a bad mood for too long. While I didn't sleep very well on my off-watch, I woke up ready to be happy, and so far it's working. By the time my watch is finished, we'll be headed for our anchorage, and are scheduled to swing on the hook for the rest of the day, which, God willing, we'll do, and which should lend itself to a decent sleep and maybe a chance to get caught up on exercise and reading my book.


 Also, I'm kind of looking at a 3d printer. Does anyone know anything about them? What I know about CAD/CAM stuff is slightly more than nothing at all.