Home Is Where The Ship Is

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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Cape Canaveral---I Need My Space

Tranquility Base, The Ego Has Landed

Greetings from the user-friendly universe 
Cruise ship service is about downplaying the negatives and creating the illusion of perfection. The FOH (front of the house) is all things to all people. Now that I am finally traveling as a guest.  I  DO  like to be served, but invisibly.

Working on floating hotels. you are the United Nations Ambassador,and the whole passenger manifest  become non-persons and are granted an ethical equivalent of diplomatic immunity. Anything goes. No judgments. Still, I know I need a vacation from my vacation, when the little things, like elevator behavior, or grab and go at the buffet line start to irk me. It's actually, the tip of the iceberg.

Spending an overnight on land in Central Florida is the best way for me to compare these two mundane worlds. Its a kind of deliverance, a release from the stronghold of the sea, and its own kind of underbelly, wildness and danger, isolated from the gloss and safety of the USA. Gravity hurts.


Legend In My Own Mind

It’s easy come easy go with sailing  memories, as the older I get the better my past gets. Everyone lives with self  mythology.  I am no miraculous exception.  A  figment  of my  imagination, I a legend in my own mind. It's not brain surgery, it's rocket science, fooled by randomness, I have left everything up to chance, yet my "career" at sea  reads like a novel, page by page.
I am the hero of my own life. This self  mythology are the stories I tell about myself. The more  I tell these stories the less likely they are true. 

Going on land to get a more  accurate view of the world and myself can be shocking---Life on board a ship is like a carton of milk, with an expiration date stamped right on the carton.
Understanding the mythology of myself at sea  is far more important than watching the instant replay of what actually happened.
The more important a memory is to the story I tell myself  about myself, the more often I rehearse the memory. And the more often I relive those memories ,  the less likely it is that they are true.
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