Am I a bad person? Probably.

So, there's a facebook page about my old hometown, and, for some insane reason, I read it.

   Today someone ran over a gaggle of Canadian geese, and an outry ensued.

 My own feeling is that I'm happy the driver is safe. Canadian geese are pretty frigging big, and having a turkey-sized bird get wedged under my front bumper in the course of driving would certainly be reason enough to jerk the goddamn wheel out of sheer surprise.

 So, having said that, I'm a bad person now. All the (female) Facebook respondents, who panicked with the 'giuz, pleez call someones pleez' were thick as flies on a shitpile, and I had to have some fun.

 Look, there were a couple of dead canadian geese in the road in a town south of Boston. You've got to understand, on the MA coast, there's a 1:1 ratio of water rats to Canadian geese. Pigeons are fuckin' exotic compared to the 15lb flying rats that infest the public laws of MA.

 At any rate, I had some fun trolling the 400lb welfare moms who infest the page in question. As a former biologist, I can attest with some accuracy that no Canadian goose gets rehabbed in south suburban MA unless, by 'rehabbed' you mean  "eaten by staff." Imagine you're a poor sap who got suckered into being a wildlife biologist in the metro Boston area. You can either save 1 otter, 6-8 raptors (hawks and other birds of prey), some ducks, a racoon and a deer or two, or you can try and fail to save some Goddamned seagulls and Canadian geese.

 Personally, I don't like goose meat. The breast is the only section that ain't all bones, and it's gamy as shit.

'Murrica

Our last cargo discharge was kind of a ballbuster. Language barrier was there, but aside from that came the realization that incompetence transcends all languages, cultures and boundaries.

 The one guy I don't interact with except at the start and finish of a cargo discharge is the one guy who can be reasonably expected to be educated at some level... or at least not a goddam retard, anyhow. Feel free to savor that naughty word as God intended it, by the way: with my lovely Boston accent:  Ree-tahd.

At any rate, the last engineer I dealt with had some English, which he used to bitch at length about how our cargo tanks are measured using the English system, not the Metric system. I had to listen to it for far too long, my friends. 3-4 minutes of a guy who eschews underarm deodorant in favor of smelling like rotting onions is about 3-4 minutes too long. So I had to keep my mouth shut. Which I failed to do.

"I guess there are two types of countries in the world, Chief; those that use the metric system, and the one that put a man on the Goddamn moon."

I dreamed a dream

So last night I slept really uneasy. Late night phone call, a 'maybe we'll call you in the overnight' for work sort of call, so I slept lightly, hemidemisemi waiting for the phone to ring. A lot of short dreams punctuated by me waking up and rolling over to try to doze off again.

 One dream stood out: in this dream I bought a Barrett .50 BMG.

 Now, bear in mind that each hot dog-sized shell costs about $7, and I'm a notoriously cheap prick. So why would I spend nice used Harley Davidson-level money on 30lbs of savings-account drain?

 Jeez, look at the thing. That's gun porn. It was a good dream.

Screw Change Day

Well, today is Crew Change Day here aboard HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HQ/Center for Mood Disorders. I'm getting off today, but not going home. As I wrote about earlier, the situation requires I stay in NY and work over, whore myself out to other vessels for the next 2 weeks before coming back here for 4 more weeks subsequent to that.

 So it goes. I haven't exactly made peace with it, as 2014 looks like another 10-months at sea year despite best efforts, but I'm more at peace than I was.

 Expect blogging to be light for a few days. I'm just not feeling it.

Pushing back on diminishing boundaries

When in the middle of an extended hitch, my world tends to get smaller. I think of it as 'pulling in,' where I start to tune out the world, forget to return phone calls and generally allow my horizon to dwindle down to the confines of the vessel I'm on. I hear that guys in prison do the same thing to keep from losing their shit.

 And that's the goal: maintain. I don't want the reminders of what I'm missing. I start to catch up on my reading, my conversational skills perhaps don't get exercised so much, too... as a tugboater told me this morning "Well, you're gonna get real ugly."  And that's true too. I'll get temperamental, at times. Moody. That's just how it is. On paydays, I'll be cheerful, as the big checks start rolling in and I see a return on my investment, but that's about it.

       Today I had the morning free, and to combat ennui, I went for a 10-mile walk through Red Hook, Carroll Gardens and the Fulton Mall area of Brooklyn. Beautiful day for the walk, too. At first it was a grind. I had no patience for all the damn people. I was expecting to be a little more alone on Sunday, but it wasn't to be. After the first few miles, I perked up, and started to look around. I got some decent news when I stepped on the scale this morning- I'm about 70% of the way to my goal, as far as my ideal weight, from where I started, and the few nice clothes I have here that actually fit are pretty comfortable for this time of year. So that helped keep me of good cheer and also from eating anything I shouldn't on my walk.

 At any rate, a 3 hour walk did me a lot of good, as a way to try to keep my horizons from shrinking down too much. There's a larger world out there, and, as much as I don't really care for New York, it's an interesting place to visit. Shame I can't try out the bars here, as there's plenty of them, but even when I'm off the clock, I'm on the clock.

 So later I'm going to take that walk again. This time there's a sandwich in my future. I actually MUST have 900 more calories for the day at a minimum, or risk losing muscle mass. Considering my battle with keeping a healthy weight, that's a nice problem to deal with.

probably too personal

Well... shit.

        Some bad news from Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's family in Brazil has thrown a massive spanner in the works. Yours truly is about to do something stupid. Looks like I won't be home for another couple of months, so that I might pull someone's fat out of the fire yet again and pay for a needed surgery.

 Brazil's a fucked up place. I've mentioned that before, I believe. If you don't have cash on the barrel when you step foot in a hospital, you are wheeled outside and placed at the conveniently located bus stop bench there.

     Anyhow, there's crazy drama, and I'm in an unenviable position. I've never in a thousand years imagined that I'd be a person to divide a family. When I see or hear of brothers who don't talk to brothers, of bullheaded people who refuse to forgive, it makes me sad, or even sometimes disgusted.

 And yet here I am. The side effect of doing this not-going-home shit is that the man who's mother I'm saving is dead to me. Any asshole who turns his back on his flesh-and-blood because it's expensive to keep them alive is not welcome in my life. I've made it clear that I'm not making decisions for my wife, that I'm not going to push her into abandoning anyone, despite the fact that they've already shown their willingness to do the same... still, I don't live in a vacuum, and the cost of sharing a roof with me now is that  there are certain people no longer welcome in my life and in my home, which is also hers, of course, and she'll have to live with that.
 Anyhow, it doesn't sit well with me, but I suspect that this may very well be exactly why it's the correct decision. Who needs more bastards in their life?


Anyhow, on a happier note, here's some pictures from New York's waterfront, taken last week on what was the prettiest day of 2014 thus far.

   

Beating the hell out of the Queen II: The Queen Strikes Back.

 As I mentioned in the last post, on Sunday I bunkered the Queen Mary II, the most dreaded job among us bunker bastards in Nu Iorque. It has been almost 18 months since the last time I drew the short straw, and in that time, they actually managed to make it even more difficult to moor alongside! Is that even possible? Other tankermen wondered. Turns out, it is.

We had to moor backwards, or heads-to-tails, my stern to their bow.  I had to shackle together two of my strongest and heaviest hawsers to stretch the 400-500 feet from my bow to the closest mooring point on his stern, then the ship stretched out one of their bow lines another 300 or so feet all the way to my stern, heaving it tight. Only then did we hump two lengths of ultralight synthetic hawser (still weighed about 150lbs each) from my bow to the quarter so that we could moor to the ONE mooring point they provide on the parallel midbody (the side) of the ship.

 As I was saying to the trainee deckhand who was helping us out that day, sometimes it takes a truly pain in the balls job to bring up the creative thinking that allows you to up your game when it comes to normal pain in the balls jobs.