Of Emeralds and Alcohol; or, How the Dread Pirate Dewey knows that His Days at Sea are Drawing to a Close.

Shipmates,

Shiver me timbers! Your collective voices must be calling out as you read the anti-saline title of this posting; the Dread Pirate Dewey swearing off the ways of the bounding main? In favour of what pray tell you must be wondering? And what, I can hear you cry, will become of the salty flow of pure pirate juice that you call blood? Will it evaporate on land leaving you a desiccated husk of a manflower wilted before its time ready to be blown about upon the mere whisper of a fresh spring breeze?

Shipmates! Cease your incessant queries for but a minute!* Allow me to explain; lend me your ear** and listen to these reasons three that have recently decided the Dread Pirate’s mind! Reason the first: human feces. Today I found human feces on the carpet around the corner from my desk. No gentle reader, this Dread Pirate was not forced to sully his hands in the removal of said human feces; he had but to call housekeeping to arrange for a team to clean up the mess. But what a harrowing experience it was nonetheless! I can’t imagine that in the history of human endeavour and struggle that anybody had such a mind-bogglingly close encounter with human feces!***

Reason the second is my soaring bar bill. For those who remember the Dread Pirate Dewey in his why-yes-i-think-I-shall-have-a-giant-bag-of-Doritos-after-a-large-pizza-for-dinner days, you’ll remember he had a taste for the demon rum!**** However, after dropping over 100 pounds of excess pirate, even the thought of the calories in a single adult beverage give this pirate hives. On land a weekly stout amongst friends and fellow weekly trivia aficionados suffices. But on ship! Holy Moly! By the end of a long day spent shoveling platitudes, mindless literature, and Sudoku into the seemingly-bottomless gorges that we call guests this humble pirate needs about 6 or 7 double gin and sodas or his head will literally explode.***** This seems unhealthy. The no-pressure, take-it-easy world of academia seems the more sane solution.

And the third reason I can say with confidence that this pirate will shortly step away from the mast in favour of dry land is because of yellow emeralds. Sit down and hear this tale mates, for tis a nor’wester of a yarn! Aboard the mighty Adventure we have amongst our amoral crew a member of the Russian royal family fleeing the cruel hands of smelly, angry peasants.****** Her name is Katerina Karatova, and the other night she regaled us with tales of the shady practices of the Muscovite jewel merchants. It seems that these unscrupulous hawks have started marketing a gemstone they call a “yellow emerald.” This stone is so rare, they claim, that they and only they have it to sell! Of course, as one peasant asked, why, if the stone is so rare, are you selling it for less than a regular emerald? He was promptly boiled in oil. As Katerina Karatova noted, one can simply sell worthless beryl as a “gemstone” by simply trademarking a fancy-sounding name and gluing beryl onto some silver-plated nickel. Especially if one has either boiling oil or a captive market of semi-intelligent consumers.

This tale helped me think through a personal experience that I had the other day. I was grabbing a quick lunch and sat with a New Zealander crew member for convenience’s sake,******* and, naturally, we fell to talking. We moved to discussing the similarities between the USA-Canada relationship and the
Australia-New Zealand relationship. I noted that there are similarities in the relationship between native and non-native persons; that is, Canada and New Zealand are similar to each other and different from the US and Oz because in Canada/New Zealand there is a smaller non-native to native ratio and we perhaps live in closer contact. Now, I might have wrong in these opinions,******** and she might have made any number of salient points, but instead, she looked at me as if I had said something stupid and then told me that “in New Zealand we don’t have “natives.” We all have some Mauri heritage and are completely assimilated.” Oh. At first I was as much thrilled to hear that New Zealand had solved such a thorny problem as I was chagrined to realize that I had just made such a blundering faux pas. After a few minutes of awkward small talk however, I gave the conversation more thought and realized that, in truth, I was speaking with a moron, an optimistic moron perhaps, a moron with some semi-distant Mauri relation probably*********, but a moron nonetheless.

When I later heard Katerina Karatova’s tale, I realized that my annoying lunch companion was, not a moron exactly, but a yellow emerald: something of little value that can only exist aboard a ship. I also realized that we are all—all the pirates and feces-scrubbing crew aboard the mighty Adventure—yellow emeralds. Or, more accurately, we are all earth-buried material capable of emerging as diamonds through the process of applied pressures and time; contrariwise, we can end up as tacky beryl only appealing to the most taste-deficient marauding horde of consumers known to humanity. And thus, I must leave the high seas!**********










*Also the purple prose!
**Well, your eyes I suppose. And your imaginations!
***Well, the team of Indonesian housekeepers certainly got closer physically, but what of the emotional cost of that moment of “first contact?”
****And the demons vodka, gin, rye, wine, beer, cooking sherry, shoe polish, and Listerine.
*****Figuratively.
******And no she did not imagine that fleeing one such group would land square in the middle of another such horde. This is an example of irony.
*******I, like any truly civilized person, normally avoid all contact with New Zealanders.
********Although I am rarely wrong—as you well know dear reader!—I will grudgingly admit the possibility.
*********My great-grandmother was half-_________, so therefore I totally understand all the trials and tribulations of ______________ people!
**********After the Hawaii cruise that is; I’m not that crazy.