I'm a cowboyĭCTG is a very sober-looking simulation game currently being kickstarted, based on the Discovery Channel show of the same name, in which burly men haul crabs out of the icy Bering sea to a Bon Jovi soundtrack. “Wouldn’t it make for a good post tho,” I thought to myself, as I went to bed on Sunday night, “if I got up well early tomorrow, took my first pill, and played the demo for Deadliest Catch: The Game”. Apparently, I was advised, the initial dose could be. Even in my Wild Youth, I’d never really crossed paths with speed, and I didn’t quite know what to expect from it.
So, while I was relieved to be prescribed something that might help me avoid losing half an hour’s working time whenever I see a new email coming in, I was slightly daunted. It is, not to put a fine a point on it, a sensibly-dosed, medically therapeutic cousin of good old crank. However, it’s also what they used to give cold war bomber pilots to stop them falling asleep at the controls of nuclear war machines. You see, the medication I’ve been prescribed, dextroamphetamine, is a stimulant meant to help with attention, focus and impulse control. I’ve come here to talk about drugs and industrial fishing. That discussion is for another time, however. Many things I thought were deep character flaws are, it seems now, just medical facts - but that doesn’t mean for a moment I don’t have to do anything about them. It’s a strange time, as I’m having to re-evaluate a lot of things I thought about myself. This week, after twenty years of deadline rushes, mood swings, lost keys and unreplied emails, I was diagnosed (against my every insistence at the start of the process) with ADHD. There’s nothing: just me and the crabs, in their invisible millions. It’s a perfect arena for introspection, scored by the lashings of rain on a hard metal deck.
And then, beyond the chipped paint of the gunwales, the infinite ocean. It’s just me, attended by a silent retinue of winches, hooks, scratched plastic tubs and battered steel tables. It’s only when night falls, the sun like a pool of something molten yet cold on the grey horizon, that I realise just how alone I am on the boat.
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