Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods.
I've always wanted to sail around the world in a handmade boat, and I built a boat.
I was proud of the waves I had made, but wondered how many boats I was supposed to rock.
There came to port last Sunday night the queerest little craft, without an inch of rigging on; I looked and looked - and laughed. It seemed so curious that she should cross the unknown water, and moor herself within my room - my daughter! O my daughter!
When my mother, sisters and I arrived on the shores of America when I was 8 years old, the boat on which we came, a freighter, passed the Statue of Liberty.
That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle - beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth.
When I'm not surfing or sailing, I am to be found at the harbour working on my boat.
When I came to New York and I opened the window of the thirty-fifth-floor apartment, there's light pollution and fog, and I couldn't see my star. So I drew it on my wrist with a pen, but it kept washing away. Then I went to a tattoo parlor on Second Avenue and had it done.
I left Guiding Light so many times, they ran out of champagne.
We were wavering around like a ship without a sail.