Pinning

  The headers gleam at the front of the factory like two gleaming, steel, masterpieces of brutalist construction. One by one they decapitate countless fishy bodies with their massive triangular blades in perfect rhythm, administering a drumbeat for the meticulous three month fish holocausts that are my summers. 

Operating the headers is called pinning.  You flip the dead fish over onto the conveyer belt with your right hand and find the sweet spot at the top of their gills with your left so you can pin their gaping faces to one of the 60 small steel phalluses protruding from the belt which will pull a tickertape of slimy cadavers towards the ever-chomping guillotine. The gills often make a satisfying crunch as they sink onto the pin. Flip, crunch, thunk! You will pin fish heads to the belt for 12 hours, and within the next four hours you will take a shower, read some of your book, masturbate if you are lucky and go to bed before it is time to begin pinning again. Jacking-off and reading: it’s not as though there’s much else to do in the middle of the Bering Sea on a giant steel bucket full of drug addicts and elderly felons. 

 You spend three months pinning aboard the M/V Ocean Fresh during the summer after you graduate high school. You stand there for twelve hours a day pinning the heads of dead salmon to a conveyor belt in absolute silence. Flip, crunch, thunk! Flip, crunch, thunk! 

After a few days, you will learn how to pin with your eyes closed. You will begin to daydream uncontrollably, intoxicating yourself with the million impossible possibilities that exist somewhere across the expanse of frigid, roiling water on a place called dry land. You imagine yourself the perfect boyfriend, and you imagine your friends and your parents better than then they truly are, and for a while the days pass on by like muculent fish corpses. 

Don’t believe anyone who tells you hopes and dreams are limitless.  I’m the best damned daydreamer in North America, but when I was 18 I learned that boredom exhausts your supply of daydreams slowly like a pinhole in a sack of flower; that along with the carpel tunnel. After about a month your hands begin to go numb, seizing up and twitching with pain like you have stuck them both in large electrical sockets. This pulls you out of your daydreams which have long since become boring because you have lived them so many times. You are immobilized by aches and boredom.

In another month you find your solution. You learn how to nullify yourself.

This is hard to communicate, but after months of unending repetition and pain you begin to realize that you are the source of everything. Your own consciousness, your thoughts are the source of the pain and the boredom. You are the one feeling these things, not the fish or the pins. If you stop thinking about what the pinning and the pain and the thunking sound and the fish are, you can’t notice that they keep coming. Everything around you just happens and you experience it moment after moment, corpse after corpse, spasm after spasm until the gleaming lights of Seattle emerge from the darkness behind the ocean and pull you back into yourself. Those unmeasurable stretches of time you spend emptying yourself into the cold, bloody, deafening cavern of a fish processing factory on a boat in the ocean are probably the most peaceful moments you will experience in your life.

This is how I learned to meditate.