oceandoggy.com

It’s the first day of summer and just like last year and the year before we went from winter right into summer. From chilly and damp to hot and humid.

Way hot.

And workin’ outside in it is a lot like havin’ a hammer beatin’ down on you shattering your thoughts into splintering shards that scatter every which away.

Which’ll hopefully explain this post-

Firstly. The song is gone. It tucked it’s tail and crawled up somewhere in the dark and dead recesses of my brain, gave me the finger, and just disappeared.

I think I’ll miss it, for what it’s worth.

Secondly. We watched The Hurt Locker on Saturday. Miss Carol and me are really bad about keeping current with movies and even when we get them it takes weeks for us to watch ’em. But watch them we do.

And honestly? The Hurt Locker pissed me off. It made me wonder why the FUCK we’re over there throwing our kids up against the stone wall that is Iraq and, dare I say it?, the muslim religion? Whether you are for or against the “war”, get it and watch it. It made my poor heat splattered brain think.

Thirdly. Miss Carol and me spent the weekend up on the beach letting the heat hammer pound us into sunburnt, toasty, mind dead muffins.

So maybe that’s where the song went.

And maybe that’s what ticked me off about the movie.

And maybe that’s what made this post so disjointed- just little bits and pieces of nothing.

Maybe it’s the heat.

Or maybe it’s me.

Boy howdy, life is good.

Real good.

I’ve wanted one of these babies ever since I saw them at a boat show, like, four years ago.

It’s the new Hobie Adventure Island trimaran. It’s lightweight. It’s way cool and way expensive which is why I wouldn’t buy one. Four grand for a toy was not passing Miss Carol’s fun test.

So I started saving, putting away a little money here and little money there, thinking that if I bought one from saved funds it’d be different from just going out and buying one.

I was close three times. The first time I had $3500 saved and Miss Carol wanted the hot tub. Then I had $2500 and we needed it for bills. Then I had about $800 and had just about given up for this year when I did some work for an older, retired couple and noticed they had one under their house.

I asked them how they liked it and they told me they’d sell it to me for $1500. I asked if they’d accept $1100 and I’d do their work for free and they said yes and now I got me one.

Hobie calls it a sailing kayak but I call it a ton of fun and I think I’m gonna call her Skeeter.

Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas to me.

(And no, I STILL have not figured out what the song is running through my brain- it’s making me mental)

Ever had a song running through your head, chewing at you, and you can’t think of the title or even the artist so you’re stuck with the endless loop of it trippin’ around in your head?

That’s where I’m at.

I’ve got this song coursing through me. I can hear it crystal clear in my head and I want to download it and listen to it ’til the end of time but I can’t ’cause it’s right there, just beyond my grasping memory.

I know it’s a chick singing and I know it’s a pop tune and I know I want it desperately enough to try and hum it to Miss Carol while I was making dinner tonight in the hopes she’d recognize the song and save me.

Instead, she punched me and told me to stop making the funny noises.

Fuck.

The title, Continental Drift, confused me for most of the book. Here I’m thinkin’ continental drift in geologic terms like, well, you know, tectonic plates and continents drifting, um, apart? Or whatever?

So.

I’m reading Russell Banks book, waiting and watching for the continent drifting thingy and wondering why the whole book’s about a guy moving his family to Florida and a Haitian chick trying to get to America and I’m wondering why I’d want to read about continents drifting anyway.

But it’s good so I kept going.

Come to find out, in the postscript at the end, Russ was talking about the demographic drift of people from their homes to someplace different in the hopes of a different, and hopefully better, life.

And all the sudden it became clear.

I’m a turd and probably shouldn’t read anything more challenging than Reader’s Digest. And maybe keep to the short stories.

Anyway.

Continental Drift is about the convergent stories of Bob Dubois and Vanise Dorsinville and their separate journeys to Florida. His from Catamount, New Hampshire fleeing boredom and predictability and middle age, and hers from Allanche, Haiti fleeing certain arrest after she and her family eat a ham her nephew has stolen from a hurricane wrecked truck.

It’s an alarmingly parallel story of similar hopes and dreams played out over the cultural differences that separate them.

But more importantly it’s a story about what happens when their sadly ordinary lives collide.

‘Nuff said.

I don’t want to ruin it for you.

Run to the store and get and forget that I’m too stupid to understand the title.

Coming next- The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson.

I wrote about these two little girls sailing around the world alone and unassisted a while back and then added them to my blogroll if, and just in case, anybody was interested in following their journey.

I didn’t want to bore my one reader with my thoughts or commentary on parents pushing their kids into hugely dangerous adventures for the sake of, well, I’m not sure what so I left it at that.

Anyway.

Jessica’s home safe after ten months at sea.

Abby isn’t.

Her parents and shore crew reported today that, after fighting 60 knot winds, countless knockdowns, and 25 to 30 foot seas, her manual EPIRB was activated.

That means she wants and needs to be rescued.

Unfortunately she’s a little girl in the middle of the Indian Ocean somewhere between Africa and Australia on a sinking or sunk boat.

Australia Search and Rescue are trying to divert ships in the area, but they’re at least 40 hours away. They’re also trying to re-direct a Quantas flight over her location so that maybe they can at least pick her up on marine radio.

Her mom says on her blog that her sailboat is built to Category 0 standards with 5 different air-tight compartments, and she has a ditch bag and life raft and what-the-fuck-ever that all means.

She’s a scared little girl in the middle of a maelstrom wanting home.

Come on home Abby.

Please.

UPDATE part 2– Ya know, just in case you haven’t already seen it or heard it or whatever. Abby was contacted by a flyover and says she is fine even though she’s been rolled and dismasted.  A French fishing vessel is headed her way and should reach her in the next 12 to 24 hours.

Maybe there are gods.

It’s a funny thing, my life.

I work all by myself, I’m a one man company. Which is fine but it means it’s generally pretty quiet unless I’m talking to myself.

In the past I’d listen to Howard in the truck and Miss Carol bought me a portable Sirius radio so’s I could listen to him all the time but satellite doesn’t work inside houses.

So I listened to the local rock and country stations till I couldn’t stand the playlist any longer. It’s a long day and working and listening to the same old same old got, well, really old.

Then I switched to talk radio and spent the day getting pissed off and ranting and raving at things that I’ll never change or spend the energy to try and change. Did I mention I’m mostly lazy?

After that I mostly wallowed in silence. And then, I had a customer remind me about books on CD.

And the stars and heavens opened up and a blue sky rained down on me and sunlight warmed my fevered brow.

Anyway.

So now that’s what I do, what I listen to while I work alone. And I just finished listening to Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam whom I’m guessin’ is a big wig in rocket and space circles? Or was?

Anyway.

I don’t know who he is and, frankly, don’t really care, and his audiobook is hokey and maybe just a touch too much of a fondly remembered  remembrance of his childhood building rockets in West Virginia.

Doesn’t matter.

It was cool and it gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, if you keep your dreams lubed and moist and work hard that maybe, just maybe, they’ll take off.

Hope.

You know how sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you’ll end up decades and centuries later with friends?

I mean, real friends.

Friends like that maybe you ignore or don’t see or don’t seek out for months and months and take for granted and tell yourself you really gotta call and get together with, but you don’t, and then all the sudden, for one reason or another, it suddenly comes together and schedules mesh and you have dinner with them and BOOM! you’re right back to it with them. The time apart drizzles away and it’s like you saw them Tuesday.

That happened to Miss Carol and me the other day.

Friends we hadn’t seen in awhile invited us over, again, for dinner. And this time,  it all worked out and all came together, and what’s cool is that with friends like these there aren’t any uncomfortable silences, no strained conversation waiting for the alcohol, the social lubricant, to kick in.

You just take up where you left off, ‘ya know?

Surprisingly, seemingly, one of the places we’d left off was Christmas. Like two years ago. But our friends, our buds, had carried the gift they’d bought us through the years, carrying it in the trunks of their cars, moving it around and wrestling it from the jaws of their dogs so that, one day, they could give it to us.

Miss Carol and me, we’re really lucky.

I was headed back out to the island this morning and I had to stop at the farmer’s market on the way in to drop off an invoice for some work I’d done for him and pick up some tomatoes.

So I’m waitin’ to turn left  and looking down the road I see something big moving across from right to left.

It’s a turtle, big as a pizza.

I grinned watchin’ him.-head up, yearning and proud, he’s trudging full speed turtle speed across the road. He’s safe crossing my lane ’cause I’ve got traffic backed up behind me while I’m waitin’ to turn into the market and it looked pretty good from the other direction as well.

So I watched him trudge, determined and wanting and just tryin’ to get to the other side of the road.

He was a little more than half way across the oncoming lane when a little station wagon came around the bend in the road.

But it wasn’t going that fast and Mr. Turtle was workin’ and movin’, and I was sure the driver would see him and slow down a little so’s he could finish his journey across the road to life on the other side.

A car passed and I turned into the crush and run parking lot of the market, watching as the turtle, head held high, thick legs churning, made it three-quarters of the way across the road.

I was sure he was home safe.

I stopped and parked and looked over just as the station wagon, piloted by a little old lady, ran right over Mr. Turtle smashing him into bloody shards of shell and turtle parts exploding down the side of her car.

It was like a kick in the gut.

WTF?

What was her problem?

Was she maybe turning her iPhone back and forth trying to remember how to bring up the keypad so she could text someone? Was she maybe looking at pictures of her grandkids?

Was she drunk?

Was she maybe just a mean old shitty little woman pissed off and lonely ’cause her husband died and left her with too many years on the bitter side of life?

Whatever the reason, I honestly, physically, stopped myself from diesel duelly burning rubber after her, chasing her down and yanking her from her car and punching her in the face until my hand got tired ’cause I remembered I’d probably go to prison forever if I did that and never see Cutter and Tug and Miss Carol again.

Still.

I was in a hurry.

One of the real estate agents I’d been trying to work with needed some work done at the last minute. Tourons were comin’ in and they’d be flowing until Labor Day and the owners wanted a couple of things before the herd arrived.

I was working replacing the rotted trim on a bay front window on an eight foot ladder and as I was coming down I hurried and forgot that there’s one more step on an eight footer than a six footer.

I stepped off, stumbling the additional foot or so and fell backwards hitting the newel post for the stairs heading down off the deck and onto the concrete.

A couple a inches to the right and I’d a gone down the fifteen foot flight of stairs backwards making for a really sucky day. But I didn’t and it wasn’t and as I stood there sweating and rubbing the small of my back I got to thinking about the almost’s of my life.

There was the weekend shark fishing trip that I climbed drunk up the outside of the bridge in the middle of the night in the middle of the ocean looking for a place to sleep at the helm and almost slipped into the water while everybody else was asleep.

There were the weeks me and my crew had to ride up on the roof of an exterior construction elevator each day ’cause the union fuck head wouldn’t allow us in the car and I almost fell 32 stories.

There was the whole motorcycle racing thing. Don’t get me started.

I think men are, for the most part, ruthlessly uncaring and unafraid but you know what? Standing there on that deck in the afternoon sun I realized I’d changed.

I’d scared myself in the past but nothing and none of that set me back like that almost fall down the stairs. I stood and looked out at the bay and breathed deep and thanked whatever gods kept me from that backwards plunge.

And I slowed down.

Jesus.

I guess I musta blinked and somehow another nine months has slipped by and once again it’s Memorial Day and the start of Touron Season.

Seems like just yesterday it was September and they were all leaving.

Almost overnight our sleepy little island has been afflicted herpes-like with herds of frantically vacationing sun-screen-slathered tourons noisily packing our beaches and parking lots and leaving them strewn with garbage, half-eaten food, and dirty diapers.

But enough about them for right now.

Memorial Day means many things to many people. If you’re in the military or have lost a loved one fighting far from home it is a special day of remembrance- as it probably should be for all of us. For too many of us though, Memorial Day just means a Monday off and burgers on the ‘barbie.

Shallow and sad, but true.

So, being fairly shallow and sad ourselves, after we endure another day today at our touron clogged beach, Miss Carol and me are gonna make us some Jucy Lucy’s.

It’s easy- simply roll out two very thin hamburger patties for each burger, quarter a slice of American (its Memorial Day, remember?) cheese and place the quarters in the center of one patty, covering it with the second patty, and crimping the edges to seal in the cheesy goodness.

Then grill ’em, pop ’em on a bun with pickles, mayo, and grilled onions, garnish with a cold beer and enjoy while you gaze out over the hordes of sunburnt and sandy tourons and dream of Labor Day.

(photo courtesy(?) of Flickr)