Fascinating Person! No Piano.
After the arrival of several key hardware components over the course of this week, on Friday evening I was finally able to begin main assembly on my new computer. Michael came over to watch. We had Chinese food for dinner, and he complained that he felt like he was coming down with something. After dinner I began to put the thing together. I think he was disappointed by how slowly and methodically I did it. I guess everyone plays at their own pace. I for one have spent almost five years waiting for this, and I was in no hurry to rush things. The CPU by itself took over an hour. First I had to open everything up and figure out exactly how to place the chip into the socket on the mainboard. Then I had trouble getting the lock closed. It felt wrong, and I was worried that I would break the chip by applying so much force. Nonetheless, I applied it. I got a call from Kendra immediately afterward. She was in Des Moines driving past their state capitol, which she thought was “either a state capitol or a palace.” Michael was getting fidgety so I kind of had to brush her off, which I felt bad about. I then greased the top of the CPU, so that I could attach a heatsink and fan to it.
Some time later in the evening, I realized that I had neglected to install the cover that fits into the input-output panel. To do it, I knew I would have to take the mainboard back out of the case, which would require repeating much of the work I had spent the evening doing. At that point I decided to call it a night. I drove Michael home and then listened to the Diane Rehm Show. When I first heard her show, many months ago, I found it hard to listen to, because she sounds like she’s 152 million years old. And that aroused patronizing feelings in me, feeling sorry for her being “out of her league.” Hah. I’m stupid. Eventually, I learned that she’s quite sharp and is a very thoughtful moderator who has some smart discussion on her show. I also learned that she sounds so ancient because she has spasmodic dysphonia, a voice disorder.
(Just as a side note: Public radio is one of those places that continually hint at that utopia we all strive for. I can’t help but feel sometimes that so much of society’s excellence is actually a matter of judgment rather than objective quality, and that public radio is a clue that life is better than most of us recognize, because we all surround ourselves with so much cheapness and filth. If all of us were interested in public radio, and were otherwise no different, I think we would have a much higher opinion of our society.)
After returning home I went to bed rather than continuing work on the computer. There I dreamed all night, including a dream of which I now remember very little, except for being on a mountain road, a mountain that ran down into the sea. It was pure rock and lose gravel; there was no mud or vegetation of any kind. The sun sparkled on the water below, and there were gravel beaches. The road eventually came down to sea level. I’m afraid that’s all I remember of that dream.
I woke up soon thereafter; it was about a quarter to seven. I was so discombobulated that it took me half a minute to figure out whether it was AM or PM, and another five minutes to realize that I had only slept for about four or five hours at that point. I went back to bed. A couple of hours later-now over sixteen hours ago-I had another dream, one much more worthy of writing down, but I had no time to do it until now.
I will admit to something that perhaps I have admitted before, but which nonetheless is one of my shyer predilections. All my life I have been a vivid imaginer. (I would add another “E” to that, but I don’t want to get sued.) The human imagination being what it is, much of my make-believe over the years has taken to places that I’ll never see in person. Impossible places. Impractical places. Places, and people, and things that are not quite people but make a lot sense to describe as such. (Is Scrooge McDuck a “person,” really?)
The problem with imagining things that I’m never going to see in the real world is that, as the imaginer, I’m holding all the strings, or all the cards, or I’m calling all the shots, or the metaphor of your choice. It’s a rather one-sided deal, and that can be disappointing sometimes. I might want to have tea with Abraham Lincoln, for instance. But the real Lincoln is long gone, and, if I were to imagine that encounter, it wouldn’t be Lincoln. It’d be me as Lincoln. Therein lies the potential for disappointment.
One alternative remains. The “me” in question is the conscious me. There is also an unconscious me with whom I have no official diplomatic relations. Despite our vast separation, this other Josh holds court every day of my life, for about eight hours or so.
So it is that the dream is the one place where the impossible is within reach. Let’s hear it for the subjectivity of life!
I dream about Silence sometimes, that perennial favorite of mine. Rarely is she herself, for in dreams does metaphor run wild. All dreams are representations. If you want to be picky, this inconvenient truth nullifies the above paragraph…but I’m not going to be picky this time.
I dreamed about her at roughly eight o’clock this morning. I had been dreaming about something else. There was this kid…a young adult…who looked like a cross between Lyra Belacqua and Ramona Quimby, except older and victim of a much less fortunate life. She was something of a street urchin, gangly and harsh. And she was in a state of hostility with these Chinese acrobat pirate gangsters. Perhaps they were down on their luck for want of career opportunities after the Olympics? They were dressed suitably for the Olympics, not so much the streets, but, make no mistake, these were some brutal people. They were also quite as young as the urchin. Let’s call her Ramona for lack of a better name. Apparently, they were her enemies. Rivals, foils…whatever.
Well, she went after them. She took a sword and started cutting them down. It was obscenely violent, except, as I looked on at this dream in my disembodied self, it didn’t arouse the emotional response in me that one would expect of violence. She was slaughtering them, boys and girls falling where they had fought. And they were fighting back. They were vicious and tough. But Ramona was berserk. She cut them down. She went after them as they fled. A few made it away, but she got most of them.
She would have gotten more, except the authorities intervened. Apparently some important group had been trying to make peace with the Chinese acrobat pirate gangsters-shall I call them the “Cap Gang”?-and Ramona’s bloodlust undoubtedly had ruined all of this delicate diplomatic progress. In this case “the authorities” were one person: Silence. From out of nowhere, her own sword crossed Ramona’s. They were on the same side. You can think of Ramona as a troubled youth belonging to this establishment which Silence represented. So, Silence’s intervention was not adversarial. It was simply to keep Ramona from doing any further damage. And that kid was unstoppable. Almost. Silence necessitates the word “almost.” Without any risk to herself, she allowed Ramona to persist for another thirty seconds or so, spending down her energy. At the end it was as though the world was spinning around them-as if they were on a merry-go-round. The clang of their blades was resonant and very satisfying. And then Silence took her left leg and kicked the girl in the side of the head, sending her crashing into the ground, unconscious upon arrival.
That was the end of the fight. Silence herself was still unsullied, dressed in her typical green garb. I remember a bit of cinematography here as she swung her sword high in the air, and then in the next instant you see only her hand on the hilt and hear the metallic shing as her sword has just returned to its scabbard.
Everything and everyone around her was bloodstained and dead, except for Ramona who was merely unconscious. I’m not sure why, but Silence was out of place being so clean, so she went running, or skipping, or something…out and back again through the puddles and pools of red human gore. In moments she was spattered with the stuff, and she seemed to be enjoying herself. That part was less characteristic of her-not the enjoyment, but the actual scampering about through a scene of obscene violence, itself an obscenity.
I woke up then, still puzzling over it for a moment before deciding that this was a dream worth remembering.
By coincidence, a scene like this could be written into the book quite easily. Most of the elements are already there. No, no acrobat gangsters, but…hey…you never know. But by an even more fortunate coincidence, introducing such a scene might even serve a greater purpose. There is a character in the story who comes under Silence’s wing relatively early on, and whose troubles not only are not yet fully fleshed out at this point in the writing process, but are also an allusion to Silence’s own past. She too had some troubles at that age. That was in the RPG.
As for the skipping through a murder scene, well…if it made me think, then maybe even that bizarre image might find its way into the novel. The trick is to do it with some thoughtfulness, so that readers don’t simply conclude that she is batshit fucking insane. In the dream, it wasn’t strange at all. It made perfect sense. All I need to do is re-solve that equation.
Improbably, I stole another four hours of sleep after that. When I finally did get up, there wasn’t much time left before I had to set off for Woodinville for Cindy’s apple cider making party. She was glad to invite me, not only because she knows of my fondness for apple cider, but because she wanted to demonstrate her assurance to me that she and Alice were still glad to welcome in her home as a friend and even one of the family, for which I am most grateful.
She had told me that Alice would be having a number of friends over, and that I should ask a friend of my own to come along, so that I wouldn’t be left out. I asked a number of friends, but each and every one declined. So instead I took a book-books never say no-and ventured off into the maw of a two-hour busride. To even get on to the bus, I had to go to the market next door and break a twenty dollar bill for a canister of Tic Tacs, which I felt very bad about doing, because it took most of the merchant’s small bills. The poor guy runs the store sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, all by himself, and gets almost no business. It’s a new market, and I really hope business picks up. Sadly, I very much doubt it will. I have resolved to buy my milk from him, since he carries Darigold, but his prices are so high on most of his stock that I just can’t afford to do much more than that.
Using my ill-gotten small bills, I purchased an all-day pass in the hopes of saving $1.50 in the course of the day. Those passes are $3.50 now; they used to be $2.00 back in my day. I boarded the 14 to go downtown, where I transferred to the 522, the “Woodinville Express.” Even knowing how good Seattle’s bus system is, I was still impressed that there is direct service between Seattle and Woodinville at all.
A few seats away from me on that bus was a very loud person who was having a conversation with some friends. I couldn’t help but listen in to his share of it. He had a strange accent; it sounded Middle Eastern at first and then Mexican later on. At first I thought he was annoying, simply because he was far too loud for any kind of tact. As I listened on, however, I began to like what I heard. He was obviously not the smartest Joe, but at one point he was telling a story about how he had bought a camera and had used it incorrectly. He kept saying that he had been so stupid, that he had unknowingly misused the camera at the time, leading to its demise when he dropped it. Every time he called himself stupid, I began to like him a little more. You see…that kind of self-deprecation is very powerful stuff. That’s the talk of somebody who has the awareness to learn a lesson from a mistake. That’s the talk of somebody who has some humility, or at least some humbleness, of the most genuine sort. He wasn’t berating himself; he was simply explaining that he had been stupid about something. I liked that. That kind of quality is not terribly common. Because of his foreign accent-you were wondering why I mentioned that, I bet-it occurred to me that American society doesn’t really have an organ for teaching people that sort of awareness, that sort of humbleness, and that sort of character. I think we should.
Too often we humans use our language and our customs for evil. Everything-everything, unto life itself-becomes one giant distraction from the truth. Here, at least, were a couple of people-him and me-who are better than that.
Speaking of human trash-well, okay, rough segue-at one point some teenagers got onto the bus. They were loud and obnoxious and pasty and dressed stereotypically. I mostly tuned them out, but I began to realize that the two males were disrespecting the female with them. One of them sat behind her. This bus happened to have reclining seats, and so she reclined her seat. The one behind her kept pushing it back forward, without fail, every time. She seemed not to notice, but she kept putting it back, only to be thwarted half a second later. She was talking to the other male, in the seat next to her left, the whole time, so it wasn’t as though there was an awkward pause or an outward tension. That male, however, was licking a sucker and at one point he threatened to stick it in her hair. I almost wrote “playfully,” because there was an element of play to it. But he would have done it if she had responded in a certain way. I was left thinking that she had no clue just how much these two people were disrespecting her. She seemed swept up in a frenzy of conversation with them, and on her cell phone, and thus utterly distracted from the unfortunate truth. I hope she figures it out soon.
Traffic was heavy, and it was a slow ride up Lake City Way and through UW Bothell, but eventually I arrived at the Woodinville Town Center, where I called Cindy and asked her to pick me up.
At her house, Alice had decorated for Halloween. A hundred pounds of apples and a big cider press were splayed out in the driveway. (Fast-forward a few hours to this moment, as I taste for the first time the cider we would make. It’s delicious! I don’t understand yet where that spiciness comes from.) Refreshments were served, including hot spiced cider from the store that is unbelievably good, but really we got right to work washing apples, chopping them, throwing them into the press where they would get mashed into apple pulp, and then pressed down to extract the cider. It was good work and we had an efficient operation.
When it got dark we ate dinner, including bratwurst with kraut and apples. =)
I got my turn at all aspects of the cider-making process: I washed apples, chopped apples, threw apples into the machine, and turned the press. Good fun! And the press looked very cool. This is the sort of neighbor-building, family-building activity that I never really had as a kid.
I had been worried that there would be tons of people there, and that it would be a frat-style party. I shouldn’t have been. This is Alice, after all. She, like her brother and sister and mom, are some very special people, and not at all ordinary. She had four or five friends over. Cindy had four more. Given the size of her house, that wasn’t a bad crowd at all, and it certainly wasn’t anything like a frat party.
I took a liking to someone named Alexia, who actually owns the property at the end of the lane where Cindy lives. She has horses and ponies that Kendra and I would always wave at when we drove by. I didn’t know that she and Cindy were friends; as it turned out they hadn’t spoken in about two years (just ‘cause time flies), and each had thought of the other on the same day. So of course she had to come make cider.
My conversation with her came pretty easily. I don’t know what it is about people. Some seem phony. One of the other people there, the mom of Colin’s best friend, seemed totally artificial when I talked to her. I could tell that she wasn’t interested in the things she was asking me. She was fond of speaking in platitudes:
“I overheard that you have an interesting job.”
“Yes, I do creative writing for a startup…video game company.”
“Oh, how nice. What’s the name of your company?”
“Alturia. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
“Well, I might not have, but I bet you my son has.”
Right. Usually I just say “video game company” to spare the unpleasant ballet of people asking questions that they don’t really want answered, which I must then reluctantly answer. In contrast, I had explained to Alexia what virtual worlds are right away.
After dinner, I noticed something peculiar: Alexia was looking straight up. This always catches my interest, because I know that it means one of two things: 1) This is a fascinating person; or 2) We are about to be crushed by a falling piano. She was looking at the stars, trying to find the Big Dipper amidst Cindy’s tall trees.
We walked out into the yard and found it. She was quite the consummate stargazer. We got to talking, and it turns out she’s an instructor at the Wilderness Awareness School, and her husband is an amateur satellite watcher. I told her about the two times I was lucky enough to see the International Space Station. We talked about the stars and the planets. I told her that, as a writer, I have come to appreciate just how important it is to know the real world, from which a writer’s power flows. I told her about horses. I’m still nothing close to an expert, but what I have after three years of dating Kendra is exposure, and exposure is all it takes to plant seeds in a writer’s mind. We talked about crows-she’s a birdwatcher-and I steered the conversation toward crows and how smart they are. She agreed and told some stories about just how smart they are. We talked about wilderness survival-which is what she teaches. Fascinating person! No piano.
Afterwards, we all cleaned out the cider press and went inside for coffee ‘round the table. Alexia and several of the others went home, but the rest of us stuck around for hours schmoozing. The conversation went all over the place, before finally delving headlong into politics. We talked about just politics for over an hour. I was struck, again and again, at the people sitting around that table. Cindy. Nick’s mom. Sid. Ryan. Ariana. Alice. All of them, except maybe Nick’s mom-about whom I do not know enough to be able to say one way or the other-were remarkably intelligent. I would have expected as much from Cindy and Alice, but the others too were quite remarkable. Alice’s friend Ariana-they’d been friends since first grade before drifting apart for several years and then drifting back together-seemed like your typical high-schooler, caught up in the drama and the inanities of her everyday world. Yet sometimes she would chime into the conversation with these remarkably cogent observations. She very much is someone on the cusp of growing up. Sometimes she would be childish. Other times she would seem like somebody twice her age. It was fascinating to watch. My opinion of her improved throughout the evening.
Her dad (I think he’s her dad), Sid, is a very interesting fellow. He’s been all over, and has means, too. Consequently, he’s able to hob knob with the big people. He’s good friends with Darcy Burner, and has spoken with Barack Obama and Cindy McCain. He’s an unabashed liberal progressive Democrat, but he has a PhD in history and is very smart. There is nothing he said that reminded me of your stereotypical ultra-leftie. To the contrary, he is remarkably self-aware and even-keeled, despite being quite emotional about politics. He was able to provide much conversation.
I found myself being silent for most of the evening. I should have chimed in, because I knew that conversations don’t just happen; they depend on people participating in them. Silent participants are dead weight. Yet I rarely spoke. Sid is very well-informed. So am I…but he said so much, and I didn’t disagree with any of it. Had I opened my voice, what would I have said? I have finally gotten to the point in my life where I don’t feel the need to be validated by piping up and offering what I know to score smart points. I saw the younger folks doing that-Ariana and Ryan and Alice. They reminded me of myself at their age. They’ve freshly learned all this wonderful knowledge, and they’re eager to let the adults know just how smart they’ve become. And, yes, they’ve become smart, but from my intermediate position between the older folks and the younger ones, there’s still no comparison. The older ones have a lifetime of experience and wisdom. The younger ones are green…promising but new. Not yet ripe. Very curious to observe.
I should mention that our political conversation was quite sweeping. We talked politics all the way back to Lincoln. We talked about the origins of the tilapia industry. We talked about Gregoire’s crappy campaign. We talked about people who give people like Sid hope for the world, such as this Kenyan fellow soon to graduate from Cindy’s department. We talked about McCain’s lifetime of opportunism, about Palin’s representativeness of Alaskan culture, and about Jewish opposition to the Christmas tree. (I was really itching to chime in on that one, but I held my tongue because I didn’t actually know enough to say something productive.) We covered it all. It was beautiful, full-figured political discussion. I was home.
(It reminded me of a comment I had overheard on Rt. 14 earlier in the day: “When I’m at (my Republican parents’ house), we don’t talk about politics, sports, or the Bible.” I wondered to myself what exactly there is to talk about Republicans with, if not those.)
The quality of this conversation and its participants, and its ability to break off into two conversations at once, reminded me of the Fourth of July at Astrid’s in 2003, one of the highlights of my life thus far. But this time I felt a little further along. Back then, I was the green one. Now I am something more. Now I am the silent one. At one point, Sid was admiring Obama for projecting such an aura of being a sincere listener, whose mental wheels are always turning. For a minute I almost expected him to look my way and make a favorable comparison, but he did not, leaving me disappointed that I didn’t have more to offer the conversation. He impressed me, but to him I must be quite a blank slate still. That’s too bad.
Time and again I could have opened my mouth, but there was no way I could contribute much real information, and I didn’t feel like showing off or arguing. I checked every thought that I might have turned into a statement against this simple test: If I mentioned it, would I really have something to talk about? Did I know my stuff on that issue? Or would my “expertise” stop at the end of the first sentence? As it turned out, I never, not once in the whole evening, made a major contribution to the conversation. Hopefully the day will come when I have more to offer in intelligent company.
At one point I finally heard Cindy’s reason for being lukewarm toward Burner and fondness for Reichert, which I had previously only heard second-hand from Kendra. As Cindy sees it, Burner’s style is nasty and mean, and sometimes flippant, whereas Reichert is moderate and appealing, and agrees with Burner on most points anyway, and would be one of the few moderate Republicans left in the House. Even here I didn’t have much to contribute, so I remained silent. I wanted to defend Darcy, but I couldn’t think of what to say that would not end up as an argument. I don’t like arguing. This kind of conversation is too good for that.
I was responsible for breaking up the party. The hour had grown late and there was only one bus left to Seattle. I was amazed that the Woodinville Express ran at all at the eleven o’clock hour on a Saturday night, but I was pleased. Alice tried to talk me into spending the night with them, lest I go home on a bus at a late hour and then walk through the city alone. However, wanting not to have to buy further bus tickets, and wanting not to have to deal with a two-hour trip on Sunday, I decided to go.
At the park and ride, as I waited for the bus, there was another person. He was distraught, and explained that he had had to leave a bar, even before getting to hear the band for which he had paid for admittance, because he couldn’t stand his friends anymore. It didn’t take but a word or two from me to get him to explain the source of his problems: He’s scared to death that Obama is going to become president, and he really, really hates females. He called Washington the worst state in the country, because it’s run into the ground by lesbians and feminists who have dehumanized males and want them to pay $250 every week so that they can get their hair and nails done. As we rode on the bus together, he continued his tirade. He mentioned all of our sports teams and called them the worst in their respective sports, because females have…well…I don’t remember his logic there. Then he tore into females for criticizing males, since we’re dying in war to protect the females. He even played devil’s advocate: “Some of them say that it’s men who start war in the first place.” He put that argument to rest by rolling his eyes.
He also told me that he is very unhappy, and is feeling suicidal, but “luckily” isn’t feeling homicidal. That didn’t reassure me. When he finally got off, he apologized for being so negative and said he had a problem that he needed to work out. I was left wondering if he was talking about himself, or about some unlucky female.
The hour was late, and things quieted down after that. As I observed the scenery, including a weird sensation of floating and sinking at several points due to the darkness outside (because it was bright inside the bus), I got to thinking about the substance of the real world.
I have been reading a book of Michael’s on virtual worlds that he didn’t mean to loan to me, and which he keeps meaning to take back, but which neither of us seem to think of at a time when it would do any good. One thing that strikes me about him is that his attitude is so different between the real world and the virtual world. In the real world, he just doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything. He enjoys many things, but never expresses appreciation. I spend so much time appreciating things. For instance, I appreciate the relative warmness on the bus, since I would have to walk the final leg home and I knew it would be cold.
I asked Michael once how he could care so much about something like, say, a bakery in a virtual world, yet not care about the real thing. He explained that it was the novelty of creating the thing in a virtual world. It had nothing to do with the substance of the thing itself. He actually said that. Then I thought back to my conversation under the stars with Alexia. How can one ever be fulfilled without that kind of substance? Maybe he’ll read this and explain it to me.
I made it home with minimal trouble, and decided to forego working on my new computer in favor of writing this log. I am sure there are plenty of things I left out. If any of them are significant enough, I will made a supplement. For now, however, it is time to go to bed. Saturday is over. Sunday beckons.
Some time later in the evening, I realized that I had neglected to install the cover that fits into the input-output panel. To do it, I knew I would have to take the mainboard back out of the case, which would require repeating much of the work I had spent the evening doing. At that point I decided to call it a night. I drove Michael home and then listened to the Diane Rehm Show. When I first heard her show, many months ago, I found it hard to listen to, because she sounds like she’s 152 million years old. And that aroused patronizing feelings in me, feeling sorry for her being “out of her league.” Hah. I’m stupid. Eventually, I learned that she’s quite sharp and is a very thoughtful moderator who has some smart discussion on her show. I also learned that she sounds so ancient because she has spasmodic dysphonia, a voice disorder.
(Just as a side note: Public radio is one of those places that continually hint at that utopia we all strive for. I can’t help but feel sometimes that so much of society’s excellence is actually a matter of judgment rather than objective quality, and that public radio is a clue that life is better than most of us recognize, because we all surround ourselves with so much cheapness and filth. If all of us were interested in public radio, and were otherwise no different, I think we would have a much higher opinion of our society.)
After returning home I went to bed rather than continuing work on the computer. There I dreamed all night, including a dream of which I now remember very little, except for being on a mountain road, a mountain that ran down into the sea. It was pure rock and lose gravel; there was no mud or vegetation of any kind. The sun sparkled on the water below, and there were gravel beaches. The road eventually came down to sea level. I’m afraid that’s all I remember of that dream.
I woke up soon thereafter; it was about a quarter to seven. I was so discombobulated that it took me half a minute to figure out whether it was AM or PM, and another five minutes to realize that I had only slept for about four or five hours at that point. I went back to bed. A couple of hours later-now over sixteen hours ago-I had another dream, one much more worthy of writing down, but I had no time to do it until now.
I will admit to something that perhaps I have admitted before, but which nonetheless is one of my shyer predilections. All my life I have been a vivid imaginer. (I would add another “E” to that, but I don’t want to get sued.) The human imagination being what it is, much of my make-believe over the years has taken to places that I’ll never see in person. Impossible places. Impractical places. Places, and people, and things that are not quite people but make a lot sense to describe as such. (Is Scrooge McDuck a “person,” really?)
The problem with imagining things that I’m never going to see in the real world is that, as the imaginer, I’m holding all the strings, or all the cards, or I’m calling all the shots, or the metaphor of your choice. It’s a rather one-sided deal, and that can be disappointing sometimes. I might want to have tea with Abraham Lincoln, for instance. But the real Lincoln is long gone, and, if I were to imagine that encounter, it wouldn’t be Lincoln. It’d be me as Lincoln. Therein lies the potential for disappointment.
One alternative remains. The “me” in question is the conscious me. There is also an unconscious me with whom I have no official diplomatic relations. Despite our vast separation, this other Josh holds court every day of my life, for about eight hours or so.
So it is that the dream is the one place where the impossible is within reach. Let’s hear it for the subjectivity of life!
I dream about Silence sometimes, that perennial favorite of mine. Rarely is she herself, for in dreams does metaphor run wild. All dreams are representations. If you want to be picky, this inconvenient truth nullifies the above paragraph…but I’m not going to be picky this time.
I dreamed about her at roughly eight o’clock this morning. I had been dreaming about something else. There was this kid…a young adult…who looked like a cross between Lyra Belacqua and Ramona Quimby, except older and victim of a much less fortunate life. She was something of a street urchin, gangly and harsh. And she was in a state of hostility with these Chinese acrobat pirate gangsters. Perhaps they were down on their luck for want of career opportunities after the Olympics? They were dressed suitably for the Olympics, not so much the streets, but, make no mistake, these were some brutal people. They were also quite as young as the urchin. Let’s call her Ramona for lack of a better name. Apparently, they were her enemies. Rivals, foils…whatever.
Well, she went after them. She took a sword and started cutting them down. It was obscenely violent, except, as I looked on at this dream in my disembodied self, it didn’t arouse the emotional response in me that one would expect of violence. She was slaughtering them, boys and girls falling where they had fought. And they were fighting back. They were vicious and tough. But Ramona was berserk. She cut them down. She went after them as they fled. A few made it away, but she got most of them.
She would have gotten more, except the authorities intervened. Apparently some important group had been trying to make peace with the Chinese acrobat pirate gangsters-shall I call them the “Cap Gang”?-and Ramona’s bloodlust undoubtedly had ruined all of this delicate diplomatic progress. In this case “the authorities” were one person: Silence. From out of nowhere, her own sword crossed Ramona’s. They were on the same side. You can think of Ramona as a troubled youth belonging to this establishment which Silence represented. So, Silence’s intervention was not adversarial. It was simply to keep Ramona from doing any further damage. And that kid was unstoppable. Almost. Silence necessitates the word “almost.” Without any risk to herself, she allowed Ramona to persist for another thirty seconds or so, spending down her energy. At the end it was as though the world was spinning around them-as if they were on a merry-go-round. The clang of their blades was resonant and very satisfying. And then Silence took her left leg and kicked the girl in the side of the head, sending her crashing into the ground, unconscious upon arrival.
That was the end of the fight. Silence herself was still unsullied, dressed in her typical green garb. I remember a bit of cinematography here as she swung her sword high in the air, and then in the next instant you see only her hand on the hilt and hear the metallic shing as her sword has just returned to its scabbard.
Everything and everyone around her was bloodstained and dead, except for Ramona who was merely unconscious. I’m not sure why, but Silence was out of place being so clean, so she went running, or skipping, or something…out and back again through the puddles and pools of red human gore. In moments she was spattered with the stuff, and she seemed to be enjoying herself. That part was less characteristic of her-not the enjoyment, but the actual scampering about through a scene of obscene violence, itself an obscenity.
I woke up then, still puzzling over it for a moment before deciding that this was a dream worth remembering.
By coincidence, a scene like this could be written into the book quite easily. Most of the elements are already there. No, no acrobat gangsters, but…hey…you never know. But by an even more fortunate coincidence, introducing such a scene might even serve a greater purpose. There is a character in the story who comes under Silence’s wing relatively early on, and whose troubles not only are not yet fully fleshed out at this point in the writing process, but are also an allusion to Silence’s own past. She too had some troubles at that age. That was in the RPG.
As for the skipping through a murder scene, well…if it made me think, then maybe even that bizarre image might find its way into the novel. The trick is to do it with some thoughtfulness, so that readers don’t simply conclude that she is batshit fucking insane. In the dream, it wasn’t strange at all. It made perfect sense. All I need to do is re-solve that equation.
Improbably, I stole another four hours of sleep after that. When I finally did get up, there wasn’t much time left before I had to set off for Woodinville for Cindy’s apple cider making party. She was glad to invite me, not only because she knows of my fondness for apple cider, but because she wanted to demonstrate her assurance to me that she and Alice were still glad to welcome in her home as a friend and even one of the family, for which I am most grateful.
She had told me that Alice would be having a number of friends over, and that I should ask a friend of my own to come along, so that I wouldn’t be left out. I asked a number of friends, but each and every one declined. So instead I took a book-books never say no-and ventured off into the maw of a two-hour busride. To even get on to the bus, I had to go to the market next door and break a twenty dollar bill for a canister of Tic Tacs, which I felt very bad about doing, because it took most of the merchant’s small bills. The poor guy runs the store sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, all by himself, and gets almost no business. It’s a new market, and I really hope business picks up. Sadly, I very much doubt it will. I have resolved to buy my milk from him, since he carries Darigold, but his prices are so high on most of his stock that I just can’t afford to do much more than that.
Using my ill-gotten small bills, I purchased an all-day pass in the hopes of saving $1.50 in the course of the day. Those passes are $3.50 now; they used to be $2.00 back in my day. I boarded the 14 to go downtown, where I transferred to the 522, the “Woodinville Express.” Even knowing how good Seattle’s bus system is, I was still impressed that there is direct service between Seattle and Woodinville at all.
A few seats away from me on that bus was a very loud person who was having a conversation with some friends. I couldn’t help but listen in to his share of it. He had a strange accent; it sounded Middle Eastern at first and then Mexican later on. At first I thought he was annoying, simply because he was far too loud for any kind of tact. As I listened on, however, I began to like what I heard. He was obviously not the smartest Joe, but at one point he was telling a story about how he had bought a camera and had used it incorrectly. He kept saying that he had been so stupid, that he had unknowingly misused the camera at the time, leading to its demise when he dropped it. Every time he called himself stupid, I began to like him a little more. You see…that kind of self-deprecation is very powerful stuff. That’s the talk of somebody who has the awareness to learn a lesson from a mistake. That’s the talk of somebody who has some humility, or at least some humbleness, of the most genuine sort. He wasn’t berating himself; he was simply explaining that he had been stupid about something. I liked that. That kind of quality is not terribly common. Because of his foreign accent-you were wondering why I mentioned that, I bet-it occurred to me that American society doesn’t really have an organ for teaching people that sort of awareness, that sort of humbleness, and that sort of character. I think we should.
Too often we humans use our language and our customs for evil. Everything-everything, unto life itself-becomes one giant distraction from the truth. Here, at least, were a couple of people-him and me-who are better than that.
Speaking of human trash-well, okay, rough segue-at one point some teenagers got onto the bus. They were loud and obnoxious and pasty and dressed stereotypically. I mostly tuned them out, but I began to realize that the two males were disrespecting the female with them. One of them sat behind her. This bus happened to have reclining seats, and so she reclined her seat. The one behind her kept pushing it back forward, without fail, every time. She seemed not to notice, but she kept putting it back, only to be thwarted half a second later. She was talking to the other male, in the seat next to her left, the whole time, so it wasn’t as though there was an awkward pause or an outward tension. That male, however, was licking a sucker and at one point he threatened to stick it in her hair. I almost wrote “playfully,” because there was an element of play to it. But he would have done it if she had responded in a certain way. I was left thinking that she had no clue just how much these two people were disrespecting her. She seemed swept up in a frenzy of conversation with them, and on her cell phone, and thus utterly distracted from the unfortunate truth. I hope she figures it out soon.
Traffic was heavy, and it was a slow ride up Lake City Way and through UW Bothell, but eventually I arrived at the Woodinville Town Center, where I called Cindy and asked her to pick me up.
At her house, Alice had decorated for Halloween. A hundred pounds of apples and a big cider press were splayed out in the driveway. (Fast-forward a few hours to this moment, as I taste for the first time the cider we would make. It’s delicious! I don’t understand yet where that spiciness comes from.) Refreshments were served, including hot spiced cider from the store that is unbelievably good, but really we got right to work washing apples, chopping them, throwing them into the press where they would get mashed into apple pulp, and then pressed down to extract the cider. It was good work and we had an efficient operation.
When it got dark we ate dinner, including bratwurst with kraut and apples. =)
I got my turn at all aspects of the cider-making process: I washed apples, chopped apples, threw apples into the machine, and turned the press. Good fun! And the press looked very cool. This is the sort of neighbor-building, family-building activity that I never really had as a kid.
I had been worried that there would be tons of people there, and that it would be a frat-style party. I shouldn’t have been. This is Alice, after all. She, like her brother and sister and mom, are some very special people, and not at all ordinary. She had four or five friends over. Cindy had four more. Given the size of her house, that wasn’t a bad crowd at all, and it certainly wasn’t anything like a frat party.
I took a liking to someone named Alexia, who actually owns the property at the end of the lane where Cindy lives. She has horses and ponies that Kendra and I would always wave at when we drove by. I didn’t know that she and Cindy were friends; as it turned out they hadn’t spoken in about two years (just ‘cause time flies), and each had thought of the other on the same day. So of course she had to come make cider.
My conversation with her came pretty easily. I don’t know what it is about people. Some seem phony. One of the other people there, the mom of Colin’s best friend, seemed totally artificial when I talked to her. I could tell that she wasn’t interested in the things she was asking me. She was fond of speaking in platitudes:
“I overheard that you have an interesting job.”
“Yes, I do creative writing for a startup…video game company.”
“Oh, how nice. What’s the name of your company?”
“Alturia. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”
“Well, I might not have, but I bet you my son has.”
Right. Usually I just say “video game company” to spare the unpleasant ballet of people asking questions that they don’t really want answered, which I must then reluctantly answer. In contrast, I had explained to Alexia what virtual worlds are right away.
After dinner, I noticed something peculiar: Alexia was looking straight up. This always catches my interest, because I know that it means one of two things: 1) This is a fascinating person; or 2) We are about to be crushed by a falling piano. She was looking at the stars, trying to find the Big Dipper amidst Cindy’s tall trees.
We walked out into the yard and found it. She was quite the consummate stargazer. We got to talking, and it turns out she’s an instructor at the Wilderness Awareness School, and her husband is an amateur satellite watcher. I told her about the two times I was lucky enough to see the International Space Station. We talked about the stars and the planets. I told her that, as a writer, I have come to appreciate just how important it is to know the real world, from which a writer’s power flows. I told her about horses. I’m still nothing close to an expert, but what I have after three years of dating Kendra is exposure, and exposure is all it takes to plant seeds in a writer’s mind. We talked about crows-she’s a birdwatcher-and I steered the conversation toward crows and how smart they are. She agreed and told some stories about just how smart they are. We talked about wilderness survival-which is what she teaches. Fascinating person! No piano.
Afterwards, we all cleaned out the cider press and went inside for coffee ‘round the table. Alexia and several of the others went home, but the rest of us stuck around for hours schmoozing. The conversation went all over the place, before finally delving headlong into politics. We talked about just politics for over an hour. I was struck, again and again, at the people sitting around that table. Cindy. Nick’s mom. Sid. Ryan. Ariana. Alice. All of them, except maybe Nick’s mom-about whom I do not know enough to be able to say one way or the other-were remarkably intelligent. I would have expected as much from Cindy and Alice, but the others too were quite remarkable. Alice’s friend Ariana-they’d been friends since first grade before drifting apart for several years and then drifting back together-seemed like your typical high-schooler, caught up in the drama and the inanities of her everyday world. Yet sometimes she would chime into the conversation with these remarkably cogent observations. She very much is someone on the cusp of growing up. Sometimes she would be childish. Other times she would seem like somebody twice her age. It was fascinating to watch. My opinion of her improved throughout the evening.
Her dad (I think he’s her dad), Sid, is a very interesting fellow. He’s been all over, and has means, too. Consequently, he’s able to hob knob with the big people. He’s good friends with Darcy Burner, and has spoken with Barack Obama and Cindy McCain. He’s an unabashed liberal progressive Democrat, but he has a PhD in history and is very smart. There is nothing he said that reminded me of your stereotypical ultra-leftie. To the contrary, he is remarkably self-aware and even-keeled, despite being quite emotional about politics. He was able to provide much conversation.
I found myself being silent for most of the evening. I should have chimed in, because I knew that conversations don’t just happen; they depend on people participating in them. Silent participants are dead weight. Yet I rarely spoke. Sid is very well-informed. So am I…but he said so much, and I didn’t disagree with any of it. Had I opened my voice, what would I have said? I have finally gotten to the point in my life where I don’t feel the need to be validated by piping up and offering what I know to score smart points. I saw the younger folks doing that-Ariana and Ryan and Alice. They reminded me of myself at their age. They’ve freshly learned all this wonderful knowledge, and they’re eager to let the adults know just how smart they’ve become. And, yes, they’ve become smart, but from my intermediate position between the older folks and the younger ones, there’s still no comparison. The older ones have a lifetime of experience and wisdom. The younger ones are green…promising but new. Not yet ripe. Very curious to observe.
I should mention that our political conversation was quite sweeping. We talked politics all the way back to Lincoln. We talked about the origins of the tilapia industry. We talked about Gregoire’s crappy campaign. We talked about people who give people like Sid hope for the world, such as this Kenyan fellow soon to graduate from Cindy’s department. We talked about McCain’s lifetime of opportunism, about Palin’s representativeness of Alaskan culture, and about Jewish opposition to the Christmas tree. (I was really itching to chime in on that one, but I held my tongue because I didn’t actually know enough to say something productive.) We covered it all. It was beautiful, full-figured political discussion. I was home.
(It reminded me of a comment I had overheard on Rt. 14 earlier in the day: “When I’m at (my Republican parents’ house), we don’t talk about politics, sports, or the Bible.” I wondered to myself what exactly there is to talk about Republicans with, if not those.)
The quality of this conversation and its participants, and its ability to break off into two conversations at once, reminded me of the Fourth of July at Astrid’s in 2003, one of the highlights of my life thus far. But this time I felt a little further along. Back then, I was the green one. Now I am something more. Now I am the silent one. At one point, Sid was admiring Obama for projecting such an aura of being a sincere listener, whose mental wheels are always turning. For a minute I almost expected him to look my way and make a favorable comparison, but he did not, leaving me disappointed that I didn’t have more to offer the conversation. He impressed me, but to him I must be quite a blank slate still. That’s too bad.
Time and again I could have opened my mouth, but there was no way I could contribute much real information, and I didn’t feel like showing off or arguing. I checked every thought that I might have turned into a statement against this simple test: If I mentioned it, would I really have something to talk about? Did I know my stuff on that issue? Or would my “expertise” stop at the end of the first sentence? As it turned out, I never, not once in the whole evening, made a major contribution to the conversation. Hopefully the day will come when I have more to offer in intelligent company.
At one point I finally heard Cindy’s reason for being lukewarm toward Burner and fondness for Reichert, which I had previously only heard second-hand from Kendra. As Cindy sees it, Burner’s style is nasty and mean, and sometimes flippant, whereas Reichert is moderate and appealing, and agrees with Burner on most points anyway, and would be one of the few moderate Republicans left in the House. Even here I didn’t have much to contribute, so I remained silent. I wanted to defend Darcy, but I couldn’t think of what to say that would not end up as an argument. I don’t like arguing. This kind of conversation is too good for that.
I was responsible for breaking up the party. The hour had grown late and there was only one bus left to Seattle. I was amazed that the Woodinville Express ran at all at the eleven o’clock hour on a Saturday night, but I was pleased. Alice tried to talk me into spending the night with them, lest I go home on a bus at a late hour and then walk through the city alone. However, wanting not to have to buy further bus tickets, and wanting not to have to deal with a two-hour trip on Sunday, I decided to go.
At the park and ride, as I waited for the bus, there was another person. He was distraught, and explained that he had had to leave a bar, even before getting to hear the band for which he had paid for admittance, because he couldn’t stand his friends anymore. It didn’t take but a word or two from me to get him to explain the source of his problems: He’s scared to death that Obama is going to become president, and he really, really hates females. He called Washington the worst state in the country, because it’s run into the ground by lesbians and feminists who have dehumanized males and want them to pay $250 every week so that they can get their hair and nails done. As we rode on the bus together, he continued his tirade. He mentioned all of our sports teams and called them the worst in their respective sports, because females have…well…I don’t remember his logic there. Then he tore into females for criticizing males, since we’re dying in war to protect the females. He even played devil’s advocate: “Some of them say that it’s men who start war in the first place.” He put that argument to rest by rolling his eyes.
He also told me that he is very unhappy, and is feeling suicidal, but “luckily” isn’t feeling homicidal. That didn’t reassure me. When he finally got off, he apologized for being so negative and said he had a problem that he needed to work out. I was left wondering if he was talking about himself, or about some unlucky female.
The hour was late, and things quieted down after that. As I observed the scenery, including a weird sensation of floating and sinking at several points due to the darkness outside (because it was bright inside the bus), I got to thinking about the substance of the real world.
I have been reading a book of Michael’s on virtual worlds that he didn’t mean to loan to me, and which he keeps meaning to take back, but which neither of us seem to think of at a time when it would do any good. One thing that strikes me about him is that his attitude is so different between the real world and the virtual world. In the real world, he just doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything. He enjoys many things, but never expresses appreciation. I spend so much time appreciating things. For instance, I appreciate the relative warmness on the bus, since I would have to walk the final leg home and I knew it would be cold.
I asked Michael once how he could care so much about something like, say, a bakery in a virtual world, yet not care about the real thing. He explained that it was the novelty of creating the thing in a virtual world. It had nothing to do with the substance of the thing itself. He actually said that. Then I thought back to my conversation under the stars with Alexia. How can one ever be fulfilled without that kind of substance? Maybe he’ll read this and explain it to me.
I made it home with minimal trouble, and decided to forego working on my new computer in favor of writing this log. I am sure there are plenty of things I left out. If any of them are significant enough, I will made a supplement. For now, however, it is time to go to bed. Saturday is over. Sunday beckons.