Screwin’ goo

“Screwin’ goo” is Joe Pareti’s curse for the gray plankton mutation he harvests in the Atlantic. First shouted in disgust, it becomes a work ritual: a repeated phrase that marks his exhaustion, his isolation, and the bleak familiarity of the goo fields.

From Outburst to Ritual

Pareti first yelled the phrase three years earlier, when he signed up as a goo-field harvester and saw the mucous-gray mutation spotting the sea. The sight had struck him as a blemish on the water, and the curse gave his immediate revulsion a blunt, repeatable form. Its force is in its plainness: the work has reduced the extraordinary sight of the spreading mutation to something he can name with a habitual expletive.

By the time of the narrated shift, the words have lost their original vigor. Near the end of the day, exhausted and speaking around a cigar, Pareti yells the phrase at the fading sunlight; the sound comes out garbled. He then murmurs “Screwin’ goo,” recognizing the expression as ritual. Alone in the punt, accompanied only by his dying voice and the ghostly gray-white goo, he uses the familiar curse to keep himself company.

The Phrase in the Workday

The expression recurs amid practical labor, not in a dramatic confrontation. Pareti spots a tentacle rising above the ocean and turns the punt toward it. He gauges the distance, readies his net, scoops up the writhing growth, and dumps the roughly five-pound fragment into the boat’s lazarette. The curse belongs to this repetitive cycle of watching, collecting, and bringing the mutation aboard; the goo is both the object of his disgust and the material of his job.

At another point in the shift, the phrase stands alone as Pareti begins working his way back. He is well into the fields and exhausted, with the shift ending. Around him, a steady swell rolls toward TexasTower beneath a hard, bright sun. The harvesting conditions are almost perfect, and the shift pays five hundred and thirty dollars, but the repeated curse keeps the labor’s unpleasantness in the foreground. Its return makes the words sound less like a fresh complaint than the refrain of a life organized around harvesting what he hates.