I was watching a movie the other night, with Adrienne, it was a remake of the old western 3:10 to Yuma. Australia's own Russell Crowe starred as a bad man who enjoyed himself in such a captivating way that we were on his side, and he did have a good side. The thing that struck me, reflecting on it the day after, was that yes - of course the actors were actors, but on top of that, the characters were actors too. Playing us. The characters of the baddies and the goodies have changed over the years (now the baddies are not all bad and the goodies are not all good) but they play out for us our own conflicts, in a form that entertains us for an hour and a half. Maybe it helps that the characters are clichés - clichés are not avoided in westerns, they are embraced .

There are times when any human enterprise - every stretch at a worthwhile goal - seems a fool's errand. The Titanic, the Hindenburg, Donald Campbell, Evil Kenevil, Vietnam, Gallipoli, Scott's icy expedition, Leicharddt's trek, Apollo 13, Chernobyl - all the same, all failures, in the end. So many of our best attempts end in the mud, or worse. Jonestown. Mai Lai. Waco, Texas. We have our personal versions, of course.....

There are places we would rather not revisit, because failure there is still palpable. Is there hope - of genuine hope? Beyond all the mistakes? Beyond our personal humiliations? Our divorces, our unfinished schooling, our family separations, money lost, the boat never built, the failed business, the dream lost? Somehow it MUST be possible, at least in another form. Only in the movies, a novel, or lived out while asleep and dreaming? No, more than that!

It seems to me that we have all tried to blot out all this - whatever you like to call it - with pot or booze or tobacco, pills or sex or gambling, loud music or buying new clothes or . . . add to the list if you will. Does any of that work?

I am sitting on board the good ship Bluebottle, a masterfully built 49 ft ketch, with THE WIFE, dear DEAR Adrienne, an orally obsessed California chick with a heart of gold and an intelligence you don't want to tangle with, in Bahia de Chamela, on the west Pacific coast of Mexico and I hear the sigh of the surf, and the sound of a tuba playing by the palapa on the beach, and I wonder ... if ... I can start the reversal of this feeling of life as a dead-end street, as a kind of inevitable, downward trajectory - with just this: the tuba! There seems to be no other instruments (no, I hear something faintly!) and every beach at which we anchor there is a tuba! A bloody TUBA! Everywhere in Mexico! Maybe not in Zee-what, but in Santiago bay, and in Tenacatita, and here in Chamela. A tuba. Surely your heart lifts at the sound of a tuba? A little smile wrinkles your lips? I once played in a band with a tuba. It was actually a sousaphone, a form of tuba with the bell (ring that bell!) poised above the player like a halo, invented for American marching bands. Instead of cradling the cold, hollow metal baby in their arms, heads down as if suckling it, tuba prodigies now held their heads high and their instruments even higher! Talk about seventy-six trombones - imagine a wall of Sousas, glinting in the sun! I played the banjo, another ridiculous musical gadget, and our third member was a clarinetist with an almost obsessional need to talk to anyone, so as to play a tune from their country. Comedy was imminent! Three-Play we called our band (we never got the hang of foreplay somehow), and we played for fun and for money, and we got rich - no, the last bit's not true, but we had a lot of fun . until, one day, at a rehearsal, at my music studio back in Tasmania, Australia, our tubaman, let's call him Brian, refused to go busking (street performing, if you didn't know) when challenged by our intrepid clarinet wielder, who was becoming more and more insistent, that we MUST busk!!. Well, a minute later after a bit of to-and-fro re busking ("I won't busk! Don't ask me!" Fred Astaire would have sung) Ubertuba heads for the door terribly emotionally aroused, sousaphone under the left arm, right hand reaching for the doorknob. I'm out of here, enough of this, not another word!! Well, as he reached for the doorknob Brian's right knuckle hit the latch and unwittingly snibbed the lock - know what I mean? locked from the inside! My, my! Now anger becomes fear, and Sousa is locked in, against his will, with a crazed clarinetist forcing busking down his throat, and no way out!! Whoa!!

Well, we never saw him again. Never played with him again. No more foreplay with Three-Play, no thank you. Musicians are not as cool as they look, I can tell you. Moral? None, but a good story. Yes, moral: let each come and go as he pleases, like good jazz. Brian and I are still good friends, as am I and the banjo. (The clarinetist and me, too.)

Do you hear the surf? The tuba now has a vocalist, faintly heard. The mountains ripple in shaky waves like a seismograph or the hand of a dedicated drunk. The yacht rolls a little. Look around you now, and listen. Utilize no judgment whatsoever, or you will miss the point entirely and merely end by getting angry with me, justified perhaps, but pointless. As we motored our floating home up the Mexican coast from Tenacatita (try the name aloud - Ten-a-ca-TI-ta !) - I stood for a long while by the main shrouds on the starboard side and watched as the boat's bow nodded to the waves, shouldering a small breaker out to the side each time she nosed downward, a small boatlaunched arch of surf, lacy-edged, resolving itself into gurgling wriggling archipelagos of frogspawn a moment later, and disappearing, now repeated, but different. The flaring fuse of the present moment! One is present with it! And now, coming in to harbor, mid-afternoon, two big ketches anchored here, and one of them is leaving, laden with children, surfboards, kayaks and uncles, we take its place, honored by the GPS. Hence the pangas, all pelicanned in, blue roofed, garrulous Spanish heard across the water.

Our friends from Sea Bear, we had Margaritas with them last night in a different bay, have caught a yellowfin tuna on the leg up to Chamela, and have invited us on board tonight, with mes amis Francais, Anni et Didier who have kindly gone shopping for us - surfing ashore in the two-foot waves, to bring back an onion, three tomatoes, six cerveza, two leche/lait/milk, ne pas avocado, but le pain Francais, Oui!

My friends! Can you join me in saying .. We are Immortal. We are Free. You may not believe it yet, but somewhere inside you know it. No problem. I never mentioned God once.