One to sing and one to haul and one to heave me when I fall

[sovay]

I got up far too early to talk about far too much of my health, but I have been shot in the shoulder and eaten a bagel with chopped liver, which is at least two things the current administration would not care for. I am cleared to travel at the end of the month.

Now that it's been dislodged into the forefront of my consciousness, the phenomenon of Pirates of the Caribbean feels like the one real time in my life I was part of a megafandom and mostly what happened was the rest of the planet suddenly concurred that tall ships and chanteys and sea-change were cool. I saw Dead Man's Chest (2006) with my family because Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) had been such an unexpected swashbuckling delight, but I saw At World's End (2007) at a packed multiplex with friends who had agreed in common with much of the audience to arrive wearing as much pirate regalia as we could muster from our wardrobes, which at that time in my life meant the one rust-colored eighteenth-century shirt and my hair tied back with a black ribbon, the gold rings in my ears being a fortuitously preexisting condition. Especially since I continued not to interact with the supermassive explosion of fic unless it originated with my friendlist, that may be the most clinically fannish thing I have done in my life. I have never looked forward to a sequel in theaters before or since. I got the salt-green seventeenth-century glass onion bottle out of that first summer, as if it had been conjured off the screen into the traditional antique shop window for me to fall in love with its crusted tide. In the dog days of the second, I finished the novelette its sand-swirled, barnacle-silted draught was part of the pearl-grit for. In the span of that year, my graduate career had conclusively foundered and left me washing around in the wreckage. It had not occurred to me previously, but in their own flawed and splashier, blockbuster fashion, those two films may have been as much of a lifeline as the sea they evoked. I didn't expect to share it with an entire internet, but I am not sure the experience hurt me any, even if it has never repeated since.

From reading about this message in a bottle, I learned not only about John Craighead George whose mother's books I grew up on, but his twin conservationists of uncles whom I had known nothing about, so all things considered it carried a great deal of information in its transit from Point Barrow to Shapinsay.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

at a packed multiplex with friends who had agreed in common with much of the audience to arrive wearing as much pirate regalia as we could muster from our wardrobes, which at that time in my life meant the one rust-colored eighteenth-century shirt and my hair tied back with a black ribbon, the gold rings in my ears being a fortuitously preexisting condition. Especially since I continued not to interact with the supermassive explosion of fic unless it originated with my friendlist, that may be the most clinically fannish thing I have done in my life.

Aww, it does sound like a lovely experience - and much needed, too, then. <3<3<3

[gullyfoyle]

that may be the most clinically fannish thing I have done in my life.

I wore Vulcan ears once in public while running a table for the science fiction club at extracurriculars recruiting day in college. No photos exist, alas.

I wonder if the paths of Craig George and my brother ever crossed in Alaska. My brother lived there for over fifty years and spent considerable time on the North Slope, but as he was a heavy equipment operator and Dr. George a wildlife biologist, they may have been at loggerheads. Nonetheless, when it comes to people, Alaska is a small place, or at least it was when I spent the summer there in 1991.

[selkie]

In re: subject line, gladly would I haul you or catch you, but I hope no one makes me sing.

Film Review with Selkie: I like the one where there ends up being a pirate queen, but there could have been so much more Bonny and Read… and I only knew about the first three films.

[asakiyume]

A friend pointed out that John Craighead George was Jean Craighead George's brother. Perfect, right? (You probably already realized this; me, I just thought, hmmm, this name seems sort of familiar)

Always love me a good message-in-a-bottle story.

Also, I like describing your gold earrings as a fortuitously preexisting condition, heh!