Most larger sailing ships have safety nets on each side of the bowsprit, but for some reason I never drew any on the Eagle Ray, so I guess they’ll have to be without. Even with safety nets the bowsprit or any other exposed part of the ship is absolutely not a place where you should hang out by yourself. :<
When work needs to be done in such places, at least two people are assigned to do it together, so they can look after each other.

* * *

This all takes place in 1998, so I’m digging up all the memories I can recall from that time, from clothes and music to what leftist people were thinking and discussing back then.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, at the time I was living in the suburb Hjällbo outside Gothenburg and going to high school in Angered. The northeastern suburbs of Gothenburg are extremely segregated. I knew only a handful of ethnically Swedish people in the highrise buildings in my area, and they had been living there for a very long time. In our school, there was a clear division between the immigrant kids from our areas and the Swedish kids from the wealthier suburbs across the river. My class was a particularly extreme example: the kids from the Swede ‘burb Kärra would sit along one wall and the kids from Hjällbo and Hammarkullen would sit along the opposite wall, while the center of the classroom would gape empty.

On the night of October 29th-30th 1998, thirteen years ago today, 63 young people were killed and about 200 injured in an arson at a Halloween party. They were between 12 and 25 years old, and mainly from our neighbourhoods. Many of them were from my school, and one guy was from my maths class. His friend had been flirting with me, while I was more interested in this guy, who patiently ignored me, since he had a girlfriend already, as I later found out … I only realised that he had died on Tuesday after the fire, and it shocked me a bit, because I thought I had seen him in the hallway at school that Monday, glaring angrily at me for some reason.

My parents had just divorced. My father didn’t call us to ask how I was doing, or if I was even alive, and my mother took the opportunity to send an angry fax to his office, questioning his empathy and responsibility as a parent. He later mentioned that a colleague had “rescued” that fax from the machine before “anybody else” had seen it. And he said he hadn’t called because his sixth sense already told him I was fine.

… People sometimes classify Driftwood as magical realism, but to me it’s just realism. V`(oo)´V