At sea, I was the captain. I was important, and I had a role. I ran the show. At home, I was the swab. I did the shit work, almost always unappreciated. I loved my family, but man did I hate being on land all the time. I tried my best, I honestly did. I really stepped up my game around the house to be the best dad and partner I could be. It just was never good enough. With no offshore fishing and encouragement at home, part of me was dead inside, the part that made me who I am. I missed my boat daily. Flashbacks were a constant. I daydreamed of foaming schools of tuna while washing bubbly dishes. I saw mahi mahi boldly charging baits as I folded brightly colored laundry. When I went jogging and my heart started pumping, I saw huge marlin going wild on the gaffs. Everything reminded me of the boat. I most likely honestly had post-traumatic stress from the whole ordeal

It is the tragedy of a distinguished mind and a generous nature that have gone unappreciated in a conventional, unimaginative world. A victim of men's incomprehension of women, a symptom of women's mistrust of men.

The Chicago historian Studs Terkel asked Bob Dylan in the sixties about how he went about writing a song and trying to outdo himself, or at least being as good as the last song he wrote, and his response was pretty damn perfect. "I'm content with the same old piece of wood," he said. "I just want to find another place to pound a nail?.?.?. Music, my writing, is something special, not sacred." If the songs Bob Dylan wrote aren't sacred, then nobody's songs are sacred. Nobody's. No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, "Thank God I didn't make that song. Thank God I didn't make that piece of art. Thank God I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world." Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been. I'm writing this just weeks after returning from Belleville, where I sat next to my dad's bed in my childhood house and watched him die. I can guarantee you that in the final moments of his life, he wasn't kicking himself for all those times when he dared to make a fool of himself by singing too loud.