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What of the ocean, Mr. Bland, and the boat? The tedium of long ocean voyages. The tedium of long term memory loss.
Rock a bye Baby the cracle will rock
Rock a bye Tethys The boat Fridhem she will rock
The Bland brain as it loses contact with its home port is at sea — stranted alone out in the middle of the nowhere, too far out for signals to reach either end of the brain. So at sea in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean Bland has no radio powerful enough to reach human contact. Rocking + Rolling hour after hour day after day. The world is slipping away as Mr. Bland is tossed about in the Atlantic. Fearful every moment of storms and/or engine failure. Just as he is fearful every moment the signals in his brain will fade away for good leaving him stranded alone in the middle of his short circuited brain.
Can Tethys actually complete the trip from Beaufort S.C. to the Azores a distance of 2500 miles in a small 60ft North Sea fishing trawler? A boat easily 80 years old. A boat that rocks + rolls like a tub.
Update as of 7/4/86 we are 400 miles past Bermuda each day a frozen memory cube is rolled overboard dropping with a [?] thud into the rolling waves.
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Each time a block disappears into the abyss the wrinkles around his eyes relax and Mr. Bland is closer to his dreams conclusion. The aim of course is to transfer as much of his memories (which are dreams as well) on to physical objects (the granite blocks) before all memories fade away. The boat is so slow will we ever get there? I feel, he says, that the blocks now at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and the sare around them belongs to me and is a fititn glong term memory storage. A kind of ROM of my personal dremas + thoughts. The [event] very personal. To stand on deck and see the horizon circled about you with no object in sight but the sea and a few clouds. Ten to twelve foot rollers coming from the north in trains of three at a time approach the boat high above your deck. The little boat [scurries] up the huge wave + glides down again. In between these passes a block is dropped into the cobalt blue void, drops with a heavy thud. Like a freshly popped Champagne bottle the block is lost in a sea of bubbles extending out ten or twelve feet. It will fall a mile or so before hitting the bottom.
