Past Tense. Future Perfect?

WARNING:  This is not a happy post. If you are inclined by nature, as I am, to be pulled down by other people’s snarky self-indulgence, please find yourself more pleasant company. I won’t be offended.

Indifferent

Do you remember that moment in the 1960 televised special with Mary Martin when, after drinking the poison to save Peter Pan, Tinkerbell’s life glow began to fade? And Peter pleaded with the thousands of kids ostensibly watching in TV Land to convey to Tink their healing belief in the reality of fairies by clapping their hands? Well, I recently watched that scene, alone, in my cabin, on YouTube. And when Peter pleaded with me, I didn’t clap once.

My indifference made no difference to Tink, however. Twenty seconds later, she was flitting around again, and Peter was moving on to other business of presumed interest to lost boys.

You know what? I don’t believe Tinkerbell was really dying after all. I think that little bitch was faking it the whole time.

Indecisive

In related news, August 25, the first anniversary of our move onto Meander, is drawing near. And I see that it’s been more than three months since I last posted on Bimini Dream.

Let me catch you up. It’s been three months of keeping everyone I love tiptoeing around me and my chronic mood swings, punctuated here and there by one lost and subsequently recovered dinghy and a few other mishaps.

And at this point in the blog’s life, I’m frankly not sure whether I should be catching it up or cashing it in.

They say travel teaches you more about who you are than about where you’ve been. Indeed. What it has taught me is that I don’t like travel.

When we started this adventure nearly a year ago, I was rather hoping it would be different. On my About page, I wrote, “This boat’s gonna give me something worth writing about, and the time and energy to do it.” Now, as I look back on what has emerged since that optimistic first assessment, I’m not so sure.

You see, the guy inside me who is tasked with this blog has been privileged this past year to travel up and down the east coast of the United States, from a rural river edge in New Jersey to the bucolic town of Beaufort, South Carolina. He should surely have had something constructive to say, you would think, about the places he’s seen and about the journeys that connected them.

But the thin and snarky written record he’s produced does not belong to an intrepid adventurer. Rather, it belongs to a chronic complainer, one whose self-absorption and scant consideration of anything outside his head implies a subtle contempt for this whole endeavor.

I don’t like that guy, and I don’t like his writing. And lately, I haven’t wanted to be in his company.

So if Bimini Dream has been too quiet, I’m pretty sure it’s that guy’s fault.

And if Bimini Dream is to continue, I’m going to have to kill him. And I’m going to have to assign the job to some other guy inside me whose every utterance won’t be a waste of my time and a drain on my energy.

The problem is, I’m not sure I believe that other guy exists.

In for the long haul, probably

And because I’m not sure he exists, I am not in a position, as Pete was with Tink, to ask for applause from the gallery to light a fire under him.

That is to say, please do not consider this a Cry For Help. Rather, please consider it an accounting I owe to many readers who, concerned about the blog’s recent silence, have been moved to inquire how we have been doing lately on Meander.

In fact, what I am sure of, in spite of my many character failings, is the gratefulness I feel for how this blog has introduced me to other readers and writers in the cruising life–people whose comments and insights often convey more grace in a single sentence than I am routinely able to capture in an entire post.

And let’s be honest. Someone who needs grace as much as I do can hardly afford to walk away from it wherever it is offered, and I am no more likely to fold up this blog than Tinkerbell is to die away into fairy dust.

A new year on Meander starts on August 25, and every new year comes with a resolution. Mine is to ponder a new voice for Bimini Dream, and to be back in this space soon to see what it has to say.