"There is only one thing I dread; Not to be worthy of my suffering

I miss Lou...god damn he was a good looking animal, probably better he died young, I think of him on deck.We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met? Ive also been thinking about not voting ONE PART OF ME THINKS: If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep me disgusted and bored and cynical and to give me every possible reason to stay at home doing whatever... on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote....



If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?



There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.



I suppose an active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize the values of creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fullfillment in expieriencing beauty, art or nature. I think there is also purpose in that life that is barren of everything...Austere . Austerity can shed light on mans behavior, my own behavior, namely in my attitudes towards existence, on a fishing vessel an existence very much restricted by external forces. creativity and enjoyment are scarce. If there is a meaning in life then surely there is a meaning to human suffering. In the face of suffering I can applie certain learned principles or I can act how I am feeling ( surely resulting in a fistfight). Here in lies the chance for a man to either make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. Ultimately this is what dostoyevski meant when he spoke about the worthyness of suffering, this, it would seem is a determining factor."It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship."

Some days boil down to the last of human freedomes, tired, sleep deprived, cup o noodles and granola bar for dinner sore everywhere... the last freedome being the choice to choose ones own attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way! And there are always choices to make, every day, every hour offers the opportunity to make a decision that would determine if you will or will not submit to the circumstances which attempt to rob you of your of inner freedome: which determine whether or not you become the plaything of circumstances, renouncing freedome and dignity to become someone who reacts to the emotions they have about any given set of circumstances. Suffering is underrated in America... fishing provides me with the kind of suffering and provisional existence that seems to feed a part of my soul that goes unfed in the 9 to 5 hours of ordinary existence
It is odd, hours seem like days and yet weeks go by in a flash... A paradox. A 54 year old man was lost in the herring fishery, no one knows what happened, they havent recovered the body yet. My guess: 20 years crewing and he had probably taken 100000 pisses off the aft deck, at some point it got routine and the gravity of the bussiness that he was in didnt seem as tangible and he got sloppy.

A supposedly Horrible Thing Ille probably do Again

Just got back from togiac.
strange place on the edge of alaska, looked like ireland, seals and whales. I
was there for herring, they come in great numbers to breed and we fish for the
females who's caviar is something special in Japan. The other deckhand quit, so
it was just me, and the captain. out there in the otherworldlyness of the Togiac
fishing grounds. eerie, on Deck for 24 hour stretches on planet togiac, having
conversations with dead authors and planning out the next 10 years of my life.
I left to escape the proffesional smile, I cancled my car insurance and turned
off my cell phone, which gets no reception here anyway , and I left. but I
wonder, why didnt they tell me what I was trading, For instance Mike: I didnt
know that after 18 hours on deck one begins to hallucinate. Auditory at first
" why wont my I phone stop Ringing, furthermore how can I here it ringing over
the 80 mile an hour gust whipping around the mast rigging... who would possibly
be calling me at 4 am and how do I get reception...out here...on planet togiac.
After 24 hours on deck awake, grinding, you begin to
hallucinate visually, the authors you were having conversations with moments
earlier, appear on deck. The midnight sun sets and the ocean is as vacant as
your thoughts are lucid ... your rowe incrusted (winners circle) beanie and the
moon, companions in a cloudless sky. Was that you David Foster wallace? ducking
behind the power roller at the aft end of the deck, trying to avoid the
inevitable barrage of tired questions that always follows your presence, the
same contrite, "look at me understanding your work because I feel like your
writing just to me" questions, that every sarcastic postmodern type fan has...
is that why you have taken up residence on the aft end of the deck, to keep me,
and the moon company on this cloudless night... on planet togiac?

I know what 200 tons of herring does to ones back and knees. I know what 50,000
gallons of herring sperm smells like. I have broken anchors and I have no more
delusions about the romance of the working class heroe. Ya dig... I think I lost
my mind... out there in planet togaic... Ille get that salmon... then that
halibut... then some crab, and ille be home.... Hope life is finding you well
your missed

chpt 24 The Advocate (amended for my ego... whats this have to do with me)

Given our discourse and mutual hatred concerning this word, this post is for you Mike...Enjoy

As Tyler Fey and I are now fairly embarked in this business of Fishing; and as this business of Fishing has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of fish.


In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large, the business of Fishing is not accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions ( doctors and layers and other folks). If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a Gillnetter, say; and if in emulation of the doctors and lawyers he should append the initials G.N .F(Gill Net Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
("This is what happens, do you see what happens" Ive seen Odd shit)

Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us fisherman, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honour. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the Commercial Fishing-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a Salmon-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the Berring Sea or the Johnson Hill Line. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

.

The Fish has no famous author, and fishing no famous chronicler, you will say.

THE FISH NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND FISHING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!

True enough, but then fisherman themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their veins.



Good again; but then all confess that somehow fishing is not respectable.

Fishing NOT RESPECTABLE? It is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."*


And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to Fishing; for a Fishing Vessel was my Yale College and my Harvard...Kinda... thanks Melville!

The Lee Shore

Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Dutch Harbor? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God--so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!











I forget, tattoos used to mean something about someone, I see a giant cod clipper with st jude on a backpiece in my future. gone are the days. jack london said show me a man with a tatto and I will show you a man with an intresting story... Ive seen strange things done by the midnight sun.