Today’s Word of the Day, dear reader, is gongoozler.  Though it sounds like something Willy Wonka whipped up in his lab over the course of several sleepless weeks, it is not.  Gongoozler is a noun, meaning a person who enjoys watching activity on canals.  Yep, there is a word for one who derives low-key, almost spiritual satisfaction from watching other people work on boats in a canal.  Not the Instagram kind of watching – real, salt-crusted, binocular-free gawking while the gulls scream overhead and diesel fumes braid with your cigarette smoke.  Like a perverse, waterborne version of birding, but with barges and the occasional guy named Chuck who’s been living on a houseboat since the Reagan administration.

The word gongoozler sloshed into existence sometime in the early 20th century, likely birthed from Lincolnshire dialect or the linguistic swamp of canal-worker slang.  It’s a Frankenstein of “gawn” (to stare) and “goozle” (throat), which is somehow both accurate and vaguely obscene.  The term was used to describe the idle gawkers who’d congregate near locks and bridges, watching boats pass like it was the Super Bowl of slow aquatic movement.

Let me tell you about the time I became a gongoozler, which is to say: a broke, semi-deranged canal voyeur with a penchant for sewage-adjacent existentialism. 

Let me set the scene: it’s Seattle, circa my personal apocalypse.  I had just moved to Fremont- a neighborhood north of Seattle that smells like kombucha and liberal artisanal despair – and I was living in a shoebox apartment that had the architectural charm of a Soviet interrogation room.  I had no friends, no money, was in the middle of a prolonged nervous breakdown, and I couldn’t afford therapy.  My only coping mechanism (and the only thing I could afford) was walking.  So I walked.  Specifically, I walked down by the ship canal, which is not a canal in the romantic Venetian sense but more like a concrete trench where boats go to die. 

The Fremont ship canal is not what you’d call picturesque.  It’s a manmade waterway that looks like it was designed by someone who hated both nature and joy.  The water is a murky shade of “don’t ask,” and there were signs everywhere warning you not to fish because, apparently, the canal doubles as a sewage slip-n-slide.  Naturally, this did not deter the local fishermen, who were mostly older Asian men with the kind of grim determination you’d expect from people who’ve seen some shit – both figuratively and, in this case, literally.  It boggled my mind…there were dozens of them – warning you, quote, “untreated sewage is routinely discharged into this waterway.”  Which is bureaucratic for: This canal is full of shit.”

But like some kind of secret society of defiant anglers who had collectively decided that gastrointestinal risk was a small price to pay for the thrill of catching a three-eyed trout.  I tried talking to them.  I really did…I was pretty desperate for a friend at that point.  But, alas, they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak whatever dialect of “leave me alone” they were fluent in.  They’d glare at me like I was interrupting a sacred ritual, which I probably was. 

So I stopped trying to talk.  I just watched.  I watched the ships.  I watched the fishermen.  I watched the ducks that looked like they’d been though a chemical spill.  I watched the joggers who ran like they were being chased by their own regrets.  I became a kind of paragongoozler – not just watching the canal, but the entire ecosystem of weirdness orbiting it.  It was like a slow-motion circus, and I was the sad clown in the audience, applauding the sewage ballet.  Sometimes, when your brain is a dumpster fire and your wallet is a cruel joke, all you can do is stand by a canal and bear witness to the absurdity. 

N.P.: “When The Lights Go Out” – Oingo Boingo