… j oin the adventure …

… you need a break, a deep breath both literal and figurative, exhale out the dark rottenness that life smuggled into you when your normally steadfast night’s watch was caught dozing at the wheel. Get away from it all. An unfamiliar undertaking, an adventure, a turning away from all the wearisome human noise. Drive to Tucson. Have an affair. A rocketship into outer space.

Even better: board a boat. Cast thy self away … and let’s make it more fun that that: embark on a secret mission beginning thusly:

Your train arrives in a smoke-smeared station, deep winter, and you leap from the car door before the train’s wheels have creaked to heavy stop, rushing toward the docks. All during the train’s night ride, a discarded newspaper rustled near you with dire news: weather systems threatening the coastal cities; hopes of space exploration dashed by a failed rocket test; and one piece in particular: the President beset on all sides by rumors of a vicious government cadre, a sinister few who have reached their deft unbuttoning fingers into all corners of goodness—

As you pass through local society, dock-bound, you observe several notable things, commencing with an odd trio, the first of whom is a handsome cad leaning insouciantly against the brick walls of a pharmacy, a malice in his eyes. Steps past is another man, similarly hungry-eyed, though this man’s gaze has the gaunt cast of desperation. Just beyond him sits a girl reading a magazine. The object of the both men’s attentions, they gaze at her lewdly. The girl ignores the second sad man: twice, though, she peers over the magazine, making eyes at the first.

There is a violence here you do not want to touch; hurry along.

Your pulse quickens as you nearly trip over a beggar cross-legged in the dirt, mumbling, “What’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all.” The redness in the beggar’s eyes, the rag of black handkerchief investing his neck, the scars of pox rushing his face, dried and cratered: all things to turn away from, as too on the next block closer is the young girl dying in the street, body fractured by some collision—blood seeps from her corpus, coagulating the dust—poor thing—carry on; a suited man behind office window, his high white collar stiff about his neck—carry on—

Soon the dock, which is filled with a motley crew of ships, square-toed luggers, mountainous Japanese junks, butter-box galleons. One sits apart: a rare old craft, a ship of the old school. She is rather small, with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her. Clearly long seasoned, weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion darkened like a French grenadier’s. Her venerable bows look almost bearded, like a lady in strange disguise. Her masts—cut somewhere on the coast of Japan, where her originals were lost overboard in a gale—stand stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks are worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. Yes, it’s all a bit much.

From the old ship’s stern, a man hails you. “Coming aboard then, ye good lad?” Elderly, rugged and hale and sun-stained. You assent, and he points toward a plank, and a moment later, you are aboard.

This is the start: begin here, in this city, these docks, this ship.

This is your mission.

Accept it.

If you believe in the spiritus mundi and/or the oversoul and/or Jung’s collective unconscious etc ie that all voices are one and one voice is all and the one-all-all-one is that which courses through you, or if you think it’d be sorta cool to be a spy, go here.