Cabo-LG Life Is Still Good

I thought college was the longest vacation I ever took but these seamesters are better than cold pizza! Same hat different day. I was here last September and wrote about it:

 


Today, Sept 2011

 



 So A Blogger walks into a bar...


 ¿Hay alguien que hable ingles?


Cabo San Lucas locals speak English as a second language. Money is their first one.


None of this "Starting Saturday, we will be closed Friday" No Spanglish. No pain in the English. Cabo is very "American".


Not too long ago,(1980) going to anywhere else but the USA  meant disappearing from the world. With the cell phone, laptop, and a wireless connection, or ISDN, modem, depending on how wired or tired the particular place I have been in is, the locals are good to go and  so I am.


Mexico on the Pacific side reminds me of Los Angeles a lot---the Valley, South Central,  even the South Bay. Just another neighborhood.

LG- LIfe is Good in Cabo. I've gone native in  a Col Kurtz sort of way, drinking tequila, and sporting a Hecho in Mexico Straw Cowboy hat---The Horror. The Horror. If 50 is the youth of old age, and Steffi was right-Food is the sex of old age! Analyse this: I had a guacamole-cheese-quesadilla-gasm. In some parts of Mexico I would be married  to that  tortilla already.

Man Of Many Hats Ed If you are all wrapped up in yourself, you are overdressed- Actually, just wrapped up  in a Brazilian Flag(left) More @Cabo Afternoon Cowboy.

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Mexico-PV -Worth Seaing

Turismo

Going through the same itinerary as last year, but now I am going beyond Puerto Vallarta. Sometimes it doesn't matter where you go but who you go with.

Mexico is an ancient thing, that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color, and slices of life,even beneath my flip flops, I feel the earth move under my feet, just as today with all the vendors and the wanting.

Now that I am done with all that Alaskan weather, I can see clearly now the rain has gone.One Nation, Under Canada, Above Mexico, I am still an AmeriCAN not an AmeriCAN·T

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Los Angeles-Johnny Comes Marching Home

The Patron Saint of  Optimism-Another dopeless hope fiend!

Geography is the topography of ignorance, a finite disappointment not only  when the map becomes the territory, but when you actually visit these hole in the wall places. In most cases, it's a lot better to transcend reality with imagination, re-framing the conversation. "Melbourne was awesome", "Ghana? Amazing!" India? a magical delight".  

Nevertheless,  there is not one ship that doesn't sail to a port where life is not uncomfortable. The future just isn't what it used to be. Yet, you don't quit countries, you quit people, and I have to say the best ships are friendships, and I have met some amazing people while sailing around the world.


Impossible Is Nothing


Going out to sea is  the infinity of hope, the preview of life's coming attractions where you have final cut in your own movie.  You can lose yourself in the ocean's food for thought. Its  menu is the meal,  and itineraries are full of promises. It gives you a  sense of destination and the energy to get started again.

The weather is here wish you were beautiful

Call it faith!  A passion for the possible. I am full of it, and shooting from the hip that is to say,   having an adventure is something more but nothing less than bad planning.  When I cold-called for my first ship job, and got it after a 12 minute elevator pitch, I began to trust myself, and only when you trust yourself can you truly begin to live it up.


  

But I'm not a sailor . Maybe a sailor  with a small s. Living on a ship,  however, might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria. It's not real life but an alibi. It  is like going out of your mind everyday- in order to come to your senses; and a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise. After 10 ships, yes ten, I no longer want to cast doubt on perfection-America.  There's nothing I wouldn't do for my country , and there's nothing it  wouldn't do for me. And that's the way we go through life - doing nothing for each other. 


Embracing the (expat)life forced upon me, I have had  nothing to do and all day to do it. An accident of birth, being born in the USA,  I won the geographically-desirable-places-to-live-on-the-planet lottery, and have squandered my inheritence in the United States of Unconsciousness, a shared hallucination of "any place but here" and " the grass is greener". 


The grass actually  is greener where you water it. 

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Victoria, B.C -Open Sources



Natural Resources 



The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. Just a touch and go operation today and it's deja vu-  access to thousands of acres of green spruce and fjord like glacial melt.

I am not stopping to ask for directions

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Vancouver - Wonderful Tonight

This is the Disney Wonder in Alaska 2 weeks ago.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” ~T.S. Eliot  The Alaska season has ended and after a 30 hour ferry ride through the inside passage,   I have been in Canada for 2 days. I am meeting up with the ship to take it back to Los Angeles and Mexico in 2 days.

Ed and Sarah

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If You See A Fork In The Road-Take It.



You ain't supposed to get salmon when they're swimming upstream
 to spawn. But if you're hungry, you do


If it doesn't kill you it will makeyou stronger. In this case the Salmon don't make it. So much for "going with the flow".  To make matters worse, young bears bulk up with salmon for a long winter' s sleep. Why do they do it? The urge to merge-The Pacific Northwestern salmon is hell bent on its quest to travel hundreds of miles upstream against the current, with a single purpose, sex of course, but also... life.
Any fish  can achieve failure and get caught. But  a salmon fiasco is a disaster of epic propotions. I witness this "programming" and it makes me  feel more alive because it didn't happen to me.

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All On The Same Boat





A boat is not a ship and a ship is not a boat. Now I get it.The odds are good that you'll find a cheap boat but the goods are odd-here is my 70 year old wood ex coast guard rec one. A wooden boat, however, is the closest thing to dreams that hands have ever made, and the real ship is the shipbuilder-the creators.


People ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say 'How to Build a Boat"

Top 3 Take aways:

1. We don't tan, we rust.


2. If you have to smoke, smoke salmon.

3. We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now here in the rain forest.



I am not ready for R I P, Rusting In Peace...I´am outta here soon.

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After The Deluge-One Lucky Dog

“Qui me amat, amat et canem" St. Bernard
Love me.Love my dog

Finally , after three days of rain, some sunshine on the waterfront.The cliche of moving up here is not necessary. After epic rainfall and flooding, I think of this beautiful quote-Eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through them.

All good things -salmon fishing as well as eternal salvation -come by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy.

This 2011 World Tour of mine has been a grace period of kindness and favor bestowed upon me, by family,old and new friends along the way,and strangers who weren't so strange after all, who assisted me--- to live the dream of world traveler. Yet, I still feel all the time I am being helped by hidden hands.

I am one lucky dog.Joe Campbell was right:the waters of eternal life are right there,when you are following your bliss. You can teach an old dogma new tricks.

 The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

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Docksider-Good Morning (Holland) America , How are you?

 Those Dam ships...

Don't you know me, I'm your native son.I'm the train they call the city of New Orleans.I'll be gone 500 miles when the day is done.
Each day there are 6 to 8 thousand passengers that not only visit but also inhabit this small town. That is more than the actual population.These one day instant tourists will be gone a hundred miles when the day is done...with the rain it's Rinse and Repeat.

The Zuiderdam, Oosterdam, Westerdam, and Noordam respectively named for the south, east, west, and north points of the compass, Holland America names its passenger ships with the "dam" suffix.  Here I am standing infront of one their dam ships!

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