Argh. I just wrote a Really Long Entry and it is all gone. Somehow, some way, some Hamptons Inn Business Center Void. All gone. FUCK.

Anyway I am halfway into my trip and I won’t go all lyrical this time except to say I have been listing to OK Computer over and over, and a little Sonic Youth and plenty of Wilco, also the Arcade Fire. I have to on these long trips and I think of CDs I might make for a current crush, while vineyards and the ocean pass by in a blur.

I am tired and refreshed at the same time. Can’t really figure that one out.

Yesterday I was in my hometown and went to the bar in the harbor where I once spent some time as a Harbor Rat. This is what you call kids who live on boats. I lived on a three masted schooner and I hated it, though I do have lots of interesting, also beautiful, memories of that time. Behind the bar was a guy I played with as a young Harbor Rat. Odd, to see him hassling his employees for being late at the age of 39, thirty-odd years later. He was like, don’t you remember how great it was growing up in the harbor? I was like, fuck no. I was at the age where I needed my own room, also a shower. Also, I remember totally torturing that guy. There are these giant hooks on the pier, that swing over the water to pull the crates of fish off the fishing boats. We (me, my brothers, and the other Evil Harbor Rats) would be like, hey, grab onto this hook! And that guy would always do it. We would then swing him over the water and let him dangle there for awhile. I can’t really understand why my old harbor friend, now tending bar at his family place, doesn’t remember all those times hanging on a hook. Instead he remembers the good times, like trying to hook seagulls with your fishing pole. A different kind of torture.

I sometimes think about moving back to my hometown. The streets and smells and people are all ingrained in me. And my current home is sort of like my childhood home, without the fog, with added palm trees. It’s kind of cool to go to a bar where the bartender is someone you tortured as a child and the waitress is your best friend from the fourth grade. And that when you talk to them you remember things that happened a long time ago, when you don’t normally remember what happened yesterday.

And now I am going to save this, in case it slips away.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2005 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Tales from a Strange Land. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.