Happy (It's Not Quite The Actual) Birthday to the Shipwrecked Sailor Blog
"...if I had had a bottle at that moment I would have put one of the cards into it, playing shipwrecked sailor..." - Gabriel García Márquez, 'The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor'
But first, your weekly Vine: Monday was Chapter 42: “Justice Part One.” Tuesday was Chapter 43: “Correspondence With The Dead Part One.” Today is Chapter 44: “Justice Part Three.” These two trilogies plus a couple standalones take the Chosen People of Vine through the 1980s, and do you like Satanic Panic stuff? Oh we got some Satanic Panic stuff. Check out the podcast, and don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter!
The full quote there is “I think if I had had a bottle at that moment I would have put one of the cards into it, playing shipwrecked sailor, just to do something amusing to tell my friends about in Cartagena.” Thinking about stuff that’d be fun to do and doing things for the sake of amusing friends—that’s me, right there. The first post on this blog said “I’m a writer, I write,” and well. Hell. You can probably stop here.
As I get older, or maybe because I’m a dad now and have to look at calendars more, I’m becoming more invested in yearly traditions and reflections. Trying to take stock, reflect, not let things get lost to time. This blog bills itself as an elegy, after all.
It’s also, well—November 2022 was a time of uncertainty for me. My contract with Cracked.com wasn’t getting renewed, Mal and I had just bought a house, I was starting out on staff at Cotton Xenomorph, my kid was starting all-day school and for the first time, which meant I could more or less have a workday dedicated to writing. I’m happy to say I feel like things have worked out okay.
Why ‘shipwrecked sailor?’
The short, easy answer is: I like Gabriel García Márquez, and I like the sea.
The longer answer, not to spoil Friday’s column, is that there’s something about that book that feels elemental to me. The eponymous shipwrecked sailor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, is a Navy man crewing a destroyer sailing from Mobile, AL, home to Cartagena, Colombia. One night, a storm strikes, Luis is thrown overboard, and heroically survives 10 days floating on a life raft. Upon his return home, he is hailed as a hero, given large sums of money to endorse products like the watch or shoes he was wearing while floating in the Caribbean, “kissed by beauty queens,” and generally treated to the exalted life. Yet he still wishes to tell his story to Gabo and the opposition-to-the-dictatorship newspaper that employs him.
Why?
Because there was no storm, Luis Alejandro Velasco and his crewmates (all of whom drowned) were thrown from the destroyer because it wasn’t weighted properly. It wasn’t weighted properly because it was transporting contraband cargo, which was against the rules for destroyers to ship, and the dictatorial regime had an interest in lying the circumstances that resulted in unnecessary death and suffering. The blowback was fierce. The newspaper shut down, Luis Alejandro Velasco had to “disappear into everyday life,” and Gabo began what he refers in the introduction to as his “exile” in Europe.
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Even though fascism is ascendant in my country, I’m not going to pretend I’m some sort of hard-nosed journalistic truth-teller or some abused-within-an-inch-of-his-life worker. I do have a low tolerance level for bullshit and the play-nice you have to do with a lot of polite society, and I have been a put-upon worker, but I’m not comparing myself to Luis Alejandro Velasco or Gabriel García Márquez.
Feels right to nod to them, anyway. You write, you tell stories you want to tell even when everything around you is shit, I mean come on, you’re still alive, after all.
If I were to make an all-influence Starting Five, like we’ve started asking guests to do on The Line Break, that book would be the beating heart of the lineup, like Joakim Noah on the 2009-2015 Bulls.
It Started With Music
It was around 2015 when I realized I can’t stop writing songs. I pick up my guitar, I noodle around, certain things stick, and eventually I get mad that they aren’t recorded songs, because I can hear what they would sound like with bass and drums and keys and such, but everyone else just hears the coily jangles on an unplugged Fender Jazzmaster. I took some songs that had nowhere else to go, released i dreamed a knife like a song you can’t whistle in 2016, then had enough fun and felt accomplished enough to do if not a river in 2017. “Felt accomplished” here doesn’t mean I think I’m some expert producer, but I remain proud of that work. Better than no songs.
My dear friends Pat and Eddie badgered the rest of our group chat into making music during Covid lockdowns, which resulted in J in 2020, followed shortly by Brendan and my first collab, weight of an anchor, also in 2020. There is at least one more record coming in 2024, and more after that one. Again—having fun, trying to do cool shit with my friends.
Speaking of reflections earlier, I can listen to all these records and know right away what artists I was into at the time. Music can be its own diary, its own etchings of the past.
What’s Fun About Blogging?
Being honest, I think a piece of me is stuck in 2003. I really enjoyed the blogosphere. I’ve always thought it was cool when authors had blogs, like John Keene’s J’s Theater. I’ve talked about my love for liner notes before, the bands I liked putting a little letter for the fans that cared to read it in the front of the CD case when I bought an album. One of my favorite parts of early Cracked.com was when their content was dominated by weekly columnists with personalities, obvious examples being
and .While being edited is great (my weekly glut of typos can attest to that) and writing for a place is wonderful, it’s very fun to have this be for whatever I’m interested in a random Wednesday/Friday. As my writing career progresses, I like the idea having The Shipwrecked Sailor Blog as this home base to holler from, to any and all who might want some extra hollerin after reading one of my books.
A Note on Capitalization
My disdain for capitalization is another product of coming of age in the early 2000s, I’m afraid. Long song titles and references to better poetry, too. I’m growing a little weary of it, and have recently been using Shipwrecked Sailor and shipwrecked sailor interchangeably. Life’s too short to really give a shit about this stuff, anyway.
You think Luis Alejandro Velasco was worried about grammar when he was fending off sharks in that life raft for ten days?
The book of short stories I’m working on doesn’t use commas.
Be weird, my friends.
Thank you so much for reading, and as always, well…
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
agree about capitalization. what? the letter at the start of a sentence is more important than the other letters? i say equality amongst all.