The Thing(s) from Inner Space!

By Mike Jastrzebski

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind I remembered a movie I watched on TV as a kid. I looked it up on the internet. I don't remember if I saw it on a Saturday afternoon horror matinee or late at night on Shock Theater, but as I began to ready the boat for cruising, the title of the movie popped into my head. It was The Thing from Another World with James Arness as The Thing.

 

What brought this to mind are the things we're finding in the deepest recesses of Rough Draft's storage lockers. Some items are truly alien in that neither Mary nor I are sure why we bought them, and on a couple of occasions even what they are.

We also have a large variety of duplicate items, tools we've never used (that may be because I've never met a tool that I didn't fall in love with) and various items that we bought when we moved aboard eight years ago and were sure we would need as we cruised.

And so, like The Thing we are trying to get rid of all of these items, culling the bad fruit so to speak. Some items are going straight to the trash, others to friends and still others to total strangers. Anything that we haven't used in the past year is subject to the old heave ho.

This is the way it should be on a boat, but as we get rid of things we face the same dilemma that those brave souls faced who killed the movie monster–how do we know there's not another Thing out there waiting to climb aboard?

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