[325] Screed City

[325]

05/07/2025 Wednesday. Top bunk. Stateroom 2363. SS Summit. Around or near Astoria, Oregon.

Ahoy from the high seas. We have been cruising up the left coast of America since last Friday. Embarked from San Pedro, home of Mike Watt and D. Boon of the Minutemen. Seminal punk band. If you don’t know them, I suggest you get off your ass and check them out stat for crying in the night.

It’s been a weird one. Neither Scott nor I are in particularly good spirits about it. We have been building a set up in Vermont for another Rumours and taking a week off to fly three thousand miles away and then float from Los Angeles to Vancouver, BC is particularly helpful. On Friday we take the red eye to Chicago and will probably miss our connection to Burlington because we have to go through customs which means we won’t be back to Vermont until after 2p. We can’t take an earlier flight because the ship gets in too late to make it to the airport. I mean, that’s six hours of travel stretched out over 30 hours. For what? To hang a couple god damned curtains.

But we did see Agustin in San Francisco. We needed some grommets so we went to town. He took the FART over from Oakland and met us for lunch. We got some Chinese food and then went to a wok store. At one point the woman who owned the store was talking about something and Agustin asked her a question and she was like, “What? Who is this guy? Did he come from Oakland?” I wish I could remember the what we were talking about, but we drank a couple beers at lunch and I can visualize the conversation and know it had something to do with the lottery, but I don’t remember the sonic details. I don’t know, she was quite salty and it was a very pleasant experience. Scott bought a wok and some bowls.

When we left the wok store there was a Chinese band playing music on the corner. Busking. One of the members handed Scott a two string guitar and the now four piece band started playing Auld Lang Syne. I sang the lyrics and Agustin smoked. Afterwards we stumbled down the road to City Lights book store and poked around. After that we heard the boat honking its horn so we had to haul ass back aboard. Agustin stood on the dock waving his tear soaked hanky at us while the ship drifted into the western drink.

Last night was the reason we were on this trip. To replace the Austrian requires such a huge amount of work that it is not possible to do when the ship is temporarily in port. Which was the original plan for this project, I learned. The drape replacements would take place when the ships were day docked. But that was an impossible task. Just getting onto the ship takes hours and you have to be off of them by early afternoon regardless of what is happening. So instead of just doing the work in an efficient, straight forward way, they throw us goons onto the boat and put us on call for seven days to do a very simple job that ultimately is the opposite of simple. Like tonight. We have the night off. We can’t work because we need to use a Genie lift. We can’t do that when the boat is cruising because the seas are too rough so we have to do it tomorrow when we get to Victoria, BC. Yet there is nothing to do on the ship but wait around with your thumb up your butt. And you’d think you’d get some work done, but the problem is your schedule is too bonkers to have any real cogent brain waves. We worked until four I think, last night. I got up at 8a to have breakfast and go ashore. I only did that because I knew that we had the night off. Otherwise I would have slept until noon and got up just to eat lunch and then plopped around in my room for eight hours feeling guilty I wasn’t doing things I should probably do but being too sleepy and dumb headed to overcome the morass. And knowing I was working later, I would have forced myself to take a nap and forced myself to eat dinner so I could work overnight.

All the while/ my room/ like a tomb/ listening to boom-boom/ from the wave shrooms.

See! See how dumb this ship work makes a poet?

Today was something else though. Astoria, Oregon, do you know it? You think you don’t but you do. Ever hear of a movie called The Goonies? I have. It is an American classic and if you are disagreeing in your mind as you read this, I have one thing to say; “What is she ragging about?” I mean, I watched the movie on an airplane last month, I think. It is very good. And it was filmed in Astoria, Oregon. The house is on 38^th street just off of Marine Drive. It is a three mile walk from the port and you walk through beautiful downtown Astoria to get there. The town is roughly 9,000 people and the local economy is mostly fishing but there is tourism as well. I walked by three weed shops. A few fast food places and this place that Lyon’s was stoked about called Pig ‘N Pancake. Oddly there is quite a bit of traffic going through town, and it is home to the longest bridge in America apparently.

I saw oil tankers, lots of them, a herd of seals making hilarious noises, gaggles of tourists like myself, all doinking around the waters edge. At one point I was greasing some dudes ass because I was walking too fast so I stopped at a parking lot to drink some coffee from my thermos, letting him get some head wind. As I stood there waiting a lesbian couple overtook me and the back of one of their shirts read “Never Say Die”. I thought this was funny because I had stopped to give somebody space and then they just took that space away from me and now I was greasing their asses. So much so that they grew nervous of me and I once again had to stop and gang way. It turned out they were going to the same place I was. Data’s House. From the movie The Goonies. Ever heard of it? And it wasn’t until they peeled off and I got ahead of them and five minutes later I was coming back from Data’s House that I understood that her shirt, the one that said, “Never Say Die”, was a Goonies shirt and then I remembered that was their slogan.

[insert Goonies house pic]

The whole experience was awkward, actually. Somebody lives in the house. They have neighbors. The town is very working class. I don’t know how often the ships land in the Goon Docks, but the woman who lived there was doing yard work when I showed up. Her neighbor was loading tools and construction materials into his truck. There were all sorts of signage telling people to not be assholes. There were five of us at that moment just taking pictures. Some of the others were asking the woman questions. Telling her it was a beautiful house. She looked at me and said, “Where are these idiots from, Oakland?”

That was the end of my self prescribed walking tour so I followed the hilarious seal noises down the hill and started walking on the train tracks back to Pig ‘N Pancake. Along the way I saw a sign that pointed out that the school I could see up the hill was the same school from Kindergarten Cop from, “It’s not a tumor!” fame. That was unexpected. Thirty minutes later I was sitting in the Pig ‘N Pancake eating a Miss Pig sandwich and fries drinking a Dr. Pepper while a very large man used a multi tool, one of the loudest tools in the entire world, a tool that should never be used during business hours in a restaurant, the man, he was using it to cut ceramic tile, which makes the tool even louder, and I was just feet from him. I ate my sandwich with my right hand while covering my left ear with my left hand. I selected a refrigerator magnet for purchase, and paid $36 dollars for the entire experience and hauled ass back to the boat.

There was nobody there to wave a soggy, tear soaked hanky at me when the ship slipped into the harbor, but I did see a seal looking for victuals and the port blew a horn so loud that I had to cover my ears. Maybe that is how things roll in Astoria, Oregon? Everything is just loud as shit? It seems like it.

[insert This Aint No Picnic]