THE INFINITE NIGHT: INTRO IN EPHEMERAL INK

Sailors, Sea Dogs, and Eternal Wanderers,

If there is one thing life taught me, it is that life is a struggle. If there is one thing death has taught me, it is that life was just the warm-up. 

When you get a marlin on your line you feel it shake your boat. You feel it pull you to deeper waters as you try to land it. The infinite sea stretches before you like a realm you will float in without hope or joy as it consumes you. If it’s not clear, the marlin was my fourth wife.

I ran into my second wife the other day. She was telling this joke, “What is the difference between a ghost of Ernest and a living Ernest in the morning? None really, one isn’t solid and the other is too small to feel anyway.”

There is a reason I chose cats over her.

As the resident ghost writer and assistant librarian of this ship, I often find myself reflecting on the endless distance between man and sea and pondering how, as a ghost, I can get drunk enough to not think about it anymore. As I no longer can, I will instead spend this month listening to the music of the sea and singing of the spectres that walk the decks at night. 

If any experience can challenge the depth of the ocean it is literature. It is the craft that expands the dimensions of all creation. Painting? Bleh. Music. For faeries. Real men read with a thick book, a strong mug of rum and their balls resting on a shotgun trigger. The ship’s lawyer just told me that those are not to be legally construed as advice.

So, as we sail through Spooktober let’s expand the universe a bit more. Let’s peel back the edges between here and imagination, let us let the inevitable fear drive us forward into the unknown instead of away from it. Especially if it’s away from my exes. 

Seriously though, it is literature that makes the terrible terrifying, that transforms shadows into pools of liquid black and reminds us that we can dive into the infinite night and come out again.

Let us do that.

/Papa Ernesto, Ghost Writer