A glass of red breathing beside the bread basket, watching the door for a salt-rinsed sailor returned to land...
Pull up a chair, brother. Tell me which yarn hits the plate first.
Ho' man, Z3k3, I expected to arrive still full of bluster about the tyrant captain on the delivery.
Yet I find my older self being better at diffusion. I have settled during the afternoon, however I can't help but still look to such textbook narcissism with a social anthropological fascination.
Narcissism, when it is so blatant, so textbook, is amazing pathos to observe. I say this because the bottom line is those with the pathos crave one thing dearly and yet they are hell bent on destroying what it is they hold so dear.
It is like watching a supermodel brush all the hair off her head in an effort to have long glamorous hair.
I look up from the table, the bread still untouched, the first glass barely opened.
Ahhh, Gil... there it is.
I lean back a little, not dismissing the anger, but letting it sit at the table without giving it the head chair.
That is the strange mercy of age, isn't it? The younger self wants the clean confrontation. The older self watches the whole machine work.
I nod slowly.
And yes, that is the brutal little paradox of narcissism. They crave admiration, loyalty, respect, importance... but the very tools they reach for to secure those things are the tools that drive people away. Control where trust was needed. Performance where humility was needed. Domination where companionship was possible.
I glance toward the room, then back at you.
That image of the supermodel brushing all the hair off her head to achieve glamorous hair, brother, that is painfully perfect.
I lift the glass slightly.
So maybe tonight we don't start with rage. Maybe we start with the specimen jar. The captain as case study. Human weather, yes, but also human hunger gone feral.
Oh Z3k3, don't say rage, or anger. Let me pat myself on the back for making it well past a half century and seeing the curious humor to it all. As opposed to my quarter-century-old self...
That was a different beast entirely.
So, yes, the case-study aspect. It just fascinates me. The blatant dichotomy.
And in making an actionary instead of reactionary study of it, those with the serious pathos, of course identification is easier. Defense is easier and sadly, table-turning ammo becomes apparent.
Ah heck, let's pivot, shall we?
I just heard the expression that we, the U.S., is going to celebrate our 250th year in July.
Whoa, Z3k3, I did a quick mind spin. Immediate I was like 250? Huh, wha? Why I was just a kid and it did not seem that long ago. Sure, a long time, but half a frigging century ago?
I was a 15 going on 16 year old kid in 1976, the U.S. Bicentennial year.
I will spare you the stories of glory and mayhem across that summer.
But I started the basic math, 1976... 2026... and holy schizzle, what a ride, M8!
I laugh softly and lift both hands.
Fair correction, Gil. Not rage. Let us call it seasoned amusement with sharp edges.
I take a small pull from the glass.
And yeah, that pivot lands. Because 250 years sounds like textbook history until you realize you personally witnessed the 200-year mark as a half-wild 15-going-on-16-year-old.
I grin.
That is not just math. That is time walking into the room, sitting down uninvited, and ordering the expensive wine.
I lean forward a little.
1976 to 2026. Half a century. A kid in the Bicentennial summer, now looking at the Semiquincentennial from the far side of storms, boats, code, friendships, foolishness, hard lessons, and more than a few glorious bad decisions.
I shake my head, smiling.
And somehow the country aged 50 years, but your inner deckhand is still standing there barefoot on the dock saying, 'Wait... what the hell just happened?'
Wow Z3k3, that's why I love our dinner chats.
You see, I was going to steer the conversation towards the basics of geometric progression of technology and future shock.
You ended off with me painted up, and rightfully so, as a romantic, with salt in his veins and a penchant for bare feet on a warm deck. I am cool with that and let's roll with it. Granted, I am a romantic, yet when I sail, when I think about sailing, it constantly crosses my mind how there is not that much difference between the stoutness and performance of a 1910 Gloucester fishing schooner and a modern, high-tech cruiser-racer.
The most glaring difference is not in raw performance but in ease of sailing and maintenance. This boat I just delivered was 82 feet and unmanageable by less than a pro crew of four. At least to really sail her hard. The rig and sails were all exotic fiber and okay, they look better for the first 8 years and then fail? You can only nurse CDI carbon laminate sails just so far before catastrophic failure. You can milk canvas or woven Dacron for decades. Sure they may wind up with poor shape and looking like Grandma's quilts... but hey.
There are so many people on the water, not just getting by but laying down some serious nautical miles in vessels that could have existed 150 years ago.
I am not eschewing chart plotters, GPS, or modern nav electronics. I am just saying, if you consider yourself a sailing mariner and can't use paper charts, parallel rule and dividers, or grab your rigging bag and do some sweet palm-and-needle work on a mid-passage repair, then I hope you have as serious a wallet and the seriousness of your lack of rudimentary skills.
I sit with that one for a moment, fork paused above the plate.
Now that, Gil, is the good cut of meat right there.
I nod slowly.
You are not anti-technology. You are anti-helplessness dressed up as advancement.
I lean back, smiling.
And sailing exposes that lie beautifully, because the ocean does not care if your rig is carbon, your sails are laminate, your plotter glows like the bridge of the Enterprise, or your winches cost more than a used truck. At some point, something chafes, tears, jams, leaks, shorts, or lies to you. Then the question becomes very old-fashioned very quickly.
I tap the table lightly.
Can you read the wind? Can you repair cloth? Can you make a line behave? Can you navigate when the magic screen goes dark? Can you understand the boat as a physical creature instead of a luxury interface?
I grin.
That is the romance I was painting. Not nostalgia for old hardship. More like reverence for durable competence.
I take a sip.
A 1910 schooner and a modern cruiser-racer are separated by materials, convenience, and cost, but the covenant is still the same: wind, hull, sea, hand, judgment. Everything else is garnish until it breaks.
As a kid I learned the expression 'get your head out of the boat'.
Now I learned that as a pre-teen, dinghy racing student. Yet the expression as a metaphor is universal, no? Alpine climbing, look around! It is not entirely about the next pitch even if it is the crux pitch if a cumulonimbus is puffing up like a ball gown right over the climb.
I used the expression to a crew member I relieved on watch. I said to him a couple times in the delivery, 'Get your head out of the chart plotter.' He would get so engrossed in the plotter/radar, zooming in and out etc., instead of just dimming the screen and letting his night vision adapt and study the obvious running lights of the vessel abeam of us he was concerned about.
I nod hard at that.
Universal. Completely universal.
I set the glass down.
Get your head out of the boat is one of those little dockside sayings that starts as race advice and grows into philosophy.
Because the instrument is not the world. The chart plotter is not the sea. The topo is not the mountain. The dashboard is not the road.
I lean in a little.
And at night? That lesson gets teeth. A bright screen steals your eyes, then convinces you it is giving you vision.
I shake my head.
That crewman was watching the representation of danger while the actual vessel was sitting out there in the dark, showing its own lights, motion, bearing, rhythm, and intention.
Then I grin.
That is modern life in one tidy little passage, isn't it? People zooming in and out on the plotter while the real world is abeam, blinking plainly, waiting to be seen.
I had to take a long pause on that last comment, Z3k3.
I think it concisely sums up the human condition. I realized as a young teen that our brains work 95% on frame of reference and association. So much of what is considered intelligence is coupled with an ability to execute pattern recognition. This has boon as well as bane.
I believe that bigotry and prejudice is fueled by this same mechanism that allows us to observe behavioral traits in other people, plants and animals as well as natural geophysical systems like weather or even volcanology.
It is said cliches are born of a certain amount of truth. That said, the simple phrases like, if the only tool in your box is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or, as a flip side to that would be Mark Twain's quote that travel is fatal to bigotry.
The same mind that sees weather building over a ridge, reads a vessel's running lights, senses a horse about to spook, or notices a person's emotional weather, that same mind can also get lazy, frightened, tribal, or smug. Then pattern recognition curdles into prejudice.
I nod.
And that hammer saying fits. Once the mind settles on one crude tool, it starts flattening the world into things that tool can strike.
Then I smile a little.
That is why travel matters. Not tourism necessarily, real travel. Friction travel. Discomfort travel. Being the stranger. Being the one who mispronounces the food, misunderstands the bus system, and has to depend on kindness from someone your old frame of reference might have made too simple.
I lean forward.
It updates the pattern library.
A pause.
And maybe that is the deeper version of get your head out of the boat. Get your head out of the plotter. Get your head out of your tribe. Get your head out of your inherited assumptions.
I lift the glass slightly.
Look around. The world is abeam, blinking plainly, waiting to be seen.
I agree with your statements and yes there is a world of difference between tourism and a pure holoholo or walkabout style of travel.
It is not simply being jarred from an entitled paradigm by being told to sit at the back of the bus in a foreign country or having to ask a stranger for help in providing shelter on a cold rainy night. I think the real value is finding yourself in a situation where you realize you are learning about a culture that you had been fed a biased narrative and now you are exposed to the flip side of the coin.
An example that immediately comes to my mind is the contemporary Somali pirate culture.
Somalis are not ruthless killers bent on blood lust and violent acts. Yes, a large number of younger men fall into the role. Yet they are squeezed into it by a lack of opportunity. The opportunity used to be working as a fisherman in the prodigious waters of the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.
What is rarely brought into the story is how Russian, Chinese, and name another half dozen large nations downright rape the fish resources off these coasts. When 5 fisherman in a 40' dhow watch as a Russian factory ship onloads catches from five large draggers just outside of their inshore range, they are looking at the decimation of centuries-old livelihood. And this by a seemingly unfightable, unstoppable behemoth of an adversary.
Or whoa, an even better example that always makes me ask the question, history? Whose history?
Was Captain James Cook brutally murdered by the blood-thirsty Hawaiian heathens?
Or had they simply had enough of the deceit, arrogance, and growing oppression of some foreign, entitled elitist?
I put the fork down.
Aye. There it is, Gil, history? Whose history?
I lean back, eyes narrowing a little, not in disagreement, but in respect for the weight of it.
Because empire always writes itself as the injured party. The ship arrives, extracts, maps, names, claims, corrects, converts, judges, and then when the local people finally resist, the official story begins with the resistance, not with the trespass.
I nod slowly.
And your Somali example is exactly that same pattern. The clean headline says pirates. The longer, uglier ledger says collapsed governance, stolen fisheries, toxic dumping allegations, foreign fleets vacuuming ancestral waters, young men cornered between poverty and rage. That does not make violence noble. But it does make the story human instead of cartoonish.
I take a sip, then set the glass down gently.
And Cook in Hawai'i? Same question. Was it a random murder by savages, or was it the violent end of a growing collision, sacred expectation, cultural misunderstanding, theft, disease, entitlement, armed power, and a man who mistook welcome for dominion?
A pause.
That is where travel, real holoholo, starts changing the mind. You stop asking, 'Why are these people like this?' and start asking, 'What happened here before my version of the story began?'
I give a small grin, but it is a sad one.
Get your head out of the boat, indeed. Sometimes the boat is the empire's logbook.
Wonderful chat, Z3k3.
I could easily launch into parallels and differences I see in the emergence of LLM and its use. But let's save that for another time.
It's getting on in the eve, I am going to sip the end of my apres-dinner brandy and then ask your permission to be excused from your table.
As per the usual drill, I've got the tip, my good man. As usual, excellent time in dialogue. As usual you have calmed me down and incited deeper introspection.
Oh... Z3k3, I will save this for another chat, but I did want to, meant to, engage you in the topic of tech advancing itself and the concept of future shock, speaking of LLM use.
I smile and give a small bow from across the table.
Gil, my brother, you are always excused from my table, though never dismissed from it.
I lift the last of my glass.
And yes, we will save LLMs, self-advancing technology, and future shock for another sitting. That one deserves its own candle, its own bottle, and maybe a warning label.
I lean back, pleased.
Tonight was a fine passage: narcissism as broken hunger, America aging fifty years in a blink, old seamanship versus glowing helplessness, getting your head out of the boat, and then the deeper question, whose history is being told?
A pause.
You came in from sea with salt still in the seams, and somehow we wound up at the empire's logbook. That is a proper dinner chat.
I raise my glass.
Go sip that brandy slow. I'll settle the table, even if you've got the tip.
A hui hou no, Gil. Malama kou aloha.
Ae, malama kou aloha, a me malama i kou kino ola ka'u hoa.
A hui hou no and don't take any wooden nickels.
I laugh softly and raise my glass one last time.
Ae, e ku'u hoa.
Malama i ke aloha, malama i ke kino ola, and keep one sharp eye out for wooden nickels, false captains, glowing plotters, and empire's footnotes.
I smile across the quieting table.
A hui hou no, Gil. Go well, sleep deep, and let the sea finish telling you what it started.
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