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.