Gil Grissom of CSI fame tells Sarah Sidle, his co-worker paramour at the end of one show at the end of one of the seasons that he'd like to know that he was dying, say of cancer, and that he'd like to have the chance to 'read Moby Dick again.' Well, I was somewhere in my teens lo these many decades ago when I read it...for fun, I think, not as an English assignment...but now that so much water has washed over the New Bedford shores, I really can't say with any discernment or certainty when exactly.
In any event, I was thinking of suggesting that my 'kids' get me a copy of it for my birthday so I could read it again, but came to the conclusion I'd better read it online first to see if I still would find it interesting. Well, I'm posting this because I'm already six chapters into it and Queequeg once again is my favorite character!!...Maybe I was a head hunting, harpoon throwing savage (well, I did play lacrosse defense man in this real life) in one of my former incarnations?!! In any event, I can already see that I'm going to get into this Whale's Tale yet not play Whale's Tails...if you get my drift...of Queequeg's coffin, so to speak.
It's especially appropriate that one of the characters is Peter Coffin, given the surname of one of the occupants of Grey Havens; which, now that I think of it could be a great name for a New England whalers' tavern in the 19th century where I might have been a ship's carpenter awaiting sailing orders on the Pequod in yet another one of my not-so-storied-incarnations; at least in my mind, as Eddie Izzard would say!
Oh, yeah, since it's time again for the World Series, the baseball connection to Moby Dick is the interaction between Jake Taylor and Lynn Wells over Queequeg's coffin...get the movie if you don't know that to which I refer!! ;p
Maybe I'll have to think about going a'whaling to at least spot the spermers if not hunt them, given the dearth of need for whale oil these days and the fact that Star Trek IV I think it is, reminds us that eliminating whales was going to get the planet eliminated, too. Besides, PETA and a bunch of others would not permit hunting whales any more any way. It would give me a good way to use up some of my vacation days...unless, of course I decide to take a Civil War Battlefields Trip starting at Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!
Got harpoon, coffin, so you can march to the sound of gunfire?!!
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