I enjoy working as a fill-in guy on other vessels sometimes because I have to get outside my comfort zone, which makes my world shrink down to the point where my area of concern is pretty much just inside the hull of the boat, and everything else gets reclassed as white noise for a while.
But, reality intrudes. Nothing makes me want to suck-start a .45 more than reading the comments section in an article I've posted online, after it's had a day or two to ferment.
You know how it goes. First few comments, someone brings up a point that supports or detracts from my central theme, or is interesting in a topical sense. Then a white knight tells them they're on the wrong path. After that, camps are forming up, with one side spearheaded by a person who insists on writing the entire biography of the person who first invented whatever I'm talking about,and no actual connection between that person and the particulars I was talking about. You know what I mean. I could have written about the Large Hadron Collider, and then we're all treated to a 10,000 word discourse on Isaac Newton's bowel habits in the comments section.
5 comments later, it's Obama/Bush's fault, and we're all racists and/or dupes. Exactly 3 minutes later, it's a Zionist conspiracy, and after the first cry of 'Dem Joooooooooz" there's no more talking about the shit I wrote about.
And all I can think about is how the fuck we got here. In this instance, I had written about the incredible reliability of the old Detroit diesel engines.
The more I dwell on it, the old timer who first brought me out on his commercial fishing boat when I was seven used to bellow 'eyes in the boat!' when I was distracted or looking elsewhere. His point was that my safety depended on limiting myself to what was in front of me.
Man had a point.
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