It is amazing what we talk about on the smoke deck. A conversation about how quickly one forgets a good thing, another story, we launch into a discussion about how things are handled between situation on a small boy, a ship with 200 and less personel, and a big ship, more specifically a carrier. The story went like this. Once upon a time, much more believable than "you won't believe this shit," The Ronald reagan raise up quite a wake as she left port one day. On the particular day that the story teller was on duty. The wake that was raised was enough to part one their breasting lines. When the line parted they mustered up just about everybody on the pier, and called the capt. On a small boy if we lost a line we would muster up duty deck divsion, about 4 to 5 people, and depending on the direction of the tidal current duty department. The senior man on the scene would be the Command Duty Officer, and he would tell the Capt. when he came in in the morning.

The conversation we were having when we got into this illustration, we were discussing what most civilians call early and what military personnel call early. A lot of people not in the military term early anytime they have to awake before 0800. Early for me, I know I am hardly an objective sampling, is when I have to wake up at 0300. Not when I have to pretend to want to get up at 0300 but actually have to get out of bed at 0300. this comparison lapse into way back when I tranfered from the Aylwin to the Simon Lake. On the Aylwin duty switch back and forth between 3 days and 4 days. When I got to the Lake duty days were 8 days, and I was in heaven. At least I was in heaven for the first 4 months after awhile I forgot how good I had it, I didn't even remember what it was like to have duty every 3 to 4 days. tell you what though I would know what it would be like to go from duty once a month to duty once every 3 to 4 days. the good news course is I'll won't, anymore, nope I will be working everyday 8 to 12 hours just to keep my head above water.

I watched Apocolypto today. I loved it. Yes, yes, it had alot of action, and emotion, but I saw something deeper than that. I saw portrayed the fate of most civilizations. Civilation starts by people grouping together for production and protection. Small villages, townships, cities become city-states. Eventually these group grow big enough where one leader becomes a beuracracy of leaders, not just kings and princes but priests, Lawyers, academics (advisors/scribes). somewhere along the line the purpose of these people become scewed. Instead the purpose of the king and his military to serve the people by protecting their life and livelihood, the people grow to serve the king and his people. The military starts by remaining well fed no matter thick of thin, because you can't protect the people if one is feeling sickly, to being overfed. In the end this top heavy society falls to pieces. whether the people revolt, and foreign nation that is stronger comes in and defeats the overfed and over bred, or any other combonation of that comes from a lack of cohesion. this is the scene I garnered from this movie.