Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay

Big container ship coming past.

It's kind of cool to watch them glide by in the dark. Impressive, like seeing your first freight train up close when you were little. Gives you a feeling of continuity with the world or something, the comforting sense that all those huge gears of commerce and multinational corporate evil and whatnot are still turning even when you're asleep. When i was little, i assumed waterfalls stopped running at night, cuz really, why would they keep going with no one there to see them?

At this hour, shipwatching is a little disconcerting as well, with the big ones. Imagine you're downtown at 3 a.m., sleep-deprived, and you witness a whole building silently pick itself up and glide inexorably away down the street. Then imagine it was under control by live people, like yourself, so you could trust that this behemoth wouldn't run anything over...except maybe just every once in a while, like, say, a year ago when our ship was tied up across the river and that huge naval prepositioning ship got taken by the current and rammed a hole in our drydock and everyone had to stumble ashore through a cloud of escaping natural gas and there was only one remaining mooring line keeping our ship from drifting rapidly down the river and sinking.

Really, it's that delightful little bit of niggling uncertainty about things that puts the zest into life.