Canto Fourteen – Log Book of the Reefer Mary Celeste
Valerie opened the book to the page Mary had indicated with the red paper book mark.
“That’s the spot where the story seems to begin,” said Mary. “The part before that ‘s all cargo manifests and navigational data.”
“Okay,” said Valerie, “Then here goes;” She began to read aloud.
We were sailing southwest from the Republic of Palau in Micronesia where we had taken on supplies at the big island of Koror. It was September of 1979. The seas were calm, although the first mate was tracking a big storm that could potentially turn in our way. We were supposed to deliver the refrigerated meat and vegetables in our hold to Pinoy Proud Food Markets of Manila by the beginning of October. There were supposed to be bananas too, but we had made the mistake of putting the bananas in the freezer and frozen bananas become just the right shade of poo-poo color to make them unmarketable. So the crew had been eating a lot of frozen banana pops. Doc Johnson, whom we call Doc because he knows a lot of useful stuff was worried that we might inadvertently cause hyperkalemic death among the crew, which worried me a bit, but since no one else seemed to know what the heck hyperkalemic meant, we were okay with eating that many frozen bananas, but I was later led to wonder if, in fact, the whole hyperkalemic death thing might be the source of hallucinations.
It was a valid worry as it turned out. Because that September, in the early morning on Monday, September 10th, Kooky Smith first saw the mermaid.
“Wow!” said Danny Murphy, “a real mermaid?”
“Well, that’s the debate, isn’t it?” said Mary. “The story starts to get stranger and stranger. And he even says it might be because they ate too many frozen bananas.”
“Does it say what the mermaid looked like?” asked Pidney.
Valerie looked carefully at the block of text ahead written in Captain Dettbarn’s goofy wrong-way-leaning handwritten letters.
“Um, yes, let me read that part.”
Chinooki was a naked woman from the waist upwards, with comely breasts and long pinkish-white hair. Her skin was a kind of fish-belly-looking silver and her dark red eyes looked brown most of the time, but glowed like fire at night.
“Gonga!” said Danny, a word he often used to express both surprise and admiration at the same moment.
Pidney, however, was blushing a cherry red that covered most of his crew-cut head and neck.
“Chinooki?” asked Mary, “What kind of name is that?”
“It sounds kinda fishy,” said Valerie. “Like Chinook salmon.”
“Or maybe Chinese,” suggested Danny.
They all turned and looked at Danny.
“What? They call Chinese people Chinks, right?”
“Polite people don’t,” suggested Mary.
“Read more about what happened,” Pidney asked Valerie.
Kooky said that he saw her the first time off the starboard rail, swimming with her head and shoulders raised out of the water. He thought she was some kind of shipwreck survivor, but when he hailed her to offer help, she waved at him and smiled, then dove and showed him her fish tail.
Of course, no one believed him. Sea stories like that get told all the time, and Kooky liked to drink… sometimes even on duty. We all knew he was quite capable of seeing things that weren’t real.
But the second time she was spotted, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones were also on deck, and when Kooky shouted they immediately came to the rail and saw her too. Now, Bob was like Kooky in a lot of ways, so we woulda thought he was making it up too, or just backing Kooky’s kooky story for yucks and kippers. But Chuck was well known for both sobriety and honesty. He was the man I trusted to keep the ship’s books because I knew he’d never cheat any of us out of a single penny we were due. And he’d sooner cut off his own hand than tell a lie.
“We have ta catch her and bring her aboard,” Kooky said.
“You gonna eat her?” Bob asked.
“Are you daft, man? I don’t want to hurt her,” Kooky said. “She’s beautiful. I want to catch her and keep her.”
“Be wary,” Chuck said. “If she’s not a natural creature, then she’s some kind of unnatural menace sort of thing. Bringing her on board this ship might be the last thing we ever do in this life.”
“Well, I for one, would very much like to see this real mermaid,” I said. I would later come to regret those words more than any I had ever said before in my whole life.
The four young Pirates all looked at each other, and all four of them shivered at once. Valerie could certainly read out loud in a way that would scare you out of your under pants.
Catch a Falling Star 
Obsessively Self-Reflective
I honestly hope you are not reading this blog to find advice on life, the universe, writing, or anything. That sounds more like something I myself might do, and I am goofy enough to think this purple paisley prosy thing is a humor blog. I don’t really give advice, good or otherwise.
Even as a teacher I didn’t tell students how to do things in a do-this, then-do-this, and then-do-this lecture format. If anything, I advised by showing them how I did things, leading by example. I taught skills and concepts by setting up tasks that let kids do things for themselves. Most people learn by doing.
This idea applies no matter what the learning goal is. If you want to do magic, you have to cast some spells for yourself. Roger Bacon’s students in the 13th Century learned to do alchemy and eventually chemistry by blowing up the laboratory repeatedly. If I am capable of any sort of artistical or literarical magic, I have achieved it only by trying to do it, trying to be creativical, and getting readers’ and viewers’ attention by being marketableical and somewhat ironical in my blogging with over-use of artificial -ical endings.
So, I treat this blog as way to generate ludicrous ideas and goofy content in order to fascinate readers and sometimes even make them laugh. And I have nothing more to write about than myself and my own experiences. It is obsessively self-inflicted observations about myself. Kinda like standing naked in front of the mirror and learning to laugh at warts and wrinkles. I believe in taking the clothes off of my life experiences and finding the naked truths that were previously hidden. And, no, that doesn’t really explain why it seems I like drawing naked people so much. It’s a metaphor, dang it!
So, that’s what this blog is all about. I am explaining what this blog is all about. I am looking at my own experience of life, the embarrassments, the sad truths, the disappointments, the triumphs, all the most personal, private, and public stuff. And I am laughing loud and long. Because that’s what life is. Mastering that fundamental skill. Learning to laugh at life.
Here’s a brief summary of the only good advice you can possibly find by reading this blog. If you want to write well, start writing and teach yourself how to do it. And if you want to learn to laugh, look for what’s funny and laugh loud and long and clear.
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