red september

Last night, I lay myself down to sleep knowing I was in for strange, unsettling dreams.  The evening's unconscious musings did not disappoint.

In my dream, my entire workplace had gone on a trip to somewhere in Asia, though I know not where.  The buildings and people appeared entirely Western, though their language was strange to me, but geographically we were somewhere west of Guangzhou.

I had brought, along with me, my baby daughter, though my wife was nowhere to be seen.  I kept her safe and happy with a lot of help from my co-workers, who all adore her and were more than happy to assist, and a large supply of infant formula that I kept in my hotel room.

There was a side-trip planned, in which we were all to take the train and perform a play for the pleasure of the Tsar of the Russian Empire.  This was the centerpiece of the trip, even though it wasn't our main destination, because a good showing in front of the Tsar would do wonders for the prestige of my workplace.

I had learned my part in the play, and the day we were due to depart, I found myself nevertheless with a very full schedule.  My mother had asked me to stop by her home and help set up the new router she'd received from Verizon.  A friend was having serious computer issues and asked me to come take a look at her machine.  And, I was informed the morning of the trip, the rest of the staff had decided they would not be able to make the trip at all, and it was up to me to perform the play for the Tsar as a one-man show.

I was a little stressed.  I needed to learn at least a dozen new parts, deal with two separate computer incidents, and make it on the train with my daughter.  Faced with all this, I decided that my mom would have to wait.  She would understand.

I stopped by my friend's place and set to work on the computer, but what should have been a fifteen-minute job turned into two hours, and she grew angrier and angrier at the time I was taking.  I finally fixed the issue, apologized for my slowness, and hightailed it out of there.

I made it to the hotel, grabbed my daughter, and drove as fast as I could to the train station.  I arrived only to learn that I had forgotten two very important things:  my passport, and the baby formula.  I still hadn't even looked at the script.

My car, naturally, failed to start, and I abandoned it.  Instead, I ran back to the hotel, gathered all the supplies and my passport in a giant bag, and carried all of it, daughter included, back to the train station at a full run.  I strained and slowed under the immense weight of all the baby supplies, and onlookers pointed and laughed, but I finally limped onto the the train with everything I needed, and we set off for Russia and the Tsar.

On the way, the Russian Revolution occurred, and the Tsar was deposed.  When I arrived, all was in turmoil, and nobody knew why I was there or exactly what they should do with me.  As a suspicious foreign element, I was imprisoned until they could figure it out.  My daughter was taken from me.  I languished in prison for days, submitting appeal after appeal for my freedom, but nobody granted the political appointment of Warden ever survived more than a day without being executed for this or that treason.

I spent the rest of that dream trying to work out the tangled web of Russian politics to understand who was ultimately in charge, but even the Prime Minister changed on a regular basis, and my pleas continued to fall on deaf areas.

Instead of the rest I was due, I lost a night worrying about the vagaries of fake Russian political maneuvering, an American unhappily abroad.  I am not sure that I ever saw my daughter again, and a gulag was probably somewhere in my future.

I never got to perform that play.

meat, cabbage, rice, friendship

Today, I was able to treat myself to an afternoon indulging in one of the great loves of my life.  Many people are surprised when they learn about this particular fixation of mine, though the better they know me, the less out of character it seems.  Those who know me best just nod, thinking to themselves, "yes, this is right.  this is perfectly consistent with who he is, and who he has always been."

I went to a Korean restaurant.  I am a great food lover, a true gourmet, and of all the fine cuisines available on this green earth, that which hails from the Korean peninsula has earned my fervent devotion so many times over that all others seem to pale in comparison.

My food journey is a long and arduous one.  As a youth, I didn't really know there was such a thing as good food.  I understood that there were some restaurants which were 'fancy', where people spent exorbitant sums to eat food, but since all food was just food, I assumed they just did it as a status symbol, not for any special taste.  My favorite things to eat were sweets, because they were the most flavorful!  It was not a healthy way to live.

In college, my eyes were opened by some very concerned friends, and I learned how good food can really be.  I gradually became more and more selective in my food choices, though I still yearned for sweets.  Before long, the common grub of the hoi polloi could no longer interest me, and now I ensure that all my meals are filled with aromatics, complex flavor interactions, and masterfully cooked and crisped meats.

It's only in the last year or so that I've been able to really leave the addiction to sweets behind, and I give the majority of the credit for that to my discovery of the magnificence of Korean food.

Korean cuisine is sweet, but not too sweet.  It's savory, but not overwhelmingly savory.  It's salty, but not brackish.  It has sour elements, but they're never the centerpiece.  And it's amazingly, wonderfully, gloriously, haphazardly spicy.

This article by Michelle Zauner (a musician who performs under the name Japanese Breakfast) approaches Korean cuisine with the same sense of intimacy and comfort that I do, though we have wildly different reasons for feeling that way.  In fact, I'd guess that she'd probably be annoyed by my familiarity and appreciation for it, as I'm clearly a johnny-come-lately to this party, and an obnoxious white guy to boot.  But she gets to the bottom of what sets it apart:  the variety and intensity of the dishes mandate a special care that other cuisines can't get away with.  The food so quickly becomes an expression of yourself, as it takes on the character you give it in the cooking process.  It's a coming-together of the finest kind, a culinary Zusammenbringen.  

Since I've started cooking my own Korean food, learning all the different ingredients, hunting them down in Korean supermarkets, teaching myself the right ways to use the various sauces and spices, researching the unusual cooking techniques and implements, I've found more and more ways to improve my cooking all around.

Last week at work, a coworker and I learned that another coworker had never had kimchi.  We resolved then and there to throw a kimchi party.  On Thursday, we each brought in a jar of our favorite kind of kimchi.  I also brought in an electric skillet and some Korean-style marinated beef (bulgogi) and a rice cooker.  We had an authentic Korean meal, the three of us sitting in an empty office together, sharing our Korean food, listening to Korean music, talking about what's so great about it and just enjoying each other's company.  None of us are Korean, and of course that doesn't matter at all.  The food was a unifying force for all of us, and we went away from that meal feeling closer than ever.

고마워.

suspended development

The future is a tough nut to crack.  Think about it too little, and you're in for a rough time when those bills come due.  Think about it too much, and you'll drive yourself mad trying to account for every niggling potentiality.  You need to find that pleasant middle ground where you've put in your due diligence about the future, but remain comfortable with the reality that surprises are in store.

I've driven myself mad, of course.  From an early age, I felt the constant need to be in control, to foresee and manipulate events such that nothing would befall me but what I'd intended.  I convinced myself that I sat, comfortably ensconced, at the center of a vest and intricate web of control, and I could tug on a thread just so, and see reality unfold itself to my whims.  No impulsive decisions, no hint of spontaneity, no single possibly meaningful decision taken without days or weeks of prior consideration.  It's not a healthy way to live.

The whole point is to foresee and avoid catastrophically traumatizing events, but they are, by their very nature, unforeseeable.  So you can only sustain that kind of mindset for so long before one of those unexpectable, unstoppable disasters hits, and your entire world explodes.  Everything you did was for naught.  Life...finds a way.

The bag you've held so carefully tips and falls, and you lose your marbles all over the floor, watching in mute horror as they roll into every unexplored crevice of your mind, activating things better left hidden.  And when it's all finished, and you're left to take stock of the new layout, and try to feel your way around without falling, the topography of the area is fundamentally changed.  And nothing's putting those marbles back in that bag.

Which is to say, I'm a lot more easygoing about what's coming down the road these days.  If you'd ask me, say, ten years ago how I'd feel about approaching a situation without a firm plan in mind, I'd tell you that you'd have to be completely insane.  Now I'm there, and it seems like a totally reasonable thing not to expect every outcome to be known well in advance.

Granted, I'm probably just gravitating towards the mean, here.  This probably doesn't seem like much of a revelation to you.  But then, I was always very good at keeping it all together.  I didn't maintain a belief in my own relative omnipotence for so long by being bad at it.  But it does mean, when the time came, I had a lot further to fall.

the road of savvy thorns

It was a muggy evening, the wetness of the air like a coarse blanket smothering everything, even the sun's lingering rays, in its liquid embrace.  I and my family, like fools, stood outside, as we watched the little drone I'd gotten for Christmas popping up and down pathetically.  No matter what, it could not maintain its altitude.  This is a problem for a flying machine.

The little drone had been ailing for some months, and I'd put off flying it because I didn't want to face the prospect that it might truly be broken.  Its attempts to take off were half-hearted, and one rotor would only spin if given some initial impulse by my finger.  It flew without speed, dropping a foot or more every time I tried to turn it.  It looked tired.

The drone had no system of communicating what was wrong.  It was up to me to observe it and infer the problem.  After a few simple tests, I determined that the weak rotor was to blame, and all the others were exhausting themselves trying to make up for it.  So I need to replace that rotor, no problem.

The copy machines where I work are filled with helpful advice on how to repair them when they break.  They're so sure of themselves that they will force you to follow their instructions, and if you don't, they'll refuse to even try to make copies.  Eighty percent of the time, the copiers are right, and the instructions they communicate resolve the issue.  The remaining twenty percent are a real hassle.  I'm usually left going through the motions to convince the machine that it was right about the problem, while fixing a completely different (unidentified) problem at the same time.  It requires a lot of dexterity and subterfuge to fix a copier, unless you're just replacing a part entirely.

You (usually) can't just replace the parts of people that aren't operating at maximum efficiency.  That goes for the parts of their personalities that might impair their efficiency, too.  What's worse, people can be difficult to convince to tell you what's wrong, but once they do, they often have even less of an idea than those carefully programmed machines.  They don't just get things wrong, either -- they might tell you the completely wrong problem on purpose, just to distract you from the true matter that's affecting them.

I want to be a cobbler, a mender of bad soles.  I want to offer what solace I can to those in need.  It's something that I've been driven towards since I was a very young child, since the first moment I realized others could feel pain, and I might have the power to help take it away.  But I can't do it as a profession (can't, won't).  And I've grown increasingly frustrated with the realization that there is so little I should do without any professional training.  Is there really no more to it than to rub each others' shoulders, and be content?

I replaced the rotor.  I took great care as I peeled back layer after layer of protective plastic coating and circuitry, unhooked slender wires from petite connectors, and untangled the mass of wires hiding within to remove the bad rotor.  When I was done putting the new rotor in, it looked more like ivy running through a garden lattice than any cold work of technology.  I sealed the drone up, inserted a battery, and watched with delight as its blinking blue and red lights reactivated, indicating its readiness to fly.

Tentatively, I lifted the remote control and nudged it to life.  All four rotors spun up rapidly, and it lifted with a steadiness that I hadn't seen in months.  Just like that, my drone was restored.

I wish I could help people as well as I helped that flying machine, but my hands will forever be too clumsy.  So I will offer what comfort I can, during the unsteadying, the wobbling, the inevitable descent, and together we will find what heights there are, and more.

write or wrong

For many years, I've considered myself a writer.  For most of the years before that, I just saw myself as someone who really enjoyed writing.  Now, it's more than something I do.  It's a thing that I am.  I parse conversations as pieces of stories, I get to know people as characters, complete with their arcs (and archetypes).  It's not a very interesting way to live.  It reduces people, industrializes the process of social engagement to something gruesome.  It's the equivalent of a butcher looking at a person and just seeing different cuts of meat.  Or, more commonly, sausage.

So I've been trying to branch out, reminding myself that perhaps people were not placed on the earth purely to distract me until I get bored with them, or even to provide inspiration for whatever wondrous literary works I might dream up in their aftermath.  We are here together for entirely inscrutable reasons, and I need to stop trying to make sense of it, or force a purpose onto it, and just let myself enjoy it.

I used to be obsessed with finding a reason to write.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe I thought it would give me more motivation if I knew, concretely, what I was hoping to accomplish.  It really doesn't matter.  Like Nietzsche, I have learned to reject the false separation of subject from predicate.  A writer writes, it's what he does.  He needs no reason, cannot have a reason, it simply defines his existence.

That sounds pretty good, but it doesn't work.  I know it doesn't work because I react differently to writing different kinds of things.  My approaches to short-form Twitter work, poetry, blogging, and fiction are all fundamentally distinct.  I clearly don't have a unifying motivation to do any of these things, other than boredom, which is as good a reason to do absolutely anything (and therefore not very helpful to think about).

I think it stems from an addiction to verbosity.  In most of my post-secondary education, I was taught that it's a cardinal sin to use a bigger word when a smaller one might do the job.  This is perfectly logical, given what I was studying -- politics and the law, as academic fields, are fighting daily battles to become more inclusive, and less obtuse to the layman.  I think that's a great idea.  These are two horrifyingly complex fields that nevertheless have an enormous bearing on the lives of literally everyone.  Making them easier to understand is an entirely correct objective.

The same cannot perhaps be said of literature.  There are many tens of thousands of direct perspectives on a single sphere, and millions more when we consider the angle of approach as well.  Yet language cannot be limited to three dimensions, and shades of inflection are limitless.  When I write,

I can say what I mean, so you don't have to figure it out,

OR,

I have the potential to unburden myself to a charming degree, cutting to the quick, sparing you the mental exercises necessary to deconstruct each interlocking clause from the next.

And there is no 'right' or 'wrong' in a given spot.  I have to use my judgment in communicating these ideas, which was never the case in college or law school.  There, my judgment was limited to choosing which ideas to communicate.  The words had been decided for me.

Not so here.  Ideas and language interact and, when I'm lucky, give birth to new ideas and more beautiful language.  In between words, after sentences, in the breaks between paragraphs, in those gentle hours after a post has been written, I exhale and find new feelings bubbling forth inside.  I examine what I said, and what it meant, and what it brings out in me, and I learn something about myself.

Like the legal profession, and most other people, every day is a battle to make myself better understood.  What I've missed, I think, is that you aren't the only one I want to understand me.  I want to understand myself, too.  And if you have to read a long, silly, pointless post as part of that process, so be it.  I appreciate you being along for the journey.

lost cause

Disappointment grows only atop hope's grave.

Underworld and its sequel, Underworld: Evolution, are difficult movies for me to come to grips with.  There are elements to each that draw me in, but also many other facets, especially in the second, that turn me out again, leaving me either fuming or perplexed by what went wrong.

These are movies where vampires fight werewolves in a "secret war," whatever that means, for hundreds or thousands of years.  They feature UV-ray and silver-infused bullets, ridiculous bouts of stupid gunplay, terribly ham-fisted romance, and wildly out-of-place gothic architecture.  To be clear:  these are very bad movies.

But the first one, strange as it is, worked for me.  Some background:  when I was young, about 13 years of age, I desired very strongly to play some sort of dice-based role-playing-game with my friends.  I begged my mom to let me buy Dungeons & Dragons, but she refused, as she had heard on the news at some point that it might be connected to drugs, satanism, or other nefarious goings-on.  But she had heard nothing about Vampire: the Masquerade, so I was able to pick it up and start playing it easily enough.

Big mistake, mom.

V:tM was written from, and aimed at, an infinitely more mature, adult point of view.  At its best, it communicated themes of isolation, despair, inevitability, degeneration, and the utter monstrousness lurking within the human heart.  At its worst, it reveled in gore, sex, depravity, and mean-spiritedness as some kind of gloriously profane expression of individual freedom.  At all times, it challenged my developing mind to find good in a world gone horribly, horribly wrong.  I played the game with my friends, and we all enjoyed it, but I was often frustrated with their inability to grasp the deeper meanings behind the stories we experienced together.  The anguish, bitterness, and heartbreak that ran through the tales we told were regularly lost on them.  They mostly thought it was awesome that they got to drink blood, live forever, and indulge in superpowered hijinx.  Sometimes we connected with the ideas that really grabbed me, but mostly, they just slaughtered innocents for fun while I tried to figure out what I was failing to explain to them.

It was serious to me.  Once, I went to the Wizards of the Coast store in the Exton Square Mall to buy a Vampire book, the Guide to the Camarilla.  I searched the shelves and finally found it, cradling its dark green marble-patterned cover in my small hands.  I carried it to the seventeen-year-old cashiers.  They took one look and laughed at me.  I didn't know what was funny, and I asked them.  They smirked and told me that they knew why I was buying that book -- I wanted to look at the dirty pictures.

I was furious, but not embarrassed.  I hadn't even known the book contained such pictures (though I should have -- all the other books did).  I was honestly buying it to gain a greater insight into the plights of the undead, that I could provide a more interesting experience to my friends playing the game, and better come to grips with the challenging ideas presented by the setting.  I was so angry that these morons would suggest I'd have any other than the purest, noblest, most honest intention than to explore the darker side of my own psyche.  As if sex could hold a candle to the higher mysteries, the great pain, the awesome trauma of living when you know you should be dead.  They might think it, but they should never have said it, and I was insulted enough to refuse to buy the book.  I found a way to order it online, which was a difficult prospect in those early days, but infinitely preferable to their ignorant accusations.

In time, my friends lost interest in the game, but I never did, though I couldn't ever again find someone who was really willing to dig into the meaty psychological torture of playing it.  I could read some novels relating to those themes, and watch a few movies, and I mostly found meaning in what I could, and moved on with my life, but never fully.

A friend, knowing my predilections, had recommended Underworld to me for several years, seemingly shocked that I had never watched it.  So, a few weeks ago, I finally did.  Let me reiterate:  this is a bad movie.  The writing, acting, plotting, cinematography, set design, costume design, and casting are all bottom-tier.  I don't understand how it was ever made.  It was painful to watch, and I laughed at it more than I was moved by it, however hard it tried.

And yet....something in the movie touched me.  Buried deep within its cheesy action scenes and overwrought love story, there were some clumsy traces of that darkness which had motivated me so long ago.  Somebody who made this movie understood, and tried to communicate (however poorly) those ideas that an immortal must grapple with and overcome.  I sensed a kinship, and it drew me in.  By the end of its running time, I was hanging on every word, even while I recognized the movie was terrible.  I was involved.  I wanted more.  In that sense, for an audience like me, the movie was a success.

If I had been at a different point in my life, I may not have been so susceptible.  But it hit me at the right time, and I responded.  In the end, I shouldn't have been so surprised.  It was no credit to the writers that they'd managed to connect with the legacy of the stories I had loved -- it turns out they probably stole one of them (albeit one I'd never read) to use as the basis for their movie.  But they had done a closer job of it than anybody else, and even if it was a crime, it was a crime that served me well.

I waited a week, and then I could wait no longer, and I moved on to Underworld: Evolution.

It was a disaster.  The spark was gone.  I had been warned, of course, that it was awful, but people had said the same about the first movie, which had earned my love.  The second, though, seemed to happily reject all of the themes that had pulled me in the first time.  Instead of claustrophobic cities, there was a wide forest.  Instead of ancient rivalries acted out through centuries of careful political maneuvering, there was a monster chasing the heroes from scene to scene, smashing things on the way.   Delicacy and nuance were discarded in favor of brute force.  There was a pervading sense of hope for the future.  I lost interest.

How could this happen?  How could the same people have made such wildly different movies?  Strangely enough, I think for someone without my context, the second movie would be slightly more enjoyable.  The action scenes were more intense, and there was less acting all around (a very good thing).  But it had none of what I had loved.  Whatever beauty had been in its misery was gone, and I was left with nothing but a memory to sustain me.

There is a third Underworld movie, but I doubt I can bring myself to watch it.  The examination of immortal suffering which once held such fascination has atrophied from neglect, and the world seems to have moved on as well.  There was a time for what moved me, but I was the wrong age to be a part of its heyday, and all that's left for me is to let it go and tend another garden, if I can find one that means even half as much.

UNDERWORLD:  B-
UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION:  D

the clock unwound

December 1st, 2045

Muchfurtherdowningtown

That Foetid Swamp On The Delaware

My hearer, my prominence, my apogean self.

Caius.  Not in a dog's bent and broken age has your name passed these fulsome lips, their tender repose undisturbed by the fluttering you erstwhile induced.  The thrushes, cicadas, and wisping cattails alike set aside their impatient murmurs, and set the sun too, and my brow lowered, and you were gone.

I have been ill, my bosom pal, too ill to sing or speak or stand or hold a wavy image of you in my tired mind.  Wherefore my sorry state, the physickers have little notion, but they pat my shoulder most reassuringly.  The missus has assisted, in her insuperable manner, but finds herself oft affected by the ague, by which I mean, of course, that our children bother her inscrutably with this or that nonsense, to my utmost chagrin.

Reduced to this pitiable penury of powers, I have sought diverse amusements which can be undertaken by a man in his frailty.  Did you know, sweet Caius, that there exist seventy-seven separate rhymes for the word 'disputable'?  Ah, it is a terrible thing, to be ill, and perceive no cure to grasp at.

So it was with you, beloved Caius, whose wings grew ever wider than I'd surmised.  Was there a thought spared for me on that golden pate?  Did your thrumming mind, amid its dovey ascent, but once come to rest on my much-beleaguered face, my soapy eyelids, my blithe mien?

Bah, but I hate this doddering, senseless prattle!...I am not despondent and I am not demanding. Suppose me, not a supplicant, but a supplican.  Wasn't there a time you and I stood tall, two kings of the Better Way, in spite of all their sycophantic slobbering to the contrary?  My pride, it is, that does me ill, and besets upon my breast the cough and lather.  And if you'll forgive the ugly, Shakespearean horse-sense for what it is, you may detect within it the quiet call of yesteryear.  O Postverta!  Waggle not those hips at me, which contain the centuries.

That's the gist, you noble soul, the upright news of a downcast heart.  To the extent that what former passed between us, moreso than the many letters, beyond the sallow humor and the reaper's disdain, in excess of the gross camaraderie which somehow persisted outside the bonds of alcoholic valour, was, above all, the cool complement of two most excellent souls, as is beyond dispute, I write to propose a very swift and merciless resumption of that galling interchange, now and to the death.

A cry for help??--Pah!  A plea for challenge!  Are you wanting, young C?  Revive me, if you can!

infused with light from a silver tree

that's how I'd know you, and you'd know me

In terms of insipid, inspirited, idiocy in excelsis (known only to the brave),

The Right Noble Mr. Buttercup (and heirs)