Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Sailing is the raw, unmediated confrontation with what we really are when the scaffolding of civilization gets stripped away: just meat and ego bouncing across indifferent water, convinced we're steering something when mostly we're just clinging on and pretending the chaos has a soundtrack. I learned this from my father in Maine waters, then had it hammered home between thirteen and fifteen when I'd spend a month getting civilized at Tanglewood, pretending Bernstein mattered, then return to spend eight weeks working six mornings a week on a lobster boat where the only music was diesel choke and the crack of chitin, where beauty meant nothing and survival meant hauling traps until your hands were hamburger and your soul was whatever kept you standing on a pitching deck at 4:50AM. To this day I can't look at a lobster without my stomach turning, can't even think about mackerel without wanting to vomit. That's what happens when you learn the price of the picturesque, when you understand that every postcard Maine moment is built on blood and bait and the kind of grinding labor that makes you hate the very creatures you're murdering for rent money. This archive reads like a logbook of someone who escaped that particular brutality but never forgot it, someone who gets that the boat is both prison and cathedral, that being out there means I'm simultaneously escaping everything and trapped with the only thing I can't outrun: myself. The posts ricochet between "First Sail" father son mythology and "The Clean Loneliness" of Thanksgiving isolation, threading through images of egret bows and Pacifico bottles, Shakespeare sonnets delivered on decks, storms that need sailing through. Performance art that performs you right back, strips me down to sinew and salt spray and whatever's left when the landlocked bullshit finally washes off, when I remember that wind and water don't give a damn about my documentary eye or my Tanglewood summers, they just ARE.
Adventure 2024
Charlie’s first time on a sailboat. Monterey Bay at sunset. Three years old and already braver than his old man. Here’s something to know when you take your kid out on the water for the first time: you’re terrified. Not of the ocean, I know the ocean, respect it, understand that it doesn’t give a […]
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Adventure 2015
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. Jack Kerouac, On the Road The thing about Thanksgiving is that […]
ReadThe City 2015
I’m not going to pretend this makes sense. I didn’t drive Elena’s stuffed animal to a maximum-security prison because I was thinking clearly. I did it because sometimes the only honest response to the world is to lean into the absurdity until it cracks open and shows something true. San Quentin sits there on the […]
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Wanderlust 2015
Everything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. Giorgio de Chirico (1919) Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and […]
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Cinematics 2015
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1 is basically a passive-aggressive guilt trip dressed up in iambic pentameter. “From fairest creatures we desire increase”, translate that from Elizabethan for what it really means: you’re too goddamn beautiful to keep it all to yourself, so make a baby already. But here’s Ava on my boat, reciting this thing, and neither […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2015
Solipsism sphere on Rocinante…. There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. Joseph Conrad, Typhoon
ReadAdventure 2014
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world, For I would ride with you upon the wind, Run on the top of the dishevelled tide, And dance upon the mountains like a flame. W.B. Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire Listen, I get it. I fucking GET it. Here’s some romantic fool naming his […]
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Adventure 2013
The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective. Henry David Thoreau Here’s the thing about getting on a boat with someone in the middle of San Francisco Bay: you find […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2013
I’m standing on Ava’s boat with this fisheye screwed onto my camera and I know, I fucking know, this is the only lens that tells the truth about what it feels like to be alive on the water at sunrise instead of entombed in some office pretending my life means something. The fisheye doesn’t lie […]
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