From time to time, when the wind’s just right and the air is especially cool and damp, I can smell the ocean from here. That heavy salt smell you get when you walk out on a pier, you know? Normally, I have to walk out on the bluffs to smell it, but sometimes it just pads up and lays on my balcony like a drunken cat. Such a night is tonight. You can hear the foghorn and the creaking mooring lines, see the dark spatter of waves through the boards between your feet. And the neighbors can be heard crying Avast, bendejo! and Shiver mis timbers!

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum
Drink and the devil had done for the rest
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
The mate was fixed by the bosun’s pike
The bosun brained with a marlinspike
And cookey’s throat was marked belike
It had been gripped by fingers ten;
And there they lay, all good dead men
Like break o’day in a boozing ken
Yo ho ho and a bottle of … nyquil.

Well, blow me down.