Just when you thought it was safe

Looks about right

Ok, change of plans.  You know that fun movie everyone was talking about making?  And when I say everyone, I mean me.  But I talk about it enough to account for everyone, right?  Ya, well, it's gonna have to be a horror movie now.  Night watch on this floating cesspool of the spirit world is having a profound effect on my perspective.  Well, not really, but it is noteworthy.  I mean, come on, I ain't 'fraida no ghost.

You tell em, Ray.  But seriously, I hear a lotta noises and see something out of my peripheral vision regularly.  For anyone who's been on a boat, the noise situation is really a bit of nothing.  We sleep through cranes, winches, generators, people hitting the deck with ice picks etc.  And while docked, there is much work going on around us.  So, the noise could be anything and often is.

But let me tell you, if this were a movie, or life as movie, the screeches of wind blown steel cable about gantries and distant wailing of train cars' indifferent collisions are enough to make a horror afficianado smile.  And the common folly of running toward mystery to investigate is irresistible.  It just can't be helped, and even as I walk about the boat I hear the horrified people on the other side of the screen chiding my recklessness with gems like, "Don't!  He's behind you!" and "He's already on the boat!  He shook the gangway from the top deck!". 

Further scrutiny would reveal that I am wholly unarmed and unprepared for any force with more menace in mind than the occasional drunk sailor with a case of mistaken boat identity.  It is a one hundred percent fact that any effort to secure the boat will result in more trouble for me than it solves.  Best case scenario, I mistake someone who has every right to be here for an intruder and commit an assault.  The worse case would be a real life armed force taking over the boat and real life shooting me.  In neither event would any course of action on my part be productive.  I guess the middle ground would be catching a petty criminal trying to make off with an extension chord or steal the twenty thousand pound doors from the back of the boat. 

There are rumors.  The veterans of the boat swear to them too.  That there is a ghost on the ship.  Legend has it that this was a military boat and that the freezer hold was used as a morgue.  Doubt it.  Might have been constructed in a shipyard next to military boats or served some other capacity during war time.  Don't think they cleaned up the Mekong Delta with our trawl net and stored the bodies in the hold.  But what do I know?

I am kidding about switching up the movie, but it would be waaaaayyyy easier to make a horror flick than something artful and funny.  But there is no easy way out.

The fun movie is on.  And I'm getting a piano tomorrow to lull whatever ghosts there may be to sleep, make them weep.  I tell you the rain drops in Seattle will be the tears of angels on that day, henceforth known to all who tread on this Pacific Northwest as "chi wano wano ana".  Which means, "Day of angelic tears".  Ya I'm lying about that.  But I'll be glad to get on some keys.  Maybe I'll whip up a theme for the movie. 

The picture at the top is from the movie 'Pan's Labyrinth'.  If you have any Christian notion of redemption in your heart, or if fatherly love means anything, then watch it.  I am a sap, true.  The valve for water works is set low for me, and even at the mention of this story I get emotional.  Just wow.  So there's that.  Movie still on?  Check.  Haunted ghost ship night watch?  Check.  Piano on the boat?  I'll let you know...