Four Months In Paris

Magic?

2012-01-08T09:18:00.001-08:00

E mails are beginning to become a fertile source for posts.

This is one I sent to a friend of Mysti’s and mine recently.

After how many years? The orchid you and Tom gave us for our anniversary is finally deciding to bloom again.

A friend of mine has five or six orchids that are always blooming. She lives in Portland, and one time recently when I was visiting I had almost brought this orchid to see if her magic could make it bloom.

I decided to wait. I had not long before adopted her method of watering. Once a week she puts each orchid in the sink and gives the plant – leaves and all – a deep water bath with the spray attachment.

After adopting that method I thought I was seeing something – different – forming down in on of the vortices; so I decided to wait and see.

As a scientist I’m glad I did.

Apparently that watering method is the magic, not the person doing it. If I had brought the thing to Portland I would have been saddled with one more baseless superstition.

Five January 2012

2012-01-05T21:12:00.001-08:00

Mysti and Morgan have just returned from a cat sitting job in London.

Morgan just sent me an email about the adventures she and her mother had there.

I decided to reply with the following.

I am going back to Seattle in the morning. To that end, after 18 days here, I spent most of the day cleaning the house. it looks pretty good. Bert hasn’t pissed on the floor yet, so the kitchen – I did the floor – is still in pretty good shape except for the cat litter that Bert has already managed to track around.

I had fish and chips at the Galley tonight. There were a number of young families in the place and an amazing number of children. I have no idea how a young couple thinks they can afford four children – and there was one of those and a couple more with three.

Having said that, those kids have my vote for being the hope of the future; and their parents are the obvious reason.

First, none of the kids – ages 3 to maybe 10 or 11 – were anything but model citizens. There was no whining; there were no tantrums; the older members of the kid families took, obviously loving, care of the younger.

And then the real show began.

Members of the various groups of children began to go to the tables of the other groups of children. They all obviously know one another and they all obviously like one another. They all engaged in conversation, just like little adults.

Their parents exchanged peasantries and the kids just kept mixing and talking, and laughing – just like real human beings. Occasionally a parent would feel the need the ask a kid to do something, and – damn – the kid would just do it.

Lopez Island may be the hope of civilization.

Time Travel of a Different Sort

2011-12-25T16:51:00.001-08:00

When I was about thirteen my parents let me buy a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. It had a plastic stock and fore piece. I made it a new stock and fore piece. It looked really nice. I still have the BB gun. I keep it in the cabinet with my real guns. Unlike my other guns the BB gun doesn’t work. I wore it out. The spring mechanism that drove the pellets just finally gave up decades ago. But I have kept the corpse of that precious little gun. I had hoped to buy a replacement mechanism to fix it, but such a thing was not available.

The activity that caused the spring mechanism to finally wear out was massive. Daisy didn’t build a weak little product, I just used it to its death. An in the process I became a deadly shot.

Now it is Christmas Day 2011.

My wife and daughter are in London baby sitting one of my daughter’s friend’s cats. I am baby sitting our last remaining cat, Bert the 19 or so year old Maine Coon that wandered into our yard in 1998. He likes it on Lopez so we are on Lopez.

Here is an email I sent my wife a couple of hours ago.

I just opened/found my presents.

I had hopefully wished that Midnight in Paris would be there.

But there were two packages.

I guess I had my mind set to seeing Midnight being there when I had opened the first package.

I was almost outside of myself, on the sidelines watching, as a startled yelp of delight came out of me when I saw Groundhog Day. Oddly I was listening – as I am now – to The Tobolowski Files.

I was really pleased that Midnight was in the next.

Then I opened the envelope on the tree.

When I opened the Mysti side of the closet and saw the Red Ryder I experienced a feeling that – even if I had been aware that such feelings were still in me I would have not been able to describe – was an overwhelming surprise.

I was twelve years old again.

A Time Capsule

2011-12-20T18:52:00.001-08:00

Not long ago the wife of one of my fraternity brothers gave me a letter I had written to him. Previously she had given a number of other such letters that I had written him and which I had read. They were bilge.

So I thanked her for the one she had just given me and put it aside.

I didn’t expect to find more merit in this one than I had in the other ones.

But I did, finally, read it.

And then I begged my wife to key it for me. There is only one edit.

I give it to you you here for what it is worth.

“27 Feb 67

Tom,

I likewise am sorry that I haven’t written but my reasons are somewhat different. I even tore one up that I had written because it was fucked up. Also, I’m not trying to keep the correspondence on a one-for-one basis.

First, don’t tell me about not being able to leave. You, at least could if you wanted to, get in your little pink car, say screw it, flip a BA at fading Pullman and go off into the world to make your fortune. (Of course it wouldn’t be long before general Hersey came calling, but at least you have a choice.) I absolutely can’t leave. I am under official orders telling me against all human logic to stay in one of the most unsafe, unhealthy dunghills in the entire world. I can’t even catch a bus ride to Bien Hoa on my day off because I have duty and travel restrictions (an “E” prefix on my AFSC – Air Force Specialty Code – which looks like: E8054) because they think that I know too much and cannot be allowed to be put in a situation more liable to capture than Saigon. This means that I am on a treadmill which must make 365 revolutions before I can get off.

At least I’ve somehow reconciled myself to this. For awhile I didn’t think that I was going to be able to do so; I was really on the ragged edge of insanity. Now I just float through the whole situation, hoping no-one will say much to me because if he does I will lash out and try to destroy him. The only people I can tolerate are the ones who become irrational when they talk about being here. This is, truly, the only rational way to react here, which may go to show ou how much of a paradox everything is. I want to destroy the ones—the vast majority unfortunately, who want to “make the best of it, and take things as they come.” This, fat, satisfied complacency can only be defined in terms of what Conrad wrote about. These are the ones who have no trouble coursing through life because they never perceive anything. They don’t really act, they merely flow along the stream. They are unruffled, but by the same token they never participate in life because they never see it or find it.

Seriously, there is a drastic need for someone to take a real stand. But no one has. No one apparently will. While Johnson mumbles of a bitter long struggle (if that is any sort of a definition) military men talk of a situation that is “bigger than all of us.” God damn it, it isn’t bigger than all of us. If someone would just have the guts to do something, we could begin to accomplish something. You will notice that there is a trend toward accepting Bob Kennedy’s thesis of talking to the NLF since they constitute “A” (possibly “THE”) legitimate voice of the Vietnamese people. This is a sign of hope, but why did we have to wait so long? Why can’t we have somebody as president who is capable—like Kennedy.

(Incidentally I’ve got to take a parenthetical time-out here to say that this whole place just shook like an earth quake. Some B-52s just dumped a hell of a load of explosives someplace near here. Now they’re doing it again—5 minutes later. I guess here will be more too—Jesus, if that doesn’t run the V.C. to the conference table I don’t know what will—that is sort of ridiculous isn’t it?)

Speaking of things that are sort of ridiculous next winter when I get back, I want you and me and Doug to find a little crummy tavern, wherever we happen to be—you may be home for Xmas by that time. I want to sit there and drink beer and eat “o-cello special super-wonderful” sandwitches [sic], and play shuffle board, or whatever the game is and get obnoxiously drunk. I hope that my repeated reference to this type of thing in my letters doesn’t sound like random ravings because they are not. One of the major things that has gotten me through this horror show so far has been knowledge of the fact that I could return to controlled absurdity when I got back. The description of the action doesn’t come anywhere near telling its value. For instance sitting on a table taking turns drinking out of a ½ gallon pitcher and making lewd observations about the young ladies present could be pretty high schoolish. But when it is something totally spontaneous, totally without thought, just like waking from a dream and finding yourself doing something, I think it takes on a real value. If you’re doing something like this merely because at that moment it was what you wanted to do, it seemed natural, then it has a sort of legitimate meaning; it isn’t for appearance. Since these things that we do spontaneously always take such a rather macabre form they are of especial value to us. They allow us momentarily to transcend general life and all the “non perceivers” that I mentioned earlier; they allow us to sit back and let this stupidity go by, for awhile at least not affecting us. When I return from here, next to seeing my wife I need this, because there is no such reprieve available here; at least I haven’t found it.

I may have asked you before, but I don’t remember for sure and you haven’t answered me in any case, about Multnomah Law School. Just how useful would a degree from there be? Would one from the University of Washington be sufficiently more useful that it would be worth the extra trouble?

I was going to pick up a beginning accounting course with the U of Maryland extension Center here, but I found out that if I accepted financial assistance from the Air Force my obligation would be extended 24 months from completion of the course. Doing a quick about face I vacated the premises screaming and foaming at the mouth. I guess I’ll have to pick it up in my first year in law school.

Ruth seems to be getting along quite well; she has gotten high grades so far in her interior decorating course and is now taking a course in antiques also. This coupled with her experience at the rug and drape company should put her in a good position to get future jobs. Along these lines, one of the biggest moral uplifts since I’ve been here was something she said in one of her recent letters. A rough quote would be “I hope you don’t change your mind about law school because I think it is best for you and also what you want. You know by now that I will help in every way I can.” Somehow this makes life in the future begin to become more real. After being told for more than 2 years about the terrors of getting out of the Air force and going on “The Outside,” I guess it has had some effect upon me. Not having ever really had to make my way on “The Outside” I have no quick answers to these merchants of doom. All I know is that I don’t like the military and I want to be a civilian, at which they laugh derisively and all-knowingly. With Ruth giving me the concrete as well as moral backing that she is there is no doubt in my mind what is right. Actually there never was, but while I was more than willing to throw myself into the black, swirling unknown, of “The Outside,” I was a little reticent to do so to Ruth and the kids. This tour has solidified what I knew all along. Further it has given me some real confidence in myself, plus a conviction that I am needed in politics. I know I can do better than many or most of those now running the show; when I see messes like this I know that people like you and me are drastically needed. Perhaps salvation is just around the corner.

A final thought, one that I touched on before but didn’t amplify, is think long and hard about how you fulfill your military obligation. In fact let’s do some real serious analysis of this subject both drunk and sober this Christmas season. I hope you don’t think that I am getting nosey, because I am truly interested, and feel that I have some reason to consider myself an authority of sorts. We’ve got to consider the political necessity of the military, and what status this necessity entails. i.e., is being a 6 months reservist as good as being some sort of officer? We also have to figure that Vietnam service probably isn’t a necessity, because as time goes by I think this is going to become an albatross—not around the neck of those who participated, but definitely of those who instigated it. Thus, since it won’t be a question of your patriotism, but of your good sense, and since being here is probably the worst thing that could ever happen to a person, I think avoiding here would be wise. Anyway, there are a bunch of things to consider, and since I just stumbled into the military I think I have learned a little bit about what to do and what not to do.

A final thought is that I have heard, I guess obviously who from—Dick—that you are not looking as healthy as you might. Seriously, you don’t serve yourself or any of your friends or our cause by destroying your health at the age of 24. Once you do ruin it, it will never be properly restored. You ought to at least eat 2 good—not pizza—meals a day, either cooked by you or at a restaurant. Possible if you walked to and from the tavern it might help also. Remember that the day of the unattractive politician is over, and being half dead is hardly attractive.

I’ve put my nose into your business about as much as is possible, but possibly the closing will justify it to you:

A E K ∆ B

Noel”

A Shift in Paradigms

2011-12-12T16:55:00.001-08:00

My sisters and I have a custom that has now assumed a surprising number of years of continuity.

Three times a year, in proximity to our respective birthdays, we go to Schuckers at the Olympic for a leisurely lunch.

Often, for me, that lunch involves two of Schuckers’ wonderful – Tanqueray – martinis.

Those martinis make me expansive in my world view beyond my non-Tanqueray world view.

They sometimes cause me to commit to things that I would not otherwise have committed to.

Such was the case at our most recent Schuckers lunch, which happened to be in celebration of my most recent birthday.

“Why don’t you come to my place for Thanksgiving” I heard someone say.

My sisters had had a subset of what I had had to drink, so the assent was uniform.

No importance was assigned to the fact that we had been talking only a few minutes previous about the myriad childhood nightmares that had been our Thanksgivings when we had lived with our parents.

I invited and they accepted.

On balance the whole thing turned out really well.

But that is not what I am posting about.

What I am posting about is a tangential occurrence to Thanksgiving, and an occurrence which may be of world changing consequence.

The event occurred the night before Thanksgiving. I had just loaded the dishwasher to its upper capacity limit, had put the soap in the soap holder and had performed the intricate sequence of button pushings and door openings and closings that have in recent years become necessary to make the obviously failing, and no longer available for replacement control panel perform the task of starting a wash cycle.

Nothing happened. “No problem” I thought. In the years that the panel has been in the process of ceasing to work I have had many such aborted attempts, and always, with a little creative clicking of buttons and openings and closings of the latch the thing has always started. But on this Thanksgiving Eve such was not to be the case. No matter what I did, nothing started, and the glowing green cycle complete light happily continued to document the washer’s final successful cycle.

The panel had finally died. “It picked a hell of a bad time” I heard a voice somewhat like mine but with a hysterical timbre to it say. That same voice then said a number of other things which it would be impolite for me to recount.

I thought seriously of calling my sisters and cancelling Thanksgiving. It was only the completely chicken shit nature of doing that that kept me from doing it. But I really had no idea how I was going to deal with the mass of dishes produced by Thanksgiving food preparation and consumption. I wasn’t even sure how I was going to deal with the full washer load that I already had.

In a moment of quiet rationality a thought occurred to me. “How did my Grandmothers, who never had a dish washer ever get through Thanksgiving?”

No answer to that question immediately presented itself, but at least it allayed for a moment the increasing hysteria that had begun to descend upon me. And in that lull I became atypically perceptive: the real problem with hand washing dishes is not the washing of them; that doesn’t take very long, and the time can be occupied fairly pleasantly with various mental wanderings and day dreams; the real problem is that there isn’t a dish drainer in existence that holds enough dishes; so one needs to do a few, put them in the drainer, and either dry them, or wait for them to dry, the former being time consuming and totally unrewarding, and the latter being so time consuming that more dishes are likely to begin to accumulate before the first batch of the base set have gotten dry.

And it was that revelation that presented to me as a follow up insight the obvious solution to the problem: the now dead dishwasher was a monstrously large dish drainer. And the totally inadequate one then became a sort of bonus rather than a tool inadequate for the task. In total I had plenty of dish drainer real estate. All I needed to do was pull both dishwasher shelves out – there was still plenty of room to get around it – and put the washed and rinsed dishes in their accustomed washing stations. The only difference was they were drying not washing. What a concept.

I have gotten through Thanksgiving and every day since totally content with my wonderful large dish drainer.

I have no idea when or if I will ever replace that drainer with one that actually washes dishes. It’s funny how many more entertaining and rewarding things one can find to do with a thousand dollars when one has a perfectly good, copious and eminently serviceable dish drainer.

Great Idea, Newt

2011-11-20T12:13:00.001-08:00

Today I heard the best and most revealing idea yet from a republican Presidential candidate.

Newt Gingrich today was quoted saying that union janitors at our nation’s colleges and universities should be replaced by students.

He said that not only would that save money, it would also get the jump on preparing graduates for their post college careers.

Musings of an Occasionally Fallen Away Democrat

2011-11-17T21:06:00.001-08:00

A few facts need to precede the musings.

The first Presidential election in which I was old enough to vote was 1964.

I was in Officer Training School at Lackland Air Force Base.

I voted for Johnson.

In 1968 I voted for Humphrey. It was brutally difficult for me when I marked the absentee ballot (I was still in the Air Force) because I had watched, during the campaign which had preceded that ballot marking, my choice – Gene McCarthy – ruthlessly run out of contention by Robert Kennedy, and then had watched Kennedy – whom I had, by then, decided to vote for - gunned down in Los Angeles, leaving Humphrey. That posed for me a major problem. Humphrey seemed to me to be complicit in the war that had made Johnson not be running and had made me to be in the Air Force. That being in the Air Force was a state of being instead of doing what I had wanted to do after graduating college. That complicity, or my perception of that complicity, had made that mark on that ballot one of the hardest things I had ever done to that point in my life. But on election night – faced with the nightmare reality of a Nixon presidency - I actually started getting excited as Humphrey seemed to be pulling away in the popular vote. Nixon was, to me, as close to the devil incarnate as I had ever seen.

In 1972 I voted for McGovern.

In 1976 I voted for Ford. Carter made no sense to me. I was – as history seems to have revealed – just too stupid to see the brilliance of the man. Ford did the right thing for the country, I felt, in pardoning Nixon. In spite of fits of vindictive joy at the prospect of Nixon being tried for treason, I felt, after each such fit, that pardoning was by far the best thing for the country. And Ford seemed stable.

In 1980 I voted for Reagan. When I was in Vietnam, as the 1968 Presidential election had begun to to loom in the distant future – I was in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 – I was depending upon the Republican Party to nominate either Rockefeller or Reagan. As a member of the team in Saigon whose mission it was to document the existence of Lyndon’s light at the end of the tunnel I had had a belly full of lies from that President. After all, I helped manufacture the data upon which those lies were based so I knew where those lies were buried. That revelation – my preferences for choice in the upcoming election – shows that I was clearly beginning to have, even as early as 1967, major misgivings about the way the Democrats were running things. (One of my personally invented truisms was “FDR is easy to simulate but impossible to duplicate”.) But the Republicans gave me Nixon. So it took 13 years and Carter on offer for the second time for a stark choice – for the second time (it was Carter in the first time, also) to run me into the Republican camp. At least I was falling away with a candidate for whom I had 13 years earlier felt an affinity. And Ford had already gotten me actively past the near occasion of sin stage to the actual act of the sin. So 1980 was easy.

In 1984 I voted for Reagan.

In 1988 I voted for Bush. I was laboring under the fantasy that Reagan had made the world a safer and better place, and I interpreted the “Points of Light” speech to be Bush’s commitment to making the United States a better place for everyone that lived here. But I gave him only one term.

In 1992 I voted for Perot. Bush didn’t get it done and I couldn’t see how Clinton had a chance of accomplishing anything. I actually thought Perot might have a chance. The state of the country was so bad that Perot, with his desire to sit down with a “blank sheet of paper “ and start over, seemed to me to have what America – if only its citizens were listening – needed; so I thought Perot had a chance. But no one was listening.

In 1996 I voted for Dole. Clinton was still the other choice and I hadn’t seen anything to change my 1992 mind.

By 2000 the Republican Party – the party of Hatfield, Lindsay, Rockefeller, Evans, McCall, and many other rational, decent people, had morphed into a crazed fascist/Neanderthal/christian cult. Since then they have gone downhill every election cycle.

In 2000 I voted for Gore.

In 2004 I voted for Kerry.

In 2008 I voted for Obama.

Today in The Week I read a snippet titled “The GOP: Growing Panic on the Right”. The Week is a digest of what has happened in the world during the seven days prior to its publication. It is brilliantly edited, and seems to be balanced: each digested recount of a happening is made up of editorially arranged quotes and paraphrased continuations of those quotes that tell a (usually) two sided story about whatever is being presented.

“Panic on the Right” nets out to the following: there isn’t anybody on offer from the republicans that is of the sort to win the presidency and to subsequently be President and that is obvious; but, that aside, Romney is going to win the nomination and win the presidency.

I had long before come to that grim assessment of the situation.

But wait, there is, and always has been, more.

In the process of my seeing and hearing everything that has been involved in my coming to the same assessment as the digested presentation of The Week I have gone through, what is for me, the inevitable urge to stray from the Democrats – when I am given, what I deem to be compelling reasons for straying. And Obama has done an effective job of giving me those compelling reasons.

While under the influence of that urge to stray I have tried to decide who would be someone I would consider voting for from the republicans (now that they are a cult I now don’t capitalize the name of the GOP). The cavalcade of clowns that is currently vying for the nomination has one person who – in spite of his constant need to throw raw meat to the cult – makes a lot of sense and knows a great deal about the world and America’s place in it. But no one is listening to John Huntsman. Going outside the cavalcade, Chuck Hagel came to mind. But he hasn’t even tried to see if any one would listen. He knows better.

But then it came to me.

And the revelation that came to me allowed me to return to Obama, just as I had on that election night so long ago returned to Humphrey. And I return with that same burst of enthusiasm.

That revelation was: anybody nominated by the republicans, no matter how much he or she might know, or how much sense he or she might make, and no matter how much I might believe that he or she could get the country back on the right track, could not make it happen.

Anyone elected by a cult is beholden to that cult and must, needs be, push, promote, propose and support the beliefs and the policies of that cult.

And that is an America that I don’t ever want to see.

Random Thoughts With No Conclusion

2011-09-19T15:41:00.001-07:00

As a general rule of thumb I believe that massive cutting of government spending now will put is in, or nearly in, a death spiral of layoffs, reduced tax revenues, cost cutting, layoffs, reduced tax revenues ... and so on.

So, I further believe that the cutting that is obviously absolutely necessary needs to be planned for a time when tax revenues are rising and jobs are increasing.

The Economist has a report in last week’s issue that names the biggest employers in the world. The US Defense Department is number one with 3.2 million employees, followed by (I’m not kidding) the Chinese Army with 2.3 million. Wal-Mart has 2.1 million.

I think that the Defense budget is between 400 and 500 billion (dollars).

I heard a guy from the Washington Post this morning who has written a book called – I think – Top Secret America. The book reveals a number of disquieting things about a shadow government/defense department that has risen up since 2001. Among the more disquieting, the author says that if this shadow were to be accounted for the defense budget would be 1.4 trillion (dollars).

But who knows.

I live on Social Security and IBM retirement. I fund special things with IRA distributions. Those distributions cost me 25 – 30% in taxes depending upon their size. I’m not a millionaire. But I am paying a rate that we all know would amount to class warfare if any of our poor millionaire brethren were asked to pay at a rate anywhere near similar to that.

But then they haven’t had any government provided bonuses in the last couple of years, either, so I guess times are really tough for them. So I guess it makes sense for me to pay and for them not to. Holding back their government provided bonuses is surely all the class warfare that they can be expected to tolerate.

But back to cutting.

So where do we cut? For example,does anybody really know anything about the – apparently – off the books 600 billion (dollars) that our annual defense costs in addition to the on the books 400 –500 billion (dollars)? Or does anybody really know anything about that on the books half trillion (dollars)? If they don’t know about it how can they cut it? If they do know about it and they can cut it do they know how many jobs in how many industries that cutting will eliminate?

Does anybody really care?

I think it’s just too much fun for them all to dance around their various campfires shouting cut, cut cut, prior to heading off to their government provided dining rooms and athletic facilities to expect them to know or care about anything that fringes the edges of reality.

I heard an interview on To The Point this morning between two differently view pointed people about Social Security. Net net, one of the guys said that with rational and minor adjustments the program is solvent for now and beyond. The other guy said it was just a Ponzi scheme with a safe full of IOUs. The first guy pointed out that the so called IOUs were really US Treasury Bonds. The second guy said that you could call them what you want to but they are worthless. If I had been the first guy I would have asked the second guy if he thought that we ought to keep that fact – the worthlessness of US Treasury Bonds - a secret from the Chinese.

But he didn’t think of it. And Warren Olney hadn’t asked me to be part of the interview.

The second guy also thinks that today’s young people should be allowed to put their Social Security money in an IRA managed by financial professionals. I have most of the pittance that I possess beyond Social Security and IBM in one of those.

Its track record had made Social Security look pretty good.

I guess the kids need to learn that not all Ponzis are created equal.

So Rare

2011-09-11T11:18:00.001-07:00

Jimmy Dorsey has been on my mind recently.

I don’t know why. He has just kept creeping into my reveries.

I was telling a friend recently that it wasn’t Ed Sullivan who gave Elvis his first exposure to national television.

It was the Dorsey Brothers. They had Elvis on their Saturday night variety hour substantially before most people had ever heard of him. After the Dorseys everybody had heard of him.

I always watched the Dorseys on Saturday night with my parents. I watched because I loved the brothers, their story and their music. I guess that love had started when I first saw the movie The Fabulous Dorseys. For me that movie was a magic exit to somewhere that I would have liked to have been rather than the place and time in which I actually existed. Seeing the vestiges of that magic on the Saturday night show was a weekly escape for me.

And I savored that time each week.

I was just settling into my Dorsey trance one Saturday evening when Jimmy made an announcement. He said something like “now the young man that all the girls have been waiting for…”

I had missed the Sinatra phenomenon so I had no referent for the reaction that elicited from all the young women in the audience. There was an overwhelming and massive wave of screaming.

Before I had fully absorbed that fact, Jimmy went on. “Here tonight, ( I couldn’t tell what he said next but I thought it was ‘Elmer Pickle’, or some such sounding name) is…”

The screaming ascended several levels and some guy came running out and started jumping around and contorting his body and face and making sounds such as I had never heard.

My parents went crazy.

They thought he was great.

I thought they WERE crazy.

It took me months to catch up with them.

But I did.

And so did the world.

Before the show was over Tommy announced that Elvis would be back the following week as guest Master of Ceremonies.

And a star had been spawned.

I said at the outset of this post that Jimmy has been on my mind.

The recurring touchstone for those thoughts on Jimmy has been So Rare, his last hit single.

I bought it from iTunes last night and have not been able to stop playing it.

I looked at where iTunes placed him in my music library.

He resides between Jimmy Buffett and Johann Sebastian Bach.

How fitting.

Adventures with Ambien and other Stories: A Review

2011-09-05T13:15:00.001-07:00

Screw-loose can be bad. Or screw-loose can be good. Then again, screw-loose can be a conscious literary decision made by a writer.

In the case of Adventures with Ambien by Lin Laurie screw-loose is two of those things.

Lin has written a book of experiences, observations and feelings with which most of us would be familiar (perhaps more women than men).

And a book that only fit that description would probably not have been very interesting or very entertaining.

But Lin has chosen to add something to the mix. She has chosen to wrap the whole tale in an envelope of beautifully screw-loose abandon that keeps one turning pages, occasionally shouting in derision, sometimes shouting in despair and sometimes, following a shout with a heartfelt laugh.

So, in the case of Adventures, screw-loose is both a good thing and also a conscious and effective literary decision made by the author.

Adventures with Ambien and Other Stories is an easily likeable and easily readable 181 pages.

You can buy it on Amazon, either in book or electronic form, and at CreateSpace.com also in either format.

It’s Pickle Time

2011-08-25T16:58:00.001-07:00

For the last few years at that time of the year when the cucumbers are getting to be about the size of dill pickles a disparate group from various parts of Portland and its greater metropolitan area (an area in which I include Seattle) begin to stir themselves from whatever other things may have been occupying their typically brief attention spans.

They begin to think of pickles.

The reason for those stirrings have never been clear to me. From such discussions as I have ever been able to have with other members of the group (in addition to being short of attention span, they are also a taciturn lot) it is apparent that the reasons for the annual migration are equally opaque to them.

For whatever reason, or perhaps no reason, we all just begin an annual migration to Northeast Portland about this time of the year. That – Northeast Portland - is from whence an inventory of ambrosia-like dill pickles emanates each year.

That emanation refills the pickle larder of each of us.

The fact that each such larder by this time of the year has been sorely diminished, or has disappeared altogether, may be the reason for the stirrings of each of us to the home of the magic pickle.

But who knows.

There are many tales to be told in relation to these annual stirrings, and this year I intend to tell them all. Four Months in Paris will, for a brief time be dedicated, not to political ravings, or stories from le 6iem, but instead, only to stories related to the annual pursuit of the pickle.

A couple of those incidents, and therefore tales, have already occurred.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Please, Please, Please Wisconsin

2011-08-08T20:05:00.001-07:00

Recall all six of those fucking Tea Party Republicans. And then get rid of the re-incarnation of Hitler – good old boy Scott Walker.

They are slippery, but they can be caught.

The Portland Mayor’s Race

2011-07-19T09:14:00.001-07:00

Max Brumm is running for Mayor of Portland.

And his opponents – the ones so far announced – don’t seem to have a lot of ideas.

So they are co-opting Max’s ideas. And as they co-opt Max’s ideas, they, of course, don’t make any attribution. Attribution would admit that there is a candidate named Max Brumm.

And that, they must feel, would be a mistake.

It is better to just pretend that no such person exists.

Max Brumm is a viable candidate for the job of mayor of Portland Oregon..

How do I know that? Instinct mainly.

But I have known him for quite some time and I have noticed that he always means what he says.

And that is, from my point of view, an important characteristic in a leader. And what he has said, and, therefore, what he means, are ideas that could be important for the City of Portland.

That is probably why his opponents are beginning to offer up his ideas as their own.

And that just isn’t right.

His opponents apparently are scared to death of what Max Brumm is. That is because: he has no history; he has no interest groups; he has no money. He is just the raw sort of politician that – in the old days – used to win elections - before money and party - became the only names of the game.

So what are Max’s opponents saying about him?

How interesting.

They aren’t saying anything about him.

In fact, they are ignoring him.

But – as they ignore – they adopt.

They adopt Max’s propositions to the voters of Portland.

And therein lies a tale.

So, let’s look at it.

Max said, when he announced in April – he was the first – that he had four issues and a slogan. The slogan would be the banner; the issues would be what he would carry forward as part of his administration’s to-do items. They were:

1. The Max Banner: “Change Starts at the top”

2. Issue One: We need efficient City Infrastructure

3. Issue Two: The Pot is the Pot. Switching Money Around Doesn’t Change the Amount Available.

4. Issue Three: Parks are a disgrace. They need to be turned into something that a world class city would consider to be acceptable.

That was April.

This is July.

So what is different?

Lots.

Max now has two opponents.

And they won’t admit that they are running against a nineteen year old who is serious.

But what they have begun to decide to say would seem to indicate that they have noticed Max and have discovered the issues that Max has made part of his campaign from the start. Here is what they are now saying, long after Max first said it.

!. The Food Lady says we need to change things at the top.

2. The food lady also says that we need more city infrastructure.

3. The Stephenson Guy says that we can’t keep moving money around.

4. The Stephenson Guy also says that we need better parks. (So, why is somebody from Washington in this race anyway?)

As an interested observer from Seattle (so do I get to run also) I just wanted to point out an apparent electoral oddity: the best candidate in the Portland Mayor’s race is being treated as if he were invisible.

Luckily Max is highly, in fact, visible. And to date he seems to be the one with the ideas.

Lopez Island Hummingbirds

2011-07-12T15:27:00.001-07:00

The Difference

2011-07-10T20:00:00.001-07:00

It is astounding, sometimes, to me.

“It”, that is, is the difference between me and my wife.

Back before we both became unemployed via that euphemistic transitional term – retirement – we were both gainfully employed for quite a number of years. As it happened, we both worked for the same company. We both worked for IBM. As it turned out, the fact that we both worked for that company had a great deal to do with – everything really – the fact that we ever became married.

It’s hard to imagine, in the face of some of the stresses that the fact of that mutually shared employer imposed on us, how we could still be married.

But we are.

Self serving history aside, the point to what I had set out to write when I first set out to write whatever it is that is still to be written, is that I am writing that she and I – my wife and I – are diametric beings.

I just had my nose rubbed in that fact as recently as an hour ago.

She was going back to Seattle.

I am staying on the island with Bert.

Bert needs to be stayed with because Bert is a cat.

Cats have many qualities that make them quite independent. Several of those qualities aren’t scooping the poop from their cat boxes and feeding themselves after their bowls have become empty. So if you have a cat, and Bert is a cat, you need to consider their strengths and their weaknesses (I prefer to think of the weaknesses as unique requirements) when you think about travelling.

Bert brings to the table some non-cat related special requirements. He is really old. We don’t know how old because he joined us from somewhere – some house up above ours in rich people’s land - on the upper side of our back garden in Seattle. Our best guess is that he lived with someone who had died. That best guess continues with the belief that whoever it was that, subsequent to that assumed death, settled the assumed dead person’s affairs, had no place for Bert.

We have no idea, obviously, what his – the cat’s - real name is.

So – as our self-invented myth of Bert recounts - he came down and insinuated himself into our lives.

And that insinuation was gradual.

Bert is a politician.

That was in 1998. Bert must have been, the vets tell us, four or five years old at the time.

But back to the point of this story.

That point being the difference between me and my wife.

She spent a good part of the afternoon packing her car for the trip back to Seattle. Most of what she was packing was recycling and garbage. We prefer not to burden the island with our detritus.

Besides we pay for two addresses to the City of Seattle for taking stuff like that to wherever the City takes stuff like that.

But there were a few other – more crucial – things that needed to be packed.

The strawberries that we had picked this morning were among those things.

She left about an hour and fifteen minutes ahead of ferry departure time which was really unlike her but she really wanted to make that ferry.

After she left I went out and planted some chard to backfill that which we have already consumed.

I also planted a couple lettuces.

That was not a backfill.

That was a pale rider of an imitation of the massive crop of lettuce – in all its amazing plethora of forms – that is going to seed much faster than is our ability to consume it.

Having planted those things, the weather having been quite dry, I attached the hose to the faucet and started to water everything, starting with the herbs, catnip and lettuces.

It was quite pleasant.

The water that runs out of the head of the sprayer and the water that runs out of the place where the asymmetrically deformed male joint of the hose (sorry, I don’t know how else to describe the mechanics of this) is connected to the sprayer. Most of that water could and was directed to the various plants that had become amazingly dry in the last 36 hours or so. However, the non-sprayed-to-the-plants water – the water that came out of the head and out of the joint with the hose – of course had to go somewhere, and it wasn’t to the plants. That somewhere where the water had to go turned out to be my shoes, and all over my pants.

But what the hell.

I was just finishing filling my shoes and wetting my pants while at the same time watering the last of the driftwood delineated beds that we have planted with all sorts of vegetable delicacies when a car came shooting down our driveway.

It’s not a driveway, it is a very short gravel road, but driveway is the easiest thing to call it.

The window of the car was down.

My wife was in the car, which shouldn’t have surprised me because the car was her car.

“I forgot the strawberries” I heard floating over the air between me in the garden and the going-down-the-driveway car.

“Shit” I said to myself, on her behalf.

Replete with that guilt that can only come from empathy – and love – I thought to myself “why didn’t I just stay in the house? She must have called and I could have taken the berries to her and she could have kept her place in line at the ferry dock.”

But I had been planting and watering.

So she had needed to make a decision.

And therein lies the point to this story – the point with which I commenced this story.

That point was, and is, the difference between us.

I, had the identical misfortune befallen me, would have sat in line, cursed, railed against my ancestors, the fates, the gods, the leadership in Washington DC and the administration of the Washington State ferries.

But I would have stayed in line.

I have no idea what, if any, verbal externalization my wife might have indulged in.

But, because she appeared coming down the driveway at about the time that the ferry probably should have been loading, I know that she hadn’t stayed in line.

*************************************************************************************************************************************

I called her on her iPhone about ten minutes after the ferry must have departed.

To my surprise she answered.

“She must be in line waiting for the eight o’clock” I thought to myself.

“Hi, where are you?”

“I’m on the ferry.”

I couldn’t have done that.

Email Musings in Response to an Imaginary Friend

2011-07-09T12:22:00.001-07:00

I just finished dinner. It was a filet of sockeye salmon from Alaska and a salad made from lettuce we have grown here on the island. I also had some steamed broccoli from an unknown source.

It – the dinner - was assisted by the better part of a bottle of cheap cabernet sauvignon from Columbia Crest.

At dinner’s completion I felt fortified enough to come back to your email, which I received earlier today.

I am really glad that you are drinking.

I may not be quite so glad about the spirit, or quantity that you appear to be bringing to the project, but the base fact is, I believe a positive one.

But then I voted for Ronald Reagan.

Twice.

So I probably shouldn’t be commenting on anything, let alone something as important as the balance of someone’s life. Especially when that balance belongs to someone important to me, and important despite the massive multi-year silence that for reasons I can’t understand descended upon the relationship.

So why should I be telling that person, that relationship, that drinking (again or still?) is a good thing?

Instinct, I guess.

I know not, except from my own self concept, but I THINK that a lot of us feel as you do.

If you were to read Screen Saver from front to back sequentially, I believe you would see that that is how I feel – that we - you and I, among a small host that I know of - should have been acknowledged to have been, or maybe even were, more significant than the fates have given us credit for.

I just choose to say “what the fuck” and keep forging ahead, either toward oblivion or toward fame.

Given the time left, and my track record to date, the latter seems more likely.

As for you, you apparently have chosen to brood.

I think both approaches to the problem have their place.

In any event, I am glad that someone is actually reading my memoir, albeit cafeteria style.

I think I’ll finish the wine.

Death Revisited

2011-07-07T23:06:00.001-07:00

In Screen Saver I recount two times that I think that I have died.

One of them was fairly recent: it was in 2007, I think.

Anyway, it was when I had to stay in bed for six weeks to recuperate from foot surgery. That time I wasn’t actually in bed when the occurrence occurred; I was in a chair in the living room lifting weights to keep from going crazy and to keep from becoming a disgusting pool of flab. That time I just went elsewhere and didn’t return for a short period of time and had some frolics of fancy in my absence.

The more recent experience was substantially more strange than its predecessor.

Today I had it’s twin. That is, I had the twin experience to the more recent of the two. And it was equally strange.

If you were to read Screen Saver you would know about both of the predecessor experiences and be able to evaluate their relative strangeness for yourself.

The one today was as follows.

I was about 7 miles into a great – it turned out to be, 16 mile bike ride - and I suddenly discovered that I was somewhere else and fading. I won’t belabor the rest of the story, although it is fairly interesting, as much as I am able to remember it.

The end of the story is that I think I have returned.from wherever it is that I had lapsed to, although things – things such as who and where I am - continued to ebb and flow for most of the rest of the day.

All things considered, I like still being here.

But if there is good wine and stuffed zucchini from Vita’s in some other place, and if we go there when we finally fade, I guess going won’t be so bad.

Especially if my wife is there.

She doesn’t believe in this shit that I keep having happen to me.

An that is a comforting counterbalance to my vestigial Roman Catholic fears of an afterlife.

Ollie the Eagle and the New York Times

2011-07-06T18:55:00.001-07:00

Since the last post Ollie has been in the land of the missing.

We want to hope that that is good news.

We want not to hope that that is bad news.

But we just don’t know.

After sitting on the beach with his back turned to us, and to the salmon that we had put out for him to eat, he flew off with surprising vigor. So maybe what we want to hope is more likely than what we want not to hope.

But we just don’t know.

But apparently we can be sure of something else.

The New York Times, having been declared to be dead, or at best, moribund, seems to be doing quite well on the Island.

At least, that can be said, about the Sunday edition.

Only a few weeks ago the local market decided to sell the Sunday New York Times. If the paper were dead, or moribund, that decision should have stirred up vast quantities of buyer apathy.

That hasn’t been the case.

We got to the market at 0930 last Sunday and got the last New York Times.

They had been on sale for an hour and a half.

Dead seems to be a description that just doesn’t fit the state of the paper. Or at least on our island, the New York Times is alive and sold out every Sunday.

Ollie Update From My Wife

2011-07-01T18:11:00.001-07:00

Tuesday AM. We found the eagle on the beach beyond the trail. His appearance was very disheartening (see below). He was lying in the sand, appeared scruffy, moved stiffly, and pooped a few times. Imagine if you'd slept all night on the beach, and you'll have a pretty fair image of how he looked. We put out some salmon, but he was not interested. So as not to further disturb him, we left a short time later.

Tuesday PM. After the disappointment of the morning, we were relieved to find him sitting on a log looking somewhat better. We were able to approach quite close and put down over a pound of salmon on a log. As soon as I withdrew a short distance, he flew to the salmon, inspected it, and began wolfing it down. Check out this youtube video for an amazing movie about 19 minutes long...the real action begins about 3 minutes in).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rYswh_5tbo

In previous emails we discussed his injured RIGHT leg. After watching him and watching the video, we have concluded it's his LEFT leg that's the problem. He limps badly when he walks and appears to lack the strength in his left leg to effectively hold fish while shredding with his beak. Watching him limp is heart-rending, but he's a game fellow. Although still dirty and dishelved, he seemed more alert and energetic. After he'd eaten most of the salmon, we withdrew. We were probably 30' from him, but with the zoom lens we might as well have been on top of him.

Wednesday PM. He was much farther down the beach, sitting on a log. We approached to within 20'; he looked a little nervous but didn't fly. This time we put out turkey breast. He watched, but didn't come to inspect. A couple of times he buried his beak in his breast and wing--is this the beginning of preening? We formed the impression that he was looking and listening to whatever might be in the trees up the hill. He's still limping badly on the left leg. A couple of eagles flew overhead screeching. We thought they might be what he was listening to. We reclaimed all but two pieces of turkey breast. Just as we were leaving he took off (flying pretty strongly) and disappeared into the trees.

Thursday PM. We had to go three hours earlier than normal feeding time. We found him on the beach just south of the fallen blackened Madrone tree. He was sitting on driftwood but flew when I approached to put out the food, landing on a branch in a nearby tree . He was still favoring his left foot and trailed it when he flew. Unfortunately our timing has not been good enough to catch him flying. We put down three large salmon filets, which he seemed to see from his perch in the tree. Uncharacteristically, he turned his back to us and refused to come down to eat. After a short time we left while he was still in the tree.

More About Ollie

2011-06-29T22:40:00.001-07:00

After the eagle with the broken wing that had been on our neighbor’s lawn just above our vegetable garden flew away, we just looked at each other for a moment or two.

Then we went back in the house.

As the day progressed we wondered more and more about whether the eagle that had been on the lawn was one and the same with the one we had discovered on the beach the day before. We wondered if it had been Ollie.

Finally my wife decided to do something other than wonder about it. She packed up some smelt that had been contributed by an acquaintance from an animal recovery organization and headed south down the beach.

When she got back she said that she had seen the eagle and had left three smelt for him and had departed. She didn’t know if the eagle had eaten the smelt, or even if eagles liked smelt. It had been the best that she could do. I thought that she had done pretty well.

Later that day, in the early evening, we both retraced our steps south. We had the smelt with us just in case. As we approached the place where she had left the smelt earlier in the day my wife found two smelt. Maybe he had eaten one of them, we thought.

After a half mile or so we saw the eagle. He was huddled in some driftwood with his back to us, but even from that view he cast a demeanor of misery. We stopped and watched for awhile and decided to let him alone for the time being. We decided to leave him alone for the night. We thought that he had had enough stress for one day. We didn’t want to contribute any more of it for the day; we turned and departed.

As we got into the vicinity of our house the canine rocket – the one from the quarter a mile away domicile - appeared. He was galloping toward us.

His master was a quarter mile back.

I engaged the dog with some tricks that I have learned over the years. (Those tricks were mainly desperation measures from the days when I used to run every early morning. That running often took place in locations that I had gone to on business and with which I was totally unfamiliar. That business travel coupled with running often led to unpleasant encounters with unpleasant dogs. It once – at a brand new hotel on the outskirts of Dallas – involved an entire pack of dogs that decided that it would be fun to chase me down. Desperation proved to indeed be the mother of invention on that early morning. And what I did then has often worked with other dogs, subsequent to that encounter, when they have come after me. Having trained, and hunted, and lived with - until he died at thirteen years old - a German Shorthaired Pointer, also imparted to me some skills in dealing with dogs.)

So I engaged this dog with all the artifices I had learned. That kept him in front of me, not past me, going down the beach to the eagle. Since I continued to walk toward him he kept backing up.

Ultimately my artifices and his backing up reaction to them put him, and me, and his master in close proximity.

An animated conversation ensued.

Ultimately the dog and his master turned to the north leaving Ollie, or some other eagle, alone on the beach without the harassment of a dog.

We returned home for the night.

We had a full day the next day leaving no time for checking on the eagle.

In fact, it wasn’t until the next day that we were able to find the time to go see if he was still in the area, still alive and still functioning.

One of our neighbors knew a different way to get to the beach from the one we typically choose. That different way involved going into the woods up the road from us and going down a primitive trail to a set of steps that opened out onto the beach. It was quite scenic en route. When we got to the bottom we stopped for a moment to look around and talk. I think the eagle was the farthest thing from our minds.

I know it was the furthest thing from my mind.

That was probably why I almost made a startled noise when I turned to face the woods and found myself looking into the eyes of the eagle.

He was in a tree just in front of me.

And he was pretty surely Ollie. I could tell from the dirty tone that dimmed the brilliance of the usually white head of a bald eagle. His eyes were the same almost white yellow that we had seen previously. They were not the more golden yellow of a younger, healthy bald eagle.

“There he is” I uttered in a gasp turned whisper. “Oh wow (or something like that)”. “Let’s see if he will eat some smelt.”

Our neighbor and I moved back what seemed a distance appropriate to creating a comfortable buffer of space between us and Ollie. My wife stayed where she was. She whistled at the bird as she opened the smelt sack. She put several smelt down on a log as close to the tree where the bird was as she dared. The bird just looked into the distance like one of our national leaders posing for Mt Rushmore.

My wife backed away to where our neighbor and I were standing.

The eagle kept staring and looking presidential.

“Oh look. He’s looking down.”

“And he’s getting ready to fly.”

As those words were spoken Ollie gathered himself and dropped down to the smelt. He grabbed one and swallowed it. Before long he had swallowed all of them.

We felt really good.

We departed.

For the rest of that evening we discussed the apparently improving prospects for our injured eagle. Having an appetite must indicate some reservoir of good health we thought. And eating and getting nourishment must be going to have some ameliorative effect on his overall condition.

Or so we hoped.

The next morning we went to town and bought out the local butcher’s supply of crab bait. It was mostly salmon skeletons left after filets had been taken. There was quite a bit of meat still on those skeletons. We had been told that eagles like scales and fins and heads and stuff.

We had lots of those things.

The acid test came that evening: could we find Ollie again and if we did find him, could we keep him from flying away while we spread his dinner; and would he eat the dinner once it was spread if indeed he stayed rather than fleeing?

We could; we did; and he did.

As we stopped in front of a very large rock, or very small monolith, I turned and found myself staring into the eyes of a very familiar eagle. He had been sitting there on the rock. Was he waiting for us?

We laid out a dinner of salmon.

It was unbelievable. We were standing not far away from an eagle tearing apart salmon skeletons and eating the pieces that he tore with gusto and relish. I like to cook for myself and others. I have never felt more culinarilly appreciated.

We watched as the last vestiges of the salmon disappeared and then took our leave, north up the beach.

No dogs appeared and all seemed to be right with the world. We had fed Ollie for the second night in a row. How could things not turn out well, we asked ourselves.

The next morning we got some insight to the answer to that question.

We had decided that if one meal a day was good, two must be great.

So we headed out, about 0730, south down the beach. We had decided against the trail because it had been raining and things in the closely hugging undergrowth were pretty wet.

We saw an eagle in a tree. Then we saw another in the same tree. One had been there and the other had just flown in. We wondered if either, probably the first, was Ollie. We looked at both through the binoculars. We had just about convinced ourselves that the first one was Ollie when both took flight and went off into the nether regions to the south.

Neither had been Ollie.

After walking down the beach some more we hadn’t seen hide nor feather of our breakfast buddy, and we had stopped to assess the situation. Just as we started, what we had just agreed to a not be about to be a very long continuation of our search, I saw him.

It was just like every other time. I suddenly phased from not seeing the eagle to seeing the eagle. It was an almost ghostly transition from not there to there.

I said something really negative like “Oh no.” Then I said “I think he’s dead”.

Just ahead of us, tail pointing our direction white head visible but half buried in the crumple of the rest of the pile of feathers that was his body was an eagle. It had to be our eagle. And he looked dead. We slowed but continued. After a few steps he stirred and sort of flopped, sort of hobbled away from us. He wasn’t dead but he didn’t look good.

We laid out some food, but his back was to us and we didn’t hold out much hope for his eating it. We left and went home with hearts substantially heavier than any time in our relationship with Ollie.

That then leaves only last evening to account for. The best way to tell that tale is to refer you to:

So far so good

An Eagle is Down

2011-06-28T22:05:00.001-07:00

The day after the movie of the eagle that was featured in yesterday’s blog post we were having a late breakfast. It would have been a late lunch for many, given the time – which was about 1330 – but it was our first meal of the day so it must have been breakfast.

The doorbell rang.

Our doorbell really is a bell. It’s a lot like the ones employed in the old days by chuck wagon cooks. It is bell shaped(not too surprising since that is what it is) and it has a ringer mounted up deep in its innards. It is mounted on the right side of the dual doors that allow entry to the house. That doorbell ring, which consisted of several assertive swings of the ringer with its attached leather thong tether, was followed by a rapid and assertive series of knocks. This whole deluge of sound was a first for me. I had never heard the bell before. I had never thought of it as a doorbell before. I had thought that it was there to call the hands to dinner. I have wondered since we got this place what ever became of those hands.

My wife answered the door.

It was a neighbor.

“May I use your phone for a 911 call?”

“Of Course!”

And they both trailed back into the kitchen dining area.

That phone is a very valuable antique. It is a blue Princess phone from the days when there were still phone cops. We keep it prominently displayed on the window sill of the window looking out of our kitchen eating area at the next door neighbor’s fence. The cord is just long enough to reach over to our massive mahogany plank dining table. That makes it possible to put the phone on the dining table. With the phone on the dining table one can sit in one of the dining chairs (actually they are part of the outdoor teak table and chair set but the wind precludes sitting out much so that table and those chairs have migrated indoors). Having that table indoors allows it to be used for piling, sorting and categorizing magazines; and the chairs can be used as dining chairs. Having those chairs inside and deployable as dining chairs makes it possible to put off the decision of what the correct type of dining chairs might need to be.

And that sort of suspension of decision is always a good thing.

Anyway, all of these things – the chairs, the phone, the piles of magazines – are part of an intricate sort of habitat that we are creating for ourselves here on the island.

There are many parallel other components of that habitat.

To mention one: the phone is seldom if ever put on the dining table with its attendant dining chair (or outdoor chair to be completely accurate) allowing an office like configuration of phone, chair and table. Instead, the phone is usually used from its accustomed place on the window sill. That makes it possible, makes it likely, really, that in the course of using the thing it will be pulled off onto the carpet with a slightly muffled ring and crash.

That keeps things like long distance calls short and keeps the phone bill down.

But anyway.

Our neighbor headed for the phone. I said “good morning”. He dialed the phone. My wife said “may I ask what is the emergency?” Our neighbor said “just listen to what I say to 911and you will discover this.” I wondered if the guy was an IT Professional.

He told 911 that there was an eagle with a broken wing at an address which he gave them. He listened to whatever it was that 911 responded with and then said that he needed somebody to come out and get the eagle. He listened again and then said “great” or something to that effect and hung up. Then he turned to talk to us. The phone fell to the floor with a muffled ring and crash. I scooped it up and put it back on the sill.

Valuable antiques such as that Princess phone need that sort of immediate attention.

“Its up there” he said pointing in the direction of our vegetable garden.

We responded with some information about Ollie. We asked a few questions trying to zoom in on the likelihood of the eagle with the broken wing being Ollie. We both hoped it was Ollie, because an eagle with a broken wing could perhaps be caught and nursed back to health. An eagle with two functioning wings was well nigh impossible to catch. The likelihood of it being Ollie was indeterminate based on what our neighbor was able to tell us about the eagle he had seen and called 911 about.

Our neighbor thanked us for use of the phone and took his leave.

A series of related phone calls, initiated by us, ensued over the next 15 minutes. The upshot of those conversations was that there was no way in hell that 911 was going to send anyone out to catch an injured eagle. One of the people we talked to did call some agency who would do that sort of thing but we were totally unclear as to when such a visit might occur. In the meantime, Ollie, or some other eagle that was on the lawn just above our vegetable garden was at the mercy of the all the caprices the neighborhood could conjure.

One of those caprices could have been another neighbor’s dog.

That dog lives a quarter mile away or so. The dog takes off frequently from his quarter mile away home and races joyfully, barking gaily down to where our neighbor’s lawn, just above our vegetable garden, is. I have been there several times in the garden or in our driveway as he has arrived from his slightly distant home.

Invariably the scene is the same.

He stops.

He takes a look at me.

He starts barking frantically, making half hearted lunges in my direction.

I am in no way threatened by this.

Nor am I in any way endangered.

I am, however, consistently annoyed to the core of my being by this behavior.

To cap it off, the dog’s master stands a quarter mile away shouting for the dog to return.

The dog pays no attention.

My wife and I looked at each other. “What if that dog gets out?” we could hear each other’s minds and hearts saying.

So she went up as quickly as possible to take up a vigil and hope to fend off any attacks by the quarter mile away canine projectile. I followed as soon as I could get my camera out.

As I approached, my wife was above the eagle on the edge of our driveway. She was kneeling in the grass watching. I stopped substantially below her on the driveway. I turned on the camera and started taking pictures.

The eagle got nervous.

The eagle raised his wings up and down a couple of times.

The eagle raised his wings one more time and flew off.

So much for the broken wing.

He headed south as he broached the beach. Just as he had passed south out of sight an immature eagle appeared and followed him south.

I couldn’t tell if the eagle on the lawn above our vegetable garden was Ollie. I didn’t, and don’t, think that this one looked like the emaciated skeleton I had taken a video of the day before. So is it Ollie getting better from his malady? Or is it an additional sick eagle?

What do you think?

Ollie the Eagle

2011-06-27T18:04:00.001-07:00

Our Island has quite a number of eagles. Some of them may be golden eagles. Or they may be immature bald eagles. There are a lot of bald eagles. We have three that live somewhere near us. At dawn all three play top gun out over the water and back over our studio. There is a fourth that sometimes appears with the three. That is one that is almost certainly an immature bald eagle. That one has changed since I first saw it late last year from an all dark black-brown bird to a bird with some white beginning to show. It is apparently going through a molt from its baby colors to its adult colors.

So eagles are kind of a big deal in our lives here on the north side of the island. I have ridden my bike around enough of the island to know that there are a great many other eagles here in addition to “ours”. There are enough to – probably – cause the residents of the rest of the island to feel the same: “what a big deal to have bald eagles all around us”.

So when one of these eagles – not one of the three plus the juvenile that live near us, but one that must be part of a tribe down the beach a little to the south of us – came up with a broken leg, we were pretty unhappy about it. I’m sure the rest of the island would share that unhappiness if they knew about it. Maybe this blog post will let them know about it.

I doubt that it will because nobody reads this blog.

In any event, what started as a sad likelihood – people here don’t often get the facts wrong, but since we hadn’t actually seen the crippled bird we could hold out hope that the word of mouth that there was an eagle with a broken leg was only a rumor – became, for us, a grim fact the day we first saw it for ourselves.

My partner and one of our neighbors walked down the beach looking for the bird a day or two before I had come back to the island from town. The still hoped-to-be-rumor had indicated that the bird was living on the ground in the driftwood some distance down the beach from our habitation.

Unfortunately those two saw the bird. It had enough strength to fly up into a tree immediately off the beach behind where it had been sitting, but it hadn’t enough strength to go any farther. And they could see that it was dragging a leg as it flew.

When I got to the island a day later one of the first things we did was walk down the beach to see if Ollie – we had named him by then – was still in that general vicinity.

He was.

And he didn’t look good.

And I am posting a short movie I took of him.

And there is more to the story.

And it is still unfolding.

So stay tuned.

Desolation Row

2011-06-14T22:00:00.001-07:00

Somewhere on a reel to reel tape I have a copy of Highway 61 Revisited.

I had borrowed the album from a friend. I was in Saigon. I had recorded it on my Sony reel to reel. I had been in Saigon, was in Saigon, and as far as I could tell, was always going to be in Saigon (the Israelis picked my time in the “war effort” to start a war with Egypt and geopolitics, being what it always is, I was pretty sure that I would be trapped in Vietnam for the duration of my life) and I had not, at the point of the commencement of this little story, gotten “used to it”.

In fact I hated everything about America and its “war effort”.

I had not volunteered for Vietnam . However the career military – I was career civilian - uniformly did volunteer. “It’s not much of a war, but it’s the only one we’ve got”. I heard that so many times that I just wanted to puke.

But, not having been a volunteer, I had had some fairly deep feelings about Vietnam.

Here is a quote from a book I once wrote:

“I hadn’t volunteered for Vietnam. If one had any aspirations for an Air Force career, one put in one’s personnel records that one volunteered for Vietnam service as soon as possible. In my case that addition to my records would have occurred at Cannon. I hadn’t thought that I had any career aspirations, although even if I had I wouldn’t have volunteered. Volunteering looked too much like tempting fate. Besides, being in the military had meant that going to Vietnam was inevitable.

Having passed through the gate from civilian life to the military life had changed at some levels my pre-military perspectives. The inevitability of Vietnamese service wasn’t a problem for me; it wasn’t something that I felt burdened with; it wasn’t something that I had any inclination to try to avoid. I just didn’t think tempting fate made any sense.

My father had fought in the final stages of World War Two in Czechoslovakia. And millions of other Americans had also fought in various parts of the world starting in 1941, or before in the case of those who had joined RAF. And the world was different than it would have been if they had not fought, and I really believed that the world was a vastly better place as a result of their fighting than it would have been if they hadn’t fought. I really believed that it was my turn. I would have preferred to have had a world free of the obligation to go fight somewhere – a world where I could have continued singing and telling jokes with Joe and Dave in a youthful attempt at trying to be something that I had dreamed of for years - but that wasn’t the way the world was. It was clearly my turn. And once the wheels had turned in whatever way they were going to turn and I had gotten my orders to go I would go with, fear, yes, but shored by the certainty and the belief that nothing could abrogate the debt I owed to my father and his generation. The thing I had only begun to have the faintest inkling of, as I looked at this sardonic, grinning, paunchy Captain - 250 pounds of man stuffed into a 190 pound pair of khaki 1505s - was that this war might be different. This war might be an option, or, worse, a mistake. This war might have no real purpose. It didn’t seem to have had any real beginning and it might never have any real end. It just might be, had been, was and always would be. In Latin that description would have sounded like a prayer we Catholics called an ejaculation.”

The Captain referenced – I dubbed him Captain Cochon – was an officer who was lurking at a significant choke point of my “processing in” to Vietnam. He was the person who, I thought, was going to tell me the threat to my country reason that I had packed my bags, left my wife, left my children, left my friends, left everything – really – to go join the war effort. What he said was “well. we’ll see if we can’t find something for you to do”.

I snapped.

I never have never un-snapped completely.

But as sometimes happens, I had, in the current issue of my life, done something that had something to do with that boring and sad old past: just recently I bought Highway 61 Revisited on iTunes. And it was a Proustian moment when I played it for the first time.

But it wasn’t until it got to Desolation Row that I remembered, on a level that is hard to describe, the hate that I had felt, and still do feel , for the people who had been in charge of that fiasco we call now the Vietnam War. Of all of Bob Dylan’s songs, for me, at least, Desolation Row says more than I would have thought to been possible to say about a system that is so phony it needs a form of vermin that we know as lobbyists.

The Tombstone

2011-05-05T17:57:00.001-07:00

Ruth and Noel and Joe and I went to Moscow Idaho one Autumn weekend. If you read Screen Saver you know that Ruth was my first wife and Noel and Joe were our sons. If you didn’t read Screen Saver, Ruth was nonetheless my first wife, and Noel and Joe were our two sons.

We went one time to Moscow to visit Jack and Ted. Again from Screen Saver, Jack was a close friend whom I had met in high school and who remained a close friend for a significant portion of the rest of my life; Ted was his roommate for awhile during their time in law school; Ted is still my friend.
We went to visit the site of their being roommates, a beautifully finished daylight basement apartment on Moscow Mountain, not far out of Moscow; Moscow is the home of the University of Idaho and the law school that Jack and Ted were attending.

The daylight basement apartment where they lived was the lower level of a recently built house belonging to Doctor Tenny, a professor in the English Department at the University. Doctor – inevitably he was called behind his back “Doc” – lived in the upper rest of the house with his wife.

The day we arrived we met the Doctor before we had found Jack and Ted. It was late mid-afternoon on a beautiful blue and gold shimmering October day. Doc Tenny was in the rather large driveway terminus that doubled as a parking pad directly in front of the windows of Jack and Ted’s apartment. Doc Tenny greeted us with almost courtly welcoming courtesy. The majority of that attention and courtesy seemed to be directed to Ruth, but that didn’t particularly surprise me. Ruth was thought by many people to look like Ingrid Bergman – I wasn’t one of them – and I assumed that the Doctor, a man in his seventies, didn’t often have attractive young blonde women as his guest. I quickly felt as if I were a hindrance to something, but that was a fleeting impression. One of the things I learned before leaving was that Ruth was certainly not of a scarce or unusual genre at the Doctor’s abode. He conducted an honors upper division literature class consisting mostly of young women not much different from Ruth, and part of the potential advanced credit curriculum involved visits to the Doctor at his domicile on the Mountain for in-depth literary analysis.

As a part of the welcoming pleasantries the Doctor gestured vaguely in the direction of what appeared to be an automobile. It must have been a 1957 Dodge, but it was somewhat hard to ascertain its exact lineage because where there once had been fins and fenders and lights there were dents and holes and bumps and roundness. Not long in the future from that October day the snows would come and, being on a mountain, the ice would follow. The garage and driveway during that time of the year became a place requiring caution, and caution was a thing that the Doctor, it seemed, lacked. Old Overholt apparently made a bad time of the year for driving not seem so bad at all; apparently due to that spiritual influence, the Doctor’s car had gradually become a shapeless lump of dented and rounded sheet metal. Jack and Ted said watching him get the vehicle out of the garage and launched out of the parking apron, down the mountain-trail-like driveway to the main highway was an experience not to be missed; the return, they said was equally exciting. The essence of the fins could still be perceived, which is how I knew that it was a Dodge; it was a well used vehicle.

The gesture to the lump-like automobile was accompanied by a running dialogue in something resembling drunken Elizabethan (or at least not contemporary American) English. “Behold yonder stands the noblest of steeds. She carries me unto battle and victory over the stanchions of evil.”
Noel and Joe were beginning to pay attention. Ruth didn’t know what to say. Nor did I. With murmurs from the two boys – murmurs of something between admiration and caution – and silence from Ruth and me, he continued. “I gainsay those who call her a cheval qui a la coeur brisé. She is merely reaching her threshold of greatness.”
With that he lurched toward the steps leading to his portion of the domicile. “Join me, children, in the curtilage for an imbibement. “ And up and in he went.

We were just looking at one another, wondering what to do next and wondering where our friends and hosts were when they appeared.

“We saw you coming and saw him out there and decided the only proper entrance for you – since such an opportunity was available – was for you folks to get a shot of the Doc unfiltered. You would have thought we were making it up otherwise,” said Ted. He was something of a poet. “He invited us in, and that isn’t an invitation to be taken lightly,” said Jack.

“What dost thou desire, fair damsel?” boomed across the large great room-with-massive-fireplace. Ruth being the only damsel present, I assumed the Doctor was addressing her. “Gin and tonic?” she asked. “Your every wish shall be granted,” rejoined Doc Tenny. And he set about making one.

As we all sat around talking, and drinking - Jack and Ted and I had helped ourselves to beer from the refrigerator, and the Doctor had poured a large tumbler of Irish without ice – time just seemed to pass. In spite of the awkwardly surreal nature of the encounter to that point, I had to admit, and I assumed the others had had to as well, that the Doctor was a good host and terribly entertaining.

After some time and some drinks he began to speak in a more contemporary manner. “ I have a treasure in the trunk of my car that I rarely share with others, but for this august group, I would like to make an exception.” Ted and Jack just looked at one another. I saw a flash of something pass between them, but I had no idea what it might be. “Yes, after our next re-fill we must go out; we must go out before darkness settles upon us, and I will show you my treasure.” And then we did another round.

Once out on the twilit parking apron, the Doctor moved to what must have been the rear of the amorphous mound of metal that was his automobile, and with a flourish withdrew a key, shakily thrust it in the direction of what was most probably the trunk and a piece of flattish metal popped up at a forty five degree angle.

In the waning light one could see a mass of things, but there was one thing of note. It was the biggest thing in the cavity: it was about three feet in length, eighteen inches in width, was curved on one end and was flat on the other end. It appeared to be made of stone. It was a tombstone.

“I found this in the woods several years ago, and I want it to adorn my grave when I’m gone. It sums me up better than I could have ever contemplated doing myself. I doubt even if Marian would have done as well.” And he, with grimaces and grunts – it was, indeed made of stone – horsed the thing out of the trunk and leaned it against his leg so that all could see. In the rapidly waning light it was still possible to read the chiseled words: “He Was A Good Woodsman”.
Thinking about this story and then telling it as I just have completed, from the vantage point of all of those intervening years has caused me to ponder what might be my exit line, my epitaph. And, I think I have it:

He Nearly Accomplished Quite A Number Of Things

Halloween Story Part Thirty Seven

2011-05-05T17:37:00.001-07:00

It must have been somewhere between the years 1600 and 1700 when the giant oak came down.

A team of woodsmen had been dispatched to cut it down and hew the massive trunk into timbers that could be used as structural members in the buildings that were going up all over Paris.

But bringing it down had not been easy.

First, the very thing that made its harvesting a desirable action, that thing being its massive size had come close to being the undoing of the project. The tree had clung to the rocky ridge of an outcropping from whence it had emerged from an acorn randomly abandoned by some ancient squirrel for so many centuries that its trunk possessed a diameter – the woodsmen soon discovered – far greater than the length of any cross cut saw known to be in existence. This they had discovered to their chagrin when first they had dragged the massive and heavy blade that they did possess up the difficult, rocky, slippery and very steep incline that allowed them to gain access to the base of the tree.

The blade was probably ten feet in length. It was far short of being able to do much more than enter the first few feet of the trunk. That initial attempt had created a nasty and perhaps fatally deep gash in the ancient giant’s trunk, but it had not come close to severing it completely through. The woodsmen had considered trying to put an equally deep cut into the opposing side of the trunk but the drop off from that side to the ravine below made such an endeavor impossible unless one were able to invoke some form of levitation.

So the tree was wounded, but spared, from that initial attempt. And with winter coming on, the tree was left to preside over another of the uncountable winters that it had endured and survived.

But that would be its last.

The woodsmen did not rest that winter. They were hard at work on a much bigger blade. Before they had left the giant for the winter they had measured what would be needed in size from a blade to be able to re-enter the cut already started and make it all the way through to the other side. They assumed the tree would come down somewhat before the saw had cut completely through, but they didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

They visited every smith that they knew. It was surprising how hard it turned out to be to be able to acquire a sheet of iron the size that they needed. A number of smiths said that they could provide the thing, but they all failed to deliver what had been promised. They were all either too short in the final analysis, or if long enough they were made of two or more pieces that had been hammered to appear as a functionally single piece, but their seams told the true story: under the stress of the almost endless back and forth that would be necessary to complete the cut the seams would heat and they would fail. The woodsmen were not smiths, but they knew the intricacies of their trade so well that they knew that a hammered seam would not stand up to the stress of their intended mission. Only a single continuous sheet of iron would allow them to craft the blade that they needed.

As the winter deepened and their ability to acquire the blank that they needed from which to create the great blade that would fell the great oak they began to despair of success.

It was then that Luc, the younger of the two woodsmen brothers, heard of a sort of wizard or alchemist who made a metal from iron, but once made it really wasn’t iron any more. He wasn’t a smith and he wasn’t inside the walls of Paris. He was a short distance outside of the walls in a place that had a small stream and was in a quite large grove of second growth oak. Luc had heard that the wizard had chosen that spot so that he had room enough build the rather larger earthen structure in which he made the metal and the equally large fireplace or kiln where he burned the oak that he harvested from the adjacent grove. In that kiln he reduced the oak to charcoal. That charcoal was the secret to the metal that he produced. His metal had proven to be a superior raw material for the blades of swords and he was prospering with sales of his product to the sword makers of numerous nobles. It was said that perhaps even the king had blades made from this wizard’s metal.

So one day in early February Luc went outside the walls and visited the wizard or alchemist or super smith or whatever he might be. Luc didn’t really care. He just wanted a one piece blank of metal from which he and his brother could craft a blade sufficient to complete the job they had started the previous winter. Gerard, Luc’s brother woodsman didn’t have much hope for the venture.

The Ethics of Road Kill

2011-05-05T08:03:00.001-07:00

In Screen Saver there are a number of stories that have bird hunting with Blitz and Brown – two wonderful German Shorthaired Pointers - as their background milieu. These stories inevitably talk about various aspects of hunting, shooting, preparing, cooking and eating various upland game birds: pheasant, chukkar, Hungarian partridge and quail.

What I didn't realize I was omitting during all the writing and editing of the book was that I completely neglected to mention a key adjunct to the hunting of birds. Being out in the wheat fields and sugar beet fields of Oregon and Idaho inevitably brought Jack and me into contact with a physical phenomenon and an associated dilemma. Pheasants like to fly into the path of oncoming cars. Sometimes they make it through unscathed. Sometimes they don't. When they don't, they often manage to limp and flop to the edge of the road where they die not much worse than for the wear and tear of a ruptured heart or massive concussion resulting from contact with the car. This caused the phenomenon: lots of possibly edible game scattered hither and yon along the roadways and byways of many beautiful autumn afternoons. Which led to the dilemma: is it ethical to re-harvest any or all of that previously harvested game?

Jack and I decided that, if we had seen the game being harvested the answer was a definite yes. If the incident of the bird's demise had not been personally witnessed by us, and, if upon stopping and examining a victim, rigor mortis had not yet set in, the answer was a slightly less enthusiastic yes, but yes nonetheless. If the victim was stiff as a tray of ice cubes the answer became hunger dependent.

Recipe to follow.

Pogo Was His Hero

2011-04-28T16:52:00.001-07:00

Dave was a member of the RF Trio. The Trio was one of the major themes in Screen Saver. When Dave died a couple of years ago I wrote this memorial. His family preferred the "Dave was born ... Dave always liked ... Dave leaves ..." format. So I have finally decided to publish mine.

Pogo was his hero. Until or unless one reads some volumes of Walt Kelly’s stories of Okefenokee Swamp and its denizens, that statement seems somewhere between meaningless and ridiculous. After such a reading one joins Dave in acknowledging his hero, and acquires a sense of wonder at Dave’s grasp of the absurd.

Music was his essence. When one watches Yo-Yo Ma play the cello it is his face that becomes the center of attention. The contortions and grimaces that accompany (perhaps provide) the verging on heavenly sounds are amazing. When Dave played the banjo similar facial gymnastics were present. And the sounds, while not Bach or Beethoven were equally heavenly.

Versatility was his forte. He excelled at singing, magic tricks, story telling, writing songs, selling appliances, being a fireman, being a health care worker, being an executive administrator, being a father, being a husband, being a friend and being a confidante. He was about as complete as any individual human ever is.
Whimsical was his spirit. When much younger he named a group of neighborhood friends the Simpson Street Marauders. The group still exists.

A real life was his goal. A friend once observed that Dave wished “to navigate the sea of life floating in an inner tube of happiness while strumming the banjo”. Those of us who knew him think that he succeeded, and have a deep admiration for his success.

But that life has ended. With Dave’s passing, the other side now has two Simpson Street Marauders. That is joyous news for the other side.

Time – and the Bottle

2011-01-30T16:24:00.001-08:00

I have no sense of direction. I didn’t know that there was such a thing - although I had heard the term used I had never given it any credence, had thought it to be a figure of speech, until fairly recently in my life. Up to that time I had always stumbled around in places unfamiliar trying to find where it was that I was trying to get to and refusing resolutely any offers of help from other people.

“What could they know about how to get somewhere that I don’t already know?” was my mantra.

So I stumbled through a life of never knowing, unless I happened to be in a place that I already knew intimately, or a place that had a significant body of water – I seemed to find direction from significant bodies of water – where I was or how I was going to get to where it was that I wanted to go.

The aggregate accretion of experiences with people who did seem to know where it was that they were going (or in some few cases where I had grudgingly acceded to their views of how one might get somewhere) finally, after years and years created a body of evidence that even one as stubborn as I had to accept as proof of the fact that there is, indeed, a sense of direction. The fact that I lacked it was, from my viewpoint a disadvantage, but to continue to deny its existence, to my always maximum disadvantage, and to the irritation of my intimates, who usually were victims, if not of my misdirection, at least victims of my bad temper related to the subject, seemed, once I had perceived that there was indeed such a thing as sense of direction, at the point of that discovery, to be something from which even I, Noel the stubborn, should cease and desist.

I guess age mellows one.

The realization and subsequent admission that there is a sense of direction, and that it is something that I completely lack, brought on a degree of pensivity.

Could there be other such “senses” that some have some don’t?

Could, for example, my running battle with everybody I have ever known about what the color of something is, be due to the fact that I have as sense of color much more acute than most? One of my best friends and I almost came to blows when I was quite young, as was he, over what the color of his sleeping bag was.

It was clearly a very dark, almost black, purple. But purple it was, nonetheless.

He said it was black.

He was, the Joe, who in my memoir, Screen Saver, picked up a hatchet and split an offending can of chili, spraying it into the air, and into the campfire, and all over his face.

That happened substantially later in my friendship with him than the disagreement over the color of his sleeping bag, but I have often wondered if, in relation to our heated arguments over that bag’s color, I had been flirting with disaster.

In any event, he couldn’t see the bag’s color.

I, long ago, stopped trying to describe to anyone, the color of anything.

Most people just don't see the colors that I see.

There are myriad much less interesting stories, hard though it may be to believe that anything could be less interesting than the foregoing, than Joe and his sleeping bag, relating to the subject of sense of color that I could drone on about.

But I won’t.

Suffice it to say that there seem to be – as illustrated by the examples given here – direction and color – senses that some of us have and some of us don’t have.

That is all a prologue to the following.

I have always thought that time has a horizontal component and a vertical component. It has a horizontal axis and a vertical axis.

The horizontal component can be expressed in garden variety, we’ve-always-known-that terms: seconds, minutes, hours, days, and so on and so on.

The vertical component is the one I have never heard anyone speak of. They allude to it but never acknowledge its existence. It is measured in numbers of – somethings – occurring across the horizontal component. Those somethings can be gustatorial, transactional, gladiatorial, sexual or anything that humans do or perceive while suspended in the horizontal axis of time.

My sojourn here in France has stress tested one such thing that humans do.

It has been bottles of wine. It has been many, many, many bottles of wine. They have been responsibly spaced across the horizontal axis of time but they have been many.

I should mention that they have not always been bottles. They have sometimes been carafes or glasses, but in aggregate they can have been measured in bottles. But they have represented a startlingly robust vertical axis to a startlingly minute horizontal one.

And that has, occasionally been cause for concern.

But not much.

As I lay in bed this evening, having come back from a great dinner, only spoiled by the most self-absorbed and boring young people that I have ever had the misfortune of having been put in proximity of, and their droning, self absorbed, listlessly asexual conversation (they were, of course Americans) I had a twinge of pain.

I had the first such twinge – I have twinges all the time anymore but this one was new to the area from which it emanated – this morning and had tried to ignore it.

The day that unfolded after that early morning twinge had been too interesting to allow me to notice further twinges.

But now, just before I started writing this piece, it is dark, it is night, the day is done and all I have to read is some kind of thriller that I found in the inventory of abandoned books that various other tenants from the English speaking world have left behind (and I have been reading it voraciously, it being amazingly good) I had nothing to fend off my awareness of the twinges.

The twinge was centered, as it had been in the morning, in my left side in the bulge, not large, by the way, of fat that exists just below one’s rib cage.

I think that is the area of the kidney. At least that belief allows me to foster deep worries about my long term permanence in this life, and I like having such worries.

I felt the area from which the twinge seemed to be coming from and I felt again, and yet again; but I couldn’t make any meaningful pain result from my probing fingers.

But when I moved the pain again re-asserted itself. It was still there.

It wasn’t a very bad pain. It was just an irritating, worrying little pain.

“Oh, I hope it’s my back and not my kidney” I heard myself say.

In my other blog I wrote a post that ended with my preferred epitaph: “He nearly accomplished quite a number of things”.

I think I like “Oh, I hope it’s my back and not my kidney” better.

Addendum to Asians

2011-01-30T09:29:00.001-08:00

I was so tangled up in trying to be valid in my impressions from which I was deriving conclusions that I was putting into the post “Asians” that I completely forgot something way more important – it seems to me – than the fact that there now seems to be a rather large number of French men and French women of Asian descent out and about and speaking educated French.

That something is that, like the Africans, the Asian sourced French seem to have a reasonably strong affinity for the European sourced French: the number of mixed couples on the streets walking hither and yon, stopping at boulangeries, boucheries and poissonneries, or having a café in the brasserie of their choice, speaking French that sounds to me to be the standard that is taught in school as properly accented, articulated, pronounced and grammared are legion.

Of course, in a mixed couple, one would expect that correctness of French from the non Asian member. That would be an appropriate and unarguable default prejudice.

But both seem to be railing on at one another with equally correct Frenchness.

I seem to have noticed that these ubiquitous mixed Asian and European couples are all of an age to have children. That is a difference compared to what I think that I have observed with the Africans. My observations, at least, don’t support the apparently multi generational mixing that seems, again by my observations, to be occurring (and apparently have already occurred) between the Europeans and the Africans.

***********************************************************

I was in the checkout line at Carrefour City back awhile and in the line next to me was and absolutely beautiful three or so year old Asian child – I guess a girl – it was too beautiful to have been a boy. She started speaking what sounded like complex sentences to no one apparently in particular. She was apparently just making observations on what was going on around her.

As always a surge of the unfairness of it all, that I didn’t somewhere early enough in life to have done something about it, acquire the need to learn French. It just seems so unfair that all these little kids can speak the language and I am illiterately mute.

But, what the hell.

Anyway, I was going through this envy trip and trying to figure out what it was that she was saying when her father bent down to her and said something. I know not what it was, but the tone and demeanor were suitably adoring.

He was a slender six foot or so, tall, European stock Frenchman with strawberry blond hair.

“Oh” I said to myself. “How stupid of me to have thought that the kid was having her hair done.”

Asians

2011-01-27T08:54:00.001-08:00

The first couple of times I was in Paris there were tour busses full of Japanese tourists going to all the places that bus loads of tourists go to.

When I got here at the beginning of the beginning of this trip there were bus loads of Chinese tourists going to all of the places that bus loads of tourists go to.

Between those two apparently symmetrical statements of tourist demography lies a gulf of change.

When Mysti and I spent our first month in Paris we quickly discovered the traiteurs – the food shops that had a vast and unbelievably enticing array of importer food – takeout food. In our arrondissement, just around the corner from our apartment was, what in later trips I started calling “The Pig” because of its happy pig’s head sign hanging over it. There were many others but The Pig seemed to be the best.

So we frequently acquired key items for of our dinner at The Pig.

We bought galettes, which were what I would have called shredded raw potato pancakes. These were cooked to a deeply, crisply, deep golden brown.

We bought quiches of wonderful, imaginative variety and wonderful, unbelievably edible quality.

I bought cold cooked trout with the skin partially removed at an angle to the axis of the fish.

Being vegetarian, Mysti bought a wide variety of salads. I eat salads too, so she bought enough for two.

And for both of us, we bought choucroute. We bought wonderful choucroute. I always thought that sauerkraut was some sort of ethnic joke. The kind that I had experience with in the United States was, by my standards, inedible. Bud Clark, the pub master of the Goose Hollow Inn in Portland had for years a standing offer n his menu: “all the sauerkraut you can eat – $5.00”. Apparently Bud had similar feelings about sauerkraut.

But this thing that they have in France, this choucroute, I discovered on first eating, starting with the thinness of the strands of cabbage, is a thing apart. It has no resemblance to its American cousin other than that it is made of cabbage.

The French version – actually it is the Alsatian version - has juniper berries mixed into it. It often has had just a little white wine added to its magical preparation process. It is only mildly sour, being more savory than sour. And it is good eaten cold, room temperature, or warm.

So, early in out times in Paris the traiteurs ran what an American would probably have called an upscale delicatessen with a pan-European selection of food.

Somewhere in the very early 2000s that changed. Sushi appeared in one of the traiteur’s shops. Then it was soon in two. And in almost no time its presence in the shops had gone geometric. And it wasn’t that the traiteurs had decided to go eclectic. Traiteurs who had all been native European stock had changed somewhere while we weren’t paying attention into Asians. The European heritage traiteurs seemed to have all, or mostly, been replaced. And soon the sushi had full show cases of other Asian foods to accompany it.

Choucroute wasn’t in every deli anymore; sushi was.

These new Asian entrepreneurs all spoke French, but even I could tell that it was French with a strange accent. French was clearly not their first language. But they were integrating at least to the point of learning the language. But where Mysti and I went, we didn’t see them. We didn’t see them, that is, unless they had happened to have taken over a shop in the areas that we habituated. And then we only saw them if we did business with that shop. They weren’t in the general population of the streets walking hither and yon, stopping at boulangeries, boucheries and poissonneries, or having a café in the brasserie of their choice and chatting gaily in animated French as their European heritage fellow citizens are all wont to do.

But a beach head apparently had been established.

And on this trip French people of Asian heritage are everywhere that I go. They are in the general population of the streets walking hither and yon, stopping at boulangeries, boucheries and poissonneries, or having a café in the brasserie of their choice. And they all speak French that sounds to me to be what is taught in school as properly accented, articulated, pronounced and grammared.

In just twelve or so years there has been, at least so it seems to me, to be that much change to the ethnicity of the typical Frenchman, or typical French woman on the street. Lots of them are Africans and lots of them are Asians. But that is merely an ethnic fact. The important thing, the fact of their nationality, is that they are French.

Pretty impressive progress it seems to me.

Africans

2011-01-23T08:35:00.001-08:00

As with the post on beggars, this post is based on impressions. It is not gospel documentation of something; it is what I think I remember from past trips to Paris and it is what I think I am seeing during this four months.

And, as with beggars, I think I am seeing things changing dramatically.

My memory tells me that in most previous trips I didn’t see a whole lot of Africans. The ones I did see seemed mainly to be on a limited number of Metro routes. And those that I saw were mainly one of two types.

There were the honest to god Africans in their most formal native garb.

Or there were the boys from the hood wannabees with their hugely baggy jeans falling off their nearly non-existent haunches and their gigantic athletic shoes tastefully in a state of random, untied, disarray, with the bills of their baseball caps skewed to some meaningful angle (probably – to them) to their direction of travel.

Oh, there was the occasional businessman (judging by his briefcase and suit) or the occasional professional woman (judged by her grooming, clothes and demeanor) and there was the occasional mixed race couple – usually the man was African and the woman European - but they were not very common. At least they were not very common in the places that I frequented.

The indicators of any advanced state of integration didn’t seem to be in evidence, at least from my observations of the Paris scene. It was depressingly similar to the scene I still observe in most of the places that I inhabit in the United States.

I have to mention one other African population, because although small, it is hard to ignore when one is in its vicinity. And what its objective of existence might be – because it is a homogeneous group gathered in a single place and doing the same thing, and apparently doing it for hours, days, weeks, and, perhaps, months and years – is a thing that I have never divined. But I have found them to be a fascinating group.

That group is the Africans that congregate around the exit of Metro Stop Chateau d’Eau. They ring the exit, leaving only the steps onto the sidewalk from the steps out of the station clear. They are all young men in their late teens or early twenties and they are all really black Africans. They dress, as I recall, in normal casual clothes, eschewing the homeboy look for more middle class mainstream attire.

Their sole activity is to stand there around the exit of Chateau d’Eau and shout at the top of their lungs. The language would appear to be African. At least it is not a French that I can identify. And the sound is deafening, and intimidating.

Maybe that is the point. But I have so far been unable to ascertain what the downstream benefits are that accrue to those guys. I can’t figure out what the benefits of such intimidation might be.

But since Chateau d’Eau is the exit for my favorite Pakistani restaurant I don’t accept the intimidation.

That was then.

This is now. Again these things are what I believe I am seeing.

The jeans falling off the haunches set is still present. But it seems to have expanded. The Africans aren’t the only ones dressing in that manner. Large numbers of their male European counterparts have also adopted the look. Apparently it has become such a compelling internationally embraced mode that it has to be considered mainstream.

But what is different is manifold.

Mixed race couples seem to be everywhere (African and European). And they seem to be as likely European man and African woman as the opposite. And they seem to span a wide age range. Many of the couples I see are not kids. On the other hand, there are enough kids that there are a lot of infants in strollers.

Bravo! I find myself wanting to sometimes utter.

There numbers of Africans in every crowd that I observe in the places that I habituate. They are young, medium and old. They are dressed just like everybody else, and, like everybody else they can be heard to be speaking French. They are stylish old women dressed to the nines just as all old Parisian women dress. They are beautiful young women dressed in the tights, wool stockings or actual synthetic sheer stockings with shorts or short skirt look that has become the dominant mode of young Parisian women since the last time I was here. (The last time I was here it was still the bare midriff look – even in winter.) They are young men in blazers or, sometimes in the highly tailored, form-fitting double breasted black wool coats that are so popular. They are just average men and women of all ages and in all manners of dress just like everybody else. They are the Postal mail carrier or the guy who drives a delivery van or is a waiter in a brasserie, or they are the woman that works in the boulangerie. They are men and women dressed like business people. They are the nice young man who pounded on my door the other day in search of Monsieur…He worked for Electricité de France.

But the main thing is they are everywhere – the streets, the brasseries, the metro, the museums, in Luxembourg Gardens with their kids or strolling the Tuileries hand in hand. (And, I think, the Chateau d’Eau crowd has shrunken.)

And their ubiquity is new. And it feels good.

It seems then, all the discussion and publicity surrounding the plight of the residents of the banlieues notwithstanding, that the French citizens of African descent have rejected the banlieue form of balkanized living. They have embraced the French view of the world and have become French: if you just speak the language well and accept a secular state that seems to care about its citizens, nobody much cares what color you are.

That seems to me to be a good way to live.

The Walk to La Bastille

2011-01-22T11:12:00.001-08:00

“Everything is good in the neighborhood” – I said in answer to Morgan’s emailed question about the state of the quartier after her, now, two day absence.

I flirted with the idea of saying that it was a sad quartier since she had left – which from my point of view is true to a painful extent – but I squelched the impulse to say so – and wrote the following sentences.

“I’m going out for a walk in a few minutes – maybe to the Tour and back,” I said to her – in emailish. “Yesterday I did something I haven’t done before because I wasn’t sure how to do it and didn’t know if it would even be fun, and therefore worth the trouble, if I figured it out.

It was great.

I started out at Parc des Buttes Chaumont - I used one of my now copiously non diminishing supply of carnets ( you are certainly a walker) - and walked around the Parc, and then exited and walked down rue Crimée to the Bassin de la Villette at Place de Bitche, and then down it to the end of the Canal Saint-Martin.

That is where I did the different thing.

I kept on going after the Canal had disappeared underground and I walked to La Bastille.

The underground canal has a park covering it all the way down to La Bastille.

The water re-appears – which I already knew, I go there all the time – as Bassin de l'Arsenal where a lot of boats are moored.

There is a lock between it and the Seine proper.

The cover park has stainless steel mesh covered air holes all along it.

Men were playing bool and others were playing ping pong on tables that are permanently installed. Just before the Bastille there was an unoccupied market space – all the covered frames were there but no vendors. The sign said it was going to be some kind of clothing market. It was huge.

It was a great walk – I came back as, I often do, up Rue Saint Antoine/Rue de Rivoli to Pont Marie and home.

I wish I had known about this walk when you were here.

I wish you had been with me.”

Beggars

2011-01-21T11:07:00.001-08:00

The first several times I came to Paris I never saw a beggar. At least I never saw one if you didn’t count the little women of indeterminate Eastern origin that skulked at the doors of the major tourist attraction churches with babes clutched to their multi-rag-wrapped breasts as beggars. I always assumed they were hired employees of the state put there to enhance the tourist experience.

From the vantage point of the subject of this blog and the retrospection that its writing has required of me, I have considered that it may be that, in those early days of my relationship with Paris, I just didn’t get out to all the places that the beggars inhabited.

But I don’t think so. The Metro took me far and wide. I even went to the Marché de Puce.

The years from 2000 to 2007, in relation to the subject of beggars, I will admit, are rather vague. However, I do have a sense of an increase in the tempo of the begging game during those years.

I know it was during those years that I had my first encounter with the woman and child combo (a version very similar to the crouching-on-the-steps-of-the-church version) accosting me on my way through the Tuileries with the question as she strode purposefully toward me “do you speak English?”

I said, as a reflex, “yes”.

She said “my baby is hungry and my husband has fallen ill. Please give me money.”

I have trained myself since that encounter to not even look at the now, in 2011, hoards of those supplicants, let alone answer them.

It was in 2006 when I had the first encounter with a pigeon dropper. That gambit is described in excruciating detail elsewhere in this blog, and in my memoir Screen Saver, so if you are interested, have at it.

The point is, merely, that the tempo from 1999 to today has picked up.

So let’s move to 2010-2011.

I wonder if they have copyrighted the formats.

There is the crippled old woman with the cup. The cup has something – presumably coins – in it that rattle harshly when she shakes the cup, which she does continuously. She is always bent – I am not making this up – at ninety degrees to the ground. One of her thighs is always wrapped in, maybe, cheesecloth. She almost chants – something – I don’t think it is French, it sounds more like what a witch might say while stirring her kettle.

She is a really sad sight.

And she, or her clones, are now spread across Paris. They are everywhere. And they are all the same.

There is the hunched-on-the-ground-with-the-dog-wrapped-in-the-blanket person. My first question, every time I see one of these people, is, what, other than brilliant marketing, does the dog have to do with it, and, as a follow on question, do you dope the dog to make it stay there looking pitifully out at the passing scene?

They are everywhere. And they are all the same.

There are the hunched-in-the-doors-of-the-church format. They were local color in a few places when I first came to Paris. Now they are everywhere – every church ahs one or some.

And they are all the same.

There are the pigeon droppers. They are the entrepreneurs of the beggar class it would seem. On one warm rainy day in November I was dropped seven times.

I was ecstatic.

The pigeon drop gambit makes my blood run happy.

There are the I-have-enough-money-to-buy-a-metro-or-RER-ticket people.

These seem to come in two formats. They either stand at one end of the car that they have chosen to harvest, or wander through that car. In any event they rave. Even I am able to hear the word “deranger” said multiple times.

That is one format.

The other is simpler from a theatrical viewpoint. They just walk around and put on the seats of the passengers a slip of paper that says “J’ai faim. J’ai deux enfants, etc. etc. etc.”

On the RER to and from the airport yesterday I was approached by three of these and one of the ravers. The paper-on-the-seat in all cases was identically verbatim.

There must be a beggar central somewhere.

So what is my point? Am I John Boehner’s brother and Mitch McConnell's cousin venting, not surprisingly, my highly self-satisfied and conservatively very large spleen on the nation of France and its unique “model?”

It would be a cold day in hell were that to ever happen.

What I have just written is merely an attempt to document what I have seen and the changes that what I have seen seem to imply.

It tears my guts out to see many of the people I have described. They can’t help it that they have nothing. They are at least trying. But if I were to try to give a euro to each of them that I encounter in a day, what is left of what I managed to save over the years and that has been massively reduced by the great tranche disaster would be gone.

And there is another consideration.

Gut wrenching aside, I still have a sense of self preservation: I am hard wired into the American model. That model says that I must be a part, as much as I am able, of the inevitable periodic bailouts of Goldman Sachs, Citicorp and the rest.

There is nothing left for beggars in Paris.

The bonuses for the bankers must not be set aside. And I am but a cog in the wheel that assures their on-going payment.

My sense of self preservation arises every time I see one of these beggars. As the humanly-intense feeling of need to give the beggar something warms my heart, I see a hologram of Jamie Dimon and I pass on; and my heart chills.

The bonuses must be paid.

But back to France: it would seem that one of two things, or perhaps both, are happening.

Is it possible that an increasing number of French citizens are falling through the mesh of the safety net?

Or,

is it possible that immigration has swelled the ranks of those that don’t qualify for the protection of the safety net?

Or,

is it both?

This needs to be figured out post haste. France is too great to have so many beggars on the streets of the city of lights.

I Was Asked A Couple Of Questions

2011-01-20T10:31:00.001-08:00

A friend of a friend has been getting the pictures that I have been sending via email to a group of friends and acquaintances; my friend has been forwarding those pictures to her friend, and her friend contacted me via email and posed three questions.

They were: “I'm also curious as to how you are enjoying your extended stay. Any advice for someone considering staying for over a month? How did you go about finding a place to stay?”

And here is what I answered.

Of course in this post I have embellished and edited what I said in the email.

*********************************************************

I am enjoying the seemingly endless nature of four months as compared to a few weeks. Having said that, I will be glad to get back to the US. There are too many people, places and things that are important to me at home for me be totally comfortable in being away from them for as long as I am in the process of having been gone.

The only advice I have should be pretty useful.

I always bring way too many clothes, and I did it again. It seemed to me that four months just implied two suitcases. How could one reside in the City of Lights for four months with only one suit case?

So I filled two suit cases.

That was just about as stupid as anything I have ever done. Stupid, by the way, is my strong suit.

I know these things that I am about to list, but I always either forget them, or convince myself that I must be wrong.

You need to know these two guideposts.

Translate the following information to be applicable to a woman. I have written the information presented as if I were talking to myself. Here is that information.

You won't wear a suit; you always plan to do so, want to do so, and even did so - once; and it was just stupid.

You don't need to take a month's supply of underwear. Thierry's apartments all have washer dryers.

There will be more more about Thierry a little later.

One dress shirt is plenty. They go great with Jeans, and dress one up just a little. Of course, that is seldom needed.

Paris is full of Netoyers so one shirt can go to the cleaners, if it ever is actually worn.

A pair of good gray wool flannel slacks is really compact and provides the upgrade from jeans that is almost never required or desired. I always wear my Navy blazer on the plane, so I have a coat if I feel the need to get carried away. So if I bring the grey flannels, I am ready for the yacht club; or Brasserie Lipp.

The problem with the uplift provided by the flannel pants and the blazer is that you need to bring dress shoes, and shoes take an amazing amount of space.

But you can stuff them with stuff – like socks - so maybe that’s ok.

A bunch of other nice but casual shirts that you always feel the need to bring will remain hanging unworn in the closet for the trip’s duration and then go back across the Atlantic to your closet in Seattle where they also will remain unworn. Why do you feel the need to add their bulk to your already challenged luggage?

Who knows.

*******************************************************

The summertime uniform for me in Paris is tee shirt and jeans and a travel vest.

The wintertime uniform is (not so cold) tee shirt and cotton sweater and the multi pocketed, multi zippered campaign coat. The wintertime uniform (really cold) is a Smart Wool jersey and a St James wool sweater and - maybe the raincoat with the wool zip-in; or, more probably, the multi-everything coat is still fine for the outer garment. Some really good over-the-ears wool hat is mandatory. It gets colder than a bitch in Paris in the winter.

So why did you bring all those other shirts? For that matter, since you have a perfectly good washer/dryer in your apartment, why did you bring a dozen tee shirts. Nobody knows you here, so they won't notice that there is a not much variety in your wardrobe. Clean is important, and the washer/dryers do that for you. Variety is completely lost on the populace of Paris. And even if you bring it (variety) you won't use it. You'll just drag it around in you roller bags and across the Atlantic to no apparent purpose.

**********************************************************

I have rented the last three trips from a guy who is the best landlord in Paris.

His name is Thierry.

Thierry believes that the rental price ought to include everything, including someone who will help you out when you need help – I have heard him call for a taxi for clients who speak zero French; I have told him I have a light that is going out in the bathroom, and he has showed up within hours to fix it; I have had him come back with just the right device to keep the shutters from flapping in the wind after I asked him if there were such an apparatus; I have attended his invitational teas for some of his clients and learned a lot more about Paris, about Thierry and about his love of the United States: he hikes in Colorado and Christmases in New York, and has been a lot of other places in the US.

As long as one of his vocations is landlord – he also teaches architecture and is a musician – I will be one of his clients.

The real advantage of that is that I will also be his friend.

His web site is at http://www.parisbestlodge.com/

The Hiatus Est Terminé

2011-01-19T01:51:00.001-08:00

Except for a couple contentless posts following Halloween Story Moving On there have been none.

The reason has been that all my writing time and effort has been taken up with additional sections to what I am now considering a novel – bad though it is, nonetheless a novel – in process.

But I have felt unsettled not making real blog posts as my time here in Paris winds down.

To address that unsettled feeling I have been constantly noting on my four folded, lined 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper torn from their tablet, ideas for posts: ideas that would become posts once the time to write them appeared.

That set of scribbled observations has evolved into what will be my “The State Of Paris” post.

The basis for my thinking I have the depth of viewpoint to write anything analytical about a place as sophisticated and complex as Paris has at least some small degree of heft.

In the last twelve years I have come to Paris quite a few times. I don’t really know how many times I have been here, but it must be somewhere near twenty. At least two years I came here three times. And except for the in and outs of being on the way or coming back from some other expedition: a month in Brittany or a self directed bike tour in Entre Deux Mers or Languedoc, I have lived in Apartments. Those stays have been as brief as two weeks – one time – were usually a month, and one time the stay was six weeks. And this time it has been four months. And this time I have lodged in three different apartments in two distinctly different locations: three months in Saint-Germain des Pres and a month on Isle de Cité.

So I think I have basis for saying that I have lived among them (“a’hve lived amongst ‘em”) for a reasonably significant amount of time.

**********************************************

Things change.

I have no surprise in that.

One of the first posts in this blog was about my – lack of surprise notwithstanding – continuing sadness about things that I had valued, loved, maybe, even, having changed or departed. But those were all physical things that everywhere come and go. My documenting of their passing was only a mark of the inevitable affection that one has for those physical things whether in Portland or Paris and the frequently felt sadness that accompanies their passing.

The basis for the post-to-be that I am previewing here in this post is change that isn’t tangible. Obviously some of the changes I will mention will have physically tangible manifestations, but the changes themselves are intangible and their physically observable manifestations are merely clues to their existence.

Some of the changes don’t have even physical clues. They are just “vibrations in the air”.

The things that I have noticed, or felt, can be categorized with the following tangible words:

Beggars

Africans and Asians

General Hostility

The Beautiful and Self Absorbed

Bordeaux

2011-01-07T10:48:00.001-08:00

I spent two days there this week and enjoyed every minute as I always have. Here is a picture of a bridge that I like. There is a blue lion on the far side.

Halloween Story Moves On

2011-01-06T15:41:00.001-08:00

I said at the outset of this blog that its purpose was to try to exhume from a – I hoped – premature grave, a novel that I was writing.

The novel had a purpose.

I really didn’t care much about it – the novel - but, if I could put it in form sufficient to get an agent to want to try to promote it, and to try to sell it to editors, I hoped that it might become the sort of vehicle of near fame, or pseudo fame, or presque- fame ( sort of like being a young woman who catapults herself to riches by being stupid, pregnant, unmarried and extremely desirous of being paid for talking about her state of affairs on cable television) that I see happening daily.

So the reason for that hope had nothing to do with the novel that I might be writing.

That hope had to do with the memoir that I had already written: a memoir to which I am extremely attached.

My idea had been, that if I could get one or more of the twenty-one, or so, year old young women agents (as I understand it there are no men left standing who function in that capacity) in New York, none of whom have ever been to the left side of the Hudson (left if one is looking north) and feel that ever going hence is a trivial un-necessity, or if they have, by some untoward causality, been to that other Hudson-side, can’t remember having been so,(or if they do so remember, stoutly refuse to admit to that memory) who are in charge of the literary input and output of the United States of America, to become interested in a half-baked tale that I had concocted in support of - I hoped to be in support of, anyway - creating downstream interest in my memoir.

I had hoped that if I could get someone to publish and promote some schlock, I could get somebody to pay attention to something that I deemed to be pretty good.

As always, things change.

I have no idea whether I can ultimately tie all the treads that I have cast out in Jacques ( the stalking horse novel) into a coherent story, but I really want to.

The stalking horse has become the mission.

I should have known.

But I didn’t.

Halloween Story is probably going to be titled Jacques if it ever appears as a published work..

That maybe someday novel is now comfortably resting – all Twenty Seven Parts and thirty four or so thousand words – in an MS Word 2007 document, complete with sections and a first page header.

Thirty four or so thousand words is just its momentary form. There are somewhere around five thousand more words in my mind yet to be put to disk. And my Ouija promises me that the rest of my ideas for this story may become unmanageable in size.

What a comforting thought.

So what I am telling you-all (y’all) is that Halloween Story - as a web blog post - is finished. It has served its – for me – unbelievably important purpose, but as a part of this blog it is finished.

The rest of its story will be between me and those young women agents in New York.

Eugéne Atget

2010-12-28T11:17:00.001-08:00

Mysti sent me an article from the New York Times about the photographic legacy left by Eugéne Atget.

He is another member of that vast group of people of real importance of whom I – of course – had never heard.

So much for the quality of my education.

Anyway, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Eugéne dragged a gigantic box camera and heavy glass plates around Paris in the early morning.

(Those mornings must have been in the summer. Being in a time zone that doesn’t fit the place – Greenwich Mean comes to mind, but being a part of the British time zone just won’t do - makes Paris dark a lot of the time and for for most of the year. That would hardly serve a pre-computer photographer)

And Eugéne took photographs.

He was a master.

In his honor – now that I have been allowed to know of his existence - I am posting some pictures that I took today of his City in grayscale.

The Ghost Tower

2010-12-23T16:36:00.001-08:00

A feeling of desperation had settled upon me. The wind had seemed to have changed direction from up my back to across my left eye. That change was significant. Where the snow had, with the wind at my back, been merely an issue (my unprotected back of head head receiving a thin but increasing veneer of ice, which melted over - not much - time and ran down the back of my overcoat underneath the wool flap of insert that was supposed to hold off almost any onslaught of cold) now, with the wind pushing the snow into my left side, the ice veneer had purchase on my whole left face.

And that difference was appreciable.

But appreciable or not, I knew I had no alternative but to continue to press forward.

I knew that there was something, something not within my scope of ability to describe, but something, that would make the whole exercise of apparent abject futility worth the pain.

The sky – at least I supposed it to be the sky, and there was no horizon and there was no “left” nor was there any “right”; there was just “front”, which had only the definition of “light” and “slightly less light”, and there must have been, I supposed, a “back”; I didn’t want to conjure on what that might look like – was a darkening, muddy grey presence, engulfing everything that I was able to see, and that which I was able to see, as the muddy greyness deepened, and the onslaught of the wind on my eye intensified, was not much.

To my left –in the direction of the ice-veneer-depositing-wind – I thought I saw something.

I stopped to try to pierce the miasmatic deluge of snow crystals, made even more difficult to visually penetrate by that fierce, horizontal, heat enervating presence, the wind. That wind, although from my side, whipped across the exposed portions of my eyes and did its level best to freeze them. Failing that – because fail it must; the blinking that occurs when one is still alive, without thought and without positive sentient control, was continually bringing slightly unfrozen fluid from somewhere in my slightly unfrozen body, again and again to their surface, keeping them unfrozen – it did its level best to turn the left side of my face to a deadened, non functioning point of initial entry, a point of initial entry, that, once established, could be expanded little by little to the ultimate victory of death by freezing.

But then I saw it. And the reason for the misery, for being out, dangerously exposed to a wind and weather that had only one goal in mind – to kill all that challenged them – became totally apparent.

I had been given the vision of the Ghost Tower.

Twenty One December 2010

2010-12-21T08:19:00.001-08:00

In Screen Saver I chronicle the cycle of things – at least the cycle of things that I have seen and, the cycle of things that means anything to me.

Among those cycles are the mountain ash trees and their leaves and flowers and berries as they progress from sprays of fairy laced light green leaves that never get very big, through the time in which their flowers first appear and emanate a smell very much like rotten meat, through the time - which is most of the late spring and all of the summer – when they just disappear into the general greenness of things, and finally to that day when the season turns as also do the mountain ash: their berries suddenly flash through the hum drum green of what is still left of summer, and they make a violently deep red orange flash-of-color statement; they say that they were their all along; and they say – with their red orange flash - that they had more important things to do than participate on the front of the stage of summertime.

Also among those cycles are the chestnut trees, starting from gray trunked winter barrenness, through their first sign of life in the spring, that sign being the appearance of myriad clusters of leaves, all looking like miniature palm trees, which are quickly followed by a burst of purple throated, cream colored flowers, that become nubbins, that become, by summer’s end, golf ball sized piñatas of Autumn munificence, which, when struck by just the right blast of chill wind, dump shining hoards of deep brown treasures to the earth on the streets where they live, to be picked up by children and treasured, briefly, before they shrivel, become dull and are discarded, or don’t get picked up, and just shrivel and become dull in place where they have fallen, to be ground to meal by passing cars, and, subsequently, washed down the gutter to waiting grates of waiting storm drains, and gone forever.

I took a great deal of satisfaction in that chronicle.

Why might that be?

No reason, really, I have to guess; except that I savor using the words that it takes to exhume the description of those things, the chestnuts and all, from their annual grave, and force them back out into the light of day.

But that is not what it is. That is not what it is it all.

What it is is is that, by chronicling those things, my most deeply hidden sense of self, or of being, or of existence, can re-manifest itself or re-enforce itself, and by so re-enforcing, perhaps, it can occlude the obvious: that each cycle leaves one less left for me, no matter how many there might be left for the rest of things.

That spate of words brings me to what it is that is on my mind at this moment.

Twenty One December is the shortest day of the year. On the calendar it is six months away – quite a number of seconds, minutes, hours or days (or heartbeats) away from twenty one June, which is the longest day of the year. But in the Screen Saver chronicles it is so close to its sister day as to be functionally adjacent.

Because for me, any more, the shortest and the longest days are not differentiated. Nor are the chestnuts, mountain ashes and the rest. They are just a blur flying by on some crazed from here to there apparatus of eternal propulsion. In the case of the longest day and the shortest day, like some sort of mad GIF animation they flash past, first one, then the other,with frightening speed, and with an apparently diminishing interval between with each flash.

**************************************

Twenty one December is also the day when I became a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force in 1964.

I guess that that is forty six years since gone.

But I don’t have to guess about other things in relation to that date.

I know it is before I went to Saigon and sunk into a pit of depression that nearly took me.

I know it is before I went to work for IBM and wondered how I was, possibly, going to survive in what was, apparently the adult world.

I know it is long after my mother, in a car, on 32nd Avenue, just down the street from my grandparent’s house (where what my mother was just about to tell me had happened) said “Annie died”.

I know that it is before Mysti and I became a unit in the middle of a bridge over a river in the desert of Central Oregon, or before I had had the dream that had released me forever from Ruth on that bridge in Paris with a view of Les Invalides.

What I don’t know, and for some reason, for the first time ever, the question has occurred to me, and the question, to my surprise for a first time question, has some degree of urgency: “how many more? how many more?”

The Dropped Off The Face Of The Earth Phenomenon And Its Benefits

2010-12-19T10:57:00.001-08:00

One of the many things that makes an extended tour in Paris so interesting and rewarding, for me, is a byproduct of my lack of ability to speak French.

Not being able to speak the language, by the way, is in my estimation, an appalling shortcoming among my many shortcomings; so don’t interpret that first sentence as being some lame attempt to make a virtue out of a weakness.

But that sentence stands.

It stands because it is truth. The truth is not that not speaking French can be a good thing. The truth is that having no clue of what is going on in the world can have immense advantages. And, when I turn on some of the French news channels, no clue is what I get. Oh, there is the occasional “même chose” or “exactement” and all the other little easy to hear children of those few phrases that I have in my vocabulary. But knowing what anybody is saying about anything - presumably the state of the world at the point at which I see them uttering whatever it is that they are uttering - is absolutely denied to me.

And that is the beauty of it.

I have absolutely no idea of what is going on in the world, and, I believe, both the world, and I, are better off due to that gaping chasm of lack of knowing.

Let’s be honest though.

I obviously have a computer, so I could just plug into – something, god knows what – and keep up to date with – everything.

But trust me; I don’t do that.

As evidence of my lack of netcitizenery please consider the following fact.

I haven’t signed on to Twitter for such a long time that I keep expecting to be cast into the outer darkness by a rapidly fleeting winged creature diving at me from above and twittering as it recedes into the inky darkness shrieking “be gone from the fold, thou foul and voiceless creature”.

But I do have three English channels, Sky News from Britain and CNN and CNBC. CNBC is the only one that is worth watching – although I do enjoy the blow by blow accounts of the various losses throughout the former British Empire that seem to keep being experienced by some British cricket team or other, so I do tune in Sky every now and then, mostly on weekends, when CNBC is dormant – so I can’t claim the total lack of knowledge of the world and its events and issues that my preceding statements would cause one to surmise to be the case. I do occasionally get some English input.

But I do manage to come pretty close to not knowing anything about anything. (I hear a chorus of voices saying “so what’s new about that?”)

But. anyway.

I don’t turn on CNBC very often. And CNBC, almost never, features commentators or guests who are talking about “news” in the generic sense of the word. They are almost always talking “business”. (Jim Cramer’s ravings may cause one to question even that assertion, but in general it seems to be true.)

One of the benefits of this state of affairs is that once in a great while I am absolutely flabbergastedly surprised.

It happened – maybe – Friday; time is a blur any more and I seldom take much note of the day in which anything, even anything of significance, occurs.

What I know was that I was watching Squawk Box while I made the bed. I make the bed every morning and fold my pajamas in this particular manner and put them, after the pillows have been arranged in just the way they need to be arranged, to make anyone who had to break into this place in the event that I were to be spirited off during the day by Hamas terrorists, believe that I had been a genuinely squared-away sort of chap – a more complicated version of your mother’s demand that you always have on clean underwear to make her look to be a good mother in the event that you might be run over by a car while you were out.

Not Faulknerian, but close.

Anyway, back to the point – there was one, wasn’t there?

I think it was Erin who – in one of those rare CNBC “news” rather than “business” moments - said something about the Senate (or was it the House?) passing a bill and sending it to the president for signature. It was a bill, to become –soon – law, to do away with “don’t ask don’t tell”. When signed into law it would let gays be real citizens and be in the military, and be open in their sexual proclivities, just like their heterosexual compatriots.

“What the …? ” I said

Maybe this gridlock deal is a good thing after all.

Things Related To My Recent Birthday

2010-12-18T11:17:00.001-08:00

Mysti sent me an experience for my birthday. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that such a thing could be done –Mysti being the creatively inventive person that she is – but I was surprised that such a thing could be done.

What the present was, was a book, I ultimately learned. But the gift was down stack from other things that needed to be done. The first of these things was to read the instructions – I forget now how the package, when it showed up in my mailbox here in Paris, allowed me to read it’s external warning before I had opened the package, and, basically, spoiled the experience – but somehow the instructions were purveyed in such a manner that I got to them first, and didn’t spoil the experience.

Here are those instructions.

Actually I was then looking at 68.

It took a surprising number of days to intervene between my receipt of the package and the instructions to get a day that was properly in tune with the description of the day that needed to be underway for me to appropriately experience the gift. That was surprising, because the weather requirements described pretty much describe Paris weather, non respective to the season. I have seen the month of August pretty much meet the description proffered.

But I finally did find a day that met them, and I honored the time to within a minute or so, and I had gone to Café de la Mairie – I had gone there for the first time a few weeks previous, but I had been passing it so many times in the years since I first traversed that route in 2002, that I felt as if I was in my home.

And I ordered a DOUBLE express and a croissant.

And just outside was Saint-Sulpice.

Just as it has always been.

Inside the package was a very brief little book. It documented everything that the author – Georges Perec , a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker of consequence, saw over several days in the Autumn of 1974, while sitting in several of the little eating and drinking establishments ringing place Saint-Sulpice.

He logged everything that his writing hand could get on paper before he forgot what it might have been. And I have no idea why,but when I started to read those loggings, that they were so magical for me; but they were – magical.

I suspect the magic had something to do with my personal involvement with the place where he wrote his sightings, an involvement that had extended over some of the most formative years of my life.

But non respective to any self-perceived personal relationship to the its topics, the book amazed me for the leverage of its – for me major impact compared to – for it - its trivial number of pages.

Anyway, here is my truncated video in support of the Perec concept of triviality as greatness. Or perhaps he was thinking of greatness as triviality.

Video:

A Tribute To Georges Perec

La Citrouille

2010-12-17T12:08:00.001-08:00

Back in 2007 I was living in an apartment on Rue Guénégaud in the 6iem Arrondissement of Paris. When I didn’t cook in the apartment, but, instead, went to a restaurant for dinner, I went quite some distance from the immediate vicinity of the Rue Guénégaud. That was because over the years leading up to 2007, my restaurant experiences had been associated with somewhat different locations to that of 2007. And my style has always been, having found something that I like, to do it again.

One evening, just prior to leaving for a significantly long walk to dinner, I had a minor revelation. “There are lots of restaurants within two blocks of here; some of them must be good” an internal voice said to me.

A possible background driving force to that revelation was the fact that one of my favored entry and egress routes from the apartment to many of the places that I went to, and back to the apartment from many of the places that I had gone to was Rue Gregoire de Tours. Rue Gregoire de Tours was alive with restaurants: traditional français, Chinois, Indien, and a couple of crepe restaurants. I had noticed these restaurants with every trip up or down the Rue Greg, and wondered if they might be any good. But since I had never been to one of them, and therefore my ingrained habit going back to places that I have enjoyed, had never had a chance to kick in on behalf of the restaurants of Rue Gregoire de Tours, I continued to wonder, but the thought of actually trying one of them never occurred to me.

That had been true until the evening I just described.

The proposition the voice within me was posing was certainly a reasonable one. So I set off for Rue Gregoire de Tours to pick one of the restaurants that I had been seeing and had been wondering about.

I remember which one it was, and I remember quite a bit about the dinner. What I don’t remember is what, if anything, caused me to select it over all the other equally interesting looking and enticing options. By that I mean that I remember being in the one I chose, but I can’t remember in the context of that evening what had made it stand out. I’m making a distinction here between remembering and knowing.

That is because I don’t remember; but I do know.

We’ll get back to that a little later, because “knowing” is at the heart of the matter of one of my now favorite places here in Paris. And the “knowing” has come from the “observing” of certain activities that are a part of that restaurant’s mode of operation.

But, briefly, what I remember is that, after once entering the place for whatever reason I had done so, being quickly and graciously conducted to a wall table, being presented with a menu and being left to ponder my choices. I remember my server being totally not there hovering around me while I was in choose mode, but I also remember that the minute I had made up my mind, probably due to some form of telepathy, he was right there asking me for my choices. I remember that they had Corbières wine, which I had never seen in a restaurant, even in Languedoc, where it comes from. I remember having a pretty good onion soup, and, what I thought to be, really good – and interesting (the chunks of beef were about three times as big as any I had ever seen in the dish anywhere else) – boeuf bourguignon. I remember that even the pommes vapeur were good.

It had been a very pleasant experience. And before I had left Paris in 2007, I had experienced it a couple of more times with similarly pleasant results.

So it shouldn’t be any surprise that, with my habit for repetition of things pleasant, that I have gone there a number of times since.

Oddly enough that hadn’t been the case. Until recently.

After leaving Paris in 2007 – that had been a six week stay – I had only been back briefly, for two weeks in 2008, and not at all in 2009. And the 2008 stay was for only two weeks and I was in an apartment toward the Eiffel Tower end of Rue de Grenell, making Rue Gregoire de Tours an awfully long walk for dinner. (That particular part of town – by Tour Eiffel - has the oddity that there really are no good metro routes to a lot of places one might want to go.) So if I ate at my newly found member of my list of favorites on the 2008 trip, I don’t remember it.

I don’t think I ate there, because as I always do, I ate in the apartment until a few days before departure so I had an accumulated budget surplus to spend like a drunken sailor. And I remember staying fairly close to Rue de Grenell.

(I will mention that on that trip I again violated my habit and tried a restaurant that was not on my previously-savored list – it was just toward Invalides down Rue de Grenell , one door from the door to my building. It turned out to be a North African restaurant, and it was really fun – and really good.)

So now we can move into the here and now of mid December 2010.

I am back where Rue Gregoire de Tours is close to where I live. I have eaten at the place I found in 2007 a number of times, both for dinner and for lunch, and I now feel as if I need to share it with the world – or at least the amazing shrunken subset of the planet who might ever read this blog.

I should mention that the name of the restaurant is La Citrouille – The Pumpkin.

From the vantage point of quite a few meals there I would say the food is on the quite good side of average.

The service is excellent.

The pots of wine are good and reasonably priced.

But it is the people, and the entertainment value that they add to the overall experience that would cause me to put La Citrouille on the top of any list of restaurants that I would ever assemble, if I were ever to assemble one, which I seriously doubt I will ever do. Even I draw the line at some forms of pretention.

So, let’s talk about the people.

The reason I know – now – even though I can’t remember what caused me to go to La Citrouille that first time instead of any of going to the other choices, is that I have been able to observe how the two waiters work the crowd. By the crowd I mean the endless queue of aimless lookyloos that pass by the glass front of the restaurant and its glass doors. That queue constantly devolves into little increments of one, two or, sometimes three, who stop and appear to be examining the menu. I can with some degree of certainty say that, while they may well be reading the words on the menu, what they are really doing – most likely without a clue that they are doing it – is they are trying to get a “feel” for the place in front of them. They are trying to see if it is “right” for them. They are trying to get a feeling if it is going to be a “welcoming” place.

From the first time Mysti and I took a side street off of the Champs Elysées and entered into the interior of some restaurant that we had decided to try, since we were starving, and since we had not eaten at McDonalds with Mary Ann and the crowd, I remember that feeling of wanting to be welcomed and accepted.

I can’t shake it. To this moment, every time I enter a restaurant that is new to me in France I crave that feeling of ok-ness. And to this day, my looking-at-the-menu-outside ritual – because I do do that - is really nothing more than hoping to be able to plug into the vibrations of the place and see what my comfort quotient might be.

And I know that that is what all those other people doing the menu examination ritual are really looking for. They are really not looking at what the offerings are – unless they are just plug stupid or really uninformed. The offerings from place place are just not that different – (they might be checking prices, but that is nothing more than the first layer of the palimpsest of “comfort”). What they are really trying to ascertain is “will I fit in here?”

And that is where the guys at La Citrouille are geniuses.

On my first visit of this 2010 trip I hadn’t seen the grand scheme of things as clearly as I do now.

But I had been able to acquire inklings.

As I had approached the entry – I didn’t need to lookyloo the menu posted outside - I was going to La Citrouille, and that was all there was to it – just before I could push the inward opening door, the waiter standing behind it opened it with a hearty and pleasant “bon soir monsieur, bon soir” and showed me to my table. How welcoming is that? (I am comparing this to a possibly more typical case, where one might have been, as I wasn’t in this case, a first time enterer of some randomly chosen restaurant door, with myriad deep seated concerns about being welcomed and accepted, and having to remember – again I am assuming a non-French tourist – what poussez might mean, and then trying to tirez unsuccessfully first, then poussez successfully, but with the embarrassment of having stood there rattling the door rather than opening it, and then entering the unknown inner sanctum, and hoping that someone would – quickly - help them to a table.)

The second trip to La Citrouille in this Paris interlude was the one that opened my eyes completely.

It turned out that the place wasn’t too full yet – I usually try to beat the hoard of Parisian diners that begin to appear about 2000, by showing up at places at 1930 or so – and they put me at a table right in the front, facing out to the windows and the poussez- activated front door.

Since the crowd so far was sparse, both the waiters had time on their hands. So they manned the door in sporadic shifts. And I don’t mean they stood there waiting for lookyloos to become customers.

First, it needs to be pointed out that these guys are psychologists. The bottom line of what they do is that they sense the comfort level, or lack of comfort level, on the part of the passersby and lookyloos – they are keen observers – and they then do – something – to raise what they perceive to be that comfort level as high, and as rapidly, as possible.

They – each in turn - stood there by the glass entry door, at parade rest, looking out - left, right, middle, left, right, middle – continually scanning Rue Gregoire de Tours.

Their major follow on activities to their observations out the windows took several forms on the night that I saw the act. I’m sure that there are many more such forms, but I am only a neophyte in the watching of these geniuses, and I know that I can’t possibly have seen anywhere near the entire show.

Observed Form One: Two mid twenties lookyloos at the in-front-of-La Citrouille menu, apparently trying to delve the depths of the cuisine de la maisson. Waiter waits until they start – the menu lookyloos seldom make a self directed move to enter La Citrouille - out and off up the street, and, opening the door he says with a pleasant beyond belief tone “bon soir, et bienvienue”. That is, anybody who ever had anything to do with IBM sales training, would know a classic example of the assumptive close. In this case it works. The young couple, as if mesmerized sheep, enter the place, take a table and become almost immediately, members of the deeply loved client base.

Observed Form Two: Same as previous form, except the lookyloos, with deep expressions of respect, and perhaps, regret, decline the offer of the open door. By this time I had become an identified co-conspirator in these activities. On a couple of occasions, when the post guy had had to attend to duties that took him off point, into the kitchen, and when, what appeared to me to be perfect configurations of lookyloos developing, I had gotten up and shouted back to the kitchen “monsieur, monsieur, les gens”. I had no idea; that was the best I could do. But the guy immediately knew that I was signing up for the game. And that made it even more fun. It was more fun because he and I exchanged observations and intelligence – everybody in the place speaks good English – but they are very respectful of my , one could only surmise, apparent desire to try to communicate with them in their native tongue – and we made non-binding bets about what was going to occur next with this or that group of recently departed menu scrutinizers.

In the case of the ones just gone, he had said “back in 5 minutes”.

That group re- appeared just about at that point and my friend opened the door as they approached it. “Bon soir, bon soir; deux personnes?”

Observed Form Three: A larger group – maybe five or six of the endless queue – stop briefly in the middle of the street (“ we don’t want to get to close to that menu; that might show commitment”) and stare myopically – they are all my age – at the general area of the menu.

My friend wastes not a moment.

He opens the door, rushes into the street shouting “bonsoir et bienvienue, monsieurs et madames; nous allons”. And he gestures to the door of La Citrouille.

And they follow him like sheep

*************************************************************************************************************************************

There is a lot more. But this post is getting long. And, if there is any value to this one, then won’t it be fun to have another one?

A Digital Big Bang?

2010-12-08T10:41:00.001-08:00

Over breakfast this morning – slices of la baguette tradi that I had bought only an hour before, still warm, at Gerard Mulot, what was still left of the several cheeses that I had bought a few days before, and which, at least to my American sensitivities, were still good, a bowl of fromage blanc naturel, and a banana and a clementine, all chased with what was left of the coffee that I had been drinking since I awakened, and a glass of jus de pamplemousse rose (there isn’t any é in the word “Rose” on the juice’s package, but then again the brand is Tropicana, so what can you expect?) was reading, as I always read over breakfast, The Economist.

The article that I had chosen to read was about what things were like before the Big Bang.

The net of the article, based on work by a physicist from Oxford, was that just before the Big Bang everything had shrunk – from a previous big bang – into nothingness. And something about that nothingness – I never was much at physics so I can’t really say what that something might have been, except that it was god damned small – caused it to become REALLY BIG in a very small ( minus power of 23 comes to mind) lapse of what we three dimensional, blooded, beings refer to as time.

I was surprised to find out that this was unacceptably unplowed intellectual ground.

In fact, it was heresy.

The physics world had, some time ago, apparently, aided and abetted by the warm and comforting wrapping of the apparently totally accepted Big Bang, gone to end game. That end game, as I understood it from the article that I was reading, was that before the Big Bang there wasn’t anything; the Big Bang had changed that and we are now, post Big Bang, on – I had to surmise because I really didn’t understand some of what I was reading – a never ending trajectory that had been initiated by the Big Bang.

“But no” has said Doctor Penrose from Oxford. “ We are in an infinitely undulating construct (my translation of what I understood him to say) that goes up and it goes down.”

I wouldn’t even be boring the couple of you people who might read this post with this book report – “what I read in The Economist over breakfast this morning” if it weren’t for the fact that I had previously thought – I have no idea from what source I may have obtained this conviction – that the whatever-it-is that-we-are-in (a universe perhaps) is in a constant state of contracting and expanding. My conviction was conditioned by the further belief that the time frame of the contractions and expansions is of such magnitude that creatures like us will never notice, but, that, nonetheless the ups and downs do exist.

So it was a real surprise to me that, not only wasn’t that concept in any kind of favor with the great body of scientists who really care about such things, but that the concept wasn’t even in existence and wasn’t under any scrutiny as to its possible validity. It was a concept, that until Doctor Penrose decided to propose it, and that fairly recently, just didn’t exist.

So where did I get it? Who knows?

The additional oddity is that as the day advanced it became in its own way entwined, at least in my mind, with questions about another kind of potential big bang.

When I was a trainee in the early days of my career at IBM I was assigned to some accounts. I was to work with and be under the management of the qualified IBM salesmen and systems engineers who were responsible for those accounts to IBM. The objective of those assignments was for me to learn the marketing and the technical ropes of IBM life from being actually involved in the doing of things marketing and things technical.

One of those accounts was the Army Corps of Engineers. They were one of IBM’s biggest accounts at the time. One of the things that they had installed was a full nine spindle array – eight usable, one for hot backup - of the IBM 2314, which was the high capacity IBM disk drive of that era.

The 2314 was an impressive machine from a number of standpoints: price/performance, storage capacity and relative reliability being among its leading features.

But from my viewpoint the single most impressive thing about the 2314 was its size. The thing was huge. At the Corps the device filled an entire wall of a rather large data center. And it weighed 1950 KG – more than two tons.

Its storage capacity was, for the eight drives that could be in use at any one time, 240 MB. That’s mega bytes; that’s not terabytes, that’s not even measly gigabytes; that’s mega bytes.

The IBM archives have provided me with a picture which I am including with this post.

The 2314 and its control unit are the hulking things behind the young woman apparently taking her lunch out of an office drawer. That drawer is actually one of the disk drives and the young lady is either putting in or taking out one of the removable, eleven platter disk packs. Each of those packs stored 30 megabytes. Since they were removable, and could be put on shelves in numbers limited only by an IBM customer’s ability to pay for them, the claim to “infinite storage capacity” could often be heard floating around in sales presentations involving the 2314.

The reason that I have brought up all that history, and my personal intersection with a small component of it, is that it gives some very real perspective to the follow-on big-bang-like episode that occurred later in the day, after my having been started down that path over breakfast by The Economist.

I have been wanting to go to the Marmottan museum for a special Monet exhibition. Since the weather today was marginal to the point of making me consider not going out at all, I had been trying to come up with an alternative to trying to walk and take pictures – my usual daily occupations – in rain and snow of a degree to make it hazardous for the camera and miserable for the photographer.

What I settled on was to see if I was smart enough to take the RER to the RER stop that connects to La Muette, which is the Metro stop for Le Marmottan. There are a bunch of arcane, and boring to anyone but me, reasons why the RER would have been a test of my mettle, and in fact why I was even taking the RER instead of just going on the Metro, but I am not going to mention them

Suffice it to say that that had just been my plan for the afternoon. The idea was that maybe there wouldn’t be a crowd and I wouldn’t need the advantage of a previously bought ticket (the advantage of that previously bought ticket being that said ticket puts the ticket holder at the head of any line) and so I could go in and buy my ticket at the museum. Alternatively, so went the plan, if there was a line I could decide whether to stand in it or catch the RER back to my part of town. In either event, so went the plan, I would have enhanced my barely rudimentary RER skills.

But is was snowing lightly and the snow was wet snow and it was accumulating in soggy amounts of sufficient degree to make walking in anything but some kind of tread-bottomed boots somewhat hazardous, so after not much distance I decided to abandon the RER to the Marmottan project.

So I was heading back to the apartment. And that was something I really didn’t want to be doing. I have noticed early in this sojourn that my mental health appears to be directly proportional to the amount of time I spend on the streets of Paris, and inversely proportional to the amount of time I spend, during daylight hours, in the apartment. And up to the point – today - of abandoning the RER project I have spent all possible time during daylight walking on various routes that interest me, taking pictures and, just generally, reveling in Paris. That has required some adaptations to cope with some rain, and a little snow, but in general, if I have assessed the weather correctly, and have configured myself correctly in response, full time access to the outdoors and the streets has been absolutely possible.

So I was not pleased with my apparently imminent first failure.

I was brooding about the situation to such a degree that I realized that I was well past the door to the apartment when the question of where was I occurred to me.

So I just kept going.

I don’t know what it was about that moment – the weather certainly hadn’t improved – that made things seem different, but they did seem different.

So, since I was going in a certain direction, it seemed to me that I ought to figure out a destination, so I could know when I was half through my journey – destinations, at least for me usually being the half point of any journey – and I suddenly had a grand idea.

I could go down Rue des Rennes, which is a major enough street that foot traffic should have been taking care of the slush to a great extent, and go to FNAC where I could buy a ticket for the Monet exhibit. Not only that, but FNAC is huge and I could walk around inside, out of the snow, and get some exercise. And there was the additional advantage that with FNAC’s massive selection of electronics and gadgets and notions and photgraphics I might find something that I hadn’t known that I really needed.

That was a potentially beguiling bonus.

As it turned out, I just wandered around the camera department absolutely bedazzled by the depth of choice, savoring, but not buying, and then went down to the billeterie, bought my ticket, and then went up two floors for a final exposure to the possibility of the commercial equivalent of near occasion of sin in the computer department. ( I have been harboring the thought that if I find an HP Photosmart multi-function printer cheap enough, I might buy it, knowing that I would have to leave it behind when I depart France in February.)

As luck would have it, there was a Photosmart multi-function unit for 69 euros, which was arguably in the price range that I would consider to make the device expendable. But it was USB attach only and there is no room for a printer in the area where my computer is lodged. And, although it is talking via Wi-Fi G to the portable router that I bought just before leaving the US, the place where the CPU is is the only place where the CPU can be.

So I was able to rationalize my way out of buying that printer.

There was, however, for 99 euros, a Wi-Fi compatible HP Photosmart multi-function printer.

The way I got around that was to say “too much; wait and see if they bring the price down as we get closer to Christmas”.

So I was sort of at loose ends, and was wandering around with no real purpose other than not wanting to go back out into the snow, when my eyes focused on the shelf of merchandise that I had wandered aimlessly to and had stopped in front of for no apparent purpose.

I had focused on just one member of the community of the merchandise on the shelf. It was a familiar green package from Western Digital. “My Passport Essential” said the writing on the carton. I recognized it immediately because I have a number of them – two with me in Paris, one 750 GB and one 1TB – and I was curious which of the tribe were on offer there on the FNAC shelf in Paris, and at what price.

It was a 500 GB. It cost 89 euros. “Not a bad price” I thought, “but a little high for only 500 GB.”

Then I widened my field of view. What I was standing in front of was a multi shelf, very long display of My Passport Essentials. I had never seen that many assembled in one place. I looked to see if there were any of the 750 GB or 1 TB, but they all seemed to be 500 GB. “That’s a nice round number” I thought to myself.

Then I did the next obvious – to me at least – thing. I took a census. They were all stacked along the shelf in neat rows of 12 packages each, so I counted down the shelf and when I had gotten to twenty times twelve I decided that I had better stop; I can’t multiply in my head beyond that.

But 240 and counting was a sound I heard in my reverie. And there were several more rows of twelve of the Western Digitals yet to be included in the body count. And beyond them stretched a similar extent of some other brand. I was afraid to examine that array for its capacity.

I was afraid because, if I multiply 500 GB by 240, I get a number that exceeds all the storage capability in the world of just a few short years ago. If I then consider the fact that that is only a small fraction of the display that I am looking at, and that what I am looking at is only the portable drives – the WD My Books and competitors are just next – and if I further consider that I am looking only at the displays in the FNAC store on Rue des Rennes in Paris (there are probably several others – I know of ten) and if I acknowledge that FNAC, in spite of my personal preference for it and my desire to make it “unique”, is, in fact one of some unknown, but very large, number of similarly configured retailers, to say nothing of the Costcos and the Wal-marts which, although different, still sell massive numbers of electronic products, I just don’t know what to think but that we are at the edge of a digital big bang.

And I don’t know what that means.

And that may not even matter, because, like the other big bang, it may happen in, and at a dimension that neither we, nor our computers, portable intelligences nor digital cameras will be capable of discerning.

But we may be imminently on the way to some form of impossible to unsort digital porridge which is but a way station to nothing again.

It seemed somehow significant to me that the length of the shelf with the My Passport Essential drives on it was about the same size as a 2314. I had to wonder how many Essentials it would take to weigh 1950 KG.

Adriana

2010-12-07T07:11:00.001-08:00

The Metaphysics Of Luck?

2010-11-29T12:29:00.001-08:00

“ I have just been lucky” I heard a voice saying as I lay staring at the crown molding of my nine foot ceilings in my apartment in Paris this morning.

“Damn, damn, damn lucky” I heard the voice say, as if in coda.

There was, after all, a kind of musical rhythm to those two phrases, and that rhythm - it seemed to me - justified the musical allusion.

If I really cared – which I really don’t any more – I probably could have made those phrases into a song.

But those days are gone,

The meaning of those words, however, at a cosmic level, became the fodder of multiple musings.

They caused me to lapse into a state of penderance.

The outer edges of that state dealt with the question “I wonder how much time I have left?”

It is odd that, at this end of my life, being so far beyond an age – when I was young – that I had allowed myself, or even had ever had had any self-serving reason to want or to believe I would ever reach – that I even give a shit.

But the voice was asking the question, and one always answers questions from voices on high.

But as I tried to formulate an answer, a deeper, related, thought occurred to me. And I was easily able to abandon any further contemplation of my longevity.

The question, I realized, was on the outer edges of the real issue. There was a nucleus and it was the entré to the real issue.

And that entré was the really important thing.

It was the nucleus of the question that really mattered.

Because the nucleus deals with the complex series of metaphysical and physical accidents that caused “me” to end up being where – (to end up being at all really) – in a given place and a time and with whatever given resources I have at my disposal, such that I can do what I, do and think what I think.

That nucleus, and what it drags with it is what it is that I am; and what it is that I can do screams the question - to me, at least - of why am I what I am – those things just alluded to – rather than being a beggar on the streets of Seattle, or Paris, or alternatively of being a piece of human detritus where such detritus is the norm and where that norm has always been the norm?

That norm is the norm in much of the rest of our world. How did my protoplasm elude that plight?

I didn’t hear any answers.

This And That Continued

2010-11-28T11:14:00.001-08:00

So I walked down Avenue Lowendal pleased that at last that street which I knew something about, and which once found would allow me to cease being semi-lost, had, in fact, finally appeared. It was kind of an ugly street though. Before breaking out into the glory of the basilica and the attendant huge square that surrounds the it and Invalides, I had to navigate the canyon-like segment of Avenue Lowendal that runs between L’école Militaire on one side and UNICEF on the other. But I survived it and soon was skirting the Rodin Museum side of the Invalides complex heading to Rue de Grenell, not to be confused with Boulevard de Grenell, or for that matter, with Rue Grenell, and the last leg, albeit a fairly long one, home.

I was getting really hungry.

Just after Rue de Grenell peters out and is replaced by Rue Vieux Columbier, Rue Vieux Columbier crosses Rue de Rennes to Café du Metro. One of Café du Metro’s many charms for me at least, is that with a glass or demi pichet of wine, after lunch hours, they give you a little dish of peanuts – cacahuètes – AND a little dish of olives. That sounded enough like food to me, that, in my advancing state of hunger it made the case for stopping for a glass of wine unarguably sound.

But after all these years – I have been going to Café du Metro since 2002 – the place had recently managed to piss me off to a quite serious degree.

On my way back from Chartres it was mid late afternoon, an ideal time for a small pichet of wine and an hour of quiet contemplation at Café du Metro, so I got off at St Sulpice which is basically the front door to Café du Metro, went in and ordered a “quart de Lyonnais”. The waiter is newer as a Café employee than I am as a Café customer, so I feel as if I have been there longer than he has. I have been served by him infrequently but when I have been served by him, I have never been able to shake the feeling that, unlike everybody else in the place, all of whom are in constant motion, shouting “bonjour” to new arrivals, and “au revoir” to all departees, waiting tables, hooting at one another and having, it always appears to me, to be having one hell of a good time, he has a chip on his shoulder.

But even at that, I couldn’t believe it when after saying no to his question was I going to eat, he said that he couldn’t serve a quart (that’s 25 cl, by the way – big glass of wine, no more) without food.

I just didn’t have the energy to try to summon the French necessary to let me tell him that I had been coming in there for eight years and frequently had – although I love the food, especially the onion soup – a quart without food. Instead, I just said “merci” and got up and left, making the mental note that if Carrie Nation was going to be allowed to call the shots at Café du Metro, one of my favorite afternoon places to have some wine and read the Economist might be struck from my list of preferred places.

But – as I approached the Rue Vieux Columbier and Rue de Rennes intersection, hunger overcame – what was ii? Was it pride? Was it really just being pissed off? Was it, most probably, a feeling of having been let down by a close and valued friend?

Probably.

But the cacahuètes and olives were sounding better every moment.

I got a different waiter this time, one who has served me a couple of times on this trip, and who is new to me this trip.

He must have been hired after 2008.

He has absolutely no chip, being instead on of the shouting, hooting, having a hell of a good time crowd.

I chose not to see if Carrie Nation had infected his server’s instincts as well, and I ordered only un verre de Lyonnais.

As I sat there inhaling the cacahuètes and olives a rather large French couple took the table almost contiguous with mine. I had to get up to let the man get into the chair that, at his table, was the reciprocal of mine.

They were marginally pleasant folk.

The woman put vast quantities of kit in the chair opposite her companion and disappeared. I assumed she was going to les toilettes. When she came back she dominated the conversation with her mate in a foghorn level form of French and in an accent that even I was sure must be from the provinces. And long ago a female Parisian X-ray (credits to Tom Wolfe) had told me that all the women in the provinces were fat.

Having finished my wine and petites hors d’oeurves, I walked the rest of the way home. (That is a great example of the nominative absolute, by the way.)

How interesting.

But wait. There is more.

Remember I said that I had given up trying to get pictures of the pigeon droppers?

There is a reason for that.

Actually there are two reasons. One is just that it’s just too damn hard catching their image. I have a number of blurred barely identifiable encounters, none of which amount to a documentary hill of beans. The one exception is the first one I got when the guy came up to me by Thomas Jefferson.

But the other reason is probably more interesting.

Several days ago I went out specifically to harvest images of pigeon droppers. To that end I chose my route carefully, having by that time in this residency noticed what appeared to be patterns of their lurks and haunts.

The plan was to troll down the right bank to Pont d’Alma and cross at Pont d’Alma and troll back to L’institute de France and home. Two hours, maybe six or seven droppers, and maybe one or two decent pictures. It was pretty much a day’s work, I thought.

So I crossed at Pont St Michel to give myself a little bit of a leader on the first likely encounter (the droppers seem to like to start more toward Le Louvre).

As I walked along, it being a really nice day for a few days before full winter, I lost track of what I had been supposed to have been doing. There were some just-right-yellow poplar leaves, and the river was absolutely sparklingly spectacular, and every boat seemed to be a candidate for a Saturday Evening Post cover.

So I was many mind-space miles from thinking about the old pigeon drop gambit.

I was composing and taking pictures and savoring a beautiful day on the right bank of the Seine, in the shadow (the sun was from the other direction, so there was no shadow, but the allusion has great literary appeal) of Le Louvre when suddenly my concentration was broken by a rather large humanoid at my side thrusting his hand with a gold-like ring in it into my field of view.

I immediately snapped back into pigeon dropper image harvesting mode, put the camera next to his hand and pulled the trigger.

That did not please Gargantua.

He started asserting in a raised-level voice – something. “No fucking way” came to mind, but I really couldn’t get anything he was saying. I don’t think it was French.

But I didn’t need a dictionary to know the gist of the message.

The problem for me immediately had become – I didn’t really care whether he liked the fact that I had taken a picture of his hand – that the picture I had taken gave him – he obviously believed – the right and the access to pursue the real point of the gambit, which was to extort funds from the mark for – something – the ring maybe – in the case of an unapproved photo, who knew? In any case, I had, inadvertently, stepped into the snare.

And I didn’t like that at all.

So I yelled at the top of as well modulated a pair of baritone male lungs as I could summon “God damn you, you son of a bitch”.

He spit at me. I think he missed. I threw a punch, hitting him mid mid chest. He was alarmingly lean. I was so angry that I just was ready for a fight. So I was surprised that all that he did was indulge in some eastern European-sounding guttural utterances. I said some things in riposte that I can’t remember now and he reciprocated.

And then not long after that he moved off down the quai.

I took some more pictures of the poplars, waiting for my heart rate to drop below three hundred.

I could see the dropper not too far up the quai. There was no way I was going to backtrack or try to elude him. I struck out in his direction.

As expected, I fairly quickly came abreast of where he was standing. And he knew that I was there. As our eyes met, and he started spewing whatever language it is that he speaks at me, I threw him a snappy, Air Force officer salute.

That seemed to throw him a curve, because he came over and put his arm around me and started saying things that seemed to have “monaie” as a major and recurring word. “Bon chance a vous” I said; and the torrent from him grew even greater. He kept asking me in English where I was from. “Are you English?” I just laughed.

By the time that encounter had been closed out, I had discovered – I think – that he was from Romania, and that there was no luck without money.

If I encounter him again, which I assume I will, maybe I will find out if my feeling that we parted as sort of mutually respecting human beings was, in fact accurate.

In any event I am out of the game of trolling for droppers.

This And That

2010-11-27T10:50:00.001-08:00

Today I took quite a long walk. It had started out to be just – I had hoped – a long walk. I was going to make a trip to Pont d’Alma and back. That is usually about a two hour circuit, allowing some time for taking pictures of the inevitably interesting things that always appear.

Some days that route is a pretty good source of Pigeon Drop contacts. Today that didn’t matter. I have decided to quit trying to catch them in pictures.

Today either there wasn’t as much interesting going on as there usually is, or the spirit of image harvesting had taken a day off and wasn’t there to move me in any significant manner to taking pictures.

I was all the way to Pont d’Alma before I took a couple of pictures of the American Cathedral (it’s either that or the American church, can never remember which is which). They turned out pretty much as I had planned them to turn out and that felt good. To the left of the cathedral there is a view of the tower of a really ugly old church that I always enjoy taking pictures of. I can never remember its name.

I was contemplating taking some pictures of the Eiffel Tower which was looming at my back while I was taking the pictures of the American Whatever-It-Is, but I just have been feeling Eiffled out on this trip.

Nonetheless, I am probably going to back-fill the looming chasm created by this lack of taking pictures of La Tour Eiffel by making some nighttime expeditions over to the Tour. There is a great North African restaurant that I discovered in ‘08 that is quite close to Champs de Mars. Those two factors – the lit up Tour Eifel and the food at a North African restaurant – should make a perfect tour guide package. So I guess I am going to take that tour sometime soon.

I have decided that the nighttime Tower is going to be the acid test to which I am going to subject the Sony computer.

So I was just standing there, not taking pictures and looking stupid, when it occurred to me that I always stop and turn around at Pont d’Alma. There is no reason for that. It is just something that I always do. Since today, as I stood there about to turn around and go back once again, I had a lot of daylight left, I decided to change that for-no-reason much-revered protocol.

I know quite a bit about what is down below Pont d’Alma for several bridges, because I have explored there coming at them from the opposite direction. Today I decided that I would go down and check out those fairly familiar haunts coming at them from a new and opposite direction.

When I got to the Tower itself I honored this whole act of throwing the hum drum to the wind by taking pictures of the Tower.

That felt really good.

The young woman and associates that I inadvertently caught in the first one – she and they will be gone with the Photoshop if I ever use this picture again, was one of a matched set. That matched set asked me to, and I complied, take a picture of them. In fact I took two.

As I got down to Pont de Bir-Hakeim - it was on the lower deck of that bridge that the opening scene of Last Tango in Paris was shot - I noticed that it was getting darker and getting colder.

Today was the first time this trip that I have abandoned my cotton tee shirt with cotton sweater inner wear for my Smartwool jersey and 80 pound wool St James sweater. Overnight winter arrived with a significant drop in temperature and some snow. I even bought a pair of gloves when I went to the market this morning.

I let the lengthening shadows and the chilling of the air decide me to not pursue the bridge circuit any farther, but to strike back toward home. Given the distance that I was away from le 6iem arrondissement, that decision really wasn’t a cop out. I had a substantial walk yet to complete. It would probably, in fact, go beyond my target time of 1600. A cop out would have been if I had gotten on the Metro there at the bridge and ridden home in comfort and style.

I at least consider it comfort and style.

Deciding to strike for home was all pretty much theory, though.

I had been where I was when I made the decision to abandon the river and strike back for home on a number of occasions, but not for a couple of years. And a couple of years erases a great deal of specificity from my knowledge of places and things. The bridge is host to a Metro line. That line runs through town on one of the few elevated above-ground platforms along Boulevard de Grenell. Boulevard de Grenell is not to be confused with Rue de Grenell, or for that matter, Rue Grenell. I had once had a vague idea of where on the map Boulevard de Grenell wended its course, and I thought I knew, equally vaguely, that that course ultimately intersected one or more streets that I knew pretty well.

So I set off down Boulevard de Grenell.

Even to my cloudy memory it was obvious at every step that I had been on Boulevard de Grenell more than several times – I have lived in an apartment in an alley off of Avenue Rapp and on Rue de Grenell itself several times, and I knew that I had used the route that I was backtracking, more than once. I had used it as the outbound leg of very long and interesting walk to Le Bois de Boulogne – but with each intersection that I passed, any familiar, and therefore useful, street continued to elude me.

I have become so crass about walking in Paris that it is only when I am semi-lost – it has been a long time since I have actually been fully lost – that I feel as if I am living up to my personal expectations and making good use of the money I keep spending to come and stay here.

So the fact that I was not finding anything but a feeling of vague familiarity as I walked down Boulevard de Grenell along its elevated Metro line was just a tonic. I could have looked at my map – I have one that is more scotch tape at the seams than paper it is so old and used, and, therefore, a valued friend – but I was totally disinterested in using my old friend to bail me out yet one more time. I was sure that I was right about Boulevard de Grenell intersecting one or more streets with which I had an intimate relationship, and that would, once broached, get me back to more familiar ground.

It was probably due to the fact that, in spite of my deeply held conviction that I knew more or less where I was, and that where I was was more or less on a trajectory to home, and that all that I needed was a familiar street name to appear so that I could complete my walk with precision, the gathering gloom with its attendant increase of chill was beginning to test that conviction.

That was probably the reason that I jumped at the chance to turn off on the first street that was even vaguely familiar. Its familiarity, I should mention, was enhanced by the fact that the street appeared at a small Place with which I am quite familiar, having taken multiple pictures over multiple visits of the sculpture of a lion that is the Place’s main feature.

The street was Avenue Lowendal. It just sounded – familiar.

As soon as I had started down it the reason was obvious. Staring down at me from not very far away was the dome of the basilica that contains Napoleon’s tomb. I had walked briefly on Avenue Lowendal only a few days before, when I had circumnavigated Invalides.

To be continued.

Les Invalides

2010-11-23T02:40:00.001-08:00

Panorama by Sony

Trolling For Pigeon Droppers

2010-11-20T09:38:00.001-08:00

Today I went to Neuilly sur Seine. It is on the Paris Side of the Seine just across from La Défense. Part of it is on a little island. I made a photo tour of that little island a few years ago. Today I decided would be a good day to do it again. As it turned out I got on the bridge across the Seine on the side opposite from the Neuilly sur Seine part of the island. I went down the steps to the island on which was nice square, but there was a gigantic iron fence denying access to the other side of the island, which is the part I wanted to be on. As I was retracing my steps to go to the other side of the bridge so I could get on the side of the island that I wanted to be on, I saw that just up river from the island that I was trying to get to the Nuilley sur Seine side of, there was another, much smaller island.

I decided to go there instead.

Here are a couple of pictures of that island.

All of that took some time and as I contemplated what to do with the rest of the rapidly waning day I decided to take the Metro back to Pont d’Alma and walk back to the apartment on the left side of the Seine.

Besides this being one of my favorite walks, it is usually alive with pigeon droppers, and I had decided a couple of pigeon drop encounters previous that I want to start collecting their pictures. I am getting so good at recognizing one substantially before he or she goes into his or her shtick, that I felt that I could get a shot of each one of them as they bent down as if picking something up (in the case of the Paris pigeon drop that something being a gold-looking man’s wedding ring).

But today was a lean day. There just weren’t any pigeon droppers. I even crossed Pont de la Concorde over and back to see if I could roust one up. Frequently one will make a hit on that bridge or Pont Royal or Pont du Carousel. Today Pont de la Concorde was a dry hole.

Just across and down a little bit along my main route one guy did make an attempt but it was so clumsy that if I had not been an expert in the game I would not have recognized what had happened. In any event it had happened clumsily, and that clumsiness had taken me off my mark and I hadn’t gotten a picture of it so there was nothing to do but ignore his plaintive cries of “monsieur, monsieur, bon chance, bon chance” and move on down the line.

A little farther on I saw a for sure pigeon drop woman and I made sure the power to the camera was on. But she turned out to be a woman who has tried the game so many times on me – she may even be the original one that Betsy and I encountered - that we now know each other. She said a pleasant “bon jour” and kept on her way.

So it was looking like the days troll was going to prove fruitless.

As I approached the statue of Thomas Jefferson, failure to date notwithstanding, I became alert. I seemed to remember that there often was activity at that point.

Sure enough there was hit in progress. It looked as if the mark had taken the ring and was in the process of putting it in his pocket it and was telling the pigeon dropper to fuck off. I kind of stopped, and even half heartedly pointed my camera in the general direction of the encounter, but I wasn’t fast enough to get the ring, and in any event, it seemed kind of socially unacceptable intruding on someone else’s pigeon drop.

But I did recognize the dropper. He was the big tall brown man that I mentioned in a previous post as the one who had ensnared an English speaking couple, the woman of which was saying to the man “why don’t you just give the ring back to him?”

So what I did do was stop just down from this encounter and stare over the sea wall into the river with my camera at attention as if I were going to take some serious shots. I was hoping that that demeanor would mark me as his next victim, since it looked as if the man of his, by then previous, mark had terminated the transaction.

I was watching out of the corner of my eye, hoping to see the guy come up do the bend down and pick something up act, at which point I was ready to get a shot.

Instead he was suddenly next to me, sort of engulfing me, and showing me the ring in his open paw. Without thinking, I poked the camera almost into his palm and pulled the trigger.

Here it is. I hope to have a lot of the bend and scoops for your edification and entertainment before this trip is over. They are really more fun that just a hand holding a ring.

And there should be hope. I noticed on that recent day that I had my record seven hits, that they seem to come out in droves in rainy weather.

On va voir.

A Mixed Bag Of Events

2010-11-18T11:54:00.001-08:00

I went to Chartres yesterday. Since the Englishman who has made a career and livelihood – and, I believe, has received the Legion of Honor in recognition of – knowing so much about each window in the cathedral, and the story that it tells, was not there yesterday, I had to go through the place with only my camera and my best artistic instincts.

Here is one of the images harvested during that venture.

One of the things that happens every time I go to see Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres, and walk around it, and go inside it, is that I marvel at how huge it is. I also marvel at the fact that people who we would probably regard as primitives – according to Wikipedia it was built mostly between 1193 and 1250, almost more than a millennium ago – could have built such a thing. Then I can’t help but wonder if we could, with all our subsequent discoveries and technology, duplicate the thing, let alone produce a superior product. Then my final reaction always is that I guess that’s what Tour Montparnasse is all about. Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres wins hands down every time I ponder that imagined competition.

I made the trip to Chartres on the train. I always enjoy taking the train in France, and yesterday was no exception.

When I got to Chartres I reacquainted myself with the lay of the town. I wandered around and took pictures of the places that interested me. That activity was partially a time killer because I had arrived at about 1100 and had planned, as I had contemplated my activities there, wanted to hit a restaurant for lunch at an acceptably French time of day for dejeuner – maybe around 1400 – and I had figured that, my attention span being what it is, I would probably not spend more than two hours within the cathedral; so I had some time to fill.

But I also had really wanted to collect some town-story images.

There were two problems with that plan.

First, it was cold as hell and I hadn’t worn my cold warding off magic cashmere stocking cap – a gift from my daughter that has become a basic part of my French expeditionary equipment – so I had begun to think about a warm place for a cup of coffee.

Second, I was getting REALLY HUNGRY. As luck would have it - and luck often does have it this way with me – I was reaching that critical point of coldness, followed not far behind by that rapidly rampaging critical point of starvation, when a possible solution to both of my problems presented itself. I was in a very large circular Place (pronounced “plass”) and had just taken a picture of the local Apple store when, slightly to the right of that American icon, I saw another: the golden arches.

I have been in McDonald’s exactly twice in France. Once Mysti and found ourselves to be extremely hungry post mid day on self directed bicycle tour in Languedoc, with mid day being a time of day when all the restaurants in that part of France closed down for the afternoon siesta. Like all the other days since we had been on tour, we had assumed there was going to be no lunch for us. We had gotten used to the lack of lunch and had usually tided ourselves over by occasional poaching ( with visions of rifle shots from the adjacent hills bringing us down filling our heads) forays upon the beautiful, gigantic, sweet and juicy grapes that were all coming ripe, all of which were still on the vine, having not yet been harvested and sent off to become corbièrers wine.

On this day, however, we had become pretty much lost in the scruffy, lightly industrial exurb of some little town that we were going to ride through on our way to our lodging and food providing destination for the day.

And there, much like the holy grail, were the golden arches. And they didn’t participate in the siesta tradition. And we found in our mutually examined hearts no elitist objections to eating there. So we did. And it was good. And we saw some young French families acting out their domestic affairs in their native habitat. All in all it was a moderately satisfying experience.

And I have always liked the Big Mac.

I just don’t go to McDonald’s in France.

The second time I ever went to McDonald’s in France was when my friend Betsy and I were on the way to the Paris Aquarium and were suddenly overtaken by the urge for a no-ceremony, no-ancillary –additional-items, quickly acquired, and quickly consumed, order of frites.

Again that day the arches appeared at just at the right moment to become a near occasion of sin.

And that is, I swear, is identical to, or at least virtually similar to, what happened yesterday in Chartres.

The idea of getting warm in a somewhat familiar common user interface was the first lurch down the slippery slope. I had also begun to have a need for a toilet, and as I had learned on my first trip to Paris, which was on a guided tour (Mary Ann, our tour leader had us all meet for our first big activity at the Champs Elysees McDonald’s because they had free restrooms – Mysti and I just kept on going down the Champs Elysees, eschewing the freeness of the restrooms for what we felt would be, and turned out to be, a more Parisian experience) McDonald’s has free toilets.

And if I felt any compunction about just going in and going to the restroom, and, upon exiting said restroom, just standing around until I got warm, and then leaving, I could order a cup of coffee.

If one were to think at all, one would see that getting in line was the next stumble down that increasingly steep and vastly more slippery slope.

“An order of fries would be just the ticket”, I thought I heard a distant voice saying.

The line was quite slow. I was a part of a little community of mixed-race teenagers all apparently trying to win top honors in that totally international game known as grabass (French spelling provided here for the edification of all concerned). Due to the line’s slowness I had way too much time for contemplation. And that was the third and final step to slippery slope to perdition. Contemplation said “if frites are good, cannot a Big Mac be better- with fries, of course”?

I wolfed – I mean WOLFED – that stuff. I was so hungry. And then I figured out where the toilet was and then I left, as a fortified, albeit crestfallen sinner; but that Big Mac was exactly what I had needed at that moment.

Here are a couple of pictures from inside the cathedral.

So that takes us to today.

For some reason I was tired from yesterday’s trip. So I didn’t get up very early today. And after going down to 47 Boulevard St Germain for a refill of fromage blanc and, more importantly, olives – with wine in the afternoon while I try to compose these posts, the olives I get down there are so good that it is scary; and the olive man has been in the land of the missing for a couple of market days, so I was getting desperate – I fooled around with email and yesterday’s images way longer than I should have and, therefore had breakfast way later than I should have; so 1430 was looming and I had just taken my shower.

I was working on convincing myself that I should stay in and finish part seven of A Halloween Story, the words of which I think I know, but the writing of which, I, for some reason, I am reticent to bring into being.

On the other end of the argument was the voice that constantly reminds me that the only downside to living in Paris for four months is that my crazed physical fitness program that keeps me from descending into abject adiposity is not possible here: I don’t have a chip and pin card so I can’t rent the Vellibs, and I don’t have an exercise bench or any weights; so walking is my only potential salvation.

So I hit the street at about 1430 today.

And I was really glad that I had done so.

I started aimlessly, taking the least line of resistance down Rue de Seine to the Quai. By the time I had gotten to the Quai I had decided that I would poke into the Louvre compound and see if there were so many Chinese tourists milling around that it would be impossible to get into the place through the entry under – ironically – a Chinese American’s contribution to the landscape of the Louvre, the pyramid. If it were possible to get in I had decided to see if the chip and pin curse also affected the automatic ticket machines at Le Louvre.

The lines were not particularly long, but at the last minute I decided to exit the compound and just meander down the spine of Paris toward some to be determined exit point for a one eighty.

The moment that about face had been completed the day became brighter.

One of my favorite features of that “spine” has been, for the years that it has existed, the Ferris Wheel.

This time, I was saddened the first time I had gone to that spine – that was the first day I had gotten here – to see that the wheel was gone. “All Things Must Pass” from George Harrison wafted my mind’s music processor and I went on.

But I was, nonetheless, saddened.

Today they were setting the Ferris Wheel back up.

I was pretty excited.

Then, as I went a little farther down, what had by then, turned into the Champs Elysees, I saw that something I had never before seen on the Champs Elysees was being set up: Christmas vending booths.

I had seen them on Boulevard St Germain along the church St Germain; I had seen them spread out like a small city below the mountainous steps of la Grande Arche de La Défense; but I had never seen them on Les Champs Elysees. So all of a sudden I had a new point of interest.

The stalls were all in the early stages of being set up. I don’t know enough about retail de France to have any idea why the 18th of November would be the day for the emergence of this oh so French form of vending, but it is eerily close to America’s Black Friday. Who knows?

And one of the first ones that I encountered bears mentioning.

In 2006 my friend Betsy and I had gone to La Défense and had taken the ticketed trip to the top of La Grande Arche where – in France, the inevitable museum lurked – and we had a grand time in the museum, and out on the the top of, what is, after all, a very tall building, looking out over the city and taking pictures. One of the shops had something that, to me at the time, and for a long time previous had seemed an obvious commercial application of technology, but which at that time I had never seen before. Betsy and I were totally excited by it.

Since Dassault Systems is a French company I shouldn’t have been too surprised to see what I was seeing - for the first time - in France; but I was so surprised nonetheless. The surprise being that something that I had imagined actually existed.

What the guy in this shop could do was to turn a digital image, using, either CATIA or something that functions the same way, into a three dimensional digital model. And then, he had a laser machine that could burn that three dimensional model INSIDE a cube of transparent Lucite. The result was that from within the block, whatever the original two dimensional digital image had been, looked out upon the outside world, and could be scrutinized from a three hundred and sixty degree vantage point from outside the cube.

That was a desk fob to be lusted after.

The young proprietor of that shop spoke English, so I was able to ask him if one could bring in a digital picture of ones choosing and have this magical process employed on that image. The answer was no, and there the English got murky. My best interpretation was that he had no way to get such an image into his machine. To him that had seemed like a show stopper. To me it had seemed to be a requirement for a USB port. But who knew? And I was really happy to know that something that was parallel to what I thought could be done with three dimensional printers – some future blog post may tell you all about the wonders of StrataSys – was actually being done, even if being done in a hands-tied-behind-the back manner.

Subsequent to that, I heard somewhere, that the wonders of USB had been revealed to vendors of that Dassault, or Dassault derivative, or Dassault counterfeit process and that people were being able to bring their flash drives in of pictures of their dogs, or their children, or themselves (does three dimensional pornography within the confines of a cube of Lucite appeal to you?) and leave not long afterwards with whatever had been in those two dimensional images forever – or until the world ends in fire – staring out at them from within the Lucite.

This leads back to today.

One of the first booths that I encountered was one that had an array of – to me - immediately recognizable Lucite cubes. I had to take pictures of them. Then I had to try to ask the young proprietor if he could make originals from digital photos.

I started with the – for me at least – mandatory “on peut” when I just became overcome with the enormity of the task that I had just undertaken, and I bailed out. “Can I talk to you in English?” A shrug and a “non monsieur, je ne parle pas Anglais” was my answer. So, since I really wanted to know if he could invoke at random the magic of Dassault, I forged ahead. He answered that he could make cubes from customer supplied images. I felt that that was comforting but not comprehensive. Where was he going to do that , or who was going to do that and where, and with what machine? I leaped across the gulf of understanding that we had reached with the question “ou est l’ordinateur que fait la chose?’

He said “last week” and pointed to a shelf behind him. I said “Pardon, qua”? He said “last week". I took the bull by the horns and said “prochaine semaine ”? He said “oui monsieur”.

Apparently I had finally found someone who shared the same ability to reverse the meaning of things between our two languages.

And, by the way, I only got hit by one pigeon dropper on the way back after I had crossed Pont Alexandre III.

Haircut Time

2010-11-15T13:22:00.001-08:00

I held off getting a haircut before I left for Paris until the last possible moment. And I had Lloyd use the one eighth inch comb on his electric shears. That is half again what I normally have cut off.

Several years previous I had faced the fact that what hair I had left just didn’t look very good when cut as if I actually had hair left. I wasn’t doing anything grotesque such as a comb-over, I was merely doing what seemed to be the rational thing: having my barber cut my hair sort of just beyond medium-short because that is what I had evolved into having my hair cut like over some fairly long number of intervening previous years. (To actually understand what I might be talking about here, one would have had to have read Screen Saver – specifically the clip about the time that I had been routing around in my bed stand drawer and had laid out my my driver licenses on the bed, next to my knee, end to end and had discovered a movie which documented my transition from youth to old age and to oblivion. What had happened, as documented by those pictures, in relation to my hair length, was that, although my spirit hadn’t changed, – I still looked as if I was ready to show up at roll call every morning - my head had changed, and that change included the mammalian covering that had come with it when I had been born. And that covering was just not what it had once been.)

The reason for the double short cut just before I had left the US was to allow a double long time to pass before I might need a haircut. I had never needed to get a haircut in France, and, therefore had never experienced that particular cultural activity; somehow, the idea of doing that cowed me. I just wasn’t sure, even with my French dictionary, how I was going to navigate that experience. Ordering a glass of wine was easy. Asking someone to “faisez la coupe tres cours” just seemed beyond what I was capable of.

But I knew that I was going to need to navigate that experience. Four months would be too long a time to go without a decent haircut. It would be too long, unless I grew a beard and started walking around the city with a paper cup with some coins in it that I could shake around and thrust at passers by saying “:j’ai faim; j’ai faim”. I gave that fairly serious consideration, but just trying to negotiate the vagaries of getting a haircut seemed to be the lesser of two weevils.

On a Paris trip or two back – I always go to Passage Brady and Restaurant Shalimar - circumstances had suddenly brought into my conscious potpourri of relevant realizations the fact that there were several barber shops in the Passage. And they only charged six euros, as opposed to Twenty five or thirty euros for – something like a haircut I guess, but god knows what it might involve to be worth thirty euros, especially for someone such as I who had, really, no hair – that I had seen posted on the windows of shops on Boulevard St Germain and similar venues.

So as my about-to-commence four month visit to Paris loomed ever more imminently in my not very distant future, I had my hair cut twice as short as I usually had it cut, just prior to departure. That would give me time to negotiate the possibilities.

And I really don’t know why I was so obsessed with hair – so obsessed that I timed my last cut before departure, and its very length to fit with the timing of the imminent trip - except that there was something overwhelmingly daunting to me about trying to tell a French-Pakistani barber what it is that I wanted done to that meager dusting of hair-like substance that occupied my head. The fact that it has the really annoying characteristic of growing too long to look good would. I knew, inevitably make the need for one or more cuts unavoidable.

And today became the day to see if I had the chutzpah and the French to pull it off. That which was to be pulled off would, if successful result in a haircut that let me go a few more weeks. And if successful. would inevitably tie me to whatever barber provided that cut, and tie me to him or her for the duration.

So I left the apartment at about 1130 today for the walk up Boulevard Sevastopol with a loop back at the last moment to Rue St Denis and up, under the arch to Passage Brady and lunch, and, I hoped, after lunch, une coupe.

Lunch was great.

Then loomed large the acid test.

When I had entered the Passage from Rue St Denis de Faubourg and had walked down to the other end where Restaurant Shalimar is, I had made note of the number of customers in the various barber shops pour les hommes – there are some for les femmes, aussi – and had decided, as I had on a couple of previous scouting/lunch-at-the Shalimar expeditions, that the one that I broached first was the right one to go to. It had less barbers and less customers. I felt more able to deal with that type of circumstance.

So I had lunch.

And then I was going back down Passage Brady toward the barber shop that I had chosen.

And then I was there.

And then I went in.

As luck would have it, there was one barber, and he had just finished with a customer.

The barber motioned me to his chair.

I took that chair.

And with a few gestures from both of us, and a couple protestations from me about my inability to speak French, we negotiated what it was that I needed, in French, and in no time I left with my new tres courte cheveux – good for, at least, 30 more days.

And I really am looking forward to going back to that shop. It is really nice when one finds someone upon whom one can depend.

Duck Pond

2010-11-14T11:33:00.001-08:00

I am a member of several vineyard's “clubs”. I just got notification from Duck Pond that I was up for another distribution. In that notification was a graphic that I really liked. It reminds me of the cover of the last Lovin’ Spoonful album: “Everything Playing”.

Here is the graphic, without permission from the artist, so, if he wants me to take it down, I will do so immediately. Oscar: contact me at noelmckeehan@comcast.net to tell me to remove it from this blog post.

Après Minuit 13 Novembre 2010

2010-11-12T16:24:00.001-08:00

Eleven or so minutes ago I became irrevocably sixty eight years old.

Just as I had thought would be the case, I can’t tell any difference from the way I felt this afternoon when I made my multi-pronged walk – multi-pronged because as sometimes happens to me in Paris, I had been going exactly the wrong way for a mile or so (but with enthusiasm; the Tour Eiffel was my constant companion out there ahead of me, and La Tour was, in final fact, the clue that I had needed to tell me of the one-eightydness of my direction of travel) – from Gare Montparnasse to home on Rue Guénégaud.

But there is no point in obfuscating the reality of the heading of this post.

I am now within ten years of the time it took my mother to figure out how to depart this life; within twelve years of my father’s identical discovery. They both made their exit in the same year.

And I was there both times.

Which gave me some perspective that I would not otherwise have had. And that perspective has never left me, never allowed me to cease pondering, pondering, pondering.

Pondering those facts have given me pause. And I have had thoughts.

I have had thoughts about myself. I have had thoughts about, I don’t have a word for it, but – something.

They go like this.

The track is long – the one my parents have recently departed, and the one upon which I still tread.

It is long, but only because it is circular.

The fact that it is circular, and therefore apparently long – apparently long, to the hopelessly optimistic, infinite even to some of that tribe, disguises the limitedness of that track. Seventy eight and eighty are numbers of laps on the track that I am fast approaching.

So introspection reigns supreme on this early morning of the day my mother and I first got to know each other.

And it is so hard to realize that the Fourth birthday party that I recounted in Screen Saver can possibly be sixty four years previous to today.

It is so hard to believe that time can implode, that time can explode, that time can do the things that time can do with the seasons, and the chestnuts, and the recycling and – just all of the sounds and sights and smells and feelings that comprise a life.

But then that is what Screen Saver is all about.

From Screen Saver: Introduction To Chapter Twenty Four

2010-11-10T07:53:00.001-08:00

One wintry December day I was in Paris and I had taken a walk along the Seine. I had walked from rue de Grenell to Pont d’Alma and along the river in the direction of Pont Alexandre. It had been raining. It was cold and grey and slightly blustery. I had considered going back to the apartment as early in the walk as the point at which I had first gotten to the river. But I had decided to keep going.

As I came to Pont Alexandre I had stopped to evaluate the effects of the gray day on the gilt work of the bridge’s sculptures and then I had taken a few pictures in an attempt to document what I had seen. As I had expected, the giant golden men shone with the same sort of glow that they had on sunny days. The intensity was just slightly attenuated in the greyness. They seemed to glow in a manner that might have been independent of light conditions.

As I was standing there looking at the bridge, looking at the water and looking at the golden giants my gaze wandered around to the right in the direction of les Invalides, and as I had looked in that direction I had happened to glance down at the ground. The walkway bordering the seawall and its concrete guard rail at that place was made up of the flint gravel that makes up so many of the walkways in Paris. Because of the rain the gravel had turned to a kind of tan colored muddy mixture of small pieces of flint, flint gravel and water. There were highpoints where the mixture became damp, almost wet sandy flint hummocks and low points that could be best described as flint gravel mud puddles. In one of the puddles was something that for some reason had caught my attention. It was black, about the size of a golf ball, but irregularly shaped, and appeared to have a husk or rind that had been partially split with the split showing a crease of creamy white material extruding from the split. It was one of the last of the season’s chestnuts. It was one that had somehow avoided the street sweepers or the traffic or – early in its life on the ground – the questing hands of children collecting the briefly shiny brown prizes of autumn. It was just lying there looking rather forlorn. At least it had looked forlorn to someone to whom the chestnut in all its cyclical forms had constituted a symbol of something transitional, transitory, acceleratingly fleeting and everlastingly significant. With a certain pang of sadness I had walked on, and the day had fled as all days fled – more swiftly than its predecessor.

That night I had periods of sleep interrupted by periods of wakefulness. I had learned in the early years of the mixture of sleep and wake that had taken over my night times, to read during the waking periods.

Those wakeful periods had constituted a huge amount of time available for someone who was a slow reader, who loved to read and who had possessed a reading list probably longer that his expected lifespan.

That night I had been reading Thomas Hardy.

My sleeping periods by that point in my life had begun to be filled with a jumble of dreams, semi-awake thoughts and impressions and semi-asleep memories lapsing into dreams. The jumble always was an absolutely bizarre mix of real and unreal, of plausible and patently beyond possibility and – as had become the case in times of less deep sleep than even the broken sleep that had become normal for me – an additional and enhanced blend of thoughts, things and pictures from the day just past.

That night had become one of those enhanced jumbles.

In one of the waking interludes I had decided to enhance my reading experience by having a glass of calvados. After an hour or so of reading and sipping, that routine had been so pleasant that I poured a second glass of calvados. As was always the case when I read at night in bed I had begun to become pleasantly drowsy – oddly, the calvados had extended the non-drowsy period substantially beyond the norm - and I had put the book away and had lapsed back into the sleep and its associated jumble.Somewhere on toward dawn, but when it was still dark I had awakened again, or had thought that I had awakened. I had just emerged from a strain of the enhanced dream jumble that had been so compelling – about something – that I couldn’t make tangible – that I had felt an overwhelming urge to add to the critical mass of the tale that I had been assembling since it had started under similar circumstances a year earlier. I was so ready to write that I didn’t take the time to boot the computer. I didn’t have time to wait for that process. I grabbed a ballpoint and my ever-present yellow lined tablet and had started writing. When I had finished writing I had gone back to bed and slept more deeply and for a longer period than I had for a long time. When I finally awoke in the middle of a Paris morning it was with a memory of having written quite a lot – about something - not long before. I had some idea of what it was that I had written. But I hadn’t been sure whether what I had written had been about something that had actually happened or whether it had been a response to and an attempt at documenting something that had sprung from what had been for the entire sleeping portion of the previous night an intensely experienced mixture of the real, the read, the imagined, the dreamed and the never could have been. After reading what I had written I was sure that it had never happened, but I was never able to convince myself that it couldn’t, or even shouldn’t have happened.

A Record Day For The Pigeon Drop

2010-11-09T10:12:00.001-08:00

In 2006 I was walking down Quai Voltaire one afternoon with my friend Betsy. We were, as was usually the case, hooting an laughing, and we were, for some reason in kind of a hurry. So we weren’t paying much attention the what was going on around us.

What was going on around us was that we suddenly had a small but rotund, brown, vaguely Eastern European looking and clothed woman right there between us. She all of a sudden there and was equally, but fluidly, suddenly bending down to the pavement at our feet and picking something up. She immediately showed us what it was, which was an apparently gold ring. It looked like a man’s yellow gold wedding band.

She said something to us, in French, but I don’t remember now what it was. It must have been pretty basic because whatever it was I understood it. The gist of it was she wanted us to take the the ring. For whatever reason I didn’t want to take the ring, and, probably, because I was the one that sort of understood what the woman was saying, Betsy was taking her cues from me.

I had never seen anything like this in my, by then, many visits to Paris, and I am not usually one to leap to conclusions particularly quickly, and the woman, I realized later, in the face of subsequent experiences, had done a masterful job of setting up the premise. Her physical presentation from the very beginning of being somehow in our midst and “finding” the ring had been totally believable.

I was so taken in that when she said something and looked more closely at the ring, said something else and then presented me with a view of the ring’s inside layer where “14k” was etched, I said “vous avez bon chance, Madame”. But she didn’t want any of the bon chance; she wanted us to take the ring.

At that point I began to have a vague but non specific suspicion.

I said and did something that got her on her way away from us. As she left, we stayed where we were. When she was maybe fifty or sixty feet away we started walking again – walking behind her, but in the same direction.

Then it came to me, although I really thought that I was being more funny than realistic, but what I said was based on similarities to a scam that I had once seen documented on 60 Minutes.

As we started off, substantially behind the woman, I said to Betsy, “we’ve just had the ol’ pigeon drop scam tried on us”. Not surprisingly she said “what is the ol’ pigeon drop scam”.

Before I could answer, the woman had turned and was coming back toward us at a fairly rapid, if deliberate, pace. “Just watch” I said.

For a really good description of the pigeon drop go to:

http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Crimes/InPerson/MajorPerson/pigeon_drop.htm

So she was back. And she said that the good luck was ours. She said that she had no use for such a ring but she could use some money for food. She said that since she had found the ring at our feet it was really ours anyway, and we should take it, only could she have some euros just as a sort of finders fee?

It took real persistence to get rid of her and that god damned ring.

Contemplating the event later, I assumed that the woman must make her living as a professional pigeon dropper. I also assumed that the experience, for me, would be a once in a lifetime one.

So I was utterly amazed when a month later, when Mysti and I were in Paris and were walking down Quai Voltaire, the same woman suddenly appeared between us – and you know the rest of the story.

But wait; there is more.

Since 2006 I have had the same gambit attempted on me at least once, and occasionally several times per trip. It has even been tried a few times by the same woman. But she has now been joined by quite a fleet of wannabes. I call them wannabes because they range in skill – compared to the woman of my first encounter – from not very good to ludicrous. As a manner of dealing with them, I adopted, long ago, a pigeon drop demeanor. When one of them begins the shtick I just keep doing what I am doing and ignore them completely. It amuses me to hear their yelps of dismay at being treated as invisible apparitions.

The disadvantage to one as curious as I am about things that occur around me of not going along with the game is that I don’t know how they play out the end game. But I am comfortable with the belief that I am probably not smart enough to outwit them if I let them get me in even the softest grasp of their clutches, so I remain ignorant of whatever the final outcome is.

This trip has been a bonanza for the pigeon drop. When I started today I didn’t have an official count, but I had been approached about ten or twelve times in 40 days.

By day’s end the count was off the charts. I had seven contacts in three and a half hours. One of them was so bad that I broke my rules of engagement and said to him in loud American English “if I was as bad at this as you are I’d look for a job”. He said “sorry; sorry”. The last one, I just looked at and laughed uproariously as I walked down the Quai toward the gold guys on Pont Alexandre.

In addition to the multiple encounters that I have had, I have, occasionally, passed by a victim who has been ensnared at least to the point of talking to the pigeon dropper. Today I was walking up on three people who were standing at the left bank terminus of Pont Alexandre III. One was a tall middle aged woman standing so her profile was presented to me. I noticed that presentation because the expression of that profile was a look of major disquieted dismay. I couldn’t help noticing and wondering what might be the reason for her ill ease. The second person of the three was a rather tall brown man whom I might have taken for a flasher due to the overcoat in which he was encased. He had one arm on the shoulder of the third person, a man, and the tall brown man was telling that third man something that I wasn’t able to hear or to grasp. And that third man who had that second man’s arm around his shoulder was about the same height as the brown man and he was saying something that I couldn’t make out either.

But the woman spoke, in English, and it all came clear. “Why don’t you just give him back the ring?” she said.

Apparently part of the end game is to get the ring into the hands of the mark.

Thoughts On The Rain

2010-11-08T11:03:00.001-08:00

For the first time since I got here on the first of October, yesterday it rained with spirit.

The apartment that I am in is on the first floor – the other floor beneath it on the ground being floor zero – which in the way this building is constructed gives me a fairly unusual feature. I have a small, exposed to the sky and the elements deck or balcony outside my apartment. It is like being at the bottom of a very closed in rectangular canyon, with the sky showing itself up there about six stories away from me when I am on that outside-of-the-apartment platform.

It is rather Spartan, but it is rather nice.

There is a planter with a variegated-leaved, I suspect non-deciduous, shrub of some kind, a little pot with a waning geranium, and maybe a fifteen foot by six or seven foot area that I can call my own outside the curtilage.

It would probably be a nice thing to have in August. In November it is just a feature.

This deck or balcony is really the roof of the zero floor. The building for whatever reasons stopped having the total square footage that was constructed on that zero floor, after that zero floor, leaving all the floors above that zero floor with a hollow rectangular core exposed to the sky. My deck, or balcony, is actually the roof of that zero floor. But it works.

One of the advantages of that deck with an opening to the sky is that I can just open either the casement windows that open onto it and disengage and open the shutters, or open the French doors that open onto it and disengage and open the shutters – or both – and get an idea of what is going on in the world. That “what is going on” can include either the ability to eavesdrop on the multiple other human agglomerations that share the outer edges of our open to the sky inner core with me – a fascinating, and somehow New York- like phenomenon ( it is easy to picture someone sticking his or her head out of a window somewhere in the rising column of residences and yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take any more” or “woaaah, it looks like rain” – or to see what the weather is doing.

Yesterday when I opened the windows, doors and shutters what I discovered about what the weather was doing was that it was raining. It wasn’t a Florida or Georgia deluge, it wasn’t some kind of mist or light rain, it was a Portland/Seattle medium heavy rain that just shouted to the skies “I am going to keep this up for a long time”.

I recognized it immediately.

One of the reasons I recognized it immediately is probably because, as near as I have ever been able to tell, Paris weather and Portland and Seattle weather are basically the same. They are kindred. That may be one of the less interesting reasons why I feel so at home here.

So I looked out and saw extremely non-walker friendly weather. For sure I wasn’t going to take a camera out in it.

That was not good news. It was not good news for two immediately to me obvious reasons.

First, I don’t want to become a blivet, and exercise, somewhat extreme, albeit old man extreme, exercise, such as multi-hour walks, are the only remedies to blivetization. I document in Screen Saver why running four times around Jardin de Luxembourg has ceased to be an option – and in any event, even when I still did that, rain made the flint gravel track such a milky soup that even when I used to be able to run, running in the rain in Paris was not an option.

Second, much though I like my apartment, and much though I enjoy those hours I choose to spend at the keyboard of my ThinkPad, I want that liking and enjoyment to be experienced only in doses that I choose to mete out, not in doses that are levied upon my by forces external, and forces beyond my control.

So, with the weather bad, and the walking and freedom of movement outside the apartment made seriously less attractive by the weather, I conjured.

What else could I do? I could go to the Louvre, or l’Orangerie, or musée d’Orsay. Those are inside, and even the smallest involves a lot of walking (Le Louvre s so big it almost defies comprehension) so maybe that would be a good rainy day exercise. But the size of the crowds that I had recently seen at those venues dissuaded me from that possibility immediately.

As it happened, that was the same morning that I had made my reservations to Chartres.

“Why not just go to that Internet café that you discovered on Rue Jouy and print out your e-ticket e-mail confirmation? It has your e-ticket reference code and you probably ought to have physical, ink on paper proof of your right to boarding a train.”

“OK” I heard someone say.

As I was crossing Pont Marie, my umbrella deployed, and with absolutely no ill effects from the fairly medium-heavy rain that had dogged me for the mile or two that I had traversed since I had left the front door of the apartment, it came to me.

“You’ve got to just get out into whatever it is that Paris has to offer in the form of weather. There is just no excuse for staying indoors. This place is so wonderful that to do so would approximate what you were taught in grade school and high school to be sin. The situation on the streets is absolutely different, and wonderfully so, once you get out from that inner core view of what is going on – that inner-core view from your apartment.”

Today, the weather again being rainy-grim, as I was coming back from a visit to the same Internet Café, driven by a need to print yet another document for my Chartres trip, I was crossing Pont Louis Philippe when a pale yellow attempt at a proto-sundown had broken out through the clouds to the west. As I looked at it, all I could say was, “what an exquisite place”.

Some Minor Victories: Or How I Figured Out How To Live Without A Chip And Pin Financial Card–Also Thoughts On The Rain

2010-11-07T11:05:00.001-08:00

I mentioned in my post about my encounter with FNAC.com and then my visit to an actual physical FNAC store, my concerns about the fact that what I have, and all Americans have, masquerading as current-century technology is something which was implemented in the 1970s. Europe abandoned the old, better called ancient, mag stripe type of plastic financial card about four years ago. In its lieu they use cards that look the same, but have a monstrously powerful tiny electronic chip in them. There are numerous advantages to this technology, but, since this is not a marketing piece for the European financial industry, or some consortium of chip makers that support that industry, suffice it to say that there are a number of major advantages and to that technology and due to those advantages it has replaced what we are still clinging to in the United States.

None of that would matter to me a hoot if it were not for the fact that a whole new generation of unattended vending devices use that chip and pin technology exclusively. Most retail establishments, including hotels and restaurants can take both the new and the ancient. But a significant component in many American’s activities in Europe could be severely hindered by not being able to use those new, unattended, machines. That is because, if you want to buy a Metro ticket in Paris, or a train ticket anywhere, you need to find an attended, human-occupied booth that sells tickets. There is an amazingly shrinking number of these. France being a full employment state, there are no less people in booths in the stations, there are just a whole lot less people who sell tickets. The rest have been re-deployed to distribute information. So there are ample numbers of booths if you want to get information, such as “why doesn’t my credit card work in the ticket kiosk?” “That’s because you are an American, Monsieur” but not many booths where you can buy tickets from a human who knows how to accept last century’s technology.

Since I definitely need to buy metro tickets, and, if I start using using the metro more and walking less, to refresh my NaviGo pass (the replacement for Carte Orange) and since I plan to make a few train trips, that “very few human ticket sellers” is a very grim scenario. I am in a country which is automation heavy in an area that I need to be able to use, but I can’t use it because the financial industry of my country doesn’t want to invest in anything new – other than, perhaps, new and better ways to slice the tranches of tranches of tranches of tranches of fictitious financial instruments so that they can sell them to idiots, and so that the lead/lag time involved with the idiots figuring out that they have been fucked will allow the sellers of those tranche matrices to, yet again, collect huge bonuses prior to checking in with the taxpayers for bonus protection insurance next time the tranches all start imploding. (Everybody I trust assures me that the recent financial reform law is a farce.)

But I digress.

Confronted with this – for me – problem, I have been thrashing about mentally, since the moment I discovered the problem two or three weeks ago. The only viable option that I could think of was to go into a BNP Paribas, beg somebody to speak to me in English, and explain my plight, with the hope that there would be some easy and painless way for me to get a chip and pin card.

But I kept coming up with really good reasons why I didn’t want to do that. Surprisingly, my ego was not one of them.

So the problem has persisted as an ever present irritant in my life, an ever murmuring voice of discontent, a constant challenge or a proto-quest.

A couple of days ago an idea occurred to me.

In the United States, when I have been on my way to England or France, and when going to those places had involved my wanting to go from London to Paris or Paris to London, I have used Rail Europe to buy the tickets. Those tickets have always been delivered to me in Seattle on time and they have always worked when I boarded the trains for which the tickets were supposed to give me access. I have been a very satisfied Rail Europe customer. I have, though, never really known what Rail Europe was, where it was or how or even why it really worked. It just hadn’t mattered. It had always worked. And beyond that I hadn’t really cared.

The idea that occurred to me was, why not buy the tickets on the Rail Europe web site and have them sent to me at my address in Paris – not metro tickets, of course, I would still have to find humans to buy those tickets from, but train tickets for real travel. I knew that there must be some reason why that idea wouldn’t work, and why what I wanted to do couldn’t be done, but, I really wanted to know what that reason might be.

So I found the – surprisingly easy to find – “contact us” link on the Rail Europe site, contacted them, and asked if I could do what I wanted.

In a surprisingly short time, a surprisingly clear, and surprisingly indicative-of-the-fact-that-the-person responding had-actually-read-my-message-and-had-actually-understood-it (that just doesn’t happen any more in this era when customer service agents are trained to know what people are going to ask before they ask, and to categorize all those questions into neat pre-packaged, automated answers that can be exhumed from the boilerplate cauldron and expeditiously sent to those people naïve enough to ask questions of customer service) answer came back.

More words were used than this, but the answer was no. And the reasons given made sense, even though I would have preferred them not to exist and not to make sense. I had pretty much assumed that that would be the case, so the reasons given were not any surprise.

But then the reply turned a corner and said, what seemed to me, mais oui – but yes.

The guy pointed out that most tickets available on the Rail Europe site had an e-ticket delivery option that was part of the checkout process.

I am now the possessor of a round trip (day trip) exploratory venture into the world of buying my tickets on my computer in my apartment from Rail Europe, choosing the “print e-ticket at the station” delivery method to Chartres in the week after next. The confirming email said that I should print out that confirming email – so that I had the e-ticket numbers to feed to the kiosk at Gare Montparnasse, and so that I had proof of purchase to cover any unforeseen problems.

So I walked down to the Internet Café that I had discovered when I was living on the island, it is on Rue de Jouy, printed two copies of that email, paid the really nice guy in attendance one euro fifty centimes, and stopped when I got back to the left bank on the mainland at Le St Séverin for a contemplative glass of wine; and then I came home to write this.

I’ll let you know how well the Chartres trip works out. If it is as good as I hope, I think Bordeaux for a couple of days is next and then, perhaps, Barcelona.

I’ll let you know how that all comes out.

The thoughts on the rain have been deferred to later.

La Terreur Du Déjà Vu

2010-11-06T10:56:00.001-07:00

In Screen Saver I recount a thing that once happened to me in the Champion that used to be on Rue de Seine. Although it was a simple to describe event from a doggy and horsey viewpoint (“doggy and horsey” is a term that Mysti and I co-opted long ago from a Peanuts strip: Charlie Brown and Lucy are lying on the ground looking up at the sky and Lucy is describing the things she is seeing in the clouds; she sees epic battles from classic mythology, heroes of American history and a panoply of people and things that only could be evoked by high intelligence stoked with a deep and classical education; she stops; there is a frame in which they just lie there, neither saying anything; and then Charlie Brown says “gee, I was going to say that I saw a doggy and a horsey”) since it didn’t take very long and it entailed nothing more spectacular than a woman’s mobile canvas-clad grocery go-to-market cart tipping over; it nonetheless had a profound and lasting effect on my life.

Stemming from that experience, in that super market, in Paris, I have a different interpretation of certain configurations of “things” that I may encounter in my daily life.

That cart, that day was the property of the woman immediately ahead of me in the checkout line. There is a complete carefully woven web of circumstances, activities and attitudes that I recount in my account of the event in the book. But I leave that detail to readers of the book.

The short version is that the cart was a commonly seen device on the streets and in the markets of Paris. It was a metal frame with a canvas shell wrapping it, the frame being on wheels. The canvas shell presented a surprisingly cavernous opportunity for the owners of such devices to stow all variety of groceries, and on the day in question the woman in question in the line in question directly ahead of me had outdone herself with the stuffing of her cart.

Another characteristic of such devices, and one which was essential to the events of that day in Champion, my subsequent “different interpretation of certain configurations of ‘things’ that I may encounter in my daily life”, and the terror legitimately connected to the events of today which I may sometime soon get around to telling about, is that those devices, when chock-a-block full, can stand with their long axis perpendicular to the horizontal surface of the floor or the ground or whatever horizontal surface it is that they find themselves to be occupying at any point in their use as carriers of potentially vast quantities of groceries.

And that is convenient for their owners. It allows those owners to cart their cart to some location or other – such as just ahead of me in a grocery checkout line in the Champion on Rue de Seine in Paris – and, having set it into that vertical, perpendicular-to-the-floor attitude of which it is capable, said owners can leave the device unattended while they reach for their wallets, or remove items from it to be put on the check out conveyor, or whatever other two handed activities would be precluded if it were not for that independently vertical standing capability.

But that capability can be disastrous for unwary others in the vicinity.

On that day I was one such unwary other. I caused that vertical standing pillar of what turned out to be mostly large glass jars of gravy to change attitude by 90 degrees, thus bringing a massive quantity of fragilely packaged brown goo into catastrophic contact with the floor.

Since that day I never stand in line behind or ahead of one of those things when I am in Paris.

Moreover, any time I see, what turns out to be a kindred configuration of “things” (it is surprising how large a clan of configurations of things that particular configuration belongs to) I get really wary.

What kind of things? you may probably be asking no one in particular.

Oh, how about a five foot high hand truck loaded up to the curvature of its handle with cases – say maybe six or seven – of eggs?

A completely separate and satisfying – at least to me – post could be written about the paucity of anything resembling a sidewalk on any but the largest boulevards of Paris. That is one of the myriad things that contribute to the charm of the place. But it does keep one constantly analyzing the activities, configurations and sizes of the people in front of one, or behind one, on those places on either side of the narrow streets that are generally, although not always, free from autos or motorcycles, so that major crashes of human kind with one another are avoided.

Suffice that just-said to be a prologue to the climax of this tale.

I was coming back from the market with my Paris market basket – remember the one which when we last encountered it was left, unusably coated with olive oil, in the story of the great olive oil disaster? – fully laden with cheese, bread and croissant, and I was on the last leg of the journey, having started down Rue Guénégaud. I was walking, dodging, going into the street – all those things one does on all those charming small Paris streets – when I came to a medium sized delivery van parked partially on what little sidewalk there was. Between the truck’s sides and the wall of the building on it right side there was ample room for one person to go if than one person put his market bag in front of himself in order that the bag might not nearly double the width of that person.

There having been a cluster of more than one person coming in the opposite direction, I stopped substantially back of the delivery truck – I was unable to see what if anything might be associated with its delivery function; it was just forward of the Fran Prix super marché so I assumed that it must be delivering something to Fran Prix – and let that cluster make their way as best they could through the space between the truck and the wall.

Once they were past I moved a little closer to the truck and tried to see ahead to see if more people were coming opposite me. There were not. As I moved forward, about to enter the gap between the truck and the wall, I saw that there was indeed a delivery person just behind the truck, in the street directly behind the part of the truck that was not on the sidewalk. I saw that he had a good sized hand truck loaded vertically with multiple cases of something. Except for a distant twinge – such twinges always accompany any such configuration that I encounter, but, mercifully, they almost never develop into anything more sinister – I didn’t think much about it.

As a person who once aspired to make his living as a consultant to the distribution industry, any manifestation of activities associated with distribution continues to fascinate me. Paris it turns out, is a laboratory for someone who has interests such as mine. To make all the little markets, stores and the like, to say nothing of the myriad restaurants work, being as they are, all lurking in back allies, and in dead end passages and inside buildings, many of which date to the sixteen hundreds, the French have adopted carte blanche what food distributors in America call DSD – Direct Store Delivery. The “Direct” in DSD is the tricky part. It means directly from the manufacturer to the store; there is no middle stage of being held in a huge wholesale warehouse. In America DSD is confined to small specialized niches such as – sometimes – beverage, and pretty much always, snacks. In France DSD is the way stuff gets to the retailers.

And an interesting result of this fact is that if you get out early enough, when it’s still dark, and go to a street upon which a number of markets and restaurants front – the intersection of Rue de Bucci and Rue de Seine is a great example – you will see a street turned into, for an hour or so, the floor of a food distribution warehouse, complete with all the tools, pallet jacks, etc. that would be present in a warehouse.

Anyone who has ever seen this sight, and who knows anything about anything, would be hard pressed to continue to harbor that cherished American belief that the French are lazy and not entrepreurial (George Bush, remember, said that they don’t even have a word for it – Sarah Palin at least, has never heard of the word in the first place, or probably, France, so she can hardly be found fault with).

Anyway, as I began to enter the gap between the truck and the wall, and saw the man and his hand truck loaded with cases up to the top of the truck’s backbone I made note of yet another evidence of DSD.

Then I noticed that the top case was open on the top, not as in someone had opened it, but as in it was a one layer carton that had no top to it by design. Since it was open, I could see that the contents of that layer of the cases was cartons of les oeufs des fermiers – farm fresh eggs.

Bear in mind, it takes much longer to tell or to read all of this than it did to live through it.

Things were moving along briskly. I had almost entered the gap and by then everything that I have just described had been discerned by me. I was digesting the fact that the top layer of the cartons was an open topped carton with multiple smaller cartons of eggs. I could see them; they were in individual cartons, themselves with cutouts in their lids so that the eggs could be seen; they were a pretty brown. I still had not actually gotten into the gap between the truck and the store, but my entry was imminent. All of this had probably occupied a second or two – let’s say two.

As second three began its lifespan I took note of the rest of the cases – the six or seven other cases upon which the top, open lidded case was stationed. They were rather large, closed cardboard cases, each consisting of a depth that would probably have accommodated three layers of the depth of the single layer open topped one on the very top. And all those multi layer cases were also eggs. It said so on their sides. As second three entered its death throes I had entered the gap. I was still two or three paces from the guy.

As second four began its life, and as I got yet that much physically and temporally closer to the vertical configuration in front of me the twinge that always accompanies my encountering those type of configurations became an almost tangible feeling of dread. Contributing to the developing tangibility of my dread – for dread it can only be accurately called – was the fact that the guy had left the configuration without his hand on the handle; he had left it in its conveniently stationary upright position and moved slightly away to do some other task.

At this point there was a confluence of cosmic proportions. Second four screamed its anguished death call, second five was born and I, in my head at least, became suspended in some never-never land from which I could see impending catastrophe but from which I was shielding myself with every power at my disposal. I may have physically stopped moving, or I may have slowed to progress measured in microns; in any event I was as close to the stack of eggs as I was going to allow myself to be, and that was far enough away that what happened next could not be ascribed to me in any way. If those desirous of ascribing guilt, if there were any such, had known of my almost eerie connection with such events they might have been able to make a case. But only I knew of the connection and I wasn’t telling anybody.

You may have noticed by now if you have read many of my posts that guilt is a big thing with me.

I don’t know whether the guy heard second five in its death wail, or whether some sixth sense tried to give him warning. I think he had an inkling of what I already knew in that weird way in which déjà vu always lets one “know” things. As second six came into being I had stopped in my tracks; I think the guy had reached for the handle of the hand truck; I had hope that the vu might turn out not so déjà.

But that hope was dashed.

Things for me had gone into that movie slow motion mode that always accompanies my participation in disasters. His hand, I think, had reached out, but just behind the now horizontally accelerating vertical configuration of eggs; second six started screaming and second seven began to make warm birthing sounds; and I, in horror watched a really large omelet come into existence.

I don’t think – and I mean this seriously – that I have ever felt more empathetically worse for a fellow human being.

Coda To The Great Olive Oil Disaster

2010-11-05T08:45:00.001-07:00

All during the time I spent recently narrowing my life’s view to that of Sisyphus, a distant predecessor, who employed a rock as his challenge generating device rather than, as I did, two hundred feet of spilled olive oil, I kept thinking that I remembered from the other time that I had stayed in the apartment, whose hall appeared to be the place I would spend eternity, on my hands and knees (remember? it had been the site of that now laughable previous achievement, my first uneventful first time entry into a new apartment) that a cleaning service periodically came in and, among other things mopped the hall and shampooed the carpets. I found no immediate solace in that possibly accurate memory. I mean it wasn’t as if I expected them to show up like the cavalry over the hill just at my time of need; it was just something that I thought that I remembered. It did have the additional ameliorative aspect that, if it were true, in the unlikely event that I ever succeeded in escaping being Sisyphus, and succeeded in completing some sort of triage cleaning miracle, the professionals might appear in due time and complete the job leaving nary a trace of that which had occurred on that fateful Saturday.

Well today due time did indeed pass and the cleaning people did indeed appear. I didn’t know it was the cleaning people when I first became aware of them. All I heard was a lot of shouting between what appeared to be two men. Obviously I had no idea what they were shouting. If I had, I suspected retrospectively, I was saying something such as “what kind of twisted pervert would coat the halls with olive oil”?

It wasn’t until I had opened the door to make my exit for my daily walk and image gathering exercise that I realized it was they whom I thought I remembered. It was the cleaning people.

What caused me to know immediately that this was the case was that the hexagonal terra cotta brick flooring that had still had telltale vestigial smudges of oil here and there – telltale at least to someone such as I who had had an intimate relationship with those smudges for their entire life span; I might even have claimed to have had a degree of fatherhood for their existence – was still glimmering wetly with the sheen of recent moppedness.

My door is the first door in the hall on my floor. There is another door across from me but it is slightly down the hall from me. Then the hall goes off down itself for how far I know not – I have been unwilling to ever go down it beyond my doorway for fear of finding myself trapped in pitch blackness due to capricious, or perhaps sinister, activities of the spirit-keepers of the little glowing things – but it is quite a long hall; I can see that in the brief durations when the little glowing things have been convinced to illuminate the area. So the still glimmering sheen (I really like that description; I think I’ll keep it) should have extended on down the hall beyond my door and be visible up to its vanishing point or until the lights went out, whichever occurred first.

But it didn’t.

Remember at the very outset of the disaster when I briefly flirted with the idea of just leaving the mess and disclaiming any knowledge in the unlikely event that anyone ever asked? And remember that one of the two reasons that I kept trying to clean it up – the other being fear of my mess causing someone to slip and kill themselves – was that the mess itself stopped right at my door in the form of one of the two significant lakes of olive oil that I had been inadvertently able to create? And with the mess at my doorstep, so to speak, it seemed that I would be quickly identified as the culprit.

Now the glimmering sheen stopped at that very self-same doorstep. When I came back from my three hour walk I was completely ready to find a note pinned to my door: “nous accusons, Monsieur le Culprit!”

But it wasn’t there. Maybe the sheen dried before anyone had a chance to see it, with its accusatory termination at my doorstep. Maybe only the cleaning people know for sure.

And the stream of olive oil down the center of all of the carpet between the outer entry and my doorway had been shampooed away.

Could the whole episode just have been a very bad dream based on my imperfect knowledge of Greek mythology? I think I will take that view henceforth.

I Have Run Out Of Steam, But Here Is Something For Today

2010-11-04T11:25:00.001-07:00

Snippets For The Day

2010-11-03T12:08:00.001-07:00

When yesterday's appointed writing time of day arrived, I just sat staring at the computer screen.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say. I have either of two things to write, neither of which do I know the length. One is another episode in Halloween Story? and the other is a coda to the great olive oil disaster: what ever became of my old friend the Paris market bag, now that it has an oil saturated bottom and leaves an oily, smudgy spot wherever it is set down?

But no words would come in support of either of those projects. My heart was really not in it.

I had returned slightly ahead of the appointed hour – about 1530 – from a highly successful expedition to FNAC to buy an ultraviolet filter for my new Sony Alpha 5. FNAC is a giant seller of electronics, cameras, books and recorded digital media (actually two guys in front of me in line were buying vinyl) to the great nation of France. For meFNAC is a magical place because it is that place to which I can go, and be absolutely sure, that something vital, electronically speaking, that I have forgotten and left on the other side of the Atlantic and am in current dire need of, can and will be found. And a corollary is that it has so much absolutely neat stuff that I always find many things for which I didn’t even know I had a need.

This day’s FNAC visit was going to be mildly interesting. It was going to answer the question “how does a huge retailer deal with the fact that, when contacted via the internet, it shows itself to have such and such an item, but the consumer who has established that item’s existence and its availability, has chosen for some reason to buy from the physical store rather than make the purchase on line?”

That was my question, and this being a gray day with a proclivity to rain, I had decided to confine my walking activities, not to image gathering, but to fact-finding and/or acquiring that item which had caused me to be aware of those facts to which I was setting out on an expedition of finding.

It had started on a day several days prior when I was occupied in my legitimate daily activity of image gathering. I had happened to glance at the upturned - to me - open face of the lens of my camera, and I had seen spots. There were spots on the outer surface of the lens. That is not something I like to see on a vital and expensive piece of optics. I made a note that I would need to use the special lens cloth with which I clean my plastic glasses lenses when I returned to the apartment. And I did. And with a huff, and with a puff, depositing a little vapor on the lens, the spots came away in toto.

But this event had called my attention to a higher level threat. It was a threat that I hadn’t thought of since Saigon, but which flooded back with an intensity as if the years were not 43 but were instead minutes – perhaps 43.

The threat was: having the very expensive curvature of one’s camera lens openly exposed to the world is a really bad idea. “Isn’t it interesting” – I thought I heard someone say – “that 43 three years ago, in a war zone, the only threat he could perceive, or perhaps the only one that he was willing to admit to giving a shit about, was the surface area of his camera’s lens”?

The solution to that problem in 1967 had been to buy an inexpensive and therefore completely expendable ultra violet filter which screwed in to the threaded extension of the outer shell of the lens’s housing. I looked at my lens, and sure enough, there were threads.

I had already bookmarked a place on the FNAC web site (I had been curious about how much I would have to pay for a printer for my apartment) and I went to “photo” and entered “filtre” and up popped some options, one of which was “UV” which I chose, and there in front of me was a cornucopia of “filtres”.

I had idly wondered prior to entering the search argument that had presented me with such plethoric options if cameras had some kind of uniform and standard size for their filters.

They don’t.

But by toggling to another tab which, when opened, gave me access to “Sony Style” I finally figured out that the filter I needed to buy was probably 49 mm.

I found a 49mm UV filtre and put it in my cart. I then performed the prerequisite ritual of setting up my user ID and password for FNAC. I had decided that, not only was the 13 euros that the thing cost, an amount that made the item’s nature as a part of my equipment totally expendable – just as its predecessor in 1967 on my Pentax Spotmatic had been – but also that that amount of money made adding yet another new dimension to my life a thing totally, feasibly, and financially within my reach. That dimension would be, if I could pull it off, the buying of something on the internet, from a French company, in French, and shipping the item to myself in my apartment in France. If it never showed up I was not out much. If it showed up I was a genius or something.

It doesn’t really take much to entertain me deeply.

Manifestement!

But, sadly, it was not to be. There was some kind of Carte de FNAC requirement that I was unable to supersede, overwhelm, get around, or even, really, to understand, but I suspected that it had something to do with the fact that Europe – with France in the forefront – has gone to chip and pin cards on more and more of their non human attended interfaces to the buying public. There are some starkly frightening implications of this for Americans who have credit cards that support the stone age technology of magnetic stripes. If an American, with his Visa or MasterCard finds him or her self in a metro station that doesn’t have a human-attended ticket-selling function he or she is pretty well stranded if he or she doesn’t already have a ticket.

I have always gone to Gare du Nord on the morning that I wanted to go to London, gone to one of the many automated ticket kiosks and bought my first class ticket and boarded when indicated.

No more.

The financial institutions of America just don’t see any justification for spending whatever money is involved with joining the rest of the world in making credit cards more secure, fungible and universal. It is hard not to suspect tangible revenge for even the laughable reforms passed by a US Congress owned by the financial industry of America. On the other hand, it may be just another form of the subtle, but very real, act of the US Government closing its net of control over the freedom of Americans to conduct themselves in manners of their own choosing tantamount among them, such things as the right to travel unfettered and freely.

In any event, I couldn’t complete the internet transaction, but I had learned that FNAC had a product that I wanted to buy, and what it was called in FNAC parlance.

So I decided that, when a day became obviously fallow enough – just devoid of other options - to use that day to go to FNAC and see if I could translate my knowledge of what they had for sale on their web site, but which had been denied to me by my lack of current technology purchasing equipment, by asking someone with a FNAC uniform, “vous avez cette filtre”?

Which is what I did.

The person to whom I addressed that question said something which I had no idea the meaning of, but he also gestured vaguely to a fellow FNAC-uniformed employee who was sitting in a bar stool height chair; he was hunched over a keyboard. I decided that the guy to whom I had asked the question must be referring me to the hunched one.

So I went over to the hunched one and waited for him to complete whatever it was that he was doing with his computer. After a few moments he looked at me and we exchanged pleasant “bon jours” and I said to him, as I had said to his compatriot “vous avez cette filtre”? I should have mentioned when I issued that question to the other guy that, in conjunction with the question, I showed him the little quarter-folded piece of lined 8.5 by 11 yellow lined paper upon which I run most of my life, and upon which I had written the words “Cokin 49mm UV filtre”.

He asked me something, but I had no idea what it was that he was asking; I gave my best Gallic shrug and said “oui”. He went to work on the keyboard, and I could see my item, a Cokin 49 mm fitre UV come up on the screen. I could also see that the price was 14 euros, one euro more than the on line price had been. He said something to me that I didn’t understand, and asked me a question that I also didn’t understand. I said, “oui” with both enthusiasm and conviction. He hit a couple of keys and in a moment he handed me a piece of paper which described the details of my impending purchase. As he handed it to me he gestured toward the caisses – the electronic (IBM by the way) cash registers – said something as he made that gesture, and then swept the gesture back across space and to a location somewhat on the other side of the retail space form where he and I were standing, and said something that I also didn’t understand, as he did so. I had no idea what he had said about the caisses or the area behind him.

But I knew in my heart.

At least I knew what I wanted it to have been that he had said. I wanted it to be something like “go pay for this and then take the receipt over there and pick up your lens”. So I tried to confirm that longed for understanding of the situation by saying something like “je prend mon achat la?” gesturing to the vague second area that he had indicated. I had decided that I would just assume that first I had to pay and that the logical place to do so would be at one of the caisses; trying to formulate a question to confirm that was just beyond me at that moment.

But I wasn’t ready to let the whole situation be that simple. I wanted there to be some separate check out line for purchases such as mine. And I wanted to figure out which one it was before I had gotten into just any old check out line, and had found that, once I had traversed the seemingly endless queue, having reached its head, that I was in the wrong line. Try as I might I couldn’t see any sign that said anything like that, so in the event I just got in a line, immediately behind the two guys buying vinyl.

Having all the time in the world to continue to analyze the situation, and look for additional data points to assist in that analysis I scanned the whole area back toward the area from which I had gotten the piece of paper that I was holding so I could pay for my Cokin filtre, especially the area where I thought the computer guy had terminated the second part of his gesture that had accompanied what I had assumed to be the description of how I was to complete the transaction. As my eyes focused with particular intensity on that area, I saw a counter with a sign hanging above it “Retrait Achats”. I knew that “retrait” meant “retired” when used with the additional words “a la”; it means “withdraw” when on a sign next to an ATM. “Achats” means “purchases”.

That seemed hopeful

What wasn’t hopeful was that when I got to be the fourth person from the checker, she – the checker - put up the sign “Caisse Fermeture”. My fellow line dwellers shrugged and said something to one another, all nodding and making conciliatory gestures toward the checker. They sort of made moves to go to another line, in fact the woman just behind me did just that. So I picked a new line also. That line was a fairly short one which I thought to be odd as I stepped up to become a part of it. The woman who was last in that line gave me a pleasant enough look as she gestured with a negative sort of connotation and said something that I didn’t understand; but I knew it to be the news that the line was closed to new blood.

So I went to still a third line, and receiving no feedback of any kind from its other tenants; so I settled in as it crept forward.

I have always taken the view, when in France, that since most of the time I have no idea what I or anybody else is doing, and no idea what anybody else is saying, there just isn’t any point in getting upset about very much of anything. (As in a similar observation I have made previously in the Sisyphus post, I hear a chorus of friends and family nay saying that assertion; I can only counter by saying that they don’t live with me all hours of all days, especially when those hours and days are in France.) The best approach has always seemed to me to be to just hunker down and act as if I think that both I, and the situation, are totally normal und under complete control.

That is really unlike the real me, but it is a façade that I have adopted when in France that seems to get me through most French situations.

So that was what I was doing there in FNAC.

And the line continued to creep forward.

I should have mentioned that both the line that I had been in initially, and in which I had been presented with the apparent fait accompli of the line being closed with me still in it, and the one that I had been told – I thought – was not accepting new members at that time, were both still checking people through and both were accepting new members.

It is always interesting.

The one exposure that worried me as my time came nigh was the possibility that FNAC would only accept chip and pin cards, leaving me at the head of the line with no way to pay for what was indicated on the piece of paper that I had been clutching. So I was especially relieved when the answer to my question “carte credite ok?” was “oui” The checker took the card from me and swiped it in slot put there for people who come from countries (there is only one as it turns out) that still use last century’s technology, rather than waiting for me to insert it in the little card slot that chip and pin cards go into, which would have been a futile, if bravado-driven gesture on my part.

And only moments later I had completed my visit to the “retrait achats” desk, had picked up my filtre, and was on my way.

Since Café du Metro is on the way back from FNAC to the apartment – that being part of the plan – I stopped, had a glass of wine, examined my purchase and gloated over another successful incursion into the unknown.

And when I got back to the apartment, having left the camera there when I had departed for FNAC, the filtre screwed in perfectly.

My low cost protective shield for my expensive and vulnerable 18 to 55 mm lens was in place.

Panorama In Lieu Of The Real Post For The Day

2010-11-02T12:17:00.001-07:00

Which is about finished, but needs editing, and I am really tired of it at this point.

But, before the picture, I need to mention my afternoon adventure.

I went to Départ Saint Michele at 1700 for a small pichet of wine and to read the 14 page report on Turkey in The Economist.

I ordered a “quart de rosé” and had settled in with my Economist, when I noticed at the table just to my right, toward the street, through the glass partition behind which I had chosen my table to avoid being in the middle of a community of smokers – everyone, almost, smokes in France but they have been banished to the sidewalk portions of the bistros – a young woman who looked like Sofia Coppola, only better looking.

“What a voyeuristic bonus to my reading” I thought to myself.

I was enjoying the report on Turkey with occasional glances at “Sofia” and her friends when the situation even had another, unexpected, dimensional improvement.

A young couple – I would have guessed not old enough to be in a bar – but in France that may be less of an issue than in Americastan, were entering the bar. The young woman was a perfect – FUCKING PERFECT – Brigitte Bardot wanabee.

Between "Sofia" and "Brigitte" I didn't get too much - but some - read about Turkey.

Just to bring things back to an even keel, I guess, as I was leaving, I was utterly sure that I saw Patty Murray take the table next to me.

But here is the picture:

Sisyphus Redux

2010-11-01T10:48:00.001-07:00

Right in front of the door, the big puddle was not innocuous water. It was, in other words, olive oil, something that as a food is wonderful, but as a puddle on the floor is rather sinister.

I frantically tried to figure out what to do about cleaning it up. I had opened the apartment. I began looking in all the cupboards and shelves for some kind of cleaning compound. I looked for a mop; I looked for a bucket. Some apartments had had all of these things. This apartment had none of these things.

I had brought two rolls of paper towels with me and there was an additional good supply of rolls in the apartment. I grabbed a large wad and went after the puddle that I had first seen when I had glanced back toward the direction from which I had come. I plunged it into the golden puddle and everything went dark. The lights that are activated by the spirits of the little glowing things are on a timer, or the spirits capriciously turn them off when they think doing so will maximize the disorientation of any humans who might be in their sphere of influence.

I knew that. I got up from the oily mass of matted paper towel and pushed the little glowing thing. The lights came on. I went back to the oily mass of paper and concluded that about all that that mass of paper could handle had been absorbed. It hadn’t even made a dent. I got another wad of towels and repeated the process. More oil was removed, some of course dripped from the towels back to the floor in a completely new location as I carried the recently used ones back into the apartment, but if one had an infinite amount of time to iterate through the process of plunging paper towels into masses of olive oil one could probably adopt the optimistic view that in time the mess could be cleaned up. But time, I was pretty sure, was something of which I had little. And I was pretty sure that what little I had was getting exponentially littler by the moment.

“How does one say stupid? Bêtement, I think means stupidly; that might do. But where is that going to get me? I’ve never known the French to be particularly accepting of statements of the obvious as explanations for incomprehensible occurrences that they encounter.” And a guy on his hands and knees in an intermittently dark hallway, wiping up what would no doubt be a totally unknown – to whomever it would turn out to be who would be my first encounter as I proceeded with my activities – was clearly stupid. “It must be bête” I said to no one in particular.

I briefly considered just abandoning the project as un-doable, and, if asked claiming total ignorance of the whole debacle; but a couple of things made me think better of that course of action, and the thought of both of those things caused even more sweat to pour from my already over-worked glands (stress and hard labor having, in equal amounts, kicked them already into overdrive). The first of those things was, the oil is slippery and it would be very likely that an unsuspecting other resident of my floor, coming upon one of the puddles in the dark, or even in the light provided by the spirits of the little glowing things would slip, fall and incur serious injury. Death, I supposed might even be a possibility. “What an inglorious final chapter that would be to my relationship with France” I thought to myself. I didn’t know anything about the Napoleonic Code, but the term culpable manslaughter came to mind. The second thing was that the fact that there was a great last puddle of the substance in front of my door. My inability to make any significant progress with even the first glob that I had attacked, let alone the one in front of my door meant, I was quite certain, that the rapidly diminishing amount of private time I was going to have in the hallway would present a real problem for me of claiming ignorance: when whoever it was going to be finally appeared, denying that I knew anything about the whole thing, with a big puddle in front of my door and not an inch beyond made, it seemed to me, denying any knowledge of the situation a hard to sell option. Even if I tried the story that I had just concocted, that there must have been some sort of itinerant deviant who had gotten into the building somehow and had maliciously poured olive oil all over everything, I didn’t think it would sell.

Everything that has been written here took almost no time to occur – much less time was consumed in doing it than a reader will have spent reading it. It seemed to me that I was on the brink of an infinitely unpleasant existential balance, and the bad news was that it had barely begun. There was no good news.

So I couldn’t see any alternative except to just continue with the futile course that I had been taking and just waiting for somebody to come and kill me.

As I sopped up oil, carried the dripping paper towels into the apartment, threw them in a greasy pile on the drain board – there was no kitchen garbage can in evidence – grabbed a virgin wad of paper towel and went back to repeat the process, punctuated periodically by the lights going out, I made a real effort to try to assemble one sentence in French with which I could at least explain the high points of the situation. I couldn’t get beyond huile d’olive. “ Actually” I thought to myself “if you yell it at the top of your lungs, they may think you are crazy and get out of the way.” I had a vague memory of a Smothers Brothers routine that ended with Dicky yelling “chocolate” and that took my mind off of the grimness of things for a moment. But only for a moment.

I am the sort of person, my wife and closest friends would be happy to confirm, who, in the face of reasonably minor adversity, becomes a complete irrational, screaming pain in the ass. Those same people would probably hasten to point out that, in fact, the state under the stress of mild adversity is merely a deeper dimension of a fairly consistently static form of behavior. And I would be in total agreement. That is exactly how I act. And it is something which I hate, but can’t seem to exercise very much control over.

What most people don’t know about me, because deep adversity has seldom interfered in my life, is that when I am faced with a situation which I am convinced is utterly hopeless, I get fairly stoic, and with the calmness of the stoic pursue courses of action that often turn out to have been the correct course.

As I greased the knees of my new levis – bought just for the Paris sojourn – and pushed masses of oily paper towel around on a hexagonal brick floor – I was a long way even from the marble landing, much less the stretch of marble between the bottom of the stairs, through the inner sanctum and out to the outer door – leaving behind a perhaps less voluminous mass of sticky slippery substance shining in the light during those intervals when the light was on, I found myself lapsing into that “genuine disaster” form of behavior. And my net conclusion from that lapse was, for better or for worse I was going to be doing what I was doing for – probably – most of the rest of my life, and I might as well get used to it. The calmness that that viewpoint lent to the situation – that I was to become kind of the scullery maid equivalent of Sisyphus– was palpable. I even toyed with the idea if I ever got the rock permanently up the hill, that someday I might make a story of all of what I was thinking and doing, that some day I might even be able to laugh at the whole thing.

“Not very likely” was my reaction to that train of thought.

I really couldn’t see any end to the nightmare in which I found myself. The only question to which there was an unknown answer was how soon would fellow, albeit French speaking, humans come upon me, and how deeply more malignant would my condition become when that – I was absolutely certain – inevitable event occurred?

Otto von Bismarck has been attributed with the quotation “god has a special providence for drunks, little children and the United States of America”. More than once in my life I have felt that he could have added “and Noel McKeehan”.

During one of my trips to the kitchen to add to the alarmingly large accumulation of oily paper towels and to gather yet another supply of non-oily ones I took one more look in the cleaning supplies cupboard for – anything. Something I had briefly looked at and to which I had assigned the status of being useless suddenly presented itself to me in a different light. It was a netoyant de vitrine – glass cleaner.

“Why not?” I said to the pile of oily paper towels.

I had by this time made some progress all the way back to the beginning of the terra cotta floor. What was left was obvious, shiny - when the lights were on - and slippery. But there was a lot less of it. I had a large, full, spray bottle of glass cleaner which I hoped might have some grease and oil fighting characteristics. I sprayed on a generous quantity and vigorously applied a clean wad of paper towels. I rubbed and rubbed and looked at the paper towels to see what seemed to be coming up with them. It looked remarkably hopeful, like what one would expect an oleo-phobic compound to have on a shimmering glaze of olive oil on the floor.

As I kept spraying, wiping and towel replenishing, I found myself harboring a dangerous glimmer of optimistic hope. That was the last thing I wanted to have. Despair and desperation seemed better companions in what I was sure was an unalterably hopeless situation than a fleeting, and probably fickle, shaft of hopeful light. I tried to subdue it. I tried to ignore it. I tried to banish it.

But as I kept on, checking the level of fluid left in the bottle periodically, I could see that I was almost to the tile at the edge of the top of the stairs, and that I had left behind me something that just looked like someone had spilled some water and wiped it up rather than that someone had covered the floor with olive oil. As I came to the stairs and saw the tell tale dark streak from bottom to top I congratulated myself with having made it that far and with not having to even try to do anything to the highly absorbent wool carpet. The streak would be there until the end of time or the arrival of the carpet cleaners – whichever came first.

So all I had left was the trail back to the outer door – there was some indoor/outdoor carpet breaking that task into two segments - a distance of about 100 feet. In most places the oil was a not especially big streak down the center of the marble floor. That was not true where I had stopped to examine my new mail box for a moment. At that point there was another small lake of oil (another piece of evidence for the jury had I opted for the deny-the-whole-thing approach to the problem) but I had already dealt with a couple other lakes and I knew how to handle this one.

As I repeated my now expert spray/wipe/replenish towels routine, I had to ponder why no one had appeared to witness my activity. I will never know the answer to that, but I got the whole mess cleaned up to the point of disguising that it, in its ultimate grim magnificence, had ever even existed, found the building garbage can and disposed of all of the oily paper towels and had exited the building to return to Quai aux Fleurs for another load without ever seeing another person.

And, except for a few – VERY MINOR – little glints of residual oil here and there one would never be aware of the whole disaster that had occurred on my most recent moving day.

WKRP in Cincinnati, one of television’s great sitcoms, had an episode that had as it’s final spoken line, what I think to be the funniest line in the history of American television. “As god is my witness, Travis, I thought turkeys could fly.”

My corollary is “as god is my witness, I never really thought that I was ever going to be anywhere but on the floor of an apartment in Paris trying to absorb an infinite supply of olive oil into a finite quantity of paper towels.” It was an experience which allowed me to transcend the inevitable, knowing, nod of the head with which I had always accompanied consideration of the plight of Sisyphus; for about forty minutes that day I was, in fact, Sisyphus.

And it was no fun at all.

Déménager Ou Désastre?

2010-10-31T09:08:00.001-07:00

Somewhere in this blog or its sibling I have gone on at some length about the always unique (meant in its purest French meaning o the word) experience of entering a Paris apartment for the first time. An – I had hoped at the time when I wrote it – entertaining episode in Screen Saver tells the story of the time Mysti and I entered our first Paris apartment for the first time. I think the later discussion in some blog of mine that I am referring to had as its point that one of the many endearing characteristics of my current landlord is that the first time I ever entered the first apartment that I ever rented from him, I was able to get in just as the directions said I would be able to get in with no adventures at all. While that may have been disappointing due to its lack of adventure, it was really pleasant from the standpoint of wear and tear on Noel McKeehan. After all, if each of us at birth has some assigned budget of all things in their kind, I had the feeling that my budget of new apartment entry wear and tear was nearing its maximum; since I wasn’t sure what happens to a person who has reached some budgetary maximum ( implode? explode? just fade into oblivion?) I was pleased to have eluded decrementing mine yet again with that now somewhat in the distant past entry.

I have now – as of this moment, the day after the new apartment first time entry with which I am about to regale my non-existent readership – made first time entries five times in apartments Thierry has rented me. And each was uneventful, with the instructions working flawlessly and the doors opening on first attempt with the key. It should be mentioned that two of the five were repeat rentals, so the fact that, at a date later than that uneventful first first time entry I could repeat the event probably doesn’t count, but I am including them for a reason to which I will get in a moment.

As this story turns out to twist, the apartment that I entered yesterday was that exact first apartment I ever rented from Thierry. Although I didn’t exactly remember its layout, I had a pretty good idea of the method of entry the, the nature of the entry chamber and the kind of stairs. In any event, I had Thierry’s always impeccable instructions, so what could possibly go wrong. In fact, the thought that anything could possibly go wrong, just hadn’t occurred to me.

In the place of worrying about any entry problems I had substituted a mild sense of impending doom which flowed form anticipation of the physical act of the impending move itself: the mechanics of getting two deleteriously stuffed Hartmann roller bags, an equally deleteriously stuffed Hartmann satchel and an amazingly full-of-stuff-with-still-some-room Targus 17 inch size computer back pack from Quai aux Fleurs on Isle de Cité to Rue Guénégaud on the left bank. Three weeks previously I had made the roughly opposite trip from Rue Jacques Callot and it hadn’t been a whole lot of fun. It took three trips. First the smaller of the two rollers with the satchel perched on it as an appendage turned into a much more than expectedly unpleasant traverse; the bag kept wanting to assume a 90 degree attitude from horizontal every time it encountered a cobble stone or irregularity in the travel surface. Paris has an ample supply of those things. Second, the larger of the rollers was a more steady traveller and, not having a fifty percent additional payload perched on its pull handle made it a much easier pull, but the sixty pounds of computer and camera gear in the back pack more than made up for any improvement coming from Hartmann. Actually, however, I was surprised. The back pack was the single best thing to transport. I wouldn’t have thought a 68 year old would have a lot of success walking a mile or so in the mid day crowds of the streets of Paris with that kind of a load on his back, but I did it.

And, at the time being here described, I was about to do it again. And any previous success notwithstanding, I was not looking forward to it. But I am just too cheap to pay for a taxi to do a job that any pack animal ought to be able to accomplish. I will admit that when I had first awakened around 0900 the fact that it was pouring rain gave me a hopeful twinge of doubt about the advisability of eschewing a cab, but, just as the weather report had said, and as I have seen on so many previous occasions, at about 1030 the clouds parted and the sun came out.

And the appointed hour was rapidly approaching and all the bags were packed and ready to go. All that was necessary was to select in which sequence the paired bags would go. Which would be first and which would be second? By default I had assumed that the market bag full of bottles of stuff would be last as it had been on its previous transit. But finally I decided to do that one - which was the one I least wanted to do because it was the most work, and unpleasant work at that. The reasons for that unpleasantness hadn’t been apparent until I had made the transport the first time. After all the market bag was an old friend, having made the trip across the Atlantic and back so many time that I had lost count. And once in Paris it had always been the ultimate transportation tool: light, flexible, copious in carrying capacity; I had never suspected that it had any bad traits. But it does when used in the way I was using it.

For example, the bag is just heavy enough to be a real drag on the whole superstructure of whichever side of my body I chose to carry it, which made it necessary to indulge in stops and starts to shift the pendulum-like thing from one hand to the other. All of this made the endeavor a sort of herky-jerky stumble of a trip with multiple “pardons” as I tried to take advantage (had to accommodate it is a more accurate description) of the additional ground speed that the vector of motion that the forty pound palm leaf woven Paris market bag full of various kinds of bottles of things that I wanted not to have to buy a second time and so which I was transporting to the new location contributed incrementally to my horizontal trajectory. The added speed of that trajectory lead to many nearly unpleasant encounters with people whom I had overtaken in my forward rush – many of those people being of the opinion that the streets of Paris were intended for slow aimless meandering which was totally at odds with my trajectory - hence many “pardons” as I entered the outer reaches each of these aimlessly wandering little communities, wormed my way into, through and by it and looked with dismay into the not distant road ahead where more of the species lurked. But in the end the bag and I both got to our destination with the contents intact.

But that was a description of the trip to Quai aux Fleurs, and background for why I had intended to put off its duplication until the last trip of the day, and why instead, I decided to bite the bullet and put it first. I did put it first, and while the trip resembled its predecessor, it didn’t duplicate it. Almost before I had successfully completely entered the comatose state that I find effective in dealing with physical pain I saw the sign Rue Guénégaud. I was nearly to my new doorway!

And then I was at my new doorway. I entered the code. It worked. And then I was inside the inner sanctum, the dimly lit space between the outside and the real inside. That inner space is always separated from the inner inner space, when an apartment building has adopted this particular type of entry format, by a glass door. Entry is accomplished through that glass door to the inner space with the use of another code. I entered that code. It worked. Then I was really in. I could tell that because it was dark as night. But I knew that what one does then is look for the little glowing spots on the wall. Those little glowing spots activate the lights so one can see to go where one needs to go. They activate the lights, but the spirits that control those little glowing things don’t brook those who would tarry. Of course I know that. Of course I didn’t tarry.

Once up the stairs to the landing and down the hall toward where, I was beginning to remember my apartment was, I attenuated that hall’s total darkness by pushing the little glowing thing that inevitably appeared, as they always do at such times of total darkness, and walked down the hall thanking the spirits of the little glowing thing.

And then I was at my new doorway. All I needed to do was enter the code to the key lock to get the key to the apartment, put that key into the lock, turn that key in the just-so manner and voila! I would be in the apartment. I would have notched another flawless new apartment first time-entry to my belt of Paris apartment entries.

It was at the point of getting the key out of the safe and inserting it in the lock that things took an abrupt turn for the worse.

I just happened, for no apparent reason, to glance to my right, which was back in the direction that I had just come. I noticed something that momentarily didn’t register in the sinister way that it was about to register. I just saw what appeared to be a drip of water, probably from the rain. “But the rain stopped some time ago; I went through a little wetness on the paving and cobbles, but nothing to bring that amount of water in with me, across the marble entry hall, across the marble inner sanctum hall, up the carpeted staircase to the first floor and down the hexagonal brick floor all the way to just back from my new door” I said to myself. In fact, as I looked a little more closely, there was a puddle right in front of the door, right next to, and under and beside the basket.

“Oh shit”, I thought. “Did the olive oil come open?”

I knelt down and put a finger in the liquid. Olive oil it was.

The real story starts here. But this prologue has already gotten long enough to tax even non-existent readers – I know it has taxed me – and, although I said at the outset, that the pain related to the events which I am about to describe faded much more quickly than I had expected, leaving the inevitable and always welcome post-disaster residue of intense humor; right now the telling of this has reminded me more of the pain.

So I am going to defer the rest of the story to another day.

Hotel de Ville

2010-10-28T02:46:00.001-07:00

This is a building that even two panoramas and some help from Photoshop couldn’t show all of in one image.

Observations From The Rube

2010-10-28T00:32:00.001-07:00

I have decided the include the occasional observations about life in Paris from the viewpoint of a country rustic. In my family, for reasons that are lost in the mists of time, we referred to those sorts as “Rube”.

Here is the first such observation. It may be the last.

I stole it it and expanded it a bit from an email I recently sent to a friend.

“Given the number of young women crashing around the streets of Paris on stiletto heels, I would expect to see numbers of them plummeting to the ground with perhaps ankle breaking results. But it doesn’t happen.

Another thing: it is un-nerving how many of the young women here are six feet tall or more. I thought they must be Germans, but they all are shouting French to one another as they careen about the streets, managing to stay upright on what would appear to be barely weight-supporting appendages of their shoes; so they must be French. Or maybe they are German secret agents.

One corollary to the large number of tall women is that their plethoric presence has apparently caused a market anomaly: a shortage of skirts of a length necessary to properly cover them. So the poor things prance about in barely ass-covering garments intended for their shorter sisters. One would expect the government to intervene.”

27 October And All Is Well

2010-10-27T09:40:00.001-07:00

Today I got a much later start than usual. The word “start” refers to the time of day when I have arisen from bed and done all the things that I have chosen to make part of my Paris morning routine: check email, look at any movies or pictures I might have taken out the window since sundown the previous evening, go to the boulanger (and the boucher, fromager, poissoniére and whatever they call the vegetable store, depending upon my menu plans) eat breakfast, brush my teeth, shower, shave and put the dishes in the dishwasher. That usually gets me on the street between 1300 and 1330 – 1200 when I have purposely speeded things up to accommodate a desire to get somewhere at a decent hour, like le Bois de Boulogne.

Today it was 1430. I don’t know what I must have done to take that much extra time (I got up at the normal time) but I must have done something, because it was 1430 as I entered the street from the apartment. I mention this because I use the being on the street each day for two purposes – three really if you count that each time I am communing with a place that I love – getting exercise to make up for that fact that I am not riding my bike thirty miles each day, and gathering pictures. Several years ago it occurred to me one day as I was walking and taking pictures on the same route that I had been walking and taking pictures for years that I was spending a lot of what relativelylittle time I have left and even more of what little money I ever had in the first place to do the same thing over and over. “Why are you doing that; are you nuts?” I heard in my mind's ear. Since the answer to the second part of that question had been known by me and most that have ever known me to be, obviously, “yes” I didn’t waste a moment ponderingthe answer to that part of the question. But the first part seemed to me to be a fair question deserving of a well considered answer. I could only come up with one, but it roared at me at the top of its lungs, so it must be the correct answer: “because you love it here; and, besides the light is always different”.

So that need to capture every nuance of the light of Paris before I die can be productively coupled with indulging in enough exercise to keep from becoming a blivet. That translates to walking two to three hours each day. That gets me back to the keyboard by 1600, at which time I can spend two hours avoiding getting serious about the novel by producing 1200 to 1500 words to post about my life in Paris.

Two days ago a minor, but what could become significant modification occurred. The modification was not in the nature of my writing routine but in the nature of the content produced. A day or two before, I had scribbled a blog idea on one of the lined yellow 8.5 x 11 sheets from my tablet – a medium upon which all my great ideas, as well as all my grocery lists (those being written on sheets that have been folded in four equal folds making it possible to use the same sheet for 8 separate grocery lists) are scribed; in the case of this idea it had something to do with an odd door on the landing of my floor up the spiral staircase, a door that couldn’t front an apartment because of its totally fragile nature, and which I had therefore surmised had no human presence behind it, and a door in front of which I had tarried more than once trying to see into the space behind the opaque, very old, glass, trying to focus what appeared to be shapes, but which couldn’t be focused into any form beyond just that: “shapes”.

Anyway, I started to write about it as just a local color item or a sort of point of interest. Almost immediately the Ouija took over, starting with having me title the post “A Halloween Story?”

It wasn’t very long, but I had terminated it where the story to that point could be viewed as complete and beyond which I already knew what came next. It seemed best to postpone that next "next" until it came around again on the clock. I had also already conceived – not clear, but at least conceptually available, numerous additional and sequentially down stream “nexts”.

It may be that all of that is the germ for the novel. It may even be possible to salvage the already extant 6000 words that I got myself painted into a corner with. On va voir.

Which brings me back to the beginning of this post.

Trying to reconcile the needs of pictures, exercise and writing just was too much. So I walked for two and a half hours, got some – I think - great captures of the light, got to see les Invalides with the sun setting on its gold corona, had an interesting encounter with a self-described “post colonial” Frenchman (parents from Mali and Eastern Europe) but didn’t get back until 1730.

So I decided that I would postpone the next “next” and just write something short, quick and simple about the weather. Apparently the Ouija wasn’t interested in writing about the weather any more than he/she was interested in being short and quick.

I guess it all pays the same.

The Seine At Four In The Morning

2010-10-25T02:05:00.001-07:00

Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night – and I always wake up in the middle of the night – I am transfixed by what I see out the window.

Guns And Sirens

2010-10-24T11:15:00.001-07:00

I keep getting emails from concerned friends in the United States asking me if I am “safe” or other words that translate to words very similar in meaning to that word of warm certainty : “safe”. Apparently the reason is that, to the American world, the French world is going up in flames.

To these concerned friends I have given a fairly consistently similar answer: “We Parisians just don’t give a shit”.

Which is true. Life is going on here in pretty much the same manner as it always has, that manner having been so beguiling to me that a significant amount of my paltry net worth continues to be spent to allow me to periodically don the mantle of being a resident of the City of Lights.

So I could have just said to my friends in my email responses something such as that. I could have said “no, I haven’t seen any gas stations being torched or terrorists lurking here and there; I had to read The Economist for that”.

But I haven’t said that.

And there is a reason.

Being “safe” is extremely low on my list of personal priorities.

Being “safe'” (the word needs to be uttered by the person asking if one is “safe” with a sort of whimper, to make it an authentic query as to one’s “safeness” and to show the queryer’s grasp of the futility of the question in the great cosmic spectrum of “unsafeness”) is tantamount to telling – whoever it is that one should aspire to be “safe” from (the terrorists come to mind, but I am so old that I can remember when “teenager” was a term of opprobrium that described a creature walking the streets in waylayance of decent law abiding – older – citizens) that they have won the day. If one wants to be "safe", those entities – whomever they may be – from whom we all need to be “safe”, have won the day, the battle, the month, the year, the century, the millennium; they have won all of whatever it may be that those of us on the “other side” hold dear and sacred; so I don’t want to be “safe”. “Safe” seems to me to be too much like “dead”, but “dead” in an eerie zombie-like form.

So we Parisians just don’t give a shit.

But the French government does, and I think I am kind of glad of that.

Because the government’s manifestation of “giving a shit” takes the form of military personnel in full temperate zone camouflage fatigues armed with short barreled, obviously automatic, machine guns.

However, this is a two-sided coin.

One side – the one that I really subscribe to – is “good; they are ready to lay the fuckers low, whoever the fuckers may be, and I guess I can jump behind a tree if I happen to be at a fucker- elimination site”.

But really.

Even I, who love guns, and view – at least the ones with wooden stocks and their beautiful pistol cousins – as works of art, am mildly rattled by three, four or five young Frenchpeople walking around (like little flocks of green, brown and black plumaged birds - and iat some locations multiple flocks of them) with the full fire power of all of WWII in each of his or her hands.

But then, I have said that I don’t want to be “safe” as the word in quotes is be defined by me. So being somewhat rattled takes the place of being "safe".

And there seem to be a lot more police sirens than I have ever heard, but Paris is not only the City Of Lights, it is the City Of Police Sirens so maybe I just am guilty of faulty memory.

The Ouija

2010-10-23T09:45:00.001-07:00

I once took a class at Bellevue Community College (now known as Bellevue College). In fact, I took a number of classes: over time I accumulated enough credits to be well on my to a certificate in Multi-Media Authoring; had I not needed to keep getting real jobs with real companies, or having travel schedules in support of my consulting business – the pretend business that tanked when Y2K came and went, not with a bang, but a whimper – I probably would have kept taking classes and finally would have gotten that certificate; I might even have accumulated enough credits for a degree in multi-media authoring. But one had to move fast in that then-emerging discipline. Whatever it was that multi-media authoring was was changing so fast that every time I returned to the curriculum after a work or travel induced absence the name of the discipline had changed, as had its supporting curriculum. It finally got to the point that understanding what I needed to graduate, or if graduation without starting over were even possible, was beyond me, and to some extent beyond my advisor.

But I didn’t mention the class to posthumously weep over milk now long spilled. I mentioned it because that class opened a window I didn’t know existed. And that window, once opened has had periodic significance to me ever since.

The class was Script Writing for Digital Media. I learned a lot from it. One of the most interesting things – because I had no idea that there was anything to know, and therefore didn’t know that I had no clue about it (a dominant and recurring theme in my life) was the structure of a movie. That structure is actually the same as the structure of a much older medium, the three act play. Basically the structure is the hook – to get you interested; the twist – to pose a problem; and the rest of the story – the solution to the problem. I never knew that. It made watching movies a lot more interesting.

We did a lot of projects that were snippets of the activities that go into producing a finished video work of some kind. We did story boards, we created budgets, we shot shots in support of concepts. We probably did a lot more but those are the only things that I can remember. Except for one other thing, which has imbedded in it the whole point my telling of this story.

As a final project, turned in the last day of class (night of class really) in lieu of a final examination, we wrote a short chunk of an original script – whatever we wanted to write a script about. It needed to be in script format – I bought and learned Scriptware to that end – and it needed to be robust enough to start from something and lead to something. In other words, it needed to be big enough and coherent enough to tell at least a little bit of a story.

That didn’t sound too hard. In fact it sounded pretty interesting.

I couldn’t believe how hard it was.

Installing Scriptware, mercifully, took some time, so I could pretend that I was doing productive work on my final project for Script Writing for Digital media. So also did learning the application take time. But after a time, all that had been done and it had become time to put some kind of words into the computer. But there just weren’t any words. I had no idea of a story to tell, and with no story to tell I had no words to feed to Scriptware.

I made an appointment to talk to Michael, our instructor about the problem. He was a really good guy and a good instructor and he took seriously my problem. He said “just think about something of significance or importance that has happened in your life and then make it into a story – a story, of course in script format”

That at least narrowed the field of possibilities. On the other hand, it forced me to realize what a really bleak life I had led. There wasn’t anything of significance or importance that jumped to mind..

Until one thing did leap to mind.

That thing was a really serious encounter that I had had with myself and with another person one time in my life on a bridge over a deep canyon in the middle of nowhere on toward sundown of what had just turned out to be one of the best mid winter days that I had ever experienced. The other person was a woman, so I would need to be able to write some kind of male stuff and some kind of female stuff. I had always wondered how writers did dialogue at all, let alone dialogue that came from mouths other than their own. “I guess I am going to find out” I thought I heard someone say.

So I set out to write.

Mercifully there were start up point of view statements and ambience description statements and time of day statements, but ultimately I had to start having words come out of the mouths of my two characters.

My words were pretty easy. “Great” I thought to myself. The “great was not directed at the quality of those words but at the fact that those words existed, glowing on my screen before me, at all. However, as always must, I would guess, happen, no matter how much a fledgling dialogue writer might want to postpone it, a reply becomes necessary from the other person.

I had reached and passed that point. Taking a deep breath I started keying the reply. I had started, I think, with the barest of concepts of what she was going to say, that concept being based upon some sort of memory of what words had actually been said in my actual past when the event had actually occurred. Beyond that barest of concepts there was nothing, so I had expected a word or two, a pause a word or three, a pause and so on until something took form.

So it was with amazement that I beheld what actually occurred.

She started saying things that I had no idea from whence they came. She was funny, ironic, whimsical but most of all desirable; she was electric; she had a life that I could believe existed independent of the script.

The fact that the person upon whom I was modeling the female script character was all of those things was neither here nor there: the script character that I had conceived and that my fingers - I thought - had been keying into life was, in my mind a sort of cardboard cutout of the real person. That was also true of the male script character. And so he remained as he spoke his lines. But the female just came forward, crashed around, and became a living, breathing being.

That was an amazing experience.

It is I am happy to say an experience that I have had repeated many times while writing Screen Saver, which although it is narrative non-fiction, nonetheless, in my estimation, needed some of the mystery of fiction, albeit encapsulated in an exterior husk of absolute factual truth.

That experience is that of some-Ouija-from -somewhere taking command of the keyboard and just taking off with whatever it is that he has on his mind. After these encounters I behold my most satisfying writing.

I have told this tale because when I set up this blog I took the high risk approach of missioning it with being a goad to me in getting six thousand words of a novel that I had started either out of the ditch or abandoned, and if so-abandoned, with a new novel started in its place.

I am now into twenty three days and I haven’t done those things. And I realize that the only way to start them is to just sit and invoke the Ouija. But that is terrifying. What if he doesn’t come?

Video Is Good Also

2010-10-22T11:45:00.001-07:00

Stills are pretty good, but videos can be even better. These are all fresh water fish. I didn't know that there was such a thing as a fresh water ray until I visited this aquarium.

Paris Aquarium 22 October 2010

2010-10-22T09:41:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite Paris places (that’s getting to be a tired old refrain, isn’t it?) is the Paris Aquarium. Today for no apparent reason the usual 5 euro tariff was not in effect, so I got in free. There were large numbers of African Frenchpeople all over the place, especially on the steps out front, and most were eating from plastic containers of fairly substantial quantitites of food so I don’t know if it was Le Jour Aquarium d’Africain, or prendez un Africain au dejeuner or what. Anyway, I got in free. Here are a few fish pictures.

La Rondelle

2010-10-21T09:23:00.001-07:00

It must be obvious to anyone reading this blog that one of my myriad handicaps is that I don't speak French.

It isn't as if I haven't tried – sort of. I have spent quite a bit of money on lessons, and I have learned a certain amount of vocabulary, and verb conjugations and all that stuff one learns when taking language lessons. I have slogged through a significant portion of French One from Rosetta stone, and that, helped my pronunciation quite a bit (now that I have a new ThinkPad with 64 bit Windows 7 Professional I can't install Rosetta Stone and Rosetta Stone wants me to pay for a completely new license, there being no upgrade price. Since that isn't going to happen, any incidental, incremental and accidental improvement in my ability to communicate in French is pretty well stymied, since I am not taking lessons any more either. All that having been said, I believe that the real problem is that I am just too old.

(One of the things that still annoys me about MS Word, now that they have gotten rid of the talking paper clip, is that its grammar checker is constantly hounding me about being guilty of fragments. No one has more of a horror of being guilty of the grammatical sin of a fragment – if one has read Screen Saver one would remember that Sister Justitia planted that horror indelibly and irrevocably as a filter to all that I write – so being constantly accused of the sin is unnerving to the utmost. The annoying thing is that whoever is in charge of grammar for Microsoft doesn't know much. For example, the sentence above: "all that having been said, I believe that the real problem is that I am just too old" was flagged as a fragment. As always, I assumed that, horror notwithstanding, I probably had been guilty of letting a fragment creep into my writing. So I looked at the sentence, and as always, I ended up shouting to no-one in particular "no way that's a fragment." This time however I decided to spend a moment and see if I could imagine any way that the MS grammar checker could draw the conclusion. There is a screamingly obvious part of the sentence which probably drew the wrath of MS Grammar Checker: "all that having been said". So again I shouted to no-one in particular "it's a nominative absolute; Caesar used them all the time; I have been using them ever since Latin II; Sister Justitia thought they were polished grammar." So I decided to call my own bluff and did a Google search on "nominative absolute". Wikipedia has a good article on the subject. The examples they use are structurally identical to the one on offer here from me. The Greeks used the construction – genitive absolute, as did the Romans, ablative absolute. So what is the deal with Microsoft? By the way, I got no further that the word "annoys" before MS Grammar again found me guilty of a transgression. MS thinks that the verb should be "annoy". "Annoys" is the form of the verb used with a singular subject, "annoy" the form for a plural subject. The subject of that sentence is "one" which could not be more singular. For the verb to be "annoy" MS apparently thinks the subject is "things" which is clearly plural. The problem is that "things" is - hey, MS , in this case the referent, although a plural word, is a singular entity, so "is" is correct - the object of the prepositional phrase "of the things" which is a modifier to the subject, not THE subject.)

Anyway, not speaking French while living in France can be quite a pain in the ass. Or it can be looked upon as goad to personal creativity and a source of untold and unbridled continuous merriment. I have chosen to look upon my lack of French language capability from the latter, rather than the former, viewpoint. So rather than just speaking English and getting whatever it is that that approach to life in France might deliver, I constantly try to do that which I most obviously cannot do: speak French.

But sometimes I get away with it for a sentence or two.

Like this morning. I have been eating salmon that I buy from the poissonnerie and cook in the apartment – a previous post even had a picture of the finished product – roast chicken that I buy from the boucherie and don't have to do any preparation, cote de porc from Carrefour which I cook myself and quiches from the boulanger which can be eaten at room temperature or turned soggy warm in the microwave. I have enjoyed all of those, but I keep eying the whole filet wrapped in bacon at the boucherie - 38 euros le kilo. Beef is kind of important to me. It is less so when I am in France, but ultimately I need some rare beef.

To that end a couple of days ago I decided to spruce up my vocabulary for the word "piece". I thought that something that must sound a great deal like "piece" must be one word that I could mumble to cover my lack of knowing exactly what the word was, or how to pronounce it – after all lots of items are marked as priced by a word that looks as if it must mean and sound like what I hoped to be its English cousin "piece". But that seemed to me to be a kind of cognate copout, and a copout that probably had no basis in actual French vocabulary usage. I thought I that I remembered having had some success a few years back buying cheese employing the word "morceau" but I hadn't used that word in the interim and I thought that I had, in any case, gotten unexplainably mixed reactions for the same transaction, same word and same product being desired. So I looked in my dictionary. Top of the list was "morceau". "Great" thought I, "but isn't there something better?" Next in line was "parcelle" but that was for land.

But then there it was; it was a beautiful word: "Rondelle" to be used with round pieces. It was feminine so I could roll out "une Rondelle" following my less frequently used old standby "je voudrais" and finish the whole thing off with a thumb and forefinger gesture indicating a size of about an inch and a half and a resounding "comme ça".

So this morning I did just that. And it worked just as I had envisioned that it would work. In fact it was even more beautiful than it had been in my imaginings: after my "comme ça" the boucher grabbed the tenderloin, got his knife, looked at me, having placed the knife (another nominative absolute, but oddly placed in the sentence) and said "comme ça?" "Comme ça".

A three element exchange: what a linguistic windfall!