Oh, why not. Let's do a Moby Dick post.
I threw the lines off of a tug this morning and as I did, I said to the deckhands, "I'll see you in three years when the tug is full of whale oil! Bring back Moby Dick if you can!"
The old skipper smirked and shook his head and the deckhand looked confused.
My guess is that nobody reads Moby Dick in English class anymore and because the Gregory Peck version of Moby Dick (the movie) is in black and white they have not seen that, either.
Not all young people. One fairly young deckhand told me once "When you first went to sea Moby Dick was a minnow!"
I took no offense whatsoever because the truth doesn't bother me.
Come to think about Moby Dick, I just remembered the time I worked with this Cajun woman. She was actually a crackerjack deckhand. She pulled her ownweight and generally then some. I really respected her.
She had come over from the tug and was helping me tie up and spotted a really morbidly obese woman on the dock that was probably someone from corporate HR or something giving a dockman sensitivity training or some such crap.
Now the Cajun woman was a pretty plain speaker. She took one look at the woman and turned to me and said, "She looks like a beached whale."
I forgot who I was talking to and replied, "Yeah. A regular f***ing Moby Dickless!" and then I immediately cringed.
Instead of a scowl I was treated to hearing her chuckle. "You got that one right," she replied.
NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY
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