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.

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?

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

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?

Burst I

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.

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

Submission to the CL Literary & Writing forum Passing Time project

Will it be the tango or the paso doble? Two men sit across from each other at a maple conference table overlooking the Potomac. One scratches something down on a cocktail napkin, a figure with many zeroes, and passes it across the table to the other, his french cuff brushing the polished top. Who knows how the cocktail napkin (where are the cocktails) came into the picture?

A glimpse down. The figures roll around in his mouth like an incantation.

“To be wired to a Swiss account?”

“As soon as you lower the value of a life to $6.9 million.”

A moment’s hesitation and then a nod of approval. This is how it’s done on the beltway. People in the know call it the K Street waltz (okay, so it’s a waltz.) When the Environmental Protection Agency dropped the value of a single life from eight million to something south of seven, a lot of money was going to be made.

Someone has to start making money first.

Those that did were wearing this . . . the Classic French Collar (No. 2505), made of the finest cotton from the Nile Delta, this shirt is worn by both Wall Street and K Street types, and even EPA technocrats with fat Swiss bank accounts.

Pearl buttons. Single-needle throughout. Men’s sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL.

Colors: Blue with White French Collar - a classic look. Any other combination . . . well, it wouldn’t be a classic.

Page 2

He was a simple bus driver with a hankering for the life of the gentleman hunter. Those Minnesota woods called out to him on the eve of every open season. Though he was still a bus driver at heart, a regular Ralph Kramden, he could afford a better rifle, a better car and a bevy of employees/servants to carry his equipment and ammunition up and over those hills and down into those valleys in search of that prize trophy to hang on his wall.

He was an unsteady shot and bagged little more that a four-point buck, but he always looked dapper in his Tweed Shooting Jacket (No. 2106), the same classic jacket worn by English gentlemen hunters in the Scottish highlands.

His lack of skill at the hunt was more than made up for by his talent at dismantling electric trolley lines like the Pacific Electric Red Cars in Los Angeles. Mass rail transit would become little more than a memory, a page in a scrap book that your grandheirs might point at and ask about.

“Grandpa, what’s that?”

“Why that’s an electric trolley we used to get around town on just after the last big war, but some big companies ripped it out and made us buy their buses and use their gasoline.”

Where did the Pacific Electric trolley go?

To the moon, Alice, to the moon, on a stack of crisp Benjamins as a matter of fact, all padding the profit margin of General Motors and Standard Oil and Firestone Tire.

In the grand scheme of things, be the hunter not the hunted in our Tweed Shooting Jacket (No. 2106.)

Men’s sizes: S, M, L, XL, XXL
Color: Grey

Page 3

OJ with a splash of Tia Maria. A gentle breeze slides off the Carribean. Sunrise isn’t too early to smoke a Montecristo No. 4 is it?

The sights, smells and tastes betray the presence of real movers and shakers here. Back home they are accustomed to living and working in what they call the “nose bleed” section of the risk-reward curve. They are the men, and a few women, who manage hedge funds.

No, they don’t have calluses from clipping at bushes all day. They generally pay people to do that while they sit, watching the market move up and down, bothering to look away from their Bloomberg monitors only to make a quip to their associates about oil futures.

In the Caymans, at the annual pow wow of fund managers (invite only), the living is easy and their attire shows it.

The Viscose Jacquard Linen Jacket (No. 2609) is tailored to let that cool trade wind in but not let market cap value out. Jackets like this are worn by a different breed all together.

Men’s even sizes: 38 through 48
Color: Blue with Creame stripe

Page 4

“Where did your watch go Senor Lansky?”

The man doesn’t answer but only rubs a pale strip of flesh around his wrist. The man’s first name is Meyer and you know the rest . . , a man of considerable means though you’d be pressed to get him to admit it.

The watch?

It’s a Cape Cod 1936 (No. 1107) with a havane crocodile strap. Senor Lansky feels naked without it, but it was an acceptable sacrifice given the dire circumstances. He gave it to a hot blooded idealist named Fidel Castro just an hour before in exchange for one more week to get his affairs together in Havana, make arrangements for passage to Nassau and transfer a fortune to various shell companies and sheltered bank accounts back in the Old World.

Yes, it was an acceptable sacrifice but one that doesn’t sit well with him. Why don’t you see for yourself how hard it would be to part with your own, even for half-a-fortnight of financial freedom?

The Cape Cod 1936 (No. 1107) comes with a matching crocodile skin humidor box. Tick, tick, tick . . . time is running out both for you and him.

Submission to the CL Literary & Writing forum Seven-in-Seven project.