Haunted House

After Crow Fair, I read "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie. This is the second book I have read this year by Christie, and I have to say, I'm thoroughly impressed. This one was more narrative than Murder on the Orient Express, and I'm not afraid to admit that the ending took me by surprise. I felt like a little kid as I was reading this book, and it was nice to be reminded that an effective story demands nothing more from the reader than total transportation. To cause your reader to forget where they are, even for a short while, is as noble a literary goal as any other. This book didn't cause me to question my faith or to reconsider my childhood. It didn't force me to reconcile my ambitions with my fears or challenge me with fundamental questions about the meaning of life. It just posed a riddle which was hard to solve, built up the tension, and then revealed everything in  a dramatic climax. Reading it was therapeutic and satisfying. "A good beach book" seems like such a dismissive or patronizing characterization. I'll settle for saying that it was an immersive book, well written with excellent pacing and dialogue. I'm excited to read another book by Christie very soon!

Crow Fair

April has been a hectic and enlightening month. The days are getting longer and the air is warming. Flowers are beginning to bloom outside, gently, as if they still remember the winter, which stayed longer than usual. It's nice to see the familiar patterns, but I can't shake the feeling that the long and tragic season of winter was just one of several disturbances yet to come. Global warming, etc.

Anyway, I finished a book recently called Crow Fair. I got this book as a present. It is named after a Native American ceremony which I know nothing about. The book didn't have anything to do with Native Americans either, except in perhaps a tangential sense. This book was set in Montana, which is built, I suppose, on the bones of Native Americans. What a sensational notion! Every state in America is built on the bones of Native Americans, but for some reason or another it was the people of the northern plains who have stuck around in our public memory. Maybe it was because they fought for the longest, maybe it's because those were the places where white America was stretched the thinnest, only a fragile veneer tearing in the wind that blows across the water color steppes and gray mountains. It is the center point of our continent and it is large and flat and mostly devoid of the modernity of the coastal civilizations. I have only lived on the coasts. I know nothing about the middle. After reading this book, I feel like I know a little bit more, but its just a feeling.

Thomas McGuane has a style which is unlike any author I've read, although I can see the influences of many writers reflected in his work. Perhaps that is the mark of a post-post-modernist; a 21st century writer is fated to recycle old things into new things. To pick up the broken trail left by Brautigan, Kerouac, and Vonnegut and try to make it lead somewhere. I know that somewhere out there an expert in feminist literature just died as a result of me writing that sentence. I'm sorry. I would read more 21st century women writers if I knew about them. I'll make it a sub-goal for this year, I promise.

Thomas McGuane writes in a way that seems easy and effortless, and that's what I like about it. The stories were very nice to read, but they hit you hard in the last moments and also immediately afterwards. A couple of the stories really stood out above the rest, but overall it was a really solid collection. No wasted words. That would be my three word review, but its not completely accurate. "No wasted words" sounds like Hemingway. It's not minimalism in a tortured sense, just simple and truthful. One adjective per noun type of writing. I loved it. I was inspired by it. Most importantly, I enjoyed reading it. The fact that I received it as a gift, and it had such a profound impact on me makes it even better. I have a bad habit of saving my appreciation for the purchases I make for myself, believing, on some deeper level, that no one could understand me well enough to hit the mark with a gift or surprise. It's nice to be proven wrong.

Head Space

Recently I read the book "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. My initial impression of it was positive. The immediate experience of reading it and reflecting upon it was similar to...well now that I am thinking about it, I cannot easily pin point a book that I have read in the last couple of years that is similar. Perhaps Faulkner, but only in the cadence and the style, the mood is completely different, and I have also found that one Faulkner book is completely unlike another, a pattern which I am incapable of establishing with Woolf (having only read one of her novels).

I suppose a better question then would be, would I read another story by Woolf? The answer is probably yes, but only after I take a break from the heady and atmospheric, the philosophical and imaginary. To the Lighthouse was a fine book, but a little too intangible for my tastes. Or at least, too intangible for me to endure in extended dosages. For my next read, I am aiming for something more rooted in traditional narrative plot advancement. I want characters that couple their thoughts with actions. I want dramatic twists and turns that have ramifications outside of a character's head. I want fist fights and long kisses and maybe some explosions. I want to read a good old fashioned story. I'm tired of the kinky stuff. Give me missionary.

Fresh Paint

The paint was always mixed on Thursdays, because that was the only day of the week that Mr. Nunez, the mix technician, was free to show up in his battered Ford van. He would drive up from the run-down section of town, the area previously known as Cross Bridge, with its towering factory houses hidden under crippling decay, a testament to the power of the now defunct brick oven industry. Ten years ago, a developer had purchased a block of buildings by the Turpentine River, and renovated them into upscale apartments for the newly rich leaving the city. Nick wasn't sure if the plan had worked. He had not heard of any magical social economic transformation, and he was hesitant to apply his dubious endorsement because he feared that gentrification would spell the end of the faded plastic cart parked next to the hospital off ramp filled with clementines and pushed by someone who looked very much like Mr. Nunez, only older and with far less teeth.

Nick tried to calculate how much money he had spent on clementines while waiting for green lights, but he quickly lost track of the numbers. The hazy fog which enveloped everything was not a new phenomenon, but he had recently begun to question its origin after several voicemails left by the "Offices of John D. Mintzhauser on the retainer of the American Society of Justice in Chemical Industries". Instead, Nick shifted his focus from the quantitative to the qualitative, and as he sat in the scuffed linoleum lobby with the breathtaking painting of the Hudson river, still waiting for Mr. Nunez to show up, he attempted to summon the image of Maria Sotomayor.

She had shown up last week to deliver the mail, and seven days later, Nick could still remember the moment he saw her. He could even remember the feeling of the mail in his hand and imagined that he could feel the warm imprint that her hand had left on it. She was not traditionally pretty, Nick could not help but notice her narrow eyes and wide mouth with thin lips. She was tall and skinny, but her arms with taller and skinnier still. Her legs, by comparison were wide and brutish, and when she walked, Nick failed to suppress the urge to draw comparisons of the equine variety.

In spite of all of this, Nick was captivated. It wasn't because of their conversations. As far as he could tell, she spoke very little English. No, it was the way her features changed and danced under the sparkling moonlight of her laughter. The narrow eyes took on a deep and mysterious aspect and the wide mouth parted to reveal milk-white teeth. There was a dance in her step or, perhaps more accurately, the echo of a dance, not ghostly, but warm and recent, as if she had just walked in from the set of some Broadway musical.

But most of all it was her hair. Her dark hair, which kept him up nights haunted by the image of the nape of her neck flashing, the pale skin shimmering under the cascade of an oil-spill pile of curtains cut loose from a tall window. Her dark and wet hair, so immediate and so honest that he could not help but imagine her washing it, working the immense lather of it with her hands. He could feel it on his hands, and he could scarcely think of anything else.

He realized he wasn't breathing, and inhaled a deep portion of recycled air, colored by the acerbic bite of latex so faint that if you so much as thought of something else, you wouldn't taste it.

"Nick, como esta?" Mr. Nunez walked in, balancing a milk carton full of paper towels. Nick had no understanding of the origin or role of these paper towels, but they remained a steadfast feature of Mr. Nunez's tenure with the company. Every Thursday, a carton of paper towels would enter the building and an empty carton would leave. Surely there was a magical chest located in some forgotten closet, a reverse Pandora's box, leading intrepid explorers to an alternate dimension filled with discarded paper towels. Nick shook his head to clear the fumes, "Hello Mr. Nunez!"

"Paint getting you down? You spend too much time in here."

"Well it is my company. If I'm not here, who else?"

"Ah, I forgot that the American dream works both ways. The man makes the company, but at the end of the day the company makes the man."

Nick laughed.

"You have a good laugh Mr. Nick. You should laugh more."

"I laugh." Nick tasted the lie, tried it out for size, and decided it was agreeable.

"You laughed today. That's a start. What's on the docket?"

"About fifty gallons of enamel, another ten of latex. Phil sorted them before he left."

Phil, the teenaged night guard with the face of a forty year old man, was the third and final employee of the Twin Rivers Paint Recycling Company. He had been working there for only six months, but had already proven himself to be as reliable as a mechanical pencil. Again, Nick had no definitive proof that he spoke English. His last name was Malinowski, and the wax paper that he would wrap his meals in often carried the strong scent of Polish surprise bread. Nick had assumed that all of the Eastern Europeans had moved away from the river when the Honda factory closed down. Now that he thought about it, Phil did have the eyes of someone who was the last of his kind. Beautiful, self-righteous eyes.

Of course Nick only saw him once every two weeks, when Phil would walk into his office, grab his check from the wooden mail sorter with the ancient U.S. Navy recruitment poster on the side, sit down and sign the check carefully. Nick wasn't sure why Phil sat down to sign the check, but he had decided that the extra two minutes they spent together every other week was a formative period of time, a relationship building period of time, that would ultimately result in a strong cross-cultural and cross-generational friendship.

"I just hope he didn't leave any of them upside down, some people don't put the lids on so tight." Mr. Nunez gestured erratically with the carton of paper towels and disappeared down the hallway.

Nick sighed and settled back in the chair in the lobby with the breathtaking painting of the Hudson river hanging directly behind him.

*******

What happens to the paint that is recycled? Is it re-used, is it re-mixed? Is it broken down into component pieces and put back together again in new and different forms? There is paint beneath the paint that drys and hardens on the walls, and that paint, when chipped, when broken laterally and shattered and examined in brilliant cross section can show layers and the dust and sediment trapped in those layers tells a story of the days and nights that have passed and the cosmic rays penetrate the lacquer and the top coat and atoms which have floated, isolated, alone, for countless eons, finally come to rest, to congeal and to exist. The earth was lifeless before, barren rock. There are barren worlds out there, barren worlds where nothing happens, nothing save the endless cycles of volcanic geysers erupting and hardening their molten stomachs, the soul of the planet onto the surface, the rock ground back into the core by waves and waves of liquid ammonia, or methane, or, in some spectacular cases, water.

And on these planets with liquid water, what are the chances that randomized components could be laid down next to each other in just the right way, ionized by just the right energy, that they form a membrane, a balloon. Self-contained. Life is nothing but shelter, reproduced. Ah, but that is the trick of it; this balloon is protected and is true to itself, but it is not life yet. It may draw some molecules in and expel certain others. But it is not life yet. Life exists past the teetering edge of death when those components, not all but some, which once laid down in a pattern to create a self-protecting, self-feeding, self-enduring organism, some of those components break away and rearrange to create something else. Something entirely similar and yet fundamentally different. Life comes and death follows, like a child dragging a cart in the sand.

Snow Melt

Well spring is finally around the corner, and boy am I relieved. This winter, which started off so mild and pleasant, really took a turn for the worst in late January. I may be suffering from seasonal affective disorder. I may be suffering from malnutrition. My classroom vegetables have plateued in their growth, probably as a limitation of their containers. I transferred three of the tomato plants into much larger containers on Friday. Only time will tell if this plan is successful. Tiny tomatoes are beginning to appear, which is good, but the pepper plants are still far too small. I was hoping to eat tomatoes and peppers together. I was not prepared emotionally for a world in which I would be eating them separately. I also think I let my arugula grow too long. It tastes rather bitter, and besides, I only have enough for like one solid salad. Or two smaller salads. I've realized that in order to make your own salads from scratch, you need to grow A LOT of greens. And maybe stagger the planting to avoid half the plants going bad while you harvest the other half? Oh well, notes for the future.

Also, for the future: My next motorcycle trip is tentatively planned for the second week of April. I am debating ordering new plastic fairings for my bike. I am thinking of selling it, in which case new fairings should probably be bought after the trip and note before in order to keep them looking good.

Here's what I read this week:

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. I liked this book because the dialogue was very convincing; something that I feel I need to continue to work on in my own writing. Hercule Poirot became increasingly insufferable as the story wore on. I am tempted to read another of her books to see if this patterns holds up across the series. 

Linear Lines

Recently, I was struck by the way in which love grows and fades. It seems to me not to be a gradual process, but rather happens in bursts of sudden movement and typically only when no one is looking. You'll be minding your own business, living your life, and the next thing you know, BAM, you've either fallen in love or fallen out of love with someone and the process is over practically before it began.

I've also noticed, and been troubled, by the way in which we make space for people in our lives at the expense of others. It is as if we have a finite amount of emotional energy (probably true) or a finite amount of time (certainly true) and we make subconscious decision about who we spend it with and, sometimes more importantly, who we spend it thinking about. 

I've realized that to say that you have fallen out of love with someone is not an entirely accurate phrasing. Instead, what I think happens, is you just make less time in your life for that person. It doesn't have to happen at once, just a little bit everyday. And within the moments that you think about that person, you still love them and care for them as much as you ever did. 

But the time for caring grows shorter, more fragmented, more periodic. Love becomes a disenfranchised and isolated thing, still strong, but disconnected from the roots of your life. Love, like a low-lying stretch of land encroached by rising sea levels, turns into islands, which break into smaller islands, which eventually disappear entirely. The love is still there, but you have to look for it beneath the surface of the dirty, shallow water.

Here's a picture of the book I'm currently reading. Believe it or not, this is the best pic I could find on the internet. Maybe I'll take a picture of my book, but its from the library and is lacking a cover:

Darker Dreams

At night he dreamed of unceasing discovery and of a flowing and continuous existence that embraced everything and allowed him to study and appreciate but also to build. For it is in building that we transcend, he believed, and it must be true. There is nothing worse than emerging from the long and grotesque embrace of consumption.The eating up of things and places and ideas and the sick realization grows deep in your stomach and eventually takes over your head, and you cannot deny the truth anymore: the universe is not an infinite space. Or, maybe it is, but our bodies and our consciousness are limited in such a way that space becomes finite. If we seek to understand objective truths, we cannot hope to begin to do so without first understanding and mastering the instruments of our own sensory aggregations. We cannot explore, we cannot build with these weights attached to the ends of our arms, to the ends of our memories. So, in this journey to understand everything, and in an effort to fight back the feelings of distrust and disinterest, however temporary, we must practice periodic self-annihilation. An annihilation of thought, of emotion. An annihilation of memory, of bias, and of belief.

Here is a photograph I took a year ago of a day very much like today: