Don’t know what to put, really. things just seem to go from bad to worse. Talk about being smacked around the head with a rather large mallet! It’s more like getting my nipples twisted, the world’s biggest wedgie, poked in the eye and kicked in the bollocks all at once! I feel like I’ve stood barefoot in the still-warm dogshit of life and it’s squidging between my toes.
There’s so much I want to say but I can’t find the words.
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
(No, that’s not them!)
Thing is, how many of us, dear reader, look in the mirror and tell ourselves that we are in control? Then, at the weekend (occasionally through the week, too), we find ourselves halfway down a bottle of red, with another in the fridge? Don’t get me wrong, the idea of getting shit-faced appeals more because it’s a good laugh: total shutdown of the frontal lobe and full speed ahead for Sillyville! Then, there’s the other side: you try to say something, get it all wrong and end up causing a whole heap of trouble, cos yer brain’s gone to Disneyland.
So, next time I’m in the bar, it’s gonna be if you could get me a drink of water, cos my lips are chapped and faded! I’ve done it before, six months without so much as a shandy, whilst staying at a bar, on a golf course in Australia. Oh, the temptation was sooooo bad!
Been playing the part of the good son whilst I’ve been back in the UK, by the way, doing some decorating for me good old mum. She’s 83; having both a hip and knee replacement. I told her, if she carries on having bits swapped-out, she’ll turn into robocop; I’ll not be burying her, but cashing her in for scrap!
Mums are great for making sons feel guilty, especially when we’re not there! It works, too. We find ourselves questioning what we’re doing leaving them without their fags at two in the morning. Oh, the guilt! I could have been, I should have been, a better son!
So, dear reader, raise your glass; the toast is: a drink for horror that I’m in, for the good guys and the bad guys, for the monsters that I’ve been. I’m pretty sure sleep and I will not enjoy each other’s company tonight. Might as well make a brew and see what Roland is up to.
Alaska beckons and then what? Well, I don’t know.
Fornit some fornus!
Katchemak Bay, Alaska. A beautiful, rugged landscape. Directly opposite, the snowcapped Mount Iliamna rises powerfully and majestically, through the thick cloud, flanked by the equally impressive Mount Redoubt, the distant Mount Spur, and the archetypal smoking, island volcanoe that is St Augustine.
It’s a glimpse back to a time when volcanoes belched magma and ash across the surface of the earth and dinosaurs marauded willy-nilly, scaring the shit out of everything: real 10,000 BC stuff, but without the gorgeous, sexy, Raquel Welch, who, clad in her somewhat revealling (for the time), fur bikini, kept so many adolescent males awake for many an hour after lights-out!
Anyway, that’s where I am at the moment. (No, I mean in Alaska, not dreaming of Raquel Welch … However…!)
We are based in Seldovia aboard the MV Okoboji, a sixty-foot, 55 ton lump of cantankerous, malicious, stubborn and downright evil bitchness! If you ever wondered why boats are referred to using the gender specific pronoun “she”, it’s nothing to do with images of grace and beauty, sleek lines and curves, conjured up in the minds of paunchy, middle-aged males who look in the mirror and see there something completely different to what the rest of the world sees, it’s because they’ll do anything to fuck you over, chew you up and then spit out the gristly bits, leaving you dazed and confused and wondering what year it is.
The engine room is a mess and, thanks to a leaking grey water tank, the bilges stink! I’ve spent so many days down there, pumping-out and cleaning, I’m in fear of turning into Gollum, or becoming the first link in the chain that sees humans evolving into the machine-serving, mindless, cave-dwellers that are Orwell’s Morlocks (So, not much change then!)
The boat? She is vicious! Stephen King’s Christine springs to mind. Mistakes are paid for in fingers. For example, it seems the whole purpose of any area below deck is to incapacitate or otherwise disable the unwary who dare to venture there. This is generally achieved via a violent blow to the head from a particularly malevolent sharp corner or low section of ceiling (known to favour those dark and dingy passageways to engine rooms and stairwells).
In the those early days, before I learned to eye every corner, every low ceiling, every sharp edge with a fear bordering on paranoia (earlier, when looking under the stairs, I got myself in the temple with a screw sticking out of the bulkhead. That was a special kind of pain!), a string of obscenities usually followed my every foray “down there”:
(Bang!) “Fuck, fuck, bastard, fuck!”
(Thud!) “Ow! Bastard, fucking bastard. Fuck!”
(Bong!) “Aargh! I’ve done it again. Bastard! Bastard!”
And up I’d come, blinking in the harsh light of the ‘above-world’, blood dribbling profusely from some new laceration; another scar in the making. I swear, you can tell anyone who works below decks by the permanently stooping gait and the terrified, wild-eyed cringe as they pass through a doorway, as if by some inexplicable act of paranormal activity, the top of the frame will reach down and suddenly plant the traumatized victim a good-one right on the pate.
Still, she’s been home for most of the summer. I love the bones of the old bitch and I’ll be sorry to leave her next week. Gotta get her winter drawers on soon though, as she’s staying in the water this year. That means lots of burst pipes and seized parts next season.
Oh joy!
WanderinRogers 