An excerpt from Tomorrows 3rd edition release of Fuccfiles, the best selling book with the chapters I deemed too weird to release. As a thank you to all your support over the years. Releasing tomorrow!
We are all somewhere, and somewhere is never utopia. I don’t think humans can handle utopia. Everything could be perfect and so we would work harder to find a catastrophe. My grandparents had it better. They didn’t have outdoor plumbing till they were 30, but the pain was clear. The pain was external, and the solution was with each other.
Sailing with the flagship in my navy days taught me that the easiest time to connect with the people around me was during the hard times. Good times make everyone resent you, and you get angry at them for doing it. I was on a frigate, they were on the destroyer. The frigates had 12 people to a mess. The Algonquin had 50. You had to lock all your kit up or it would go missing. No one in the mess was a thief, but it still went missing. The frigs were nice. The room had air conditioning. The water had a working heater. The plumbing worked. Algonquin didn’t have any of that. But Algonquin didn’t have careerists, accusations, and feminists, either.
The water pooled on the deck, the showers were ice cold. The walls creaked in tandem with the waves. Mold waited in the walls and the hull reacted to the sea. It was built in the 70s. We didn’t know how to make hulls stable in the water. All that mattered was beating the communists. The frigs were built in the 90s. They were the Cadillacs of the water sailing subordinately to the asbestos laden tractor of the sea.
Algonquins Jr. Rank mess was full. Everyone was in there drinking. Two bosuns would drag the captain into the mess, which is unheard of, just to buy him drinks. Their Captain was a lower decks captain. Our captain had a drinking problem. He stayed in his cabin and drank. He ordered the executive officer to keep him company. No one would have invited him anyways. He would see a small infraction. Why turn a blind eye for crew morale and camaraderie when you can more easily grind him to dust in order to get promoted?
Their crew was tight. Every foreign port they moved like a mass of people. In our ports we scattered. There was a 6 mile barrier around the ship that no one would enter. At 6 miles the odds of seeing a co worker were 0, so you could be free to do your thing without fear of reprisal. No one ever did anything brash, or illegal, or even suspect. Everyone on our ship had a side business, a family, investments. All the Algonquin had was each other. One of there members got grabbed in Croatia. 20 crew mates went to her defense. 40 Croats threw some of them off a balcony. They were recalled, then confined to ship. Together.
We were Balkanized. We never knew what anyone did, and no one got in trouble. We were comfortable. We were apart. We got to experience the Croatian Palace for the full time ashore.
One man’s Utopia is another man’s eggshells.
