what’s shakin’ bacon

Name’s Gordon (Cooper if you’re angry) Tracy.

If you can tell us apart, you’re doing well.

Brothers > all others 👨🏻🧑🏻🧑🏼‍🦰🧒🏼👦🏼👩🏽

6ft-something ish.

Swam the 100m butterfly in fifty seconds flat once, but nobody saw me.

Fish are friends, not food ✌️

Ask me about my favourite ocean current.

Let minnow if you want to talk - get it? 🐟

Oh, sometimes help out a little bit here and there at the family business.

Right, gotta run. Snacks to eat, waves to catch, lanes to swim, reefs to dive, lives to save 🤙

See you in the sea! 🦑

Oh, want to read my ramblings? Use #gordonssquidthoughts or #gordonssquidthinking

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This is an entirely in-character RP blog ran by @tracyislandinmymind. Don’t be shy, all welcome! TAG based mainly, with a good dose of TOS/2004/fanon.

Couple of quick housekeeping bits:

AI generated content is not welcome here. DO NOT use any of the content on this blog to feed AI. Do not scrape any post to generate AI content, whether literature or artwork. Anyone posting AI content will be blocked.

I unfortunately work a real life job and have a family, so there’s gonna be quiet times.

Mostly this is Gordo’s social media account, but happy to reply in longer verse/writing too!

How about 10?

Nothing like an easy, lighthearted question is there 😏 okay, this might be an essay…

One year?

Plans: Actually get started on that boat of mine and maybe get it finished within the year. I’m also really excited about the initiatives we’ve got starting in the next twelve months at Tracy Industries too, it’s gonna be busy.

At least three surfing trips.

Dive at least three new spots (as a hobby, not as work)

Hopes: that we’re all still together, happy and healthy. That International Rescue continues to keep the world safe and sound.

That family camping trip would be awesome…

Dreams: I’d settle for a decent vacation and some diving for fun, honestly. Continuing to feel as content as I currently do!

An uninterrupted Christmas with everyone would be awesome!

Virgil lets me fly Two entirely voluntarily.

Five years?

Plans: Villa of my own and have it built. There’s this perfect spot on the easterly side of the island and the first run of plans looked awesome (under the sea kitchen with a glass roof, under the sea kitchen with a glass roof) and there’s a great space for a dock and a little beach… gotta speak to the gang about it.

Expand the Tracy Industries third sector and conservation portfolio, including all the projects we’ve currently got sitting in the very early stages of thinking about. I'd also love to have continued to build on our team at TI that's doing work none of us could've achieved on our own!

Hopes: that we’re all still together, happy and healthy. That Alan’s back from college. That International Rescue is still doing what we do best.

That I am doing a huge amount of learning (not a PhD, before a certain two people start). There is so much I’d like to learn, to get proficient in. There is always something to learn!

Dreams: That aside from the work, I get a bit more time to enjoy together with my family. Especially my favourite travel partner (it’s unlikely but hey, dreams right? 🙂‍↔️). Getting to see a lot more of the world together. Would like to sail the ring, y’know, all the way around the globe in aforementioned own boat.

And hopefully another kind of ring too, that answers that question about forever…

Virgil lets me fly Two entirely voluntarily.

Ten Years?

(And no, ten years is not too far out to have plans, thank you very much. But also it’s a very long way out for some things so…)

Plans: to still be doing all of this; swimming, diving, rescuing. The work will always matter to me, building things that outlast me, y’know? Own villa will be very finished and very much home by that point. Still be giving Four her weekly manicure.

Hopes: that we’re all still together, happy and healthy. I hope International Rescue is still out there doing what we do best.

I hope Tracy Industries has helped make ocean conservation boring, and I mean that in the best possible way. I hope restoring reefs, protecting marine habitats and cleaning up coastlines have become so normal that people wonder why it was ever considered something we had to actually think about doing. I hope we’re still pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

Dreams: An enormous coral reef that you can view from the living room of my villa, flourishing obviously. The piranha tank for my enemies 👹

Truth is... my favourite adventures have never really been about places. They've always been about people. So still having my siblings and family, the people I love, close, and all our usual shenanigans continuing.

The next Tracy Family Adventure. A couple of little rescue scouts who think Uncle Gordon is hilarious would also be great, thank you big bros.

Maybe adding one of my own to add to the party. Who knows.

Lost the bet. Having to fly his Sproutship home while he lords it up in the back.

Ad astra per aspera 🌻

According to someone, we can’t rate colleges by their pools…

And he’s right, given he will never be in it.

I can understand this question, it’s a fair one.

I’d love to compete again. Honestly, at one point there was just about nothing I wouldn’t have done to be able to jump back into the competitive pool and be back where I was. I’ll never not love swimming 🐠

But no. I’d never compete in something like the Enhanced Games. Even being banned from mainstream comps.

My spinal reconstruction wasn't designed to me a better athlete, it was designed to make me functional again, but given that it was the first of it’s kind, there’s really no way to prove it didn’t inadvertently do that. I’m fast enough these days that I could challenge my own record, and if I beat it, I’d be a huge personal victory for everything I went through in recovery after the ‘foil. But y’know, it’s not about me.

If I win, the question is gonna be is it because I’m older, physically stronger, better technique… or is it because of the tech that keeps me upright? I don’t think it is, but nobody can answer that for certain, not even me, so… and I wouldn’t want anyone I’m competing against to feel they were being cheated.

And that’s fair enough to me, even if I struggled with it to begin with because hey, swimming competitively was my life for so long. It actually answers why I don’t believe in competitions like the Enhanced Games too.

Sport, at least the way I've always understood it, is about finding out what you can achieve through discipline, training, skill, and determination. It's about testing yourself against other people who have made the same commitment. The stopwatch, the finish line, the splits…those things only mean something if everyone agrees on the same challenge. Once the question becomes "who has the most effective enhancement programme?" I'm not sure that's the same challenge anymore 🤷‍♂️

If someone wins because they trained harder, executed better, or showed more grit under pressure, I can respect that even if I lose. If the deciding factor is whose enhancement was more effective, then personally, I'm no longer interested in the result.

If others want to explore that kind of competition, that's a debate for them to have. But it isn’t what I believe sport to be. The whole reason I fell in love with the pool in the first place was because it was one of the few places where effort mattered, and I still believe that.