f0rrest | Entries tagged with moby dick

It is dark and gloomy in here.

The light is on the lowest, most orange setting possible. There is a downpour going on. The rain sounds like rocks on the roof. Storm clouds have hovered over this town for weeks. I am absorbing the blue light of three computer monitors. The radio is on, some writer on NPR is talking about his friend’s children in such soft saccharine tones that it almost makes me sick. “My friends' babies look just like my friends, and that makes me love them all the more, like I’m always going to be there for these little babies, and they don’t even know it yet.” There is a small spider crawling up the wall. I allow him to live. “Yes, I am a writer, but I don’t want to be known for my books, I want to be known for the impact I make on those around me. I want to be a bridge to happiness for others.” The guy oozes fakeness. No one can be this nice, it’s just not possible. I don't like him. I start to wonder if selflessness is just selfishness in disguise, a way to alleviate some ever-present feeling of guilt, and then I start to wonder if motives even matter, or just results. I wonder if I just don't like the writer guy because I’m threatened by him, existentially, like he's better than me or something. The window unit hums loudly. I turn it off. I'm pretty sure I just don't like the guy because he comes off as insincere. There is a psychic malaise of listless negativity pouring out of all the holes in my head. I am full of sardony and saturninity. Earlier, I was looking up old high school girlfriends online. It made me sad. I wondered if they ever looked me up online, and then I wondered if we ever looked each other up online at the same time, like some sort of serendipitous stalking, and this also made me sad for some reason. Sometimes, when I'm alone, I behave as if they're watching me, through a crystal ball or something, so I pose in the mirror, walk with a strut in my step, and do this cool little twirly wrist thing when I close doors. I know it's stupid. The rain now sounds like bowling balls on the roof. I spent at least an hour compulsively clicking browser bookmarks, hoping each refresh revealed something new and exciting, but nothing new and exciting ever happened. The spider is on the ceiling now. I watch it intently. I envy its simple biological imperatives, its lack of angst. This is not boredom, it's more a sort of cosmic ennui emitted through the background radiation of a dark star. I have no desire to write, but I'm doing it anyway, as if on autopilot, like one of those bugs that just does things. Maybe I am no different from the spider. Maybe I am sphexish. I have smoked like five cigarettes within the past thirty minutes, even though, after the first one, they all start to taste like nothing and produce no discernible psychological effects. If I hold my hand out in front of me, it trembles ever so slightly. I cannot focus. There are things I want to do but cannot bring myself to do them. The woman on NPR is now imploring listeners to donate, she says it's more important than ever now that the Trump Administration has cut all their funding, and she's absolutely correct. I desire companionship but would probably reject it outright. I considered calling my friend but have nothing interesting to talk about. Music sounds bad. Nothing is enjoyable. I have a strong hunch that nothing matters. I hope to follow this stream of consciousness until the very end of it, which is hopefully soon. Sometimes I get like this, like I'm the dark star itself, taking on its heinous gravity, on the brink of collapsing in on myself. I wonder what happens when there are no stars left in the sky. I wonder where all the light goes. I wonder if time stops. I wonder if that would be such a bad thing. A mosquito lands on my computer screen, I thumb it to death and wipe the guts off with a napkin soaked in 91% isopropyl alcohol. I sometimes wonder if things really happened if no one remembers them happening, and now I wonder if the mosquito will come back to life if I forget about killing it. The rain has not stopped.

And now I'm reminded of that last paragraph of Moby Dick, the one right before the Epilogue, the one that goes something like this,

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf, a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides, then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

And that reminds me of Leena’s speech at the beginning of Chrono Cross, when she's standing on the shore of Opassa Beach, talking to Serge about the sea, the one that goes something like this,

“It's been rolling in and out like this since long before we were born. It'll probably keep rolling in and out, in and out, long after our lifetime, without a single change.”

And now I can't decide if this makes our transient lives entirely pointless or if it just makes them all the more beautiful. I don’t know. Maybe these things are not mutually exclusive.

I wish I hadn't killed that mosquito.

I’m writing this from Gate B6, CLT, sitting in one of those uncomfortable faux-leather airport chairs that feels more like sitting on a flat rock than sitting on anything even remotely chair-like, although I suppose rocks could be considered chair-like, since it’s all a matter of semantics when you start to think about it. Actually, I wrote most of this long, rambling journal entry on my phone, in real time, as the stuff was happening around me. I’m just now writing this first paragraph, and doing all the editing, here in B6. You see, I’m traveling for a work thing, a big meeting tomorrow, the details of which I won’t be covering here, because I don’t want to be responsible for manslaughter in the event that whoever reading this dies of boredom. The important bit, however, is that my flight from JAX to CLT was delayed by like 45 minutes, which resulted in me missing my flight from CLT to MSP, so I had to book a new flight to MSP, which takes off in approximately 2 hours. It’s all very mundane, first-world airport stuff. I don’t want to bore you with the details. Plus, the company I work for pays for all of it, so it’s not like I’m in serious debt now or something. I actually like hanging out in airports sometimes, when the mood is right, especially the Atlanta airport, as I kind of grew up flying in and out of that place, from my mom’s to my dad’s every month, and it’s nice and big with plenty of places to hide, and it has this cool underground train that takes you from terminal to terminal, and it really hasn’t changed much in like twenty years, so it’s kind of like a monument to my vagrant youth or something.

Anyway, hours ago, during that time when everything is dark fire and mellow gold, I was slowly making my way through a maze of retractable rope, pushed up real close to a ponderous old man with a curious haircut and a suitcase about as big as he was. In front of us, at least a hundred other people of all colors and creeds, all of us waiting in line like good little humans, each of us going to a different place but using the same process to get there, like a great equalizer of sorts.

But calling an airport a great equalizer would be ignoring the fact that airports are little microcosms of have-and-have-not systems, i.e., capitalism. I’m not trying to get all socioeconomical, I’m really not, but, I mean, think about it, people pay extra just so they don't have to take their shoes off at the body scanner, as if annual payments of cold, hard cash somehow prove you're not a threat to national security or something. The whole airport thing illustrates that, if you have the money, you can bypass some of the more inconvenient systems everyday people have to deal with, similar to how a speeding ticket is nothing but a slightly annoying travel delay to a rich man, which reminds me of that one fake Final Fantasy Tactics quote: “If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.” The comparison works in the airport scenario because, in an airport, everyone is treated like a criminal by default, meaning the crime is simply being there and the fine is TSA PreCheck.

Another capitalist parallel, or anarcho-capitalist parallel if we're being snooty, is the fact that, in an airport, food and drink is treated like a hyper-rare mineral resource, thus expensive as hell, amounting to pretty much low-key extortion, because those businesses know that, after the security check, you're stuck in there with them, not the other way around. Notice how, in most airports, there's barely any restaurants before the security check, but there are literally hundreds after. And don't even think about bringing your own drinks through the security check, because that's illegal. It’s kind of like gas stations raising prices during hurricane evacuations or whatever, except there are actual laws against that in most places, yet airports are immune for some reason. Think Disneyland prices, except Disneyland isn't required if you want to visit your grandma who lives halfway across the country. What I mean is, you don't have to go to Disneyland, but sometimes you have to go to the airport, meaning sometimes you’re basically coerced into paying $5 for a bottle of water and 600% markup on Wendy’s chicken nuggets.

Anyway.

The guy next to me on the plane was really tan and he had a long white beard, and he was wearing one of those nylon shirts or whatever, with Formula 1 stuff on it, and jeans, he was wearing jeans. He had an earpiece in, yet, before takeoff, which was delayed by like thirty minutes due to some mechanical thing, his phone kept going off, and his ringtone sounded like a classic telephone, and it was loud as hell. I didn't understand why, if he had an earpiece in, the ringer had to be on. I thought that, when you had an earpiece connected, which I know he did because he didn't hold the phone up to his ear to talk, the ringer would come through the earpiece. It didn't annoy me or anything, because I'm not that easily annoyed, it was just a curious thing. I don’t want to be ageist or anything, but the guy was a few generations my senior, so maybe he didn’t know how tech worked, in general, although he certainly knew about cars because, whenever someone called him, he would be answering some sort of technical car question, stuff like, “Well, if it’s cranking but not starting you might have a bad sensor or it could be the fuel pump relay,” and one time he said a bunch of stuff that I couldn't even understand, myself having absolutely no car knowledge and thus no frame of reference. The language of a mechanic, to a layman like myself, can really start to make you think about some totally out-there Wittgensteinian stuff, if you know what I mean.

Before all that, when I was walking down the aisle to my seat, 25C, I noticed just how much mist was coming out of the ceiling vents. I was afraid the plane would become the setting of a Stephen King novel or something. And I bumped a few people with my messenger bag, walking to my seat. There was this one girl in front of me, dressed in all black, wearing a short-cut top, her belly totally exposed, with a belt around her stomach with loops that were little hearts, and she had these long fake black eyelashes on, and a backwards black baseball cap with an ankh on it, and little studs pierced all around her lips, framing her mouth, and she was pale as hell, and, to top it all off, her top said METALLICA on it. I know, this all sounds very stereotypical, but she was real. I remember, when she was walking to her seat, some white-bread-looking middle-aged dude wearing a blue sunhat flashed a wide-eyed glance at her, one of those bug-eyed eye rolls, like a virtue signal made manifest. “This girl does not jive with my values as a God-fearing Christian man.” The guy was obviously disturbed by the girl’s presence. I wondered to myself, what sort of person would you have to be to even care? I mean, seriously. I can understand having certain thoughts about the girl's appearance, but I can't understand manifesting those thoughts into the physical world. Like, imagine how fragile your worldview must be to act like that, it's high school, it really is. Seriously, at that point, the problem is YOU, not the slightly weird-looking goth girl that just happened to walk by.

Behind me, in seat 26D, sat a bald man with a thin face who kept complaining about the delay. He was cracking sarcastic jokes to the person he was sitting next to. He was real surly, but he was trying to hide it behind this cool, ironic posturing. It was real high school stuff, per usual from grown adults, many of which never advance beyond high school. Anyway. He kept going on and on. “I bet the captain is just getting a blowjob in there.” Stuff like that. I thought to myself, like, how awful it would be to be this person, just low-key pissed off about everything all the time, trying to hide it behind a thin veil of comedy. I know, earlier, I said I wasn't easily annoyed, but this guy annoyed the hell out of me. I kept thinking to myself, what does complaining about a delay accomplish, exactly? Does it fix the mechanical issues that are causing the delay? Does it make people nearby feel better? It seems to me that he was only making things worse, not only for those around him, but for himself especially. It also seems to me that, instead of complaining about something you can't control, perhaps you should take the cards you're dealt and make the best of them. As the late MF Doom used to say, “Only in America could you find a way to earn a healthy buck and still keep your attitude on self-destruct."

The flight itself was calm, nice even. Up there in the sky, there's not much to worry about, either you'll land or you won't, in which case you die. You're really putting your fate in the hands of the super unknown up there, faith in complex systems that lead to the creation of large metal Airbuses, a system whose inner workings are completely unknown to the average person, myself included, which just goes to show how much trust we place in the assumption that things work simply because we’ve seen them work hundreds of times before. Considering my awareness of all this, you'd figure that, hanging suspended so perilously up there in the hands of the super unknown, I’d find it hard to focus, that I’d be constantly worried about falling out of the sky or whatever, but that’s just not the case. Maybe it's the thin air or the pressure playing with my head, but I find flying quite relaxing, and I even find myself better able to read up there without getting lost in secondary thoughts. In fact, on the flight, I was so focused that I read four chapters of Moby Dick. I started thinking that maybe an airplane is like the Pequod, full of all sorts of diverse people, and the destination is like the whale, our singular focus, the thing we hope provides us with some meaning, or something like that.

I have mixed feelings about Moby Dick in general, but the narrator, Ishmael, is an introspective, delightful character, when he's not droning on and on about the minutiae of whaling in excruciating detail. The section I read today, however, was pretty good, exciting even. It was the part when the first sperm whale shows up, and Starbuck, Queequeg, and Ishmael, after valiantly attempting to harpoon the beast, end up stranded in the sea, or something like that. The book is actually kind of hard to follow, to tell you the truth, mostly due to the archaic language and overabundance of semicolons and em-dashes, but despite all that, it sure is full of incredible quotes, like this one that I just happened to come across up there in that endless sea of clouds.

“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”

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just words

"How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words."

Entries tagged with moby dick

light from a dark star

an airplane is like the pequod

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January 2026

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