We sailed right past the private mansion of the spinster heiress of the Vanderbilt fortune and Wallace never stopped to say hello. Doesn’t he know she is sick and tired of all those billionaire playboys that keep coming around? She wants a decent, down-to-earth fellow with his own place. I think Wallace should lower his standards and go ask her out.Boarding a nearly empty ship, we rode through the swank neighborhoods of Ft. Lauderdale without hardly seeing any people except gardeners. (Pardon me, I mean landscape technicians who deserve just as much respect as the lawns they work on and that kind of thing.) Some of the names dropped were Al Capone, Sony & Cher, Lee Majors and the guy who invented Alka-Seltzer. I don’t recall that last moniker , but “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, now you know, who he is”.
We enjoyed that and other spirited commentary by the captain on what was otherwise a quiet ride under some drawbridges and around local harbors. According to ancient mariner law, there is one dynamite looking gal on every boat trip. But she was with her squat monkey-shaped boyfriend who spent the entire journey hovering over her. You normally see a lot of that out in the prairies, the fat greaser with the skinny girlfriend who doesn’t dare leave him because they both know that’s as close as he’ll ever get.
It was clear after just a few miles and roughly 600 yachts that this is the main drug artery of America. No jobs anywhere pay what it costs to live like that, or put another way, no job that you or I could apply for. The captain mentioned it costs “thirty to forty thousand dollars” to tank up one of these boats. About half the slips were full, the others were “probably in the Mediterranean” until hurricane season was over. The crew lives on the local boats year round proving that, like the boats, they are expendable.
The most impressive boat was a gleaming new 125 footer registered in the Cayman Islands. Even the anchor chains were chromed. The flag was blood red with a stylized Union Jack in the corner. It is not necessary to actually take your boat to the Caymans to register it there. When you buy a “dock-ominum” for $25,000 per foot you can park it right here in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. No questions asked, particularly if you like your skull the way it is. The local police even patrol the river, you know, it keeps out those undesirable elements.
Do you know what a “shadow ship” is? Man, what a land-lubber you turned out to be. It is a type of utility vessel that you hire to sail along behind your yacht. Your boat, after all, is supposed to be for extracurricular activities. So your Harley, helicopter, launch and stuff you don’t want cluttering up your poopdecks and gunwhales now follows you discretely out of sight over the horizon. Spare engines, spare girlfriends, that type of thing.
Descending from the stratosphere, I returned home to work intensely with Cakewalk. Once and for all, I will master MIDI and Karaoke. I am beginning to suspect Karaoke is a direct off-spin of MIDI and no longer consider it coincidence they both arrived in the same era. It is equally revealing that most of the people I know who have Cakewalk were evidently unaware of this capability (or they would definitely have said something). During the upcoming week, I shall see if I can locate a user manual.
You want to hear something I find embarrassing? It is those TV shows about military training. Where all the cadets are lined up and trained to shout rehearsed answers. What’s with the “officers” and that chest full of ribbons? Hey guys, the last popular war was over sixty years ago. Hello? It is disgusting how America has never outgrown the medals nonsense. We obviously as a group learned nothing from Viet Nam. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against self-defense. But all this quasi-tribal ritual is fooling us, not our enemies.
“Do you know why you are here, Private Snowball?”
“To exceed your expectations, Sir!”
Truth has become the first casualty of peace. Pregnant women and married men in the front lines. The Empire is in decline. The German records of captured GIs tell the true story. One man in thirty had fired his weapon but seven in ten had shit their pants. Yet we persist in playing the game.
I’m having second thoughts about visiting the Karaoke player next Tuesday. He is halfway into the next county and the venue is an Italian restaurant with no holding bar. What kind of prices are we to expect there in a town where Denny’s charges $10 for the Grand Slam (breakfast special).
Return Home
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