I woke up in the next door neighbor's back yard. My eyes opened to the sky with the back of my skull on an area rug. My legs, still wrapped in skinny jeans, lay nearly lifeless under a blanket. One of my Paolo pig skin leather boots was lazily untied. I only discovered today that the sun had burned the cheap Irish skin on my forehead. This wasn't my neighbors' yard, It was a friend's neighbor, it was overlooking the Pacific and it was the fourth of July.
Everyone who has been in the presence of the ocean has a connection to it. My connection started early and was reinforced by the beaches of Hawaii. Our family was stationed there from the years when I was two and three years old.
I pursued my interest of the sea as far as spending three weeks working for the collections and quarantine department of the Bermuda Aquarium and starting my college career as a marine biology major. In my ideal future, at the time, I was to live on my boat with my wife and child. I was to discover the origins of life on this planet deep within the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the Pacific (according to my calculations, anyway). I was to have the ocean as my backyard, my playground, and my livelyhood. I would breathe in it's vopor and it would breathe life into me.
I felt alive, albeit still a little drunk, when I woke on this year's Independence Day.
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