2016: A Magic Carpet Ride
Happy Last Year
The year the map became a mirror: desert light, cathedral silence, American noise, Caribbean water, North Sea weather—and the long return to Santa Monica.
At the time, I thought I was collecting destinations.
Looking back, I was assembling a navigation system.
2014 did not arrive as a curriculum. It arrived as weather: desert heat, cathedral cold, engine noise, tropical water and the low mechanical pulse of ships. I moved through it without knowing which moments would become coordinates.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. The older I get, the better my past gets—not because the facts improve, but because the pattern finally appears.
I do not reopen this archive to live backward. I return to recover the bearing. Every city asked a different version of the same question: Will you merely understand this life, or will you move?
The World Opens
January
The year opened where water was absent. Dubai and Sharjah made ambition visible: towers, roads, dunes and whole futures pushed into being. The desert offered the first lesson of the log. Intelligence can admire an impossible city. Action builds one.
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Dubai - Strange But Awesome
A city built as a declaration. Dubai made excess feel architectural and reminded me that possibility becomes real only after somebody pours the concrete.
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Sharjah - Desert Safari Adventure
Beyond the glass towers, the dunes erased the map. Survival became balance, momentum and respect for terrain that does not care about confidence.
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In One Year And Out The Other
A New Year meditation on time: not something to save for later, but the only currency already in the account.
Open original logFebruary
February slowed the pulse. Chichester and Arundel placed me inside centuries measured in stone. Venice then loosened the ground beneath everything. The urban monk and the sailor met in the same lesson: stillness is not stagnation, and movement is not always progress.
Chichester Cathedral - Urban Monk
Cathedral silence as navigational equipment. A place to reduce the noise until the next honest thought can be heard.
Open original logArundel - Castles & Dreams
A thousand years of walls, inheritance and weather. History makes the present feel temporary—and therefore usable.
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Venice - Picturesque Floating City
A city that refuses the ordinary agreement between land and water. Venice proved that an entire civilization can be built on adaptation.
Open original logMarch
By March the sea had returned. Galveston showed the industrial coast: crude oil, shipping lanes and work hidden behind the postcard. Cozumel opened the world below the waterline. The surface was only the beginning.
Galveston - Oil and Water
A working port where commerce, weather and the Gulf negotiate in public. Not picturesque. Useful. Real.
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Cozumel - Eminence Waterfront
The Caribbean as threshold: bright water above, older histories and living systems underneath.
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Cozumel - Any Fin Is Possible
Below the surface, noise disappears and attention becomes physical. The sea rewards breath, patience and correct response.
Open original logThe Body Enters the Story
April
Insight had to leave the notebook. April put the journey into the body—walking, heat, fatigue and island time. A dream that cannot survive contact with feet, weather and inconvenience is still only decoration.
I Walked The Walk
Movement without metaphor. The body carries every philosophy eventually, and exposes the ones that were only words.
Open original logAloha - Hanging Loose in Hawaii
Hawaii complicated the tourist gaze. Paradise is not an empty stage; it is a living culture with limits, memory and its own pace.
Open original logMay
May traded ocean hush for engines, guitars and inherited American myths. Indianapolis, Nashville and Memphis were three forms of velocity: mechanical, musical and moral.
Indianapolis - The 500
Speed disciplined by engineering. The spectacle works because thousands of invisible decisions were made before the green flag.
Open original logNashville - Cabin Fever
Songs as portable homes. Nashville showed how private ache becomes public rhythm when someone finishes the verse.
Open original logMemphis - The 3 Kings
Music, civil rights and memory occupying the same streets. Culture changes when voice becomes action.
Open original logJune
June returned me to the operating system I understood best: the ship. Sea life is edited life. The horizon repeats. The schedule becomes ritual. There are hours of boredom and moments when the weather, machinery or human judgment suddenly demands everything.
@Sea - Picture Perfect
The polished surface of ship life—and the discipline beneath it. Hospitality above the waterline depends on unseen systems below.
Open original logNassau - Ship Happens
A port call as interruption, comedy and reminder: plans are invitations offered to weather.
Open original logThe Long Passage
July
Hamburg, Southampton and Stavanger connected modern travel to older maritime power. Ports are not merely arrivals. They are machines for converting distance into exchange.
Hamburg - Queen Mary's Celebration
A great liner in a great port: engineering turned into ceremony, and departure made public.
Open original logSouthampton - Gateway Port
The shore-side half of every ocean crossing. Southampton held the memory of liners, empire, migration and return.
Open original logNorway - Stavanger
Fjord geography, North Sea industry and a colder definition of beauty—less invitation than command.
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Fort Lauderdale was water translated into suburbia: canals, docks, heat and boats waiting beside ordinary life. It suggested a compromise between voyage and address, though sailors know every compromise has a tide table.
South Florida - Fort Lauderdale
A city arranged around water, where the vessel can remain close enough to keep departure imaginable.
Open original logReturn with a Bearing
October
After the unlogged spaces of September, October returned to England. Arundel repeated itself differently. Portsmouth made the maritime story operational again. Return is never repetition; the traveler has altered the evidence.
Arundel - White Castle Return
The castle revisited. The stones had not changed, which made my own changes easier to see.
Open original logPortsmouth - Navy Blue
A naval city where seamanship becomes institution, history and consequence—not lifestyle branding.
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Beachy Head placed the edge of England underfoot. Santa Monica placed the Pacific ahead again. One was a warning. The other was a waiting room. The sailor returned to a harbor for people who did not necessarily intend to sail.
Beachy Head - Coastal Drama
White cliffs, hard weather and the clean geometry of an edge. Some landscapes remove the illusion of endless options.
Open original logSanta Monica - My Pier Group
My piers. The People’s Republic. A beautiful harbor of slackers, dreamers and the intelligentsia—where insight was plentiful and action remained the scarce commodity.
Open original logNot every part of a life leaves a neat artifact.
The original timeline contains no September chapter and ends before December. I have left those absences visible. A logbook is not the sea; it is what the sailor managed to write down. Some passages happen between entries. Some changes are understood only after the next landfall.
What 2014 actually taught me
A full itinerary can still conceal avoidance. Progress requires a chosen direction, not merely mileage.
A street address is useful paperwork. Home is the place—or person—that allows the inner compass to settle.
Cathedrals, castles, ports and old songs remind the traveler that every present tense is temporary.
Watchkeeping reduces life to signal, weather, maintenance and the next useful action.
The world does not reward the journey imagined perfectly. It answers the page published, the passage booked and the body that arrives.
“Are you reelin’ in the years?”
The question is not whether time has passed. It always has. The question is whether the year was merely stored—or converted into judgment, courage and a more accurate course.
The journey ended where the next one had to begin.
By November I was back with my piers in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica: a harbor for slackers, dreamers and the intelligentsia. The Pacific remained available. So did delay.
The year had supplied desert, castles, reefs, engines, music, ships and cliffs. Santa Monica supplied the harder test: dry land. Could the sailor carry watchkeeping inland? Could insight survive ordinary hours?
That became the final lesson of 2014 and the beginning of everything that followed: the map can inspire you, the view can awaken you, but only action moves the vessel.