Jun 8, 2026 · 6 hr 22 min · 14 segments
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speaker: Lorenzo PROGRAM NOTES: In the spring of 1964, a narrow bookstore opens on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz. The Hip Pocket Book Store becomes a portal, a…
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[piano music] Chapter One: Merchant Marine Blues.
Peter told me once that the ocean has grammar.
Not metaphorically, he meant it literally, the way a linguist means things literally.
Subject, verb, object.
The way waves build in threes, how swells have syntax, how weather systems conjugate across the Pacific in regular declensions.
He said if you watched long enough, you could almost parse it.
I think that’s what he was doing out there, those two years on the freighters.
Not running from anything.
Not exactly.
More like listening.
Waiting for the world to finish a sentence it had started in Istanbul.
This part I’m more sure of than the taxi.
I’ve got his merchant marine papers, stamped and fading.
I’ve talked to men who sailed with him, or men who claim they did, which amounts to the same thing after enough time passes.
And I’ve got the letter his sister sent.
The one that brought him home.
Peter kept it folded in a copy of the Tao Te Ching for years.
When the hip pocket finally closed, I found it there, the paper soft as cloth from being touched.
So this is what I know, or what I can reconstruct.
The SS Mariposa Queen was a rust-bucket freighter running the Oakland-to-Manila circuit, carrying lumber out and bringing back whatever the Philippines wanted to export that month.
Copra, hemp, occasionally human cargo in the form of optimistic immigrants or pessimistic Americans heading the other direction.
Peter signed on in January nineteen sixty-one, three months after mustering out of the Air Force.
He stayed aboard for the better part of two years.
Peter worked the graveyard watch, midnight to eight AM, which suited him fine.
Meant he could avoid most of the crew’s daytime bullshit.
[piano music] Chapter One: Merchant Marine Blues.
Peter told me once that the ocean has grammar.
Not metaphorically, he meant it literally, the way a linguist means things literally.
Subject, verb, object.
The way waves build in threes, how swells have syntax, how weather systems conjugate across the Pacific in regular declensions.
He said if you watched long enough, you could almost parse it.
I think that’s what he was doing out there, those two years on the freighters.
Not running from anything.
Not exactly.
More like listening.
Waiting for the world to finish a sentence it had started in Istanbul.
This part I’m more sure of than the taxi.
I’ve got his merchant marine papers, stamped and fading.
I’ve talked to men who sailed with him, or men who claim they did, which amounts to the same thing after enough time passes.
And I’ve got the letter his sister sent.
The one that brought him home.
Peter kept it folded in a copy of the Tao Te Ching for years.
When the hip pocket finally closed, I found it there, the paper soft as cloth from being touched.
So this is what I know, or what I can reconstruct.
The SS Mariposa Queen was a rust-bucket freighter running the Oakland-to-Manila circuit, carrying lumber out and bringing back whatever the Philippines wanted to export that month.
Copra, hemp, occasionally human cargo in the form of optimistic immigrants or pessimistic Americans heading the other direction.
Peter signed on in January nineteen sixty-one, three months after mustering out of the Air Force.
He stayed aboard for the better part of two years.
Peter worked the graveyard watch, midnight to eight AM, which suited him fine.
Meant he could avoid most of the crew’s daytime bullshit.
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