Easy and Hard – Stream of Consciousness Saturday, March 21, 2026
I was just looking at another bloggers picture of a harbor with some low fog blowing in. It was easy to whisper, “Looks like it’s blowin’ a smoky sou’wester.” But it was hard to acknowledge the man who’d taught me that over thousands of hours of coaching, exasperated mutual frustration, and eventually more than a bit of mutual dislike – no, at the end it was hate. At the very end when my marriage to his daughter was on “a lee shore” and headed for the rocks there was no communication at all. After she and I agreed to part, he siezed many of my tools as revenge.
But he formed half of my inputs that informed me as a sailor and a seaman. Between my father and he I learned to walk a deck, take up slack, tie a sheepshank, read tides, come about, and estimate when the weather would turn foul. Sometimes I tend to utterances that seem alien and foreign if you were not from a specific piece of coastline.
As a sort of comeuppance for the bad, I’ve given him a starring role in my stories about the coast and sailing. I give full credit to the man I called the Cap’n for all his mastery, while allowing for all the pettiness and casual idiocy to leak out.
See, what’s my dilemma? I owe a lot. And struggle with the satire while acknowledging the debt.
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Yep. Sometimes I think about my mom along the same lines. Where she was good? I live there. That woman was transformed by a ride in the country, among the farms. We’d even go outside of Denver to watch a herd of cattle head home for supper. It made her incredibly happy. The way she and her sisters would talk about growing up on a farm? None of them lived that way as adults, but all of them were nostalgic for it. She would say, “Let’s get out of here. I need to get my head on straight.” As she self-destructed my Aunt Jo remembered that and said, “You mom needed to get out there and get her head on straight more often.”
For the past 22 years I’ve lived in a rural setting. I was happy in the big cities, but I’m happier out here, just as I was happier 30 miles east of San Diego, though that was a bitch of a commute. I dunno. That evil addicted bitch gave me one huge amazing gift for my whole life.
That’s the way I guess it happens. the good with the bad. But we are sensible enough to appreciate the contradictions that come with it, and still appreciate the good.
Yep! That’s the gift of surviving and loving life, I think.