New posts of anything other than nominal size and anecdotal nature, for 10 days. I've been inundated with paid work through the end of the week and am spending a week touring ski hills with my father starting on Saturday. The process of fermentation will not abate, however, but will abide.
I would like to leave you with another excerpt from "The Savaged Detectives" gleaned on the sly from under my mountain of work:
"For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy."
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Justice: Subsection 1.5
Continued from: Justice: Subsection 1.0:
I remembered something. Something salvaged from the sawtoothed scrapyard at memory's edge, consigned there in the long ago as a matter of practicality.
There was something else, I said. Something better. Stranger.
The brows crept up the dessicated scalp as the man glassed me over the rim of his beverage.
I've never told a soul this before. But I'll never see you again, so what the hell. This was also a long time ago. I was a young man and I had a summer to myself in the mountains. Real mountains and really to myself. A privilege. One day I was out kind of patrolling the slope above where I lived with my rifle. Just looking around, hoping maybe to get a shot off at a rabbit. Out of the corner of my eye I see some movement through the branches. It's a squirrel, has to be. I duck behind a tree and wait.
I finished my beer in a gulp and looked down at the bar, unsure how to go on.
Well, the man said. Unburden yourself.
Let me just get straight to the point. I shot the squirrel a few minutes later. Nice big one. Big billowing tail. I got my knife out to dress it, the way you do. First I spilled the guts, then I dug through the diaphragm. Hooked my finger around the cardiovascular system and gave a tug. You have no idea what it was like to this this. The fucking heart was artificial. A fucking electromechanical pump with a battery and wires and tubes and everything. Strike me dead by lightning right where I fucking sit if it wasn't so.
The man smiled mildly, never diverting his eyes. He raised his glass and drank, but very quickly as if our time had turned precious. All mirth was gone from his face when he rested his glass on some of the bartop's carved sentiments.
Now you're talking. Course, whether I believe it or not is another question. But I think your ear may be worth the telling, my friend. Now, the strangest thing I-
Hold up. I'm sorry. I want to hear you out, I do. I also happen to know you'll spill it. You've been dying to tell me from the minute you sat down. But I'm on a roll here. I keep remembering things. So if you'll indulge me, if you'll just forbear a minute.
He puckered his lips scantly, expressing the dormant cruelty of a thin-lipped judge, if that makes any sense.
All fired up with no one to talk to, eh? Go on then. Spill your soul.
I motioned at the bartender with a whipping motion. He understood and poured me a shot from the whiskey bottle capped by the tin horseman. This was personal and I needed fortification.
All right, old man. Just hear me out. I think this one'll get you.
I sipped and remembered those shriveled legs poking out from the institutional gown flapping on the sterile wind, the proud eyes forever agape at the void, distant clamor of sirens ferrying the newly dead and dying in their batches.
It's like this, old man. I had this friend. A much older man, a kind of mentor to me. A good man.
Some words feel good on the tongue: A good man.
What was he?
Doesn't matter. The point is that he was right in the head. Proud, fair. The body was a different story. Problems, problems, problems. Liver, lungs, blood, all of it fucked up, you know. All of it slowly catching up to him as the years pass in the way of things. By and by he comes to dying. Barely able to stand, shaking like a leaf, stinking to hell. He'd never been one to seek medical treatment, but in the end a few of us just rounded him up and took him to the hospital, clawing and yelling. Of course the situation was as hopeless as it looked. The doctors took one look at him before prescribing an opiate and carting him off to the hospice ward. He yelled at us from the gurney, said not to come looking for him in the fortress. We could find him on the reaper's common, whatever that meant. And not to come looking for him in the fortress. Before leaving we asked the doctor how long he gave him to live, and his answer was two days. They have their ways of knowing, I guess--here I raised the whiskey to my lips and just kind of sniffed at it before going on--So I come back the next day with another friend he'd meant a lot to and ask to see him and they say he's gone. Just like that. When we asked if we could see the body the nurse said we hadn't understood, that he'd risen from his bed and shuffled off and escaped, unlikely as it seemed. So we left and started walking around, asking ourselves what the hell he meant by reaper's common. We walked around for a long time that night and saw a great many sad things, but I'll cut to the chase. We found him laid out at the foot of a bridge pier, dead. Just wearing his hospital gown with his hollowed old man's legs poking out onto the concrete. His eyes were open and there was this fucking smile on his face. But his hands were folded neatly over his chest, his feet were evenly arranged, and there was a ratty little pillow under his head. A fucking pillow. Someone had tidied up his corpse, composed it, you know? As if there were some vagrant freelance mortitioner patrolling the forgotten parts of the city. When we leaned down for a closer look there was a little bouquet of weeds fluttering in his cold hand. I thought it was a kind of miracle, you know? I mean going out...you know...on your own terms and, and...to be treated with dignity like that...I don't know what to say.
Tears were streaming down my face, and the old man sat quietly by as I mended my facade.
That's it, he said. I downright like you. You ready for the story now?
I nodded.
The thing I saw wasn't a thing, really. Not something really to be seen either. It was a series of events that I lived through when I was a young man living with my friends. Living the way we wanted to. A great luxury, and the only freedom. I guess we had what you'd call a commune. Now, we hadn't ended up there straight out of the womb. Most of us had come up through the normal institutions that mold our young, and what we were doing was running away from all that as fast as we fucking could. And let me tell you before I get into too much detail---there was the seed of something amazing there. Something like freedom, with enough food and love to make it work. Shit. I think I only really know the meaning of food of all those words. Point being there was something to it. We were going places. Spiritually.
I, your narrator, inclined my head in interest, motioning discretely to the barman for another beer.
Our little community had 9 members at the time. Now there were defections and additions pretty often. But at the time I'm talking about we were nine. Pretty good people too. We lived in a big old three story house owned by my uncle, who was not only wealthy but also favorably disposed to what we were trying to do. Theodore Cheesegrave, a libel lawyer with a famous practice and a reputation for winning cases that seemed impossible. From us he required nothing more than upkeep. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a little gardening, touching up the paint where it peeled, buffing the floors, whatever. He would come visit us once every couple months, smoking his corncob pipe and looking around with this air of benevolent confusion. I think he got some pretty big kicks out of the contrast between the house and its occupants. It burnished his credentials as an eccentric, appealed to his pride.
At any rate, one of the people living with us a woman named Vanessa. Now Vanessa was what you might call a four alarm fire. I mean just hands on your knees tongue flapping eyes all big gorgeous. What she saw in us, who could say. Which is exactly what I mean. Her just being there meant that we that we had the magic. Do you see what I mean? We live in different times now, dark fucking times, but what we had there was a commune where gorgeous women, there were others, would come live with us because we were where the hope was. Vanessa would have been 27 or so at the time. Naturally, she loved to garden. Hoe, shears, spade, rake, you could pretty much always count on seeing one of those in her hand. She grew the usual things. Spinach, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes and what have you. There was also a shaded patch in the corner of the yard cooled by this little brook that she devoted to growing mushrooms. Chantarelles, I think, and portabellas. There were regular cooking mushrooms too, even some spurious fungi that got more than one of us good and sick. We ate pretty well in those days.
He drew on his beer and gave a short, bleak laugh.
Another thing about her was her voice. Her singing voice. She sang as she gardened, sang when she cooked, sang in the shower. Never real songs. Just notes, words, trills. Sometimes she'd get stuck in a loop and sing the same damn thing the whole afternoon. It would have been enough to drive you nuts if it hadn't been for the rest of her. And the inanity of what she sang about, Christ. You'd have thought her short a few cards upstairs if you never saw her when she wasn't singing. She also sang when she made love, as I knew from personal experience. No--let me go on. Her voice wasn't lovely. It was too weak and sad for that, haunting in its way. There was some beauty to it, there's no denying it, but it didn't accord with the rest of her. It was like something you'd hear from a wilting flower. I mean if it could sing. Who knows why, that's just the way her voice was. Maybe we should have known what would happen.
As you can imagine, Vanessa was the source of more than her fair share of trouble. At least two guys and one gal that I can remember had left us because of her. Hopeless loves for the guys and hopeless jealousy for the gal. And they were better off for leaving.
He sipped again, deliberately. A new gloom had overspread his face when he looked up.
This is what happened. After being pretty free with herself for a long time, Vanessa settled down into a relationship with one of us, a called The Camel. He was called that because he was strong as an ox (or a camel) and whenever something heavy needed carrying he was the one to do it. He also had a nasty temper and smoked Camels like it was his job, often to keep a lid on his emotions. He was from Bakersfield, California too, which I guess made the name even better. The Camel and Vanessa had been in a relationship for maybe two or three months when he had to leave for a week to bury his father and settle the estate and what have you. During that time I was working on building a new shed in the back yard. A really mammoth shed, almost like a miniature stables. The initiative had come straight from the desk of Uncle Theo. His motivation was to lower the value of the property prior to the next tax assessment. He was never going to sell anyway, and I guess he thought that an unsightly shed would sway the man he referred to as the assessor-parasite into a lowball appraisal. Point being that I was back in the yard spending my time with Vanessa most days. I'd always felt some flirtatious electricity between us, and this situation was more or less a crucible for that energy to run its course. You could also look at it this way, as I certainly did: The more we talked, the less she'd sing. I remember she kept making these comments about the tools I was using and especially the way she'd roll the words, words like hammer or wedge or nail or, even especially, words like plow or rake or turn and earth and yield, just roll them around her mouth, voluptuously, like she needed to extract the marrow from them before letting go.
I think you can tell where this is going. Yes, we ended up going for a roll in the hay, in this case almost literally. It happened on the raw plywood floor of the halfbuilt shed. We strewed a bag or two of grass clippings on it for comfort. What can I say? It was good. I guess she liked it too, because it happened again, this time in her room. Except this time it wasn't good, because The Camel walked in on us just as she was beginning to climax, which I knew for a fact because she had burst into song. It was horrible.
(To be continued shortly)
I remembered something. Something salvaged from the sawtoothed scrapyard at memory's edge, consigned there in the long ago as a matter of practicality.
There was something else, I said. Something better. Stranger.
The brows crept up the dessicated scalp as the man glassed me over the rim of his beverage.
I've never told a soul this before. But I'll never see you again, so what the hell. This was also a long time ago. I was a young man and I had a summer to myself in the mountains. Real mountains and really to myself. A privilege. One day I was out kind of patrolling the slope above where I lived with my rifle. Just looking around, hoping maybe to get a shot off at a rabbit. Out of the corner of my eye I see some movement through the branches. It's a squirrel, has to be. I duck behind a tree and wait.
I finished my beer in a gulp and looked down at the bar, unsure how to go on.
Well, the man said. Unburden yourself.
Let me just get straight to the point. I shot the squirrel a few minutes later. Nice big one. Big billowing tail. I got my knife out to dress it, the way you do. First I spilled the guts, then I dug through the diaphragm. Hooked my finger around the cardiovascular system and gave a tug. You have no idea what it was like to this this. The fucking heart was artificial. A fucking electromechanical pump with a battery and wires and tubes and everything. Strike me dead by lightning right where I fucking sit if it wasn't so.
The man smiled mildly, never diverting his eyes. He raised his glass and drank, but very quickly as if our time had turned precious. All mirth was gone from his face when he rested his glass on some of the bartop's carved sentiments.
Now you're talking. Course, whether I believe it or not is another question. But I think your ear may be worth the telling, my friend. Now, the strangest thing I-
Hold up. I'm sorry. I want to hear you out, I do. I also happen to know you'll spill it. You've been dying to tell me from the minute you sat down. But I'm on a roll here. I keep remembering things. So if you'll indulge me, if you'll just forbear a minute.
He puckered his lips scantly, expressing the dormant cruelty of a thin-lipped judge, if that makes any sense.
All fired up with no one to talk to, eh? Go on then. Spill your soul.
I motioned at the bartender with a whipping motion. He understood and poured me a shot from the whiskey bottle capped by the tin horseman. This was personal and I needed fortification.
All right, old man. Just hear me out. I think this one'll get you.
I sipped and remembered those shriveled legs poking out from the institutional gown flapping on the sterile wind, the proud eyes forever agape at the void, distant clamor of sirens ferrying the newly dead and dying in their batches.
It's like this, old man. I had this friend. A much older man, a kind of mentor to me. A good man.
Some words feel good on the tongue: A good man.
What was he?
Doesn't matter. The point is that he was right in the head. Proud, fair. The body was a different story. Problems, problems, problems. Liver, lungs, blood, all of it fucked up, you know. All of it slowly catching up to him as the years pass in the way of things. By and by he comes to dying. Barely able to stand, shaking like a leaf, stinking to hell. He'd never been one to seek medical treatment, but in the end a few of us just rounded him up and took him to the hospital, clawing and yelling. Of course the situation was as hopeless as it looked. The doctors took one look at him before prescribing an opiate and carting him off to the hospice ward. He yelled at us from the gurney, said not to come looking for him in the fortress. We could find him on the reaper's common, whatever that meant. And not to come looking for him in the fortress. Before leaving we asked the doctor how long he gave him to live, and his answer was two days. They have their ways of knowing, I guess--here I raised the whiskey to my lips and just kind of sniffed at it before going on--So I come back the next day with another friend he'd meant a lot to and ask to see him and they say he's gone. Just like that. When we asked if we could see the body the nurse said we hadn't understood, that he'd risen from his bed and shuffled off and escaped, unlikely as it seemed. So we left and started walking around, asking ourselves what the hell he meant by reaper's common. We walked around for a long time that night and saw a great many sad things, but I'll cut to the chase. We found him laid out at the foot of a bridge pier, dead. Just wearing his hospital gown with his hollowed old man's legs poking out onto the concrete. His eyes were open and there was this fucking smile on his face. But his hands were folded neatly over his chest, his feet were evenly arranged, and there was a ratty little pillow under his head. A fucking pillow. Someone had tidied up his corpse, composed it, you know? As if there were some vagrant freelance mortitioner patrolling the forgotten parts of the city. When we leaned down for a closer look there was a little bouquet of weeds fluttering in his cold hand. I thought it was a kind of miracle, you know? I mean going out...you know...on your own terms and, and...to be treated with dignity like that...I don't know what to say.
Tears were streaming down my face, and the old man sat quietly by as I mended my facade.
That's it, he said. I downright like you. You ready for the story now?
I nodded.
The thing I saw wasn't a thing, really. Not something really to be seen either. It was a series of events that I lived through when I was a young man living with my friends. Living the way we wanted to. A great luxury, and the only freedom. I guess we had what you'd call a commune. Now, we hadn't ended up there straight out of the womb. Most of us had come up through the normal institutions that mold our young, and what we were doing was running away from all that as fast as we fucking could. And let me tell you before I get into too much detail---there was the seed of something amazing there. Something like freedom, with enough food and love to make it work. Shit. I think I only really know the meaning of food of all those words. Point being there was something to it. We were going places. Spiritually.
I, your narrator, inclined my head in interest, motioning discretely to the barman for another beer.
Our little community had 9 members at the time. Now there were defections and additions pretty often. But at the time I'm talking about we were nine. Pretty good people too. We lived in a big old three story house owned by my uncle, who was not only wealthy but also favorably disposed to what we were trying to do. Theodore Cheesegrave, a libel lawyer with a famous practice and a reputation for winning cases that seemed impossible. From us he required nothing more than upkeep. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a little gardening, touching up the paint where it peeled, buffing the floors, whatever. He would come visit us once every couple months, smoking his corncob pipe and looking around with this air of benevolent confusion. I think he got some pretty big kicks out of the contrast between the house and its occupants. It burnished his credentials as an eccentric, appealed to his pride.
At any rate, one of the people living with us a woman named Vanessa. Now Vanessa was what you might call a four alarm fire. I mean just hands on your knees tongue flapping eyes all big gorgeous. What she saw in us, who could say. Which is exactly what I mean. Her just being there meant that we that we had the magic. Do you see what I mean? We live in different times now, dark fucking times, but what we had there was a commune where gorgeous women, there were others, would come live with us because we were where the hope was. Vanessa would have been 27 or so at the time. Naturally, she loved to garden. Hoe, shears, spade, rake, you could pretty much always count on seeing one of those in her hand. She grew the usual things. Spinach, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes and what have you. There was also a shaded patch in the corner of the yard cooled by this little brook that she devoted to growing mushrooms. Chantarelles, I think, and portabellas. There were regular cooking mushrooms too, even some spurious fungi that got more than one of us good and sick. We ate pretty well in those days.
He drew on his beer and gave a short, bleak laugh.
Another thing about her was her voice. Her singing voice. She sang as she gardened, sang when she cooked, sang in the shower. Never real songs. Just notes, words, trills. Sometimes she'd get stuck in a loop and sing the same damn thing the whole afternoon. It would have been enough to drive you nuts if it hadn't been for the rest of her. And the inanity of what she sang about, Christ. You'd have thought her short a few cards upstairs if you never saw her when she wasn't singing. She also sang when she made love, as I knew from personal experience. No--let me go on. Her voice wasn't lovely. It was too weak and sad for that, haunting in its way. There was some beauty to it, there's no denying it, but it didn't accord with the rest of her. It was like something you'd hear from a wilting flower. I mean if it could sing. Who knows why, that's just the way her voice was. Maybe we should have known what would happen.
As you can imagine, Vanessa was the source of more than her fair share of trouble. At least two guys and one gal that I can remember had left us because of her. Hopeless loves for the guys and hopeless jealousy for the gal. And they were better off for leaving.
He sipped again, deliberately. A new gloom had overspread his face when he looked up.
This is what happened. After being pretty free with herself for a long time, Vanessa settled down into a relationship with one of us, a called The Camel. He was called that because he was strong as an ox (or a camel) and whenever something heavy needed carrying he was the one to do it. He also had a nasty temper and smoked Camels like it was his job, often to keep a lid on his emotions. He was from Bakersfield, California too, which I guess made the name even better. The Camel and Vanessa had been in a relationship for maybe two or three months when he had to leave for a week to bury his father and settle the estate and what have you. During that time I was working on building a new shed in the back yard. A really mammoth shed, almost like a miniature stables. The initiative had come straight from the desk of Uncle Theo. His motivation was to lower the value of the property prior to the next tax assessment. He was never going to sell anyway, and I guess he thought that an unsightly shed would sway the man he referred to as the assessor-parasite into a lowball appraisal. Point being that I was back in the yard spending my time with Vanessa most days. I'd always felt some flirtatious electricity between us, and this situation was more or less a crucible for that energy to run its course. You could also look at it this way, as I certainly did: The more we talked, the less she'd sing. I remember she kept making these comments about the tools I was using and especially the way she'd roll the words, words like hammer or wedge or nail or, even especially, words like plow or rake or turn and earth and yield, just roll them around her mouth, voluptuously, like she needed to extract the marrow from them before letting go.
I think you can tell where this is going. Yes, we ended up going for a roll in the hay, in this case almost literally. It happened on the raw plywood floor of the halfbuilt shed. We strewed a bag or two of grass clippings on it for comfort. What can I say? It was good. I guess she liked it too, because it happened again, this time in her room. Except this time it wasn't good, because The Camel walked in on us just as she was beginning to climax, which I knew for a fact because she had burst into song. It was horrible.
(To be continued shortly)
Monday, February 23, 2009
The trek
(The successor trek to this trek)
Okay, okay, you got me. I'm not going to write "101 Ways to Die on the Mountain". Hell, I never intended to. Not only would it be to court a fate that is severely unwelcome, but it would also be a stretch. It would smack of inauthenticity. The truth is that I haven't daydreamed about more than a couple-three ways to die on the mountain. You want them? Here they are:
1. I am walking along an open expanse of snow in a draw or on a ridge and the snow gives way under me. I fall into a yawning crevasse, never to be heard from again. Winston takes over my blog, but everyone can tell he's an impostor.
2. I am traversing a steep face of snow. About halfway up I decide to sit down for a breather. No, it's not an avalanche. I'll leave that prosaic death scenario to the second-rate bloggers. I sit down and sip on some water, munch on some nuts, get comfortable. Then I think what would really make me comfortable would be to take off my snow shoes. So I do it, planting them securely in the snow beside me. Next, seized by, oh, what to call it--the imp of perversity, perhaps--I decide that it would be an interesting experiment to tramp around a little bit without the snowshoes to get a handle on just how difficult it would be. I walk downhill, sinking up to my waist in powder with every step. After no more than 20 paces--hard going, I might add, just brutal--I have an inkling that what I'm doing is foolish. But it's too late: There is no way I'm making it back up that snowbound slope to my pack and snowshoes without, precisely, the snowshoes. Oh--I also left my knife up there, meaning I have no way of fashioning primitive snowshoes for increased traction through the powder. I'm fucked, in a word. Thinking to allay the fears of my readership, Winston steps up to the helm of the blog but doesn't fool anyone.
3. I head up high in my snowshoes, toting my XC skis on my back. At an appropriately high point I switch foot apparel and begin to ski down. You guessed it: I haven't the foggiest about how to turn or brake, and go sailing headlong over a precipice. When they find me they conclude it was a suicide. But Winston, who knows better, launches a hopeless campaign to expose the truth on the pixels of africauntitledpartdeux.blogspot.com. Mostly because of his unbearably high-flown prose, my parents and friends view the campaign as a shameless publicity stunt and launch their own counter-campaign to have the blog shut down, may it rest in peace. With Winston out of the picture, the all too fitting executor of my literary estate is Entropy Himself. Shiver.
~
I had of course wanted Winston to step into the breech tonight, weary as I am, but he made some vague excuses about having to tend to his ailing wife and I had to let it go. Technically he was duty-bound to narrate this post, but I'm flesh and blood, so I let it go.
Why am I weary?
I'm glad you asked.
I'm weary because I executed the trek up to the Nez Perce Pass according to plan. That is to say, I got up well before the dawn was at the trailhead at daybreak. I'd packed the night before and made arrangements to have Tipper fed later that day by my neighbor Terry, bless her. My gear this time was as follows:
A huge backpack, deadweight 7 lbs., containing the following: Sleeping bag (I checked, and the piece of merde is actually rated to 40 degrees F), inflatable mattress pad, tent (minus the stakes to economize on weight), also 7 lbs., stove, a half-filled 1 l. steel gasoline canister, first aid kit, 2 headlamps, a few tealights, 2 lighters, 6 Lil' Hotties (that's a registered trademark, damn it!) chemical warmer packets, 2 space blankets, a few feet of utility rope, extra sweater, long johns, socks, gloves, reading material (The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño), a relatively useless map covering hundreds of square miles published by the Idaho Parks Service in 1989, compass, timepiece, field glasses. There may have been some more things. Ah yes, food: A small bag of almonds for refinement, a few fistfuls of raisins for pep, some remaindered Grape Nuts for fiber, 1 tin of sardines for brainpower, 1 tin of kippered herring for my ancestors' sake, 2 PB&J sandwiches for my country, and 4 Swedish oat balls made by me, for power (oats, sugar, butter, egg, vanilla flavor and cocoa powder mixed up, rolled into balls and frozen). On the outside of the pack I had a bottle of water, a canister of bear mace, and a Swedish Mauser made in 1911. On my person I wore a thermal top, a windbreaker, snowpants, two pairs of socks, XC ski shoes, and the skis themselves, which I picked up at a used ski equipment auction in Bozeman back in November. They have the old 3-prong nordic bindings and are made by the Finnish outfit Karhu).
Enough fetishizing of material. Atoms, molecules, fabrics, alloys, brand names--who needs them? Let us enter the rarefied air of pure narrative experience!
As I was saying: At daybreak I pushed off and began skiing up the road. The sun seemed to lurk behind the ridge to the south for hours, and I was a long time skiing through the shadows. It would have been cold, and was in fact cold when I stopped for water and an oat-butter ball, but the expenditure of energy while skiing kept me tolerably warm. It did not take long before I passed the farthest point I'd reached on the road until that time. The going was relatively easy, the uphill slope of it just a shade to this side of perceptibility. At around 11:30 I reached a landmark. It was a campground called Fales Flat, which let me know that I'd covered 8 miles. With only 6 or so to go, I was entertaining visions of being camped out at the pass by one o'clock. This, in short, was not to be. Shortly after Fales Flat the road shrugged off its riverine moorage (it had been cleaving to the Nez Perce fork of the Bitterroot River) to cut a path up along the side of the mountain, and my pace was reduced to an old man's shuffle. It was hard going, but not nearly as bad as last weekend, and I was not reduced to the indignity of counting paces between breathers. After a long and tiresome grade going straight up I came to the switchbacks. After the first switch I took a longish breather and consulted the map. It looked like I had less than a mile to go. By that time the sun had warmed the snow to slush, so I strapped the skis to my pack in favor of the snowshoes. From here there isn't all that much to report: As I should have expected, the last mile or so seemed to go on forever. If you've ever been on foot hoping that the next turn will reveal the summit you can't see you'll know what I mean. It was torture. I kept telling myself Look, if it's not around the next bend, just make camp and make a quick stab up there in the morning without your gear. That way you can say you've been to Idaho while saving yourself all that trouble. I ignored this sagacious inner demon and trudged on as the sun scorched me from above and below. You know how it ends: I made it at last, the view from the pass into Idaho was beautiful, damn beautiful, like something out of Caspar David Friedrich, and I camped in the snow. I had a glass of wine as I watched the sun go down and read Bolaño until I fell asleep, and then again in the middle of the night. It wasn't nearly as cold as the weekend before, and I actually managed to sleep decently. The following morning I was sore all over, and the trip down, though beautiful, was an exercise in aches and pains that I've never had before, the sport of XC skiing being new to me. There were a couple dog teams being mushed by city folk near the bottom, but there was also an older fellow on skis who turned out to be a friend of my neighbor's. Good for him.
I should mention the conditions under which this was written, the constellation of which is new to me in this place. It is late, and a heavy rain is drumming on the roof. What little snow remains on the roof has been crashing down off it at odd intervals as it becomes saturated. It is 37 degrees outside, which means that heavy snows are swirling higher on the mountain, which is good, not least because my father is arriving in 5 days to take me on a ski holiday. Part of me does wish the rain down here were snow (the arc of my personal meteorology tends toward snow, to paraphrase Dr. King in this month of February), but the drumming of it seems to have an equivalent precipitative effect on the mind which, in concert with the wine I am drinking, has been making me feel altogether alive.
Okay, okay, you got me. I'm not going to write "101 Ways to Die on the Mountain". Hell, I never intended to. Not only would it be to court a fate that is severely unwelcome, but it would also be a stretch. It would smack of inauthenticity. The truth is that I haven't daydreamed about more than a couple-three ways to die on the mountain. You want them? Here they are:
1. I am walking along an open expanse of snow in a draw or on a ridge and the snow gives way under me. I fall into a yawning crevasse, never to be heard from again. Winston takes over my blog, but everyone can tell he's an impostor.
2. I am traversing a steep face of snow. About halfway up I decide to sit down for a breather. No, it's not an avalanche. I'll leave that prosaic death scenario to the second-rate bloggers. I sit down and sip on some water, munch on some nuts, get comfortable. Then I think what would really make me comfortable would be to take off my snow shoes. So I do it, planting them securely in the snow beside me. Next, seized by, oh, what to call it--the imp of perversity, perhaps--I decide that it would be an interesting experiment to tramp around a little bit without the snowshoes to get a handle on just how difficult it would be. I walk downhill, sinking up to my waist in powder with every step. After no more than 20 paces--hard going, I might add, just brutal--I have an inkling that what I'm doing is foolish. But it's too late: There is no way I'm making it back up that snowbound slope to my pack and snowshoes without, precisely, the snowshoes. Oh--I also left my knife up there, meaning I have no way of fashioning primitive snowshoes for increased traction through the powder. I'm fucked, in a word. Thinking to allay the fears of my readership, Winston steps up to the helm of the blog but doesn't fool anyone.
3. I head up high in my snowshoes, toting my XC skis on my back. At an appropriately high point I switch foot apparel and begin to ski down. You guessed it: I haven't the foggiest about how to turn or brake, and go sailing headlong over a precipice. When they find me they conclude it was a suicide. But Winston, who knows better, launches a hopeless campaign to expose the truth on the pixels of africauntitledpartdeux.blogspot.com. Mostly because of his unbearably high-flown prose, my parents and friends view the campaign as a shameless publicity stunt and launch their own counter-campaign to have the blog shut down, may it rest in peace. With Winston out of the picture, the all too fitting executor of my literary estate is Entropy Himself. Shiver.
~
I had of course wanted Winston to step into the breech tonight, weary as I am, but he made some vague excuses about having to tend to his ailing wife and I had to let it go. Technically he was duty-bound to narrate this post, but I'm flesh and blood, so I let it go.
Why am I weary?
I'm glad you asked.
I'm weary because I executed the trek up to the Nez Perce Pass according to plan. That is to say, I got up well before the dawn was at the trailhead at daybreak. I'd packed the night before and made arrangements to have Tipper fed later that day by my neighbor Terry, bless her. My gear this time was as follows:
A huge backpack, deadweight 7 lbs., containing the following: Sleeping bag (I checked, and the piece of merde is actually rated to 40 degrees F), inflatable mattress pad, tent (minus the stakes to economize on weight), also 7 lbs., stove, a half-filled 1 l. steel gasoline canister, first aid kit, 2 headlamps, a few tealights, 2 lighters, 6 Lil' Hotties (that's a registered trademark, damn it!) chemical warmer packets, 2 space blankets, a few feet of utility rope, extra sweater, long johns, socks, gloves, reading material (The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño), a relatively useless map covering hundreds of square miles published by the Idaho Parks Service in 1989, compass, timepiece, field glasses. There may have been some more things. Ah yes, food: A small bag of almonds for refinement, a few fistfuls of raisins for pep, some remaindered Grape Nuts for fiber, 1 tin of sardines for brainpower, 1 tin of kippered herring for my ancestors' sake, 2 PB&J sandwiches for my country, and 4 Swedish oat balls made by me, for power (oats, sugar, butter, egg, vanilla flavor and cocoa powder mixed up, rolled into balls and frozen). On the outside of the pack I had a bottle of water, a canister of bear mace, and a Swedish Mauser made in 1911. On my person I wore a thermal top, a windbreaker, snowpants, two pairs of socks, XC ski shoes, and the skis themselves, which I picked up at a used ski equipment auction in Bozeman back in November. They have the old 3-prong nordic bindings and are made by the Finnish outfit Karhu).
Enough fetishizing of material. Atoms, molecules, fabrics, alloys, brand names--who needs them? Let us enter the rarefied air of pure narrative experience!
As I was saying: At daybreak I pushed off and began skiing up the road. The sun seemed to lurk behind the ridge to the south for hours, and I was a long time skiing through the shadows. It would have been cold, and was in fact cold when I stopped for water and an oat-butter ball, but the expenditure of energy while skiing kept me tolerably warm. It did not take long before I passed the farthest point I'd reached on the road until that time. The going was relatively easy, the uphill slope of it just a shade to this side of perceptibility. At around 11:30 I reached a landmark. It was a campground called Fales Flat, which let me know that I'd covered 8 miles. With only 6 or so to go, I was entertaining visions of being camped out at the pass by one o'clock. This, in short, was not to be. Shortly after Fales Flat the road shrugged off its riverine moorage (it had been cleaving to the Nez Perce fork of the Bitterroot River) to cut a path up along the side of the mountain, and my pace was reduced to an old man's shuffle. It was hard going, but not nearly as bad as last weekend, and I was not reduced to the indignity of counting paces between breathers. After a long and tiresome grade going straight up I came to the switchbacks. After the first switch I took a longish breather and consulted the map. It looked like I had less than a mile to go. By that time the sun had warmed the snow to slush, so I strapped the skis to my pack in favor of the snowshoes. From here there isn't all that much to report: As I should have expected, the last mile or so seemed to go on forever. If you've ever been on foot hoping that the next turn will reveal the summit you can't see you'll know what I mean. It was torture. I kept telling myself Look, if it's not around the next bend, just make camp and make a quick stab up there in the morning without your gear. That way you can say you've been to Idaho while saving yourself all that trouble. I ignored this sagacious inner demon and trudged on as the sun scorched me from above and below. You know how it ends: I made it at last, the view from the pass into Idaho was beautiful, damn beautiful, like something out of Caspar David Friedrich, and I camped in the snow. I had a glass of wine as I watched the sun go down and read Bolaño until I fell asleep, and then again in the middle of the night. It wasn't nearly as cold as the weekend before, and I actually managed to sleep decently. The following morning I was sore all over, and the trip down, though beautiful, was an exercise in aches and pains that I've never had before, the sport of XC skiing being new to me. There were a couple dog teams being mushed by city folk near the bottom, but there was also an older fellow on skis who turned out to be a friend of my neighbor's. Good for him.
I should mention the conditions under which this was written, the constellation of which is new to me in this place. It is late, and a heavy rain is drumming on the roof. What little snow remains on the roof has been crashing down off it at odd intervals as it becomes saturated. It is 37 degrees outside, which means that heavy snows are swirling higher on the mountain, which is good, not least because my father is arriving in 5 days to take me on a ski holiday. Part of me does wish the rain down here were snow (the arc of my personal meteorology tends toward snow, to paraphrase Dr. King in this month of February), but the drumming of it seems to have an equivalent precipitative effect on the mind which, in concert with the wine I am drinking, has been making me feel altogether alive.
Slap your knees
A man goes walking in the forest. Like me, for example, walking in a national forest in the west, huge and wild and unspoiled. So the man goes walking. I go walking through the forest, I turn a corner--and I run into five hundred thousand of my countrymen who are walking and crying inconsolably, like children. I stop and I ask them why they're crying. And one of my countrymen looks up and says because we're all alone and we're lost.
The above is a joke, mutatis mutandis, from a brilliant passage in Bolano's "The Savage Detectives." Not exactly the kind of joke that makes you laugh out loud, but there's something to it, wouldn't you say?
Here's a kindred joke, from Martin Amis by way of Zadie Smith if I remember correctly:
Birth is when two people go into a room and three come out. Death, on the other hand, is when a person goes into a room and no one comes out.
The above is a joke, mutatis mutandis, from a brilliant passage in Bolano's "The Savage Detectives." Not exactly the kind of joke that makes you laugh out loud, but there's something to it, wouldn't you say?
Here's a kindred joke, from Martin Amis by way of Zadie Smith if I remember correctly:
Birth is when two people go into a room and three come out. Death, on the other hand, is when a person goes into a room and no one comes out.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Justice: Subsection 1.0
I was sitting at the mostly empty bar on Haggins alone one day during the heavy rains we were having late one summer, halfheartedly swilling on an ale I knew the bartender had cut with shit pilsner like the underhanded miser he is as I thought about odds and ends like what I was going to do with my boy who was plunging into the depths of teen nihilism and incivility with what seemed almost conscious malice and what I was going to tell the neighbor woman to whom I'd pledged an overly optimistic sum for a cancer walk she was doing when she had finally walked her miles and came round to collect, not to mention the other problems that would not go away like the bloody back taxes owed to every conceivable fiscal authority and all the financial loose ends that once discovered would put me out of a home, out of a home when the chickens came home to roost, of that there could be no doubt, they were facts as plain as the froth on the beer under my chin and I was considering them to no discernible practical end between my automaton sips when an older fellow of I'd say about sixty settled into a stool two seats down from mine.
Now when a bar is pretty much empty and a fellow sits down within, what would you call it, palavering distance of one of the patrons--when that happens I'd be inclined to think that that fellow, if not actively seeking conversation, inclines at least ever so slightly toward the positive side of perfect indifference to being engaged in one. Wouldn't you say?
After a moment I looked up from the swill that you'd be at pains to distinguish from the murky floods coursing through the gutters just outside the bar and asked the older fellow what he thought.
What do I think?
Yes. In a general sort of way. It's an open question.
He wore a heavy unkempt beard of the kind associated with the sea or with solitude, but you could tell that the face beneath was angular and somehow hollowed with the years. His arms were hairy and lean, almost fleshless. His eyes gazed at me flatly, for a long time, as the question completed its transit from the air to his ears and through the apparently vast conduits in his mind to the chamber that would hear it, weigh it, and either furnish it with an answer or reject it out of hand.
I don't think you want to know what I think, Sir, he said at last, smiling very slightly. Now if you don't mind.
He swung away from me and flagged down the barman for a cognac. It was set before him. He paid, then collapsed within himself to preside over the beverage like some vulturous sovereign. I was looking at him for something like five minutes, but he seemed aware of nothing but the cognac, his hand, and the space between them. I had an urge to prod him, to roust him from whatever stupor he sought, but in the end I withdrew back to the microcosm of my own beer, my own Catatonia. There was the matter of the lawn now that I could no longer afford the modestly priced service provided by the Jensen boy, that letter I had been meaning to send to my grandmother who by some trick of cellular metabolism was still alive in which I wanted to thank her, simply thank her for the gift of fortitude in having been able to live for so long, and also to remind her of some of the little trips we'd gone on when grandpa grew sick and it was she who decided where we would drive, always odd places like the dairy with the largest cheese wheel, the birthplaces of famous cooks and cooking personalities, parks with funny names, things like that, not to mention the delicate matter--to be included in the letter that it--of who she meant to inherit grandpa's rifle collection, which in turn got me thinking between one sip and the next of the possibility of taking my boy out into the country on a hunting trip as a means of connecting with him by teaching him something, in this case as essential as the disposal of another creature's life. I remembered how my father had taught me the patience to wait for the perfect moment, to gauge and anticipate the wind.
You want to know what I think, eh? It was the old man. I turned to him.
Well. Only if you do. I mean if you've come around.
You know, a man does want to talk. I mean it makes it all a lot easier. But it's hard to know if someone will understand. I mean if they have the imagination and the decency it takes. I've been going over some memories, to tell you the truth. Strange and sad memories. And I'd like to think you're a man who might understand if I were to confide in you, you look like a good enough fellow. But what's in a face right?
He lifted his glass and drew on it long and thoughtfully. I waited.
Let me ask you something, he said. And I'm sorry to put you through hoops like this, but there's something I'd like to know about you.
Okay. Like what? My name's---
No need for names, he cut me off. It's better that way.
Okay.
If you don't mind, I'd like you to tell me about the strangest thing you've ever seen.
I looked at him. It was a difficult question. I didn't know what to make of it. I mean I had been around for forty years and more, surely I'd seen some strange things. But now that I was on the spot.
Take your time, he said.
I smiled at him, awkwardly I'm sure, and lifted my nearly empty glass to my lips in lubrication. I thought.
Another round? It was the bartender, bleary and meek. I nodded.
All right, I said, leaning halfway into the space between us. Maybe this isn't what you were looking for...
Go on.
This was a long time ago. I was basically still a kid. Must have been my first or second year of college, back in Wisconsin. My girlfriend and I were walking home from a party late one night in the rain. A long walk. It was falling hard enough so that it made that tearing sound on the asphalt, but the night was warm and we were drunk anyway. Suddenly she gives a tug on my sleeve. What's that? She's pointing down the road a ways, off it, past a clearing. There was a glow sort of dancing up and down the sky and we hurried down to look at it. It turned out to be a barn on fire, just burning like I'd never seen anything burn before. I could see cows roaming around the pasture in confusion. The damndest thing was that we couldn't hear it for the rain. All we could hear was the rain and this faint hissing. As if only one of the things were real. I don't know if that makes any sense.
The old man was looking at me with interest. A glow had crested onto his cheeks above the beard and his eyes were illuminated with something like engagement.
Hell. Raining and burning to beat the band both.
He smiled, still looking at me intently, his smile fading into uncertainty as the seconds passed.
But in the final reckoning it's not very strange, is it? I mean wood burns, rain falls, sometimes they coincide. I'll allow it must have been peculiar not to hear it for the rain.
I nodded, waiting for him to go on. Then I remembered something. Something salvaged from the scrapyard at memory's edge, consigned there in the long ago as a matter of practicality.
There was something else, I said. Something better.
The man's brows crept up his dessicated scalp. He glassed me over the rim of his beverage.
I've never told a soul this before. I don't know why I'm telling you of all people. Maybe because I'm never going to see you again. This was also a long time ago. I was a young man and I had a summer to myself in the mountains. Real mountains, really to myself. A privilege in other words. One day I was out kind of patrolling the slope above where I lived with my rifle. Just looking around, hoping maybe to get a shot off at a rabbit. Out of the corner of my eye I see some movement up among the branches. It's a squirrel, has to be, I thought. I ducked behind a tree and waited.
I finished my beer and looked down at the bar, unsure how to go on.
Go on, the man said. Unburden yourself.
Well...all right, I'll get straight to the point. I shot the squirrel a few minutes later. Nice big one. I got my knife out to dress it, like you do. I spilled the guts and what not, then I dug through the diaphragm, you know. Hooked my finger around the cardiovascular system and gave a tug. Do you know what I saw? The fucking heart was artificial. A fucking electromechanical pump with a battery and wires and tubes and everything. May a bolt of lightning strike me where I sit right fucking here if it wasn't so.
The man smiled mildly, never taking his eyes from me. Then he raised his glass and drank, very quickly, as if there were no time to lose. The mirth was gone from his face when he set the glass down.
Now you're talking. Whether I believe it or not is another question. But I think you may be worth the telling, my friend. The strangest thing I ever saw wasn't a thing, really. And I didn't really see it either. It was something that happened when I was a young man living with my friends. I suppose the arrangement we had was what you would call a commune. We were all escaping something, trying to forget something, trying to reinvent ourselves, trying to be healthy and fair and moral. Hippies but with a good deal of seriousness if you see what I mean. It wasn't a word we used very often, but I guess the truth is that we were revolutionaries in our way. I guess that's strange enough to hear or remember in itself these days, but what happened back then was, it was, I still don't know what to think of it.
I inclined my head in interest, motioning discretely to the barman for another beer.
Now when a bar is pretty much empty and a fellow sits down within, what would you call it, palavering distance of one of the patrons--when that happens I'd be inclined to think that that fellow, if not actively seeking conversation, inclines at least ever so slightly toward the positive side of perfect indifference to being engaged in one. Wouldn't you say?
After a moment I looked up from the swill that you'd be at pains to distinguish from the murky floods coursing through the gutters just outside the bar and asked the older fellow what he thought.
What do I think?
Yes. In a general sort of way. It's an open question.
He wore a heavy unkempt beard of the kind associated with the sea or with solitude, but you could tell that the face beneath was angular and somehow hollowed with the years. His arms were hairy and lean, almost fleshless. His eyes gazed at me flatly, for a long time, as the question completed its transit from the air to his ears and through the apparently vast conduits in his mind to the chamber that would hear it, weigh it, and either furnish it with an answer or reject it out of hand.
I don't think you want to know what I think, Sir, he said at last, smiling very slightly. Now if you don't mind.
He swung away from me and flagged down the barman for a cognac. It was set before him. He paid, then collapsed within himself to preside over the beverage like some vulturous sovereign. I was looking at him for something like five minutes, but he seemed aware of nothing but the cognac, his hand, and the space between them. I had an urge to prod him, to roust him from whatever stupor he sought, but in the end I withdrew back to the microcosm of my own beer, my own Catatonia. There was the matter of the lawn now that I could no longer afford the modestly priced service provided by the Jensen boy, that letter I had been meaning to send to my grandmother who by some trick of cellular metabolism was still alive in which I wanted to thank her, simply thank her for the gift of fortitude in having been able to live for so long, and also to remind her of some of the little trips we'd gone on when grandpa grew sick and it was she who decided where we would drive, always odd places like the dairy with the largest cheese wheel, the birthplaces of famous cooks and cooking personalities, parks with funny names, things like that, not to mention the delicate matter--to be included in the letter that it--of who she meant to inherit grandpa's rifle collection, which in turn got me thinking between one sip and the next of the possibility of taking my boy out into the country on a hunting trip as a means of connecting with him by teaching him something, in this case as essential as the disposal of another creature's life. I remembered how my father had taught me the patience to wait for the perfect moment, to gauge and anticipate the wind.
You want to know what I think, eh? It was the old man. I turned to him.
Well. Only if you do. I mean if you've come around.
You know, a man does want to talk. I mean it makes it all a lot easier. But it's hard to know if someone will understand. I mean if they have the imagination and the decency it takes. I've been going over some memories, to tell you the truth. Strange and sad memories. And I'd like to think you're a man who might understand if I were to confide in you, you look like a good enough fellow. But what's in a face right?
He lifted his glass and drew on it long and thoughtfully. I waited.
Let me ask you something, he said. And I'm sorry to put you through hoops like this, but there's something I'd like to know about you.
Okay. Like what? My name's---
No need for names, he cut me off. It's better that way.
Okay.
If you don't mind, I'd like you to tell me about the strangest thing you've ever seen.
I looked at him. It was a difficult question. I didn't know what to make of it. I mean I had been around for forty years and more, surely I'd seen some strange things. But now that I was on the spot.
Take your time, he said.
I smiled at him, awkwardly I'm sure, and lifted my nearly empty glass to my lips in lubrication. I thought.
Another round? It was the bartender, bleary and meek. I nodded.
All right, I said, leaning halfway into the space between us. Maybe this isn't what you were looking for...
Go on.
This was a long time ago. I was basically still a kid. Must have been my first or second year of college, back in Wisconsin. My girlfriend and I were walking home from a party late one night in the rain. A long walk. It was falling hard enough so that it made that tearing sound on the asphalt, but the night was warm and we were drunk anyway. Suddenly she gives a tug on my sleeve. What's that? She's pointing down the road a ways, off it, past a clearing. There was a glow sort of dancing up and down the sky and we hurried down to look at it. It turned out to be a barn on fire, just burning like I'd never seen anything burn before. I could see cows roaming around the pasture in confusion. The damndest thing was that we couldn't hear it for the rain. All we could hear was the rain and this faint hissing. As if only one of the things were real. I don't know if that makes any sense.
The old man was looking at me with interest. A glow had crested onto his cheeks above the beard and his eyes were illuminated with something like engagement.
Hell. Raining and burning to beat the band both.
He smiled, still looking at me intently, his smile fading into uncertainty as the seconds passed.
But in the final reckoning it's not very strange, is it? I mean wood burns, rain falls, sometimes they coincide. I'll allow it must have been peculiar not to hear it for the rain.
I nodded, waiting for him to go on. Then I remembered something. Something salvaged from the scrapyard at memory's edge, consigned there in the long ago as a matter of practicality.
There was something else, I said. Something better.
The man's brows crept up his dessicated scalp. He glassed me over the rim of his beverage.
I've never told a soul this before. I don't know why I'm telling you of all people. Maybe because I'm never going to see you again. This was also a long time ago. I was a young man and I had a summer to myself in the mountains. Real mountains, really to myself. A privilege in other words. One day I was out kind of patrolling the slope above where I lived with my rifle. Just looking around, hoping maybe to get a shot off at a rabbit. Out of the corner of my eye I see some movement up among the branches. It's a squirrel, has to be, I thought. I ducked behind a tree and waited.
I finished my beer and looked down at the bar, unsure how to go on.
Go on, the man said. Unburden yourself.
Well...all right, I'll get straight to the point. I shot the squirrel a few minutes later. Nice big one. I got my knife out to dress it, like you do. I spilled the guts and what not, then I dug through the diaphragm, you know. Hooked my finger around the cardiovascular system and gave a tug. Do you know what I saw? The fucking heart was artificial. A fucking electromechanical pump with a battery and wires and tubes and everything. May a bolt of lightning strike me where I sit right fucking here if it wasn't so.
The man smiled mildly, never taking his eyes from me. Then he raised his glass and drank, very quickly, as if there were no time to lose. The mirth was gone from his face when he set the glass down.
Now you're talking. Whether I believe it or not is another question. But I think you may be worth the telling, my friend. The strangest thing I ever saw wasn't a thing, really. And I didn't really see it either. It was something that happened when I was a young man living with my friends. I suppose the arrangement we had was what you would call a commune. We were all escaping something, trying to forget something, trying to reinvent ourselves, trying to be healthy and fair and moral. Hippies but with a good deal of seriousness if you see what I mean. It wasn't a word we used very often, but I guess the truth is that we were revolutionaries in our way. I guess that's strange enough to hear or remember in itself these days, but what happened back then was, it was, I still don't know what to think of it.
I inclined my head in interest, motioning discretely to the barman for another beer.
Several ideas came to me as I took Tipper on a long, linear walk this morning. Ideas seem to come to me in two main places:
1) On the road, whether walking leisurely as Tipper's pawpatter urges my brain along like a metronome--at times like these the thoughts sift down from the air, from the mountains, having found on my shuffling frame a convenient receptacle--or running, when the effort and the strain wear down the thought's defenses until it is dislodged from my bowels. Accordingly, the thoughts that strike from above while walking are abstract, speculative, prospective, intellectualized, while those that rise from below as I run are more emotional, reactive, intuitive: In a word, "visceral."
2) In the tub, while I read, giving such ideas a character contingent on the thoughts of others. I read in other places, too, such as the couch and the bed, but none seems to motivate thought the way a tub filled with warm water can.
The first of the morning's ideas had to do with another expedition, more precisely the winter's crowning expedition. As I have mentioned here previously, the Nez Perce Road effectively ends 2.5 miles from my house during the winter months, where it is closed off to wheeled vehicles by a snowbank. If you are using your feet or some kind of device worn on your feet, on the other hand, the road continues some 110 miles through the largest wilderness area in these continental United States, terminating in Elk City, Idaho. What I'd like to do, if you catch my drift, is to park Nystrom's Pride in Elk City via the circuitous route open in the winter, return to the cabin in another vehicle, and then recover Nystrom's Pride by traversing the entire length of the Nez Perce Road on a set of cross country skis. Which--if I'm lucky--should take a week. It's a pretty inchoate idea at this point, but I can't see a good reason not to do it. To form some idea of the terrain and its rigors, I'm planning to cover the very first stretch of the journey on an overnight trip this weekend, that is to say the 13 miles or so to the pass into Idaho. 13 miles on a set of XC skis shouldn't be particularly grueling, and barring any unexpected difficulties it will leave plenty of latitude for speculation about still more adventures.
The next idea actually began while I was running yesterday and returned this morning in somewhat more workable form. This one concerns a story dealing with a subject of elementary importance: Justice. The thing itself, that is, as opposed to its institutionalized specter.
For quite some time my fictional work has taken place in the realm of the absurd (not to say insignificant), at the margin of human experience and pathos. To speculate on something I don't quite understand, I'd like to advance the idea that this focus on marginality on my part, as a writer, is the product of a dialectical process whereby I consciously selected marginal soil as the seedbed for my plots and characters on the strength of a conviction that the margin, that vast neglected forum where the bulk human experience and learning and suffering occurs, would yield the most fertile literary results; and where I simultaneously in effect "marginalized" myself from the very serious role that is the writer's to fulfill precisely by contenting myself with the flotsam of absurdity--at the expense of the very weighty subjects that writing was invented to address, indeed, on whose tackling, weighing and reckoning writing has a virtual monopoly.
In case that is too obscure, let me state this by way of preface to the installments that will follow here, as clearly as I am able. I believe that it is a primary function of literature to search for truth. Literature may entertain, it may titillate, it may fascinate, thrill or disabuse--it should do all those things--but the success of all such criteria can be said to emerge as a function of how successfully the writing is able to expose, emulate or approximate the truth, or at least whatever piecemeal truth the individual is capable of getting at.
If the writer is seeking merely to entertain himself, he may as well be masturbating or playing a video game. In the above sense, the truth is something obscure, a state of affairs that must be brought to light and investigated. Certain truths are more pressing than others, as a function of the historical moment in which they are hidden. And here I am far from saying that the writer's task is the straightforward one of singling out his truth, or "truth," and then going at it directly. In fact I am suggesting something like the opposite: After all, we all live with the truth right under our noses, and do not see it. No, the writer must work laterally, obliquely, clandestinely, from bitter searching of the heart, to borrow a line from that fine man Leonard Cohen. The writer must undermine the edifice of appearances and learn to deploy paradox as a weapon. Skill is necessary, but insufficient without courage. All of this is easier said than done. Very few have managed, really, to do it, just as only a few will manage, really, to do it in future. And yet it must be done. It must be. We must. The stakes are staggering, and the penalty that awaits our failure to do so is grim to the point of defying contemplation. Who will be able to pinpoint the moment in which our humanity as we have defined and celebrated it hitherto was definitively lost? Or, at the risk of obscurity: Does a dog know when it stops being a dog?
This, then, while maintaining the humility and retiring nature requisite to the task of proper vision and judgment, is the struggle to which I am struggling to pledge myself, consciously now, after years of toiling in the margins of unseasoned absurdity. I'll need all the help I can get.
Lest I leave a hole in the middle of my reasoning, let me seal it with a concluding disclaimer here, in case it wasn't clear from the foregoing, or from the sum of my Werdegang, to use a nice German word. When I say that I seek rehabilitation from the thematic margins into the main stream of literature's wider concerns, I mean just that, and nothing more. The farther I am from the center of our, ahem, cough, wink, nudge, society, the better. In any case, the center is a savage illusion that may be collapsing about our heads even as we read and write.
So. A story about justice. Coming soon to a screen near you. I have yet to write the first word.
1) On the road, whether walking leisurely as Tipper's pawpatter urges my brain along like a metronome--at times like these the thoughts sift down from the air, from the mountains, having found on my shuffling frame a convenient receptacle--or running, when the effort and the strain wear down the thought's defenses until it is dislodged from my bowels. Accordingly, the thoughts that strike from above while walking are abstract, speculative, prospective, intellectualized, while those that rise from below as I run are more emotional, reactive, intuitive: In a word, "visceral."
2) In the tub, while I read, giving such ideas a character contingent on the thoughts of others. I read in other places, too, such as the couch and the bed, but none seems to motivate thought the way a tub filled with warm water can.
The first of the morning's ideas had to do with another expedition, more precisely the winter's crowning expedition. As I have mentioned here previously, the Nez Perce Road effectively ends 2.5 miles from my house during the winter months, where it is closed off to wheeled vehicles by a snowbank. If you are using your feet or some kind of device worn on your feet, on the other hand, the road continues some 110 miles through the largest wilderness area in these continental United States, terminating in Elk City, Idaho. What I'd like to do, if you catch my drift, is to park Nystrom's Pride in Elk City via the circuitous route open in the winter, return to the cabin in another vehicle, and then recover Nystrom's Pride by traversing the entire length of the Nez Perce Road on a set of cross country skis. Which--if I'm lucky--should take a week. It's a pretty inchoate idea at this point, but I can't see a good reason not to do it. To form some idea of the terrain and its rigors, I'm planning to cover the very first stretch of the journey on an overnight trip this weekend, that is to say the 13 miles or so to the pass into Idaho. 13 miles on a set of XC skis shouldn't be particularly grueling, and barring any unexpected difficulties it will leave plenty of latitude for speculation about still more adventures.
The next idea actually began while I was running yesterday and returned this morning in somewhat more workable form. This one concerns a story dealing with a subject of elementary importance: Justice. The thing itself, that is, as opposed to its institutionalized specter.
For quite some time my fictional work has taken place in the realm of the absurd (not to say insignificant), at the margin of human experience and pathos. To speculate on something I don't quite understand, I'd like to advance the idea that this focus on marginality on my part, as a writer, is the product of a dialectical process whereby I consciously selected marginal soil as the seedbed for my plots and characters on the strength of a conviction that the margin, that vast neglected forum where the bulk human experience and learning and suffering occurs, would yield the most fertile literary results; and where I simultaneously in effect "marginalized" myself from the very serious role that is the writer's to fulfill precisely by contenting myself with the flotsam of absurdity--at the expense of the very weighty subjects that writing was invented to address, indeed, on whose tackling, weighing and reckoning writing has a virtual monopoly.
In case that is too obscure, let me state this by way of preface to the installments that will follow here, as clearly as I am able. I believe that it is a primary function of literature to search for truth. Literature may entertain, it may titillate, it may fascinate, thrill or disabuse--it should do all those things--but the success of all such criteria can be said to emerge as a function of how successfully the writing is able to expose, emulate or approximate the truth, or at least whatever piecemeal truth the individual is capable of getting at.
If the writer is seeking merely to entertain himself, he may as well be masturbating or playing a video game. In the above sense, the truth is something obscure, a state of affairs that must be brought to light and investigated. Certain truths are more pressing than others, as a function of the historical moment in which they are hidden. And here I am far from saying that the writer's task is the straightforward one of singling out his truth, or "truth," and then going at it directly. In fact I am suggesting something like the opposite: After all, we all live with the truth right under our noses, and do not see it. No, the writer must work laterally, obliquely, clandestinely, from bitter searching of the heart, to borrow a line from that fine man Leonard Cohen. The writer must undermine the edifice of appearances and learn to deploy paradox as a weapon. Skill is necessary, but insufficient without courage. All of this is easier said than done. Very few have managed, really, to do it, just as only a few will manage, really, to do it in future. And yet it must be done. It must be. We must. The stakes are staggering, and the penalty that awaits our failure to do so is grim to the point of defying contemplation. Who will be able to pinpoint the moment in which our humanity as we have defined and celebrated it hitherto was definitively lost? Or, at the risk of obscurity: Does a dog know when it stops being a dog?
This, then, while maintaining the humility and retiring nature requisite to the task of proper vision and judgment, is the struggle to which I am struggling to pledge myself, consciously now, after years of toiling in the margins of unseasoned absurdity. I'll need all the help I can get.
Lest I leave a hole in the middle of my reasoning, let me seal it with a concluding disclaimer here, in case it wasn't clear from the foregoing, or from the sum of my Werdegang, to use a nice German word. When I say that I seek rehabilitation from the thematic margins into the main stream of literature's wider concerns, I mean just that, and nothing more. The farther I am from the center of our, ahem, cough, wink, nudge, society, the better. In any case, the center is a savage illusion that may be collapsing about our heads even as we read and write.
So. A story about justice. Coming soon to a screen near you. I have yet to write the first word.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Or your money back, Part Deux
Continued from Part Un.
The chill was sharp in the man's nostrils as he crossed the space between trailer and truck. The morning was shabby with proofs of entropy. Plumes of smoke and steam were rising from the handful of other trailers in the park, alloying with the generalized gray of the day. He opened the door and sat in the cab inhaling its familiar smell. He took a penny from the dash and used it to turn the ignition. The engine turned over easily, soon settling into a throaty purr.
He went in to get the dog and the shampoo bottle and the directions he had written out as the engine warmed. He was wearing a rumpled dress shirt adverting the name of a defunct enterprise he had once worked for in the days when there was work. The dog followed him eagerly down the walkway. When the man pointed at the bed it cleared the tailgate with an impressive leap.
"Goin on a road trip boy. Whaddye think?" The dog wagged its stump in ratification. The man moored the dog to an anchor in the bed before climbing into the cab.
There were only a few miles of mixed-use land separating his trailer park from the main highway into the city. Scrapyards, brownfields of varying descriptions, granite pits, an abandoned foundry, the occasional enclosure patrolled by lean livestock. From the corner of his eye he saw a fallow field presided over by a derelict scarecrow with nothing left to frighten.
On the highway the man stayed in the right lane as the newer vehicles stampeded past on the left, inscrutable pilgrims pledged to their nameless and desperate causes. After a few miles the billboards preaching the sanctity of life and varying degrees of commercial activity began in earnest. Between the billboards flickered visions of developments that would never be completed.
A few miles on lay the office parks. Elysium Avenue, Enterprise Boulevard, Commerce Way. He followed one such road onto one a corporate campus and was soon faced with the shampoo and miscellaneous toiletry enterprise's headquarters. A massive cube of a building on steel stilts that heaved it off the ground where it shaded the vehicles of the parking elite. The windows were mirrored, and no activity within the building could be discerned.
The man opened the door and swiveled his boots down onto the concrete, turning to grab the culprit bottle before he closed the door. He whistled sharply. "Let's go, boy."
They strode toward the entrance with a businesslike air. It is impressive to see an otherwise undignified dog assume a businesslike air.
Once within the headquarters they were greeted by an enormous banner. Process Competence + Efficient Organizational Infrastructure = Sustainable Success. A voice spoke to the man's left as he fathomed the banner. "You can't bring that in here."
The man turned. At the black reception console sat a small woman in a warden's outfit. She wore thick glasses that gave her eyes a piscene, walled appearance. Her body had the collapsed look of a tree monkey, and her pinched features clove to her skull like a hideous drumskin. Nevertheless, her hair spilled from her head in a lustrous cascade. A perquisite.
Oh. You see...well, he's the reason I'm here.
What?
The dog. I'm here because your shampoo did this to his coat and I want to talk to someone about it. Who can I talk to?
You can't talk to anyone with that dog, sir. I'm going to have to ask you to take it back to your vehicle. Do you have an appointment?
Appointment? No. I have a complaint to make.
I see. In that case I can direct you to a link where you can download our complaint form. You'll have to complete it and include the UPC code and original proof of purchase.
The man and his dog looked at the woman for a moment. She fixed them back with her unblinking aquatic stare. He thought carefully before speaking.
Alright, I understand you have a policy against dogs in the building. That's fine. I'll go put him back in the truck. I just need to be able to talk to someone about my problem and see about that refund. I don't have a computer at home, you see. I'm sure I can take whoever it is out to the truck to show them what the shampoo did to his coat. Do you think you can help me with that?
The woman wheezed a sigh of exasperation. Sir, I just helped you. We can't issue refunds here at corporate. Claims have to be filed with the claims department.
Lady, I tried calling your claims department. They were not helpful, and I couldn't hardly understand what the woman was saying. Now I drove all the way here from Gibbonsville, and I'm not leaving until I get to talk to someone who can help me. Your product guarantees my satisfaction or my money back, and I'm taking you at your word. C'mon boy, let's get you back in the truck.
The woman was working the console as the man exited the lobby.
When the man returned the woman was flanked by a large man wearing an identical uniform with the single difference of a small medal above the left breast.
What seems to be the problem sir.
What? There's no problem. I just want to talk to some kind of manager. I'll just have a seat until someone can see me.
Sir I believe Miss Veristasis here went over the procedure for filing a claim. I'm afraid that's the only option you have.
What only option? You have got to be five finger...what is this? All I want is a refund for the shampoo that ruined my dog's coat and, you know, maybe a little money to get it fixed. Is that too much to ask?
The woman spoke: I told you he was being disrespectful, Erwin.
The guard surged forward from his position flanking the woman at the console. Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.
Oh no you don't. Hey! Get your hands off me. I want my damn money back like the bottle says.
Sir if you don't cooperate we'll be forced to press charges.
For what? Are you out of your mind?
All right. Let's go. You're out of here.
The guard executed a swift maneuver and led the man out the door in a half Nelson.
Now, which car is yours, good buddy? We're going to make sure you get out of here safely now.
You're making a big mistake here, man.
The guard continued leading him.
Hey, do you hear me? I'm telling you you're making a big mistake.
And why is that?
The dog, you damn didjit. Oh, shit.
It was too late. The dog reacted automatically as soon as it saw what was happening. Launching itself from the truck, it had knocked them both to the ground in seconds. The guard was scrambling for his electrocution device but the dog was already at his throat.
No. Oh no. Let go boy. Damn it to hell let go!
A detachment of security guards flooded into the parking lot from the lobby while the man pommeled and pleaded with his dog over the guard's gurgling anguish. The guards fell on them with clubs and electrocution devices. Fucking bum, he heard somewhere. Then darkness.
*
The man woke up with a savage headache. There was a furred and ferric taste in the back of his mouth, as if his brain had descended an inch or two down the drainpipe of his spine. He was sprawled on the concrete floor of a cell. His joints hurt. He dragged himself up against the wall as he mended the shreds of what had happened. After some minutes his confusion had not abated. He called down the corridor through the bars.
Hey. Where am I? Hello?
No response issued. The prison was soundless save for the faint yawns of plumbing and ductwork.
Hello?
Several hours later he awoke to the sound of a key turning in the lock of his cell. The man looked up to see an archetypal jailer figure. Large, portly, mustachioed, proper, eyes oozing reptilian malice.
You Mason Dewey?
The man nodded.
All right now. Get your sorry ass up. Time to give your statement.
The man staggered to his feet. I don't know what happened, he said.
What do you mean you don't know? You sicked your dog on a man and put him in the hospital. Damn near killed him.
I never sicked him.
That's what you say.
It sure is. Will the guard be all right?
What the hell do you care, sackashit. Let's go.
The jailer led him roughly down the corridor.
What about my dog?
What?
I said what about my dog?
Never mind about your dog.
What do you mean never mind? Where the fuck is he?
Watch your language. Sackashit.
What happened to him? Can I see him?
Suddenly the jailer hurled his skull against the bare cinderblock. A red stain bloomed in his vision. The jailer leaned in and whispered.
All right, you want to know what happened to your dog? They stove his head in. And you know what I say, sackashit? Good riddance. That was damn near the ugliest thing I've ever seen. Fucking overgrown rat. Pathetic.
The man slumped out of the jailer's grip and spilled onto the floor. He began to sob violently.
The jailer stood and witnessed the scene.
Go on, pansy. Cry it out. We're still gonna charge you. Now come on. Here we go.
*
The walls of the room were also of cinderblock, but had been painted institutional green. A guard presided over the man as the detective behind the desk asked him questions. His left hand been cuffed to the desk for good measure.
Mason Dewey.
Yes.
That's got a nice ring to it. I like that. Mason Dewey. So. What have we here.
The detective peered over to top of his glasses at the papers on the desk.
So what is it you have against Better and Better Soaps? What would drive a man to terrorize the headquarters of a soap company?
I don't have anything against them. I just wanted a refund.
Is that right. And setting your dog loose on one of their security professionals was your way of stating your case, is that it.
I never sicked the dog on that man officer. He did it himself. Not to mention I warned the guard. Why would I want to sick my dog on someone and get in a pile of trouble?
Why do people murder their mothers, Mr. Dewey? I have at least four witnesses willing to testify against you. They all say you were being aggressive and disrespectful. Allowing your dog to attack that man fits the pattern.
That's what they say. You can't listen to them. The whole place had it in for me from the start.
The detective scribbled, muttering. Paranoia...irrational...possible conspiracist...
Mr. Dewey, let me ask you something. What line of work do you follow?
Work? Officer, as a man of the law...all I wanted was a refund for my shampoo. The people at Better and Better were meaner than hell, and then they turned violent. That's what set my dog off. I didn't do anything wrong. And who's going to compensate me for the dog?
Mr. Dewey, let me be clear on one point. I will not sit here and twiddle my thumbs as you rattle off bald-faced lies. I won't. And let me give you a piece of advice while we're at it: This will be a hell of a lot easier on you if you cooperate. So tell me, what is your line of work?
The man regarded the detective uncertainly: I can fit pipes, I can weld seams, I can lay tile, I can plane wood. You name it. But there isn't any work officer. You know that.
Drifter, then. That'll win the judge right over.
What the fuck drifter? I don't drift anywhere. I don't have any work now is all. I'd like to see you get a job in construction the way things are.
The detective's eyebrows were raised. The man noticed that they had been painstakingly groomed. Then the detective shifted his gaze upward, almost imperceptibly. A fist crashed into the man's neck, slumping him over into a gagging heap.
I won't have you swearing at me Dewey. I can't allow it. Now if you'll abide by these simple rules, I think you'll see that we can get through this thing painlessly.
The man was was still coughing painfully and was over a minute in gaining his breath. All right, he said. All right. What do you want from me?
I'm glad you asked, Dewey. Why, all I want is for you to sign this little piece of paper.
What is it?
It'll set things in order and start to make good on the harm you inflicted to day.
I said what is it?
It's your confession.
Shit fire. I'm not signing any confession.
The detective arched his carefully groomed brows.
The chill was sharp in the man's nostrils as he crossed the space between trailer and truck. The morning was shabby with proofs of entropy. Plumes of smoke and steam were rising from the handful of other trailers in the park, alloying with the generalized gray of the day. He opened the door and sat in the cab inhaling its familiar smell. He took a penny from the dash and used it to turn the ignition. The engine turned over easily, soon settling into a throaty purr.
He went in to get the dog and the shampoo bottle and the directions he had written out as the engine warmed. He was wearing a rumpled dress shirt adverting the name of a defunct enterprise he had once worked for in the days when there was work. The dog followed him eagerly down the walkway. When the man pointed at the bed it cleared the tailgate with an impressive leap.
"Goin on a road trip boy. Whaddye think?" The dog wagged its stump in ratification. The man moored the dog to an anchor in the bed before climbing into the cab.
There were only a few miles of mixed-use land separating his trailer park from the main highway into the city. Scrapyards, brownfields of varying descriptions, granite pits, an abandoned foundry, the occasional enclosure patrolled by lean livestock. From the corner of his eye he saw a fallow field presided over by a derelict scarecrow with nothing left to frighten.
On the highway the man stayed in the right lane as the newer vehicles stampeded past on the left, inscrutable pilgrims pledged to their nameless and desperate causes. After a few miles the billboards preaching the sanctity of life and varying degrees of commercial activity began in earnest. Between the billboards flickered visions of developments that would never be completed.
A few miles on lay the office parks. Elysium Avenue, Enterprise Boulevard, Commerce Way. He followed one such road onto one a corporate campus and was soon faced with the shampoo and miscellaneous toiletry enterprise's headquarters. A massive cube of a building on steel stilts that heaved it off the ground where it shaded the vehicles of the parking elite. The windows were mirrored, and no activity within the building could be discerned.
The man opened the door and swiveled his boots down onto the concrete, turning to grab the culprit bottle before he closed the door. He whistled sharply. "Let's go, boy."
They strode toward the entrance with a businesslike air. It is impressive to see an otherwise undignified dog assume a businesslike air.
Once within the headquarters they were greeted by an enormous banner. Process Competence + Efficient Organizational Infrastructure = Sustainable Success. A voice spoke to the man's left as he fathomed the banner. "You can't bring that in here."
The man turned. At the black reception console sat a small woman in a warden's outfit. She wore thick glasses that gave her eyes a piscene, walled appearance. Her body had the collapsed look of a tree monkey, and her pinched features clove to her skull like a hideous drumskin. Nevertheless, her hair spilled from her head in a lustrous cascade. A perquisite.
Oh. You see...well, he's the reason I'm here.
What?
The dog. I'm here because your shampoo did this to his coat and I want to talk to someone about it. Who can I talk to?
You can't talk to anyone with that dog, sir. I'm going to have to ask you to take it back to your vehicle. Do you have an appointment?
Appointment? No. I have a complaint to make.
I see. In that case I can direct you to a link where you can download our complaint form. You'll have to complete it and include the UPC code and original proof of purchase.
The man and his dog looked at the woman for a moment. She fixed them back with her unblinking aquatic stare. He thought carefully before speaking.
Alright, I understand you have a policy against dogs in the building. That's fine. I'll go put him back in the truck. I just need to be able to talk to someone about my problem and see about that refund. I don't have a computer at home, you see. I'm sure I can take whoever it is out to the truck to show them what the shampoo did to his coat. Do you think you can help me with that?
The woman wheezed a sigh of exasperation. Sir, I just helped you. We can't issue refunds here at corporate. Claims have to be filed with the claims department.
Lady, I tried calling your claims department. They were not helpful, and I couldn't hardly understand what the woman was saying. Now I drove all the way here from Gibbonsville, and I'm not leaving until I get to talk to someone who can help me. Your product guarantees my satisfaction or my money back, and I'm taking you at your word. C'mon boy, let's get you back in the truck.
The woman was working the console as the man exited the lobby.
When the man returned the woman was flanked by a large man wearing an identical uniform with the single difference of a small medal above the left breast.
What seems to be the problem sir.
What? There's no problem. I just want to talk to some kind of manager. I'll just have a seat until someone can see me.
Sir I believe Miss Veristasis here went over the procedure for filing a claim. I'm afraid that's the only option you have.
What only option? You have got to be five finger...what is this? All I want is a refund for the shampoo that ruined my dog's coat and, you know, maybe a little money to get it fixed. Is that too much to ask?
The woman spoke: I told you he was being disrespectful, Erwin.
The guard surged forward from his position flanking the woman at the console. Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.
Oh no you don't. Hey! Get your hands off me. I want my damn money back like the bottle says.
Sir if you don't cooperate we'll be forced to press charges.
For what? Are you out of your mind?
All right. Let's go. You're out of here.
The guard executed a swift maneuver and led the man out the door in a half Nelson.
Now, which car is yours, good buddy? We're going to make sure you get out of here safely now.
You're making a big mistake here, man.
The guard continued leading him.
Hey, do you hear me? I'm telling you you're making a big mistake.
And why is that?
The dog, you damn didjit. Oh, shit.
It was too late. The dog reacted automatically as soon as it saw what was happening. Launching itself from the truck, it had knocked them both to the ground in seconds. The guard was scrambling for his electrocution device but the dog was already at his throat.
No. Oh no. Let go boy. Damn it to hell let go!
A detachment of security guards flooded into the parking lot from the lobby while the man pommeled and pleaded with his dog over the guard's gurgling anguish. The guards fell on them with clubs and electrocution devices. Fucking bum, he heard somewhere. Then darkness.
*
The man woke up with a savage headache. There was a furred and ferric taste in the back of his mouth, as if his brain had descended an inch or two down the drainpipe of his spine. He was sprawled on the concrete floor of a cell. His joints hurt. He dragged himself up against the wall as he mended the shreds of what had happened. After some minutes his confusion had not abated. He called down the corridor through the bars.
Hey. Where am I? Hello?
No response issued. The prison was soundless save for the faint yawns of plumbing and ductwork.
Hello?
Several hours later he awoke to the sound of a key turning in the lock of his cell. The man looked up to see an archetypal jailer figure. Large, portly, mustachioed, proper, eyes oozing reptilian malice.
You Mason Dewey?
The man nodded.
All right now. Get your sorry ass up. Time to give your statement.
The man staggered to his feet. I don't know what happened, he said.
What do you mean you don't know? You sicked your dog on a man and put him in the hospital. Damn near killed him.
I never sicked him.
That's what you say.
It sure is. Will the guard be all right?
What the hell do you care, sackashit. Let's go.
The jailer led him roughly down the corridor.
What about my dog?
What?
I said what about my dog?
Never mind about your dog.
What do you mean never mind? Where the fuck is he?
Watch your language. Sackashit.
What happened to him? Can I see him?
Suddenly the jailer hurled his skull against the bare cinderblock. A red stain bloomed in his vision. The jailer leaned in and whispered.
All right, you want to know what happened to your dog? They stove his head in. And you know what I say, sackashit? Good riddance. That was damn near the ugliest thing I've ever seen. Fucking overgrown rat. Pathetic.
The man slumped out of the jailer's grip and spilled onto the floor. He began to sob violently.
The jailer stood and witnessed the scene.
Go on, pansy. Cry it out. We're still gonna charge you. Now come on. Here we go.
*
The walls of the room were also of cinderblock, but had been painted institutional green. A guard presided over the man as the detective behind the desk asked him questions. His left hand been cuffed to the desk for good measure.
Mason Dewey.
Yes.
That's got a nice ring to it. I like that. Mason Dewey. So. What have we here.
The detective peered over to top of his glasses at the papers on the desk.
So what is it you have against Better and Better Soaps? What would drive a man to terrorize the headquarters of a soap company?
I don't have anything against them. I just wanted a refund.
Is that right. And setting your dog loose on one of their security professionals was your way of stating your case, is that it.
I never sicked the dog on that man officer. He did it himself. Not to mention I warned the guard. Why would I want to sick my dog on someone and get in a pile of trouble?
Why do people murder their mothers, Mr. Dewey? I have at least four witnesses willing to testify against you. They all say you were being aggressive and disrespectful. Allowing your dog to attack that man fits the pattern.
That's what they say. You can't listen to them. The whole place had it in for me from the start.
The detective scribbled, muttering. Paranoia...irrational...possible conspiracist...
Mr. Dewey, let me ask you something. What line of work do you follow?
Work? Officer, as a man of the law...all I wanted was a refund for my shampoo. The people at Better and Better were meaner than hell, and then they turned violent. That's what set my dog off. I didn't do anything wrong. And who's going to compensate me for the dog?
Mr. Dewey, let me be clear on one point. I will not sit here and twiddle my thumbs as you rattle off bald-faced lies. I won't. And let me give you a piece of advice while we're at it: This will be a hell of a lot easier on you if you cooperate. So tell me, what is your line of work?
The man regarded the detective uncertainly: I can fit pipes, I can weld seams, I can lay tile, I can plane wood. You name it. But there isn't any work officer. You know that.
Drifter, then. That'll win the judge right over.
What the fuck drifter? I don't drift anywhere. I don't have any work now is all. I'd like to see you get a job in construction the way things are.
The detective's eyebrows were raised. The man noticed that they had been painstakingly groomed. Then the detective shifted his gaze upward, almost imperceptibly. A fist crashed into the man's neck, slumping him over into a gagging heap.
I won't have you swearing at me Dewey. I can't allow it. Now if you'll abide by these simple rules, I think you'll see that we can get through this thing painlessly.
The man was was still coughing painfully and was over a minute in gaining his breath. All right, he said. All right. What do you want from me?
I'm glad you asked, Dewey. Why, all I want is for you to sign this little piece of paper.
What is it?
It'll set things in order and start to make good on the harm you inflicted to day.
I said what is it?
It's your confession.
Shit fire. I'm not signing any confession.
The detective arched his carefully groomed brows.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Blogospheric absence explained
Dear Blog Enthusiasts:
This message is being conveyed on Markus Nystrom's behalf in order to make excuses for his unseemly long absence and to inform the reader regarding a recent excursion undertaken by Markus. Allow me, by way of preface, to introduce myself. My name is Winston Meriwether Threatte, and it is I who from time to time serve not only as Markus's mentor, but as his factotum. It is in the latter capacity that I pen the following as Markus recovers from recent exertions. Enough about me for now.
Between his most recent post and the weekend just past, Markus's time for creative-reflective activity was cut short by a sudden spike of translation work. Whatever else you may think of him, you must remember that he has certain debts to satisfy. And while it is true that such indebtedness poses an erosive threat to the creative capacity, the satisfaction of the debt, once achieved, will doubtless pay dividends in the form of tempered character. That at least is the nostrum that I peddle to Nystrom when he chafes against the bit.
If the pace of paid work last week was frantic, it was with the definite object in mind of clearing the weekend of any obligations but those he'd set for himself in the way of ordeal. Indeed, by Friday afternoon, all that remained to Nystrom was to pack and to prepare himself for what the morrow would bring. I shall convey the course of his rugged expedition to you much as he communicated it to me, not only because his words (slightly filtered here) would be truer to the spirit of the venture than any volume of polished paraphrase I might offer, but because I know he would despair of such an inordinate stain of what he deems my "prolixity and terminal formalism" spreading over the pixels of his blog. After all, possession of another writer's user name and password confers at least as much responsibility as it does privilege.
So then:
The goal Winston, as you might have guessed from what I've told you so far, was primarily to recover the tent and, if that proved successful, to make a push for the summit overlooking Nelson Lake--and possibly the lake itself. To realize this goal, I prepared exhaustively the night before and set my alarm to ring well before dawn. My packing was as light as I dared make it: A small day pack containing a flashlight, a stove, a tiny aluminum frying pan, a small bag of nuts and raisins, a plastic lunchbox containing 2 turkey sandwiches, a small bag of coffee, spare long underwear and gloves, an emergency "space blanket". To the outside of the pack I fastened a plastic water bottle, a steel bottle of gasoline, and my sleeping bag. In my pockets I carried compass, lighter, watch, map and 3 shotgun shells. My clothing was as follows: A thermal top made from some synthetic material, a heavy wool sweater, snow pants, and a nylon windbreaker. My feet were wrapped up in two pairs of socks, a sturdy pair of boots going on their 13th year, and snow-shoes thoughtfully gifted this past Christmas by my mother and her husband Peter. Rounding out the equipage was my 12-gauge Winchester shotgun, manufactured in the year 1949, and a single ski pole.
I got underway by around 7:30 and was soon privileged with an intimate audience with the sun cresting the ridge behind me. The beauty boded well for the day to come. Initially the way was familiar. Not only was I able to walk in the traces that remained from my previous snow shoe excursions, but successive thaws and refreezes had hardened them, at least at the bottom of the mountain, to where I could get traction without sinking more than a few inches into it. Some parts were steep and icy, but I knew the way well (even having gone to the length of flagging crucial switches with bits of red tape) and had reached the alpine meadow directly below the thicker wood where I knew my tent stood, in a little over three hours. I was still feeling relatively fresh, but I knew that I had to be careful and methodical about my search to avoid squandering the rest of my muscle power, not to mention the day's light, on an aimless bushwhack in search of the lost tent. This task needed not just body, but mind in conjunction with body. I sat down for a minute to mimic the state of mind I must have been in the day I pitched the tent. I would have been heading north by northwest, I reasoned. And it couldn't have been more than 15 minutes from where I stood that I had collapsed and made camp. The course I decided on was to fix a bearing of N by NW on the compass, to follow it for 15 minutes, and, if I saw nothing, to return the way I'd come. After that I would bracket that bearing by 15 degrees, first to the west, then to the east, then increasing my deviation by another 15 degrees in either direction, etc., until I found it. Like I said, the tent was my main objective, and I was prepared to look for it until an hour before sunset. It took precisely two tries. A distinct feeling that I was going to find it came over me about halfway through that second hub-and-spoke stab. The extreme slope of the hill and the murky setting were exactly as I remembered them. Yes, I thought, just let yourself be lulled into a gentler traversing angle here...and there it was, undamaged and erect. There was a considerable layer of ice crusted around the base, but it proved easy to peel off. Nor had any vermin been tempted into trespass by the smell of cashew nuts and coffee. Inside everything was as I had left it: Two sweaters, a spare can of gasoline, my sleeping pad, the food, and a day pack containing a medical kit, candles and some chemical warmers. I took the warmers and the pad, hoisting the rest into a tree for recovery the day after. I was able to affix both the tent and the sleeping pad to the outside of my little day pack. The load was not terribly well balanced, but I was moving very slowly up a mountain, so it was not much of an issue. The tent dangling on the left and the shotgun dangling on the right also tended to equilibrate each other.
As I had suspected when I camped there a month ago, the ridge was not distant. Probably no more than a couple hundred yards as the crow goes, but with several hundred feet of vertical gain. It was tough going. I believe the time was about 1 when I finally reached it. There is no mistaking a ridge, of course, but I knew that it was the ridge because of the snowmobile tracks. My neighbor Steve had mentioned that he'd been up above Nelson Lake on his machine the weekend before. It had taken him 20 minutes to get there. As irksome as the track may have been to my mountaineer's machismo, it had packed a nice rut into the snow that eased my progress considerably.
Having gained the ridge, the whole world opened up before me. I could see the sheer face of Boulder Peak hulking up out of the gorge to the north. I could see the ranches lining the Nez Perce Road reduced to conceptual ribbons on a map. Most impressively, I could see the countless snow-seized summits of the Bitterroots yawing straight up out of the world in all directions but north. I was about two and a half hours in making the summit overlooking the lake. I had passed 7,000 feet, then 8,000. The air thinned and the day was sapped of its warmth. I began to feel the ice forming in my nose as I drew breath. Near the end I emerged into an open area that looked like an old burn. What new trees grew there were stunted by the wind and cold. To the north, the ridge appeared to drop off into a chasm. I approached as close as I dared and looked down to see what looked like a rubblefield, but no lake. At which point I decided that I had the energy to surmount the next knob, but little more. If the ridge continued to rise after that, I would camp. I began counting steps between rests. 50 steps, breather. 40 steps, breather. 45 steps, breather. Finally I was there. It was, oh happily, the summit overlooking Nelson Lake. The lake was very far below. It looked like it would be possible to traverse the face to get down there, but because the face was not very well forested, it also looked like doing so might also be to court an avalanche. Screw it, I thought.
I pitched my tent, melted snow, boiled some coffee, ate frozen bread, raisins and turkey, and swaddled myself in my sleeping bag. It did not take long before the day winked out into utter dark. I huddled and shivered and tried to read. Our Enemy, The State, by the great and largely forgotten eccentric Albert Jay Nock. My hands grew numb as I read about the unbridled greed and rent-seeking of our nation's founders, save Jefferson. Ice began to encroach on my mustache. Eventually I gave it up. Our enemy was very far away, after all. Thereafter I focused on the conservation of heat, chiefly through mummification and utter stillness. I had to be still because the walls of my sleeping bag were thin with age, and to come into contact with them was to be touched by the night's icy tentacles. It wasn't going to work. I am sure there was very little risk of freezing to death (I had collected wood as a precaution, and a hot coffee was always no more than ten minutes away), but the cold was straining my endurance. Then I remembered the chemical warmers. I opened all four packets: two for my feet, two at large inside the sleeping bag. Then, for my coup de grace, I ensconced myself in the space blanket within the sleeping bag before remummifying. It was not comfortable enough for sleep, but it sufficed for a long bout of relatively warm contemplation as falling snow danced against the tent.
The following morning, as I'd been dreading through the night, was arduous. My hands kept freezing to things. Getting my boots on elicited more profanity from my mouth than the morning paper could ever do, even during these grim days of larceny. At one point I had to laugh: What straits must a man be in to be hell-bent on donning two blocks of ice onto his feet? The steely leather gave last, and soon I was ready to make my way down. The day was beautiful, and soon tolerably warm. There were animal tracks everywhere in the fresh snow.
*
That is what Markus reported to me, and what I have attempted to transmit to you, the blogospheric public, as faithfully as possible. Markus will return from his recovery period shortly, no doubt.
With esteem,
W. Meriwether Threatte
This message is being conveyed on Markus Nystrom's behalf in order to make excuses for his unseemly long absence and to inform the reader regarding a recent excursion undertaken by Markus. Allow me, by way of preface, to introduce myself. My name is Winston Meriwether Threatte, and it is I who from time to time serve not only as Markus's mentor, but as his factotum. It is in the latter capacity that I pen the following as Markus recovers from recent exertions. Enough about me for now.
Between his most recent post and the weekend just past, Markus's time for creative-reflective activity was cut short by a sudden spike of translation work. Whatever else you may think of him, you must remember that he has certain debts to satisfy. And while it is true that such indebtedness poses an erosive threat to the creative capacity, the satisfaction of the debt, once achieved, will doubtless pay dividends in the form of tempered character. That at least is the nostrum that I peddle to Nystrom when he chafes against the bit.
If the pace of paid work last week was frantic, it was with the definite object in mind of clearing the weekend of any obligations but those he'd set for himself in the way of ordeal. Indeed, by Friday afternoon, all that remained to Nystrom was to pack and to prepare himself for what the morrow would bring. I shall convey the course of his rugged expedition to you much as he communicated it to me, not only because his words (slightly filtered here) would be truer to the spirit of the venture than any volume of polished paraphrase I might offer, but because I know he would despair of such an inordinate stain of what he deems my "prolixity and terminal formalism" spreading over the pixels of his blog. After all, possession of another writer's user name and password confers at least as much responsibility as it does privilege.
So then:
The goal Winston, as you might have guessed from what I've told you so far, was primarily to recover the tent and, if that proved successful, to make a push for the summit overlooking Nelson Lake--and possibly the lake itself. To realize this goal, I prepared exhaustively the night before and set my alarm to ring well before dawn. My packing was as light as I dared make it: A small day pack containing a flashlight, a stove, a tiny aluminum frying pan, a small bag of nuts and raisins, a plastic lunchbox containing 2 turkey sandwiches, a small bag of coffee, spare long underwear and gloves, an emergency "space blanket". To the outside of the pack I fastened a plastic water bottle, a steel bottle of gasoline, and my sleeping bag. In my pockets I carried compass, lighter, watch, map and 3 shotgun shells. My clothing was as follows: A thermal top made from some synthetic material, a heavy wool sweater, snow pants, and a nylon windbreaker. My feet were wrapped up in two pairs of socks, a sturdy pair of boots going on their 13th year, and snow-shoes thoughtfully gifted this past Christmas by my mother and her husband Peter. Rounding out the equipage was my 12-gauge Winchester shotgun, manufactured in the year 1949, and a single ski pole.
I got underway by around 7:30 and was soon privileged with an intimate audience with the sun cresting the ridge behind me. The beauty boded well for the day to come. Initially the way was familiar. Not only was I able to walk in the traces that remained from my previous snow shoe excursions, but successive thaws and refreezes had hardened them, at least at the bottom of the mountain, to where I could get traction without sinking more than a few inches into it. Some parts were steep and icy, but I knew the way well (even having gone to the length of flagging crucial switches with bits of red tape) and had reached the alpine meadow directly below the thicker wood where I knew my tent stood, in a little over three hours. I was still feeling relatively fresh, but I knew that I had to be careful and methodical about my search to avoid squandering the rest of my muscle power, not to mention the day's light, on an aimless bushwhack in search of the lost tent. This task needed not just body, but mind in conjunction with body. I sat down for a minute to mimic the state of mind I must have been in the day I pitched the tent. I would have been heading north by northwest, I reasoned. And it couldn't have been more than 15 minutes from where I stood that I had collapsed and made camp. The course I decided on was to fix a bearing of N by NW on the compass, to follow it for 15 minutes, and, if I saw nothing, to return the way I'd come. After that I would bracket that bearing by 15 degrees, first to the west, then to the east, then increasing my deviation by another 15 degrees in either direction, etc., until I found it. Like I said, the tent was my main objective, and I was prepared to look for it until an hour before sunset. It took precisely two tries. A distinct feeling that I was going to find it came over me about halfway through that second hub-and-spoke stab. The extreme slope of the hill and the murky setting were exactly as I remembered them. Yes, I thought, just let yourself be lulled into a gentler traversing angle here...and there it was, undamaged and erect. There was a considerable layer of ice crusted around the base, but it proved easy to peel off. Nor had any vermin been tempted into trespass by the smell of cashew nuts and coffee. Inside everything was as I had left it: Two sweaters, a spare can of gasoline, my sleeping pad, the food, and a day pack containing a medical kit, candles and some chemical warmers. I took the warmers and the pad, hoisting the rest into a tree for recovery the day after. I was able to affix both the tent and the sleeping pad to the outside of my little day pack. The load was not terribly well balanced, but I was moving very slowly up a mountain, so it was not much of an issue. The tent dangling on the left and the shotgun dangling on the right also tended to equilibrate each other.
As I had suspected when I camped there a month ago, the ridge was not distant. Probably no more than a couple hundred yards as the crow goes, but with several hundred feet of vertical gain. It was tough going. I believe the time was about 1 when I finally reached it. There is no mistaking a ridge, of course, but I knew that it was the ridge because of the snowmobile tracks. My neighbor Steve had mentioned that he'd been up above Nelson Lake on his machine the weekend before. It had taken him 20 minutes to get there. As irksome as the track may have been to my mountaineer's machismo, it had packed a nice rut into the snow that eased my progress considerably.
Having gained the ridge, the whole world opened up before me. I could see the sheer face of Boulder Peak hulking up out of the gorge to the north. I could see the ranches lining the Nez Perce Road reduced to conceptual ribbons on a map. Most impressively, I could see the countless snow-seized summits of the Bitterroots yawing straight up out of the world in all directions but north. I was about two and a half hours in making the summit overlooking the lake. I had passed 7,000 feet, then 8,000. The air thinned and the day was sapped of its warmth. I began to feel the ice forming in my nose as I drew breath. Near the end I emerged into an open area that looked like an old burn. What new trees grew there were stunted by the wind and cold. To the north, the ridge appeared to drop off into a chasm. I approached as close as I dared and looked down to see what looked like a rubblefield, but no lake. At which point I decided that I had the energy to surmount the next knob, but little more. If the ridge continued to rise after that, I would camp. I began counting steps between rests. 50 steps, breather. 40 steps, breather. 45 steps, breather. Finally I was there. It was, oh happily, the summit overlooking Nelson Lake. The lake was very far below. It looked like it would be possible to traverse the face to get down there, but because the face was not very well forested, it also looked like doing so might also be to court an avalanche. Screw it, I thought.
I pitched my tent, melted snow, boiled some coffee, ate frozen bread, raisins and turkey, and swaddled myself in my sleeping bag. It did not take long before the day winked out into utter dark. I huddled and shivered and tried to read. Our Enemy, The State, by the great and largely forgotten eccentric Albert Jay Nock. My hands grew numb as I read about the unbridled greed and rent-seeking of our nation's founders, save Jefferson. Ice began to encroach on my mustache. Eventually I gave it up. Our enemy was very far away, after all. Thereafter I focused on the conservation of heat, chiefly through mummification and utter stillness. I had to be still because the walls of my sleeping bag were thin with age, and to come into contact with them was to be touched by the night's icy tentacles. It wasn't going to work. I am sure there was very little risk of freezing to death (I had collected wood as a precaution, and a hot coffee was always no more than ten minutes away), but the cold was straining my endurance. Then I remembered the chemical warmers. I opened all four packets: two for my feet, two at large inside the sleeping bag. Then, for my coup de grace, I ensconced myself in the space blanket within the sleeping bag before remummifying. It was not comfortable enough for sleep, but it sufficed for a long bout of relatively warm contemplation as falling snow danced against the tent.
The following morning, as I'd been dreading through the night, was arduous. My hands kept freezing to things. Getting my boots on elicited more profanity from my mouth than the morning paper could ever do, even during these grim days of larceny. At one point I had to laugh: What straits must a man be in to be hell-bent on donning two blocks of ice onto his feet? The steely leather gave last, and soon I was ready to make my way down. The day was beautiful, and soon tolerably warm. There were animal tracks everywhere in the fresh snow.
*
That is what Markus reported to me, and what I have attempted to transmit to you, the blogospheric public, as faithfully as possible. Markus will return from his recovery period shortly, no doubt.
With esteem,
W. Meriwether Threatte
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Or your money back
"Come here boy." The man's voice was harsh with tobacco and recent exertion.
The mutt was covered in coagulates of blood and bits of gristle from a recent encounter of which it had been the victor.
It must be mentioned that the dog would have made prime fodder for one of the more bizarre entries in the annals of recorded dogdom. Its build was on the portly side, with the strongly articulated musculature, bristling coat and squat legs of a bulldog. Its face, on the other hand, was hardly fit for inclusion in dogdom at all. Put charitably, it had the elongate snout of a Russian wolfhound. But if the observer were to get down to brass tacks, if he were to strip away the veneer of simile, he would undeniably conclude birth had crowned the dog with the face of a rat. The only part of the dog whose proportions were correct, so to speak, was the neck, but it must be remembered that this correctness was only the result of wild imbalances that teetered on either side of this bridge.
The bloodied dog was lingering sheepishly in the dying light beyond the door.
"I said come here boy." The dog's eyes dished up at the hard gaze. Its docked tail flagged as it crossed the threshold, following the man down the ratty carpeted aisle of the trailer and into the small bathroom.
The man closed the door and turned on the spigot. The tub started to fill. Cold water. The dog's eyes rolled.
"Shut up now and sit. There you go. Gonna get a shine on that coat again ain't we now."
The man picked his nose and flicked the fruit of his foraging into the rising water.
It was soon full.
"Git, boy." The dog looked up pathetically. "Git I said." He pointed at the tub, looming over the sanguinary dog. The dog crouched down and would not get. Belting out a curse, the man stooped down and grabbed the dog's studded collar, heaving it clean into the tub. It howled and splashed and scrabbled.
"Just where is it you think you're going dog. Now hush." He pinned it against the enameled iron and reached for the bottle of shampoo. "Hush dammit! There's other folks around besides us. And we wouldn't want them knowing what you've been up to. Lord, what an ugly old dog you are. And mean too. Hush now, that's right, be easy. Take just a minute."
He emptied the bottle over the dog's rump in a liberal swizzle, working the lather up the spine to the neckfold, to the crown of its rodent's head, and to the ears, the lather blooming from white to slurrid pink as he worked. He squeezed more shampoo into his palm, then worked the legs down to the bloodied paws, one after the other. The dog shivered, its breaths quick and shallow, but it did not struggle.
The man stood back after some time. Satisfied that the shampoo had accomplished the deep, gentle cleanse it advertised, he sat down on the edge of the tub.
"You know what they say. This is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. And it won't even make you nice to look at."
Bracing himself with his feet, he bore down on the dog's neck to force it under water. It bore the weight for a few seconds before collapsing onto its hocks and into the water, the man nearly following. A fragment of chewing tobacco escaped his mouth and fell into the water with a muted plink.
"Shit a brick."
Keeping his weight on it, he let the dog's struggles rinse the lather from its coat for him as the water took on the color of the floorslurry in an abbatoire. After several seconds more he stood and let the dog breach and struggle aright. Once it had caught its breath it let out a tremendous sneeze that seemed to exceed the conceivable capacity of any canine set of lungs, as if its innards were nothing but a great wheezy bellows. It looked up, its eyes now placid and altogether doglike, without trace of pain or fury.
"Oh no you don't!"
But it did. It shook itself dry in a tremendous wave of contortions and contractions which, beginning at the head, seized its entire body in a convulsion from which the water went forth in a pink applescented rain before the last tremor winked out at the right hind-paw. The man was drenched. He looked at the dog for a moment in silence.
"Hell, I deserved it, didn't I?" The dog's tail rose in a tentative wag. "Now git!" No sooner had he opened the door than the dog bolted through, a streak of sodden enthusiasm. He let it out the door into the fenced yard. When he'd closed the door he leaned his head against it and closed his eyes.
When he woke from his nap the dog was pawing at the door. The sun had set and the warm nights were over. He hardly recognized the thing when he went to let it in. "You got to be five finger fucking me. What'd you see, the ghost of every dog you ever whooped?" Every bristle on the dog's hide was standing on end. Worse, the neck fur had risen into a pronounced collar that set the dog's face off even more starkly against the body. It slunk off to a corner and groaned as it settled onto a patch of balding carpet. Groggy with sleep, the man plodded to the refrigerator and reached for a beer.
"Be damned if it wasn't the shampoo."
He stood a long while drinking and looking at the dog.
*
Well, I'm sure as hell hoping so. I've got a situation with your shampoo.
Yeah, I got a complaint to make.
About the shampoo.
Well, it's like this. I used it to wash some hair, and now the hair won't settle down. I mean it's just standing up like someone sat him in the 'lectric chair.
Well no, it wadn't my hair I washed. But like I said, the hair I washed, the shampoo just plain screwed it up. He looks like a hairmetal mascot if you know what I mean.
I did, yes.
Of course I tried brushing it down. I just said so.
Well I wouldn't be calling you if I didn't think there was something else I could be doing about it.
Today. A couple hours ago.
It's still standing up. Just on end. Like I said before.
I don't know. What's the difference what scent it is. It ruined my, it ruined that hair all right.
All right, okay. Lemme get the bottle. Just a sec.
All right. It's Apple Zephyr. Zulu, Edward, Papa, Hotel, Yankee, Romeo.
OK. Yeah, lemme just look. OK, that's 52187352. Now what am I going to get for this?
Well look. I don't have a camera, so you're not getting a picture. But you've got my word.
Look, lady, it says right here on the bottle that if I'm not satisfied you'll reimburse me. Your friggin shampoo ruined my dog's coat.
Just a second now. What do you mean doesn't apply to dogs? It doesn't say anything about dogs on the bottle, lady. Just if I'm not satisfied I'll get my money back. Well I'm not satisfied. And you know what? I've got a dog hiding in the corner of shame, and he sure as shit ain't satisfied either.
Yeah yeah, I'll submit a written complaint with the UPC code and original proof of purchase. Count on it. Listen, let me ask you something. Do you like doing this job? I mean do you like stiffing saps out of 3.99 when the product don't work? What's in it for you? And where the heck are you anyway? What kind of accent is that?
No, no, that's it. I called about one thing and you couldn't help me with it.
Oh yeah...and thanks for talking to Mason Dewey. Mason Dewy always appreciates a load of crap.
*
"I'll be...I want that money back. Whaddye say, dog. I think we should head over to the head office tomorrow and get that money back, don't you?"
The man lurched to the refrigerator for another beer. He twisted the cap free and took a tremendous quaff.
"Hell fire."
-To be continued
The mutt was covered in coagulates of blood and bits of gristle from a recent encounter of which it had been the victor.
It must be mentioned that the dog would have made prime fodder for one of the more bizarre entries in the annals of recorded dogdom. Its build was on the portly side, with the strongly articulated musculature, bristling coat and squat legs of a bulldog. Its face, on the other hand, was hardly fit for inclusion in dogdom at all. Put charitably, it had the elongate snout of a Russian wolfhound. But if the observer were to get down to brass tacks, if he were to strip away the veneer of simile, he would undeniably conclude birth had crowned the dog with the face of a rat. The only part of the dog whose proportions were correct, so to speak, was the neck, but it must be remembered that this correctness was only the result of wild imbalances that teetered on either side of this bridge.
The bloodied dog was lingering sheepishly in the dying light beyond the door.
"I said come here boy." The dog's eyes dished up at the hard gaze. Its docked tail flagged as it crossed the threshold, following the man down the ratty carpeted aisle of the trailer and into the small bathroom.
The man closed the door and turned on the spigot. The tub started to fill. Cold water. The dog's eyes rolled.
"Shut up now and sit. There you go. Gonna get a shine on that coat again ain't we now."
The man picked his nose and flicked the fruit of his foraging into the rising water.
It was soon full.
"Git, boy." The dog looked up pathetically. "Git I said." He pointed at the tub, looming over the sanguinary dog. The dog crouched down and would not get. Belting out a curse, the man stooped down and grabbed the dog's studded collar, heaving it clean into the tub. It howled and splashed and scrabbled.
"Just where is it you think you're going dog. Now hush." He pinned it against the enameled iron and reached for the bottle of shampoo. "Hush dammit! There's other folks around besides us. And we wouldn't want them knowing what you've been up to. Lord, what an ugly old dog you are. And mean too. Hush now, that's right, be easy. Take just a minute."
He emptied the bottle over the dog's rump in a liberal swizzle, working the lather up the spine to the neckfold, to the crown of its rodent's head, and to the ears, the lather blooming from white to slurrid pink as he worked. He squeezed more shampoo into his palm, then worked the legs down to the bloodied paws, one after the other. The dog shivered, its breaths quick and shallow, but it did not struggle.
The man stood back after some time. Satisfied that the shampoo had accomplished the deep, gentle cleanse it advertised, he sat down on the edge of the tub.
"You know what they say. This is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. And it won't even make you nice to look at."
Bracing himself with his feet, he bore down on the dog's neck to force it under water. It bore the weight for a few seconds before collapsing onto its hocks and into the water, the man nearly following. A fragment of chewing tobacco escaped his mouth and fell into the water with a muted plink.
"Shit a brick."
Keeping his weight on it, he let the dog's struggles rinse the lather from its coat for him as the water took on the color of the floorslurry in an abbatoire. After several seconds more he stood and let the dog breach and struggle aright. Once it had caught its breath it let out a tremendous sneeze that seemed to exceed the conceivable capacity of any canine set of lungs, as if its innards were nothing but a great wheezy bellows. It looked up, its eyes now placid and altogether doglike, without trace of pain or fury.
"Oh no you don't!"
But it did. It shook itself dry in a tremendous wave of contortions and contractions which, beginning at the head, seized its entire body in a convulsion from which the water went forth in a pink applescented rain before the last tremor winked out at the right hind-paw. The man was drenched. He looked at the dog for a moment in silence.
"Hell, I deserved it, didn't I?" The dog's tail rose in a tentative wag. "Now git!" No sooner had he opened the door than the dog bolted through, a streak of sodden enthusiasm. He let it out the door into the fenced yard. When he'd closed the door he leaned his head against it and closed his eyes.
When he woke from his nap the dog was pawing at the door. The sun had set and the warm nights were over. He hardly recognized the thing when he went to let it in. "You got to be five finger fucking me. What'd you see, the ghost of every dog you ever whooped?" Every bristle on the dog's hide was standing on end. Worse, the neck fur had risen into a pronounced collar that set the dog's face off even more starkly against the body. It slunk off to a corner and groaned as it settled onto a patch of balding carpet. Groggy with sleep, the man plodded to the refrigerator and reached for a beer.
"Be damned if it wasn't the shampoo."
He stood a long while drinking and looking at the dog.
*
Well, I'm sure as hell hoping so. I've got a situation with your shampoo.
Yeah, I got a complaint to make.
About the shampoo.
Well, it's like this. I used it to wash some hair, and now the hair won't settle down. I mean it's just standing up like someone sat him in the 'lectric chair.
Well no, it wadn't my hair I washed. But like I said, the hair I washed, the shampoo just plain screwed it up. He looks like a hairmetal mascot if you know what I mean.
I did, yes.
Of course I tried brushing it down. I just said so.
Well I wouldn't be calling you if I didn't think there was something else I could be doing about it.
Today. A couple hours ago.
It's still standing up. Just on end. Like I said before.
I don't know. What's the difference what scent it is. It ruined my, it ruined that hair all right.
All right, okay. Lemme get the bottle. Just a sec.
All right. It's Apple Zephyr. Zulu, Edward, Papa, Hotel, Yankee, Romeo.
OK. Yeah, lemme just look. OK, that's 52187352. Now what am I going to get for this?
Well look. I don't have a camera, so you're not getting a picture. But you've got my word.
Look, lady, it says right here on the bottle that if I'm not satisfied you'll reimburse me. Your friggin shampoo ruined my dog's coat.
Just a second now. What do you mean doesn't apply to dogs? It doesn't say anything about dogs on the bottle, lady. Just if I'm not satisfied I'll get my money back. Well I'm not satisfied. And you know what? I've got a dog hiding in the corner of shame, and he sure as shit ain't satisfied either.
Yeah yeah, I'll submit a written complaint with the UPC code and original proof of purchase. Count on it. Listen, let me ask you something. Do you like doing this job? I mean do you like stiffing saps out of 3.99 when the product don't work? What's in it for you? And where the heck are you anyway? What kind of accent is that?
No, no, that's it. I called about one thing and you couldn't help me with it.
Oh yeah...and thanks for talking to Mason Dewey. Mason Dewy always appreciates a load of crap.
*
"I'll be...I want that money back. Whaddye say, dog. I think we should head over to the head office tomorrow and get that money back, don't you?"
The man lurched to the refrigerator for another beer. He twisted the cap free and took a tremendous quaff.
"Hell fire."
-To be continued
Nystrom's Fictions, Nystrom's Pride
Hi there readers. Yesterday represented an anomaly. I did not mean for this blog to become a forum for my fictions, not for a second. If you liked what you saw yesterday--if you stuck it in your pipe and smoked it--follow this link: http://nystromspride.blogspot.com/
Friday, February 6, 2009
To kill and not to have killed not quite a squirrel
On a day engulfed by one sodden white fog after the next, Ignace Hamilton Braxator went up into the mountains armed with a shotgun. He marched in his snowshoes, straight up the trailless slope. At first the going was cumbrous. The snow was heavy, gray and as wet as water. The gun seemed an unaccountable burden that had to be shifted left and right, end over end. And the forest was oppressively silent, as if the winter had frozen its denizens and banished the wind. To say nothing of the constant cares that haunted his waking hours, and which refused to give him peace in his attempt to encounter the forest sconced in its alabaster blanket. After some minutes he stopped, turning to see the way he'd come.
Already the plume of woodsmoke from his cabin had receded into something like an illusion alloyed with the driving fog. The scene had no dimension, only mute colors, horizontality, verticality. He was often plagued by this thought, to the point where it had become a commonplace: What if this vista were a screen, a foil--and if he could part the fog, what horrors might lie beyond?
And yet he had just come that way, through the reality of it. Stooping to adjust the bindings on his aluminum snowshoes, Ignace Hamilton cursed his mind for being so hopelessly and romantically inclined to illusion. This was nature, wilderness, one had to be careful, and observant, fully rooted to what was real. If he lost his way in an idle daydream there would be little to prevent him from breaking his leg and being harvested into the granary of an indifferent fate. He faced about, squared against the towering obstacle of the mountain, and walked, soon falling into a rhythm of slow steps, steady breathing and paced progress. It did not take long before his thinking settled and was tethered to the circumstances of the day right there. Ignace's mind shrugged off the cares of the receding world below and abandoned itself to something like the moment. The butt of the gun rested in the flat of his hand and the forestock now weighed a reassuring groove into his shoulder. He began hearing things between footfalls: A chirp here, a creaking trunk there, snow dropping from boughs everywhere.
He had purchased the shotgun as a precaution against wolves and other possibly malevolent critters. But on this walk he had envisioned using the gun for something else. Having enjoyed the best of what a metropolitan upbringing and bachelorhood had to offer--and only that--our Ignace Hamilton Braxator had never killed anything larger than a millipede, which had once slithered out repulsively from under a dusty philological volume while young Ignace secretly rifled through the drawers of Uncle Camillus's desk. He had crushed it with the book unthinkingly, discoloring the cover forever. But that is neither here nor--suffice it to say that it is irrelevant, and we shan't linger for a moment longer over this episode. Now, then, Ignace had put himself in the position to reenact what his primitive ancestors had done out of necessity, and his more immediate ancestors had pursued as their hereditary right. He aimed to kill something, to field dress it, and to return to his rustic hideaway to eat it. Foremost on his list of targets was a bunny, but he would settle for what creature he chanced on or could flush into view. Ignace, he he decided, was henceforth to be a direct participant in the circle of life.
Instinct will overtake us if we allow it to, we all should know. Ignace realized that he would give himself the best chance of training his sight on a real animal by selecting an area, sitting down, and being still. At first there was no place, really, to select. He was ascending a vast wooded slope where each thicket or clearing was like the next. By and by he came to a shelf in the land where the slope of the mountain seemed to hiccup before resuming maybe a hundred paces ahead. As if, he thought, some obscene creator had furnished this lonely mountain with the perfect bed for a multiline highway. Ignace Hamilton found a little hollow in the snow where a tree had been uprooted in the wind, and it was here that he made his ambuscade, if you'd like to call it that.
Soon after being seated the fog coagulated around him into a soup to beggar the senses, seeming to close from above and below without sign or suggestion. Would he be able to find his way back down in such thick fog? He tried to quell the panic, but his mind raced with auguries of imminent dark and a boreal cold that would come creeping into his veins and freeze him from the heart out. It was while indulging this death-fantasy that Ignace heard the chattering. A kind of glottal hammering oversampled with a squeal, a to him uncanny hybrid between woodpecker and mouse. It sounded small, defenseless, and close. Ignace Hamilton knew also that it could not see him. With a slowness bordering on trepidation, he stood up out of his hollow and began advancing gingerly toward the source of that helpless and alien yibbering. He timed his steps to coincide with gusts of headwind and the rhythm of the chattering itself, relishing the conviction that he was doing it right. At length he thought he could hear the sound immediately overhead and stopped.
Yes, it had to be there. He undid the safety on the piece and swung the muzzle up toward the enfogged canopy, waiting for the curtain to open on his prey. There Ignace stood, a model of hunstmanlike composure, for the better part of an hour when, finally, at last, the fog parted--quickly, as if obeying the touch of a button on some screen--and Ignace could see that it was a squirrel. No sooner had he seen the obsidian glint in its rodent eye than BLAM! Ignace's aim was true. For one second, the squirrel scrabbled against gravity and doom. Then it arced out of the tree and whoomped its own grave into the snow, trailed in its descent by two tufts of disaggregated and gently dishing hide.
Thrilled by the success of it all, Ignace Hamilton Braxator reached for his knife and fell to. Again he felt that his actions were guided by instinct. He had never flayed an animal before, but here he was, sectioning it down the middle, authoring the closure of the circle of life like a consummate outdoorsman. His knife was sharp, the cut clean. Very soon he had revealed the abdominal cavity and begun to empty the guts. First the entrails, the blood blooming off them into the snow. Intestines, stomach, kidneys...there came the liver. With the lower work done, he used his knife to puncture the diaphragm and get into the chest cavity. Into this he reached two fingers. They closed around an object and pulled. It wouldn't dislodge easily, and he pulled with a bit more conviction. There was something about it, he felt. Something odd. It was too hard and unyielding. He pulled harder still but it wouldn't budge. Soon he was pulling with all his might, swearing and sweating. When last it gave and the heart clattered out onto the snow, Ignace fell back and looked at it in disbelief feeling the hairs on his head and legs prickle and stand on end. The squirrel's heart was as hard as a stone. More than that, it was covered in verdigris and rust. There were plates, terminals, wires, tubes. The last thing he did before bolting headlong down the mountain was to crouch over the cooling corpse and register the suture marks on the ribcage. He did not even bother to pick up his gun.
Ignace Hamilton left that cabin in the mountains for good the next day. No one in the area remembers having met him, and of what he had seen that day he spoke to no one at all.
Already the plume of woodsmoke from his cabin had receded into something like an illusion alloyed with the driving fog. The scene had no dimension, only mute colors, horizontality, verticality. He was often plagued by this thought, to the point where it had become a commonplace: What if this vista were a screen, a foil--and if he could part the fog, what horrors might lie beyond?
And yet he had just come that way, through the reality of it. Stooping to adjust the bindings on his aluminum snowshoes, Ignace Hamilton cursed his mind for being so hopelessly and romantically inclined to illusion. This was nature, wilderness, one had to be careful, and observant, fully rooted to what was real. If he lost his way in an idle daydream there would be little to prevent him from breaking his leg and being harvested into the granary of an indifferent fate. He faced about, squared against the towering obstacle of the mountain, and walked, soon falling into a rhythm of slow steps, steady breathing and paced progress. It did not take long before his thinking settled and was tethered to the circumstances of the day right there. Ignace's mind shrugged off the cares of the receding world below and abandoned itself to something like the moment. The butt of the gun rested in the flat of his hand and the forestock now weighed a reassuring groove into his shoulder. He began hearing things between footfalls: A chirp here, a creaking trunk there, snow dropping from boughs everywhere.
He had purchased the shotgun as a precaution against wolves and other possibly malevolent critters. But on this walk he had envisioned using the gun for something else. Having enjoyed the best of what a metropolitan upbringing and bachelorhood had to offer--and only that--our Ignace Hamilton Braxator had never killed anything larger than a millipede, which had once slithered out repulsively from under a dusty philological volume while young Ignace secretly rifled through the drawers of Uncle Camillus's desk. He had crushed it with the book unthinkingly, discoloring the cover forever. But that is neither here nor--suffice it to say that it is irrelevant, and we shan't linger for a moment longer over this episode. Now, then, Ignace had put himself in the position to reenact what his primitive ancestors had done out of necessity, and his more immediate ancestors had pursued as their hereditary right. He aimed to kill something, to field dress it, and to return to his rustic hideaway to eat it. Foremost on his list of targets was a bunny, but he would settle for what creature he chanced on or could flush into view. Ignace, he he decided, was henceforth to be a direct participant in the circle of life.
Instinct will overtake us if we allow it to, we all should know. Ignace realized that he would give himself the best chance of training his sight on a real animal by selecting an area, sitting down, and being still. At first there was no place, really, to select. He was ascending a vast wooded slope where each thicket or clearing was like the next. By and by he came to a shelf in the land where the slope of the mountain seemed to hiccup before resuming maybe a hundred paces ahead. As if, he thought, some obscene creator had furnished this lonely mountain with the perfect bed for a multiline highway. Ignace Hamilton found a little hollow in the snow where a tree had been uprooted in the wind, and it was here that he made his ambuscade, if you'd like to call it that.
Soon after being seated the fog coagulated around him into a soup to beggar the senses, seeming to close from above and below without sign or suggestion. Would he be able to find his way back down in such thick fog? He tried to quell the panic, but his mind raced with auguries of imminent dark and a boreal cold that would come creeping into his veins and freeze him from the heart out. It was while indulging this death-fantasy that Ignace heard the chattering. A kind of glottal hammering oversampled with a squeal, a to him uncanny hybrid between woodpecker and mouse. It sounded small, defenseless, and close. Ignace Hamilton knew also that it could not see him. With a slowness bordering on trepidation, he stood up out of his hollow and began advancing gingerly toward the source of that helpless and alien yibbering. He timed his steps to coincide with gusts of headwind and the rhythm of the chattering itself, relishing the conviction that he was doing it right. At length he thought he could hear the sound immediately overhead and stopped.
Yes, it had to be there. He undid the safety on the piece and swung the muzzle up toward the enfogged canopy, waiting for the curtain to open on his prey. There Ignace stood, a model of hunstmanlike composure, for the better part of an hour when, finally, at last, the fog parted--quickly, as if obeying the touch of a button on some screen--and Ignace could see that it was a squirrel. No sooner had he seen the obsidian glint in its rodent eye than BLAM! Ignace's aim was true. For one second, the squirrel scrabbled against gravity and doom. Then it arced out of the tree and whoomped its own grave into the snow, trailed in its descent by two tufts of disaggregated and gently dishing hide.
Thrilled by the success of it all, Ignace Hamilton Braxator reached for his knife and fell to. Again he felt that his actions were guided by instinct. He had never flayed an animal before, but here he was, sectioning it down the middle, authoring the closure of the circle of life like a consummate outdoorsman. His knife was sharp, the cut clean. Very soon he had revealed the abdominal cavity and begun to empty the guts. First the entrails, the blood blooming off them into the snow. Intestines, stomach, kidneys...there came the liver. With the lower work done, he used his knife to puncture the diaphragm and get into the chest cavity. Into this he reached two fingers. They closed around an object and pulled. It wouldn't dislodge easily, and he pulled with a bit more conviction. There was something about it, he felt. Something odd. It was too hard and unyielding. He pulled harder still but it wouldn't budge. Soon he was pulling with all his might, swearing and sweating. When last it gave and the heart clattered out onto the snow, Ignace fell back and looked at it in disbelief feeling the hairs on his head and legs prickle and stand on end. The squirrel's heart was as hard as a stone. More than that, it was covered in verdigris and rust. There were plates, terminals, wires, tubes. The last thing he did before bolting headlong down the mountain was to crouch over the cooling corpse and register the suture marks on the ribcage. He did not even bother to pick up his gun.
Ignace Hamilton left that cabin in the mountains for good the next day. No one in the area remembers having met him, and of what he had seen that day he spoke to no one at all.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
"Denial of the truth envelops our culture like a suffocating fog."
-Arthur Silber
The man to whom the attribution goes is worth reading. If before you were on the brink of despair, his work will give that little tap on the steering wheel that sends you crashing through the railing. Find his work here: http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com
If you are not prepared for some unpleasant challenges to your tacitly held ideological assumptions, don't go. He attacks the complacency and ignorance and bloodthirsty savagery that constitute our national ethos with a rabid fury. He vivisects the motivations of our monstrous rulers, the men and women who have murdered a million Iraqis, made torture law and sold your future down the river. He crushes the myth of "change." He interrogates our blind slaverous worship at the altar of authority to the point of its origin in childhood, and beyond, into the ether from which subject and state are confected. His writing takes the form of a hammer that pounds away cruelly at the reader. These are cruel times of course, and here, finally, I've discovered a writer with the courage to break decisively with each and every one of the dangerous and childish fantasies that inform our political culture.
But don't worry, I'll guide this blog out of the no-fly zone of oppositional politics in my very next post. The Log Bird's cockpit may not be sound enough to brave this empyrean. We wouldn't want it to fragment in that lonely void, would we?
So: 101 ways to die on the mountain, coming soon to a screen near you.
-Arthur Silber
The man to whom the attribution goes is worth reading. If before you were on the brink of despair, his work will give that little tap on the steering wheel that sends you crashing through the railing. Find his work here: http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com
If you are not prepared for some unpleasant challenges to your tacitly held ideological assumptions, don't go. He attacks the complacency and ignorance and bloodthirsty savagery that constitute our national ethos with a rabid fury. He vivisects the motivations of our monstrous rulers, the men and women who have murdered a million Iraqis, made torture law and sold your future down the river. He crushes the myth of "change." He interrogates our blind slaverous worship at the altar of authority to the point of its origin in childhood, and beyond, into the ether from which subject and state are confected. His writing takes the form of a hammer that pounds away cruelly at the reader. These are cruel times of course, and here, finally, I've discovered a writer with the courage to break decisively with each and every one of the dangerous and childish fantasies that inform our political culture.
But don't worry, I'll guide this blog out of the no-fly zone of oppositional politics in my very next post. The Log Bird's cockpit may not be sound enough to brave this empyrean. We wouldn't want it to fragment in that lonely void, would we?
So: 101 ways to die on the mountain, coming soon to a screen near you.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
101 Ways
The days since the last post have been exciting. Again, much of the excitement centered on Tipper, who is having a most eventful dotage. Let me explain: On Saturday morning, with Tipper as my lookout, I piloted Nystrom's Pride the two miles or so to where the alpine reaches of the Nez Perce road have been blocked off to car traffic for the winter by a towering snowbank. I strapped on my snowshoes and put Tipper on a lead. We walked through a cut in the snowbank made for snowmobiles and foot traffic. She pattered eagerly up the road. I had made the mistake of wearing only jeans for my undercarriage. The snowshoes kicked up slushy snow that spattered and soaked the flimsy denim with every step. To say nothing of Tipper, whose entire shaggy eminence was soon buried beneath a thick accumulation of the white stuff. My legs numbed. Tipper accepted her new mantle of white. We forged on. After maybe a half hour a snowmobiler zipped up the road behind us. I pulled Tipper out of the way. The man stopped. "What ye got there? Piece of wolf bait?" I explained that Tipper, old city dog though she may be, was not scared of anything. He conceded that between her bravado and my gun, Tipper's chances weren't so bad, and crozzled away. Another snowmobiler passed later. About an hour into the walk I heard a sound coming up from the rear. I turned to see a sled being pulled by five huskies, closing fast. There was little time to react. I fetched Tipper up in my arms and tried to step out of the trail. The dogs were upon us in no time. Disoriented, Tipper squirmed out of my embrace and landed in the jaws of the lead husky. The other sled dogs snarled and snapped as their leader thrashed poor old Tipper about by the neck. Within a few seconds the dog musher, a woman, was able to intervene and get the big dog to let go. Tipper tore back down the way we had come, howling in pain. The woman looked at me. "There's another team coming. They'll be on her any minute." Sprinting in snowshoes is a cumbersome and difficult business, but it can be done, and it's what I had to do to save Tipper. I set off in pursuit, begging her to stop. After maybe 45 seconds at a dead run I managed to tackle her and roll out of the road. The next team cantered by no more than 10 seconds later, pausing to snarl and bare their teeth at my fragile charge. If not exactly wolf bait, then Tipper had become the plaything of the wolf's closest domestic cousin. To her credit, once the sleds were out of sight, Tipper's enthusiasm for our outing had diminished not one bit. She may be 17, half blind, half deaf, and more than a little stupid, but she's not scared of anything.
Let me close with a preview of posts to come:
a)I bought a book on trapping, and aim to offer you some excerpts. One method, for instance, calls for a lure to me made from the decomposed glands of five house cats.
b)While trudging around on the mountain, I sometimes become acutely aware of the risks inherent to the undertaking. After due analysis, I aim to offer you "101 ways to die on the mountain."
Let me close with a preview of posts to come:
a)I bought a book on trapping, and aim to offer you some excerpts. One method, for instance, calls for a lure to me made from the decomposed glands of five house cats.
b)While trudging around on the mountain, I sometimes become acutely aware of the risks inherent to the undertaking. After due analysis, I aim to offer you "101 ways to die on the mountain."
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