I’m Still Busy. Here’s A Picture Of A Boat

I’m still too busy to write. I’m not writing this, really. Consider this not written.

That’s a boat I built. It’s 14-1/2 feet long. It’s made of mahogany, and the hull is made of marine plywood, which is made from mahogany too.

It was fascinating to read the ink stamps on the material and paperwork, and trace the trajectory of the wood around the planet before it got to me here in Southcoast Mass.

The wood itself is probably African, or from Southeast Asia. It’s glued together in a sandwich of layers and epoxy glue, in Greece of all places. Then I think it went to Canada. It was blessed with holy syrup there, or something. Perhaps extra splinters were installed; I dunno. Then it went to Maryland. I don’t know about that one either. Then I bought it from an internetish concern in Somerville, Massachusetts, and the Maryland people drop shipped it to me. I made something out of the oak pallet it was shipped on, too.

I farted around with this boat for a decade, maybe two. By “farted around,” I mean I looked at the plans over and over. They were sold to me by a guy in Florida, who bought the rights to them from a guy in Maine. The guy in Florida took out an ad in a magazine published in Maine to sell the plans.

I have a headache.

Anyway, I started building the thing, forty-five minutes a year, just like clockwork. I am very steady in this regard. I can work on things forty-five minutes a year almost indefinitely. I am implacable. It is wiser to be a glacier than a supernova, is it not?

It was in the way, eventually, the 315 minutes worth of moulds and the few sticks of boat. So I finished it in about three weeks. And then I put it in a garage. It’s still there. We rechoose a name for it every couple of years to keep the interest we have in it at its fever pitch.

Hmmm. Perhaps I was hasty earlier. I think it’s still in the garage.

At the time, it was the third boat I owned. The others were each much bigger, and slightly smaller than this one, respectively. I gave those two boats away, because I never really used them. They were moored ten miles away, but late at night in the summer, when the roar of the peepers and the gentle coo-coo of the morning doves abated, I could hear those boats laughing at me across the inky ocean and the verdant landscape. I didn’t know how to sink them, so I gave them away.

I could always go out on the water on this one, the one in the picture, I thought. You know, the one in the garage, I think.

I’m busy. Here’s a picture of a boat.