The gods might be laughing in the gray-
light twittering of the flock that lives in
the courtyard, mostly your basic starlings
with some itinerant blackbirds mixed in.
But before the chirping cacophony there's
a different sound, an urgent rustling of
hundreds of folded wings, heard through
a window and mistaken for the quick steps
of bustling Japanese maidservants as they
flutter about the palace in pastel kimonos,
or the muffled clatter of infantry coming to
attention in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas.
In another season, alert at that hour, the
synchronous flapping comes clear through
the air, the sign of spontaneous assembly
of the consolidated mind of the flock.
Then the laughter begins, the euphonious
delight of the collective at finding itself
whole after a night of separation, when
each disparate element was isolated,
alone.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Zionism in the evening
We had a farewell dinner for a young French friend named Emmanuel who is going back home after seven years here. He happens to be a Jewish guy who also chose to spend a significant part of his life in Israel and did a stint in the IDF, which disqualifies him for association with my politically-correct acquaintances. I disagree with many of his views on Israel/Palestine, but he's fundamentally a good guy, a mensch, the kind of person you want to have standing next to you when trouble is brewing. While it is true that no trouble of that particular kind is brewing around here, I always have to remind myself that as an outsider I don't have the complete picture of the situtation over there in the Middle East.
My critical views are very well considered and not easily shaken in argument, but normally I avoid political discussion with people like Emmanuel since I don't know how to break out of the sort of circular arguments and repetitive tautologies that always occur. But on that evening another very intelligent and articulate Israeli named Haggai was present, as was my Jewish friend Bill who's an ardent liberal/left activist and as anti-Zionist as they come. A political discussion about Israel was inevitable, so I got it rolling by asking Haggai what he thought about the wall. What followed was a two-hour back-and-forth during which the entire array of standard bullet-proof apologetics was enumerated and repeated over and over, though calmly and without hysteria of voice or expression. Bill and I did our best, but it was just as useless as always. At one point Haggai even trotted out the old business about "blood libel" against Israel and Sharon for Sabra and Shatila in 1982, a topic I happen to know something about and was able to dispatch fairly easily. I told him that I was afraid of going to Israel because if I went there I might begin to identify with his position. I hope that would not be the case, but it happened to someone I know who went there in a naive condition and was subjected to unceasing propaganda, finding himself among friendly Israelis who denigrated the Palestinians as dangerous and dirty and full of hate, and he came back here with his head twisted all the way around.
I'm a non-denominational American mutt and the Israel/Palestine issue is not my fight, so the final refuge of zionist polemics is to accuse me of anti-semitism because I don't subject other countries to the same moral standard, and why do I care about the poor little Palestinians when there is an ongoing massacre in Darfur and on and on, etc. There are many perfectly reasonable ways to respond to this accusation, but when the discussion reaches this point, I head for the door. I react with some anger to the accusation of anti-semitism because it is the cloak and bludgeon of the Likud. Holocaust-related guilt is by far the most powerful weapon in their arsenal, and they use it to great effect. Since 9/11 we have witnessed the Likudization of our own government, and the accusation of anti-Semitism effectively silences all rational argument. Especially on college campuses, where discussion is supposed to be unfettered and open, openly anti-zionist professors fail to get tenure and are attacked and villified and often fired for their views. The question of Israel/Palestine has long been and continues to be radioactive here, glowing poisonously underneath the surface of acceptable discourse. It is the third rail of American politics, and on the very day it rises above that dangerous subliminal level, the entire Middle East will be reduced to charred ash. There will be no survivors, and with all due respect to Haggai and Emmanuel, both of whom I hold in high esteem, none of us will be excluded from that holocaust.
My critical views are very well considered and not easily shaken in argument, but normally I avoid political discussion with people like Emmanuel since I don't know how to break out of the sort of circular arguments and repetitive tautologies that always occur. But on that evening another very intelligent and articulate Israeli named Haggai was present, as was my Jewish friend Bill who's an ardent liberal/left activist and as anti-Zionist as they come. A political discussion about Israel was inevitable, so I got it rolling by asking Haggai what he thought about the wall. What followed was a two-hour back-and-forth during which the entire array of standard bullet-proof apologetics was enumerated and repeated over and over, though calmly and without hysteria of voice or expression. Bill and I did our best, but it was just as useless as always. At one point Haggai even trotted out the old business about "blood libel" against Israel and Sharon for Sabra and Shatila in 1982, a topic I happen to know something about and was able to dispatch fairly easily. I told him that I was afraid of going to Israel because if I went there I might begin to identify with his position. I hope that would not be the case, but it happened to someone I know who went there in a naive condition and was subjected to unceasing propaganda, finding himself among friendly Israelis who denigrated the Palestinians as dangerous and dirty and full of hate, and he came back here with his head twisted all the way around.
I'm a non-denominational American mutt and the Israel/Palestine issue is not my fight, so the final refuge of zionist polemics is to accuse me of anti-semitism because I don't subject other countries to the same moral standard, and why do I care about the poor little Palestinians when there is an ongoing massacre in Darfur and on and on, etc. There are many perfectly reasonable ways to respond to this accusation, but when the discussion reaches this point, I head for the door. I react with some anger to the accusation of anti-semitism because it is the cloak and bludgeon of the Likud. Holocaust-related guilt is by far the most powerful weapon in their arsenal, and they use it to great effect. Since 9/11 we have witnessed the Likudization of our own government, and the accusation of anti-Semitism effectively silences all rational argument. Especially on college campuses, where discussion is supposed to be unfettered and open, openly anti-zionist professors fail to get tenure and are attacked and villified and often fired for their views. The question of Israel/Palestine has long been and continues to be radioactive here, glowing poisonously underneath the surface of acceptable discourse. It is the third rail of American politics, and on the very day it rises above that dangerous subliminal level, the entire Middle East will be reduced to charred ash. There will be no survivors, and with all due respect to Haggai and Emmanuel, both of whom I hold in high esteem, none of us will be excluded from that holocaust.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Boulevard Jourdan
I was often awakened late at night by the yowling of stray cats. In the mornings I made my way over to the cheap student restaurant for coffee and a roll, and as I left the Fondation building by the back door I passed alongside a huge pile of sleeping cats. There must have been over a hundred cats in that pile, which was located several floors directly below the window of my room. I understood that the midnight yowling was probably the sound of the cats arranging themselves in the pile and deciding by some mysterious process who gets to sleep at what position in the pile. I supposed the top cats to be the strongest, but in any case, never before or since have I witnessed such a phenomenon of stray cats sleeping in a massive pile. It was striking also that nobody seemed to notice them, as if such a huge living pile of cats was just another aspect of daily life there, a fuzzy kind of outdoor furniture, something to be ignored the way people ignored so many other things that I—as a newly arrived American—couldn't help noticing, so after a while I too no longer paused on my way to breakfast to regard the pile of cats with naiveté and amazement.
At the student restaurant there was usually a line consisting of a United-Nations variety of other students, many of whom came from countries where the concept of waiting one's turn in a queue was a foreign notion. This meant that the line resembled something more like a funnel than a single-file line waiting to pass through to the dining room, so you had to be agressive and push your way along or you wouldn't get any breakfast. Such a funnel-like queue is a normal social phenomenon in many places around the world, and it indicates for me the absence of a fundamental aspect of the consensual arrangement we refer to as civilization. Ultimately, human society is probably just another cat pile, but without some surface-level niceties like the ingrained habit to faire le queue (form a line), life loses a certain measure of its charm.
Cité Universitaire
There was a lot of activity in that hallway and something very jarring about the harsh voices jabbering incessantly in several strange languages and echoing off the hard surfaces of the walls and floor. I used to have a recurring dream that I think originated from repetitive exposure to that sound. In the dream I'm out in a large exterior area filled with people, all of whom are grunting and making guttural noises while slabs of meat and live chickens are thrown into the crowd from the open backs of trucks—a vision that's not far from the reality of daily life in some miserable areas of the world.
Without exception the weather was always gray—always. After my arrival I did not see the sun for more than eight months, which was very hard to bear at first, but after a few months I started to discern subtle differences between one cloudy day and the next, and realized that it's actually possible to adjust to such conditions, though it lent a grim dullness to the daily experience of living there. I went off to my dull classes in the Clignancourt direction, ate a dull lunch in another dull student restaurant, and in the afternoons took the same dull metro back towards Port d'Orleans to my dull workplace near Denfert Rochereau, which was a working section of the city then.
In fact the work was not really dull. I learned to be very good at multi-color viscosity printing using large rollers on deeply etched intaglio plates, and the printing shop contained another United-Nations variety of people who made an interesting crowd, a diverse and stimulating community that was comfortable to be part of in the huge foreign city, the first major city I'd lived in. Since then I've felt the need to live in a large international city where people mind their own business and are tolerant of differences. In that way and in others, my experience of living in Paris in the mid-seventies was formative. It's part of who I am, but as far as community goes, sauve qui peut la vie.
The Nagual
At the student restaurant there was usually a line consisting of a United-Nations variety of other students, many of whom came from countries where the concept of waiting one's turn in a queue was a foreign notion. This meant that the line resembled something more like a funnel than a single-file line waiting to pass through to the dining room, so you had to be agressive and push your way along or you wouldn't get any breakfast. Such a funnel-like queue is a normal social phenomenon in many places around the world, and it indicates for me the absence of a fundamental aspect of the consensual arrangement we refer to as civilization. Ultimately, human society is probably just another cat pile, but without some surface-level niceties like the ingrained habit to faire le queue (form a line), life loses a certain measure of its charm.
Cité UniversitaireThere was a lot of activity in that hallway and something very jarring about the harsh voices jabbering incessantly in several strange languages and echoing off the hard surfaces of the walls and floor. I used to have a recurring dream that I think originated from repetitive exposure to that sound. In the dream I'm out in a large exterior area filled with people, all of whom are grunting and making guttural noises while slabs of meat and live chickens are thrown into the crowd from the open backs of trucks—a vision that's not far from the reality of daily life in some miserable areas of the world.
Without exception the weather was always gray—always. After my arrival I did not see the sun for more than eight months, which was very hard to bear at first, but after a few months I started to discern subtle differences between one cloudy day and the next, and realized that it's actually possible to adjust to such conditions, though it lent a grim dullness to the daily experience of living there. I went off to my dull classes in the Clignancourt direction, ate a dull lunch in another dull student restaurant, and in the afternoons took the same dull metro back towards Port d'Orleans to my dull workplace near Denfert Rochereau, which was a working section of the city then.
In fact the work was not really dull. I learned to be very good at multi-color viscosity printing using large rollers on deeply etched intaglio plates, and the printing shop contained another United-Nations variety of people who made an interesting crowd, a diverse and stimulating community that was comfortable to be part of in the huge foreign city, the first major city I'd lived in. Since then I've felt the need to live in a large international city where people mind their own business and are tolerant of differences. In that way and in others, my experience of living in Paris in the mid-seventies was formative. It's part of who I am, but as far as community goes, sauve qui peut la vie.
The Nagual
French Lessons
I took six or seven years of French classes in grade school, and in all that time I learned almost nothing, so when I arrived in Paris in August 1975 I could say only the most basic phrases. Even before landing in my first hotel room in the latin quarter, I realized that I was going to have to start over again from the beginning. Better informed Americans who go to Paris with the intention of learning the language discover the Cours de Langue et Civilization Francaise at the Sorbonne. I didn't know about that program and probably couldn't have afforded it anyway, so I just went along with the crowds of Middle-Easterners, Africans and orientals to the Alliance Francaise on the Boulevard Raspail.
I had made a connection through a teacher and was in Paris to work in a print shop, where I had to start immediately, even before finding a living arrangement. At first I worked in the afternoons, and after I found a dormitory room in the Cite Universitaire, I started attending morning classes at the Alliance. My progress was excrutiatingly slow because the classes were large and taught by rote, with every one of about thirty students required to repeat the same phrases one after the other, around and around in an endless cycle of dumb repetitions. I had never particularly liked the French language and the routine boredom of the Alliance classes felt like punishment and only estranged me further, yet in a curious way the difficulty drew me on and kept me going as a kind of masochistic challenge. I was determined not to let this French thing beat me, but now all these years later, it's still an even race. Of course I speak much better than I did then, but somehow I'm still essentially neck-and-neck with that sadistic language. (The aspiration to learn a foreign language is a terrible thing to waste on French.)
My continuing distaste for French is odd considering the enormous time and effort I've spent trying to learn it. It is harder than Spanish or Italian and other Latin languages. In three months of intensive Spanish in Mexico I picked up the basic structure of that language and learned a lot of things I never expect to master in French even now. More than twenty-five years after that first visit to Paris, I'm still working at it, albeit reluctantly, and frequently decide the time has come to just give up and admit that I'll never master the language with all its impossible idioms, silent suffixes and endlessly confusing homonyms. Damn the French anyway for speaking such a complex and difficult language that seems intentionally designed to be opaque to outsiders.
Some big famous person (Thomas Jefferson?) once said that Americans go to France only to discover how American they really are, and I agree with this sentiment. My last trip home from Paris serves as an illustrative example. There I was near the Luxembourg gardens with my travel bags, descending down into the bowels of the city to the RER, the extraordinary deep-level subway system that enables very rapid access across the city and out into the surrounding suburbs. Every time I ride the RER I curse our American religion of private transportation. The Europeans in general and the French especially are lightyears ahead of us in modern rapid transit.
The RER is fantastic and impressive, but for some reason the people who ride it don't seem appreciative of their great good fortune in having such a wonderful system, and appear to simply expect it as their due. Everyone on those trains looks severely bored and utterly disinterested in their surroundings. Maybe it is the famous sang froid, the European sophistication and formality, but whatever the explanation, the face that French people put on to meet the faces they encounter on those trains is repellant.
The train arrived at the Charles De Gaulle airport, a magnificent sprawling temple of modern airport design. The fact that the beautiful winding reinforced concrete sructures occasionally collapse to crush a few hapless travelers only indicates for me the daring nature of architecture across the puddle, and as I strolled through the glorious interior volumes of the various pavillions I felt uplifted by the sheer beauty of the place. I boarded the plane finally and—
—the arrival at Kennedy airport in New York was a violent shock by contrast to the departure from Charles De Gaulle. One is herded like a pig to be slaughtered in customs and the baggage area, then unceremoniously dumped out onto the ring road with no indication of what to do or where to go. Eventually, after standing in the rain and wondering what to do, a Manhattan bus arrives, but turns out to cost $35. Many people board it anyway, seeing no alternative and grumbling about the rip-off, but you can stick it out for the jitney bus that circles through long-term parking and finally stops at the A-Train, which is what I did.
The little bus was jammed with people I recognized from the flight. The ventilator was not working properly so it was uncomfortably humid and stuffy, and the driver had to stop to wipe down the windshield every couple of minutes so he wouldn't smash into other vehicles. There was something distinctly ominous in the experience of riding that little bus, and I noticed an attractive young French couple looking terrified at what they'd gotten themselves into. I joked with them to put them at their ease, but I understood their consternation at finding themselves in the great city of New York—Numero un dans le monde—and feeling as though they might be in for some good old-fashioned American violence, something they obviously had not expected.
After a twenty minute ride, the jitney finally arrives at the A-train station and everyone gets off to stand once again in the rain, there being no protective roof at that station. Almost unbelievably, there were hardly any lights either, so in addition to the indignity of being exposed to the pouring rain we had to stand waiting in near total darkness, which multiplied the general feeling of distress and even danger. Considering such conditions on arrival, one is forced to conclude that the great and powerful United States of America has descended to the status of third-world backwater.
Eventually the train arrives, and of course it's a cattle car compared to the magnificent Parisian RER. During the long rattle toward Jay Street I find myself surrounded by a bunch of crazy kids who are yacking away excitedly about all sorts of things, projects they are working on, their future plans and some gritty stuff about serious problems caused by unemployment, drugs, poverty, racism, etc. and suddenly I am content to be back in squalid America, where transportation is problematic, public education is a disgrace and all sorts of terrible social issues are glaringly obvious all around me, but where people are happy to talk on the subway.
I had made a connection through a teacher and was in Paris to work in a print shop, where I had to start immediately, even before finding a living arrangement. At first I worked in the afternoons, and after I found a dormitory room in the Cite Universitaire, I started attending morning classes at the Alliance. My progress was excrutiatingly slow because the classes were large and taught by rote, with every one of about thirty students required to repeat the same phrases one after the other, around and around in an endless cycle of dumb repetitions. I had never particularly liked the French language and the routine boredom of the Alliance classes felt like punishment and only estranged me further, yet in a curious way the difficulty drew me on and kept me going as a kind of masochistic challenge. I was determined not to let this French thing beat me, but now all these years later, it's still an even race. Of course I speak much better than I did then, but somehow I'm still essentially neck-and-neck with that sadistic language. (The aspiration to learn a foreign language is a terrible thing to waste on French.)
My continuing distaste for French is odd considering the enormous time and effort I've spent trying to learn it. It is harder than Spanish or Italian and other Latin languages. In three months of intensive Spanish in Mexico I picked up the basic structure of that language and learned a lot of things I never expect to master in French even now. More than twenty-five years after that first visit to Paris, I'm still working at it, albeit reluctantly, and frequently decide the time has come to just give up and admit that I'll never master the language with all its impossible idioms, silent suffixes and endlessly confusing homonyms. Damn the French anyway for speaking such a complex and difficult language that seems intentionally designed to be opaque to outsiders.
Some big famous person (Thomas Jefferson?) once said that Americans go to France only to discover how American they really are, and I agree with this sentiment. My last trip home from Paris serves as an illustrative example. There I was near the Luxembourg gardens with my travel bags, descending down into the bowels of the city to the RER, the extraordinary deep-level subway system that enables very rapid access across the city and out into the surrounding suburbs. Every time I ride the RER I curse our American religion of private transportation. The Europeans in general and the French especially are lightyears ahead of us in modern rapid transit.
The RER is fantastic and impressive, but for some reason the people who ride it don't seem appreciative of their great good fortune in having such a wonderful system, and appear to simply expect it as their due. Everyone on those trains looks severely bored and utterly disinterested in their surroundings. Maybe it is the famous sang froid, the European sophistication and formality, but whatever the explanation, the face that French people put on to meet the faces they encounter on those trains is repellant.
The train arrived at the Charles De Gaulle airport, a magnificent sprawling temple of modern airport design. The fact that the beautiful winding reinforced concrete sructures occasionally collapse to crush a few hapless travelers only indicates for me the daring nature of architecture across the puddle, and as I strolled through the glorious interior volumes of the various pavillions I felt uplifted by the sheer beauty of the place. I boarded the plane finally and—
after the long miraculous flight
—the arrival at Kennedy airport in New York was a violent shock by contrast to the departure from Charles De Gaulle. One is herded like a pig to be slaughtered in customs and the baggage area, then unceremoniously dumped out onto the ring road with no indication of what to do or where to go. Eventually, after standing in the rain and wondering what to do, a Manhattan bus arrives, but turns out to cost $35. Many people board it anyway, seeing no alternative and grumbling about the rip-off, but you can stick it out for the jitney bus that circles through long-term parking and finally stops at the A-Train, which is what I did.
The little bus was jammed with people I recognized from the flight. The ventilator was not working properly so it was uncomfortably humid and stuffy, and the driver had to stop to wipe down the windshield every couple of minutes so he wouldn't smash into other vehicles. There was something distinctly ominous in the experience of riding that little bus, and I noticed an attractive young French couple looking terrified at what they'd gotten themselves into. I joked with them to put them at their ease, but I understood their consternation at finding themselves in the great city of New York—Numero un dans le monde—and feeling as though they might be in for some good old-fashioned American violence, something they obviously had not expected.
After a twenty minute ride, the jitney finally arrives at the A-train station and everyone gets off to stand once again in the rain, there being no protective roof at that station. Almost unbelievably, there were hardly any lights either, so in addition to the indignity of being exposed to the pouring rain we had to stand waiting in near total darkness, which multiplied the general feeling of distress and even danger. Considering such conditions on arrival, one is forced to conclude that the great and powerful United States of America has descended to the status of third-world backwater.
Eventually the train arrives, and of course it's a cattle car compared to the magnificent Parisian RER. During the long rattle toward Jay Street I find myself surrounded by a bunch of crazy kids who are yacking away excitedly about all sorts of things, projects they are working on, their future plans and some gritty stuff about serious problems caused by unemployment, drugs, poverty, racism, etc. and suddenly I am content to be back in squalid America, where transportation is problematic, public education is a disgrace and all sorts of terrible social issues are glaringly obvious all around me, but where people are happy to talk on the subway.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Smart, creative, committed, dead
I think it was in 1972 that General Westmoreland, the Commander of American forces in Vietnam, stood on the lawn of the nation's capital and gave the folks watching at home the benefit of the wisdom he'd gleaned through years of experience in southeast Asia:"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important."
Throughout the national disgrace the neocons call "the war on terror," there have been many Westmoreland moments, and we're now being treated to another one after three Guantanamo prisoners managed to commit suicide by hanging themselves with sheets and clothing.
From the TimesOnline:
Yesterday, Colleen Graffy, a senior State Department official, dismissed the suicides as a “good PR move to draw attention” and “a tactic to further the jihadi cause." The camp commander described the men as dangerous extremists who would go to any lengths to become martyrs. “They are smart, they are creative, they are committed,” Rear Admiral Harry Harris said. "They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."
A total of 350 'self-harm' incidents were reported at Guantanamo in 2003, including 120 'hanging gestures'.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
District B13
I got snookered into seeing this ennervatingly bad French movie last night by reading the lead-in of the NYT review, so off I went with some friends to see it at the Angelika theater.
Big mistake. District B13 is derivative, gratuitously violent and transparent propaganda that appears to have been produced under government influence in response to the car-burning riots that started in the housing projects of Seine St. Denis last summer.
In early 1930s America, with the misery of the great depression in full flower, Hollywood was gaga over the talkies and directors like Howard Hawkes were making movies full of crackling dialog and blazing guns, many of which glorified criminal violence as a way of getting ahead in a world that left no other avenue open to success. (Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson and the original Scarface are examples of this genre.) The authorities under the Hoover administration were horrified, resulting in the establishment of the Hayes Commission's Motion Picture Production Code that specifically prohibited such movies. In accordance with Hayes guidelines, leading-man actors like James Cagney, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson started showing up as wise-cracking FBI agents instead of dangerously attractive gangsters. District B13 is the nauseating equivalent for the current French context.
A single misleading film review is no big thing, but after Judith Miller's spectacular stenography about WMD and Tom Friedman's authoritative support for the war party (not to mention Times Select), I rely less and less on the Gray Lady and such ignorant mistakes only confirm my disaffection. Here is a better capsule review by the New York Post's Lumenick:
Update: Woops. District B13 was made in 2004. Well, so much for that theory.
Big mistake. District B13 is derivative, gratuitously violent and transparent propaganda that appears to have been produced under government influence in response to the car-burning riots that started in the housing projects of Seine St. Denis last summer.
In early 1930s America, with the misery of the great depression in full flower, Hollywood was gaga over the talkies and directors like Howard Hawkes were making movies full of crackling dialog and blazing guns, many of which glorified criminal violence as a way of getting ahead in a world that left no other avenue open to success. (Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson and the original Scarface are examples of this genre.) The authorities under the Hoover administration were horrified, resulting in the establishment of the Hayes Commission's Motion Picture Production Code that specifically prohibited such movies. In accordance with Hayes guidelines, leading-man actors like James Cagney, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson started showing up as wise-cracking FBI agents instead of dangerously attractive gangsters. District B13 is the nauseating equivalent for the current French context.
A single misleading film review is no big thing, but after Judith Miller's spectacular stenography about WMD and Tom Friedman's authoritative support for the war party (not to mention Times Select), I rely less and less on the Gray Lady and such ignorant mistakes only confirm my disaffection. Here is a better capsule review by the New York Post's Lumenick:
Idiotic French mashup of Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13 starring a couple of veteran stuntment qualifies as something of a guilty pleasure, though its every bit as dumb as its American counterparts.That's more like it.
Update: Woops. District B13 was made in 2004. Well, so much for that theory.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
"We love it here"
That's what one of them said to me, the young wife or the young husband. I forget which.
It was in Colorado, in some former mining town straight up into the Rockies from Boulder where I was doing a four-month programming contract for a little corporation owned by a rich guy named Bob. He ran the place with arbitrary authority and had me digging holes and filling them up again in the software we produced. On weekends I'd rent a car and drive up into the mountains, and it was on one such adventure that I ran across this strange little nowhere-ville that had somehow become a legal gambling zone and was completely taken over by casinos with names like "Gold Rush Gulch." I remember nothing about the young couple apart from their words, though I think they both had blond hair.
I did not particularly love it there. Mountains are beautiful and majestic, but I prefer to visit them only occasionally, though the city of Boulder is geographically extraordinary, situated high on the eastern slope under cascading cliffs. I enjoyed riding up and down the mountainside on the bike paths that someone had had the intelligence and clout to build across the city many years before. They went across fields, behind houses, along rushing streams, even through tunnels under highways. Nowhere else in America can you find bike paths like the ones in Boulder.
For the duration of my stay there I lived in the finished basement of a house at the highest end of the town, right at the upper edge of habitation. At that elevation there was a lot of wind late at night. Right in the middle of almost every night I was awakened by a wild and roaring wind. Once I actually saw a tornado, like a huge ghostly-white hose in strong moonlight, hanging in the air not a mile away with it's open end slowly roaming around horizontally and not touching ground. Some day maybe I'll find another place that has such powerful winds at night. There is something utterly magnificent about night wind, but for other reasons I was glad when my contract finished and I got sent on to another one, this time in smelly old Cleveland.
My earliest memory is of being held up by someone to look at the ocean. I looked out and tried to focus my eyes on the distance, but the sky was overcast and the sea blended with the clouds so as to completely obscure the horizon. I remember the sickening feeling of disorientation, and I might even have puked. This was probably at Crane's beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Years later I did a bunch of canoeing around there in an old Grumman. There are interesting estuaries in Ipswich and meandering through the tidal bogs between Newburyport and Plum Island. I paddled around the estuaries and pulled the canoe through the shallows on a rope, usually with someone but sometimes alone. I remember hauling the canoe over sand bars and dunking myself often in the shallow water. There is something about immersing myself in an estuary that makes me feel integral to the ocean, as if I were some sort of waterborn mammal.
I lived up there for a short while too, in Newburyport, working for a couple of rich guys who felt entitled to order me around arbitrarily. Newburyport is an old city that was once larger than Boston due to its location at the mouth of the Merrimac River, which made it a perfect place to build ships. There are plenty of fine old federal-style houses up on the hill overlooking the broad river. One evening I was in a bar in the gold-leaf-embalmed historic town center, talking to a young couple who had recently moved there from somewhere else. They were both blond, and one of them, I forget which, said "We love it here."
I didn't love it there and moved away not long after. It was my fifth move in a single year of five moves, or at least that is my recollection and I think it might even be true. I went to New York, where I've now been living for about fifteen years. I wouldn't say that I love it here, but I don't hate it, though I'm preparing now for another move. I don't work in software anymore either, and I try to avoid working for rich guys.
It was in Colorado, in some former mining town straight up into the Rockies from Boulder where I was doing a four-month programming contract for a little corporation owned by a rich guy named Bob. He ran the place with arbitrary authority and had me digging holes and filling them up again in the software we produced. On weekends I'd rent a car and drive up into the mountains, and it was on one such adventure that I ran across this strange little nowhere-ville that had somehow become a legal gambling zone and was completely taken over by casinos with names like "Gold Rush Gulch." I remember nothing about the young couple apart from their words, though I think they both had blond hair.
I did not particularly love it there. Mountains are beautiful and majestic, but I prefer to visit them only occasionally, though the city of Boulder is geographically extraordinary, situated high on the eastern slope under cascading cliffs. I enjoyed riding up and down the mountainside on the bike paths that someone had had the intelligence and clout to build across the city many years before. They went across fields, behind houses, along rushing streams, even through tunnels under highways. Nowhere else in America can you find bike paths like the ones in Boulder.
For the duration of my stay there I lived in the finished basement of a house at the highest end of the town, right at the upper edge of habitation. At that elevation there was a lot of wind late at night. Right in the middle of almost every night I was awakened by a wild and roaring wind. Once I actually saw a tornado, like a huge ghostly-white hose in strong moonlight, hanging in the air not a mile away with it's open end slowly roaming around horizontally and not touching ground. Some day maybe I'll find another place that has such powerful winds at night. There is something utterly magnificent about night wind, but for other reasons I was glad when my contract finished and I got sent on to another one, this time in smelly old Cleveland.
My earliest memory is of being held up by someone to look at the ocean. I looked out and tried to focus my eyes on the distance, but the sky was overcast and the sea blended with the clouds so as to completely obscure the horizon. I remember the sickening feeling of disorientation, and I might even have puked. This was probably at Crane's beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Years later I did a bunch of canoeing around there in an old Grumman. There are interesting estuaries in Ipswich and meandering through the tidal bogs between Newburyport and Plum Island. I paddled around the estuaries and pulled the canoe through the shallows on a rope, usually with someone but sometimes alone. I remember hauling the canoe over sand bars and dunking myself often in the shallow water. There is something about immersing myself in an estuary that makes me feel integral to the ocean, as if I were some sort of waterborn mammal.
I lived up there for a short while too, in Newburyport, working for a couple of rich guys who felt entitled to order me around arbitrarily. Newburyport is an old city that was once larger than Boston due to its location at the mouth of the Merrimac River, which made it a perfect place to build ships. There are plenty of fine old federal-style houses up on the hill overlooking the broad river. One evening I was in a bar in the gold-leaf-embalmed historic town center, talking to a young couple who had recently moved there from somewhere else. They were both blond, and one of them, I forget which, said "We love it here."
I didn't love it there and moved away not long after. It was my fifth move in a single year of five moves, or at least that is my recollection and I think it might even be true. I went to New York, where I've now been living for about fifteen years. I wouldn't say that I love it here, but I don't hate it, though I'm preparing now for another move. I don't work in software anymore either, and I try to avoid working for rich guys.
Screwgun
Women use skin creams and something called "body wash." Guys use screwguns.
Women are emotionally mature. Men excel at fixing things with their screwguns and expect to be rewarded like puppies after retrieving tennis balls.
Women... ahhh, screw it..
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