A Subsequent Navigation in The eye of every storm

The water’s dark, an oil slick across the expanse, ever growing and there is no end in sight. Land, solid ground, is a distant memory. It’s been awhile since I’ve stood on terra firma. The only constant seems to be Orion. I keep coming back to my hunter, ever scouring the universe for the Great Bear he doesn’t realize is light years away. There’s some distant solar system. There’s something greater.

I think about sailors in the 16th century, navigating that inky blackness based solely on another inky blackness, immeasurable and empty. They were hoping for land, or hoping for a new life, or hoping for treasure, or hoping for a murderous rampage when they arrived to wherever they landed. And here, among the dead sailors souls, I find myself with either glory or treachery in my heart, slowly grasping at the last straw with tiniest writing scrawled upon it that says they are one in the same.

Orion, send me an iceberg. Queue the violin quartet. Tell my friends and family to hit the lifeboats for safety, because my hull is creaking under the weight, fighting gravity to stay afloat, trying like hell to avoid the detritus and king crabs and angler fish trawling the depths for whatever they can find. I’m transitioning. I’m going to be part of a new ecosystem, one of those that are fed and one of those that are the feeders.

And you, my love; if you find yourself stranded upon a door, floating in the oil-slick ink salt, know in your heart there is only room for one, and your name is inscribed deeply into my wooden heart.

I’ve stumbled through San Diego town, listening to some blues band in the gaslight talking about Martha. I’ve been walking in Memphis, the dirt and poverty crunching beneath my feet. There’s a library in downtown Portland where heroin addicts lay on the steps, passed out, needles still in their arms, and I just kept walking. Somewhere in Saginaw lies a woman with a broken heart. I met a man in Virginia who gave me a ride to a grocery store, and we stopped by his house, and he showed me his guns for when white people become extinct, as if this uneducated, overweight, suburban hold out would somehow be the last stand for his perceived culture. Driving through Pine Ridge I saw decimation on a scale that I’d not seen in Addis Abba, or An Nasiriya, or Mosul. An entire culture who owned this land, famished, starving, and dying while we wait.

What are we waiting for?

I’m waiting for an asteroid to rain diamonds onto our planet. I’m pleading with a super-volcano near Missoula. A piece of the Azores falling into the ocean, a precipice I’ve once stood upon could really help about now. Standing in Prudhoe Bay in the winter of 2007, I realized the ice caps aren’t melting fast enough.

And you, my love; I hope the ending is quick and painless. I hope you rest peacefully, joining the hunt for the Great Bear that clawed the lodge at the Belle Fourche river in eastern Wyoming.

I’ll keep steering this ship. Through ash and fire and hell itself, I’ll navigate one malevolent blackness based upon another. And when the time comes, I’m going to drive this fucker right off the face of our flat earth.