BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Our world is a wooden ship; a great lady wandering silently through space. We have no homeport painted across our stern, and we fly no banner from our staff. We follow a track line over one million years in length, plotted by a madman; and we take our bearings from what little we know of the local waters, marking our helm by the lights of experience and happenstance. The current comes at us from all directions, a swirl of time and space forming overlapping eddies and creating moments which form countless more. There is no tide table, and the compass needle spins drunkenly. The ocean has no source, and you cannot kill a beast that had no head to begin with.
Life is a series of small moments and large fortunes. She rocks in response to the waves; we must move with her, or we shall find ourselves buried up to our neck in a dry riverbed with fire ants nibbling small passageways in our ears. The morale of this unpleasant anecdote is only this: if you do not choose a path, one will be chosen for you.
Cross her decks at the centerline. Peer down at the anxious passengers forming up at the brow, and you will surely see that life, too, is all about waiting in line. Waiting in line to fall in love, waiting in line to be born, to die, to believe in something great, or to have something powerful choose you and you alone as its sole acolyte in the temple of madness; rejected by society, doomed to pound forever on the doors of deaf churches. One person in a hundred will spy that same faintly glimmering star one late night on watch; a point of soft light just port of the mast which has guided men to their true home for centuries. A bell once rung cannot be unrung. This is the basis of all understanding.
Countless passengers shall board her, and many more will debark at random ports of call-- according to a schedule understood by no one, save the Quartermaster; only a brief meeting face-to-face will elevate a person’s status from "perfect stranger" to someone you once met in a bar, shouting a brief exchange above the din of yet another bar band covering, according to the flyer, "Today’s hits and a few of their own", which is where I find myself now, three sheets to the wind.
Once more to the anvil, I stalk a prey too elusive for even the most skilled of hunters: decent conversation. You must be prepared to correctly interpret the moment the instant it lands in your lap, and when that happens, you have to know how to pick it up, turning it first this way and then that way until clarity breaks through like sunbeams on the darkest day. I’ve got news for you: the brightest minds of the NSA couldn’t have saved this one.