Just the green wave going by

"Does anyone still celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day?" I wondered, before it occurred to me that I could just ask the internet and discover the answer was yes. In keeping with my haphazard observance of the holiday, have an admiring gifset of Robert Newton heroically impersonating a wrecker in Jamaica Inn (1939) and Gordon Bok, Ann Mayo Muir, and Ed Trickett on "Soon May the Wellerman Come," which is neither a pirate song nor even a chantey, it's a tall tale of a shore-whalers' song from New Zealand, but I was immensely entertained when it took the quarantine internet by storm. I was listening to it along with the rest of its album last week.

I dreamed of a polite conversation with a stranger who was surprised in a slightly skeptical way to hear that I had been writing and publishing short fiction and poetry for more than twenty years, which I suppose suggests my state of mind regarding what no longer feels like it passes for my writing career. I am reminding myself that I have some sort of (multiply tested as such) miserable cold and may be concomitantly low in spirits and should take a walk or something while it's this autumnally bright. I bet it isn't helping that my college reunion for which I did not RSVP because I was too sick to know whether I had any chance of attending is coming up.