Dark and Stormy Night

Was very sore over the weekend in glutes and adductors so I decided to rest up. Today was feeling well enough to go for a run, plus the weather was good.

The point - 3 laps run, 4 laps walk.

I can’t believe it has been over six months of inactivity here. Well, since I’m not writing as much as I should be, I might as well workout, build some muscle and get back to the lean self I was back in early 2009.

Here is my first entry on my workout log.

Walked the point loop - 6 laps.

Fast body weight squats - 3 x 15

Alternating forward lunges - 2 x 12

Last set of alternating lunge - felt tightening of glute and hamstring so I stopped.

I’ve just started getting back to it after taking several months off, and I’m feeling so out of shape. My goal is to get back to 180 lbs. and it’s going to take months of consistent work.

I just picked up The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski and have just finished the first twenty pages, aka “The Hook.” As a writer I always marvel at reading a sharp hook, like a little leaguer might stare in amazement, mouth agape, as Ken Griffey Jr. hits a grand slam into the second deck. If you aren’t familiar with The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, it was the “hot” book of the summer of 2008, an Oprah selection and a NY Times bestseller. I don’t know yet what it is about though the story as described in the sleeve reminds me a bit of the timeless story of Hamlet with some multi-generational dog breeding thrown in. Everyone loves dogs, and just about everyone I know loves brooding and indecisive Danish princes. Imagine our hero walking the dog . . .

To scoop or not to scoop. That is the question.

Oh yeah, back to the hook. Edgar’s hook amazed me. The first few paragraphs seemed vaguely familiar. Had I read it before? Yes, of course I had and you may have also, though we are most intimate with only the first sentence. It is in fact another take on the famous purple prose hook “It was a dark and stormy night” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The scene as described is essentially identical, though one is set in the alleys of London while the other the dark and stormy streets of Pusan, South Korea.

Here they are side-by-side.

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of the lowest orders, was wending his solitary way. He stopped twice or thrice at different shops and houses of a description correspondent with the appearance of the quartier in which they were situated, and tended inquiry for some article or another which did not seem easily to be met with.”

Paul Clifford
By Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“After dark the rain began to fall again, but he had already made up his mind to go and anyway it had been raining for weeks. He waved off the rickshaw coolies clustered near the dock and walked all the way from the naval base, following the scant directions he’d been given, through the crowds in the Kweng Li market square, past the vendors selling roosters in crude rattan crates and pigs’ heads and poisonous-looking fish lying blue and gutted and gaping on racks, past gray octopi in glass jars, past old women hawking kimchee and bulgoki, until he crossed the Tong Gang on the Bridge of Woes, the last landmark he knew.”

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
By David Wroblewski

I admit to being a superstitious writer in that I never start a story with a reference to weather. It is trite and “going through the motions” in my opinion. That was part of the reason I decided to call this writing blog “Dark and Stormy” because I refuse to have my own writing commence with a reference to either sun, wind, snow, sleet or rain. Now, I suppose if a character is in fact a weatherman or woman, I’ll lighten up and toss some weather references into that sharp end of the hook, but generally I’m attached to the rule like a moist tongue on a frozen flagpole.

Do I consider Wroblewski’s writing purple prose? Perhaps not the Bulwer-Lytton variety, but the hook is definitely violet-tinged. Does this mean the rest of the “hot” novel’s 500 pages will leave me cold? The forecast is unclear. I don’t know if I should dig out my galoshes or my flip-flops.

So far I’ve toiled hard to not become one of the denizens wasting hours on social networking sites. You know the sites and maybe some of you readers may be big-time users. The Facebook, the Myspaces and now the Twitter. They seem like traps to me along the information superhighway, capsized peach crates propped up at one corner with a carefully positioned twig, a moist strawberry or slice of cheese visible in the shadows near the back. If I can only just get past that flimsy twig . . .

My defenses broke down because I was invited to view a photo album of a friend’s trip to Fiji. The album was only viewable on Facebook, which forced me to log-in and compose a password combination of seven digits or letters. It was simple enough and I hadn’t planned on telling the site anything about me or establishing my own profile. Just a simple in an out job to see a few photos of colorful jungle parrots, maybe a bathing beauty or two or three on a white sand beach, strangers in an cabana bar with bloodshot eyes, and yes, all that was there. There was also an enticing link to a list of Facebook profiles, photos included, of people who the site said I had graduated high school with some twenty plus years ago.

Some faces I recognized at once, some were completely unknown, and many plied that neutral zone of mental space between either poles. These photos elicited unvoiced thoughts like these:

“Yeah, I kind of remember him.”

“Jesus, did she get fat.”

“I was sure that guy wasn’t going to make it past 25. Guess I was wrong.”

“Where did that dude’s hair go?”

I found the profile of my best friend my senior year. I hadn’t really heard from him or seen him since our sophomore years in college because we went to two different schools and that’s just the way life goes. I’ve never been the type or temperament to have lifelong friends.

So my friend is one of the world’s leading authorities on nineteenth century European philosophical thought, specifically Kant and Nietzsche. He is a full professor at a liberal arts college back east and travels all around the world talking about earnest and pondering deceased white guys and the things they thought so much about. For some reason, he’s a big hit in Cairo, talking about his field of expertise. The thirst of thinkers in the Nile delta must be unquenchable. My old friend is also a big hit in Caracas and visits the faculty at the universidad there for several guest lectures, light discussions on morality and the lack of an empirical basis for time independent of both materialistic substance or human perception.

I think back to that time around our second to last meeting. I would head up to his campus because his school was generally esteemed as a party school and mine was not. We each took a tab of acid on the tongue and talked for that hour before the LSD started to hit. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about but for some reason I recall distinctly us chatting about what we planned to do at school and in the years after. He said something about studying philosophy or, if that didn’t work out, psychology. He appeared uncommited to anything, a typical free agent freshman/sophomore, like he would just flow with the current of life to wherever it took him. I privately wondered how the study of philosophy would ever prepare one for life out there in the world.

And somehow that current of life propelled him to a place where people know of him, look forward to his lectures, make travel arrangements for him, wait for him to turn in their grades and comment on their dissertation proposals. I think it’s wonderful and I knew he would be a success even with a father who liked hitting the bottle much too hard and much too often.

I partially filled out my own Facebook profile, but the site refused to accept my first name as I wanted it to appear. I tried several times, but Facebook wasn’t having it. This refusal broke the social networking spell that was being so subtly cast. I had no real need or desire to talk with these people who I don’t really know now and probably didn’t know even then. Why fool myself into thinking that I did? I immediately closed my browser and went on with my day, unburdened by this set of old faces trading e-mail addresses and recollections of lakeside keggers and tripping sessions brought on by vinyl floor tile. It was all in our collective deep past, but really did those things even happen?

She wonders why her nation’s men don’t look at her,
Mere laughing and don’t consider her,
It is because they are legends here,
For their large size in a cold land,
They see no need to pick that which can be picked at home,
So she sleeps on midsummer’s eve,
Seven flowers under her pillow,
Snapped three centimeters up from the earth,
By the neighboring girl in concrete block 209,
Given to her to put under her pillow,
Pillow of pickled herring,
Because she grasps her pillow too tight,
In hands that are washed over and over,
Dreaming upon a pillow of pickled herring with seven flowers underneath,
Will bring her a husband,
Who watches her feet,
And knows when to hit the sabar and when not to,
And is always a good man for swaggering down to the beach,
To pick a fine fish to be stewed in the manner of Dakar,
For something less than a kronor,
Peanuts replaces cream,
Atlantic where there once was the Baltic,
And a table dressed in indigo

This is for your reference as well as mine. Perfect for all weather conditions and occasions . . .

2 oz Gosling’s Black Seal® rum
4-5 oz cold ginger beer
½ oz freshly squeezed lime juice (optional)

I stayed at the same hotel in which David Carradine hung himself just a short while ago. The Nai Lert is the nicest hotel I’ve stayed at in Southeast Asia. At the time I was working for an equity mutual fund that wanted to invest in a low-cost flash chip maker in Thailand. As I had been through Bangkok a few years before while passing on my way to the southern islands for scuba diving, my boss felt I was somehow more qualified to take the trip to that steaming cauldron of a city and its Malay neighbor Singapore. The firm booked two nights at the Swissotel Nai Lert.

I’m not a big fan of Bangkok. The last time I had been there on vacation I earned a nasty cough from inhaling all the exhaust billowing from the dense traffic of taxis, tuk-tuks and tourist buses. My throat had been so raw I found I couldn’t breathe the pure air in my tanks without sudden and violent bouts of coughing, and this was discovered at one hundred feet under the surface of the South China Sea. So no, I wasn’t looking forward to the three-day due diligence jaunt.

But the Nai Lert was beautiful and the air was better than I had expected.

Now the Nai Lert is in a nice part of town nearby Siam Square. These are not the slums of Bangkok, nor are there many working people living here. Mostly the population is made up of transient westerners, embassy and hotel support staff. On my first morning I woke up early, still suffering from lag, ate a full breakfast of french toast, melon and cantaloupe, and then made my way to the lobby to rendevous with the car the company said it would send for me. After about twenty minutes of waiting it was clear the car wasn’t going to come, and all the taxis were being pre-reserved for the numerous nocturnal entertainers, some women, some men and some not-so-anchored either way, who seemed to have been released from their cells above, trickling down through stairwells and elevators to the molasses-like flesh conveyer that is Bangkok morning traffic.

After five more minutes, I decided to start walking toward a taxi stand I had spied the night before a few blocks to the east. Doing so I passed through an alley with deep gutters, the type common in Asian metropolises which suffer sudden downpours in the wet season. In these gutters were men, all men with physical bodies misshapen by what I believe to be leprosy. Where these men should have possessed arms and legs, there were stubs of various lengths. I believe the reason they were in the gutter and not on the sidewalk was because it eased locomotion, the gutter being essentially a curb with a 90 degree angle upon which their stubs could get traction.

I walked toward the lepers thinking they would not leave the security of the Bangkok gutter, but as I neared, several looked up at me, some with ghostly eyes cursed with glaucoma. They popped out of the gutter with bowls clenched in their teeth looking for some trifle or coin from me. I wasn’t more than two hundred feet from my soiled plate of french toast and maple syrup.

I didn’t know what to do then. I could spread a few Thai baht here, some more baht there, but there would always be more upward pleading and flagellating through gutters so as to deliver more bowls at my feet. The whole thing sickened me, though at the time I couldn’t figure out exactly what about it did.

I dropped a few coins and stepped over a few more bodies - you had to step over some of these men the way they strategically placed their torsos across the earth between me and the taxi stand. I did finally get a taxi which delivered me to the flash chip factory fifteen minutes late. Over apologies and tea, the company’s CFO and I watched as the line workers started their shift with ten minutes of Tai Chi led by none other than David Carradine captured in digitized video glory moving with both grace and strength.

So this is what I think now. I ask myself why would a guy who appears healthy and centered both spiritually, mentally and physically through training and meditation, a guy who I believe wasn’t hurting for money or fame (if he cared about that) or the affections of a sweet, probably younger thing, would hang himself from some appendage of the Nai Lert.

I think he might have stepped over those same lepers. Maybe his car didn’t show up on time at the set and he decided to stretch his legs only to discover a little bit of hell on earth. Some people don’t know how to handle that. They feel way too much for their own good. I didn’t know the man but he seemed like the type to keep things silent and bottled-up inside until those spears thrown at him by shaolin monks, those tiger blows, those swift strikes of bamboo staffs and that burning cauldron that the uninitiated must embrace, all those things made him numb and scarred up inside, so numb that parts of him began falling off. And what good is a five-star dragon death strike if you don’t have the arms to pull it off?

I’ve been playing around with a service called Scribd. Through them I’ve published a short collection of bursts from way back in time. Feel free to download yourself.

Burst I

A syringe of lidocaine before it starts to get better.

A rightful stimulus to render an appropriate response.
The aftermath is a planned better.

The hour just before dawn
it may not seem like it will get better.
Far from it but
It does.

Homes in foreclosure will often lead to
something better
but the good is years away
and unavailable now to thrust stormed minds
and racing hearts into happiness

Some times reduce you to ash
before you had planned on becoming it and then,
like the debut drop falling on your head from a
leaking roof
the better comes,
unannounced,
and this was after
you were ash for only a lucky short while.

It is good when that drop falls.
But you still get all that came before that.

Sept. 5, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP)

The White House Medical Unit, the US government office responsible for the medical needs of White House staff and visitors, is preparing for all possible outcomes of this November general election. That includes a McCain presidency. The unit is poised to revamp its facilities in case the Republican ticket prevails.

“We’re a top-tier facility as one would expect considering that we are charged with monitoring and maintaining the chief executive’s health,” said Dr. William Haas, Colonel, United States Air Force. “But we have to stay one step ahead and be prepared for every contingency.”

Staying one step ahead includes a modernized crash cart equipped to handle such conditions as stroke and cardiac arrest. Across from the elevator whisking the president between his living quarters and the oval office, a new room is being prepped for a cutting-edge, multi-million dollar CT-MRI-PET scanner.

“It’s the top of the line and will not only help us diagnose disease before it becomes a problem but will assist in real-time emergency procedures such as endovascular treatment of stroke and coronary blockage. Such treatment needs to be conducted within the golden hour,” Haas explained.

The golden hour is a term in emergency medicine used to describe the short window physicians have to treat neurological events such as stroke before severe or permanent brain damage occurs. For cardiac events, there is more time to stabilize patients such as the president, though it is more likely the doctors and medical technicians of the medical unit will move the patient quickly to Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

“There has been some talk of installing a high-speed patient conveyance system using a mag-lev track that runs between the unit operating room and the Marine One medivac landing zone on the South Lawn, but we’re still waiting to see what happens in November and if there will be any room in the budget for that,” said Haas.

Dr. Haas also added that several other improvements to the facilities are being considered including a special broadband link between the unit and other essential offices in case it became necessary to exercise the 25th Amendment. Also under consideration are coded locks on the pharmaceutical cabinets, especially for cabinets storing powerful pain medications.

“Again, we are trying to think of every possible scenario,” he said. “I’m confident we can become practically a world-class trauma and rehabilitation center within three months if we are called to be that.”

Associative Press