I was thinking this as I made my way back to the sleeping hatch before.  “This is like a submarine,” I said to myself, with the stirrings of some other possibly clever lines following suit in that funny way they have, tumbling like monkeys.   I was not in the mood to so much as jot down any clever lines, so tired I was, “shoot,” I told myself, and my monkey mind, “I’ll jot that semi-clever jive down tomorrow.”  Then I turned to the compromised Lazy Boy, a sly smile creeping, “maybe….” I said, then went down the narrow hallway starboard toward the sleeping area.

Except, once I got starboard, goddamn, there was very little air in the hatch.  Fresh air, that is.  I’ll be lightheaded e’er long, I thought to myself absently, glad I wasn’t actually there, my heavy head pressing heavily against the many pillows on the pallet.  There was also a hiss, suggesting either that we were taking on water (very unlikely, I reasoned) or that steam heat was sissing up through the tenement pipes (odder still, it seemed to me).

OK, how is like a submarine?  Well, it’s fairly long, front to back, and it’s become narrow, with my dusty possessions piled aft and the length of it made narrow by things also on the other side.  The fore deck and the poop deck, well, let’s not even talk about such disgusting things at this hour,  I can easily move from the front of the U-boat to the back, and  dive and surface, blindly but with little trouble.  It’s mainly the narrowness of it and the damnable lack of a periscope– or gyroscope, for that matter, that make it so submarinelike.

“You do realize how that sounds,” says the sour-mouthed bowsin, indignant that I don’t even bother to google the proper spelling of boatswain. 

“Like the periscope in this Class D- frigate following sub, you, sir, do not even exist.  Forget about spelling your imaginary title correctly.  ‘Woof, woof,’ as a matter of fact.”

“Sure,” says the boatswain, more sourly still, “why don’t we just boat forget the whole thing.”