Sauce on the Side [#33]

Are you familiar with Pinterest Fail photos? You know which ones I’m talking about? Those laughably terrible snaps — botched attempts at greatness with the caption, Nailed it.

The lopsided, half-baked cake disaster that looks more like the spawn of gastroenteritis than the log cabin it longed to be.

The newborn baby buried up to her fourth belly-roll in a giant crystal bowl of gumballs screaming her head off instead of sleeping with a smile. (Gumballs are very cold and uncomfortable, y’all.)

The middle-aged mom who, despite following Kylie Jenner’s online makeup tutorial like a boss, now more closely resembles Tammy Faye than the 23-year old super model she was aiming for. (Which is a damn shame because a world where proper face-contouring techniques can’t make me look half my age and flawless is not a world I feel good about living in.)

From recipes to senior pictures to backyard stunts to craft projects and just about everything in between, wouldn’t you know, most people are not very good at things.

I'm totally those people.

I am also, however, keenly aware that there exists within this group of not-so-good-at-things an elite core who are making it work. Like, really making it work. There’s a brave and hilarious handful of humans who’ve managed to guzzle down the self-deprecating, self-aware, humor-centric cocktail that makes them the most fun at parties (or anywhere, really). Those Magicians of Mess-Ups who turn sucking at things into being awesome.

I'm totally not those people.

I mean, I want to be — don’t get me wrong. But actually being good at being crappy at things might be even harder than just being plain ol’ good at them.

You know what’s not harder than either of those? Being entirely average at being average.

As far as I can tell, that’s the winning combo — at least as measured by the Effort Scale. (And, as aforementioned in posts 1 through 32, I’m sort of addicted to the path of Don’t Work So Hard.)

Of course, I’m confessing this while attempting (unsuccessfully) to craft a perfect blog post and carefully choose Instagram photos while wondering if maybe I just missed a step in Face Contouring for Dummies.

I swear it's not you, Kylie. It's me.

There are two major problems with my staunch devotion to Which Way is Easier.

The first, is that Boat Life is just as fiercely committed to There is No Easy Way, Ever. The second is that Blog/Social Media Life is really a much bigger fan of Be Awesome, Always than it is of Regress to the Mean.

What to do about that…

Do I keep writing one post a month?

Waiting for even a modest flash of inspiration or some noteworthy event or experience to finally inspire me to sit down and write? Simply fill in the gaps with Instagram posts — mini photo-glimpses into our day-to-day: palm trees and parrot fish, bike rides and baked goods, good friends and game nights?

This isn’t a trick question. The answer is Yes. I can do whatever I want.

I’m not getting paid to write the blog. I’m not getting paid to post photos on Instagram. I’m not even almost getting paid. (Somehow, “getting paid” seems like the determining factor for actually having to do something these days — save keeping my children and myself (and sometimes John) alive.)

But “waiting for inspiration” sounds like a lazy excuse from a wannabe high achiever — a label I’m even more averse to embracing than Founding Member of the Average at Being Average Club.

Dammit.

A friend asked recently if I wanted the blog to “get big.”

My immediate response was, “Oh god, no.”

But then I stuttered a bit as I tried to elaborate on that answer and realized I couldn’t. A decent chunk of time has passed since we first started this blog and we haven’t paused long enough to reevaluate where we want it to go, if anywhere.

This should come at no surprise to anyone because "reevaluating things" is definitely never a charted anchorage along the Course of Least Resistance.

So, since articulating an answer about my hopes and dreams for the future of the BEAM REACH ADVENTURES blog sounds painfully daunting, I’m gonna call time-out and just do a right quick word-vomit about the goings on aboard Ruby Vī these days — a little experiment to see if Average is, in fact, all I’ve propped it up to be.

We’ve been living at Bocas Marina for nearly 11 weeks.

This is at least seven weeks longer than we ever thought we’d stay tied to a dock, and we’re probably not leaving for good until October-ish.

Don’t get me wrong, there are two main parts of marina life we adore: Shore Power (which translates directly to aircon, the InstaPot, a bread machine, grass for Bear, ice, and freshwater showers) and Friends (which translates directly to fun outings, weekly poker games, ritual Sunday dinners, and the kind of camaraderie that makes our souls happy).

You might think, two-and-a-half months dockside would allow us to accomplish some really lofty goals and provide us the space, motivation, and access to start checking some big to-dos off our list.

But you'd be wrong.

There are people who are good at being good at Boat Life — lots of people actually.

I know this because when I peel myself off the couch halfway through a rainy (or sunny) Netflix binge day, I can see the good-at-boat-ers outside — rain or shine — fixing things, doing things — like actual boaty things.

Not like watching back-to-back seasons of Dirty John on Netflix.

I know this also because their two-hour projects only take two days (I mean, they’re not immune to Boat Time) while ours take four.

Four days, in case that was unclear. 

For someone who spends more than enough time searching for the easy way, I am really pretty terrible at finding it.

(Or Boat Life is exceptionally good at hiding it.)

Recently, we replaced three 24-foot cables that each had to be run from our engine room to the helm station (by way of a ridiculously narrow and crowded 24-foot path that zig zagged up and down and around: behind walls, through a bathroom, under a bed, between levels, and through tiny cutouts in random places). The good-at-boats crew could have done this in their sleep.

We do not belong to that crew.

The Devil Cable Project took our family of four no fewer than five separate sweaty and obscenity-laden attempts over four days to jam and shove and pull those cables through the Twisted Tunnel of Frustration.

Marina patrons lucky enough to stroll down our dock during any one of our attempts at claiming a cable victory, likely enjoyed the cacophony of our warped game of telephone — relaying orders and complaints to each other from our respective work stations:

Hudson -- at the helm outside 

John -- in the bowels of a bathroom 

Wyatt -- at the nav station inside 

Molly -- awkwardly contorted in the starboard engine room 

Hudson screams John's instructions to me, I holler back instructions for Hudson to relay to Wyatt who yells at Hudson for yelling at him. 

All the while, a flood of "Whaaaaaat?!" and "I can't hear you!" and "Shut up, Wyatt!" and "You shut up, Hudson!" are screeching on a loop over the top of it all. 

It was no one’s finest hour(s).

Lest you think we’ve been awarded Almost Average participation ribbons only for Boat Projects, I offer you a glimpse into our now-firmly-established shopping routine.

Our weekly trips to Bocas Town for food and booze require no fewer than three of us to complete.

At 12 o’clock sharp — on what I’ve come to believe are Wednesdays — we board the marina’s free water taxi for a quick two-minute ride across the pond to town. Then, never-enough-shopping-bags in tow, we march five minutes down the main road and two side streets to buy smoked pork chops and chicken breasts from Tutti.

From Tutti’s, we hustle back to the last corner on the main road to grocery store #1 (because they have the cereal Hudson likes, the pizza toppings John likes, and sometimes seedless grapes). By the time we walk out of this one, we have 27 minutes left to make it to stops #3 and #4 before the one o’clock water taxi leaves without us.

Almost like clockwork each week, we arrive at stop #3 with twenty-four minutes to divide and conquer.

By 12:54, we’re dragging ourselves out the door and back to the dock, 4,000 pounds of food and booze heavier. Do we have time for store #4? Probably not. But they have dried apricots and good lettuce and sometimes fresh jalepeños so maybe I’ll just run in real quick-like.

Rationing died a quick death in Bocas — a loss mourned by exactly zero members of Ruby Vī’s male crew.

I can’t say we’ve exactly embraced our Hot Mess approach to shopping and boat projects, and our current dockside mantra of Netlix-Now-Chores-Tomorrow regularly makes me feel like a giant tool.

I wonder if perhaps, this is simply the cost of membership at Club Average -- which would be super annoying because this is by no means a club worthy of membership dues. 

How can a club that isn’t even fee-worthy presume to produce content that’s blog-worthy?

It’s easy for me to see how someone might be interested in following the highs and lows of our journey — the milestones achieved and revelations found, the new places and faces, even the Oh $#*! moments. After all, these are standard ingredients in the Awesome Sauce that social media and blogs fawn over — easy to photograph, easy to write about.

Spectacularly saucy meals are easy to want more of.

But what about the lame stuff?

What about the dried out white bread sandwiches, the sad snack bowl of unseasoned croutons, the pathetically plain tortillas?

I'll be the first to admit, this journey of ours feeds off its fair share of boring -- and sauceless -- bread products. 

But who wants pictures of dry toast or stories about crispy bread cubes? Who subscribes to that channel?

I tell myself that too much sauce is kind of a drag. That too much sauce makes everything taste the same — a little soggy, a little predictable.

Eventually, even too much Awesome starts to taste an awful lot like Average.

I gotta believe there's a place on our table for intentionally stale breads.

So, I’m thinking, if all the fancy clubs eventually serve a version of the same slop anyway, we might as well keep our membership to the cheap one whose doors are wide open to all.

It’s definitely not the kind of bold move that will land this blog at the top of anyone’s Google search.

By no means will it turn our IG account into the kind of follow-worthy magic that performs flawlessly for its endless sea of fans each day, and you won’t find our faces owning stardom in that viral Fail video you keep laughing at.

But maybe our my devotion to Average will help us (but mostly me) create the time and motivation to document the little stuff — the mundane, the daily — the habits and routines that seem so boring and uneventful (and often times embarrassing) to us now.

Because, boy, does that occupy a lot of our weeks of late. 

So the question remains: how do we authentically record this voyage in an honest way and avoid drowning in the seductively saucy stew of social media?

When we look back on this experience and try to recall what these years were like — what they were really like — I hope we remember that for every wild story of adventure, there were 100 others of almost-comical chaos and even more of mind-numbing stillness. Every Michelin-starred meal swimming in special sauce came with a bowl of stale croutons.

I hope when it’s all said and done, we can still taste the memory of both.

As the next handful of weeks passes by, if any of you begin to wonder where I am, trust you can find me at the Club —

I'll be the one lounging in the chair reserved for Mediocre Molly, simultaneously watching Netflix and posting pictures of perfect palm trees on Instagram, while our four-page to-do list remains stuffed in my back pocket. 

There’s a (slim) chance I might even be slowly slogging my way through a new post about watching paint dry.

It’s not fancy here at Club So-So, but the price is right and, even though their menu boasts a host of dry toasts, they do offer a lovely selection of Awesome Sauce on the side.