by: Lazy & EntitledPosted on:

Friday Links: Into The Sea Edition

“The sea is, if anything, famously huge.” – Kathleen Rooney, ‘Man Overboard!’

If your floors do not have sand residue, if your clothes don’t smell vaguely of sunscreen and chlorine, if your grill remains untouched, if you haven’t eaten outside, if you haven’t taken a personal day off work, if you haven’t gone to a street festival, if you haven’t gone for a bike ride, if you haven’t tossed a frisbee around, if you haven’t walked around your neighborhood right as the sun is starting to set and the bugs start singing, my dude, what are you doing? Granted, I haven’t done all of those yet. It’s summer tho. Let’s have a summer. We’re reading the perfect book for it this week, too.

Hey, would ya look at that? We got a new Lazy & Entitled Podcast this week, featuring an interview with this week’s author, Kathleen Rooney. Amazing stuff. Apple | Spotty | SoundCloud

What I’ve Been Reading This Week

A perfect beach read. Wait, let’s define terms (everyone’s favorite beach activity, defining terms). I define a perfect beach read by three metrics:

  • gotta move. I need short chapters and fast prose. But it’s also gotta surprise. I’m not here for boring language, I’m not here for pure plot. I can watch movies if you’re not gonna bother to write good sentences or challenge my thinking. Books can be easy to read and thoughtfully crafted, idk if anyone knows this.
  • gotta make me fall hard for the character, and the character should be an idiot. Many of literature’s greatest narrators are idiots. Arthur Dent, although he’s not first-person narrating. Same for Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice. Nate from White People On Vacation is first-person. Rob from High Fidelity and Will from About A Boy. The biggest idiot in literary history is Harry Stables from Trouble Finds You, and I love him so, so much.
  • gotta take place on or near water.

This book does all of these, and it rips like a tide, homies. I’m talking, of course, about Man Overboard! by Kathleen Rooney. Oh what’s this? A bonus song to listen to while you read the book section?

Man Overboard! by Kathleen Rooney: we meet our idiot, Patrick “Kick” Kilpatrick, on the ocean. Literally—he is no longer on the cruise ship that he boarded and got rum-plastered on just yesterday. Instead, he’s floating in the sea somewhere between New Orleans and Cozumel, naked except for boxers and a tank top, wondering how he got here. Genuinely, he can’t remember: was he pushed? Did he fall? Did he jump? Like on purpose? Like suicide?1 Each question brings up more troubling questions. Luckily, Kick’s got time to think. Or, uh, hallucinate conversations with sea creatures. Maybe not hallucinate, who knows. Point is, Kick’s going on a mental journey.

a book, Man Overboard! by Kathleen Rooney, held in a hand
Man Overboard! by Kathleen Rooney

The thing about Kick is he’s just a dude. He’s a personal trainer at a gym that his friend owns. He’s in pretty good shape. He’s reasonably close with his sister. He’s in a “we’re not putting labels on it” with Justeen, who’s both super hot and age-appropriate for early-30s Kick. He’s not some manosphere grifter, or “#metoo went to far” jerk, or MAGA. That said, he’s not exactly strong or secure in his values. He considers sleeping with some woman at cruise ship karaoke (remember, that was his first night on the ship). He doesn’t push back when Ankush, his gym-owning friend, says he should listen to Joe Rogan. He is a personal trainer2 who sleeps with clients. He tells everyone his mom died of cancer when he was 10, but that isn’t what happened at all. His mom survived cancer, and after her brush with death, decided to leave her not-great-and-not-gonna-get-better husband and pursue the life she really wanted before she got pregnant. Kick has absolutely never dealt with that trauma, has absolutely never established a value system for himself, and now he is floating in the sea.

What I’m trying to get at with that paragraph is I think Kick is a kind of underrepresented man in contemporary narratives about masculinity. Personally, I believe the “masculinity crisis” is somewhat overblown, but I won’t deny that men are mostly trash. Kick isn’t trash in loud ways, he is trash in fixable ways if he just decides to get his shit together. I’ve been there. Shit, 33 was around the time I turned my life around. If Kick is rescued, you hope his journey results in inner peace or enlightenment or better understanding of his mother or whatever. You also hope he can maybe drag some of his casually shitty friends and relatives out of the gutter, too. First, though, he’s got to get out of the unforgiving sea.

LINKS!

Something to listen to while you browse? Cruise ships love playing reggae songs, but they know that their customers don’t actually like reggae, so they play the same shit over and over. I address this in my story “Aboard Empire Cruise Lines,” available in the latest edition of Hollowpoint Press’s journal. In spite of white people, I do generally enjoy reggae. I like the way the music is written, with high guitar chords and bass lines that often start on an upbeat. So here’s Pachyman on KEXP:

What’re you still doing here? To continue what I was saying earlier, they have three songs they play on cruise ships. “Brown-Eyed Girl,” “No Woman No Cry,” and “Margaritaville.” I’m the son of a parrothead, and you could probably call the way I dress “punk parrothead.” So I thought it’d be fun to see what sorts of interesting covers YouTube has to offer of “Margaritaville.” After wading through a slippery-clean, smelling-of-cleaning-product-and-sellouts pool of Zac Brown and Miranda Lambert, I found someone covering it in D minor (the original is in D major). What if “Margaritaville” sounded like a Sade or Dire Straits song? Sure, that’s fun. The winner, though, is polka on the beach. Take it away, West Coast Prost.

If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Especially if you work on a cruise ship. My god. Actually, if you are a cruise ship worker and reading this while “cleaning” during an 18-hour shift? Thank you for choosing the shipwrecked sailor blog. Sorry about what that one person said to you earlier, you didn’t deserve that.

Sorry you got an email,

Chris

  1. that’s right dudes, lazy and entitled dot org is not subject to the same algorithmic censorship other places are. We don’t run from the truth here, and we don’t say “unalived.” All that said, if you need help, please seek it. The National Suicide Hotline can be reached by dialing 988. There’s never any shame in getting the help you need. ↩︎
  2. I wouldn’t exactly call Kick vain, but he does care a good deal about his appearance. It seems like normal levels of caring about his appearance to me, but maybe that says something about how much I care about my appearance, because it read as familiar. ↩︎

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