Guns In The Sky, The Story

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"I have learned that I really cannot be destroyed."
-Martha Stewart

She's right, as is everyone who's ever flown high enough to see that the roads that connect us all are, really, just made by man.

I hope only that she, too, realizes that in her death, she'll be utterly forgotten by everyone as friends and family, and an entire generation die out, and in the cultural gap remaining, the market, that greatest invention of mankind, will cease to bet on the losing horse of a brand made by a woman nobody remembers.

In a way, I think that's beautiful.

I think that's fantastic. No man-created God, no immortality, no concrete reasons, no purpose, no meaning, just change, every single day, as the cracks show and the world weathers; the vines grow.

We are small. We can be as big as our fishtank, and it will seem godlike to us, but we are small. Within our fishtank, we are as big and free as we wish to be, and our only other competition are other fish.

I ran across an article about refusing to vote, and it really struck a chord in me. I believe voting is worthless. I haven't always felt that way, but I do these days, which is one of the reasons that I consider corporate vote-buying to be more or less a valid new representation of democracy. I guess that's me going "fuck it" to the power of the people, since I don't think the power's ever been with the masses, but that's beside the point.

The point I liked was that he got the same bullshit everyone who hasn't voted has gotten - that people like to say, "Well, then you don't have the right to complain."

Realizing Martha Stewart's own self-styled invulnerability made me realize even more what I've had on my mind for so long.

Nobody gives me the right to complain, and nobody takes it away. What a lot of god-making it takes for someone to tell me what rights I do and do not have. The only people that can restrict my rights are those that will that restriction on me by force. The rest of the world will have to negotiate with me.

In the same token, I realize I have no rights.

Both ways are a relief, perhaps. I'm not a fighting man, and yet I suppose I'd fight for my right not to vote harder than I would for my right to vote. That sounds more Milo Minderbinder than anything I've said in a while, and yet it rings clear, in a way.

Halloween Crude

I was going to get on here and post about how oil's down under $60.00 a barrel, but then I realized the markets all speak for themselves, and I haven't got a whole lot to say at this point anyway.

Weird, how the reflective times come and go. Been playing Counter-Strike: Source lately. Just passed another sailing class. Work is busy. Getting antsy to make another application for the Smartphone, something about marine weather reports, oh, and that Captain's Log program I've been wanting to make...I wonder what's for lunch today -

*loss of signal*

H5N1

In The "Don't Panic" Corner:

• EU health chief: No need to panic over bird flu
• China stresses no human cases of bird flu
• Bird flu threat not alarming for India, say experts

In The "We're Panicking" Corner:

• Hoarding halts flu drug shipments in U.S.
• Nations clamor for once-obscure flu drug
• Hong Kong rethinks plan to seal China border
• Premier calls on Beijing to be `honest' about bird-flu
• Health official seeks HELP ON BIRD FLU
• Bird flu: EU set for bird import ban
• Flu fears hit exotic bird markets in HK, Taiwan

Sitting In The "We're Going To Be Rich" Skybox:

• Chiron wins big contract to make bird flu vaccine
• Glaxo to start trials of bird flu vaccine
• Taiwan plans to make own Tamiflu in December

Rolling By

Nobody goes home on one of these things.

I'm staring right at thirty-thousand horsepower with eyes like giant flashlights, God's flashlights poking through the darkness, cutting yellow cones into the sky a mile wide.

I look into the lens and I see the gears of the industrial revolution, the new revolution, starting all over, combustion so far, so far away from being worshipped like it once was, sinew, guts of those factory workers so black from coal, this was their temple, once. Long ago.

But the man tells me that nobody rides home on it. He says it runs just to stay alive, like it's an animal, a living being. It breathes, etching out a sooty soil edge against the night rain. I see spatters turn to chalky vapor where it's too hot to touch.

Somewhere, someone's falling asleep. I'm waiting for my chance to leave, to sleep, to be in a pair of arms that I'll turn away from at two in the morning, but be at peace, just knowing they're there.

We run just to stay alive. We run to stop running, to know what it feels like to run, what it feels like to stop. I throw a newspaper out into the rain to hear the rain patter on the ink, and watch the lens, blinding myself, wondering if it'll be permanent.

It's not special for the man that arms the throttle, watches the gears work. All the gears are behind screens, big sheer plates of plexi, hidden back behind millions of trapdoors, layers and layers that hide us away from the things we made with our own hands.

I'm wondering where she is now. Behind those millions of trapdoors, those billions of stars, all those lost lives and in every chunk of coal that turns white hot in the belly of the beast with God's eyes. The paper is soaked. The rain won't stop. Umbrellas are everywhere.

And he's telling me that the train is leaving soon. Soon, just to stay alive. I stand up, and walk over to the platform.

Wait, he says. Nobody rides this train home.

I tell him: I do. Every night. I ride it every night. This train runs just for me. These eyes are just for me. She's just for me. And I go inside.

The rain is flat on the window, the cushions soft. I touch the inside, smiling, realizing it's all just another layer.

I sit down, and we take our first fumbling steps into the night, together.

Congrats to Jennifer

My first girlfriend, Jennifer, was in a pretty big hurry to get married. That's the primary reason I decided to call things off with her.

We broke up in February of '02, if I remember right. I always had the idea that she'd get married pretty soon after - it's no secret that what you're looking for in life, you'll usually find.

I gather from the photos here that she's indeed gone and gotten married, as of about three weeks ago. She's my age, twenty-four.

I feel old. I feel like the old guy in the club, going on and on about how good it is to live the "single" life, and while I still feel that way, the world gets a little more four-dimensional, decisions and outcomes a little more hazy when you punch up an image like this and sigh a little bit.

We were together for four and a half years or so. It was the great exploration, the child-gone-adult love story, we even tried living together; that bombed horribly in a cold basement apartment with low ceilings and spiders everywhere.

I started my writings in that dead period, trying to escape whatever it was that I felt was dragging us down. I started blogging then too, now a four-year trend of its own. In February of 2002, after a particularly disastrous meatloaf of mine, I decided I couldn't fake this domestic thing and called it all off.

But she helped me learn much of what I know about love and relationships. The name Jennifer is a modernism of the olde-English name Guenivere, the epitome of the lady, the bright femme in the muck and squalor of the middle ages kingdom. She is definitely that, not having lost a bit of that feminine edge, if the pictures of the wedding are any indication.

Hey, there's a picture of cousin Jeff. They used to be my family. I kind of miss them in a fond way. I think Jennifer was as close to a wife as I've ever gotten, by time and by familial expectations. It could have all been mine. The ceremony, the family...the inevitable kids...

Inside, when all of the cards are on the table, I'm glad the honor went to someone else. I'm not ready for marriage. No way. And so, here's to the new Mister and Missus, to thine health, fair weather betide. And to mine, no woman abide. *wink* Slainte!

Millibars

They say Hurricane Wilma's low-pressure center registers at 882 millibars. That wouldn't have really struck me all that much if I hadn't seen a Weather Plus broadcast with a guy explaining it in my terms.

882 millibars, that's way over on the left...

He's talking about the reading you'd get out of a barometer when you're in the center of the hurricane. Analog barometers typically come in circular configurations with low pressures on the "left", or at the 7 o'clock position if you thought of it like a clock.

Worst-case thinkers aside, most barometers that measure in inches seem to go as low as 28 inches or 950 millibars of mercury on the 7 o'clock side and they call that "stormy".

Just for reference, the current pressure at WPOW1, West Point, just at the north end of Elliott Bay in Seattle, is 29.90 inches / 1012 millibars and rising. Gusts are as high as 23 knots at West Point. Wave heights are probably about 3 feet.

Western Caribbean weather buoys are reporting gusts up to 43 knots and waves of 17 feet on a pressure of just 29.71 inches / 1006 millibars.

There's a lot more than just air pressure at work, but it's a good indicator of conditions; you can see that just a little bit of change, less than 0.2 inches, can make a pretty big difference.

Well, I converted 882 millibars, and found that Hurricane Wilma's center is registering 26.04 inches. That's not just "way over on the left". That's all the way out the bottom, off the scale, right off the deep end. I haven't been in many (any) storms, but seeing that number pop up would make my heart sink.

Winds are now at 165 mph in places, according to reports. I am looking at buoy data - feel free to look with me - and trying to see if I can get a report of those massive winds, but so far the highest I've seen is about 40-some knots.

Hoping there aren't any boats stuck out there in this.

Note: Good PNG graph of pressure drop taken from station 42056 in the Western Caribbean. See the green line for pressure, red line for wind gusts.

Vanishing Stability

I can still feel the boat's heel, cutting, drawing deep on ragged surf. I felt it when I went to sleep. Felt it when I woke up. I look at the clock. It's been five hours. Five hours since I came back. I can still feel it.

I felt it when I stepped outside into the evening and tasted the wind. It's been eight hours now, eight hours since I came back.

I got frightened today - stepped into the real world and got scared. I thought it was going to be easy. Thought I'd even get some pictures.

I can feel my muscles burning and my mind crying out for someone else to take control; my guts churning. I'm trying to reel in the headsail, I need to go home. You'll last three minutes in this water. Three minutes.

Every other wave feels like a salty slap in the face. I taste it, it's in my mouth. We've been out for only an hour. It's too much, I say; I don't care if it's exciting. If you go in, you'll last three minutes. Three minutes.

I'm used to making the two miles to the Elliott Bay Marina in an hour and a half. Today, we passed it in twenty minutes. We're trying to come home. The wind is pulling on the headsail hard; she's flogging, tired and battered, signaling: this is too much.

Fifteen knots of wind on two-hundred and twenty-nine square feet of sail is two-hundred and twenty-two pounds of force. I can't pull that much weight. But we have to, to get the sail in. I need to bring in the sail, we have to motor in. This is too much.

We're curving in the water like a torpedo missing a fin. A gust hits the headsail; we go thirty degrees over, thirty-five. Closing on forty. Water washes over the leeward deck. That godforsaken water, three minutes - our speed picks up, we're five knots on headsails alone. We're passing back by the ugly black breakers of the Elliott Bay Marina.

The boat broaches in the gust, heads right into the wind like it has a mind of its own. The heel falls off, the world is straight again. But the headwind kills the speed, the wind hits us again, spins the boat, the heel comes back, that devil heel, thirty-five degrees tipped over on our side and the boat jumps a wave, coming down in frothy spray.

One more time, I hear myself say. I need the boat to depower for just another few seconds. A gust comes - you can see it; the water wrinkles like pruned skin in a bathtub just before the blow arrives hard abeam. We go over, thirty, thirty-five, thirty-eight - I have visions of it not stopping, not ever stopping, the mast tipping into the water.

It used to be that you could just give up and go home.
That was part of being young.
Mom and Dad would save you.

Mom and Dad aren't here now. They wouldn't know what to do if they were here. We're into the wind, the sail is flogging; she's confused. I pull, trying to bring her in.

She won't move.
She won't roll up.
I can't turn this thing off. The wind, the spray, the uncontrollable broaching - none of it will stop until I roll her up and turn it all off.

I'm grabbing for the winch handle, because it's the only thing I can do. I wrap the furl around the drum, slot the handle, and start cranking. She moves an inch. We're back into the wind now, she's trying to fill up, but I don't care. I crank again. The furl slips, but she goes another inch in.

Another twist around the winch and both hands on the handle. Thirty degrees over again, but I don't care now - this winch is my job; it's my life. The headsail is moving. It's going the right way. The winch is sticking like it was glued, like big rubber bands are keeping the sheets from moving far, but not from moving. It's moving. The sail is slipping back into the roller, and as the surface area is chewed up, I feel the heel fall off. The spray is still on, and rain is beginning to fall, but in my mind there's sunshine, glorious sunshine.

Two pulls on the starter and the motor is alive. I've got a second to throw my hood over my head; hitting the gears and engaging the prop. We're headed home. There's plenty of saltwater between us and home, but my chest is expanding back out, my breath growing deeper again, my eyes letting more of the world in.

As I get my wits back, watching our home harbor loom larger as we approach, I look down the companionway and notice the camera, unused, not a single shot stored on it.

The hell with it. It's in my head. I don't think I need any more than that.

Thanks to a great crew today.

Do What You Love

Newsweek: What God Made Us Good At

I like it. Who knows how empirically true it is?

I like it anyway.

Singlehanded

I took a chance the other day.

I chanced that winds and weather would grant me safe sail as I took the task of boating alone.

Helm and halyards, steering and sheets, all bundled up in one set of nerves, muscles, and memories.

I had the idea that it was going to be some kind of soul-seeking thing, some kind of autodidactic proof I had to bring around to myself, like looking in a mirror, asking myself if I existed, if this flesh was real, if this knowledge was real, if I was.

It didn't really turn out that way.

I don't know if I'm disappointed, since it's entirely possible for me to go out and sail on my own (I proved it, I'm still alive), but I didn't get the peace of the thing as I had dreamed I would.

Maybe it's because I'm having the first-time stumbles, holding the sheets with one hand, jamming a roast beef sandwich into my mouth with the other, steering with the tiller between my legs, stumbling to get the fenders up off the side and out of the water.

Maybe it was the unremitting reminders of the engine of global commerce still gray-gear grinding every second of every day as I cut around the zooming ferry boats, fighting the wake of oncoming tugboats pulling sandy, salty gunmetal barges, with my head on a swivel, looking for the next eight-figure shipping leviathan to come bearing down with pipes full smoky ruin, burning up the miles to harbor on Shipping Lane A.

Or maybe, just maybe it was the sirens from the city still bouncing down off the buildings in view, the high-pitched electronic screams scattering around the waterfront like a million aural marbles...but it wasn't all that good zen shit that I expected it would be.

In a way, it was a discovery, the proof I had sought when I first decided to make the journey, four months in, and in control on my own, hey, look at me, I can do it all on my own...and yet, who needed proof? I knew I could, I knew I had it in me, even early on. I was telling myself something I already knew, converting the converted, speaking the gospel to a man that already bought the Jesus fish for his car.

I consider that battle fought, perhaps needlessly, but the point is, I like sailing better with friends, people that can feel my love for the sea, the boat, and the art of sailing, people that are willing to learn and share and be a part of it all.

I think I'd like to get into teaching and training. If not sailing (as that's a pretty serious discipline shift), then into something more fitted to the world that I'm currently professionally swimming in.

The time's come for a change, anyway.

Hey, 100th post.

P7 Qualifier

P7AfterQualShootBW
Originally uploaded by agentcox.

Things to cross off my to-do list:

Do a qualifying shoot in the pouring rain like Johnny Utah from Point Blank

Good God. Me and the P7 got soaked down to the nuts and nearly frozen, but it was an awesome experience. Sorry, no photos.

Now, I'm guessing she goes back in the gun safe for another few months.

Eye of the Wind

SailingStormOct05 012
Originally uploaded by agentcox.

Every day on the water makes me appreciate every day on the land.

Every day on the land makes me appreciate every day on the water.

Rainbows, sunsets, squalls, and seven knots. Sailing in today's rainy northwest weather was an incredible experience.

More pictures here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agentcox/sets/1061814/