Jinjin

Saluting every snowplow and salt spreader going down my street with gratitude and pride in my heart

Living near a DSNY garage and following @nycsanitation on Instagram has turned me into a Sanitation Dept Stan

Maybe that’ll be my tattoo

Doctors hate this one weird trick:
-Prep a coffin
-Line it with hard tack
-Suddenly remember you still have 3.5 chapters left of Moby Dick
-Recover

Not Ahab demanding his harpoon barbs be tempered in fresh pagan blood 😭🐋

Queequeg, such a legend…saves himself from death by suddenly remembering he has unfinished business on shore…I wish this method worked for me 🐋

I fell behind with my reading and posting…in fairness to myself, knowing what comes next, I was loath to depart the peaceful verdure draped whale skelly in the arsacides 🐋

What if we kissed inside the whale skeleton draped all over with fresh verdure, where Life folded Death and Death trellised Life? 🐋

Ishmael full-body tattoo reveal (Queequeg’s influence?) 🐋

An embarrassment of riches to have them so close together on the text

Ishmael slyly bragging that Tranquo, king of Tranque, invited him to stay for the holidays as a special guest and they went to see a whale skeleton together…sounds kinda romantic if you ask me 🐋

Partial list of silly names from Moby Dick:

- the learned Fogo von Slack
- Dr. Bunger, ships surgeon with a dent in his head
- Fitz Swackhammer
- Dr. Snodhead, prof of Low Dutch and High German
- Tranquo, king of Tranque

🐋

“Bunger and Boomer” is a beautiful name for a comedy duo 🐋

“You Bunger! Was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in a pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal”

Feels like I am reading Tom and Greg dialog from Succession and not Moby Dick 🐋

“Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them, it cannot solve itself.” 🐋

So many deep ponderings on the doubloon, but imo the Manxman has the biggest galaxy brain take with his assertion that the doubloon is the ship’s belly button 🐋

So many great scenes of work—

The Belly of Paris: Charcuterie and wholesale food markets

L’Assomoir: Laundry (all the little irons they use!) and a blacksmithing scene

La Bête Humaine: Steam engine driving

L’Argent: Stockbroking

Nana: Showbiz

The Ladies’ Paradise: mass market retail

Etc etc

If you like me are loving the descriptions of how whaling work actually gets done (with accompanying metaphors on how it’s all a microcosm for life itself), may I recommend Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series 🐋

These men are moisturized. Happy. In their lanes. Focused. Flourishing (till the next whale is spotted) 🐋

TFW you are a mariner going about suffused in unctuousness 🐋

A meme reading “Friendship ended with Bulkington. Now Queequeg is my best friend”

Eyes on the road, Ishmael!!! (Understandable though, Queequeg is very excellent)

Not Ishmael staring too long at beautiful Queequeg in the try-pot flames, going into a trance, and nearly capsizing the ship 🐋

WHY is Ishmael fantasizing about Louis Le Gros thigh tartare 😭 🐋

(Each of us starting in our respective pots, polishing away, making mathematical discoveries)

What if we kissed over the polished iron lips of the try-pots 🐋

I’m sorry, they do WHAT with the whale penis skin??? 🐋

Screenshot of Wikipedia with the text highlighted: “records indicate that Melville’s encounter with Craik’s book in 1850 caused him to replace Burlington (the originally intended companion of Ishmael) with a new character: Queequeg.”

According to Wikipedia he may have gotten replaced by Queequeg??

Sign me up for Spermaceti Immersion Therapy 🐋

Ishmael gazing moonily into various crewmembers’ eyes while gently squeezing their hands in a vat of unctuous spermaceti is beautiful…like a Whaler’s version of The Artist is Present 🐋