The Pulse

i tried to feel the size of the world once. i failed completely. in 2014, when i was 35, i sailed to hawaii because it felt like a calling. that's the clean version. the fuller version is: i loved adventure, i trusted strange invitations from the universe, and i had not yet developed a healthy suspicion of paper plates full of fireworks. the boat was a 40-foot beneteau. at the beginning, she was the biggest boat i'd ever been on. solid hull, good sails, autopilot, watermaker, enough berths for four adult males. everything we needed for an eighteen-day passage. there were four of us: paul, the owner. mark, the hired captain. tyler, the cook. and me, the crew. she would surf the trade swells until she crested the wave and seemed to slide down the back of it. then, in the trough, she'd do this little wiggle, like she could feel the next wave building from behind. she felt alive. then came the fourth of july. and with it, a plan. not necessarily a good plan. but a plan with spirit. i was leaning down with a paper plate full of fireworks, trying to light them and place them gently into the pacific, because apparently even the middle of the ocean deserves a festive neighborhood association. then i fell. shock first. then panic. then disbelief. i tried to grab the fishing lines we were dragging behind the boat, which turned out to be a bad idea. parachord burning through your hands is a very direct form of education. luckily, the rest of the crew saw everything happen and warned me about the hooks at the end of those lines. there are moments in life when your entire philosophy becomes very simple. mine was: watch out for the hooks. the first image i remember clearly is the sailboat sailing away from me. not dramatically. not cruelly. just sailing. the wind was still the wind. the boat was still the boat. and i was suddenly not on it. then i saw her turn. and the fear loosened. i could see they were coming back. i was going to live. once rescue was obvious, something strange happened. fear gave way to relief. relief gave way to wonder. wonder gave way to curiosity. i was floating in the pacific ocean, farther from land than my body knew how to understand. so i tried to understand it anyway. i listened. i looked at the horizon. i felt the water holding me up. i wanted to use every sense i had. i wanted to feel how far away land was. i wanted my body to understand the size of the world. i put my head under and opened my eyes. and there it was. nothing. just blue. a blurry gradient from light to dark. i wanted revelation. i wanted my senses to stretch all the way to the edge of the world. i wanted to feel the distance to land, the curve of the planet, the size of the thing i was inside of. but i couldn't. it was too big. the world was so far outside the range of me that i felt silly for even trying. and then, somehow, that feeling opened. i was tiny. easily missed. easily forgotten. a little head in a big ocean. but i wasn't separate from it. i was in it. held by it. made of it. too small to measure the world, but not outside the world. and with that sense of nothing, i got everything. then the boat came back. quite undramatically, actually. after briefly communing with planetary scale, i was hauled aboard like a damp raccoon with opinions. for a day or two, i was embarrassed. it is a strange thing to be the guy who fell off the boat. especially when the ocean has just handed you a mystical experience and everyone else mostly remembers the splash. but i make light of things easily. eventually, so did they. years later, that moment still lives in me. not as fear. as scale. i came back knowing i was small. not in a sad way. in a true way. and the truth made me feel connected. also, i no longer recommend fireworks as a flotation-adjacent activity.

i got arrested in cabo san lucas once when i was sailing. this was after the baja ha-ha, just finishing the baja ha-ha from san diego to cabo san lucas. we were partying, and i was in one of the bars there. i speak spanish, so i was getting along with one of the local mexican men. we were having a good time, having fun, drinking, and just shooting the breeze. then i started running out of cash, so i went to the atm, and he came with me. as i was pulling out some cash, or i don't remember if i did or not, i can't recall if i had access to cash right at that moment—no, i did not—a municipal police car pulled up beside the atm on the street. this mexican man looked at the police car and said, "pinchi munizipales," and gave them the middle finger. they stopped, got out of their car, grabbed him, put him in handcuffs, threw him in the back of the police car, and drove away. i was standing there, thinking, "what just happened?" i wondered, "what do i do now? do i go help this guy? do i have to go, because we were having fun, do i go to the police station? do i call someone?" i didn't know what was going on; my brain was going a mile a minute. a few minutes later, or a couple of seconds later—i don't know how time went there, it was pretty slow, it was weird—the police car came back around. the cops got out of the car, came up to me, arrested me, and put me in the back of the police car. we were just driving around, handcuffed in the back of the police car, me and this man i was drinking with in the bar in cabo san lucas. he was crying, saying, "oh, please, please, please, please, don't put me in jail." he was being such a little, well, he was pleading for his life, so it seemed. because i can speak spanish and interpret, i understood what was going on. i said, "shut up, dude, you're the biggest idiot in the world. this is what you get for flipping off the cops, man! why would you do that, you stupid, you're so dumb! why?" anyway, we kept driving around, and we went into this dark alleyway. i don't know where it was; i was handcuffed in a police car and drunk. it was all dark. they gave me a phone or put a phone to my ear, and i talked to this supposed lawyer. he said, "oh, you're probably going to have to spend a night in jail." i said, "what?" he explained, "because you're with this guy, they can take you to jail, or you can work something out with the cops, they're locals." so, obviously, they were asking for more. i understood. they took us back to the atm machine where they picked me up. i pulled out what i think was 600 pesos for each of them. i had a thousand pesos in my bank account, which is about a hundred dollars, so i just gave it to them, or 1200, whatever it was, split between the two cops. luckily, i got to go sleep on the sailboat again, because it would have been a lot harder of a story to explain in the morning, having been released from a mexican prison, rather than being released from a mexican police car. that was when i got arrested in mexico, in cabo san lucas. that was in 2014, i think, on the diamond girl.

if it’s happening, it’s happening. if it’s believable, it’s believable. go with the flow, because when the universe decides to get weird, it goes full-tilt unbelievable. case in point: what happened today. santa claus ran out of gas at my house. not the north pole ceo himself, but a professional santa impersonator. he was starlight-delivering uber eats on his scooter when he sputtered to a halt right in front of my driveway. i had just pulled in, exhausted from a long shift working as a greensperson in the film industry (which is a whole different brand of chaos), only to find saint nick stranded on the curb. santa was on my doorstep, frantic because someone’s pad thai was getting cold and his reindeer-powered scooter was bone dry. it was impeccable, cosmic timing. he looked at me and asked, "hey, you guys have any gas?" he pointed to a random jerry can tucked under a trailer nearby. i grabbed it, but realized it was two-stroke mix. santa, desperate to deliver, said, "let’s try it!" we fed the scooter the oily cocktail, but it wouldn't start. my mechanical experience mostly consists of hopeful thinking, so we were officially stuck in a holiday-themed breakdown. not wanting to be the guy who ruined christmas (or lunch), i threw santa into my truck. on the drive, he told me he does santa claus appearances and travels around the us and canada. he showed me pictures of him in toronto at this massive mall setup, which was pretty cool. it's funny because my friend and roomate does christmas light installations for homes around our community, and santa claus ran out of gas in front of the christmas light installation company. we completed his uber delivery together—imagine the customer's face seeing santa hop out of a pickup—and then headed to the gas station to fill a proper jerry can. we got back and tried the real stuff, but the scooter was still on strike. that's when he finally threw in the towel and called bcaa. now we're here trying to fix his scooter. he's a cool guy, using uber to pay for whatever he needs. it was funny that it happened and that it was santa claus (he wasn't dressed like santa), and the coincidences are so funny, i wanted to share this one.