Limbo...

Just a quick short post about where I'm at right now to clear my head a little bit. I'm in Dutch Harbor for Opilo crab season. I can't really complain, because I'm on a great boat and everything has gone pretty smoothly. Except the ice. So I'm finding myself spending longer in town than a trip would have taken and my season drags on. I wasn't too keen on being away from home this season in the first place, but it is nice to have a pay check and its been really great seeing friends up here. The rub is still being here after I already thought I'd be home. I'm getting paid while I wait for things to start up and I know that everyone thinks getting a paycheck for doing nothing other than being there and ready when the work picks up sounds nice, but I actually find it harder than just being out there doing the job. At sea, I can't call anyone or get online; I'm trapped in my own little environment. Which sounds bad, but sometimes when you are cut off from your home and where you want to be, it's easier when the isolation is complete. The first day back on land, being able to call home and check email and see everyone who is in town is amazing and kind of fills up your tank. Having a couple of days to hang out with friends while you sit out a blizzard is awesome. Suddenly, after a few days something shifts. There isn't that much to do and you find yourself trapped in Groundhog Day, doing the same things over and over and not feeling any closer to things changing. That's where I am now. I totally understand the reasons for the delay and I like getting payed for not so much effort. Still it feels like limbo and makes me feel more isolated and cut off than I do when I'm actually trapped in a floating prison freezing my ass off.

I know we'll get moving soon and I'll get to do my work and read my books and then I'll be home before I know it; just needed to air out the nagging thoughts swirling around my head.

holes filled with crabs

HP Lovecraft, a first taste

(written earlier in the year while still at sea...)

I don't normally go in for horror or gothic fiction or movies. It just has never been my thing, but I think I've just gotten my hands on the wrong stuff. I might actually have inside me the makings of a decent enthusiast of the darker, creepier side.

Earlier I wrote about Neko Case tingling my spine and making my hair stand on end and lamented for fiction or film that could do the same. I hadn't prepared for this desire, but in a music exchange last fall a few MP3's of Call of Cthulu came my way. I discovered, much to my horror, that the three sections did not encompass the entire tale, so I listened rapturously then found myself against a wall: no more Lovecraft for me.

: (

I haven't avoided his books, just never picked one up. I'm kind of glad it came to me as it did. The audiobook version of this is perfect. The sounds quality isn't great actually and hisses a little bit, but the voice of the narrator... I'll venture there has never been a better match of voice to tale. I could listen to this speaker for hours reading anything, but it seems particularly suited to this tale. So gentle, I've started to listen to it as I go to sleep, which probably doesn't do good things to my dreams (or maybe amazing things).

It isn't often that I listen to an audio book and then want to go back and read it again, but this one I want both in text and audio. The language is delicious and rich. Had Lovecraft not chosen to benefit humanity using his gift for good as a sci fi author, who knows what horrors he might have done as an evangelist. Which I suppose he is in a way, just not the bad way. He preaches wonder and more than meets the eye and reminds us to be scared of the dark. Perhaps the ugliest stupidity to come out of the twentieth century is the widespread belief that we shouldn't have to be scared of the dark. Sure, it is nice to not always be terrified when the lights go out, but we should remember how to be scared in the dark. We need dark evangelists to remind that not everything is illuminated by reason and not everything makes sense or has motives we understand.

Perhaps I get ahead of myself in assuming I understand our author's message. I plan to dive deeper in and remedy this deficit.

Only boring people get bored.

I keep telling this to myself. It is one of those horrible aphorism thrown about by busybody aunts who chide any complaint and encourage guilt, but I might be one of those people kind of people deep down. I don't particularly encourage guilt; I'm more in the camp of perpetual re-analysis for results and reshaping future actions accordingly, but none of the handwringing over episodes that one would rather not repeat. If you repeat them and hate the results again, you should feel stupid, not guilty (sometimes I am stupid, but I try my best not to be). Anyway, I am more prone to chiding complaints than coddling them. Particularly when I am the one complaining.

I am currently bored, and it is stupid. Actually, boredom isn't the right word. Maybe I am more restless. Because I spend so little time on land when I am working, I feel like time on land is valuable and I shouldn't waste the goodness. I like working up here on boats specifically because it gives me time to crawl into my own head and cut myself off from the world and read. And I have my stupidly heavy suitcase full of books that I look forward to reading, so I could just pull one out and get started. But I can do that at sea and I am on land, so I can't sit reading a book without the potential of terra firma nagging me that I should be doing something that I won't be able to do when we finally set sail.

I've been wandering about and enjoying the beauty of the area and rambling around town and enjoying time spent with friends here, but I already do so much alone and on my own time that I kind of don't feel like wandering around by myself at the moment with no partner in crime. I've got a couple of friends in town who are awesome co-troublemakers at night, but who have real jobs and so I've got an expanding series of days with no one to ramble with.

I might get up tomorrow and try to find somewhere to build a snow man or something else fun that you can do in the snow, but even though I'm staying plenty warm and like the white fluffy landscape, I'm really more of a tropical soul. I want to go hiking and swimming and even just lay on a beach or in the grass. I know, wah wah wah. Just feeling a little disjointed and I'll quit my complaining. Don't worry, my moments of self pity are short lived (self pity is something that is mercilessly brutalized and destroyed by the other inhabitants in my head) and I'll get back to normal.

so much I will miss in New York...

...but the best thing about being trapped on a boat is all the books I get to read when there is no phone that can ring, no email that can be checked, no happy hour calling my name.

And I promise to write more this go round.

the fountainhead: Part III

(written early last year, during my second trip in Hawaii)

Ok, so I may have softened a little on the fountainhead. Yes, I still think it is mostly pompous rape/cuckoldry fantasy done up in flimsy drag as radical philosophy. But it can be a reasonably readable book when it isn't busy monologuing and explaining everything.

If you haven't noticed, I've been kind of hard on this book from the start. My irritation comes from three sources. One is obvious: the book itself is irritating. The hero worship starts on the first page and only get cringingly more fawning as it goes. The philosophy of the whole thing is so black and white and so condescending and pedantic that even when a good point is made, you want to disagree with it because you know that had that point been made in that same way in real life, it would have been made by someone you hate.

The second is a few well-meaning friends commenting when they heard that I was going to read it that I should be careful and not be taken in by Ms. Rand's wily storytelling. I know that they are afraid of me becoming as annoying as they were when they were fifteen and read it and thought it was mind-blowing that someone could suggest that being selfish was something to aspire to and felt it really spoke to their frustrations with all the mindless imbeciles that every teenager feels surrounded by (and not always without reason). I'm not exactly a teenager and don't exactly shy away from fairly difficult reading, so I'll admit to being mildly offended by this well-meant warning. Ok, initially miffed and increasingly full stop offended as I've proceeded through the book.

The third reason is that over the years too many people have made comments like, "Have you read the fountainhead? I think you'd like it. Your take on things reminds me of it." Which is not unlike when I worked at a summer camp one year and was told repeatedly that I was just like Dan Edge who had worked there the year before. "You are just like Dan Edge, except he was a total asshole." Thanks. So my take on things reminds people of the philosophy expounded in what may be the most annoying book I have ever read? Great.

So, yes, I walked into this with unfair baggage, already prepped to dislike the book. But the baggage was only unfair because I hadn't read it yet, not because the book wasn't annoying enough to deserve the derision outright.

Actually, I should be clear. If this were a random tome picked out of obscurity from some shelf, I would have nicer things to say about it. It is reasonably well written. The characters are well developed, even if annoyingly developed as one-note sychophants, and the plot keeps sort of twisting til the end. As just a book that had managed to get published, I would judge it kindly and might have finished it, though probably not and if I had would have found it reasonably thought provoking even if a little naked about its intentions. But it isn't just some random book. It is a book which tons of people hold up as this life changing experience and a brilliant mind expanding read. At the end of the day, it is a bold attempt at sexualized hero worship, a story about a woman getting to be bored by the mediocrity of the world and lashing out with her beauty and competence and status to keep it all at bay until she meets this powerful machine of a man-god to ravage her. Yawn.

the fountainhead: Part I

(written early last year, on my second trip in Hawaii)


On my first trip, I headed to sea with far too few books. I didn't think this when I left; the weight of the books was a ridiculous addition to an already cumbersome collection of junk. But you never realize how quickly you can read books when you take away other forms of distraction. Suddenly held tight on a boat where only one other person really speaks english well enough to hold a conversation and you suddenly plow through books like a maniac. Not all because you necessarily love them, but simply by the fact of them being there. Anyway, this trip I swore I wouldn't spend three days straight playing Snood on my cell phone and grabbed books like crazy.

"Like crazy" may be a more appropriate description than I would like to admit. I had all these plans of going book hunting and buying tons of great books and reading them and being all excited, but somehow with all the days spent in the office and then running around doing all my other tasks in that short valuable time that we spend on land, I didn't go out book shopping. Thankfully, as I unloaded the books I had read, I picked through the assorted books left behind at the house and the gear shed and came away with a motley crew of things which I had thought perhaps in the past of reading, but knew there was no way on earth I would ever read most of them in any other situation. So here I find myself in the middle of the ocean with Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard, The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Jewell by Brett Lott, The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck, and the fountainhead by ayn rand (I also have Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood and A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes, but since these made the previous trip with me and have both been read and picked apart many times, they seem to require separate mention). For some unknown reason, I decided to pick up the fountainhead. It had to happen sometime.

Why do I persist in refusing to capitalize the title of the book or its authors name? Because I have begun reading the book. THIS is the heralded beacon of reason and objectivity that annoying goth kids in high school and pretentious college antagonists have gushed so enthusiastically about? Granted, I'm not finished with the book, but I wouldn't have trudged past the first chapter if I wasn't stuck on a boat and wasn't rationing my few precious downloaded episodes of America's Next Top Model like they were manna from heaven. But I am on a boat, so I'm going to finish the damn thing.

It isn't exactly a painful read. It might be reasonably enjoyable if it didn't have all that reverent hoojab about how great and life changing it is. It is written as poorly as Ishmael (speaking of reverently adored, eye-opening, badly written books), but at least Ishmael did have some eye opening insight to offer which wasn't found laid out as directly or as challengingly in other books, even if it was clunkily chinked into a silly story. the fountainhead doesn't have all that much which is eye opening and unavailable elsewhere. It is basically just elaborate rape fantasy spruced up as Frank Lloyd Wright fan fiction. If she manages to cram in the description of a shirt clinging to the shoulder blades of another man, I'll throw up. The book starts with a naked dude looking at nature and thinking about how he would control it and overpower it, how it was waiting for him to take control and improve upon it. Force himself upon it, if you will, but as it has been waiting for someone to do, for someone to bring it to that climax that only this ultimate man could deliver. Throw in some other characters, some time, a perfect beautiful stone-cold bitch, a nice trajectory to the bring them together... whatever.

The book is fine as what it is. The story is reasonably engaging, the characters sometimes border on likeable and you even find yourself wanting to see Mr. Roark's buildings get built. But unless there is something really waiting for the last half of the book to bring it all together and make this profound commentary that people have told me this book makes, this is just one more book that I really couldn't recommend anyone devoting the time to unless they find themselves stuck in the middle of the Pacific with only a few books at hand.

isolation or not

(this was written in early October)

Fishing in the Bering Sea is not like fishing long-line off Hawaii. It isn't the weather that marks the greatest difference; it is the isolation or lack of it. Dutch Harbor itself feels cut off from the world because it is small and the people there are mainly there for one reason: fishing or somehow supporting or profiting off the fishing fleet. And internet access is slow and not so easy to come by and the cell phone service is controlled by a monopoly which wants you to pay through the nose.

But on the water... it almost feels crowded. This is ridiculous, of course, or at least relative. The boats are huge and comfortable and much more connected and modern. This opinion may change later as we venture further out, but two days into fishing and I can still see land! This is a stupid thing to be excited about, but in Hawaii, seeing land was so rare. After three weeks at sea, you would go on deck every few hours on the trip back to see if you could spot land yet and as soon as you could, you would just stare. The solid lines and bulk of it seemed so amazing and almost like a mirage after so long without. We were so far out and sighting anything but birds and fish was so rare that the light of a single fishing boat on the horizon would make you stop and stare and wonder which boat it might be. Even trash floating by became fodder for the imagination. Any little suggestion that there were things in the world beside your little floating prison.

Maybe it is also the contrast of having more people on this boat, it being larger, and the crew all speaking English that makes this feel less isolated, but I still haven't been out of sight of land and other boats are almost always visible. Even when we do leave sight of land, it is unlikely that we will ever be even 200 miles from shore, which is closer than we would start fishing in Hawaii.

This is early, it is still warm. Let's see how I feel about it all as the season wears on.

isolation or not

Fishing in the Bering Sea is not like fishing long-line off Hawaii. It isn't the weather that marks the greatest difference; it is the isolation or lack of it. Dutch Harbor itself feels cut off from the world because it is small and the people there are mainly there for one reason: fishing or somehow supporting or profiting off the fishing fleet. And internet access is slow and not so easy to come by and the cell phone service is controlled by a monopoly which wants you to pay through the nose.

But on the water... it almost feels crowded. This is ridiculous, of course, or at least relative. The boats are huge and comfortable and much more connected and modern. This opinion may change later as we venture further out, but two days into fishing and I can still see land! This is a stupid thing to be excited about, but in Hawaii, seeing land was so rare. After three weeks at sea, you would go on deck every few hours on the trip back to see if you could spot land yet and as soon as you could, you would just stare. The solid lines and bulk of it seemed so amazing and almost like a mirage after so long without. We were so far out and sighting anything but birds and fish was so rare that the light of a single fishing boat on the horizon would make you stop and stare and wonder which boat it might be. Even trash floating by became fodder for the imagination. Any little suggestion that there were things in the world beside your little floating prison.

Maybe it is also the contrast of having more people on this boat, it being larger, and the crew all speaking English that makes this feel less isolated, but I still haven't been out of sight of land and other boats are almost always visible. Even when we do leave sight of land, it is unlikely that we will ever be even 200 miles from shore, which is closer than we would start fishing in Hawaii.

This is early, it is still warm. Let's see how I feel about it all as the season wears on.

going...

...out to sea.

Looking forward to the seahab and time to read. And play solitaire compulsively. And see what kind of crazy things we can drag up from the bottom of the sea.

Say a little prayer that my seasickness isn't too rough.

:)

double Dutch

I'll enter again a time of radio silence, as I head out to sea after a hiatus on land. I'm in Dutch Harbor now, sitting in the only spot I've found so far with public wifi access, and in the background is a bar filled with Deadliest Catch people. They are filming in the hotel bar, making everyone sign releases before entering. Nothing against the show, but for now at least, I remain outside.

Dutch Harbor is unbelievably beautiful. Not the town so much, as the architecture remains the boxy functional crap that seems to be all the rage in Alaska, but the buildings are fewer and the landscape more dramatic and much closer. It doesn't simple fill the background, towering behind all the strip malls like in Anchorage; the town is stretched along the water at the base of mountains and hills here.

There are ravens everywhere, particularly around the hill I have to pass to walk to my boat. They make fun clicks and whistles and do a rolling dive when I go past; I'm not certain this has anything to do with my presence or is just something they like to do, but I'll pretend it is for me. I haven't spotted any eagles yet.

I got placed on my boat today. I make it a point to not discuss my actual job, as we all know that blogging about work is a recipe for disaster (even if temptingly cathartic), but I'll say that however much the Bering Sea is a more threatening body of water than the balmy expanse of the Pacific around Hawaii, I still think this is going to be a smoother ride than anything I've every experienced. Compared to what I'm used to, this boat is huge and amazingly clean and seemingly stable. I'm psyched. And most importantly, no smoking indoors! If you ever want to puke your guts out, shut yourself up in a floating prison with bad ventilation and chain smokers. Thankfully that does not describe my upcoming trip. Just being on the boat felt good. I'm anxious to get out on the water. Time on land has been nice, but I'm in work mode now, and there is something comforting about the water. It calms me and makes me feel, for a while, balanced. I'm really good at relaxing anytime anywhere, but most of the time on land I'm faking it. Not faking it so much as forcing it: I can sit and be calm, but I have to fight to achieve it, constantly fighting back nagging reminders of all the things I should be doing and need to get done. This is impossible at sea. I can think of things I wish I was doing and want to do, but not things that I should be doing. My tasks are limited and demand to be done when they present themselves, so no lost hours procrastinating. Reading here is not procrasting, it is its own task demanding its own time.

There is much I'll miss while out at sea, but I'm looking forward to the recharge.

there is something strangely exhilarating about looking out at moonlight reflecting off the waves in the middle of the ocean at midnight...

...while shitting in a five-gallon bucket on the back deck of a moving boat.

boat stop...

We are sitting here in the middle of the ocean and something is wrong with the engine. It seems to be starting up again, but it has restarted a couple of times so far over the last couple of hours only to stop again. We are one day north of Christmas Island and have yet to fish even once. If something does go wrong, where the hell do we go? Back to Christmas Island? Surely it will work out, but at the moment I don't know what is wrong, so images of everything that could go wrong are dancing through my head at the moment. A few minutes ago it was just the realization that if we do go back without setting, then I'm condemned to go back on this boat again when it does go out next. Which actually wouldn't be so bad, but still...

Now that they are revving the engine and the boat is shaking I'm having flashes of the motor exploding beneath me sending me flying into the ocean.