Real Life Fiction

As I have previously mentioned, I'm reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick. I have been reading Moby Dick for the past... many months. I think I started last February, but I could be wrong. But I think I'm right. 

The reason for the length of my reading is not because I'm bored with it, but rather because my reading time is limited to mere minutes per day (or every other day). 

The novel has been a treat, to say the least. It's a first time read for me, and while the subject matter gets terribly gory at times, the way the man writes just fascinates me. 

Take this line for example;

Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab's iron soul.

Really? Who writes like that? Well, ok, many people have written as brilliantly, but it doesn't make it less amazing. Where do these words come from? 

 So like I said, the whole killing of whales thing is down right gross, but it's worth it to read the book.
While we're on the subject of gory subjects - this kind of gory I can handle. It's clean gory, if that makes any sense at all. It's worth the blood and stench and stickiness to experience the writing. The words wash over me like the waves he's describing and I feel like I'm on the stinky boat myself.

To change the subject somewhat but not really at all; there I was. Sitting on the plush loveliness that was the couch in the living room of the Beach House in Oregon, reading my Moby Dick, when all of a sudden Aunt Susie yelled

"Thar' she blows!"

Ok, she didn't really yell that, but it would have been cool. Because there she certainly did blow, right  in front of me. I didn't even have to get up off the couch to watch them! My kind of entertainment.

See? Two whales. Right there. In the ocean. While I was reading about them. We saw some flukes too, but the camera didn't.
That's the only time I have ever seen live wild whales, and it was crazy cool. I had chills.

And it also made me even more sorry for the wretched soul that was Captain Ahab, as the whales slowly swam away and I went back to reading about his hunt.
Let's just forgive and move on, shall we? You miss out on so much pain that way.