Written at the bar of Grappa 72, 818 Central Avenue, Albany; Brian bartending; Wednesday, April 11th, 2024.

”What would you like,” the bartender asks.

“I’ll take an old fashioned—”

”—with a splash of club soda,” I hear from stage right. [All the world is a stage, and this is especially true of a bar.] It is Sienna, who served my family on Easter Sunday. It was the best service we’ve had for Easter dinner in decades. I am particular about my Old Fashioneds, and I am tickled that the server remembered my order two weeks later. By “tickled” I mean it is the kind of thing I live for.

Unexpectedly, a three piece jazz band, The Hamilton Street Jazz Trio, has just begun to play. A pianist, a drummer and a stand up bass.  I would link to them but I can’t find their website and I bet they don’t have one. But the bartender says they are the House Band. Grappa has jazz on Thursday and Friday evenings, he says.

Which thrills me. When I’d first moved to Albany after college, you could go to jazz every night of the week. Justin’s on Lark had jazz six nights a week and had a terrific Sunday jazz brunch. 74 State Street had jazz in their 50’s-esque second floor lobby with its grand piano, red leather seats, and plate glass window looking over the intersection of State and Pearl. As late as 2015 I could take my girlfriend to a patio jazz show on Saturday nights at a hotel tucked away on a cobblestone side street near the Times Union Center. There were multiple options on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. The Speakeasy below the City Beer Hall always had live jazz and was The Best place to bring a date as far as atmosphere was concerned, because they prohibited cell phone use, which forced would-be couples to engage in conversation. And then all of the jazz places disappeared. A lack of live jazz is correlated with the death of culture in any city, in my opinion. Like the lack of slow dancing today, it is indicative of the death of romance and the vapid disintegration of our popular culture. So I am glad I am starting to see jazz reappear.

Of course it was also a Me Problem. Brian says this band has played at Grappa for 14 years on Thursday nights. I’ve just recently started to explore places that are more than a ten minute drive from my home.

….Apologies, I got distracted, this post is supposed to be about boat building!

So what I am trying to build is a trimaran, or three-hulled boat, that separates into two boats, the way the Enterprise-D (NCC 1701-D) could separate its saucer section from its “secondary hull” or “battle bridge.”

And I want to have the main propulsion be from two electric motors which are controlled from a central cockpit, but also allow the gas engine to be used when I need to move in a hurry or through bad weather. And I want to have multiple sources of generating power, wind and solar, and also a rowing station. And I need to have remote internet access so I can work from the boat. And the ability to fully enclose the boat to keep it dry and secure. And I can’t buy a boat that has any of these things, I have to do it myself.

I know, I know, it’s “needlessly complicated.” But not really. It is complicated, yes, but not needlessly. I have a picture in my mind of what I want, and I have wanted it for years…years!!!!…and nothing is more important to me, to have, than things I have wanted for years.

There is a difference between “complicated” and “complex,” by the way. If something is “complicated” it has many steps. If something is “complex” it not only has many steps, but each step also involves choices at every step. Repairing a grandfather clock is complicated—it might take you years to take it apart and replace one gear and put it back together again, but you could learn how to do it and do it if you wanted to. Contrast that with the Federal Reserve making economic policy. Not only is that complicated, but every person is an economic actor who will respond differently to the policy, and even take the policy into account to try to maximize their benefits once they know the policy is in place. That’s why economic policy almost never turns out as predicted, but you can hire a technician to fix a piece of machinery. Anyhow, designing and building my boat is a complicated endeavor, but not a complex one, and I have been at it for 19 years now, so its also less complicated to me than it might seem to you.

The difference between a “dream” and a “goal” is that a “goal” is something you have a plan to achieve. It’s been my dream to impress McKayla Maroney; but it’s my goal to get to New Orleans on a home made boat. (Actually,  I secretly hope that getting to New Orleans on a home made boat will impress McKayla Maroney, so maybe that counts as a plan? Probably a better plan than when I DMed the former Olympic gymnast to say I think she is cool on Instagram. But only barely.)

To make a plan, often it is necessary to arbitrarily pick a starting step. For me, for this goal, the starting step was to obtain the three “hulls” that I would literally ride to success.

The difficult thing for me over the last 15 years or so was procuring the “amas” or “pontoons” for my trimaran. Back in 2008 my friend and I built “stitch and glue” amas for our 15 foot trimaran, Excelsior. But it was a pain, it was expensive, and they leaked. I had thought about using two skulling vessels as amas but I’ve never found a skulling boat less than $2,000. A Hobie Cat is a catamaran (two-hulled vessel) with a 30 foot mast connected by a trampoline stretched over an aluminum frame, but those have always been beyond my budget, too. But a month ago I found a Hobie Cat on Facebook Marketplace that was reasonably priced and geographically close. So I drove down to check it out at the beginning of March, on a Tuesday night.

It takes about an hour exactly to go from Albany to Rhinebeck, which is roughly across the river from Kingston. Since my Jeep was in the shop for the last 90 days, and my Dad’s truck doesn’t have Bluetooth, I had a doubly nostalgic experience—listening to the radio, and driving to Rhinebeck in a pickup truck, like I used to do when I dated Maggie back in 2011, 12, 13. She was a cool girl, who taught me about Ayurvedic medicine. Our mutual friend Emily introduced us when Maggie was up from New York City, where she worked, and I was out at Susies in Albany after a long night at the NYS Assembly. About a year later I had quit my job and was waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant, and Maggie had been laid off and moved home and was working at a farm stand in Red Hook (upstate).

“What the hell happened to you guys,” Emily asked when she came back to visit a year after introducing us and moving to Seattle. “When I introduced you guys you both had great jobs. Now you’re scraping tacos off plates and working at farm stands.”

What can I say….sometimes pecuniary paucity is a prerequisite for pursuing a person’s plans.

So anyway I was cruising south on the Thruway and crossed over the Rip Van Winkle Bridge onto Route 9 and I started to pick up a country station. It was playing Bill Currington, Good Directions and Turnip Greens, a song I’d first heard on some back country road in a truck and liked because the narrator sounds like a backwoods loser who makes it with a big city girl at the end of the song, which is how I’ve always assumed my life would turn out. And then they played a bunch of country songs from the ‘90s which reminded me of my mom driving me around with the window open and a cigarette in her hand when I was five and she was 29. I don’t like focus-group-made country music or other crap that panders to the lowest common denominator. But I like older country, and I felt young again driving a pickup truck on the back roads like I did for my first date with Maggie, whose dad, a sheet rock contractor, said he liked that I drove a pickup truck.

I got to the house and met Brian, the seller. (A lot of Brians in my last two posts.) He was friendly, trendily-dressed, well-kempt, and restored boats for fun. He looked about 45. In fact, he was ex-military, around 55, and had a wife and at least one son who he’d just gotten back from visiting in Austin.

The Hobie Cat looked brand new. Brian mentioned a couple of times how fast and light she was. He was obviously proud of the great work he had done restoring her. He showed me before-pictures of the dinged up and dirty hulls he had patched and sanded and gel coated.

I felt a little like I’d be disappointing him when I told him my plan was to Frankenstein his Hobie into parts to make a trimaran. He asked me how I was going to connect the two vessels. I said I’d find a way to put them together even if I injured myself in the process, and he said “Oh yeah I know how that goes” and held up his left hand which was missing most of one finger and 1/3 of two others, from a time he was using a band-saw on a boat project. I think I said “I’ve go more boats at the bottom of the Hudson than you have fingers left,” and we both laughed.

[Subsequently, Brian and I have been texting and he has been giving me all kinds of advice for how to fix the wooden boat, which will serve as the center hull of the trimaran. That is the wood boat which my last post described, that the tree fell on. I texted him that I didn’t relish fixing the bottom of the boat, which would require suspending the boat by straps hung from 4X4s, pulling the busted trailer out, and laying on my back on the driveway holding up sheets of fiberglass with my knees and rolling epoxy onto it, with the amber resin dripping down my hands and arms and onto my face. Brian said “You gotta flip the boat over!” which I had never considered and which will surely save me hours of frustration and mess.

So now I have both of these boats in my driveway.

The pontoons are easy to dismantle but the frame of the Hobie is jusssssst a little too narrow for he pontoons to slip around the sides of the boat. So I have to figure out whether to push the Hobie with the wood boat, or place the Hobie behind the wood boat, but the motor will be in the way. In either case it will be awkward looking as opposed to aligning the pontoons amidships somehow. And I have to figure out how to preserve the Hobie as an independent, electrically powered “secondary hull” independent of the wooden, center hull “battle bridge.” Good thing these are complicated, rather than complex, challenges.

It’s a difficulty that has taken a lot of my attention over the last two weeks, and I still haven’t found a solution. But that’s OK. It means it is a difficult project, which means it is more likely to impress McKayla Maroney.