Tools, T-Shirts and Tattoos
Tools, T-Shirts and Tattoos
Expressing Your Individual and Teamwork Abilities To Work in Neptune’s Realm
The dive helmet, dive life support systems, and the recompression chamber are enabling capabilities. These components get you to the underwater project. Hopefully, the dive team friends you hang out with at the local bar after work can properly use tools and safely maintain the dive systems you breathe from. Demonstrating an ability to safely use and apply a wide variety of tools and techniques on your dive systems, and when you get to the dive project, is the only expression of an individual's ability that counts in Neptune’s Realm.
In my dresser drawer, I still have a couple of blue-and-gold reversible Navy Diver t-shirts I purchased more than 30 years ago, when I was stationed in Hawaii. My old blue-and-golds don’t have pictures on them. No pictures of mermaids or sharks on these blue-and-golds. Just a faded emblem on the blue side of an old dive command I was stationed at in the early 1990s, Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit One. Back in my working-diver days, the blue-and-gold t-shirt was a cultural tool of the time, used by the Master Diver. When a diver or dive medical technician accumulated RNT from a dive or treatment table, the diver reserved and donned the t-shirt with the gold side out. The gold side-out signaled to the rest of the team to conduct a risk assessment before the gold diver left the surface for the subsequent dive. When the gold diver walked into the bar for a round of cheer, other divers from the area lockers knew that the diver had logged in a hard day's work.
Artificial intelligence generates beautiful tattoo ideas. I’ve seen remarkable dive tattoo artwork over the years. I have my two Drezmala dive tattoos, one of which I received during the last week of dive school in 1991. The story behind my dive tattoo is the successful completion of Navy Dive School. I survived the dive physics test, the sugar cookies, and the miles of beach runs on the Silver Strand in Coronado, California. Echoes of “push-ups forever, are you ready?” and the Cat and Mouse song live in my dive tattoos. My old Navy Dive blue-and-gold t-shirts and the plan green dive tattoos I have tell a story about graduating from dive schools and lifelong friends I made during my Navy Dive career. I thought about getting another tattoo, but I haven't decided.
I was fortunate to have an inherent mechanical ability before I joined the Navy. The Navy enabled me to log hundreds of hours underwater, demonstrating tools and their uses to Neptune in his Realm. Expressing our teamwork abilities to Neptune cost us extra health issues we deal with in our later years. Many of my PM Diver friends and I have early-onset arthritis, replaced knees and hips, painful and noisy joints, and short-term memory loss, to name a few. Over the years since I’ve been retired from active duty, people ask me whether, if I had to do it again, I would log fewer bottom-time hours and not work as hard underwater for all those years. I say no. My Navy Diver Association blue hooded sweatshirt keeps me warm and helps manage my arthritis pain. I’d rather live with two simple dive tattoos and the pains from my dive tools and their uses than be known as an AM diver with a closet full of I love sharks and mermaid t-shirts and storyless tattoos. You’ll have to purchase my book and read about it if you don’t know what the difference is between an AM and PM diver.
