Reading Moby Dick and the whole opening is wild. “I’m Ishmael. Sometimes being a person makes me want to scream, so whenever I feel I can’t hold it in anymore I run to the nearest shipyard and sign up for some hard manual labour on a random ass boat where nobody cares who I am. After a few months I’ll settle down and get back to business. Everyone does this sometimes, it’s probably normal. Anyhow, I’m at the pier.”
I’m gonna do this differently, for me, and by memory, because my favorite bits are missing.
“Hey, my birth name doesn’t matter call me Ish. So a while back (and don’t pry about when thanks) I realized I needed to get away for a bit. You have to do this sometimes, and I do. The bullshit involved in everything puts me in a mood, and I find my fingers idly going through the motions necessary to tie a hempen half-windsor, or twitching at a steering wheel and tempting me to swerve into oncoming traffic. When musing threatens to turn to maiming or murder I channel it into movement, and spend a month or many riding rails or sleeping on busses and getting far away from everything. This keeps the house of cards from toppling. So anyway, yeah, I ended up doing warehouse work near Tulsa.”
I am begging you on my knees to rewrite the classics