The Bing
Greece · Bada Bing · The Origin Voyage
Answer the CallThe Adventure Starts: My First Ship Job
A cold call, a 12-minute elevator pitch and the moment the trip stopped being transportation and became the destination.
Bada Bing · The Opening Scene
Space Sheriff Ricochet Rabbit Reporting from Greece
Starting to cruise around the world. The weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.
The adventure did not arrive with a perfect plan. It arrived with a ship job, a strange new rhythm and the dawning realization that I could finance movement by working inside it.
There I was in Greece: Bada Bing. Half employee, half accidental sailor, fully awake.
Archive Photograph
The Bing
Originally uploaded by Ed Reif. Space Sheriff Ricochet Rabbit reports for duty.
Origin Video
The Adventure Starts
Hotel @nyware
Let the Geeks Inherit the Earth
Embracing the life forced upon me, I had nothing to do and all day to do it. By the accident of being born in the United States, I won the geographically desirable places-to-live-on-the-planet lottery—and then squandered part of the inheritance in the United States of Unconsciousness, a shared hallucination of pills, porn and poker.
This sort of instant gratification takes too long.
I sat down at my computer and took a stand. Home is a feeling, not a place. It was no longer where my heart was; it was where my computer was. My computer had become my phone, and with a G1 Android it no longer felt quite so phony. I was no longer digitally homeless.
I wanted to travel to faraway places and watch, in fascination, the kinds of people I ignored at home on Facebook, Twitter and Blogger.
Money cannot buy happiness, but it can buy a five-dollar cup of coffee in a paper cup—which is almost the same thing.
Sitting in an epiphany chair, pontificating about the mental institution I had dropped out of—NYU: Now You’re Unemployed—I began to understand freedom differently. Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose. You can never leave or lose yourself. Wherever I went, there I was.
I carried a Mr. Brightside attitude: I am never now how I have been.
Hotel @nyware Equation
Home Is a Feeling, Not a PlaceThe Call
An Adventure Is Bad Planning with Better Lighting
I wanted Hawaii: the aloha spirit and white sandy beaches. For weeks I had not been able to get anywhere. Yet the farther I seemed to move from my destination, the more clearly I understood that the trip was the destination.
I knew both sides because I was both sides: a tourist who did not know where he had been and a traveler who did not know where he was going.
I had not been everywhere, but it was on my list.
I once thought college was the longest vacation I had ever taken. This new graduate-school sea-mester was study abroad in Nomadic Pursuits.
The grass is not greener on the other side. It is greener where you water it. I was out of there anyway. I wanted to be surprised every day.
Greece · Beginner’s Mind
The Accidental Sailors
Santorini · Greece
With James Hopkins
The ship carried us slowly across the blue. The landscape did the rest.
Beginner’s Mind
Many Possibilities
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few. Greece was not merely the cradle of civilization; it was a chance to approach life again without the weight of expertise.
A miracle is a shift in thinking. When everything is gone, anything is good. At the lowest ebb comes the turn of the tide.
Read Greece, Beginner’s MindBefore you can take your path, you must live it in thought. Make it up—make it up so well that it has somewhere to happen.
On the road, you become your own best ex. You have nothing in common with yourself. Things happen that you did not know yourself capable of, and cool, unlying life rushes in.
When you are traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People do not have your past to hold against you. There are no yeses in yesterday on the road.
Change is instant. Getting ready for change takes forever. Infinite patience brings immediate results.
Sicily · Declassified File
The Cover Story Begins
For years, people treated my life at sea as though it were an elaborate cover story.
Sailing around the world once sounded adventurous. Sailing around it repeatedly sounded suspicious. Most Americans did not own passports, and I was collecting immigration stamps, crew credentials, port clearances, currencies, strange stories and photographs from places they could not locate on a map.
So I learned not to explain too much.
The truth was better protected by understatement.
Sicily would later become a declassified file in The Cruising Godfather: family memory, shipboard identity and the useful art of revealing only what people needed to know.
Code phrase: “Don’t ask me about my business, Kay.”
Open the Sicily FileIstanbul · The Sales Pitch
Buy My Carpet
In Istanbul, the locals could act personally insulted if you did not enter their shop and buy a carpet.
Is there anything sadder than being Carpet Salesman of the Year?
Perhaps carrying the business card in your wallet nine years later.
True story.
Travel does not remove the pitch. It gives every pitch better scenery.
The 12-Minute Threshold
Only When You Trust Yourself
Call it faith—a passion for the possible. I was full of it and shooting from the hip.
I cold-called for my first ship job and got it after a 12-minute elevator pitch. That was when I began to trust myself, and only when you trust yourself can you truly begin to live it up.
The essential requirement for working on a ship to finance world travel was not a perfect résumé. It was a love of traveling and a passion for the work. The time and opportunity were onboard. The money followed commitment, focus and determination.
Your attitude reflects your altitude. Instant gratification takes too long. You get there slowly.
The Origin Equation
Cold Call + 12-Minute Pitch + Self-Trust = A Life at SeaContinue the Route
Three Files from the First Mediterranean Education
Greece
Beginner’s Mind
Ancient Greece, fresh eyes and the accidental sailors learning to live unhurried across the blue.
Open GreeceSicily
The Cruising Godfather
A literary cover identity built from ports, family memory and a life that sounded too improbable to be true.
Open SicilyOrigin Log
The Bing
The original first-ship-job field note: the weather is here, wish you were beautiful.
Open the First Log