Still Here, I Ashore You

Your e-mail's historic folders can be saddening at times, depending on who you are.
Like, for dudes who went to school with Scarlett Johansson and kept in contact during college, but who never 'made a move'.
"I could be high on the hog right now, making Colin Farrell jealous."
For those who have no friends and save their spam mail as though it's from actual people.
"Oh! The diamond miners wrote again! Gee, for guys who mine diamonds, they sure need a lot of my money."
And for those who are bad at keeping in touch. Like myself. I have so many replies that begin with, "Sorry I took so long getting back to you..."
Anyway, sorry for taking so long to get back to you.
I think I have eczema.
"Eczema? Gross!"
I spelled that correctly on the first attempt, without ever dating one pharmacist.
Pharmacists are sexy.
And I'm not just saying that because one of my cousins is a pharmacist.
I did a gig once with Brian Aylward and Bryant (pronounce the T) Thomson for graduating pharmacy students.
Beauties. Just out of this world.
That's because the lady pharmacists know both the skin creams that actually work, and those that just give you eczema.
Anyway, I'm on a boat.
Ship.
I have to remember to call it a ship.
If you're asking "What's the difference?" and to be fair, I suppose you should be, the difference as explained to me is that "Ships carry boats."
This one carries...three, I think.
It also has at least two cranes. Not that anyone will let me operate them.
Yes, I'm on a boat, and no matter how many times I say it (aloud, alone in my cabin), it doesn't put me on land.
To be fair, land is currently just a gangway away, but that land is Lewisporte.
No offense to the finite people of this town, but Canadian Tire is closed, and I'm not sure where else I'd go.
On Friday, however, I'll be going to The Pub (that's the name of the place. It's a flamenco studio [I'm kidding; it's a pub]).
Fridays are bumping at The Pub. I'll be going there with sailors. Real ones.
I suppose I'm a real one now, also.
I was on this thing while it was careening about forcefully enough to move all of the chairs to and fro in the crew's mess - while the crew were seated in them.
And I didn't vomit once! Ya hear that, world! Not one time!
Knock on bulkhead. I really don't want to vomit while I'm sober enough to enjoy it.
The short answer to "What are you doing on a boat? Ship?" is: maintaining sanity.
It pays well and it'll allow me to sit around during the summer and catch up with all of you fine ingrates.
At a real desk. The desk is already situated and it exists somewhere in the world right now.
But more on that later.
Sailors!
They're fascinating, kind of.
The whole process is fascinating.
In essence, I live and work with these people in a steel, three-storey apartment on the ocean, which is housed above several million liters of flammable liquid.
I'd type all of that out a second time, just for effect, but this is the 21st century, so I'll copy and paste it:
In essence, I live and work with these people in a steel, three-storey apartment on the ocean, which is housed above several million liters of flammable liquid.
It's great and terrible, as you can well imagine.
Drunken sailors being obnoxious and eventually ejected at a bar makes perfect sense to me now.
Made perfect sense within days of joining them.
I hope it happens to me, particularly in Montreal.  
Sailing on an oil tanker is sort of like being in a very small prison.
The only difference is that in prison you're able to play basketball sometimes.
We're all dudes. There are no women. We can't escape, and even if we could, there's nowhere to escape to. We all eat together. There's no alcohol allowed on board. No drugs. Either are searched for and confiiscated.
The similarities are there.
It's not so bad, though.
I have access to several pounds of baking soda, and I've never been able to say that before.
Let me tell you a bit about the boat.
Ship.
Umm...let's see.
It's 161 meters long, for any engineers who may be reading this.
It does usually have wi-fi, but it appears that, once you go far enough out to sea, even sattelites won't bother with you.
All of the doors are quite heavy, and I believe they're water-tight.
Despite its tremendous size, it does not just 'float on the water' like a 'cruise ship'.
And that's just the first of its many dissimilarities from cruise ships.
It has rolled back and forth so severely that I have feared for my safety.
Not for fear of it capsizing, mind you, but for fear that the small potted ivy I purchased to 'spruce the place up' might careen across my cabin and hit me in the head.
That chair thing I mentioned before?
That happened while we were all eating.
The chairs (and men) all slid one way, and then began to slide the other.
I panicked and hopped out of mine, only to have several heavy chairs come barreling towards me.
I had to do a little backup hop onto a table, the way referees scoot to avoid pucks sometimes.
Then the chairs stopped moving and I said, "Now what do we do?"
Everyone laughed.
The water that comes out of my tap is slightly yellowish, and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to brush my teeth with it, but I'm too embarrassed to ask.
We have traversed through melting ice floes.
Some of them had seals on them.
And we beat them with our clubs and we sang our jolly tunes.
That last part I made up.
There were seals, though.
The same boat (ship), while on an Arctic voyage, encountered a polar bear. The lads threw a rope overboard, and played tug-o-war with it.
That's true. I've seen footage of it.
Four men couldn't move the bear, by the way.
Everyone has hard-drives dedicated to porno, and most of them seem willing to share these.
We stay on Newfoundland time, despite the time zone.

I have a life vest and an immersion suit in my room. 

I miss sex.
These are some of the basic details of the boat (ship).
I've been keeping a log of my travels.
I'll start including those because the tone is really fun and it gives me a reason to continue writing them.
You give me a reason to continue.
I suppose I forget that sometimes.
...
I'll upload some pictures because I never do that.

Oh! One last thing, and I'm not saying this to be funny or whatever.
Whenever we pull out of a port, I get Barrett's Privateers stuck in my head for a solid hour or two.

 

Done 4G

Wouldn't it be nuts if it turned out that Steve Jobs was in fact a malevolent asshole?
Like, he purposefully put cancer in all of our phones and we just don't know it yet because we're still alive (for now) and no investigative reporters have uncovered the secret?
No one enjoys a good conspiracy theory these days. 
They're putting rickets in the bacon!

Try As You Might

Single ladies, if you believe you have a big bum, don't be sad about it.
Some boys really like a big bum.
Some boys just love dat ass.

Well, that's my good deed for the day.
What an indication of humanity's scope for being considerate:
Counting the nice things we do so we can reach the cutoff, and stop.
And our cutoff is, as it turns out, one.
Also, some people have a tough time distinguishing a 'good deed' from a 'chore'.
"Well, I mowed the lawn. Time to go cheat on the wife."

Where are my grammar bunnies at?
Did you catch that one?
I put periods and so on outside of single quotes, inside for double quotes.
The latter is right, but I'm not sure about the former.
Fortunately, I don't care.

I did a comedy show in Bridgewater recently.
Besides having a Best Western, there's not much I can tell you about the town.
Went on down there with Blacky, Thomson, and the sexually impressionable Catherine Robertson.
Many of you don't know any of these people, I know.
I'm just sticking their names in there so that I can hope to recall this down the road once I'm senile and this blog is the only relative I have left.
Relatively speaking.
We had a great little time.
The hotel owners were both very lovely, and maybe a bit drunk.
They let us order food and I didn't eat any, which flabbergasted everyone.
If there's one sort of food I find tastiest of all, it's free food.
No one knows this better than my comedy buddies.
I did have a few gins though.
Anyway, one airhead called me a 'faggot' on his way out of the venue.
Some puffy-jacketed, simple man.
He muttered it under his breath as he walked by.
Unless they bellow it from a moving vehicle, they always mutter it.
I wasn't in the mood, really.
It's a staggering thing to hear, but it's hard to place why.
People will say, "Oh, in this day and age, how could someone still say..." and so on.
Which misses the point.
Close-minded people will always be around, no matter what decade it is.
It's just shocking in the sense that I didn't do nothin', y'know?
Like, I get that I'm skinny and I'm wearing my grandmother's shirt, but I talked about banging women onstage.
Was he not convinced, or simply not satisfied?
Anyway, I wasn't in the mood.
So, I said, "What was that?!"
He turned around and acted like he couldn't understand why I was addressing him (this was annoying, too. They always do that.)
Look them right in the eye, let them know it's a challenge.
"Maybe you're the fag!"
Yes, I said that. At this point in the story, everyone so far has stopped me and said, "You didn't say that!"
Yes, I did.
Really, you're sort of doing the same thing as buddy by assuming I wouldn't say that.
"Paul stood up for himself? But he's always been such a pussy."
Now, homosexuals might get bent out of shape that I'm offended at all, since I'm not gay.
Anything that implies homosexuality they sometimes believe is theirs exclusively.
But I'm here to say that if I've spent my life having to put up with shit like this (and I have. Pre-teen. Before junior high. Before sexuality) then I have a right to a reaction.
Besides, he wasn't really calling me gay. He was calling me weak.
And I ain't no Nancy. Not these days.
Besides, as I've told everyone I've recounted the story to so far, these men are gutless.
It's a coward who accuses without meeting one's eye. 
I didn't feel physically threatened in the least. 
So, "Maybe you're the fag!"
He said nothing at first. He didn't expect this, of course.
Then he simply muttered that I was a faggot again and walked away.
Now, what can we take away from this occasion?
"Bridgewater is full of backwater hicks."
Wrong! That's wrong.
I was surprised by how many people said that after the fact.
"Jesus...Bridgewater."
It's not the town. There are cowpokes like this guy in every town, including your own.
The people of Bridgewater were lovely.
So, I guess we'll just have to accept that humans can't handle what's different.
Not just that guy, either. I mean, he's a bit of a dick, obviously.
But all of us have fringes to our comfort zones.
I curse on hippies under my breath and in my head all the time.
So am I any better?
When you strip away the anthropology, the answer is "not really."
So, then, the real question is, why are we this way?
We're all bothered by some group or another, no matter who we are.
Factions or tribes that we would prefer to do without. 
Look at the bigot in yourself (he's in there. He looks and sounds exactly like this guy) and try to figure out where he came from.
Then try to kick him out.
You'll be surprised at how hard it can be to appreciate everyone.
To just say, "Well, that's their thing."
Many of us, especially the arts majors, tell ourselves that we do this.
The artsy-fartsies will tell you how open-minded they are before spending half an hour shitting on jocks.
It's a very special, extremely minute population of humans who truly accept everyone. 
I try with the goddamn hippies. I really do.
But you can't make pants out of yarn and eat food that makes you miserable and then act like you're better than me.
Still, I wouldn't cough, "Hrmph! Goddamn hippies!" while walking past their shanties.
I'd just call them that in the privacy of my own home.

Hair-Trigger Hairdo

You have a cat nearby? Is there a cat lounging about as you read this?
Are you videotaping that cat? Uploading the videos?
If you're not recording that cat, then you're wasting the cat.
Older ladies will cluck their tongues at you and dustily say:
"Why would they want the animal in the first place if they're not going to record it?"

Okay, first thing's first:
Having a conversation on Spring Garden Road here in Halifax will cost you bus fare.
Going rate these days, then, is $2.50 per exchange, unless you have a transfer on you.
It's okay, y'know.
Sometimes it's worth it.
Andie (vixen) and I were waiting for a bus inside a Subway (the sandwich place) recently.
A nice fellow spoke to us about the weather, and we found out he was from Jamaica.
We then learned a number of extra things about him (nothing objectionable.)
Then he recommended Appleton Rum and requested two bucks for the bus.
I decided he'd earned it. 
A chipper conversation of an evening is something that we all might have to pay for one day.

North Korea and South Korea are at it again.
South Korea is upset because North Korea is exercising military drills with live ammunition.
North Korea is upset because Kim Jong-Un's haircut still hasn't caught on.

Nor will it.
What a classic example of a kid who can't make friends.
You can tell that this fellow, this deity, if you will (and some do. Isn't that fucked?) can't make friends.
Has never been able to make friends.
Kids just hang out with him sometimes because his house has lots of toys and it's the only one with grain in it.
Now he's allegedly a man, and 'toys' has been replaced with 'nuclear weaponry'.
You're less inclined to play with nuclear weaponry, but just as likely to stay on the good side of the kid who has it.
People worry about The Big Red Button.
Nations with their itching fingers at the ready.
One goes, they all go.
Should the worst occur, I do think that this would be the reaction by all leaders.
"It appears they have chosen to decimate us, sir."
"Decimate back!"
But I don't really believe anyone, even Kid n' Play here, would ever actually push the button.
Nuclear weapons are a nation's equivelant to a home security system.
You don't have it installed for the alarm; you have it installed for the alarm sticker you put in your window. 

This post brought to you by Appleton Rum.
Remember, if you want to drown in the hotel pool during your vacation, it's Appleton's.