Stuck: Sunken Ships

This is new. Images of sunken ships scare me. 

When I was a little girl I remember being fascinated by pictures of the remains of the Titanic. After the movie came out, where I was first introduced to the tragic wreck, I spent weeks looking up images of the submersion.  
Imagine the ship, surrounded by a dark dense oceanic water, the rails and floors of the decaying boat dried with a dripping icicle of rust.
 I was  taking baths around the time, because let us face it, baths may be slightly disgusting because of the whole soaking in your own filth thing, but they are just so darn relaxing.  I had always loved swimming when I was a kid so the tub was the closest thing to a pool when I was at home in my apartment. I would sink my head under the water, blowing bubbles out of my nose.  And the image in my closed lids, which usually projected a somehow familiar tiled-floor—somewhere I still cannot place—became the image of that dynamic ship underwater. A repetitious image of the ship sinking, again and again. The lights of the ship in all that blackness. And then the decent.

I think about the ending of the movie The Goonies, when One-eyed Willie’s pirate ship breaks out of the entrapment of the cave. I always thought the ship dipped down into the ocean in the end.
It would have been the proper burial for One-eyed Willie. But I guess, why would a perfectly good ship trap itself—for a second time nonetheless—under water?

*This is the only shipwreck I can tolerate looking at:

*Or any of J.M.W. Turner’s remarkable paintings of ships and wrecks and shipwrecks.



The fear is called submechanophobia. And a part of the fear for me is wanting to see the vision of these impressing ships, even though they make my shoulders rise with a chill and clog my throat. I wonder how a ship of that magnitude could break and fall and sink. In my mind, I can see the cruise ship in Italy lying on its side like a starlet on a piano. And suddenly, all those boats become toys in my imagination—weightless. Because that is what it takes to sink a ship, weightlessness.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You Have to Draw the Line Somewhere

Image
Since when do people not know how to wait on line?             Imagine if you will: it is 7:30 in the morning, you are tired and cranky, and certainly not a morning person. You arrive at the bus stop where people appear to have forgotten the fundamentals, not to mention the common courtesy, of waiting patiently in an orderly place on line. No! Let’s do away with lines , I think they think as they cluster-fuck together in a clump (or a crowd as some people call it) so that there is no rhyme or reason­­— and just so I can piss the fuck out of all the other passenger-people . Maybe if you would wait on line you could be lucky enough to stand next to me and hear me bitch about how people do not know what a line is anymore. Here is a line:  Here is a line of people:  Here is a bus line:  Here is a clump (or a crowd—a clumpy crowd):  I am just short of snapping and holding a sit-in, or a stand-in—a strike more like it. But there is only so much I can d
Read more

Brain Boggle

Image
This is kind of like everything I have ever said (similar to my post about putting things in inappropriate places, or just where they do not belong— Tear Down That Bitch of a Bearing Wall ).  This kind of situation that I will talk about in a few sentences from now happens with words and sentences and idioms and things.  Perhaps this is how we have come to know some of our most ridiculous and popular phrases like white on rice or call a spade a spade or putting my foot in my mouth .  See, but if one is to do their research I am more than positive that there are reasons and explanations for those exact sayings.  But there may not be a reason at all for what I am about to explain.              You know those instances, where you just do not say what you want to and your brain takes over and that little guy inside manically laughing rewires the word choices of your brain so that there you are saying some barbarically asinine statement.   There are a few logical reas
Read more

The Big Book Theory

Image
It all started with someone’s status on Facebook being, “Nook or Kindle?” and me writing back, “Book.” The status writer cleverly or stupidly spat, “I think you spelt Nook wrong.  And anyway I am just looking to read, no fancy stuff.” So I remarked, “Like I said, Book!” Later I told my dad the story inserting, “I need to turn pages!” as my reasoning for a book being the victor of a very pointless competition.    “And if he wants to read to just read, why get a nook at all?” I continued.  “He can’t say he read a book then, he just looked at a screen.  That's worse than scanning a book.”  I told my dad, “It’s like when you were reading audio books; you didn’t read them, you had them read to you .  You listened to a book, but you certainly did not read one.” My dad said, “Screw you,” probably, and asked, “Then what would you say about a blind person reading a book?” “Oh, that’s easy," I said.  “They felt a book up!”
Read more

Dear David Hasselhoff

Image
Dear David Hasselhoff, I do not like you. You know how everyone has that one celebrity they cannot stand, who grids their gears, who irks them to the core—I am sure you have one too. Well, that one is you for me. I have no real reason to dislike you. I have never met you. Although a friend of mine worked for a major retail store, and as the story goes, this friend’s manager was serving you and your daughter and you tried to bargain down a thousand dollar coat and made a whole scene when you were denied. I have not even really familiarized myself with your work to make this judgment against you, but I have encountered just enough. This is not to say that I do not find you funny, I do. I found that video you made of Knight Rider funny, and some other appearances of yours, sure. But to be honest, I just cannot shake the distaste. And just like how I image it will be when I meet my future mate, I can pinpoint the exact moment this aversion arose.  Vocal 8: senior year of high scho
Read more

Beyond the Road

Image
*For Halloween, but mainly for Dan, without whom this story would never exist, because it happened to him (with a few of my artistic embellishments). Like I said, worked real hard on this. Hope I did the vision justice.                 A driver drives southbound-east in a car, shoving crusty chips in the corners of his cheeks. The bag of grease lounges on the passenger’s seat and the driver dips his hand in periodically, licking vinegar crystals off his fingers from the sea-salt snack. His other hand padlocks around the steering wheel, drives onward. His glasses fall to the point of his nose; eyes fixated on the pulsing potato chips and not the road ahead—those circular discs of caloric pleasure. The fatty deposits at his sides expand his smallish figure. The groan in his belly growls deeper. The radio dial flickers neon blue and reverberates off the lens of his frames onto the road before him. He watches as the light casts its image on the lane. Not a single c
Read more