Avast! Have Ye Seen The Other Shore??
pass into another. One hundred and eight bows and a lusty sea chanty before swabbing the deck and facing another day on the torrid seas.
Something I have yet to understand is when men say things like, “I’m gonna kick your butt.” This expression makes no sense to me. Even in the days when I got into an occasional scuffle myself, I never vowed to boot anyone in the pooper. What’s the butt got to do with anything? If someone is brandishing a fist or a gun, the butt is hardly the most important target. Warriors don’t say silly things like that.
* * * *
Under the jolly roger, they might kick a malmsey butt if it’s dry, but only to help make way for a new one. We might even throw the spent cask overboard, then roll in the new one while singing our drunken revels.
Ah, me bonnie lass
Takes sassafras
She eats the berry and leaf
In a quesadilla
With sarsaparilla
Because I loved her too much,
OH!!
Because I loved her too much!
So went the song of the self-promoted Admiral Jacobin de Cuervos Ayala Gonzalez Barandiaran Castaneda Carlos Simona Lupe San Remos Torreles Miguel Jose Maiz Gomez Jesus Rosendo Cordoba Francisco de Silva Torreado Fernandez Apellaniz Gravina Sahagun Busardo Pajarero Guantanamera Para Bailar La Bamba Hare Rama Hare Hare Rama Dalai Lama Cruzaba Baba Alla Mama Pizzara Abejundio Vaya Con Dios Esteban.
But everyone knew him as Nancy.
Nancy was in fact the most feared, the most talked-about, the most dreaded (indeed, his dreadlocks dangled almost to his shoulders), the most evil-smelling, violent, pestulent, crabbed (for which he scratched himself continually), scarred, combative, profane, altogether mad, thoroughly repulsive pirate known in all of Europe. He was surly with the lunatic fringe on top. He had been known to rip planks off the deck of ships he sailed on, just to sniff the mildew and hallucinate; then he would draw his rusty cutlass and joust with unseen sentries or husbands, thrusting and slashing indiscriminately. He was a mishap walking on two legs (one of them wooden). Stories about him were told to frighten children into good behavior; other stories about him flushed the cheeks of chambermaids from Spain to Provence to London and up to Oslo; to the Skagerrak Strait and even the Black Sea.
A prevailing rumor had it that Catherine de Medici did not die of natural causes at all, but was kidnapped in 1589 and that Nancy the Pirate fed him to the Reverend William Lee, the very year Lee invented the first knitting machine, and who used her bones as knitting needles.
That was Nancy the Pirate. A raving malevolent drunkard with insects living in every part of his body that had hair, a lumbering, stalking, syphilitic, stinking tornado disguised as something that used to be a man.
And as the crew sang with their mugs in the air, sloshing grog over their shirts and onto the deck, Nancy was wholly in his element – which was chaos.
* * * *
After the chanting, the sitting time. Breathe deep, taste the salt water. Breathe out, send it all into the vanishing point where ocean and sky are one. You think something is being tossed this way or that, but the sea, she is always in balance. Beautiful, the sky when it smolders like the end of a incense stick before the dark embrace of night.
They are long days lately, and there is no sign of land. Feeling lost in the heartbeat of the turning world? Stay just a little bit hungry and a little bit tired. When you are tired, so is your obstacle. When you only sleep four to five hours at a time, one day really does
