The Hat

From the Log-

The trip was exceeding smooth all down the coast. There was not a wave large enough to actually be called a wave. You might well have thought you had been motoring on San Francisco Bay on one of its clear and calm days. We had no fog and the weather was delightfully warm as we reached Santa Barbara around 1:00 o’clock on September 20, 1953.

And so it begins . . . I like to start things. That is the essence of the creative process. From nothing comes some . . . thing. The finishing . . .
Well, I’m not so good at that.
The beginning - That’s where I rock!
I'm competent in the middle.

The way the Internet works is a lot like how my mind works. Information goes in, gets divided up into packets and then is routed along a very large number of paths. At the other end, at the destination, the first piece lands, and then all the other pieces get added to it one by one in their proper order until the list of packets is complete and the information is displayed. It all works at blinding speed. The difference is that I don't know where the information is coming from, and rarely can I fathom how to line it up at the end.

This blog thing is cool. I cast my net onto the stream of thoughts and ideas, and pick out the letters, line them up into words, form sentences . . . and hopefully it all makes sense.

This blog begins with a hat, the inspiration for 'Captain John', and the gentle push I needed to open my grandfather's logs, which had been sitting on my bedroom dresser for nearly seven years, unread. I'm using the chronological order of the log entries, paragraph by paragraph to help line up a small fraction of the thoughts that swirl around in my brain. I transcribe a paragraph, write a blog entry, and then transcribe another paragraph.

The last of those packets should be my grandfather's arrival back home.

I know he made it; otherwise I wouldn't have this love for the wind and waves,

If not for his stories; I wouldn’t have this love for words.