There are three boat pictures in my room, not including my current calendar picture, which is also depicting a boat. You're probably thinking, "Goodness! She's a boat fiend. All of her relationships will play second fiddle to her love of boats. She'll wind up throwing everything away for a chance to sail off into the sunset with the wind at her back. What a whore."
I promise that my whorish ways have nothing to do with my love of boats. You see, a boat is the perfect metaphor for the true, brutal, beautiful nature of freedom and how risky that freedom is. Patrick Henry very likely understood that. After all, he did not say "Give me a reasonable promise of security, or give me death!" Safety and security do not freedom and liberty make. Having a tremendous military devoted to protecting the homeland by occupying strategic points all over the globe and squatting like a great troll on a Statue of Liberty-shaped bridge to make sure all the little brown, not-English speaking people can't get in to Uh-merika (unless they're willing to pick oranges or scrub our toilets for slave wages) does not equate to freedom.
Why do we put such stock in freedom when to most of us it is little more than an idea unpracticed? Most of us, aside from exhilarating moments of adolescent stupidity, never come very close to experiencing genuine freedom. Freedom is wild and dangerous. Freedom doesn't care if you make it home alive or in an oblong box. Freedom is the shirking of any and all responsibilities to anyone or anything. Freedom is leaping into the abyss, eyes wide open, amazed and terrified.
The closest I've come to that, aside from a moment on stage during a high school play, was on a tall ship off the North Island of New Zealand. Before you leap to your feet and storm out of the room in disgust (New Zealand! Harrumph.), I was a tourist on a tour boat with a small group of aging Swedes. No, it wasn't the circumstance so much as the realization, as we swooped out of the bay and into open ocean, that about three inches worth of wood planking was all that stood between us and a deep and watery grave. Tied up in that realization was the sudden head rush of sheer joy of being alive and being on a boat and skating perilously close to oblivion, all at the same time. That three inches of planking is, really, all that ever separates us from death. It is right there, and any decision you make, whether it be to gun it through that yellow light or just to sit down on this particular bus stop bench at this particular moment, could be your last decision. And that right there, that is what freedom is. That individual power of choice, even if it operates within the grim confines of a world that for the most part is beyond our control, is our own little beacon of light in the darkness. We are always three inches from the wrong turn, the wrong hello to the wrong stranger, the wrong dessert, anything.
Being on a boat is freakin' terrifying. To me, anyway. A frantic little part of my brain is shrieking about all the things I have left to do, to be, to see, to rail against, to vote for, to cling to and let go, to love, and on and on and on. But unless you actually make the decision to do away with yourself, getting dead is just another thing you don't have very much control over. You have control over only those decisions made while skating along on that three inch planking, and you could break through anytime whether you want to or not.
Forget about endless preparations and just start skating for the sake of skating. It is the closest you'll ever really be to free.
I promise that my whorish ways have nothing to do with my love of boats. You see, a boat is the perfect metaphor for the true, brutal, beautiful nature of freedom and how risky that freedom is. Patrick Henry very likely understood that. After all, he did not say "Give me a reasonable promise of security, or give me death!" Safety and security do not freedom and liberty make. Having a tremendous military devoted to protecting the homeland by occupying strategic points all over the globe and squatting like a great troll on a Statue of Liberty-shaped bridge to make sure all the little brown, not-English speaking people can't get in to Uh-merika (unless they're willing to pick oranges or scrub our toilets for slave wages) does not equate to freedom.
Why do we put such stock in freedom when to most of us it is little more than an idea unpracticed? Most of us, aside from exhilarating moments of adolescent stupidity, never come very close to experiencing genuine freedom. Freedom is wild and dangerous. Freedom doesn't care if you make it home alive or in an oblong box. Freedom is the shirking of any and all responsibilities to anyone or anything. Freedom is leaping into the abyss, eyes wide open, amazed and terrified.
The closest I've come to that, aside from a moment on stage during a high school play, was on a tall ship off the North Island of New Zealand. Before you leap to your feet and storm out of the room in disgust (New Zealand! Harrumph.), I was a tourist on a tour boat with a small group of aging Swedes. No, it wasn't the circumstance so much as the realization, as we swooped out of the bay and into open ocean, that about three inches worth of wood planking was all that stood between us and a deep and watery grave. Tied up in that realization was the sudden head rush of sheer joy of being alive and being on a boat and skating perilously close to oblivion, all at the same time. That three inches of planking is, really, all that ever separates us from death. It is right there, and any decision you make, whether it be to gun it through that yellow light or just to sit down on this particular bus stop bench at this particular moment, could be your last decision. And that right there, that is what freedom is. That individual power of choice, even if it operates within the grim confines of a world that for the most part is beyond our control, is our own little beacon of light in the darkness. We are always three inches from the wrong turn, the wrong hello to the wrong stranger, the wrong dessert, anything.
Being on a boat is freakin' terrifying. To me, anyway. A frantic little part of my brain is shrieking about all the things I have left to do, to be, to see, to rail against, to vote for, to cling to and let go, to love, and on and on and on. But unless you actually make the decision to do away with yourself, getting dead is just another thing you don't have very much control over. You have control over only those decisions made while skating along on that three inch planking, and you could break through anytime whether you want to or not.
Forget about endless preparations and just start skating for the sake of skating. It is the closest you'll ever really be to free.
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