Nautical Miles

"I'm bound off for California, by the way of stormy Cape Horn. And I'm bound to write you a letter love, when I am homeward bound" -The Leaving of Liverpool by The Clancy Brothers

I woke up early. Its been happening lately. The Sundays which I used to spend in bed 'till at least noon, are now like all other days. They begin with an anxious eye upon the strip of light which shines between the the window frame and the ill fitting curtain. And then there is the sense that I need to get up, and do something. Though, especially these days, there is a scarcity of pressing matters, in addition to a scarcity of matters pressing. But it doesn't matter. I still wake up looking for something to press. I usually settle for the click of my camera. I think all this has something to do which getting older and what Morrissey described in a more than slightly melodramatic tune as 'the urgency of life.' I have a cold and laryngitis. I take a Fisherman's Friend lozenge, which tastes like a fisherman's hand.

It's about 7:30 in the morning, and I listen to one side of a crackly old Irish folk album I picked up at Academy Records in Williamsburg, which may be the best thing about Williamsburg these days. I walk to my car, a slightly world weary blue station wagon, currently looking terrible as it is covered in dirt and road salt from the blizzard last week. I stop by the Korean bakery where the girls giggle at my scraggly sideburns and dark sunglasses on the Sabbath. But they know my morning order by heart and repeat it in one continuous syllable when I walk through the door "Thai ice tea milk no sugar egg bun and whole wheat bun to go." I'm back in my car by 7:36 but I'm not due at my parents for dinner until 2pm. Its an hour and a half drive out to the midway point of Long Island where my parents live, and where I grew up. I had given myself many hours to wander. Maybe half on purpose. I don't know.

Remember a few blogs ago where I talked about an idea for an art project called 'the confrontations'? When I mentioned that, I was specifically thinking about going to places in New York City, haunted places which affected me & my art growing up. I thought about sitting on the sidewalk in front of the Dakota where Lennon was shot. I thought about having a pint at Dorrian's Red Hand, where Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin met the evening of Jennifer's death...what would eventually be known as 'The Preppy Murder.' But all of those sort of places merely play a tangential role, an aesthetic role in my secret history. They are abstract. But returning to the sound, the docks of Port Jefferson where once I lived for an endless fortnight with a mermaid...that was a real confrontation. And that was where I was driving to, even if I didn't realize it until I was virtually there.

As I pulled into town, I saw that the ferry was in port, picking up and dropping off passengers whose cars would rest inside her steel bones. There were a couple different ferries, but they all traveled back and forth between Bridgeport Connecticut and Port Jefferson New York. This one was called the Park City. I thought about what the mermaid had once said to me, that "reality was mostly just one's perception." An idea which I had accepted and repeated without giving much thought. But seeing the Ferry really kind of brought it home. At first I thought. "Alas me ship has sailed, and I shant be on it."

But as I coughed into the cold wind, with collar turned up, I thought why not "Me ship's come in."

A choice of perceptions. A theory of relativity. How we save our lives. But in the infinite thinness where the light hits the water...between the devil and the deep blue sea...could anything ever be real enough again?

In essence the Park City belongs neither here nor there. New York nor Connecticut. Perdition nor Providence, nostalgia nor amnesia. The past nor the future. It belongs only to the ocean. The rest is, as they say...perception. You will forgive me for feeling a bit like that craft that morning. Bound for ceaseless travels between points which offer no quarter. Waving at the mermaids and princesses, troubadours and blacksmiths which trade places with me upon those docks. In this we are all sailors. And places are not haunted by people, but rather possibilities. In my case, that the little apartment above the tackle shop could have been home.

But home is where you hang your hat (Not where you hang your head...whose song is that Tom Waits?) and these days I'm hanging my very suspicious looking Holden Caulfield Hunters cap in Apartment 3F in Long Island City. Not far from the water, with Manhattan's skyline over my shoulder. Perhaps that's where my ship will come in. Or perhaps we will all meet up, either here or in Kingdom Come, when we learn to walk on water.

There was a lot of traffic getting home.

Till next dawn we tread,
Michael 'Mickey' Grace