"Chicago was still a thousand miles away"

"So I sat at the desk every night, learning less biology, dreaming the dream over and over, until one night I looked at my respectable -- nevertheless Woolworth -- slacks, and realized that the freight trains no longer slowed down at Rock Camp.  There was always the bus, but in all three times I collected enough pop bottles for a ticket to where the train slowed down, the pool balls would break in my ears, and quarters would slip away into slots of time and chance.

'You can't see the angles,' Chester said to me one day after he ran the table in less than a minute.

I was in the tenth grade and didn't give two shits for his advice.  All I knew was all my quarters were gone, there were no more pop bottles along the Pike, and Chicago was still a thousand miles away.  I just leaned on my stick: I was sheared and I knew it."

-- Breece D'J Pancake, "The Salvation of Me"

(Former) Watering Hole

 

The former Little Roadside Tavern, Nugent's Corner, Washington.

When my Old Man moved out here to build a house he came across this bar, which closed down a few years ago apparently.  Over my visits during the past 20 years I think I was actually in here two or three times total.  Our neighbor was a regular ("I just go to play pool," says the functioning alcoholic) and strangely enough it plays a small role in the book Lone Patriot by Jane Kramer, about the right-wing militia movement here in Whatcom County during the nineties.

My Dad likes his red wine, but he isn't very social.  He was probably in this place only a few more times than I ever was.

Still, it's kind of sad all the same.  I'll be curious to see if someone buys and reopens it.

Getting The Pfizer Pfshot

I'm getting my second and final shot this Friday.  It's hard to believe last March of 2020 I was in Daegu and preparing to teach my college classes online.  My adult classes were cancelled for one semester, then taught again in person with masks and appropriate social distancing for the second.

I'm glad the health authorities have done a good job here in America (I'm shocked that South Korea is actually behind the U.S. when it comes to getting shots in arms) but my overwhelming feeling is just one of plain tiredness.

Granted, providing fulltime care for my Dad isn't really doing much to find me new wellsprings of energy either.

But he's gotten his shots (months ago) and I'll be done this Friday.  Given the rapid increase in climate-related issues, I'm guessing our next "100 Year Virus" will come in about five or ten years.

Good times, as always.

And apparently I qualify for a single marijuana joint in Washington State.  If I didn't live with my Old Man I'd definitely take them up on it.

I think the last time I smoked pot was in Charlottesville in 2002 or so.

'died noisily'

"At 3:00 a.m. on August 31, planes were heard overhead, and moments later canisters of supplies and weapons began drifting down to the drop zone, followed by Franks and his men.  Then pandemonium erupted.  One canister filled with ammunition exploded as it hit the ground.  The maquis [French resistance] began looting the supplies before teh SAS men [British special operations] had even landed.  In the confusion, the captive Fouch seized a Sten gun and rushed off.  The Russians, who spoke some German but not French, shouted 'Achtung!'  The French, hearing German voices in the darkness, assumed they must be under attack and began shooting wildly.  The looters meanwhile were gorging themselves, 'One Frenchman died of over-eating,' Druce recorded.  Another of the maquis extracted what the took to be a hunk of soft cheese from one of the containers and devoured it, only to discover it was plastic explosive, which contains arsenic.  He then 'died noisily.'"

-- Ben Macintyre, Rogue Heroes

"one long wheeze and rattle"

"The world was an ugly place.  It was the ugliness of things that had gone crooked and were now twisted out of all meaning.  It was a deformity that began with houses that had been badly matched to the bodies they held, being too small, or too windy or cracked open to the rain like the careless laying of an egg on sharp rocks.  Then there were the bodies themselves.  In the cruel confinements of their lives they had grown awry.  The very effort of living was a pain.  You could hear it in your bed at night if your ears had been sharpened enough by disgust.  The world was one long wheeze and rattle as it laboured uncertainly in sleep.  Butcher's hands were another living embodiment of this reality.  So too the dead face of Gumboot Dhlamini, the one they had taken on the trains.  It was true of all life.  The only trees in the township, those around the cemetery, had expressed it in their stunted growth, drawing out the full meaning in their misshapen silhouettes seen against the windy sky.  It amounted to the basic horror of existence."

-- Athol Fugard, Tsotsi

"shaking every step of the way"

"Goody Nelson continued to chortle long after Hazard had gone.  It was still a world full of wonder.  Wildman, for chrissake!  Had he or Clell -- or even Jack, who had been the man's squad leader, after all -- been remiss in not spotting seeds of greatness in the fast little fuck?  No.  There was never any way to tell beforehand.  Courage under fire came from all sorts, the smart as well as the smart-ass, the steadfast as well as the moral coward.  Winners and losers.  The Army had actually commissioned studies of Medal of Honor winners, their behavior before the act, trying to find patterns or tendencies.  It had been a waste of taxpayers' money.  Great physical bravery was often nothing more than a nervous response to a desperate situation, the unthinking, impulsive act of a man who thought he had nothing to lose.  On the face of it, you'd expect somebody like Willow to be a candidate for heroism, but you'd be wrong.  Willow would do fine, he guessed, but Jack was cursed with the worst disease a man could carry into combat: a good imagination.  Fear came easiest to those who could clearly imagine all the horrible possibilities.  Most heroes were dull clods.  People like Clell were the real heroes, scared shitless but still able to function with professionalism, still doing whatever had to be done.  Men like Clell, and him, too, had earned their medals the hard way, shaking every step of the way."

-- Nicholas Proffitt, Gardens of Stone

"indefinite wandering through strange places"

"To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp, here and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across blue mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.

The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where wild-fowl had been, but where then there was no life nor sign of life—only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches."

-- Jack London, The Call of the Wild

"digging up blackberry roots and drinking beer"

"When young writers ask me, with that starry, glazed look they get in their eyes, What's the most important thing for a young writer to know or do?, I tell them, without exception (unless their daddy owns Macy's), to try and find a rent-controlled apartment.

Unlike the young aspiring artists and writers today, gathering in places like San Francisco's Mission District and Brooklyn back east, working long hours in hateful jobs to make rent, I as able to pretty much fake it through my thirties, grabbing scut work here and there when necessary.  Come to think of it, during that decade I spent an awful lot of time digging up blackberry roots and drinking beer in the backyard.  I suppose that's the reason, as the trombonist upstairs goes through her scales this morning, a noise most would probably find intrusive or annoying, I find it to be music to my ears."

-- August Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs

Mothership Connection

I know I talk a lot of smack about my current home of Bellingham, Washington, but imagine my surprise to find out that Bernie Worrell (of Parliament and Talking Heads fame) had a house just up the road from us in Everson (blink and you'll miss it).

It's not the worst place to retire by any means.

"more spiteful than charitable"

"Like many intelligent men, Stone took a rather suspicious attitude toward his own brain, which he saw as a precise and skilled but temperamental machine.  He was never surprised when the machine failed to perform, though he feared those moments, and hated them.  In his blackest hours, Stone doubted the utility of all thought, and all intelligence.  There were times when he envied the laboratory rats he worked with; their brains were so simple.  Certainly they did not have the intelligence to destroy themselves; that was a peculiar in invention of man.

He often argued that human intelligence was more trouble than it was worth.  It was more destructive than creative, more confusing than revealing, more discouraging than satisfying, more spiteful than charitable."

-- Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain

"you call it a massacre because that's what it was"

Vox has an excellent write-up, along with a very good and informative video, on the Tulsa White Supremacist Massacre of 1921.