Tag: ocean

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 241

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Hi.

Coffee:  Americano, Caribou Coffee

I spent the last half-hour watching videos of sea creatures. I got started on an article about killer whales, how they hunt white sharks while eating only their livers, squeezing the organ out of the body through a small gash. It made me think: oh, animals can know God too.

My favorite fact was: ‘Ghost Pipefish stick in pairs.’ They’re relatives of seahorses, so imagine a seahorse stretched out and turned upside down. They float beside anemones or detritus. Their bodies are camouflaged with fronds. Poor swimmers, they stick to their cubbies, waiting for food to come along. But no matter how many times the divers filmed them, or rooted around for another specimen, there were always two of them, together, paired, inseparable.

What a simple strange life to be a pipefish. I wonder what show they’re putting on for the camera crews, and what life is like for them behind the ocean’s closed doors.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border  – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN

Farther out beyond the reef, where the coral gives way to the true deep, at a certain time of day a tribe of flat silver fish gather in their thousands. To be there is to be surrounded by living shards of light. At a secret signal, all is chaos, a thousand mirrors shattering about him. Then the school speeds to sea and the boy is left in sedate water, a tug and pull of the body as comfortable as sitting in his father’s outspread sarong being sung to sleep.

Naoymi Munaweera, Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 178

garethlivesay1 Comment

Hi.

Coffee:  Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

My roommate was skinning chicken on the kitchen counter. She had a long sharp knife, a pair of rubber gloves, and a trashbag for the bones. Little pink lumps like a bunch of beetles turned inside-out. They crawled around the counter and registered for a one-night residency teaching anatomy classes in my head.

I’d been thinking about cooking something tonight, but instead I went with cereal.

My thumb’s mostly healed from where I’d cut it chopping onions two weeks ago. The skin’s a little lower like a crater and it’s very red and smooth. I imagine I’ll have a scar for a while. Call me twisted, but there’s something seductive to me about having small scars. Knicks and marks that only you and people closest to you will ever notice – notching on the wall of a body prison.

I talked to a man today who’s moving to Wilmington. It’s got good business for him and he wanted to be closer to the ocean. Eventually, that plastic bag full of chicken bones might find itself in the same Atlantic waters. It’ll travel on the back of a garbage truck, settle in a landfill, let in enough light and moisture for the bones to decompose (but only partially), then, during a bad thunderstorm or errant hurricane, it will wash off the heaps of trash and run from creek to creek to the nearest river, tumbling in the waves, occasionally getting caught on overturned trees or submerged boulders, but finally – inevitably – it’ll get swept out to sea. One morning, years from now, the man who moved to Wilmington might find it, but will he recognize it for what it was? Or will all that time in the ocean have stripped it so clean that it’s barely a trashbag, much less a bag of chicken bones?

There’s no telling what comes back to you. And often, we don’t even recognize it when it does.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border  – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN\

I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

Coffee Log, Day 65

garethlivesayLeave a comment

Hi.

Coffee: Organic Bolivian Blend, Trader Joe’s Brand

I woke up at 6am. The sky was deep gray-blue. It reminded me of the Atlantic on particularly stormy nights. I’ve seen a couple oceans and a few seas and only the Atlantic has that hard-edged steel.

When I was little, I had a few recurring dreams and the most prominent took me and my parents to a big dock on the Atlantic coast. The dock was an amalgam of a few places I’d been. It had Wet N’ Wild water park’s showers and Wilmington’s boardwalk. In the dream, there was a big elevator from the lockers to the deck-dock. My parents were waiting on deck while I waited at the lockers. It was nighttime. I was running late.

And I always missed the ship. I remember watching it sail away without me, a hulk of a hull that rivaled the Titanic. Whenever I’d wake up from one of those dreams I had the sense that something important had passed me by. For awhile I obsessed over it, that awful feeling, until I got older and realized that most of life is important things passing you by. The trick is knowing how to keep your eyes open and thumb out for the next barge.

Currently Reading:
The Pardoner’s Tale, by John Wain

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“To know the earth under one’s foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water.” – Malcolm Lowry, Ultramarine

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