Obituary for Richard A. Wordless

I've known Captain Wordless for very near my entire life. He had few friends, or so I've been told. Speaking honestly, I don't count myself among that select and privileged few. I hated the man. He was small, petty and consistently depressing. But it seems that the people who knew him better have even less good to say about him and so I've volunteered to write his obituary for the "Barnstable Patriot".

Captain Wordless was born on October 28th, 1929 in the small hamlet of West Barnstable, a foggy speck of land out on the Massachusetts Cape primarily known for its overpriced gift shops and the stony but usually polite demeanor of its denizens. His father, a rich successful banker in Boston, killed himself the day Richard was born. He received only two calls on that day. The first informed him of the birth of his son. The second passed along news regarding a certain decline in the stock market. Realizing his investments had permanently fled south, he walked to the window of his office, adjusted his tie, and took a single step towards the ocean which was several blocks and floors away.

Richard's first crowning achievement was his graduation from high school and flush with this success he quickly joined the Merchant Marines. It was a hard life but in time Richard rose to the top of this august body and soon captained his own vessel, a small river boat named "The Lead Compass". His boat last saw active service during the Civil War and was permanently docked in the Narragansett Bay where it operated as a small museum with a lucrative trade in nautically themed gifts. After several years of undistinguished but tragedy-free service, he was elevated to the captaincy of an ocean going vessel, the U.S.S Broken Rudder. It's better not to talk about the rest of his life. The name "Broken Rudder" was actually granted posthumously after a tragic accident in 1951. Let's end at a high point. God bless.

Mirror, Mirror

Welcome from inside the whale where it's dark, wet and the danger of dissolving into a puddle is an ever present danger. I feel like I've been swallowed by my emotions lately. I never write when I'm happy. To tell you the truth there's a part of me that hates writing. It's like following a candle into the darkness. You feel like you're going some place but you wind up nowhere. And when your problems end and the sun comes up - well, that didn't have a lot to do with candle did it ? But things are pretty bad right now and I'm eager to clutch at any light at all. It's dark in here and getting worse. I had a good winter and I'm not really sure when or why all the trouble began. I think I started to feel this way at the end of March after my daughter's last visit.

It's amazing how disconnected the inside and the outside of me are. My feelings are in full open rebellion but you won't find the reasons for it in the day-to-day happenings that have cluttered my life. I say cluttered because my actions just seem to have fallen into a big heap. Something deep shifted within me at the beginning of spring. I had really been keeping myself busy but after March it was like the wind had fallen out of my sails and I began charting a direct course to the bottom of the sea. If I could hold a mirror up and show my friends a reflection of the interior me, I don't think they would recognize the person there. I radiate unhappiness like some kind of dark star. I've talked with a few people about it but ultimately I sound like a broken record. And the last thing I want to do is pull people into my own unfortunate orbit.

Spring is the worst time for this sort of mood. The cheery sunlight is a direct insult, a thumb in my eye. It really seems to accentuate that what's going on inside of me is a direct contradiction to everything on the outside. My heavy mood lifted ever so briefly this morning as I was walking from my car to my office. I was thinking about driving from California to Austin to see my daughter. Maybe it was the thought of getting into a car and driving as far from my life as I can or possibly the very idea of seeing my daughter cheered me up. In all likelihood a little of each. When I got home I read Book Two of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comic series. Why do they call them comic ? They're not. Mr. Gaiman didn't do much for my mood. And as for that space between the beginning of my day and its end - not a lot happened either. By the stroke of midnight this pumpkin had turned into a carriage and went very far away. But not so far that I couldn't return by morning. Isn't life as a Reverse Cinderella grand ?