Category: Talk Like A Pirate Day

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
So, the captain optioned George to the minor leagues.
The humiliated George complained bitterly.
A professional pirate, forced to sail with rookies who wore life preserves and carried rubber swords.
Every day, the instructors put George through basic drills, and they had a weekly scrimmage battle with other minor league pirates.
And then, George got the call to come back.
“Was it my hard work and effort?” asked George.
“Nah,” said the captain. “A cannon blew up and killed Lefty.”
George had maintained that cannon…
So he kept quiet.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
You know those stickers that soccer moms put in the back windows of their minivans?
The ones with stick figure families, with stick figure kids and stick figure cats and dogs?
Sometimes, you’ll see stick figure zombies and stick figure dinosaurs eating the families.
Well, George had a stick figure on the back window of his ship.
It was a stick figure pirate.
But it wasn’t a very good stick figure pirate.
He’d peeled the decal off wrong, and it was kinda scrunched up.
George eventually scraped it off.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
In desperation, he sought out a psychic to remove any curses that might be on him.
“I can determine if you’re cursed,” said the psychic,”but I’d have to refer you to a witch doctor or a witch to remove it. Or, if it’s demonic in nature, a priest.”
George was passed from charlatan to charlatan, until he had finally run out of money.
“Oh well,” said George.
He went back out to sea and hunted more treasure so he could continue his quest to resolve his frustrating curses.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
He thought that yoga might somehow help him be a better pirate.
So, George bought a few books on yoga and a few audio tapes, but he had a hard time remembering the positions.
His crewmates had to untangle the knots he’d tied himself into.
Then, he went to classes, but the yoga teachers and students thought he was going to pillage and loot the classroom and they attacked him.
His crewmates had to untangle the knots they’d tied him into.
George insisted on keeping the skintight pastel leotard.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Still, he did what he could, and at the beginning of the day he’d stand in front of the mirror and give himself two thumbs up.
The mirror-George would give him two-thumbs up back.
George then mounted a mirror on the opposite wall so there’d be an infinite number of him giving himself an infinite number of thumbs up.
Curious about the nature of infinity, he pulled books by Cantor and Dedekind from his bookshelf while his crewmates yelled for George to bring up more ammo, God damn it.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Is that all George is? A pirate?
Must we put so much value into our professions?
What else defines us?
Where we come from?
What we want?
What we hope to become?
How we treat others?
George may not have been a very good pirate, but he never cheated at cards.
Nor did he fight dirty. Always a clean, honest fight.
He lost a lot of fights, sure, but he came about it fairly.
“That’s why you’re not a very good pirate,” said the Captain.
George shrugged and smirked.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
Every night at 8 bells, the ship’s doctor opened his window in the forecastle and yelled MEDICATION!
Pirates lined up at the window to get two cups… one with their pills, and another with water.
The pirates tossed the pills in their mouths and washed them down.
“They’re just salt pills,” said the doctor. “And I’m not a real doctor.”
Which explained why so many pirates chose to go out of network to use doctors on other ships.
Oh, and those doctors handed out yummy sugar pills.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
When the captain reviewed the ship’s budget, he determined that there was an opportunity to reduce spending on personnel, and he announced layoffs. Everyone assumed that George, being not very good, would be laid off.
But instead, Stinky Pete, Cannons McGee, and Ochrebeard were sent ashore with severance checks.
“Why did you keep me,” said George.
“Because you’re cheap,” said the captain. “And there’s no risk of you mutinying against me.”
George asked the captain for a raise.
The captain said no way.
“Mutiny,” yelled George.
The captain sighed.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
So it was hard finding things for him to do that didn’t put the ship in danger.
Swabbing the deck, working in the galley and acting as the spotter in the crow’s nest were his usual jobs.
He worked the night watch a lot, and he heard that pirates who worked the night got a bonus.
“That’s not true,” said the captain. “Everybody gets paid the same.”
“That’s also not true,” said George’s shipmate, Ralph. “I get a shilling a night.”
George ended up sleeping both day and night.

George was a pirate, but he wasn’t a very good pirate.
In George’s body, though his veins and arteries, chemicals and elements flowed that had flowed through so many other living things over the eons.
Before that, the oceans… the fields… the sky… through space.
Blasted into the universe by dying stars, each atom made more complex and dense.
Generations of supernovas building carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, and gold.
George opened his wooden treasure box, and ran his fingers through the gold.
The stars also made arsenic.
But George was wearing gloves, unlike the pirate who tried to rob him.