Sitno possibly >>73<< but we'll see how the tides turn...
Been awfully quiet since I submitted my resignation forms to Hotz. I'm placing bets with everybody, will they try to ignore me surrender or will they throw me off the ship come Southampton. Should be interestng either way, as I have no money at all. LandManager didn't reply my email. Nobody said anything. Haven't had the resignation interview yet. SLSB is acting like my bestest friend ever, and not just mine. He is cheerfully chatting with the customers, he is cheerfully chatting with the other shoppies... He came by the bazaar yesterday and asked: "You had breakfast? Also coffee? You need fifteen minutes?..."
... O.o ...
I really wonder if he knew all this time how foul he was towards me. Or did he think that's how normal people interact? No, I'm being ironic. Of course he knew. When I said 'man, you tried to get me fired the second day I was here, when you should have been mentoring and protecting me...' he said: 'That? But that was ages ago!'...
The Shetland Isles were wonderful. As cold, bleak and barren as my soul. Bognor jumped around as happy as a pegasus. We drove to an archaeological site called... Jarlshof or something, which was exactly like Skara Brae, only it wasn't abandoned and conserved, it was recycled over and over again and half of it was eaten away by the sea. If there were no people, I would have started screaming, because I couldn't find any other way to express myself. Poetry wouldn't be sufficient. But there were many people and also ponies and those wouldn't understand a woman shouting at a sea in the fog. They would think there's something wrong.
We had a sea day in between the ports. Didn't eat, but forgot to drink as well, and took a pill for what I thought were period cramps. Mental note, when you forget to drink and take a painkiller, don't be surprised when the pill wanes and your head nearly falls off. I sucked a water bottle dry.
Went to a cheap shop to buy some clothes, but ended up only buying undies and socks. Dublin is the same as I remember it and I remember it really well. What's it been, twelve years? Even found the bookstore and the museums I hid in, after Afrika. Managed to hop onto a tour that took me to Trinity College to see Book of Kells or faksimile thereof, as I always doubt originals are actually displayed, that would be crazy. No matter. Mesmerizing stuff either way. Their library is what Dream God's Heaven looks like - I know, I visit it often, to talk to the tomes and frottage their spines. Took a pic of a poem by a monk who wrote about his cat companion, chasing the mice around at night, while he chases the darkness away by making illuminated initials...
Found a neat cafe to Skype G, but as most of everything around here, it closed in half an hour, at five. Sought several other possibilities, until I walked into a REAALLLY posh hotel, concierge dressed like Neo in the Matrix, shaved head, hitman features, skylight, tea at five euro starting price... - with perfect wifi and very nice eastern European waitresses and Filipino toilet cleaner. Damn. Deja vu! Stayed here for hours. The General still has toothache, but he is already making plans on how to get me home as soon as possible, and how to never let me work on any ship ever again. He said he's only just gotten used to not having me next to him; he is not interested in repeating that process again in a hurry...
Off to seek a comic book store if there are any opened, to see if I can spend my last few bucks on another horror neo noir american gothic comic novel...
Wau, that was a mouthful...
Sitno >>72?<<
Liverpool. Sunny! And freaking freezing! Shot gangway, best I could in sunny-cloudy intervals, then put on leggings and wooly cap and marched off into the wild wild world to find a comicbook store a shippie fellow recommended.. Found a quirky shop that sells old suitcases, though luckily didn't have enough money :D Bough: the new Sandman, Wytches, The Beauty and Twice Told, volume two.. Then checked out the shell of St.Luke's church, tried on some black bob wigs and found an Italian cafe that makes me feel like I'm still in Ireland. Skyped my beloved toothached darling until he passed out. He is starving. How fucking hard is it to make a smoothie, people? Just stuff all the bananas, honey, granola and chocolate ice-cream into a blender, and it should be liquid Flapjack in no time...
I still have a few pounds in my pocket... Lemme see how much that old suitcase actually was...
Sitno >>71?<
I think sometimes Bognor gets so large he fills up the entire shell of the ship and begins to resemble the shape of the Gem itself.. That is what I thought I saw today, when I was coming back to the quay.
Because Crazy Russian Safety Officer Guy likes his drills long and smack in the middle of free time, there wasn't much of actual free time left to explore Rosslare. I had my eye on an old Irish open air museum, alas. As soon as I got off, dressed for winter (gangway was so cold I needed parka and was still frozen stiff, and wind so horizontal and en-face, tears were streaking down my face.), the welcoming comitee gave me free postcards, strawberries, a pen and promised they will post what I write free of charge... i wrote down the entire list of my people, sending out some fifteen or twenty cards. Sent four or five to poor G, who required dental surgery and had to have three of his teeth removed and was so out of it, he barely sounded coherent when I phoned to see if he's okay. Since he ismine, that man is an extremist. He doesn't just have a toothache, he has a dental landslide.
Found a forlorn beach, laid down in the sand and listened to the sea foam bubbles hiss as they seeped into the sand, kids play in the distance, a tiny dog coming to sniff me happily and then running off again, and ravens pick the seaweed, which looked so big and fleshy I am now sure those can't be animals, but they are not exactly plants either... We brought some Scottish weather with us, though it cleared anough to let some sun through on me. I thought of nothing, I was almost nothing, just a speck of dirt on flawlessly systemic creation, just a purple parka in the middle of primary colors elements, mighty for being aware of it and tiny for being there for only an hour, leaving nothing behind, not even my story. While the Reality was horrid because people did terrible things to other people, I cloaked myself in one of those: "... See the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour...."
It would have been so easy to let go. If only the Gem was not what stands between my love and me... I was our penultimate port of call, maiden as it was, and the welcome comitte was just preparing to send us off with an Irish band music. I could hear them tuning in the wind. We have formal tonight, and need to set up sooner, because Captain is bringing his family to be photographed... I hid behind SLSB to play the photographer in this case. I can't make such photos of the people I know. I can't do them they way I think people deserve, so I won't be the one making them. I am peefectly happy taking pics of giant gellyfish corpses and my own feet, bare in the sand.
I wrote down the conversation Kay has with Goose as he is dying, about how easily art can be saved. How it has actually saved itself already, and the artists with it. Look. Can you see it? It's as plain as day. I know it feels like we are all temple-keepers of St.Luke's in Liverpool, but look. It was right THERE all along, the good answer.
I ate more strawberries, wholewheat bread with dry goat cheese and chutney, and home made apple juice, offered by the locals. Thank you, ship, for bringing me to these places. I forgive you for putting me through hell in your entrails. But thank you for middays like today. Mum asked me how this cruise was. It was perfect.
I can tell you about the future, too. My future is like a bit of breat being torn off for a bite. Let's see. Tonight the band will say goodbye by playing me 20 minutes slow jam called Nina's Blues and tomorrow, in the tiny town of Falmouth I will find another waterfront cafe with the menus written in chalk, owned by a beautiful woman, who will serve me coffee in a bucket, play for me some easy corner radio music that can't be identified, or Shazzamed, and I will go out to find handmade postcards. I'll buy butter shortbread and hide in a seaman's mission until it stops raining. I'll check the bus timetables to Paris and tell the General to go fuck himself for not telling me how much pain he's in. At some point I will stop in my tracks, between what's coming and what's been, between a bookstore and a castle, between a train station and a ship, my pockets full of town maps and sea shells, and I will feel everything at once all over again.
Do you have any idea
How hard it is
To re-assemble my corporeal being
From grains of glassy sand
And tiny shards of crushed seashells
The carnivore seaweed
And pizza plate sized jellyfish corpses
The comuli clouds on my sky
The grass that would cut through my jeggings
The tiny dog in a bowtie hairclip
that came to sniff me
The laughter of kids in swimtrunks in the distance
The ravens picking on crab pincers
A random condom tangled in driftwood
The sound of none of my thoughts
The smell of the world in the wind
The nobody that I find myself almostbbeing
Consciousness that I needn't harness
A heart designed to beat a hundred
The brain eighty
And the teeth to grind for fifty years
To unstuck myself from the planet
Get up, get the windbreaker on
Beat the sand off the camera bag
Put on the cap, shake the shoes
Walk back to the quay
To the coffin of salty iron
That is my ship?
Every cell in my body is glued to a silt grain.
Do you have any idea how much
Of willpower it takes to become me again?
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