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Day Seventeen:

With the help of several seagulls, thirty thousand yards of fishing line and twenty-five billion ping-pong balls, I was able to patch the hole and float my boat to the sea surface. Now, floating once more, I can continue the search for land. 

With the seas calm and the salty air still, I pace the ship's deck anxiously. At intervals I scan the horizon: I see nothing but the sea, still as the night air, stretching out its arms as it drifts in and out of sleep. And as the darkness closes around me I try to maintain composure- the hallucinations and thoughts of wandering eyes are dangerous in these trying times. Enough to sink a ship, they say, and I am all out of ping-pong balls. 

I try to remember my parents (as a forgotten past is enough to delay any flight). Born in the front seat of a 1952 Mercury Coup, my parents were shocked to learn I was perfectly normal at birth- no teeth, some hair, and the vocabulary of a dull block. A chipped block. A chip off the old block. 

My mother, of Polish descent but Russian by nature, married my Greek father when she was only nine years old- they met on the fairgrounds of her family's traveling circus when they were passing through Spain on their 1923 Tour de Farce; my father, a drunk by blood but a clown by nature, had wandered from his village and spent the night chasing my mother as she spun from the trapeze, all the way asking her for the time of their flight tomorrow morning. She said she admired the color of his cheeks and so, against my father's wishes, they would be wed immediately. Surrounded by the freaks, flags and frogs that made up the circus crew, they were wed under the big top. To the sounds of her parents weeping and the freight train that passed every time something happened in the world, they said their vows and went to bed, and promised to be better looking in the morning. 

Unfortunately, I think, for my parents, the sudden conception of their first born son was ill received by the circus folk and my parents were forced off the grounds: my mother banished from the freak show and my father strongly discouraged from ever returning. He said he didn't want to anyway; he grabbed my mother's single arm and together they hopped to the used car shop three miles outside of town where Herb, the used car salesman, would be gracious enough to give them a great deal on the new set of wheels whose cigarette burnt suede interior would be my first sight, and introduction, to this world.