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Just Started Reading...

and find your musings engaging.

You describe moments in porn that reveal, if not beauty, humanity. I feel a connection with that thought.

I was a professional seaman for several years. I loved being at sea. When I started, I was infatuated with the stories. Sailors, like many people at the fringes, have amazing stories. I spent long periods of time in close quarters with them. It was very different from the military in that many of these people had lives, few had discipline, and all had money. I have remarked in the past that romantics, broken dreamers, and psychopaths go to sea. It is true. The sea gets everything that cannot hold on and is washed from land.

So, why the connection. People, in many ways more personalities than real human beings, at sea are a collection of extremes. It is as though the middling portions of their characters fall away and one piece of their self becomes dominant. There was beauty and truth in that. I could see what happens to a person if one facet of their personality became their entire being. Truth, because it showed me, in a small and focused way, how the human mind works. Many people I know, now, do not think it is possible for a person to believe that (fill in your blindness here). I believe it and I have likely seen it run amok.

But, I noticed a trend in that people who go to sea beyond a certain time stay at sea. They "get the sea in their blood." True. They get golden handcuffs (make too much money to move to another industry). Also true. Mostly, the rest of life does not offer the rush, peace, and truth of going to sea. I got out, but I think back on it continuously.

I say that it was an incredible lifestyle, but not a life.

The longer I spent away from the sea-going community, the more I realize how hard I had gotten. How wounded I was by what I saw and heard. How damaged I was becoming. Still, when I dream, I dream of the sea.

I see connections to some of what you say about the porn industry. That, and sailors are addicted to porn.

Be peace.

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