Some people are proud of their scars. I am a bit embarrassed by most of mine, as it seems they are almost all permanent reminders of my own stupidity. Boat life is, for me at least, an unending cycle of wound recovery: I am in a constant state of healing something, and about the time I manage to successfully form a scar, I start in on another wound, ever coming up with new and profoundly clumsy ways to hurt myself. Best part is that daily immersion in sea water guarantees that proper, rapid healing will not take place. All those wives tales about salt water being good for wounds? Take a glass of sea water and put it on your window sill for a couple of days, and tell me it doesn’t start looking like a high school science project involving a worse for the wear piece of Wonderbread. Now take that freshly scabbed wound of yours and, instead of cleaning it once a day in a shower and keeping it covered in Neosporin, soak it three times a day, an hour each session, in a lively biotic soup of water that, by nature of being in a closed lagoon, doesn’t really circulate the way the open ocean does. How’s that scab coming along? Keloid tissue, people. I’ve learned to welcome it. Proud of it? Not really, as it seems more a badge of stupidity than anything else. Wary and oh so devoted to avoiding it whenever possible? You bet. Ever finding new ways of covering myself in it, despite care and caution? Sigh. I’ve almost healed this diagonal gouge on my chest, so I’m off to find something to bang my head on in the engine room.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Doom Generation
People ask me what wreck diving is like. I have had a lot of time to think about it, mostly while I am wreck diving, and the best description that I can come up with, having been a teen during the advent of first person shooter video games, is that it is like playing Doom. Without the monsters and demons and shotguns and explosives and rocket launcher ammo and whatnot...actually, there are explosives and ammo here, there just aren’t zombies actively trying to use them on me. I’m getting ahead of myself.
For those of you who haven’t wasted inordinate amounts of your life playing video games, here’s the short version. First person shooter games present an explorable environment using the screen to give a first person perspective of what you would see if you were moving through that environment. Turn left and your view changes left, look up and you see what is above you, crouch to examine something on the ground and you zoom in on it as if you were getting closer to it. The themes of different games range from ancient times to the far future, with attendant weapons, foes, puzzles, maps, clues, etc., but certain mechanics of these games are pervasive. The world is broken down into areas. Each area has a layout, a map through which you navigate. The designers insert into the maps hidden areas and navigational puzzles to reward the observant, persistent, thorough player. Careful examination of each area reveals in the nooks and crannies hidden rooms with caches of goodies and passages that allow access to hard to reach areas or shortcuts through the map. Play enough of the games or figure out the designer’s logic, if there is any, and finding the hidden goodies becomes easier.
What the hell does this have to do with wreck diving? Simply this: exploring the wrecks, learning them, mapping them out mentally, poking into every nook, is similar to exploring in a first person shooter. I am looking for the same things: hidden goodies and ways to get to hard to access places. I get the same feeling in a wreck as I do in a game: show me everything, leave nothing unturned or unexplored, poke nose and flashlight everywhere. I enter new areas in wrecks the way I do in games, methodically moving from one side of the space to another, searching high and low. Granted there’re no aliens waiting to jump out and liquefy my face or axe wielding zombies bent on dismembering me when I disturb their lair, but I have found more than one pile of human remains in the wrecks, and that’s something one often encounters in the more macabre games. Ammo too. Much of a shooting game revolves around finding enough ammunition to get the job done, and there’s plenty, plenty of ammunition around here. I’m not going to fall back on that old video games are useful because they improve hand eye coordination saw, but I have solved more than one maze riddle in a wreck superstructure by using the always turn left trick everyone who ever played Castle Wolfenstein learned. Who said video games are a complete waste of time?
Agora Sweater
Ever have one of those simple misconceptions from childhood that bleeds over into adult life? You know, one of those things that you got in your head as a kid, something that seemed logical, and it just stuck until you had a definitive mental map reconstructing moment that put things on the right track? I’ll give you an example. I knew Washington was a state. I knew Washington D.C. was the capital of the country. Naturally I assumed that someone had parked D.C. in the state of Washington. Why would they be on opposite sides of the country? It took an embarrassing snafu in fifth grade geography to set me straight.
Same with agoraphobia. I’d heard and read the word enough in context to think I knew what it meant: a fear of large spaces. It took junior high Latin and, by association, Greek to find out that the root, literally translated, was fear of the marketplace. It took walking into my first Super Ultra Mega Do You Like What We’ve Done With This City Block Consume Anything Your Greedy Heart Desires Welcome Back to America For the First Time in Two Years Sucka Wal Mart to really, really understand agoraphobia.
I traveled to Texas while on vacation and, on a whim and the need to feed a super premium jones, I entered a Super Wal-Mart in an effort to make up for two years of ice cream deprivation. Everything’s bigger in Texas, but Lordy I wasn’t prepared for what happened as the automatic doors hissed apart at my approach.
I took two steps inside and froze, woodland creature in headlights, completely overwhelmed and confused. Fluorescent lit space disappeared into the unfathomable distance in all directions. Cavernous, yawning commercialism stretched as far as I could see. The hugeness was staggering. Those patient enough to have read some of my other entries know I’m not above hyperbole to make a point, but I kid you not, my chest actually tightened, my breathing became labored, my vision started to tunnel, and I broke out in a prickly sweat. I make a living squeezing my body into small, dark, claustrophobic places inside collapsing shipwrecks, and here I was, in a store, the most innocuous of places, panting, jelly kneed, fight or flight response fluttering. I backed up against the wall just inside the door and put my hands on the gumball and temporary tattoo machines to steady myself.
Super Wal-Mart. Ultra K-Mart. Mega Target. Did we really need to supersize these already massive establishments? Only in America could a bunch of guys sit around the board room and decide to take America’s largest indoor business establishments and make them bigger. “I know what old Sam Walton would have wanted. Let’s EXPAND. Not just our store numbers. Our internal volume. Our footprint.” Can you picture it? “We’ve already undersold small town America into oblivion, wrecking every local business economy we enter. But the grocery stores are still in business. There’s a slice of middle America’s paycheck we aren’t getting. We should do something about that.”
I finally got over the fact that I was standing in a store that had a greater volume of retail space than every store in the town in which I live put together, and far more stock, to boot. I remember getting off the live-aboard in Kona after a long stint at sea and wandering around a regular Wal-Mart thinking that it was like being in downtown NYC, but this feeling was somehow different. In Chuuk, people are content with little, mainly by necessity. They’d be just as happy to have the cardboard container or the wooden pallet in which all the merchandise I was seeing was packed, much less the contents. I was standing in a space, a huge space, where you could get, well, anything. By design, you can go into Super Wal-Mart with a wildly diverse list of needs and errands and knock out every one, from grocery, appliance, garden, kitchen, and electronics shopping to meals, a health check-up, bank visit, and a new set of prescription glasses.
I guess I don’t have to tell you guys; you can see it any time you want, and I envy that on many levels. Point is, people ask me what strikes me as different in the US since I left. Being on a bus full of people absorbed by the data devices whose screens they are poking and massaging, relating not a bit to the outside world or anyone in it until their PDA’s GPSs tell them they have arrived where they are going; that’s different. Successful business models for artisanal bakeries and chocolatiers that make nothing but seven dollar cupcakes or thirty dollars a pound chocolates; that’s different. Having a mobile pet grooming service willing to arrive at my doorstep in a small RV and wash my pet; that’s different. Seeing someone in a type of shoe other than a flip flop and driving down at a road at double digit speed, both very different. Turning on the internet and having a web page load up instantly is certainly different.
People also ask me what I’ve missed in the US since I left. The food, the variety, going to a movie theater or a museum, those things I’ve missed. Super Wal-Mart? Not so much.
Family Matters
Between Christmas, visits with the folks, and a trip to Honduras with just about everyone on my mother’s side of the family within one generation of me, I spent a lot of time with my family the last couple of months. First time I’ve been around most of them in two years. They are the coolest people I know. Now that could be because I’ve been around them all my life and I’ve just gotten used to them, but I don’t think so. I really believe that I just hit the jackpot and happened to fall into the deep end of the gene pool. My family is as diverse, talented, intelligent, and downright interesting a clan as you could ever expect to meet. As a bonus, the cousins in my generation are marrying age, and many of them are dating or getting married to entertaining, fun people who mesh perfectly with the rest of us. There’s no other group with whom I’d rather spend my time, and the fam was the highlight of my trip.
Okay, enough sappy gushing; let me get to my sappy point. My family gets along famously. There are no warring factions or people on the outs or members who, through withdrawal or due to distance, have achieved long lost status. Nobody bickers or does anything backhanded. It’s all love, respect, support. In this, I’m lucky.
Some of you reading this may not be so lucky. There may be issues, real or imagined, that keep your family members apart. It is to you that I say the following: take the first step. Rift in your family? Someone with whom you don’t see eye to eye? Hate the person your family member married? Old grudge? Skeletons in the closet? Long distance hindering communication? So what? Let the healing begin, people! Make the effort to reach out. Patch up an old misunderstanding. Send a thoughtful gift to the niece you never met. Write a newsy catch up letter to a lonely uncle. Forgive a debt. Forgive a slight. Hash out your differences with a sibling. Basically, recognize the fact that blood is thicker than water, that you are stuck with your relatives, and that you may as well enjoy their company. Who knows what redeeming qualities you may discover or rediscover? Naive advice? Perhaps. But hey, they’re family. Give it a try. Okay, preaching over, soapbox kicked aside.
Publish or Perish
That’s how the old expression runs. Though I feel in no threat of imminent demise due to my recent laziness, I want to thank those who have gently and not so gently pestered me to get off my butt and type something. It is to those of you I now apologize for the...bloginess of this entry. Merely a way of catching up so we don’t jump from Nan Madol directly into tepid Truk without a little backstory. I’ve been in the US a couple times since last year; musings to follow. The differences are overwhelming. Not good or bad necessarily, just mighty different. In between those US trips I have spent a couple months back in Truk and am back again until the end of the year. New boat responsibilities have introduced a new learning curve that has been eating up my time and sleep, making writing a distant second. No excuse, unfortunately, for all my off time when I could have been writing instead of messing around. It’s fun to blow off a year’s worth of weekends in a two months, but not conducive to keyboards. So, without further bloglike ado, some half baked stuff that’s been kicking around on the drive for a while. Once again, thanks for reading and prodding me to get back to it.