I would probably want to be a funny ghost, as I am not particularly funny in my real life. And pleasant to be around. Come to think of it, were my story to be made into a ghost-movie with D's and my romance as the central plot, it would be a marvelous combination of Ghost and Splash.

That's a little funny, now.

13 July 0:15

After spending the best part of yesterday evening tacking down to Port Liberte and back on resident all-around genius Rene's little J-24 sailboat, trying to get a feel for the tiller—I keep thinking of that Cat Stevens tune—I stepped back on land and felt myself slightly more a sailor than I was the day before. Beer is certainly an impediment for me, personally. I know that my ability to perform on violin decreases in devastating increments with each drink, so perhaps I should have gathered that a two-beer sail would leave me slightly befuddled and unable to execute directional commands. We did, nevertheless, pull into shore successful, with all fingers and toes intact. I look at the bicycle with an admiration that grows each day. This year is, for me, the age of machines, and attempting to understand contraptions that others have designed to make us go faster.

Locomotion aside, briefly, I have spent this evening marveling at the shocking number of seafaring metaphors and images that saturate our culture. I hear things in passing, like a tall, well-dressed woman today who was performing for a man with a camera along the waterfront at Exchange Place...and that's when I decided to jump ship and head for the east coast...and the others are everywhere, even in my own speech. He, like, totally bailed out at the last possible second...just give me a little more leeway...that really took the wind out of her sails...and that's not even beginning to scratch the surface of sailboat-print shirts, sailboat imagery on supermarket summer flyers, nautica boating pants, Sperry Top-Siders, boat shoes and navy-and-white horizontal stripes. Anchor tattoos! We may lose our feel for the sea, and certainly our need for sailing skills to travel, but the vestigials remind me that our culture would not exist were it not for intrepid sailors and often unwilling passengers, lengthy uncomfortable voyages and ancient skills. Particularly here, in the New World, we owe our lifestyle and our major metropolitan areas to the wind and stitched shapes of cloth.