And the shrouds hum full of the gale of the grave and the keel goes out to the sea

In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I respectfully wish to submit that if I had just had scurvy, this whole week would have been much easier. Have a suspicious ghost crab, the Changelings' "Port Royale" (1998), and Tim Eriksen rocking out Bellamy's setting of Kipling's "Poor Honest Men" (2011). In keeping with the recent influx of Kevin McNally in the eighteenth century, when I get back to my stack of DVDs I could just rewatch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006). For all the varied and undeniable flaws of those second two films, their sea-iconography has clung to me like dream-wrack for nearly twenty years and I wouldn't have a cycle of stories without them.

The dark sleek heads are risen from the water

Home from six days in hospital with a plan designed not to land me back there any time soon, I have been passed into the care of Dr. Hestia, who is already carrying out her duties with enthusiastic ministrations of purr. I have washed my hair for the first time in a week. I have eaten food prepared by my family. I napped like a stone in the late afternoon, which I will have needed since my regimen for the foreseeable involves a schedule of medications I cannot let slide even when some of them require me to be awake at hours I have preferred my entire life to spend unconscious. My calendar is inevitably full of further maintenance, but I am truly looking forward to an increase in conversations that have nothing to do with the monitoring of my vitals. Mostly I am marrow-tired and vague with new chemistry and glad to be home in my own clothes and drinking water I don't have to ring anyone to bring me in bed. I was not expecting and delight in the gift of a plush harpy eagle that arrived while I was away.