GUN FRIENDLY

...suspense...

2010-03-03T22:27:00.010-05:00

I am dead as a doornail, as my dad would say. It never occurred to me when I was a kid and still listening to him to wonder at this analogy. I couldn’t have told anyone what a doornail was, although I vaguely recall at least once picturing in my mind a large, sturdy nail like those

old-fashioned boxy kind wedged in remnants of long ago carpentry.

My interest in what a doornail might be never rose above that tentative association, a half-hearted nod to its prospects as a curio displaced, no doubt for the better, by modern materials. If the origin of my dad’s expression remained elusive, its import never came into question. Simply, dead as a doornail meant dead. Not dead tired or dead to the world, not a little bit dead or nearly or maybe or probably dead. Just dead. All the way, no doubt about it, completely and absolutely irreversibly and usually regrettably forever and evermore dead. As dead as I am as you read this.

I can say this because of where I am and what I see before me. Strapped inside my crumpling Nissan Sentra is where I am, rather, hanging in the seatbelts of my upside down crumpling Nissan. The crumpler in this instance is an International Harvester truck, into the path of which my Nissan came to rest after skidding out of control and rolling across a grass median.

A frothy garnet spew blots most of the truck’s gnashing grill, which leered at me an instant prior with enough karmic glee to fill an eternity, an epiphany of sorts to discover comfort in a display of one’s own arterial blood as a shield from the slayer’s profanity. It took working back with logic from this vision to discover that what at first struck me as an impossibly shaped, glowing shadow, an amoebic hologram frozen in mid-pulse before my eyes was in fact what it was, sprung into its geyser by the Nissan’s steering wheel, which had been shoved far enough into my

mouth to detach the jaw and rip open a carotid. I eventually deduced that the grungy steel-filled rubber arc would conclude its lunge all the way through my spine into the filthy seat fabric above my shoulders and perhaps beyond.

This enlightenment occurred quite a bit later, an eon or so after the gushing gore first came into view. It’s taken much deliberation for me to be leaning now toward the blood-fright theory as an explanation for my predicament. Scared I was. No doubt about that. Ever increasingly so during the several seconds leading up to the blood. The approach of panic brought a proportional elongation of time outside my mind, which developed inversely to the velocities of my thought sequences. It’s a psychological phenomenon that I suspect relates to the cinematic illusion of slow motion. The more frames of film exposed to a particular motion the slower the motion appears on a screen if the projected film reel revolves at its standard rate. The greater the racing mind exceeds the speed of whatever motion it perceives, the more increments of that motion are apt to register. We are told that the Devil is in the details. That very well may be, folks. It just may well be.

Any concept of hell that I entertained before now - I use now in an objective sense here quite distinct from my impression that all time outside my mind has stopped dead in its tracks - is poignant, callow in its meek reflection of the fire that roasts the soles of my soul these relentless

millennia.

The physical pain was easiest to get past, nonexistent, in fact, until I remembered that what was happening to me surely must hurt. It did, then, of course, excruciatingly, but I quickly caught on to the power of focus and how I could use it to shift my attention to something other than the howls of nerve endings torn from each other or the screams of others being stretched to their limits. Among these are the network of nerves that service my larynx, enough of which remains intact to the extent that it conveys my terror with the traditional squeal, registering in my eternal moment as a jagged itch that reaches up from the killing zone into the adenoids.

I use eternal to convey a probability, which, if I’ve not come quite fully to accept as conclusive at least has won sufficient corroboration by the perceived eons of my situation that neither of the logical alternatives interests me: scene ekes back into motion or instant oblivion. I’m long prepared for either.

This may seem odd in that I’ve come to believe that the credit for my cerebral fandango goes to a primal fear of dying, that the prospect of death was so unacceptable at that instant that its imminence could not be denied in the usual ways yet was nonetheless managed in a punch of mind to warp speed, keeping denial ahead of demise.

Chemistry of desperation. I know it from my attention deficit disorder, genius at diversion right up to crunch time and then panic-fueled manic focus. Adrenalin junkie, now telepathist.

Telepathist. That you’re reading this proves as much, although I can only speculate how I’ve come to engage the typist. Yet, who better to fly fancy than someone with all the time in the world and nothing to do but cogitate? Getting used to the notion that I have become an endless,

helpless flame of consciousness, that oblivion for me is utterly out of reach if not out of the question, is an exhausting process, or would be in the usual context where energy matters.

Somebody told me that an LSD trip is triggered by the microsecond it takes the brain to react to the chemical, that all of the cerebral pyrotechnics and optical and aural distortions that spin out for sometimes hours emerge from the cornucopia of that single spark of chemical effect. The idea fascinated me at the time, but I made no effort to explore its plausibility. I’m inclined to wonder now if it wasn’t balderdash if only because I doubt that any scientific analyses done in the early 1970s of how hallucinogens affect the brain would have gone much beyond the anecdotal. Surely not to the extent of measuring actual chemical/brain interactions. Even if anything so sophisticated were being done back then it is unlikely that any of the drug adventurers I came across would have known about it. Probably bubbled up during some pharmaceutical fueled soiree. It tickled my fancy then, and from my immeasurably expanded a priori vantage seems tenable to me now.

There’ve been long moments in my current state when I welcomed, when I begged for the ending of this long, strange trip. An endless sleep promises an end to more than the physical and mental torments, which I have learned to manage. I have become fascinated by the prospect of conclusion. Suspense has always irritated me. It corrupts me, taunts me with its reminder that I’m at a mercy beyond my reach. Remembering the suspicion that I’m the one wielding the mercy brings a desolation of spirit palpably worse than any other of my hells. I remember it often. There was a time, a long, long stretch extending from when it first came to me, that the possibility that I am my own Inquisitor stunk up every hairline crack in every thought. Getting past it was complicated, fraught with more subtle twists and unacceptable inferences than the standard job performance evaluation. It ultimately came down to - it surprised me no end when I finally understood that this was it - getting comfortablewith myself.

I had always been annoyed by, and at the same time susceptible to folks who exude the kind of innocence that bespeaks a complete unconditional acceptance of self, an acceptance so unquestioning that it might have survived unscathed the trials of Job, an impervious buoyancy that keeps the head above the water no matter how wicked the turbulence it rides.

I never parsed it out then, but I see now that my resentment grew out of a suspicion that linked the ease I perceived with smugness. I used to joke that attaining smugness was my life’s goal. As with most jokes it was half true. I wanted to be happy, but I sensed that the only way I could attain happiness would be to believe that I was in fact happy, which would require me to embrace folly, to become, not just to play, the fool, gladly, and I consistently doubted I would ever find the power of concentration to do so. Drink or the occasional recreational drug could give me illusory moments, but this grace was all too fragile when it came, too easily perforated by the ubiquitous misgiving. I envied those who seemed to be bringing it off, and I resented my envy.

I was missing the point of view, of course. Any parish priest, rabbi, guru or imam could have shown me my error: too much attention to wanting, not enough to gratitude. A bit late for me to be catching on to this, you might think, as did I initially, yet it has held up. The word gratitude

keeps its currency, has a calming, renewing capacity even in the abstract, just bringing it to mind with no particular context.

Its constancy is a mystery such that in trying to get to the bottom of it I’ve developed a theory along the lines of a finite saturation point of gratitude, if you will, which, when it is reached a transcendence occurs. I’ve pressed toward that saturation point, swooning with an all-encompassing spirit of gratitude, throwing myself to the winds of gratitude, setting myself adrift on a sea of gratitude, making gratitude my mantra, becoming gratitude, testing the damned theory to either debase gratitude or ride it to deliverance. I know, I know, it’s the motive that foils me. I’m curious that gratitude thus far is no more than what it’s been, and I’m grateful it’s been no less.

Madness occupies much of my attention. I found it at first an escape from the implications of my predicament. Shrieking, wailing, giggling, voiceless, of course, yet undeniably aural. Eventually the signals from my forsaken soul lost their relevance along with the presumptive demand for relevance. Mdness now comes in little flicks and flashes, inevitable nips from the philosophic gnats and the occasional horse fly. These micro-assaults arrive not in patterns, which could aid insight, but frequently enough to boggle the promise in any promising notion.

Demons pursue even as I nap, which is how I regard the infrequent episodes of passivity when I am surrendered completely to music. Most often I hear Mozart. My musical taste had been eclectic, if uninformed. I can recall owning only one Mozart album, which gave me sustenance on

many an eve of college exams.

In my present state at first I hadn’t a clue as to which compositions were on the album or which orchestra performed them, information that became accessible as I became more at home in my mind, learned to plumb it archival intricacies. As the album replays for me now I am struck by how invariably I find something fresh, some nuance that reaches me for the first time, no matter how often I’ve heard the same recording. I have the sense that Mozart’s mind is suspended as well, as alive as mine and merging with mine as if, utterly acquiescent though I feel while listening, something of me is joining the music, helping in some undeliberate, osmotic way with its creation.

Images often appear when this is happening. It’s Winona Ryder during the Divertimento in D Major finale, whirling on a ballroom floor, black eyes flashing, impertinent face floating above an impossibly complicated assemblage of elegant Victorian fabrics. At some point I’m whirling with

her, her eyes so near mine I can see one of her pupils deliver a lascivious wink.

Then comes the intrusion, when it comes. Most recently it was a mosquito alighting on the tip of Winona’s joyous nose. A smirk on the intruder’s narrow face resembled that of a former employer. At other times it’s a noise, a sneeze, a fart or an odor: fart, halitosis, stale deep-fry grease, bubblegum. On one of these occasions my ex-boss, full bodied and unwinged, cut in on Winona and whirled a time or two with me. These and a myriad other myopic insults arrive often enough during my reveries with Winona that latent annoyance lurks every time nonetheless. A mocking syncopation all the more irritating for its failure to so much as scratch Mozart’s majesty.

But you don’t need me to tell you that. Listen to a proficient rendering of the D Major Divertimento, the finale, seven billion, twelve million, four hundred eighty six thousand six hundred and eleven times or so, and you can see for yourself. If you can find the July 29, 1985 Henry Wood Hall recording by the London Sinfonia, maybe my ex-boss will whirl with you, as well.

I don’t which to leave the impression it’s just the Mozart that starts playing at these nap times. Another regular is Miles Davis’s Bitch’s Brew, a smoky, quietly screaming late night alchemy that had always been a perfect drinking companion. Hearing its shrieks and stalking beat

invariably harks me back to those nights of sauce and solitude, rolling the same riddles around the skull as then but no longer hinting at solutions. The Brew is now largely style, its poignancy at each arrival carrying incrementally less mystique. I’m persuaded that the glimpse of soul Miles ultimately renders is more agreeable than he’d have liked.

Expanding this notion toward the universal, I suspect that eonian scrutiny can leaven all but the subtlest manifestations, that they might be held dispassionately. I suspect that should I reach this point and beyond, to include the subtlest manifestations, then, possibly, whatever has kept the Nissan’s steering wheel from completing its trajectory will lose its impetus and I shall sleep at last the sleep beyond Miles and Amadeus. I am fairly dispassionate about the prospect, but it still tickles.

I’m occupied of late fielding questions. A blizzard of questions, actually, Does everyone end like this? Am I a fluke? So long as I think, I am? Or is it can everyone end like this, perhaps depending on attitude? If I don’t know I’m dying - bullet in the back of the head, stroke - does my mind behave as it is now? Is there in every brain an all-powerful circuit linking every body cell and poised to fire up and take control at the catastrophic instant?

Despite the impossibility of my ever knowing if this message gets through, I’m intrigued by the thought that it shall, no matter how remote the odds.

In an infinite realm, the possible is the rule. Insanity has overtaken me many, many times in this timeless state as I’ve struggled to escape the posit that I everything that’s possible must in fact exist then everything that exists must exist in infinite numbers and variations. As you pluck a

hair from your head there is an infinite number of you in the universe plucking that same hair from their heads, while an infinite number of you are plucking a different hair, and an infinite number of you are plucking no hairs, and the pluckers are plucking an instant ahead of and behind you and two instants and three and on and on. I expect this will drive me mad many, many more times, perhaps an infinite number of times, but right now I am looking at it with the cognitive counterpart of glazed eyes.

Simultaneously, it amuses me to imagine the infinite varieties of myself and of the jackasses who pulled in front of me and the shades of difference in what I did and what they did (and are doing and will do) to make this come out otherwise.

Several seconds either way in my morning routine, or in theirs, and we would have missed each other. A little brighter or quicker on their part, or less irritable on mine. On theirs, to wait until I had passed the intersection before pulling out; on mine, had I gotten laid the night before or that morning I’d have let it go instead of cursing and deliberately coming up fast behind them to teach them a lesson. Had I had the cocoa instead of the coffee for breakfast I might have allowed their inexcusably mindless driving pass without censure and its concomitant retaliation.

Had I then remembered the trick I’d recently discovered for thwarting limbic ambushes of my neocortex, the incantation that seemed to be working to head off emotional seizures and supplant them with calming reason, I might have arrived at work as usual to do whatever the routine was that I did.

I remember even now the incantation that had struck me as so promising when it came to me on a strip of paper from a fortune cookie, but of which I was unmindful when it might have saved me from this ambiguous eternity. A sequence of simple imperative sentences: Be still. Be patient. Be brave. Abide. Forgive. Love.

When I first read them, the almost hypnotic ability of this succession of words to lower my pulse rate and clear my mind eluded explanation. I since surmised that their influence derived from focusing attention on particular anatomical sensories. Be still spoke to the lower part of my brain, the robotic thalamus, which shoots emotional demands up the pipeline. The next two commands interceded further along the reactive network, soothing and reassuring tendrils the first had set atwitter. Patience, the promise that stillness was not abandoned. Bravery, reaching higher to the frontal lobes, reminding that dignity won’t be denied. Abide, another promise, this one that suffering need not be in vain. Forgiveness, of course, is a demand on the cortex proper, this vaulted sanctuary of understanding, an ethereal realm where ideas appear and vie for favor, the only human terrain where communion with a greater consciousness is possible. And, finally, Love. Magic Love, allowing only the wholly surrendered to enter, and then embodying the self, wholly.

My strategic error was not taping the strip of paper from the cookie onto my dashboard. I had taped it somewhere, probably on my computer monitor at work or on the one at home. I imagine it had either lost itsnovelty or hadn’t become imbedded in my mind sufficiently to be there when I needed it most. Else I’d have thought, or even spoken: Be still, when the rage first broke upon me as I grasped that the other car (I never got a good look at it, but I’ve fixed in my emotional memory that it carried at least three old people.) had pulled in front of me and was going too slow for me to avoid having to take measures to keep from ramming it.

Had I remembered Be still, and not been so inattentive myself as to not consider that the roads had become slick from the drizzle I’d have taken my foot off the accelerator and eased around them in gentle spirit. Moreover, had I allowed for the possibility of their unwanted good

intentions (I lumped them together as co-conspirators) I’d have whipped around them sooner, instead of waiting until the final seconds to frighten them, when an instant after I started into my whip they started easing into the same lane into which I was whipping.

And had I allowed for the possibility that these elders were less sluggish than I assumed, I’d have continued trying to get around them on the theory they’d stop drifting into my lane once they saw what I was doing, which is what they did, being so polite as to begin drifting back into the original lane, just as I whipped back into it, leaving me the only remaining maneuver: a jerk of the wheel that sent my car spinning toward the grassy median whereupon it bounced, rolled and scraped along on its top into the path of the truck.

I had my final glimpse of the car that had pulled in front of me as my right rear wheel tripped on the median curb. The other car seemed to be accelerating now. I imagined its occupants watching my demise with a touch of fascination and relief that we hadn’t collided. I suspected the

fleeing car was aglow with a sense of that grateful tingle old folks surely enjoy while watching a reckless punk getting what he deserved.

I wonder who they are. They might be turning around to come back and try to help me. They might be folks I knew or who knew me. I wonder if the truck driver got out of this, or if a moment after me he, too, or she, was suspended in dying mind. It’s all wonder now.

Lessons? Not sure. Maybe analogy: Take the discipline of a football player, a quarterback or receiver. You know you’re going to get hit, but you concentrate on doing your job as if you won’t. Stretch to pull the ball out of its trajectory while enforcing absolute denial of the inevitable

impact of a significant part of a ton of hurtling, hysteria-driven meat and bone desperate to crush the life out of you. More complex, standing in the pocket, surveying a field of predatory tonnage bent on smashing you as you strive to identify a viable distant target and connect with it before the essentially inevitable crunch.

The concept of second efforts fits well here, too, the juking and spinning, the charging ahead, the scrambling to your feet and persisting after being slammed to the ground, the persisting, no matter how bleak seem the odds, right up until the play is whistled dead or until the game clock reaches four zeros. Games showcase the power of attitude over performance. Where the analogy can’t keep up with us is its comfort factor. Winning isn’t everything, said Vince Lombardi, it’s the only thing. If life were a game, we’d all let the coach down, ultimately.

Norman Mailer wrote that it’s all about courage outweighing cowardice in the balance. I liked this idea until it became clear Mailer probably held his liquor better than I. The line too easily blurred for me between brave and foolhardy, chicken and cunning. Mailer thought to settle these quandaries through existential deliberation.

I went on the wagon.

Primrose Lane

2010-02-14T23:00:00.002-05:00

By Clark Kent

prologue

I suspected right away that I had stumbled upon an assassination plot.

Not sure I can explain how I came to suspect this. I don't think I'm psychic, unless you would count the occasional ability when I was younger to start humming a tune an instant before it was played unannounced on the radio. It could have been because the disc jockey had been playing the same sequence of songs so often that I unconsciously memorized the order. Then again...

I wonder now if a related phenomenon was at work to prime me for my immediate recognition that the strange message I'd stumbled onto while snooping through White House email might well be a communication between conspirators in a plot to assassinate my boss, the President.

The President, being the President, of course, was hated by multitudes. In her case the haters constituted right-wingers - both greedy economic giants and bitter proletarian ignoramuses - along with assorted misogynists, misoneists and misologists of all races, ages, income levels, genders and sexual proclivities. Many of them who might otherwise have tolerated her or even offered her grudging respect, were utterly turned off by her refusal to confirm or deny that she occasionally enjoyed a pharmaceutical compound proven clinically to induce female orgasm, which is sold to billions of women world-wide under the trade name Primrose Lane.

Assassination plots ranked a close third behind fund-raising activities and poll results in the President's morning staff meetings. That is, until the President one morning waved an impatient hand at Warren Hendrian, her domestic affairs advisor, to halt his usual litany of plots against her life that were newly discovered, under investigation or recently thwarted by various law enforcement agencies, the primary one being the United States Secret Service, to which, among his many duties, Hendrian served as the President's liaison.

"Warren, enough. Enough already," she said in a tone that hovered dangerously close to scold. "If they're going to kill me, they're going to kill me. I dearly hope our guys are smart enough and good enough to keep that from happening. But if it happens, it happens, and I'm sick of hearing about all the sick and evil people out there who want to do me in. So...," she smiled abruptly, showing a set of even teeth so white they looked like Jimmy Carter's caps, "enough with the lists of all the plots and counterplots and so forth at these little morning get-togethers. OK, darling? We have more important things to talk about, I hope. Adele, what's happening in the jungle? Whose asses do I need to kiss today?"

This effectively ended the routine discussion of assassination plots in the morning meetings, although I, as Chief of Staff, had Hendrian deliver those reports to me so that if nothing else I could adjust the President's schedule to avoid situations that could prove opportune to any of the plotters who had been identified and, I hoped, really were under investigation.

I decided at first not to tell Hendrian what I had discovered. I had several reasons for keeping this card face down. Perhaps most important among them was that he was a pompous ass who would have loved nothing more than to push my face into a pile of my own feces were I dumb enough to show him the pile and then bend over it and wait for him to strike. Which is what I would have been doing had I told him that something I'd stumbled upon while snooping in the purgatory file of the White House email network might be a note from one would-be assassin to another.

My first inclination was to bring in Tonga Cooke, who was chief of the White House technical support team, and a friend. And, or, possibly, Joan Stonebraker, agent-in-charge of the White House Secret Service detail.

For the time being, I worried solo. I did keep a journal during this time, though, partly because I felt frustrated and outraged - not to say terribly vulnerable - that there are still and may ever be serious doubts about the government's integrity in the JFK murder and its investigation. One journal kept by a player in that sad, sorry episode might have contained the key to obviate all of the myriad heavily and meticulously documented theories both proving and disproving the various intricate conspiracies credited for the crime that will haunt Americans for as long as there is an America.

Let us, then, proceed to my journal.

© 2010 by Mathew Paust

If you're not paranoid yet: Shutter Island

2010-02-12T19:01:00.001-05:00

I say this without having seen the movie. Just knowing that Scorcese and DiCaprio are doing it means that Dennis Lehane's incredibly unsettling novel will be done right.

The novel is so ingenious and so cleverly and masterfully written that I was left literally (and I mean literally) gasping at the end. I read in bed before going to sleep, and I swear to you on all that is sacred to me (which doesn't include Congress, SCOTUS, the POTUS or the hokey pokey), that I did not sleep well the night that I read the closing paragraphs of Shutter Island. It should have been called Shudder Island.

I may not sleep well tonight, either, after having dredged up the memory of this fearful, brain-shrieking. weinie-shrinking story. Oh, God...boogidyboogidyboogidy, but Lehane has given us a hauntingly horrible vision with which to contend. Horrible horrible!

Whatever you think of my review, do not read the book first! Please, in the name of all that is holy!! If you do, you'll be afraid to see the movie. I am.

Dump Fatal

2010-02-10T21:35:00.004-05:00

This is the "first chapter" I mentioned in an earlier post about the agent who tried to sell me his course on how to write fiction. I since decided the chapter should be a prologue.

Within seconds after he let up on the gas, Wendell Prine felt the kick against his back. He was not surprised that it happened, but the jolt still startled him. He didn’t bother to check in his rear-view mirror, because he knew it was the white pickup that had just rammed him. Instead, he tightened his grip on the steering wheel and perched his right foot on the clutch pedal, keeping his attention on the approaching side road. At the last second he stomped the clutch to the floor and jammed the transmission into low gear. The engine howled, but the truck’s forward momentum slowed as Prine tapped his brake pedal and put his truck into a sliding turn.

He waited until the truck stopped rocking on its fatigued suspension before he looked in the mirror. The white truck was there. Again, no surprise. But again, his gut clenched. Why was this happening? It was a question that had haunted him since the white truck first appeared a couple of weeks ago, and Prine was no closer to an answer.

But now he was less concerned about an answer. He was more interested in bringing an end to the torment. For this he had a plan. Until just now, when the white truck nudged his rear bumper, the plan had been mostly theory. The bump changed things.

Prine glanced at the loaded .45 pistol beside him on the seat. Bringing it out moments earlier from its hiding place behind his feet, feeling the pistol’s cold heft in his hand, had steadied him at a time when the rising adrenalin in his blood was pushing toward the twin peaks of rage and panic. He’d been uneasy borrowing the gun from his father without asking, but he knew he couldn’t have explained to him why he wanted it. He’d been unable to tell anyone what was happening - not his friends, not his boss, not even his wife. He’d thought more than once about trying to tell her.

“Babe,” he imagined himself saying, “there’s some white dudes in a pickup truck been following me.”

“Say what?” she’d have said. “Some men following you? Ooowee. Dell, you been shaking that cute ass in the wrong place again?” He’d have had the choice then of either insisting that she take him seriously, and scaring the hell out of her, or letting her good humor infect him, and laughing it off.

Whenever his thinking reached this juncture, he opted reflexively for stoicism. As of now, it was bothering only him, he figured. If it was anything to worry about, he’d handle it. If it wasn’t, or if he couldn’t, well, then no sense dragging anybody else into it. He didn’t feel like thinking it through any further than that. The effort just to reach that point, thinking it through to the line beyond which he’d have to start considering someone else’s dignity or safety, used up as much energy as a day on the job. And it always came back to the one simple question. Why?

The first time he’d noticed the white truck it took him awhile before he felt certain its following him wasn’t happenstance. It took the nearly twenty-six miles from his job site to his home, which involved eleven turns, to be sure. As a precaution, he’d continued past his house, and when the other truck stayed on his tail, he led it on a pursuit of random turns and last-second exits until eventually it dropped out. By then his heart was pounding. It pounded long after he assured himself the white truck was gone. A primitive alarm had awakened in him the instant he knew beyond any doubt that the driver of the white truck was deliberately following him.

After losing the white truck the first time, Prine pulled into his driveway and sat behind the wheel to compose himself before going inside to his family. Emotions he hadn’t felt since he was a kid on a school playground - fright, mixed with an odd sense of guilt that he’d done something improper to provoke what was happening - were vying for control.

A queer intimacy had connected him with whoever was in the white truck mocking his dignity. What the hell had he done? He hadn’t pulled in front of the other truck or cut it off in traffic. Had he?

Whoever was behind him had singled him out for some reason. Surely it wasn’t simply racial. Things were subtler these days. Prine hadn’t heard anyone call him a racial slur since high school. Nor did he go out of his way to make race an issue with people. He got along with whites, felt comfortable with most of them. If this was a racial thing, he figured, it has to be some really ignorant or sick son of a bitch, somebody off the ordinary scale. People like that existed, he knew, and the thought sent tremors of dread, alternating with flashing anger, through his bowels.

The intrusion, after permeating his nervous system with its ambivalence, bled into the ambience of his truck’s cab. The little pillow he’d gorilla-glued to the console, for his elbow, the collapsible litter basket under the dash, the shabby face of the dash, the odor - an acrid mix of chemicals and eroding metal, dried mud and old upholstery - embarrassed Prine now with their sentimental frailty.

A scrap of lyric from a Doors song by Jim Morrison wormed its way into Prine’s thoughts as he tried to reason his way through the implications:

There’s a killer on the road,
His brain is squirming like a toad…

Prine had never really felt the lyric’s malignancy until now. Emptied of its comic energy it kindled a different kind of mirth, rich with irony, which enabled him to reach an equipoise between the poles of his emotions. He sat in the truck in his driveway until the squirming of his own mind stilled and his breathing had settled into its regular rhythm, then went into his house and pretended all was well.

When it happened again three days later, then again after nearly a week, he seriously pondered whether he might be losing his mind. He still opted to keep it to himself. He couldn’t go to the police. What would he tell them? He hadn’t seen the truck’s tag number. Hadn’t even seen any faces. All he knew, from what he had glimpsed in his mirror, was that one of the occupants, the driver, wore a cap, while the other seemed to have bushy hair and maybe a beard. He assumed both were men, and he presumed they were white.

This was the fourth time. This time the truck pulled up closer behind Prine than it had previously. His heart leaped form the surge of adrenalin this provoked, making him gasp a couple of times for extra oxygen. He knew he was near to losing control. Then he remembered his father’s gun. Resolve began to gather as he reached under the seat and placed his hand around the heavy piece of steel. He pulled it out and set it on the seat beside him. This action alone seemed to affirm a strategy that was born full-blown almost simultaneously, as if it had been incubating quietly at some sublevel of consciousness awaiting just the right cue to emerge.

Recognition that a line had been crossed gave Prine a sudden clarity that would have been exhilarating under different circumstances. Now, however, understanding in yet another part of his brain the incongruity of what he was doing with everything that he had been up to then and understanding also that what was happening now could redefine all that had come before and drastically alter or conclude what might remain for him, a grim deliberateness took over. Then came the bump, which sealed his fate.

The crossroad Prine had turned onto led into a heavily wooded area broken only by occasional small farms and trailer homes. Winter had stripped most of the leaves from the maples, gums and oaks, creating a limbed webbing around the blots of cedar and scrub pine. Prine’s mind was racing now, but everything else seemed to have slowed or stopped, separated into surreal increments.

He hadn’t gotten a clear view yet of his tormentors, but his imagining how they looked fed his determination to end the terror they were bringing to him: grinning cruelly, stupidly. Yes, he could shoot them. Damned right he could. God damn them to hell. He hadn’t bothered them. They had no God damned right to bother him. The God damned bastards…

He looked for a place to pull off the road for a confrontation. Before he could find one, the white pickup started to pass. Prine could see the passenger window rolling down as the truck drew abreast. He reached for his pistol. Then he saw a flash of something in the other truck’s window. A gold badge in a leather folder. Shit. The bushy-haired man holding the badge motioned Prine to pull off the road. Prine did. He rolled down his window as the cop got out of the other truck. Prine stashed the pistol back under his seat, pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and had his operator’s license and registration in hand by the time the cop, wearing dirty jeans and a faded red plaid shirt, walked up, his breath steaming in the December chill.

The cop was wearing the kind of mirrored sunglasses cops universally seemed to favor. He barely glanced at Prine’s documents before speaking.

“Get out, nigger.”

“Excuse me, officer, what have I done?” said Prine, trying to sound calm, while his brain worked frantically. He felt a giddiness lighten his head as he stared at the double blip that was him in the cop’s reflecting lenses.

“I said get out of the truck, nigger,” the cop snarled, this time jerking his arm back as if reaching for the gun on his hip. Prine was astounded when the cop’s hand came up and stuck a gun through the window. The gun had a huge barrel, which, when his eyes focused on the small hole in its end, Prine realized was a silencer. He experienced an odd detachment as his prostate relaxed and warm urine gushed over his thighs. His spirit froze with the sudden understanding of exactly what was happening and what it was that he had to do, and that he was going to try to do it. Still staring at the grotesque muzzle inches from his face, he rocked forward to grab the gun under his seat, raising his left hand to smack the intruding barrel away. He watched it follow his head. Then, as the fingers of his right hand found the grip of his own pistol and the back of his left hand barely touched the other, he saw a flash of light stab out from the little hole in the center of the massive barrel. He heard nothing. Felt nothing, except a momentary intense itch in his left eye.

The man standing outside Prine’s truck squeezed the trigger three more times, feeling the pistol jump slightly in his hand as it coughed the .22-caliber hollowpoint slugs into Prine’s brain. The body jerked upright and sideways across the seat, then flopped half a dozen times like a landed fish, shoes scraping under the dashboard while the bowels evacuated loudly, sending their stench to overpower the nip of hot gasses from the fired cartridges.

Prine’s executioner waited until the legs and splayed arms ceased their final, shuddering spasms and the body at last was still. Then he opened the truck’s door and knelt beside the body, peering inside the cab until he found the victim’s wallet. He took the money and replaced the license and vehicle registration, then tossed the wallet on the ground. He ripped a gold chain from the dead man’s neck, and climbed into the white pickup, which slung gravel against Prine’s truck as it spun through a U-turn and headed back to the main road.

Winter in Tidewater Virginia

2010-02-07T14:44:00.009-05:00

Second weekend in a row we've had snow. Ten inches last week, more like two or three this time. Here are some shots I took about 10:30 this morning out the windows before the sun starting melting everything.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Facing east into the woods where Tasha and I like to walk.

Facing south

Another south shot - click on photo to see bird in upper quadrant

Click on photo to see bird in lower left third.

Southwest

Big Red escorts Goldie to the theatre

finis

My only interview with Christopher Waltz

2010-02-04T20:48:00.007-05:00

He came down our mile-long gravel lane on a motorcycle. Pretty damned impressive, considering this was two days after The Day We Got Ten Inches of Snow, and the bumpy, curvy lane now had an inch of black ice under two more of slush, all the way from the highway to our front door.

But he seemed no worse for the wear, which was hyperbolically impressive, considering the "stand-in" riding in the sidecar and the "camera crew" in the back of the canvas-covered truck all appeared pale and fairly shaken, as well they should have been. Oddly, they were still wearing costume uniforms from what Waltz described as "a rather glourious film project" of which he graciously declined to provide useful details our family might have enjoyed. I invited him in, of course, as, truth be told, what the hell else could I have done, considering the Luger strapped to his belt and the tensely charming manner with which he presented himself?

"I am not intruding, no?" he purred, smiling guilelessly, but with a hint of a smirk at the corners of his rapacious mouth and unmitigated irony behind his wolfish, penetrating eyes. "My men vill be looking around, viss your permission, of course. Ve are looking, heh heh, for a location for a critical scene in our...ahem...film, you see."

"Uh huh," I answered, tentatively, wishing I hadn't left my cell phone in the bathroom, where I'd been enjoying several moments of primal relaxation when the raucus rumbling of our guests' arrival down the lane had hurried me up, so to speak. Fortunately, Mrs. K and our daughter, were in the front room watching Academy Award preview shows, and were unaware of our unexpected and unusual visitor.

"Perhaps I should introduce myself," he said after a longish pause during which I wondered if I could think of a plausible excuse to slip back into the bathroom and retrieve my only communication with the outside world except for my computer, which was tied up with an ugly shouting match in a comment thread on Open Salon.

"Uh huh, yes," I said, when his question broke through my fragmented attention span.

"Vell, zen, my name ist Colonel Lan...er...nein...I mean non...er, vould you mindt if ve spoke in French? Or Italian, perhaps? Heh heh."

"Look, Mr. Waltz, I recognize you from the newspapers. I'm struggling here just trying to figure out what the hell you're doing in my house. You can speak any language you like, and it won't really matter. I do wish, however, that you would have left that Luger on your belt outside. We have cats and chickens here, and they are terrified of firearms." I was amazed that all of this came blurting out through lips that were on the verge of quivering with uncontrollable misgivings. I took a deep breath as I watched Waltz unsnap his holster and begin to withdraw the dull, black pistol from its keep.

He smiled conspiratorily when he saw the anxiety spread across my face as I started to rise from my chair.

"Neinneinnein...er...nonononono! No need to vorry, Mr. Kent...you are Mr. Kent, of course?" I nodded, jerkily. "Vell, zen, I haf no intention of frightening any of your pets. I just vanted to show you zat zis pistol, vhich I call Giesele, meine fraulein, ist loaded only mit blanks heheheheh. See?" *BANG!!!«•*«¨*•.¸¸BANG!!!*«•*¨*•.¸«¸¸.¸

I dropped to the floor and scrabbled quickly, injuring my knees severely on the transition bump from the hardwood to the tiles toward the next room. With a quick glance, I observed that my wife and daughter were laughing at something on the TV and evidently still remained unaware of the bizarre episode transpiring in the dining area off the kitchen. Taking this as a sign that either I had gone mad or that this whole...whatever the hell it was, was the result of those damned strange-looking mushrooms Mrs. K had brought home from the little farmer's market down the road with the huge peace symbol on the roof, which I had eaten fried with a Vidalia onion for lunch and which may also have been the reason why I'd been on the thundermug when...whatever.

Outta sight, outta mind, I figured, as I glanced up to see Waltz struggling with his pistol, which apparently had jammed. Clambering to my feet, I skedaddled down the short hallway to the front door and burst into the frigid February afternoon, from whence I ran like the wind toward and into the nearby woods.

I damned near smacked into a tree turning back to see if anyone might be following me. I saw nuttink, as Waltz or Schultz or Scheisskopf might have said, but I kept running, through the briars and the brambles, running through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go. I ran so fast that the hounds, had there been any, couldn't catch me. Hell, I'da run down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, had that been in the cards.

Fortunately, I remembered I had my iPad with me all along, or I wouldn't be able to post this account of this encounter. Still don't know what's happening back home, although I just now heard some inglourious laughter wafting through the trees. Ahhh, let's get this damned Oscar horseshit over with, jawohl?

Holiness of Low Expectations

2010-01-30T21:48:00.001-05:00

My spiritual evolution has worked its way from mandatory Lutheranism to voluntary Christianity to atheism to agnosticism to Existentialism to Unitarianism to a half-assed Buddhism to a sort of half-blind ecumenicism to where I am now, which is a purely defensive approach, sort of the religious equivalent of an Asian-based martial arts discipline, such as jiu jitsu, in which, as I understand it, the opponent‘s strength plays to your advantage.

I grew tired of life intruding on whatever spiritual discipline I tried to follow in search of redemption. My first disillusionment came at a tender age when a Sunday school teacher scoffed at my mention of an article in the current issue of Life Magazine that seemed to refute the teacher’s strict biblical interpretation that Adam and Eve had lived only several thousand years ago instead of eons. Evidently pre-ordained to be a newspaperman, I found the Life article more credible than the teacher, and my Christianity took one huge and nearly fatal hit right then and there.

That’s when I initiated a personal relationship with a forgiving, ethereal presence I considered to be God, despite the authoritative natterings of Lutheran authorities, who also insisted that I was courting evil by joining the Boy Scouts. “You could be praying next to somebody who worships trees,” said the exasperated son of the Lutheran school principal, who stared at me incredulously as though suspecting some nondescript heathen had already converted me to worship the Devil Tree.

“Isn’t it more likely, I responded, frightening him with my audacity, “that our God, being the creator of you and me and the Boy Scout and the trees that he’s worshiping, would forgive him for such a mistake? If I‘m praying to God, shouldn’t God know I‘m not praying to a tree?” Mortified mute, the kid scurried away and ratted me out to his father, who soon visited our home with his immediate boss, the minister, to chat up my parents, a significant, ecclesiastically tactical mistake. My father, a lawyer and an avowed atheist (my mother was the Lutheran), told them to hit the road or he would cease paying our annual church dues and would sue their asses if they didn’t leave us alone, henceforth. Henceforth, they did.

It’s probably a wonder my dad’s scoffing influence didn’t nip in the bud any further spiritual exploration I might have considered. Actually, considering the largely unhappy filial relationship we endured throughout his life, contrasted with my mother’s inherent sweetness and the quiet, unpretentious celebration of her Lutheran faith, his cynicism (for that’s what it was, the classic romantic’s bitter disenchantment with reality) might have subliminally spurred me to keep a pilot light flickering as I felt the incremental descent from my own fierce romantic nature toward a landing that I somehow knew I should dread.

Along the way I learned sarcasm and denial. I told a literary friend years ago that what I sought as my ultimate denouement in life was smugness. The off-the cuff remark made us laugh because we knew that by recognizing this secret craving in our nature we were hoping to immunize ourselves from such gracelessness. Yet, over the years since then I’ve found myself from time to time agloat in the very real sensation that at a particular moment my shit in fact did not stink. The sensation was intoxicating and, as we know from the myriad examples of people with corporeal power, it is quite habit forming and with all but a pitiful handful of saintly folks, ultimately beastial. The abrupt ego deflation that always follows such momentary delusions of adequacy turns me inward to see if the pilot light still burns. It hasn’t failed me yet. Its glimmer has always set me back on the meandering path that’s brought me to where I am at this moment.

Life punches. It throws jabs, it kicks in the groin, stabs in the back, viciously claps powerful palms against both ears and pokes sticks in the eyes. Life hurts. The kinds of religious disciplines that require concentration and unwavering focus failed me because of my attention deficit disorder. I know that now. Wish I’d known it at the time I spent long hours struggling to keep my head on course and failing often enough that I never gained any confidence in the techniques, and then ultimately gave up on the theological theories behind them. I drifted from meditative detachment back to the supplicating approach of my childhood - abject prayer.

It was easier than ohhming or trying to focus on nothingness. With ADD no matter how hard you try you can’t clear your head of all the signals coming in and then setting up housekeeping. You don’t have the control over thoughts that a proper brain gives you. Prayer is more assertive, more dominating. But it also must make sense, or seem to make sense. Do we pray to God to save us from life's miseries? I’ve tried that. It didn’t work, that I know of. Do we pray to God to give us strength to endure life’s blows? I've tried that. Sometimes it seemed to help. Problem is, you’ve got to believe in an anthropomorphic God - really believe, that is - in order for such prayer to help. The times I’ve believed that it helped I was able to convince myself that I believed that God personally gave a shit about me and would give me the strength that I needed. Later, I would suspect that I’d merely hoodwinked myself. Maybe I did, maybe not, but what I took from those experiences was the knowledge that even if I had scammed myself, such a procedure was good to know. I set out to perfect the technique in a way that would enable me to fend off life’s unwelcome intrusions whenever necessary without disrespecting my rational mind. Not easy. Not an overnight project. It’s taken me years, but I have come up with some tools.

So, gather ‘round, disciples. Here’s the short version of my religion, as it stands to date:

Holy. It’s the base word. The only concept from all of my religious efforts that still holds power. Not sure why. Maybe because it’s easy to remember, because it’s incredibly simple, or because it harkens back to the metaphysical roots that may have taken hold in me before I had any idea what the hell was going on. Holy. All I can say is that when I think the word, pronounce it in my mind, it instantly calms me. Then, when skepticism almost immediately encroaches, I think to myself, “Do I believe that holy is real? Well, do I?” Then, whether I believe it’s real or not, if I say, “Yes, I believe holy is real,” then I in fact do believe that it is real. I go through this little drill whenever there seems to be some doubt. It’s always worked for me.

In the long version of my explanation I get into the concept that the word is a talismanic link to the Collective Unconscious, which I capitalize because to me the C.U. is what others call God. I don’t consider it in the strictly Jungian sense as a biological entity, but with a little of Plato’s metaphysical Universal Mind thrown in for good measure.

I’ve settled on several words and phrases that I’ve determined to be holy, because they repeatedly get me out of jams and calm me as much as the base word itself. The words are patience, low expectations, you are a fucking idiot and gratitude.

Someone gets in my face. My immediate reaction is intensely emotional, because that’s the way I’m wired. I take a deep breath and think, “patience,” and this suppresses the rage until my rational engine kicks in, and when reasoning begins, the rage gradually slinks back into its cage. If the assault on my ego is so great that patience seems a pusillanimous response, I wheel out “you are a fucking idiot,” which has not failed me yet. All this, while breathing steadily and either smiling brightly or keeping the face calm and stony.

The gratitude comes in as a reminder that no matter how displeased by circumstances I happen to be, I am, truth be known, really grateful that things aren’t, as they well could be, a whole helluva lot worse. Just saying “gratitude” is enough. Its implications are well known to me and filter throughout my sensibility without need of mini-lectures and efforts to compile lists of all of my blessings. Just the word by itself. Does the trick.

Low expectations joins the fight when frustration, disappointment and downright discouragement loom near. It instantly triggers the realization that high expectations are the exclusive property of employers at performance evaluations, and are usually bogus.

Smugness can seem almost within our grasp when we don’t expect much more in life than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Amen.

That's the news, and I...am...outta here!

2010-01-27T23:43:00.006-05:00

But first, the headlines - that is, for those who still read nyewspapers. This from an Internet email:

Do you run the country? Think about it. Think hard about it. You do? Run the country? For real? Just checking. Well, then, according to a federally funded study conducted recently by Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, your nyewspaper of choice happens to be The Wall Street Journal. But you knyew that.

Think you run the country? Probably, if you're watching this show. Hey, how 'bout The Washington Post. That wasn't a question.

You say you're good with crosswords and you think you ought to run the country? Hands down. New York Times. See? Damned good study!

Awright, now it's getting tougher. You read USA Today. The study shows that you think you ought to run the country but you don't have time for the Times. You don't have time for statistics, either, unless they're displayed in pie charts. You're amazed by this, I'm sure.

That was the New York Times. There are other Timeses, such as the Los Angeles Times. That's the one you read? Ahhhh cool, dude! You wouldn't mind running the country, would you? If you could find the time, of course, and if you didn't have to leave Southern California. Maaaan!

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you read The Boston Globe. Don't forget the The, by the way. You read it quietly and at home, don't you? That's because your parents used to run the country, but they got blasé, didn't they, and pretty soon they were out the door? Uh huh. Thank you.

OK, let's get some new blood in here. You read the New York Daily News (forget the The and the New York). You aren't positively absolutely sure just who in hell is running the country and you don't give a fat cahoot, either, do you? Getting a seat on the commuter train makes your day. Hey, huh?

Oops! Running outta time? Okey dokey, moving along then:

New York Post - You don't give a fat cahoot who's running what, so long as they do something scandalous, preferably while shitfaced drunk. We know.

Miami Herald - You're running some other country but you need the baseball scores and jai alai results, like fast.

You aren't sure there is a country or that anyone is running it, but, if there is and there is, you oppose all that they stand for. There's the occasional exception, if, for example, the leaders are handicapped, minority, feminist, atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided, of course, that they are not Republicans. Your paper? Drumroll....need you ask?? Cymbal clash: San Francisco Chronicle, moron!

Quickly now:

National Enquirer - It's OK. You're trapped in the Wal-Mart checkout line.

Last one...wheeee! You've caught a fish, and you desperately need something in which to wrap the sucker. Whattaya grab for? You could insert the name of your least favorite local news rag here, or you could pick the default - the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Why? Must be where the person who wrote the email is from. Do I look like I should know? Or care?

Hey! That's it, folks! That really is the news, and now, for tonight anyway, I...am...outta here!

Stuck my nose in a gun discussion by hoplophobes

2010-01-27T15:24:00.002-05:00

This is a discussion today in the mostly liberal blog community Open Salon. Up to now, I've been avoiding controversy over there, blogging on the site because it's a good place for writers to try out their stuff and get instant feedback. I just couldn't resist jumping into this one:

"Being pretty much a pacifist, I am horrified by my son's fixation on guns - Airsoft guns, which shoot plastic pellets, paintball guns, and virtual guns used to shoot aliens/enemies/glitches via Xbox. Not having fallen freshly from the turnip truck, I am aware of the mass of data showing that exposure to meaningless violence in games, television and movies can desensitize children to its true horrors. I also know that many families choose not to allow their children to have toy guns or violent games, and that sometimes they are just the tiniest bit smug about their triumphs as I writhe in silent agony knowing that my kid is at his friend Troy's house with his arsenal, darting around corners in hopes of a successful ambush. "Oh," they will say, when I confess,"Sam has guns." Even in the blandest of tones, this translates to: "we would never let our children have toy guns and we would never let them play war games on Xbox and your son is on his way to being caught in abandoned shed in Idaho after mailing carefully crafted bombs to 30 innocent people."

Here's link to the blog post/comments: A Hello to Arms

Favre Should Never Retire! Ever!

2010-01-27T10:53:00.008-05:00

He should stay in the game until it's over, for good. In his true heart, Favre would want it this way. To be hauled off the field on the cart, twitching in agony, blood morphing the green and gold to a ghastly rust, something critically, irretrievably broken, shattered, clear to all who see that he will never put the pads on again should he ever make it out of the hospital and then live long enough to have such a ludicrous choice.

It's the only way this drama can end with dignity, if life is indeed an allegory for football. Life, the extended game, boundaryless, referee free, timed only by the hidden clock, fraught with dangers, bountiful with options and opportunities to beat the moment, slip the rush, grab some glory, dance and leap into the arms of vicarious cohorts.

Nobody gets out of Life alive. Why should it be any different with football, the rendered down, compressed microequivalent in which boardroom power plays and household management require actual smashmouth contact, flea-flicking agility, laser focus and lightning mental calculations?

Something as grand as the game itself should accompany the exit of participants from this condensed, real-time Life, a kind of valedictory reward beyond the usual, something that allows them to limp back into the macro Life in a manner less suggestive of Death than the graceless fade. A syncopation of some gentler kind, a fare-thee-well bye before they join the rest of us in the boneyard. Calling it simply "retirement" is too mundane.

Retirement for Brett Favre? Oh, mercy. From what we know of him, besides tending to his family and various charities, and football, of course, he's happiest mowing his lawn. He loves to ride and ride on his lawn tractor, cutting grass, possibly with an earplug piping good ol' shit-stompin' redneck honky tonk kickass chords and riffs and hell-raisin' lyrics to soothe the brain that no longer needs to fret over defensive coverages and blitzes and what the fuck are those dad-blasted receivers doing over there!

He'd be tired to death of it in a month or two. He'd be sending out feelers and fielding calls from "friends" to try to get some shit going before fall. No matter how old he was. No matter how hard it would be to get a decent grip on a football, much less get it to anybody through the air. No matter hard it would be just walking up the goddamned stairs to the attic, and then, jayzuz, all the way back down without a knee buckling or a nerve along the hip sending another warning that any minute now it would shut down some lower muscle systems and then he'd be so fucking sorry.

Not Life. Not for Favre. No way. He'd want to be back on the field, shaking off the infirmities of age and willing his youthful heart back into the real game, the one of magnificent stakes, where losing is no option so long as he can stand and see and breathe. He'll find a way.

Let the man play!

Political Discourse: Preaching or Screeching, no Art

2010-01-25T21:48:00.006-05:00

Obama!~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Yomama!!

I love to talk politics. Problem is it's hard to find anybody anymore to do it with. Everybody knows it all, has his or her mind made up. No doubts, no questions, full of passionate intensity. Except me.

Everybody's become an ideologue, it seems. This leaves no room, really, for debate. You can preach happily to a friendly choir or you can sling delicious sarcasm, ridicule and snot at the others.

There's not even any room anymore to ask innocent questions - I mean real innocent questions, not the smarmy kind that are really from an agenda intended to test which side you're really on.

try this:

Has he said he would do that?

See what I mean? That's a liberal question!

Huh? No, I was just asking...

Just asking, shit!! That's a goddam socialist liberal fucking question!!! I knew it, with those fucking Birkenstocks and the goddam purple turtleneck and shit. You're a communist!!! A goddam traitor communist bastard!!!

or this:

Is that true about Nancy Pelosi demanding her own government jet? I mean...

Oh, you must watch Fox. Are you a Palin...er, devotee, too? [turns to friend; they exchange smirks]

Huh? No, I was just asking...

Excuse me!

But I...

Excuse me!!

I was just ask...

EXCUSE ME!!! That's better. Now, I'm trying not to be judgmental here, but you are a guest in our home. I think you should remember that.

~~~~~

Granted, these are not examples of political discourse, because discourse, as I'm intending it, would require the participants to have fairly open minds. Maybe the ones asking the questions could have a civil chat, but they are imaginary. I haven't run across many people who don't have their minds already clamped down and sealed on at least one viewpoint of the day's contentious national issues.

Understandably, how could anybodyexpect to converse intelligently about the economy, foreign policy, immigration or health care, for starters without being a Washington insider or an academic with credentials in the area of the topic being discussed?

Would it help any to have the entire health care reform bill, with all its amendments and variations completely memorized, beyond being able to dazzle your listener and better seduce him or her to your position on health care reform? Probably not, if the listener has already decided yay or nay, come what may.

I like to listen to the pundits on the NPR-aired show Left, Right & Center, who speak intelligently, with good, factual backgrounding and who make reasonable arguments on various sides of the major issues. They represent the positions so named and they invariably represent these positions without giving an inch of ground. But they do it civilly and with good humor. They don't influence my thinking other than to stimulate me to think and to recognize how persuasive people with an agenda can be to someone less informed, less mentally agile and less articulate.

In other words, it's a game.

The kind of political discourse I enjoy is about the game, not the stakes. In other words, the practical side of politics, where a cynical eye can be vital.

It comes down simply to tactics and strategy. No need for smarm or snark or sneer or shout. These only annoy.

Ultimately winning the game is what it's all about.

Hello...anybody home? Hellooo...

2010-01-18T19:37:00.007-05:00

I couldn't blame you for abandoning this blog, because that's almost what I've done.
I had hoped I was kidding in the previous post, claiming to have been abducted by Open Salon but with every intention of keeping up Gun Friendly and First Shot.

I still do.

But Open Salon is seductive, and I've just about lost it over there, with so much incredibly good stuff to read and an audience to read my stuff, with almost instantaneous feedback. I'm not criticizing youz guyz for not providing instantaneous (geez, that's hard to type!) feedback over here and on First Shot. I'm happy that anybody even bothers to check this place out at all, especially in light of my dereliction this past month - PAST MONTH?? Yeah, 'fraid so.

But I'm back, and will try to get back here every day henceforth. I've even finally posted Chapter Sixteen! Can you believe it? Waiting so long with that is almost inexcusable, except that I was so distracted over at Open Salon that I could hardly put my mind to anything else.

I hate to admit it, but the main reason I'm back here right now and that I was able to finish Chapter Sixteen, is that Open Salon has been down all afternoon. First time that's happened since I started dallying over there, and maybe a good thing to happen every now and again.

So please accept my humble apology for neglecting these sites, and if you are happening to read this, you have my deepest gratitude.

I'm not cheating on you!

2010-01-05T18:47:00.007-05:00

OK, here's what happened. I got into a spirited discussion on Ed Gorman's blog about whether Amazon and its goddamned Kindle will put honest publishers and booksellers, and, with the old trickle-down trick, writers, out of business. One of the participants was Peter Winkler, a writer who has a blog over on Open Salon. So I went over there to check out his blog, and...um, there was this cute little redhead...um...oh, you know. Hey, I'm just pulling your legs!

But what there is over there are so damned many good writers and interesting personalities that I almost forgot about you guys, my loyal readers, my true friends. Almost. I mean, sure, OK, I did start up a blog at Open Salon to see if I could keep up with these guys in the fast lane. And let me tell you, it is the fast lane. Whew! I can't begin to keep up just with the reading, and then just keeping up with the postings of those writers whose works I've gotten to know over there. Stuff gets posted, it seems, every couple of minutes. I'll give you a link here to one of the best examples that come immediately to mind, but there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of excellent writings being posted over there. Every time I refresh the homepage a bunch of new shit is there! It's a goddamned buzzing beehive of literary activity, from comic to tragic to silly to profound to stuff so complex and interesting that I have to go back and read it a couple of times to not only get it but to fully appreciate it's incredible magnificence!

Here, read this. I had to take a break after I read it the first time. It should win a Pulitzer.

But that's just the postings. Then there are the comments. Whew! Some debates have gotten so heated in the comment section that I've had to pour ice water on my monitor. I stay out of that shit, tho, believe me! Well, let's say I try to stay out of that shit. It's an open community, but some of these folks have been there awhile, and thus the usual cliques and anti-cliques roam the place and do battle. But they also commiserate and send positive energy to members who need a cyberhug or who are facing serious health issues. In these instances it's like a giant extended family. And as a family it has its goodies and its baddies and its stars and its embarrassments and its betrayers and its loyalties, its mamas and papas and enfant terribles and, well, just plain unruly brats. Even my inner brat Buford has been mentioned and is considering an appearance there one day soon. You guys probly should call in sick on that day. I probly should, too.

Forgot about you guys? Hell, no. I thought about you all the time I was meeting new friends over there, wishing I could bring you along. Wait a minute! I can! Just click on this, and you'll be there! It'll be like stepping thru Alice's mirror. You might not even wanna come back. They might not wanna let you come back. But if that happens, all you hafta do is find my blog over there and click on this, and you'll be home!

Yeah, I know I've been neglecting First Shot, too, and I feel rotten about it. But I'm almost finished with Chapter Sixteen, and will post it either tonite or early tomorrow. Promise.

Still love me?

We have a winner!!!

2010-01-01T08:17:00.006-05:00

David Cranmer picked up the challenge of finding the answer to why Herman Melville hyphenated the title of his masterpiece, the great American novel, Moby-Dick. Here's what David found on ye olde Internet:

I found this online so it has to be the truth right?

Hyphens were more widely used in the nineteenth century. Did you know, for example, that Herman Melville hyphenated the title of his most famous novel? He called it Moby-Dick. In many cases, the hyphens are no longer used. They either have gone back to be two words or have become one word. A lot of biological names that were hyphenated and no longer are. For example, the common North American woodland plant the May apple used to be hyphenated most of the time; nowadays, it seldom is.

So I guess the answer is it's dated.

Thanx a bunch Dave! I wish I'd have found your answer last nite before I turned in, so I would've gotten a little sleep instead of tossing, turning, tossing some more and fretting up a storm over that irritating, nagging, torturous question. So perplexed was I over this issue that I hadn't even thought up a prize for the winner. Yet, you did it anyway! All the more deserving of a prize, altho, ashamedly, I still haven't come up with one.

Happy New Year to you, friend!

BTW, loyal readers, if you're considering treating yourself to a blog adventure that's unusual and fascinating, check out David's site - The Education of a Pulp Writer. But be careful, it's addictive!

Sorry about the dingbats

2009-12-31T21:28:00.005-05:00

Thanx to og for pointing it out. I knew I was using the webding font, but only because it was easier for me to read - I may well be a dingbat, but on my machine it came up here looking more like comic sans, which I don't have as an option. Anyway, I shall go back and make everything legible again.

My apologies for the confusion!

Save your ammo tonight!

2009-12-31T15:08:00.021-05:00

When midnight comes, just walk outside and yell, BOOM! The neighbors will understand. 'Til 'aught ten, then!

No author this week...or maybe next...

2009-12-31T11:21:00.022-05:00

OK! OK!! OK!!! Stop flooding me with emails demanding a new Author-of-the-Week already! You should be able to deduce from what I am posting here that I've been busy trolling on other blogs and dealing with Holiday Spirit issues.

And, of course, there's Moby-Dick. I'll do an update on The Great American Novel just as soon as Ahab makes his appearance - possibly in the next chapter, or the one after that...Lord, but this book doth amble along, but I knew that going in, so I'm not complaining, just noting it for those of you who haven't yet dipped a tepid toe into that roiling sea of verbiage.

I received oodles of books for Christmas and for other, more personal, occasions.

One, for my birthday from my daughter, is Mitch Albom's have a little faith, a sweet, modest memoir on the order of and by the same sportswriter who gave us Tuesdays with Morrie, a sweet, modest remembrance of spending time with an interesting dying old fart, which I enjoyed. I take a sip or two of have a little faith (the ee cummings affectation being a tad annoying, to my prickly taste) after a long draught of Moby- each night before turning off the bedside lamp and floating away on my own internal seas, an agreeable combination that will end shortly, I know, as Albom's book will long have been devoured whilst the Pequod keeps a'luffing. What I shall do then is another story, not for now.

One last question, which I should research myself but, in the interest of communal participation, I'm tossing out to youz guyz: Why is Moby-Dick hyphenated? And don't nobody dare come back with something like, well, when Helen Moby married Dave Dick, she wanted to keep her maiden name yada yada... OK? Thanks.

What the...?

2009-12-30T08:13:00.024-05:00

Ran into a long, well-thought-out perspective on Ayn Rand yesterday on Charlie Stella's blog, and then, same day, entered a discussion on Rand and John D. MacDonald at Ed Gorman's blog, where I noted jokingly that Rand was in fact William F. Buckley Jr. wearing a hippy wig.

My observation met predictably with the equivalent of a less-than-amused Buckley sniff. Well, actually, it met with no response whatever, possibly because the other posters thought I was being snarky. Can't imagine why. There's also the chance that no one wished to venture into such a potentially tripwired thought because Ed's blog included no photos with which to make a comparison.

Well, by cracky, here are a couple of photos, a..and I was right!

Here are a couple more:

A bonus irony: Buckley vanquished Rand's "philosophy" among conservative intellectuals, and Rand threatened to take him outside and "whup" his "skinny ass."

Come ze revolution?

2009-12-29T11:29:00.006-05:00

Check out this video of Lt. Col. Allen West, a congressional candidate in Florida. He's got the "holy shit" factor down pretty pat.

Here's his website.

Sherlock Schmerlock

2009-12-29T09:39:00.014-05:00

(Skip my drivel by clicking here to read the review by Ken Levine that pretty much says what I would have said if I'd have said it first...well, then again, there's this review by "Alex K." of Ruthless Reviews. I enjoyed reading it almost as much as watching the movie. Evidently I still have some exploring to do before I can say with confidence that I know my own mind!)

I always hesitate a millisecond before posting anything about a movie I've seen, because movies these days seem to push so many politically or ideologically charged buttons, i.e. the movie's not PC, the story's not PC, the director's a commie or a nazi, one or more of the actors is/are a louse-laden liberal or a vicious, vermin-torturing fascist, and so forth.

I'm here to say I usually don't give a rat's ass about these opinions, except that occasionally a particular actor, such as Smartalec Baldwin, Sean Penncildick, Barbra Strident, George Clowney and Christian Bratboy Bale, persuades me to despise him or her - as people. But I don't hafta deal with them as people, as they're only actors. Unfortunately some of them are pretty good actors, so, despite disliking them personally, I will not refuse to watch a movie they're in if I believe the movie is likely to be pretty good.

Usually I don't pay any attention to the politics of actors, because, after all, they're only actors. Now and again one of them manages to thrust himself or herself out of the world of make-believe and into our faces with their smug, spoiled, cliche-ridden political views so that we can't ignore them. If these little forays into reality become too intrusive, they detract from my ability to suspend disbelief enuf to be able to enjoy their performance on camera no matter how skillful it might be. And then I will skip their fucking movie, at least until it comes out on Netflix and they won't get paid as much from my pocket.

I don't know if Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are liberal idiots or fascist idiots or even whether they're any kind of idiot. I do know that Downey has made an ass of himself on several occasions because of the demon booze, but, then, in my younger days - much younger days - so have I. I've enjoyed both Downey's and Law's performances in previous movies, and I enjoyed their performances last night in Sherlock Holmes.

There was something missing about this Sherlock Holmes, tho, which bothered me a little until I read the reviews linked to in my disclaimer above. Probably a good thing I'm not a movie reviewer.

Back to the tribe?

2009-12-28T10:36:00.015-05:00

(Click here to skip my diatribe and proceed directly to the WSJ article: "Can We Rescue the Republic Before the Dark Politics Take Over?" which inspired this post.)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- W.B. Yeats

I surely hope Yeats was merely feeling down in the dumps when he wrote that, and wasn't working from a hellishly true glimpse of the future. Yet, more and more these days I get the sense that "the blood-dimmed tide" is in fact "loosed," and that everywhere indeed "the ceremony of innocence" is drowning, and just reading that "the worst are full of passionate intensity" sends chills up my spine.

I say this because there sure as hell is a lot of passionate intensity being hurled about, and I include myself among the hurlers, as now and again something pisses me off so egregiously that my choice of words in general discourse deteriorates to that found in basic military training regimens.

It's beginning to look to me as if trust in the very framework of our noble experiment, i.e. the constitutionally defined democratic republic that offers us a balance of powers to ensure that the will of the majority shall prevail without squashing the rights of the minority, is virtually kaput, and that the framework itself is becoming, if it hasn't already become to those who should know, a quaint idea that's been hopelessly outmoded by a technology that enables those with the most power to do whatever the hell they please regardless of what anybody else thinks, including their own mothers.

So where does this leave us little people if it's true? We can fight, and die quickly, gloriously and insignificantly, or we can hide in denial and pretend it ain't so and imagine we're enjoying the drugs and cheap entertainment tossed our way to keep whatever discontent we discover from rising any higher than a whine as we focus on the thrill of our ride in the bucket that's taking us straight to hell, or we can form tribes of like-minded folks willing to do whatever it takes for the tribe to prevail against the predators that virtually everyone outside the tribe then becomes.

I've a sense that this last is already underway. The only catch I see with the idea is the like-mindedness part. Tribe members would have to subscribe to some fundamental principles and rules.

Any ideas? Oh, I don't know. Perhaps something along the lines of, "We the members of the Weain'tbuyinyershit Nation, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish these principles and rules for our tribe, to wit..."

It's a thought.

Google toilet?

2009-12-27T10:25:00.027-05:00

(Click here to evade my rant and go directly to the YouTube video that will make you laff as it scares the living crap out of you. You may then return to the rant, if you like, for a little comfort.)

I try to avoid conspiracy theories and paranoid outlooks, not because they're not fun, because they can be. I avoid them because they can also be addictive, which means, for me anyway, there's most often a crash that follows the exhilaration of thinking you're onto something big.

I've dabbled enuf with conspiracy theories to know the dangers therein - the biggest, for me being that when I was paid to find nefarious linkages as a news reporter, finding none worth reporting meant I'd wasted a lot of time. Worse than that was the nagging suspicion that I'd wasted time bumbling, that if I'd only looked harder here or there or asked these questions before asking those questions or been smart enuf to understand what the hell I was reading or where to look to find something better to read I might have actually found the linkages that would have been worth reporting.

If anything good came of this vocation, other than the meager pay and the occasional conspiracy I actually did manage to nail down and present to our readers, is a jaundiced skepticism when presented with anything that even looks remotely as if it could be part of a conspiracy. This skepticism even extends to an acceptance that there might well be a conspiracy here or there, but that most conspiracies are damned hard to prove and even if they are most people could care less about trying to do anything about them.

My vocationally trained skepticism ultimately isn't a helluva lot more notable than the kind of so-what-I-have-my-own-problems-so-fuck-off attitude that most people display when confronted with what appears to be evidence of something vaguely or even explicitly sinister that should rile them if they want to be good citizens or at least to help protect their constitutional rights or their descendants' well being or the well being of the United States of America. There's not a lot of difference between my vocationally trained skepticism and the denial most people willingly accept so long as the wolf stays the hell away from their door.

This is where so many erudites these days love to say, "That said,..." which means I will not say it, not because I don't consider myself erudite, but because I still cling to the perhaps naive belief that intelligent people should try to avoid sounding more intelligent than thou by using an au courant expression that people who try to sound more intelligent than thou invariably use. More revealing, it's redundant. Therefore I shall say nonetheless (which is an old enuf expression that it's not only no longer vogue but sounds stiff to the hip neo-intellectual, who, if nothing else, would sooner be caught reading Dan Brown than sound stiff to his or her peers).

Nonetheless, then, I'm presenting this link to the Google Toilet sketch on YouTube, which actually does scare me a little, mainly because it's quite possibly too close for comfort in its prophecy and in my own sense that I'm probly not gonna do squat about it. It's probly too late, anyway. I think the bast'ds have us where they want us and we're already on our way to hell in a bucket, baby, so we might as well enjoy the ride.

Ah, the magic's gone...

2009-12-26T18:00:00.002-05:00

Doesn't take much, really. Just a news account of the latest Islamic asshole with a taste for 71 virgins and a hatred for the U.S. of A. See it here, unless you'd like to keep the holiday spirit alive a little longer. It's a shame the spirit and reality can't get along for a couple of days, but maybe that's why it's called "reality."

Ah, the magic!

2009-12-24T09:35:00.011-05:00

It arrived last night, when the family cleared up a misunderstanding. This was worth, to me, more than all the Christmas Eves I can remember, packed together into one bundle.

A gentleness, a lightness, is here now. Bustlings and little noises - things that ordinarily bug me - at the moment bring smiles to my heart. This sense, this spirit, won't last long, I know, but I've experienced enough Christmas Eves to know also that no amount of reflection or analysis, trying to write it down, will have the slightest effect on it or enable me to recapture it at any other time. It's here now. Let it be.

It helped (it always helps) to read Brigid's eloquent words this morning, which she posted in the wee hours about having to leave home on an assignment and how exciting this was and how it also took her back in time to other road trips, short and not so short, with flashes of lingering youth and its music and curiosity and anticipation of more to come.

It helped not to check the Drudge page or other news sites to see the gloating and mendacity of those involved in a Senate bill that was supposed to be voted on this morning and which I shan't even name here to avoid stimulating too many unneeded gastric fluids so early.

What left to do? Quick trips, to the dump and Wally World. Pick up a few items - beer, a decent after-dinner wine (port or sherry), gift tags and one last gift.

A brief look around: everyone's in relatively good health, tranquility settles as spirits rise and loved ones forever gone are in our hearts, their essences rendered by distance and more poignant than ever. Peace is here.

Blessings to all.

YIPPEEEE!!!

2009-12-22T15:05:00.017-05:00

It amazes me that something so simple as completing an undesirable task can make me feel so good. The Christmas cards are done. In the mail. I sent them only to those from whom I've already gotten cards this year, so I expect to be mailing a few more yet during the season. But this is the first I can remember getting the returns out in time to reasonably expect them to arrive before Christmas.

I feel renewed and invigorated. OK, I feel joyous. And a little embarrassed to have discovered, live and online, how easily my traditional dark pre-Christmas mood can be lifted and me converted into a leaping, heel-clicking, saliva-spewing, loving-if-not-lovable Yuletide fool.

At least Scrooge had to undergo the trauma of the ghostly visits. All I had to do was scribble on some Christmas cards and stick them in the mail slot. Our oldest, who is working on his Ph.D. in psychology, could probly give me some educated explanations for this pathetic turn of events. But I shan't give him the chance. This must remain a secret between me and you, my trillions of readers (sorry, on my drive to the Post Office and back I listened to economists on NPR discussing the deficit, numbers that ordinarily would have plunged me back into the depths of seasonal humbuggery, but not today hahahahaha).

So, then, apparently it didn't have a whit to do with juxtapositions of anything - pagan tradition and the Nativity, or childhood expectations versus adult responsibility, as I'd wondered. And, besides, who's to say the old pagans (as opposed to the new pagans, or Wiccans) were any more greedy than modern Christians? Hypocrisy abounds everywhere, and, truthfully, only pisses me off when I spot it in others. So this was clearly a red herring in my quest for an answer. No, people, I hate like hell to admit it, but, because I've thrust my inquiry out onto the great Algorian network of ego basking, admit it I must. Just plain laziness.(You've no idea how hard it is for me to own up to this!)

I could try to rationalize it by arguing plaintively that getting ready for the Christmas holiday throws everything into a flux, with so many sudden annual chores and necessities and time-wasting visits and running hither and thither and making lists and checking them twice and thrice and Packer games coming right when I've planned to do the damned cards, and movies to see and on and on and on. But I know you're not buying this, as I no longer can, now that know my Grinchery Scroogery funkadoodle is a product simply of inertia, plus, I suppose, a sense that the card tradition has outlived its time, what with Algorian networking and all.

But it hasn't really. Once I plunged into my cards I began to enjoy writing the little nothing messages and addressing and licking the envelopes and affixing the pretty Christmas stamps. I felt good when I stuck the ten-spot into the card I sent the paperboy, who occasionally forgets to deliver the Sunday paper, but, what the hey - I used to screw up when I was a paperboy, and Christmas is a time for remembering the blessedness of forgiving.

And what primal joy 'twas to drop the bundle of cards into the outgoing bin at the Post Office. It was so pleasurable that I was unable to control my facial muscles enuf to keep the smugness from twitching ear to ear as I checked out other patrons for signs of the guilt I used to feel when getting my mail while still behind on my carding. Not today, folks. I feel great! Don't you?

Ah, to leap and wiggle whilst airborne and try to click the heels without spraining something! Next year I shall start even earlier!!

I should perhaps point out here that this mood swing I've been describing isn't exactly an epiphany. Something else is likely to come along and give me an excuse to grumble and gripe before the magic appears. I should note, too, that during this day of reflection I've found that there are two types of Christmas people - those who love the whole business, whose excitement grows incrementally at first and then exponentially as the the magic hours arrive until...everybody's sitting around the tree opening presents and feeling that glorious peak of indulgence at the almost unbearable breaking point of the downward plunge of oh, shit, it's over it's over, oh, it's over, it is, isn't it? Over? Over.

That last part is me. The first part is my wife. For her, it's never over. She basks in the idea of Christmas, the buildup to Christmas, the peak and even the downward plunge, which, for her, isn't so much a plunge as it is a gentle settling and barely perceptible, lovely, loving landing. She's the most optimistic, loving person I've ever known. Her reaction to disappointment and frustration is to laugh, whereas mine...well, I'm ashamed to admit, you can probly guess, accurately, is not.

But I got the damned cards done, and I actually enjoyed doing them. And I feel good. I've said it here before, but I'll say it again, have a merry Christmas! The new year? Well, let's just hope it's not as bad as the old one.

Bwaaaaahahahahahahahaha...shame on me!

2009-12-21T17:56:00.002-05:00

A Times Square bloodbath was narrowly avoided because the machine-pistol-toting thug who fired at a cop flipped the gun on its side like a character out of a rap video, causing the weapon to jam after two shots, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

Card-writing day

2009-12-20T12:59:00.022-05:00

Doing the cards is always hard for me. One year I was so into denial about the ritual that I didn't open any of them. I just tossed them in a pile. They're still in that pile, some of them still unopened. Not that I haven't kept in touch with the folks who sent them. In fact, I've exchanged cards with them in subsequent years. It was just one particular year, no particular reason. Some tired little Scrooge in some very dark corner of my heart that year simply said, fuck it.

But that's not quite it, either. It wasn't so much a Scrooge reaction as it was a tired one. And that shouldn't be, because Christmas is supposed to be a time of renewal. And it is, for me, but only during the magic hours of Christmas Eve and Day. It's the days leading up to the Yuletide hours that bum me out - the dragging up from the basement the incredibly heavy artificial tree and the outdoor lights, putting together the outdoor tree and the deer, and making sure everything works, invariably something doesn't work - a string of lights or some key bulbs or a mechanical feature on one of the deer, and...oh, I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.

Granted, the first night when all the outdoor stuff is up and lit is pretty neat, but it gets old real fast after that, and then comes the growing dread of knowing that it'll all hafta come down within a couple weeks and be repacked and stowed in the basement for the all too short 350-some days before it all has to be dragged back up the stairs and the whole damned rigamarole done all over again. And that's not to speak of all the indoor decorations figures and animals and artifacts that have accumulated over the decades, and continue to accumulate as, each year, some new doodads catch our attention in the store, and we just hafta have one for our house.

And then there's the dinner and the rels, and the food is good but I always eat too much and feel sick afterward and often some petty bullshit arguments piss somebody off (usually me) with the subsequent sulking and attempts to cover it up with false good cheer and ho ho ho, oh gimme a break, just wash the dishes or get the hell out or wash the damned dishes then get the hell out ho ho ho...gonna barf...there, that's better. It's not always this bad, but I'm sorta compressing a buncha years into the one symbolic festive event that represents the standard one that I conjure when I'm in the frame of mind I'm in right now, which is thinking of ways to put off doing this year's cards.

For a stretch of years I was fairly diligent about doing the cards, but I usually procrastinated until it was too late to get them to anybody by Christmas, so I would rationalize that if I got them out between Christmas and New Year's Day it would still be the holiday season, so I wouldn't look too pathetic in the eyes of folks to whom this kind of timing means a lot. I suppose I should be wondering what am I doing cultivating friends to whom this kind of timing means a lot, but I'm not gonna go there. I'm just not gonna, so forget it! It was just this kind of quandry, partly - wondering what I was doing cultivating friends to whom getting a seasonal card on time is important - that brought about my shutdown several years ago, I think. I said the pile was still sitting nearby, and it is. I'm going to fetch up one of the cards right now to tell you which year it happened...hmmmm, it was only two years ago. I'm holding one of the cards I never opened, from a relative I truly like and whom I exchanged cards with last year and with whom I exchange emails with frequently. I'm putting it back in the pile, unopened. I just read this year's card from him and his wife moments ago, and will write them a card later today, without, of course, mentioning the "lost" card of '07.

If you're still reading this, and wondering why you're reading the ranting of a madman, I thank you for sticking with me thus far, and I do hope to assure you that I haven't gone too far South, without plunging into some kind of philosophical/psycho moralistic babble that I would refuse to read if you or anyone else wrote it and tried to entice me into. But I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with the juxtaposition of what was traditionally a pagan festival with the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace?

On the one hand we, as children, learned that Christmas is a time to get things, and this is what we obsessed over in the weeks leading up to the event. On the other hand, at the same time, we learned about the birth of Christ and the importance of giving to others, rather than receiving from others. Bit of a contradiction there, don't you think?

Then there was the magic. Everything was quite normal, except for the excitement of wondering what we were going to get, until Christmas morning, when we came downstairs and saw the fully decorated tree with gobs of presents - for us - under it. Lordy! What joy!

I remember a story my dad told me about when he and his four siblings would tiptoe down the stairs on Christmas Eve to watch Santa decorate their tree and fill the cavity under its branches with presents. This was back when, instead of strings of electric lights, they decorated the tree with candles.

My dad said he and his brothers and sister watched in horror one Eve when the family friend or relative playing Santa, who apparently had sipped his grog a little earlier than he should have, lit the candles from the bottom up, and caught his beard afire as he leaned over to light the ones nearer the top. Ho ho ho, we all laughed whenever Dad told this story, always making sure we understood that Santa survived what could have been the tragic end of Christmas forever and ever after.

I'm wondering now if my discomfort with the days leading up to Christmas has less to do with the contradiction between pagan greed and Christian charity than it does with the struggle between my inner child, which wants to be surprised by the magic of it all, and the adult that has to do the grunt work of making the magic happen.

It was never so onerous, I must say, when the kids were still kids, and I would put the bigger toys together in my garage office and lug them across the lawn under their bedroom windows when the kids were supposed to be asleep and I wore a red stocking cap festooned with jingling bells. They're mostly grown now. The youngest is 16, her older brothers are living away. They'll be home for Christmas, but the old magic is gone, long gone. All three still have inner children that will try to find a little of the old excitement in our efforts to preserve the tradition. But this gets harder, as the fatigue hovers ever closer, year by year.

Maybe the renewal will come with grandchildren. That's a ways off, though, we think. Maybe by then my gratitude will outweigh my expectations.

Maybe by then our tradition will have settled on a table tree.

But for now, may you and those you love have a wonderful Christmas and a secure and prosperous new year.

First Shot correction

2009-12-18T10:02:00.005-05:00

Not only is math not one of my strong suits, I didn't do spectacularly in high school Latin, either. Thus, I posted Chapter XIV last week as Chapter IV (actually, that was more of a brain fart than pure ignorance, but...). I caught this egregious error whilst posting Chapter XV last night. Gratefully back to only two Roman numerals. Far easier to get my fingers to tap out two correctly than three, evidently. Therefore, those who might have feared I was regressing the narrative can take heart. We're back on the track, clickety clacking along!

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-16T17:17:00.004-05:00

Due to the tight economy and the lack of parity in distributing federal stimulus funds throughout the land, certain neighborhoods have dispensed with the annual competition to see who can run up the highest electric bill come January from their seasonal festooning of homes. One such neighborhood this year - we're not saying where, mainly because we don't have a clue - is making its diversion from tradition abundantly clear while yet exhibiting a Yuletide gesture of cooperation and simultaneously risking derision from Scroogey types who might endeavor to equate this brightly-lit togetherness with the humbug of creeping socialism. We may never know just what the hell is going on here or how it all comes out in the end, but it truly makes one wonder, and wonderment, as we've been told, is indeed a big part of the Christmas spirit. So mote it be.

And Happy New Year!

...hic...

Write or Die!

2009-12-15T08:16:00.020-05:00

The meaning of this expression has become more and more important to me the nearer my ship comes to its final shore. As I haven't written anything worth shit yet (big picturewise, anyway), and as most of my productive years have been spent promising myself that I would write something worth shit before I die, the sense of urgency to do so attains a relentlessly ascending scream during my remaining hours - both awake and, I've come to recognize, while asleep, dreaming.

The advent of Algore's Internet has heightened this dynamic by enabling me to bring others into my little drama to maybe keep poking me along, or at least to allow me to fantasize that others are keeping a jaundiced eye on the diarrhea of my tap tap tapping on this keyboard, which I should probably call, for the time being anyway, as I've finally put off putting off reading the Great American Novel, Pequod. (God, that's pretentious, but, as I can't recall the name of Queequeg's coffin - if in fact it has a name - Pequod shall suffice for awhile, even if its appropriateness may be problematic inasmuch as I don't have the slightest idea how my journey will end, and certainly not with the certainty that Queequeg's coffin carrying Ishmael ends, if I remember accurately what I will find at the GAN's long-from-now conclusion.

Translated, this means now that I'm no longer writing in secret I no longer dare rely on the awkward dismissal that "I'm writing in my head," which, of course, all writers do, except that in order to deserve the title "writer," we also must eventually transfer the words from one head to others. My deepest gratitude then to Algore for giving me this last crucial step, this kick in the britches, this unavoidable aching in the abdominal region each day now if I wait too long before setting the fingers in motion.

I've heard the expression "write or die" on and off over the years. It struck a chord at first that resonated only in my brain. Perhaps I laughed knowingly and a tad nervously then. Then, a week or two ago, while perusing the tantalizing menu on NPR after something caught my fancy while listening to the radio upon dropping my daughter off at her high school, I checked out the current buzz on books and found a brief interview with Mary Karr on her new book, Lit. The expression appeared again, this time slapping me smartly across the face.

Karr was talking about how badly she felt the writing of Lit was going: "I threw this book away twice," Karr says. "I walked around in my bathrobe for three days and made obscene gestures at the rafters. And there are a couple people I call at such times, sort of the way the president would push the red button. I'd call these people. So I called Don DeLillo, and DeLillo sends me a postcard that says 'write or die.' " Karr's reply speaks volumes about her thick-skinned perspective and dark humor. "I think I sent him one back that said 'write and die.' "

Yeah, well. So true.

I've never read DeLillo, and had not thought I ever would, but this little anecdote has piqued my curiosity. Anyway, I couldn't believe that our magic expression was DeLillo's alone, as I was pretty sure I'd come across it before I'd ever heard what a pretentious writer DeLillo could be, by some perceptions. So I did a Google search. What I found was a website that pricked my entrepreneurial envy. Here's the link. Kinda wish I'd have thought of it before "Dr. Wicked" did, but if I had, of course, I'd be less concerned about scratching a living, and, in that light, surely be writing less, as well.

But Dr. Wicked's little venture does vindicate my suspicion that DeLillo borrowed the pithy expression in his postcard whack upside Mary Karr's haid. The mystery of its origin remains aloft.

There. I wrote. I shall sleep better tonite!

Whale of a tale

2009-12-14T10:27:00.012-05:00

Spent waaay too much time with the Introduction. Don't know who "Tony Tanner" is, but he's introduced on the title page of the Oxford World's Classic edition thusly: "Edited with an Introduction and Notes by." If there's anything else about him, I haven't found it and am damned well sure I won't be wasting any more time looking.

The Introduction plods along for 19.5 pages. I read it to help prepare me for what I know - what everybody knows - is a leviathan of a novel, to give me some clues, some pre-interpretation, a little something I didn't know about Melville, that sort of thing. And I did get some of that sort of thing. But, good Lord, do I need to know that "The first chapter is entitled 'Loomings', a word with at least two senses...blah blah blah...etc. etc. etc. etc.?" The short answer, plucked clean of vulgar, annoyed derision, is, "NO!"

But I continued plodding through the academically dispirited morass, based on the pledge I'd made to myself that I would do the same with the novel. And if so, why not give due respect to the "expert," who was guiding me into it? Toward the end I was getting so purely pissed that I did simply scan some of the nonsense, breathing an enormous sigh of disgusted relief when it was finished. I almost forgot to mention that before I read the Introduction, I read the letters in the appendix, which were written by a fawning Melville to the man he dedicated Moby-Dick to: Nathaniel Hawthorne. I was disappointed that no answering letters are included here, but, then, perhaps Hawthorne simply shook his head and hoped against hope that the over-the-top adoring sycophant would fuck off and leave him alone.

So. Finally. I dipped a toe into the murky, metaphysically daunting, existentially promising sea of the Novel itself. And what a sheer delight it's been. Reasonably short chapters (I read in bed, and don't enjoy holding a book over my head for long periods.) and, thus far, a delightful sense of humor and agile wordsmithing.

But, my my, what a looooong long time it takes for Ishmael just to get through the entrance of the Spouter Inn! It takes him forever to get past the "very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose."

And that's just his first reference to it. Ishmael waxes on for three more long paragraphs about what he thinks the painting might depict before he gives it up (at least for now, we suspect) to check out the opposite wall of the entry, which, he reports, "was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears." His account of this wall's impression on him extends for awhile, as well. Quite awhile, as you might guess if you're catching my drift.

I'm completely sincere when I say that, despite the master's interminably chattering style, I absolutely love what I've read of the novel thus far, if only because it's such a warm and human contrast to the bloodless, chattering theories of "Tony Tanner," which preceded it.

My bookmark is between pages 12 and 13, 2.5 pages into Chapter Three, which is a tad longer than my arms were willing to endure last night.

Dillinger - The Untold Story

2009-12-13T09:03:00.019-05:00

Finally saw Public Enemies, last nite. It didn’t stay in the theaters around here long or I’d’ve tried to catch it on the big screen. I’ve had a particular interest in Dillinger since boyhood, having grown up in a small Wisconsin town that Dillinger was known to have passed thru on his way to and from Little Bohemia, a lodge in the North Woods he and his gang liked to hang out at between bank robberies.

Oldtimers in my hometown told of meeting the notorious bandit when he stopped at a local hotel with one of his girlfriends to spend the nite. I was nine or ten when my dad bought the old hotel and converted into offices. A couple of the oldtimers who’d been living there and who helped him fix it up told him that Dillinger was unfailingly polite and tipped well, but that he always kept a hand in one of his pockets as if holding a gun.

I spent many an hour after school and on weekends snooping thru the building’s second floor rooms trying to divine which one Dillinger and his companion had occupied, and searching patiently, hopefully and - beg pardon - diligently for a loose pistol cartridge or some other identifiable relic he might have left behind.

Some of the filming for Public Enemies was done in my hometown. I picked up a little of the excitement from friends and relatives who live there, and learned about a few of the tricks behind the magic of movie making, such as putting down rubber cobblestone sheets on the streets. A local fellow started a blog to follow the action, and I’ve borrowed some of his photos for this posting.

I picked up the DVD at Wally World, and brought it home with a six-pack of Ice House beer and a plastic tub of Merkts Cheese Spread with Port Wine, from Kaukauna, Wisconsin.

The movie was both interesting and vaguely disappointing. Depp’s performance was stellar, as usual, and I was favorably impressed with Marion Cotillard, who played Dillinger’s number one squeeze, Billie Frechette. My wife commented afterward that the movie might have been more successful at the box office had the electric romance between Depp and Cotillard been promoted. As I recall, the hype seemed to rely simply on the name draw of Depp and Bale and the promise of major tommygun action. Bale, whom I dislike, turned in an adequate performance, but he was upstaged by Billy Crudup’s J. Edgar Crossdresser.

Yes, there was major, major tommygun action. Oh, yes. Good thing ammo was still cheap during that depression or the guys would’ve had to rob twice as many banks just to feed their tommys (sorry).

And, speaking of bank robbing, most of my vague disappointment came from the license the movie took with history. I’m not a fanatic for fastidious detail, especially if such adherence to fact would slow down the drama, but evidently the writers of Public Enemies ignored one of the best historical sources available, a biography of Dillinger written a year after his execution by FBI agents as he exited Chicago’s Biograph theater with two female companions on Aug. 23, 1934.

The writer was G. Russell Girardin, who was assisted in much of his research by Dillinger’s lawyer and the lawyer’s private investigator. Girardin’s work was serialized in the Hearst newspapers and then was forgotten, until William Helmer stumbled upon it and interviewed the elderly Girardin at length, during the last months of Girardin’s life, to produce an updated version, which was released in 1994 as Dillinger - The Untold Story.

What I found most interesting is this note by Girardin: “It may be mentioned that some of the Dillinger bank robberies were prearranged affairs. “We were then in the Great Depression. Insurance covered a bank’s loss in case of failure but not that of its depositors, and many were ruined in the epidemic of bank closings during the Hoover era. Banks were held in scant esteem, and there was no shedding of tears on the part of the general public when they were robbed.

“As for the banks themselves, a staged robbery represented an opportunity for profit or for covering any losses that might otherwise be difficult to explain, for any amount could be reported as a loss. Most of the scheduled robberies were concerted with the underworld connections of the gang in East Chicago, Indiana. The day and hour of the robbery were arranged, the money to be taken was to be in readiness, no resistance would be offered, and pursuit would be delayed until the gang had made its escape.

“In later conversations with Alfred O’Leary, Dillinger mentioned the Greencastle robbery as a specific example of this.”

The following note was added by Helmer: “An insurance investigator told federal agents that he suspected Greencastle was staged, and one of the gang’s later associates claimed this in connection with other robberies.”

So, anyway, even tho this book is out of print, used copies are still available. Girardin and Helmer are this week’s spotlit authors.

New features at First Shot

2009-12-11T09:16:00.009-05:00

Thanks to my friend and generous editor Rob, I've made some changes to the First Shot site that will enable you to follow the narrative without ruining your mouse clicking back and forth and back and forth until you scream, "Shoot me! Shoot me!"

Anyway, you will now find a link at the end of each chapter that will take you to the next chapter. I would suggest starting at the list of chapters in the sidebar rather than scrolling down the main page.

Also, I have given each chapter a working title to help keep them straight. Rob said he was getting lost among the numbers, and I had to admit that so was I.

Finally, you (and I) now have a cast of central characters posted on the sidebar. Offline I've been referring to a file slugged geezer notes for this purpose as I write the drafts before posting them. But at Rob's suggestion, it suddenly occurred to me that if I need such a crutch to keep track of my creations, why the hell wouldn't the reader, as well? Well, problem solved.

Thanks again, Rob, and thanks to you, gentle readers, for sticking by me on this long, strange journey!

Oh, one more thing: Please, people, I need all the help I can get with this project. Any and all suggestions and comments will be deeply, sincerely appreciated!

On a bit of a roll here...

2009-12-10T19:09:00.003-05:00

Chapter Fourteen just went up. Interesting conversation about U.N. Resolution 1540 between two D.C. politicians. Language not for tender ears.

First Shot update

2009-12-09T07:03:00.003-05:00

We've rounded a bend in the narrative. Chapter Thirteen definitely thickens the plot, and should be of special interest to the Second Amendment Rangers among us. Things are picking up...

Blind sided

2009-12-07T17:46:00.015-05:00

My wife may watch her first football game tonite, or at least more of one game than she ever has since I've known her. And that's because we went to the movies last nite and saw The Blind Side, based on the true story of Michael Oher, who scrabbled up from the streets of Memphis and is now starting at right tackle for the Baltimore Ravens - as a rookie.

Don't worry, this isn't a review, other than to say I liked the movie. Haven't read the book by Michael Lewis, altho I plan to (after I finish Moby-Dick, which will be awhile).

The movie is worth seeing if only for Sandra Bullock's exceptional performance as the rich white woman who persuaded her family to take Oher in when he was essentially homeless. A scene that was so good I nearly choked on my popcorn laffing was the one depicted above when she went out onto the practice field and "coached" Oher. When I saw the previews, that scene about persuaded me the movie'd be schlock. To the contrary, in fact. It made it for me.

I read somewhere that the political "right wing" - whatever that means in this context - objected to the movie. Oh yawwwn. There's too damned much political correctness these days, folks - on both ends of the political spectrum. Yeah, the movie's a tad touchy feely, but so what? And there's some racist trash talk on the field and in the stands. Ooooooo! Big deal. It's real. If that's what has political purists' panties in a knot, I say, let 'em stay knotted.

My wife's a liberal, I'm not. We don't talk politics much. People can live in the same house and love each other despite their political views. People should be able to watch a damned movie without getting out the little red book or the little blue book or whatever the hell little damned book it is that runs their lives. Well, other than something by Michael Moore or Algore, that is.

Anyway, there's a good gun discussion in the movie that passes us Second Amendment Rangers' litmus test: Bullock (whom I love to watch regardless of whatever character she's playing) is facing down some gangbangers who want revenge against Oher for heaving them around their crack-smoking den when they badmouthed his adopted family and flashed a piece. One of them made a crack as Bullock was walking to her car. She turned around and marched back up to them and stared down the baddest of the bunch. They gave each other some tuff talk, with Bullock noting that if they hurt her "son" she'd be back.

"I'm a member of the NRA. I pack," she said. "All the time, 24/7."

The bangers goof at each other and giggle. Baddest one then says, "Whatcha got, bitch, a little .22 or a Saturday Night Special?"

Bullock patted her purse, smiling evilly. "It works just fine, then and every other day of the week." She stared awhile longer, they gulped and snorted, and she got back into her car and drove away. I laffed then, too.

Hope I didn't spoil the movie for anybody by giving anything away. That's what shoulda been used in the previews, but perhaps it was deemed too politically incorrect for the family TV.

But we're gonna watch the game tonite. I'll be rooting for Green Bay, of course, and I suppose my wife and daughter will pull for...oh, let's just not go there.

[Postscript: Green Bay won in one of the sloppiest games I've ever watched. Even Big Mike Oher whiffed a couple blocks. My daughter stayed in her room upstairs. My wife watched enuf of the game to catch Big Mike's number and see what he did on the field, then made the comment, "Is that all they do? Bump into each other?" She fell asleep on the couch soon thereafter.]

Outdoorswoman

2009-12-06T08:33:00.010-05:00

I've never read The Yearling, for which Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings won the Pulitzer. Nor have I seen the movie, starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. In fact, the name Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings meant nothing to me until my wife mentioned it to me several years ago when we were visiting Gainesville. Florida, where she had graduated high school. We took a side trip to Cross Creek and spent a couple of hours checking out Rawlings's homestead, a 72-acre orange grove where she lived most of her adult life. Her sprawling, rustic home has been kept just as she left it when she died in 1953. Her typewriter still sits on the screened porch where she did most of her writing, including the autobiographical Cross Creek, which is the only work of Rawlings's I've read - besides her cookbook, Cross Creek Cookery.

"Food imaginatively and lovingly prepared, and eaten in good company, warms the being with something more than the mere intake of calories. I cannot conceive of cooking for friends or family, under reasonable conditions, as being a chore."

I had planned to award the Author of the Week space today to Joyce Carol Oates, but changed my mind after reading Brigid's posting yesterday on her amazing blog, Home on the Range, in which she listed some of her favorite books to have handy while spending a cold and rainy day indoors by a fire with her dog, with nothing much to do but read. The Yearling was one of Brigid's choices. Seeing this, and realizing that Brigid's independent, country life, her culinary gusto and her sublime writing were startlingly reminiscent of Rawlings's...well, you see how fate can sometimes divert the noblest of plans.

So, anyway, more from the cookbook: "Food eaten in unpleasant circumstances is unblessed to our bodies' good - and so is a drug-store sandwich - or a raw duck. Some of my dishes, such as alligator-tail steak or Minorcan gopher stew, may horrify the delicate, who may consider them, too, unblessed. I have included nothing that is not extremely palatable, and the reader or student of culinary arts may either believe me or fall back in cowardly safety on a standard cook book." Although I doubt that Brigid has ever tried alligator-tail steak (I sure as hell have not!), I have a hunch she and Rawlings would have gotten along just fine.

One more quote, this one from Cross Creek, from the chapter entitled, For this is an enchanted land: "The road goes west out of the village, past open pine woods and gallberry flats. An eagle's nest is a ragged cluster of sticks in a tall tree, and one of the eagles is usually black and silver against the sky. The other perches near the nest, hunched and proud, like a griffin. There is no magic here except the eagles. Yet the four miles to the Creek are stirring, like the bleak, portentous beginning of a good tale. The road curves sharply, the vegetation thickens, and around the bend masses into dense hammock. The hammock breaks, is pushed back on either side of the road, and set down in its brooding heart is the orange grove."

I'll be around...

2009-11-30T09:58:00.006-05:00

We used this great Alec Wilder tune as the theme song for our high school dance band. Even without the sophisticated lyrics, which Wilder also wrote, the smooth, uptown quasi-bluesy sound embraced just the right mood to nudge 1950s teens toward that romantic cool we sought in our faltering reach beyond childhood.

I'll be around,
No matter how
You treat me now
I'll be around from now on.

Anyway, just wanted you to know that I'm gonna plunge right into chapter twelve of First Shot, not wanting to lose the momentum that's building, so I won't be trying to post something every day this week. Something worthy comes to mind, up it goes. But there may be a day or two when all you get is a trifle of a tune.

daaa daa daa dum daa daa dum...

Time for Moby-Dick

2009-11-28T17:28:00.007-05:00

I've never read Moby-Dick. There, I said it. No apologies, no excuses. I ordered it from Amazon.com a few minutes ago. Heard a program this afternoon on NPR devoted to Moby-Dick. That was the bait. The review I've posted below is the best one I found among the many Amazon guest reviews. That was the hook. So, as soon as I finish Baldacci's Divine Justice (which I must assume is a bowl of popcorn to Melville's full-course Thanksgiving dinner) I'll start the big one, and read it straight thru. I don't care if it takes me half a year. I shall report here on my progress from time to time, maybe with a quote or two that blew me away, but I'll be chugging along in pursuit of the mighty whale until...OK, I won't spoil the ending. As for the beginning, "Call me Ishmael."

What other American work compares to Virgil and Shakespeare?, October 4, 2004

By	mulcahey (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Forget everything you have heard or think you know about this book. What it decidedly is not is the story of a one-legged madman pursuing a whale for revenge.

Do not give this book to high-school students. Have them read THE AENEID, the prophet Isaiah, a few scenes of HAMLET, so that when they are forty and MOBY-DICK falls into their hands, they will recognize at least some of its underpinnings.

MOBY-DICK is as weird and far-ranging as Scripture, and stakes out the same terrority, namely heaven, hell, earth, mortality, joy, flesh, eternity, the soul. Ahab is no more mad than Edmund in KING LEAR: the real madman of MOBY-DICK is Melville himself. But he can only have been unhinged by an angel, so sweeping is the power of his imagination.

It's perverse to look on the shape and construction of MOBY-DICK as radical, innovative, foreshadowing such moderns as Joyce; it's like calling Revelations "innovative." Melville has no such aim and has no interest in technique. Indeed, he has few "literary" virtues. His language is dense, syntactically clumsy, exhausting, over-precise to the point there's no telling what precisely is being said. No human being could speak the dialogue that erupts from the mouths of its personages: it's like opera, or the dialogue in PARADISE LOST. It has a more urgent, essential motive than speech. It's the soul speaking.

MOBY-DICK is nothing so trivial as a literary experiment. It aims for wholeness, concreteness; it wants to be about everything, inside and out, and its eye is everywhere. Melville senses the sun and stars are part of his story, and equally so the bones and guts of a whale, so he makes them characters. When the convention of the first-person narrator becomes too restrictive, he lets Ishmael lapse, absorbing him and all of the Pequod into a single, unlocatable consciousness that seems to have existed before time.

The greatness of this book has nothing to do with its "qualities," but with its passion, its madness -- its genius. If ever a secular work was inspired, surely it was this one. It is beautiful not in the way books are, but as a created thing is, a horse or a river or a redwood. It makes little sense to me to call MOBY-DICK The Great American Novel, since it's hardly a novel at all; it is sui generis, acknowledging no standards but its own. If it must be a novel, then has the same standing in the canon of world literature as TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES: the supremest expression of the mind of a culture, disavowed by the culture itself.

As for this edition, it is at least handsomely printed and well bound. The foreward is profoundly irrelevant, and there are no notes, though I can't imagine any torrent of notes would be of much use in penetrating the mystery of this vision, prophecy, epic, call it what you will.

If you find yourself these days looking for reasons to be proud to be American, MOBY-DICK will give you one.

Why I Own a Gun (guest editorial)

2009-11-27T16:15:00.004-05:00

Kim du Toit retired from blogging at 11:59 p.m. 30 Nov. 2008, according to his excellent blog, The Other Side (which is still online and can be reached by clicking here: CLICK), where he posted the following personal explanation, which, until I write my own (I'm still ruminating), shall be my adopted manifesto. I'm copying it here to share with those of you who might not have seen it, and who might find, as I do, that it's an appropriately intelligent response to any who might lift their eyebrows and inquire, in an ever so condescending way, as to why a civilized person in this modern day might have such an interest in "tools of death."

Why I Own A Gun

By Kim du Toit

April 6, 2002
2:15 PM CST

I’ve been asked by more than a few people to explain why I’m such a gun nut. There are actually three reasons: the enjoyment I derive from shooting; the role of guns in self-defense; and the issue of guns and civic responsibility. Let me take these in order.

Personal pleasure.

It makes one something of an anomaly to admit a love of guns and of shooting, especially in these times of girly-men, of men afraid to admit they’re men, or of men who have become too "civilized" to contemplate violence. No one has ever explained it better than Jeff Cooper, in his fine book The Art of the Rifle: "There is an enchantment cast upon almost any man when he holds a rifle in his hands." Cooper also points out that when a man holds a rifle, he becomes almost godlike: suddenly, he has the ability to deal death and injury to another over a considerable distance--to send, as it were, a thunderbolt of Zeus. For some men, unquestionably, this power is going to be abused, just as some men will always drive a fast car at reckless speeds. For the vast majority of men, however, this power produces precisely the opposite effect: they are humbled by the power they hold, and they become more responsible in its use. That is why, in a nation of well over seventy million gun owners, only a tiny fraction, less than half a tenth of one percent, use a gun to commit a crime each year.

I love shooting for many reasons. In the first place, holding a gun means that I am not helpless in the face of aggression coming from another. I also love the very act of shooting, for one simple reason: it is the ultimate form of self-control. If I pull the trigger, and the bullet doesn’t go where I wanted it to go, I, and I alone, am at fault. (It has been my experience that 99% of guns are more accurate than the shooters--and that is certainly true in my own case.) In other words, I have to practice self-control when I shoot: there is no point in losing my temper when I miss, no point in blaming the gun, bullet or sights. I simply have to take a deep breath (not too deep, because hyper-ventilating causes my hands to shake), and try again. It is a constant process of self-improvement, and to achieve a goal of perfection, or even near-perfection, brings me immeasurable satisfaction.

At the end of every shooting session at the range, I come back at peace with myself and with the world. The noise of shooting, the power I’ve unleashed (and which I’ve had to control), the calmness which I’ve had to achieve, all combine to bring me into a state of Zen-like stillness.

It’s something everyone should experience. I’ve taken many people shooting with me, a lot who have never shot before. Without exception, they’ve all come away as fans of the sport, and wanted to do it again.

There’s another thing that’s not just personal: and it’s a guy thing. Guns are almost perfect machines. When you take one apart, and see what I call its "simple complexity", you are in awe as to what happens--cams move, sears disengage, springs coil back, metal moves along metal, all within tolerances of thousandths of an inch, and all within a couple millionths of a second. Then you reload, and do it all over again. I have a rifle in my collection which was made in about 1906, and it still works as advertised. Find me another machine that still works about as well as the day it was made a hundred years ago, has detonated and contained a mini-explosive device many thousands of times, lasted through who knows what weather, endured rough handling and neglect, and traveled through at least two continents (it was made in Sweden, for the Army). Like I said, the love of so perfect a mechanism is a guy thing.

In any event, I make no excuses for my attachment to guns, nor do I care about the opprobrium or condescension of others. I have far more than one gun, for the same reason that other people own far more than one CD album, and more than one performer withal. I don’t need more than, say, two or three guns (actually, I once worked out that eight would be about my minimum), but gun ownership has little to do with need anyway. Except for self-protection, and I’m going to talk about that next.

Self-defense

With a gun, I can also defend my family and property from evildoers (or, as Cooper wonderfully calls them, Goblins).

Men, especially men living in Western societies, have become something less than men over the past fifty years. We have become gentled, more civilized, more refined, and more, well, more like women. Unfortunately, however, fifty years of social conditioning cannot easily overcome tens of thousands of years of genetic conditioning, which is why little boys still prefer to have swordfights than host dolls’ tea-parties, and why men still get into fistfights. It is an instinct that will not be denied, much to the dismay of those who would attempt to suppress it or deny its existence. We are called "animals" or "troglodytes", as though this streak of violence is something to be looked down upon or denigrated. But when push comes to shove, men will still defend themselves, out of instinct.

This defense of "self" extends to family. Every man I know would cheerfully put themselves in harm’s way to protect their children--it is the most basic male instinct, after sex. And of course this drives authority figures and the societal nannies crazy. "Leave that to the police," they implore, "Don’t get involved." Bullshit. Where I and my family are concerned, safety is first and foremost my own responsibility, and I will not abrogate that responsibility to others. A pox on those who would make me do otherwise.

Of course, if I could sue the police for not giving me complete protection, then I might feel differently (or not--don’t count on it). But the Supreme Court has repeatedly found that the State cannot be at fault for not protecting its citizens--so if the cops take 25 minutes to respond to your 911 call, and in those 25 minutes a goblin kicks open your door, shoots you and your wife, rapes your 11-year-old daughter, and beats your baby to death, that’s just tough luck.

Uh-huh. Thanks, but no thanks. From where I stand, if a goblin tries to assault me and mine, the proper role of the police is to take my statement, and because I don’t know the number, to call for the hearse to pick up the goblin’s corpse.

As with all things, there is a great deal of responsibility to be exercised in self-defense. I wouldn’t chase after the goblin down the street, shooting at his worthless ass, tempting though the action may be. Once he’s out of reach or off my property, then he becomes police business. They just have to follow the blood trail.

The very idea of abrogating one’s own personal protection to the State would have thrown the Founding Fathers into peals of laughter--it is a concept completely without historical foundation, and deserves no currency today, either. Defense of the people as a whole, however, is a different thing altogether, so let’s look at that now.

Civic Responsibility

We’ve moved from the purely personal, to the family, and now we’ll look at the civic nature of gun ownership. Here’s the Second Amendment, my personal favorite:

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I’m not going to parse it word by word--or on second thoughts, maybe I should, given all the crap that liberal idiots have tried to throw over its intent. Let’s deal with the low-hanging fruit first.

The “militia” does not mean the frigging National Guard, which came into being over 150 years after the American Revolution. There are essentially two versions of the word militia: the way it was understood by the Founding Fathers and other original patriots, and the actual legal definition.

For the former, we only have to rely on the actual words of one of them (and the others agreed, as you will see):

“I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

That’s George Mason, speaking during Virginia’s ratification convention in 1788. He makes no mention of state governments, nor of standing armies (like the National Guard), which the Founding Fathers regarded with as much liking as for a snake in a bedroll.

The United States Code of Law narrows the definition somewhat, but not overly so:

“The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age...” ~~Title 10, Section 311 of the U.S. Code.

Note that the U.S.C. doesn’t say “as maintained by state government” or any other nonsense--it’s an unequivocal statement of all able-bodied males.

Oh, and one more thing about that pesky first phrase: “regulated” does not mean “beset by rules and laws”: that’s the modern meaning. In 18th-century English, “regulated” meant “trained and equipped”, in other words: ready for action. Hell, we’ve even lost that because of the abolition of the military draft. Aaargh.

Now for the next phrase of note, the ”security of a free State” one. Note that security of a free State does not just mean of the country as a whole--but by using that other pesky word “free”, the Founders made it plain that the whole concept of a free state is that which requires security. It doesn’t just mean a state free from Nazi tyranny, for example, but also a state inherently free, from its own government if necessary.

How do I know they meant that? Let’s roll the tape, Simon:

“If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is no recourse left but in the exertion of the original right of self-defense which is paramount to all forms of positive government.”—Alexander Hamilton.

Need another? Sure.

“No man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”—Thomas Jefferson.

And one last one:

“Arms in the hands of the citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defense of the country, the overthrow of tyranny or private self-defense.”—John Adams.

Those phrases make the blood of government lackeys run cold, or rather, they should.

Now for the penultimate phrase: ”the right of the people to keep and bear arms”. Not just “the people who can afford to buy a gun license”, or “only the police” or “only Mayor Daley’s bodyguards"--it says, “the people” without qualification. Can’t be much plainer than that, really--

-- except perhaps for the last phrase: ”shall not be infringed.” Note carefully that the Second does not say, “Congress shall not” or “government shall not” or “Mayor Daley shall not”. The use of the passive voice is quite intentional: it is a clear, universal statement that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be circumscribed, by anyone or by any institution.

It is, of course, no coincidence that the right to have guns is one of the earlier freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights. Without guns in the hands of the people, all the other freedoms are easily negated by the State. If you disagree with that statement, ask yourself if the Nazis could have gassed millions of Jews, had the Jews been armed with rifles and pistols--there weren’t enough SS troops to do the job. Lest we forget, in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, a couple of hundred Jews armed with rifles and homemade explosive devices held off two fully-equipped German divisions (actually about 8,000 men) for nearly two months.

Using the Germans during the First World War as another example, the thing that caused German officers and their troops most concern was the appearance of francs-tireurs: individual citizens who, from their homes and villages, shot at and killed German officers and soldiers as the Fourth Army made its way through Belgium. The Germans considered this form of fighting to be completely at odds with the rules of warfare, and began to slaughter civilian hostages as reprisals.

Why was the mighty Fourth Army (of some six million men) so afraid of a few irregular snipers? Because they knew that they could never defend against a million pinpricks--their morale would suffer, and they’d spend all their time policing the Belgian countryside, instead of invading France and fighting the French Army.

I take my civic responsibility very seriously. I am the epitome of the franc-tireur: a man who would defend his country from invasion, who can use a gun, and who would not hesitate to risk his life in its use. I suspect that, if the chips were down, there may be another seven-odd million men like myself in the United States.

This country will never be conquered militarily--and it has nothing to do with our Armed Forces, because they are just the first line of defense. The rest, the militia, are more than a match for any army, at any time--as long as we still have our guns.

And one last word on the subject: the next politician who assures me that he’s not going to go after my hunting rifle with his latest “reasonable” gun law, is going to get a punch right in the face. The Second Amendment isn’t about hunting, buddy. Don’t insult me by thinking I’ll swallow that lie.

Perhaps the best statement I’ve heard about “government vs. citizens” with regard to the gun issue came from a politician, Rep. Suzanna Gratia Hupp of Texas, who said:

“How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.”

Finally, I’m going to shut up and roll the credits, quotes of people who have said it, all far more eloquently than I, and who can explain the original intent of the Second, because they wrote it: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison all understood the importance of private gun ownership in a free society.

Jefferson:

“And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms… The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” (in a letter to William S. Smith in 1787. Taken from Jefferson, On Democracy p. 20, S. Padover ed., 1939)

Adams:

“Arms in the hands of the citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defense of the country, the overthrow of tyranny or private self-defense.”

Hamilton:

“If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is no recourse left but in the exertion of the original right of self-defense which is paramount to all forms of positive government.”

And Hamilton again:

“The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.”

Madison (in Federalist No. 46, predicting that encroachments by the federal government) said that these would provoke ”plans of resistance” and an ”appeal to the trial of force.” Madison also said (still in Fed. No. 46):

“[T]he advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

And Thomas Paine:

“The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside… Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them...”—Thoughts on Defensive War in 1775

While Tench Coxe said:

“Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American… The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state government, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.”—(Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788)

While we’re about it, let’s also quote again another of the great men, Patrick Henry, commenting on the Second Amendment in 1788:

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined… The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.”

And another from Mr. Henry:

“Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?”—(3 J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State Conventions 45, 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1836)

Even the British used to have the right idea (they don’t nowadays):

“No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.”—
James Burgh (Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses) [London, 1774-1775]

Some more modern quotes:

“The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”—Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN)

From George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, himself a socialist:

“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”

From another Brit (an expat):

“The certainty that a potential victim is unarmed is an encouragement to armed criminals. Less guns, more crime.” and “...it is interesting to note that of the 150 or so law enforcement officers killed every year in the U.S., one in four is shot with his own weapon. The moral of that is: If you are defending yourself with a gun against someone bigger than yourself, be much less scrupulous about shooting him than police officers have to be.”—John Derbyshire

And, from the foremost practitioner of passive resistance and non-violence:

“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”—Mahatma Gandhi (Autobiography, by M.K. Gandhi, p.446)

And from the world’s gentlest human being:

“If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”—The Dalai Lama (May 15, 2001, The Seattle Times), speaking at the “Educating Heart Summit” in Portland, Oregon, when asked by a girl how to react when a shooter takes aim at a classmate.

And lastly, opinions from a couple of bad guys:

“Gun control? It’s the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I’m a bad guy, I’m always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You’ll pull the trigger with a lock on, and I’ll pull the trigger. We’ll see who wins.”—Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, Mafia hit man

--A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.--—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.”—Adolf Hitler (H.R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talks 1941-1944)

Some worthy websites:
The Unabridged Second Amendment
The True Meaning of Gun Control
Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries (a must-read!)
Keep & Bear Arms

May your Thanksgiving be blessed with happiness!

2009-11-23T20:27:00.002-05:00

You may never read another novel after this one...

2009-11-22T09:18:00.016-05:00

You may be afraid to go to sleep after reading Shutter Island. Worse, you may be afraid to wake up the next morning.

Shutter Island.

Oh, lordy, what a terrifying book. Makes me shudder just recalling it. Starts a slow spread of embalming fluid burn deep in my stomach that has nothing whatever to do with the black coffee I just drank with breakfast. Mercy!

Dennis Lehane is more than simply a master of horror. After him, Poe, King, Koontz - any other writer who writes to frighten - can get in line. And Lehane's horror doesn't depend on ghosts, ghouls, zombies, insects, space creatures or toys that come to life. His horror oozes up from within the soul. In fact, his relentless squeezing grip can make you wish you never had a soul.

I've got to move on now, before my hands get to trembling so bad I won't be able to finish typing.

The first Lehane novel I read was Mystic River - after I saw the movie. Both were good. Both created the kind of incrementally gathering dread that's so inevitable and fascinating it's virtually hypnotic. Lehane's strength is story. Not just plot, but the magical ability to spin a tale that keeps you guessing at the same time it pulls and pushes you along as it develops. The settings and characters and dialogue and interior voices and circumstances and consequences and...and...capture a sense of reality that no other writer who comes to mind has been able to accomplish - for me.

Help, I'm gushing! Must be the coffee.

Lehane was one of the writers who contributed to the absolute best mini-series I've ever watched on TV - The HBO exclusive, The Wire. Yegads, was that good!

Anyway, among Lehane's nine books (he's fairly new on the scene), three have been made into movies - besides Mystic River there's Gone, Baby, Gone and...oh yeah, Shutter Island (movie link), due out next year. Gone, Baby, Gone is one of several he's written featuring a couple of Boston private detectives who struck me at first as amateurs compared with, say, Robert B. Parker's Spenser, but who quickly proved to be a helluva lot more devious and interesting than their uptown counterpart.

I've read just about everything Lehane has written, and, frankly, I'm jealous as hell of his talent. But that's nothing new. He might be at the head of the line of writers I'm jealous of, but he's so damned good I may one day forgive him.

Yup, new name...

2009-11-20T16:55:00.015-05:00

"Thoughts" wasn't working, on several levels, but mostly it didn't really say anything. Although thoughts can on the rare occasion have historic consequences, they're usually of an ephemeral nature - little puffs of mental effort, and way too often simply hiccups and farts of the brain.

But it was all I could come up with when I started this blog. I'd like to think I put more effort into thinking of the name than a little puff, and it seemed at the time as if I were. But in the several months now that I've been blogging I've seen some really clever names, some funny ones, some - many - that give you a lot more intelligence on the nature of the blog itself than "thoughts" ever could.

I'm almost embarrassed to have foisted it on the cyber world. My only consolation is that I'm so new that hardly anybody has seen the blog, and most first-timers who have seen it probably forgot the forgettable name the instant they clicked away.

But enough of the self flagellation.

Switching "friendly" for "thoughts" came to me in an exciting burst of...well...thought while on my way to pick up my daughter from school a couple hours ago. I could hardly wait to get back home.

I could go on and on, perhaps, with reasons why "friendly" is better than "thoughts," such as it being a more active word (it's almost a verb!) and being unusual in the context.

What I really like about "friendly" is that when coupled with "gun" it carries the subtle message that while guns and I do get along I'm not necessarily obsessed. (Maybe I am, but "gun friendly" kinda takes the edge off that perception.) It frees me up to write about other things , even, yeah, thoughts, with the implicit expectation that guns may be mentioned from time to time without apology or challenge. Role models for me in this pursuit are Frank W. James and Brigid, with their blogs: Corn, beans, spent brass, an empty page and a deadline... and Home On the Range respectively.

Potential readers seeing "gun friendly," may conclude that while I won't be sneaking any anti-gun or hoplophobic propaganda into my posts, neither will the blog be of interest to only "the gun crowd." In a political context, "gun friendly," as we know, may identify a Democrat who votes right on Second Amendment issues - unlike RINOs who may spout what they think Second Amendment rangers want to hear, but who cave in the crunch and sell us out to the grabbers.

One thing I haven't done, and don't plan on doing with this blog is to belabor my political views. There are already some damned fine bloggers out there on the front lines, fighting the good fight. For me to jump in with similar stuff would be wearily redundant, croaking "me, too!" to a powerful choir that needs no affirmation from an old fart who sings off key.

Besides, I've become too cynical in my evening years to take politics seriously enough for persuasive debate. By that I mean national politics and their issues. Whatever messianic passion I might have had is gone, folks. The "elected" lackeys of the special interests are gonna do what they wanna do, and I've got too many things on my mind that are important to me and my family that I can do something about to waste time entertaining distractions that can only piss me off.

My political activity is strictly local, the arena where you and I do have the power to influence policy. Higher than that, I vote mostly along party lines, thinking of those elections more as referenda on public opinion than as real races among the candidates, who rarely even pretend anymore to have the stones to do what they promise. But I promised to avoid politics in this blog, so I hereby desist.

Oh, BTW, I just filed Chapter X of First Shot. Give it a shot!

My bad...

2009-11-17T17:47:00.025-05:00

I screwed up. I could easily go back and rewrite the Baldacci piece and pretend I hadn't made a dumb mistake, and I might have done so had I been sure nobody'd read the Baldacci piece yet.

But I don't know that, so I must admit the mistake and do right by John Grisham, whom I damaged - not tortiously, I dearly hope, but damaged nonetheless.

I said in the prior piece that although Baldacci had burst on the scene as a lawyer/writer sequel to Grisham, he was so prodigious a writer that he quickly left Grisham "way back around the bend." I said that without bothering to check if it were true.

It's not.

They're both prodigious writers. Grisham has more books out because he had quite a head start, breaking into the big time with his second novel, The Firm. His first, A Time to Kill, was published in 1988 and almost immediately sank out of sight.

"We couldn't give them away," Grisham says in an open "letter" on his website.

Of course, after The Firm became "best seller of 1991" on the The New York Times bestseller list and starred Tom Cruise in the movie, publishers suddenly recognized the potential of A Time to Kill, put it out again and, lo, this time it, too, became a bestseller - a..and a movie! starring Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock!

Baldacci's Absolute Power wasn't published until 1996. Five years can mean as many as 10 books for each of these two novelists.

That's the rate both these guys can crank out the thrillers. I'd forgotten many of Grisham's, probly because I read only a few of them. A lot of them became movies, and I missed most of those, too.

I soured on Grisham when I read The Client, which features a little boy who witnesses a murder and spends the rest of the plot running from the cops because he refuses to tell anybody what he saw. The cops, not the gangsters! Excuse me, but that's so much hot horse shit.

We've all seen movies where the killer, smiling benignly, asks the hapless fool who has witnessed a crime or figured out how it happened but hasn't identified who dunnit, "Oh, by the way, you haven't told anybody else about this, have you?" And when the fool says, "Oh, no! I came straight to you!" The killer smiles again, differently this time, and murmurs,"gooood," and we all know what then soon happens to the fool.

Not the little boy in The Client. He thinks that by keeping his mouth shut the gangsters will leave him alone. As I recall, they do, or at least aren't bent on killing him to shut him up. It's the cops and the prosecutor who are leaning on the kid and his lawyer to get him to talk, threatening him and/or his lawyer with jail if he doesn't. (My memory of details in this novel is vague, and I've no desire to check them out.)

I think the only other Grisham novels I've read, besides The Firm and A Time to Kill, which are both pretty good (in fact, A Time to Kill is the best of those I've read), are The Pelican Brief and The King of Torts, which are both pretty good. I read Pelican before Client, and Torts only because it was a Father's Day gift and I figured OK what the hell, give the guy another chance.

I'm an easy sell on fantastic plots, so far as being willing to suspend generally my conditioned skepticism, so long as the plot is plausible. I can't abide a story that's fundamentally flawed by a phony premise, unless it's satire or parody.

Had it not been for the gift, I might never have read another Grisham novel after Client.

Anyway, productionwise, Grisham's cranked out at least a book a year, and sometimes two or three. I can't be sure for this posting because many of those listed are paperback issues. I haven't the time nor the inclination to research the actual copyright dates.

This, then, is my apology to Grisham and to my readers. I hereby pledge to be more diligent in future postings.

Baldacci writes faster than I can read!

2009-11-15T09:21:00.008-05:00

That's a slight exaggeration, but my goodness this guy is quick with the words! Check out the Author of the Week sidebar for more on this fellow who struck many when he first burst on the scene as John Grisham-II, as in young Virginia lawyer-come-bestselling-novelist.

Baldacci has since left Grisham way, way back around the bend, simply in productivity. Their styles aren't that similar, though, with Grisham sticking more to the law and lawyers with his stories, while the newcomer is more into government-related characters and plots. Both authors give you fine entertainment for the bucks and the time. Truth be told, I'm more apt to grab a Baldacci on the remainder table than a Grisham. But that's just for now. My tastes aren't wearing cement overshoes.

I've seen Baldacci on two occasions, most recently at the 2007 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C, where he was as down-to-Earth and as entertaining in person, speaking to an audience in the "Mystery/Thriller" tent, as he is with his novels.

The first time was much earlier in a smaller setting. As I recall, he'd made it huge with Absolute Power, and was working on his third novel, with his second, Total Control, sold but not yet released.

What I remember most vividly from this meeting of a group of aspiring writers in a classroom at a local community college, are two anecdotes - one hilarious and the other containing some advice that has stuck with me and, I hope, has made me a better writer. I'll give you the advice first:

Baldacci said he was amused by published reports of Absolute Power's million-dollar sale that characterized him as this young attorney who, bored with his job, dashed off a thriller and hit the big time. The book deal, which included paperback and movie rights, was the biggest ever for a first-published novelist, and it was reported, along with a profile of Baldacci, on page one of the Wall Street Journal.

Problem was, Baldacci had been writing fiction for years with no success.

"I had enough rejection slips from magazines and book publishers to wallpaper my office," he told us.

What eventually turned the tide for him, he said, was recognizing - from somebody's advice or from reading something somewhere, I don't remember which - that detail was more important than plot.

"I had great plots, but essentially I was telling people what was happening, not showing them. I started carrying a notebook with me constantly, wherever I went. I jotted down everything I could - how a bird looked and acted on a tree branch, how a woman on the subway sat and fussed with her packages and touched her hair, the sound of a car starting up, the smells of a spring day - everything.

"Then, when I was back at my desk, writing, I used what I'd jotted down, some of those descriptions, to put some life into what I was making up in my fiction. That's when I knew I was on the right track."

But that's not what he told his boss at the Richmond law firm where he was a struggling junior associate. I'm writing this as if quoting him exactly as he spoke, but I didn't take notes at the time, so I can only guess what Baldacci actually said. But I'm sure he'd forgive me, because presenting what he said as direct quotes puts more life into this account.

"The senior partner who was my mentor came up to me one day and tossed a brief on my desk. It was one I'd written for a case I'd been assigned. The partner criticized how I'd written the brief, and said that if I wanted to succeed in this firm I would have to learn how to write properly

"He then tossed me a copy of Strunk and White's little book, Elements of Style, and told me to study it.

"It wasn't long afterward that I sold Absolute Power, and when I came to work the day the Wall Street Journal article ran I saw that everybody had a copy of it, and they looked up at me differently than they had before.

"I went to my desk, packed up my personal things, then took the copy of Strunk and White's little book and walked down the hall to the senior partner's office. When I went in, I saw that he was reading the Wall Street Journal article, too. I told him I was resigning and that I wanted to thank him for mentoring me. Then I tossed the little book on his desk.

"'I want you to know, sir, how very much this book has changed my life,' I said, and then I left."

Indeed.

Chapter Nine's in the can!

2009-11-14T21:51:00.001-05:00

On a roll now, folks. Starting to move along. First Shot

Back online

2009-11-13T09:21:00.011-05:00

The remnants of Tropical Storm Ida blew through Hampton Roads most of this week, knocking out our satellite Internet server for much of that time. But it's mostly passed now, moving up the coast, and it looks like I'll get some uninterrupted online time for a spell.

During the hiatus I finished Chapter Eight of First Shot, offline, and was able to post it this morning.

The photo is of the house we lived in when Hurricane Isabel whacked us in 2003. The water came within 1/4 inch of entering the house. It did ruin everything underneath and rose to about a foot or better in two outbuildings where we lost books, manuscripts, heirloom photos and garden implements. The experience helped significantly to nudge us out of that low-lying community to an upland house up county.

(click on photo to enlarge)

News and weather reports predicted the nor'easter we weathered this past week would bring flooding to about the same level as it was during Isabel. I haven't driven down that way yet, but I've learned that some friends who still live there were seeking higher ground yesterday as the afternoon high tide moved in.

As it turned out, the damage wasn't nearly as catastrophic as Isabel's. This was partly because many who lost their homes in 2003 and who rebuilt on the same lots, raised their new houses on the kind of stilts you see along Outer Banks beaches. Many whose homes were heavily damaged during the Isabel flooding, used federal assistance money to elevate their houses, as well.

Happy Eastwood Day!

2009-11-09T21:19:00.006-05:00

Lifted these from the Down Range Cafe, thanks to Jackel and twyacht.

And here's a bonus. It does seem the kind of sign Clint would stick in his lawn if he were, well, really pissed.

And, finally, as you can see, this is not our hero. But Johnny certainly belongs in the club. BTW, someone emailed me both photos. Dunno if copyrights apply, but if somebody wants to claim they do, they're welcome to sue me and try to squeeze blood out of a turnip. I'll let Mr. Cash express my true sentiments on this prospect:

This just in...

2009-11-09T09:32:00.001-05:00

Thanks to my sister, who emailed it to me this morning.

Southern Fried Crime

2009-11-09T06:44:00.020-05:00

Please read more about our spotlit author this week in the sidebar on the left. Wanted him out here, too, because writers who can orchestrate words with the poetic power of a tommygun, to mortally wound or scare the bejeebies out of our inner zombies, deserve an extra plug.

Burke's not a gunny - Dave Robicheaux, when he's armed at all, carries his "GI .45," and his pal Clete's primary choice is a ".38 snubnose" - but both men definitely have the mindset. When it's time to shoot, they shoot. These guys left condition white behind for good in kindergarten.

So far as I know, Hollywood's done Burke only once, with In the Electric Mist. Tommy Lee Jones is Robicheaux and John Goodman's the really nasty Julie "Baby Feet" Balboni. Clete wasn't included in the screenplay - my only real disappointment with the movie.

A bonus was Levon Helm, former drummer with The Band, as the ghost of Confederate General John Bell Hood. Helm's a helluvan actor. Quite a stick man, too, the "Levon" British balladeer Elton John reputedly wrote an anthem to some years back. But we won't even toy with that one... Or have we?

While violent crime and man's inhumanity to himself are constant themes in Burke's work, he occasionally gives Robicheaux and Clete a rest and brings other quirky characters onstage to capture our hearts and leave indelible marks on our souls.

His collection of stories - Jesus Out to Sea - came out after Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans. Because Burke knows the place and the people so well, his you-are-there immersion in the nightmare needs no dramatic artifice to inflate his narratives. They're fiction, but they're real.

"But all these things happened before the storm hit New Orleans. After the storm passed, nothing Miles and Tony and me had done together seemed very important...

"The color of the water is chocolate brown, with a greenish-blue shine on the surface like gasoline, except it's not gasoline. All the stuff from the broken sewage mains has settled on the bottom. When people try to walk in it, dark clouds swell up around their chests and arms. I've never smelled anything like it." - Jesus Out to Sea

Katrina also inspired a Robicheaux novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, of which I wouldn't gasp with surprise to learn Hollywood's already caught the scent.

Fill your hands, you sonofabitch!

2009-11-06T19:42:00.033-05:00

So. Who will be The Duke in the Coen brothers' remake of the classic True Grit? A little Googling tells us that it just might be Jeff Bridges who wears the eyepatch, hefts the bottle and gets done the dirty deeds.

But. Hold on! Josh Brolin's name comes up, too, and Matt Damon's. Matt Damon?? You gotta be kidding? That's what I said when my Hollywood insider, The Hyco Kid, called me tonight with the news. That's what the Kid says he said, too, when he heard it.

The Kid, by the way, plans to fly out to LaLa Land after Christmas to audition for a bit part. He's been in a bunch of movies already, as an extra. No speaking parts, but he's hoping this will change with True Grit. Retired Navy, he's taken acting lessons, has his Guild card and is accommodating.

"I'll go anywhere they wanna film it. Timbuktu, if I have to," he says. (That's The Kid, on the right.)

Anyway, after The Kid told me about Damon, I did the Googling. Damon's talking with the Coens, say the gossip columnists, but to play the Glenn Campbell part. Ah. That could work. Now I won't hafta torture my imagination trying to picture Matt Damon with an eyepatch, reins in his teeth and a gun in each hand growling...well, you know what the Rooster growls. Couldn't be Matt Damon. Too clean cut.

Then I saw where Jeff Bridges might get the Cogburn role. Yeah. He could pull it off. That could work.

Bridges did a good villain - a damned good villain - in Iron Man. Meaning he has the gravitas (love that word, especially for situations like this.) to play a heavy. And, make no mistake: Rooster Cogburn is a heavy. Heroic, maybe, in the end, but a heavy, a heroic heavy. (Sorry, got hung up on another word. It happens.)

I know you're probly wondering, so where does Brolin come in? Brolin, the heroic middleweight in No Country for Old Men. Are the Coens seriously thinking of casting Brolin as Rooster?

He could look the part, he could walk the part, but could he say, sitting on a horse, with reins in his teeth and a gun in each hand, without laughing, "Fill your hands, you sonofabitch?" Nah. Not Josh Brolin. He'd make a good Ned Pepper, though, the Robert DuVall role, a villain lite. Perfect.

(Must try to wrap this up quickly and whisk it off to the Coen brothers, to help them decide. In fact, let's all whisk our recommendations to them. Here's their forum: Coen Brothers. Frankly, if I had my druthers, Tom Selleck would be Rooster. Tom Selleck is Rooster Cogburn, dammit!)

Anyway, The Hyco Kid also told me another tidbit he picked up from his sources: Jerry Bruckheimer is doing a remake of The Lone Ranger, and guess who's gonna play Tonto? Hahahaha, of course! How could it be anybody other than.....Johnny Depp! Perfect! The Kid says the masked man's gonna be Clooney . I don't like Clooney, but I've grudgingly enjoyed some of his performances. Michael Clayton is one that comes to mind. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?, I like, too. Yet, I think he'd ruin The Lone Ranger if he were the Lone Ranger.

Enough grumbling. Bruckheimer's told the gossip columnists that Clooney will not be the Lone Ranger. Whew. Thank you, Jerry! So who will it be? Who do we want it to be?

I'd give you a link to Bruckheimer's website, but it takes too long to load.

Bob Lee Swagger?

(Anybody know how to switch heads on Photobucket - if it's even possible? I've been trying to replace my ridiculous effort here with the head of the real Lone Ranger, but can't find a way to do it.)

Smallest epic battle?

2009-11-05T03:34:00.015-05:00

Only two days fighting and one dead on each side, yet the battle for Fort Pulaski, Georgia, in April 1862, struck not only a strategically fatal blow to the Noble Cause during the War of Yankee Audacity, but ended 1,000 years of trust in the concept of brick fortresses as viable cover in a tactical defense.

Thanks to? The Parrott Rifle, actually a cannon, making its decisive debut in this battle, which kicked off at 8 a.m. April 10, and concluded with the fort's surrender at 2:30 p.m. the following day.

[I should note here that, as usual, my inspiration this morning comes from my trusty Civil War 2009 Calendar (Penguin Putnam) and the ever loyal Wikipedia online. In this instance, I also wish to thank Our Georgia History for its online account of the battle and its significance. I feel compelled to explain that while Penguin Putnam holds the copyright on the calendar, actually it is published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. There...gasp...I think we're covered!]

Where were we? Ah, yes. The Parrott Rifle. Coming in sizes ranging from those that fired 10-lb. shells to the rare versions that hurled projectiles weighing close to that of an NFL nose tackle, their advantage over the traditional smoothbore artillery piece was, as we gunnies might expect, in range and accuracy. The five 30-pounders could lob their loads nearly four miles before they pounded through a fort's brick walls like hammers of Thor.

With their brutal accuracy the Parrott's shells smashed two breaches in the fort's walls and began homing in on one of its powder magazines, which contained some 20 tons of black powder. The imminent danger of a massive explosion persuaded the fort's commander, Col. Charles H. Olmstead, to hoist the white flag and surrender.

All in all, the feds, under Gen. David "Black Dave" Hunter, lost one dead and "several" wounded, while Olmstead's volunteer militia suffered one fatality and 363 wounded.

But the strategic loss to the Confederacy was that the Northern Aggressors had now closed the port of Savannah to Rebel traffic.

Tactically, the Parrott Rifle had demonstrated the futility of masonry as a material behind which combatants could find protection against the enemy's biggest guns.

Invented in 1860 by Robert Parker Parrott, who was then superintendent of the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, N.Y., the weapon itself eventually fell from favor. Made of cast iron reinforced with a wrought iron band, the cannons unfortunately had a habit of bursting at awkward times, injuring members of its crew and embarrassing senior officers during demonstrations at the West Point training grounds.

Pressured by the elitist New York Times in 1889, the War Department's Ordnance Bureau retired the Parrotts from service. Many of them can be found today in battlefield parks, courthouse lawns and the like. The first production gun tube, serial number 1, rests on a reproduction gun carriage in the center square of Hanover, Pennsylvania.

This Soldier Can Write!

2009-11-01T09:40:00.024-05:00

Bucky Burruss's books are his books, not the "told to a ghost" variety that so many celebrities settle for to cash in on their names. Bucky taught high school English after his first tour in Vietnam, before he decided he'd rather get back into the action where he'd lost close friends and where other friends were still fighting.

If Bucky hadn't wanted to tell his story himself after he finally hung up his sword for good the story might never have reached print. He wasn't a celebrity. No ghost would have found him marketable. Turns out Bucky writes a helluva lot better than your average ghostwriter, anyway.

Mike Force was the first of five books Bucky's published, and the only one that's nonfiction. It's a brutally honest account of his first years in the Army, where he won his green beret as an elite Special Forces officer and, in Vietnam, led one of the so-called A-Team Mike Force units, a highly mobile detachment poised 24-7 to rush to the assistance of soldiers in more conventional units that had gotten into trouble.

Here's what Lt. Gen. Yarborough (Ret.) said in an Amazon.com review of Mike Force: "A beautiful piece of work by an author who is sensitive, a keen observer, and a gallant soldier."

It's a shame that Mike Force was largely ignored when it came out in 1989. The book received the kind of public reception bestowed upon most of the war's participants: a general sense of denial and contempt. Vietnam wasn't a popular war, and the country turned its back on those who were stigmatized by having been a part of it. Bucky's four subsequent novels fared little better, despite their literary quality and being based on Bucky's first-hand experience, which included helping Col. Charlie Beckwith create what has become this country's almost mythical elite fighting force, known as Delta.

Bucky was deputy commander of Delta Force when he retired from his military career.

After spending some time in California, writing and working as a security consultant, where he worked with film star Julia Roberts and sang on Lyle Lovett's I Love Everybody album, he returned to his native Gloucester County, Va. and settled down with his family.

The modest first printings of his books eventually did sell out, but they remained out of print until recently. They've been reissued. His most ambitious work, All That Matters, is a thinly disguised fictional account of his life. The novel concludes a heartbeat before the military disaster in Somalia, which was depicted in Mark Bowden's exceptional book, Black Hawk Down.

All of Bucky's books are now available at Amazon.com. He's donating the royalties from All That Matters to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which provides financial assistance to families of fallen U.S. warriors and ensures that their children receive college educations.

He's writing a sequel to All That Matters.

It may be apparent at this point that Lewis H. "Bucky" Burruss is this weeks' Gun Thoughts' literary laureate. I've provided several links throughout this posting to access information on Bucky and his books, and will post yet another link in the Author of the Week gallery on the left. Oorah!

Las Tres Calabazas wanted for you to enjoy their special Halloween performance, but they no feel so good...

2009-10-30T18:49:00.005-04:00

Suppressor confessor

2009-10-30T09:07:00.010-04:00

Of course I'd like to have suppressors. Who wouldn't? Who above the age of thirty lives for noise? Who wouldn't like to be able to get in a little backyard target practice now and again with the same neighborhood apprehension that would accompany a little backyard archery practice - namely, unless a neighbor stops by and sees you, none?

Who wouldn't like to be able to take out a fox or opossum that's just tripped a motion-activated alarm as it moves in on the chicken coop at 3 a.m., without awakening any human other than oneself? Hey, my confession goeth only so far! I'll let you guess at the answer to this one.

Oh, OK, not me - meaning I'd like to be able to shoot the bast'd with a lethal weapon that's so quiet I'd be inclined - were I a Darwin Awards contender - to look down the barrel after each shot to make sure the projectile wasn't lodged in there somewhere.

I'd buy a can today if I could do so without my name ending up in another federal database. I know, I know. I'm in plenty of them already, with guns alone. Every time I fill out a BATF form at the gun store or the gun show to purchase yet another absolutely necessary component for my modest battery, I can hear the new ka-ching registering in some monster computer somewhere that's not supposed to be accessed by anyone without a darned good reason.

My reasoning is thus: I'm in their damned computers enuf already, and have no desire to add another layer of data for their software to chew on in compiling a list of those citizens deemed most dangerous to the regime - should there, of course, be a darned good reason for the regime to compile such a list.

So, no, even tho I'd like to have a suppressor or two and a tommygun and a .308 SCAR and...and...stop! Stop right there!

But what I might acquire is a Gamo Whisper! Twelve hundred feet-per-second of a nasty .177 caliber PBA Raptor missile hurtling from my deck into the shoulder of Reynard or Pogo at 3 a.m. or into a target out behind the pool at any time of day, with no more noise than a single kernel of popcorn popping would be just fine.

A couple of grizzled nimrods at the range recently were busting the wings off flies at 50 yards with their new Whispers. I was down a few tables, and was wondering when they were going to start shooting, until I looked over and realized they'd been shooting all along.

With the ads for Whispers I've seen getting prominent play in American Rifleman, it would seem these beauties are moving off the shelf fairly steadily. Wait a minute - "off the shelf?" Did I say "off the shelf?"

Hell, you can buy the Whisper online, without any paperwork to tip off the feds that another dangerous citizen has just joined the revolution.

The same goes for the Whisper's big bad brother, the Hunter Extreme, which pushes a PBA (Performance Ballistic Alloy) Pellet downrange at an advertised 1,650 feet-per-second. Without the suppressor, which Gamo advertises cuts the Whisper's decibel level up to 52%, I'm guessing the Extreme lets loose with the sound of two popcorn kernels popping.

My neighbors could live obliviously with that.

Thanks, Angie!

2009-10-29T20:04:00.000-04:00

You go, Girl!

2009-10-28T04:09:00.002-04:00

Got this from my sister this morning. Couldn't find it on Snopes, so I'm assuming it's real. I hope it is!

The real Miss America.

This 19 year old ex-cheerleader (now an Air Force Security Forces Sniper) was watching a road that led to a NATO military base when she observed a man digging by the road. She engaged the target (i.e., she shot him). It turned out he was a bomb maker for the Taliban, and he was burying an IED that was to be detonated when a US patrol walked by 30 minutes later. It would have certainly killed and wounded several soldiers.

The interesting fact of this story is the shot was measured at 725 yards. She shot him as he was bent over burying the bomb. The shot went through his butt and into the bomb which detonated; he was blown to pieces. The Air Force made a motivational poster of her.

Gun Control thru Health Care

2009-10-27T06:36:00.006-04:00

These guys never give up! At this rate it won't be long before they come at us thru our insurance policies, like the life premiums going up if you own a Picasso because that indicates a frivolous, unstable lifestyle. A teacher told us that in grade school (way before they invented gun control). Own a gun and, sorry, Charlie, you're too dangerous for Prudential.

Anyway, my friend Rob sent me this editorial that ran last week in Investors Business Daily. These damned victim disarmers (disarmors?) are coming thru the cracks. Best keep the bug bombs handy:

Gun Control By Way Of Health Reform

Posted 10/22/2009 06:45 PM ET

Gun Rights: A decade after Congress forbade the CDC from studying the health consequences of gun ownership, the National Institutes of Health has started funding such research. Will reform pry the guns from our cold, sick hands?

More than a decade ago Congress, seeing it as a backdoor assault on the 2nd Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms, voted to cut funding for firearms research by the Centers for Disease Control. Such research was viewed as one-sided and based on flawed assumptions that all gun use was bad, even that which saved lives and deterred crime.

The National Institutes of Health seemed to have picked up the baton by funding similar studies of gun violence as a public health issue.

"It's almost as if someone's been looking for a way to get this study done ever since the Centers for Disease Control was banned from doing it 10 years ago," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, of one of the NIH studies. "But it doesn't make any more sense now than it did then."

In response to inquiries about the studies, NIH spokesman Don Ralbovsky said: "Gun-related violence is a public health problem — it diverts considerable health care resources away from other problems and, therefore, is of interest to NIH."

Considering the drive for health care reform and the views on private gun ownership held by this administration and appointees such as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, this renewed linkage between gun control and public health is of interest to defenders of the 2nd Amendment as well.

After the 1996 shooting of 16 kids in Dunblane, Scotland, the United Kingdom passed one of the strictest gun-control laws in the world, banning its citizens from owning almost all types of handguns. But that didn't cut down on violent crime, which nearly doubled from 1998-99 to 2002-03.

Australia also saw violent crime pick up after it banned private possession of most firearms in 1996. Increases in violent crime averaged 32% a year in the six years following the ban. Armed robbery rates showed increases of 74%.

Nothing increases gun violence like the sure knowledge your potential victim is unarmed. Such studies ignore the lives saved and the rapes and assaults prevented by guns in the home or by citizens in "right to carry" states.

In many instances, merely brandishing a firearm sends the assailant fleeing with no one injured. None of this is counted on the plus side of the public health ledger.

According to data from the Census Bureau, 65.7% of the U.S. population lives in the 39 right-to-carry states, and there is no indication that such laws have turned our neighborhoods into the O.K. Corral.

To the contrary, all the stats we've seen show a steep decline in murders and violent crimes after a state adopts a right-to-carry law.

Dr. Glen Otero of the Claremont Institute reports that where U.S. counties have enacted conceal-carry laws, murder rates have fallen by 8%, rape by 5% and aggravated assault by 7%, with the highest declines in urban counties.

As researcher John Lott notes, much of our violent crime is also gang-related, with 70% of American murders occurring in just 3.5% of U.S. counties — inner-city areas where drug dealers are concentrated and gangs fight over turf.

Most of the mass shootings of recent vintage, from the Trolley Square Mall in Utah to Virginia Tech, occurred in gun-free zones where only the predator was allowed to be armed.

As we deal with the H1N1 virus, we need to be armed against another kind of swine.

So what the hell do I know?

2009-10-26T16:52:00.009-04:00

I shoulda gone to Mr. Google on this one, too. This photo ran on TheFiringLine. Of course I'm embarrassed!

The Silenced Revolver

2009-10-25T18:20:00.012-04:00

Years ago I wrote a letter to the author of a pretty good mystery novel, telling him how much I liked it and how I hoped he'd write a sequel. Then I very gently pointed out a mistake that I said probably would be noticed only by gun buffs, but that as gun buffs probably make up a good portion of the mystery novel market it might be worth the trouble to avoid such technical errors as the one he'd made, which, as I recall, was the old silenced revolver trick. Or possibly the old "clicked off the safety" on his (modern) revolver trick.

I invited him to contact me with any firearms questions in the event he was writing a sequel or any other novel in which a gun or guns might appear. He was a local man, who sold rare books or ran a bookbindery - it's been awhile. This was his debut novel, and, so far as I know, his last. I never heard from him. I was disappointed, as I'd had in mind the sort of literary relationship enjoyed by English firearms expert Geoffrey Boothroyd and Ian Fleming. It was Boothroyd who wrote to Fleming a letter admiring the James Bond character, but suggesting something with a tad more stopping power than the .25acp Beretta Fleming had Bond carrying in, I believe, Casino Royale. Fleming wrote back, and a long literary collaboration began between the two, first noticeable in the next Bond book, Dr. No, in which Bond moved up to the .32acp Walther PPK.

I've occasionally wondered over the years how the author to whom I wrote - I've forgotten his name and the name of his book - reacted to my letter. As I knew nothing about the man except that he knew books and had written a pretty good mystery, I settled on the possible scenario of him sneering, muttering, "fucking gun nut," and tossing the letter over his shoulder to a Letterman crash, then sipping some mediocre brandy and vowing never to write about fucking guns ever, ever again. There!

I wrote another letter around that time, after reading Armed and Dangerous, a writers guide to weapons, by Michael Newton (Writer Digest Books, 1990, Cincinnati, Ohio). Again I was complimentary. I liked the history, and I enjoyed the examples of literary gun gaffes Newton included, with the silenced revolvers, revolver safeties, seven-shot .44 Magnum revolvers and other mistakes by writers who were clearly gun ignorant and either too lazy or too blase to do their research.

Again I tactfully pointed out an error, this time among the four photos contained in the appendix, illustrating examples of a semi-auto and a bolt action rifle and a single-action and double action revolver. The two revolvers chosen were Rugers - a Redhawk, which was labeled "single-action," and a GP-100 for the double.

Again, I heard nothing back.

From its listings at Amazon.com, it appears that the book was reissued in 2001, one would hope with a Colt Peacemaker or at least a Ruger Blackhawk for the single-action illustration. And one would hope Newton also corrected the other mistakes he made, which were not-so-gently pointed out on the Amazon page by several experts, including famous gunwriter Duane Thomas. Whatever, as the kids say. It's now moot, as the lawyers say: Both editions are out of print.

Fortunately, meanwhile, along came the Internet, so a writer needing precise information on firearms need only tap a word or two into the search window of his or her new friend Mr. Google.

Hell, I used Mr. Google several times in this posting alone! Wonderful tool. Don't know how I ever got by without it.

Doubleday Day

2009-10-23T08:36:00.010-04:00

It's Capt. Abner Doubleday's day, at least so far as my trusty Civil War 2009 Calendar (Penguin Putnam Inc.) is concerned, which chose today to remind us that Mr. Doubleday, as second senior officer at Fort Sumter, S.C., fired the first Union shot of the War for Southern Independence.

This cataclysmic event actually occurred on 21 April 1861.

Many of us also think of Mr. Doubleday as the inventor of our so-called national pastime. Legend has it that he invented baseball in Elihu Phinney's Cooperstown cow pasture in 1839.

Nah, historians have virtually unanimously sneered, 'tain't so, whether on Oct. 23 or any other day. Mr. Doubleday, that year a West Point cadet, was nowhere near Cooperstown, N.Y. The evolution of baseball is much more intricate, they've insisted, with roots wriggling back to England about 100 years earlier to various informal bat-and-ball games, one in particular called "rounders."

Moreover, the man honored by two Doubleday Fields - one in Cooperstown and the other at West Point - never claimed himself to have had anything to do with inventing baseball. And he was not necessarily a modest man, referring to himself as the "Hero of Sumter" for ordering the first artillery piece to "FIRE" at the attacking Confederates.

I'm lifting this information from my old friend Wikipedia, to which I've linked the title of this post. I'm a tad disappointed to discover such ruthless revisionism of the legend with which I grew up. But I'll get over it.

At least there's a record of Mr. Doubleday's wartime reputation, which, sadly, is a tad spotty. Yet, his memory is honored for that, as well. Thousands of U.S. troops in WWII were carried to England aboard a Liberty Ship named the USS Abner Doubleday.

One of baseball's all-time greats no doubt could forgive history for taking liberties with the man whose legend, whether real or myth, is enshrined at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Mr. Berra was thinking of something else when he said this, but it applies here just the same: "If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be."

Chapter Six is filed!

2009-10-22T20:56:00.001-04:00

Whew! Too many distractions this week, but I think I'm getting a little momentum going now. We'll see...

Should I sue?

2009-10-20T10:49:00.003-04:00

Nah. The weaselly little blighter's agency will say they thought of it first, altho it's so fresh (Oct. 12 issue of Newsweek) that I could make a good case that I was first out of the gate. But I can't prove it, and with Warren Buffett calling the shots I'm sure Geico could wheel out oodles of "proof" that their ad agency thought of it waaaay back in the Stone Age.

If this blog were "monetized" I'd hafta worry about them suing me, wouldn't I? It ain't fair, of course. It ain't.

And now, back to First Shot. Dammit, I swear I'll have Chapter Six posted by day's end! I'm about out of excuses.

Stump Time #5 - Esmeralda

2009-10-17T10:54:00.019-04:00

Charlie was a cop most of his adult life. He'd been in gunfights - seen the Elephant, as they say - and survived without a serious scratch from that dangerous career.

It was the other job that did him in, the one way back before he first pinned on a badge, the one that didn't put him deliberately in the harm's way cops choose as they preserve the peace and protect others from mayhem and violent death.

Charlie died slowly from a hideous disease called "asbestosis," that took half a century to creep on clawed microscopic feet through his lungs and strangle him long after his exposure to asbestos working as a teenager with the nasty stuff building Navy ships.

I met him near the end of his police career, when he risked his retirement to help a news reporter root out corruption that involved some of Charlie's colleagues. At one point, unbeknownst to me, he sat in his car out of sight while I interviewed a couple of subjects in the investigation. The interview was in a bus garage. The "subjects" were hostile. I bluffed my way back outside, which might have been a tad trickier had I known how concerned Charlie was for my safety.

Bonded during this vocational relationship, which required absolute trust on both sides, we became friends and hunting/shooting buddies.

He told me about meeting, as a young Marine, Col. Charles Askins, who was helping set up a rifle team for a competition. Askins had a reputation as a "real hardass," Charlie said, admitting to being nervous about meeting the living legend. When he did, he added, he found Askins to be gruff, but polite and respectful to the younger men. "He was a gentleman," Charlie said.

It probably didn't hurt that the younger men knew well who their mentor was and treated him with the deference due a man of such stature.

Charlie had pretty bad arthritis in his hands by the time I knew him, so he was limiting his shooting to rifles and skeet. Friends of his told me he'd once been a serious contender with handguns in competitive shooting. He was at the top of his game in 1983 when he shot against Rob Leatham and Ross Seyfried in the IPSC's World Shoot VI, which was held within tobacco-spitting distance of Charlie's backyard - York County, Virginia.

I remember the event because our outdoor writer, a friend of Charlie's who years later introduced us, did a story for the paper about a local gunsmith who fixed Seyfried's 1911 after its extractor broke during a match. Seyfried was the reigning IPSC champ, having won World Shoot V in his native Johannesburg, South Africa two years earlier. Leatham took the crown this time, winning his first of five IPSC world championships and launching an unparalleled career of shooting achievements.

The gun Charlie used to put pressure on these giants was Esmeralda, a nickel plated Series 70 1911A1 .45 tricked out with nothing but an Aristocrat Rib. He'd done a little crude smithing on the piece, filing and buffing the ejection port a tad to reduce the chance of stovepipes, and adding a Colt rubber wraparound grip.

I found out he'd named it Esmeralda years after he sold it to me. Someone happened to mention it at the range once, and it seemed to embarrass him. I found out quite a bit later that Charlie had borrowed the name from someone else, I believe it was Col. Jeff Cooper, who evidently had conferred the feminine moniker on his favorite 1911. I tried just now to confirm this in a Google search, but came up only with Exotic Grips by Esmeralda, which, if nothing else, definitely links the name to the right genre.

Anyway, Charlie's 1911 will always be Ezzie to me. I've tricked her out a tad myself. Replaced the barrel with a Bar-Sto, replaced the Aristocrat Rib with Big Dot sights and replaced the Colt wraparound with a Crimson Trace equivalent.

I don't carry Ezzie much, but she's always nearby when I'm at home or at the range. I'll hang onto her until I've matriculated to the next stage, where Charlie and Richard and other passed friends have gathered.

Meanwhile I trust I'm as much a comfort to her as she is to me.

Open v. Concealed Carry

2009-10-16T08:49:00.008-04:00

The issue of open carry has come up lately on several of the gun fora I visit, and it has gotten me to thinking, which, since I retired three years ago, I didn't think I'd have to do much of anymore.

But here's what I think: It's good for all of us that some people - I call them activists - are willing to push the envelope of convention and wear their iron on their belt for all the world to see.

What these folks are doing is part political and part consciousness raising. They're testing the waters, testing people's reactions. By putting themselves in the spotlight this way, they become ambassadors for our cause - showing the general populace that wearing a gun can be as unexceptional as wearing a cellphone, that the folks who wear them aren't wearing them as chips on their shoulders, aren't looking for trouble, aren't paranoid freaks, but are simply regular Janes and Joes carrying their guns legally, openly and unafraid of what anyone might think of them or say to them about it.

This, of course, carries with it an enormous responsibility.

Off the top of my head, it would seem to me that if one is carrying a gun openly one should dress as inconspicuously as reasonably possible. This would mean no gangsta pants dangling below the butt, no ominous tattoos or in-your-face freaky spiky hairstyles, no nose or tongue studs or eyelid rings or piercings that I don't have the stomach to even imagine at the moment. No T-shirts with provocative messages of the "Kill them all and let God sort them out" philosophy.

At some point in our social evolution, if we are successful, even people who push other envelopes of convention might be able to openly carry without frightening too many voters. But, for now, I should think that making one political/consciousness raising gesture is enuf - if for no other reason than that it follows the KISS principle of keeping things simple, keeping the focus on one thing at a time.

Carrying openly requires behaving oneself with exceptional discipline. No flipping the bird at drivers who cut you off in traffic, or getting into hardass staring contests with hardass types looking for trouble. It means controlling ones temper in public no matter how pissed one might get about damned near anything.

It also means focusing on "yellow" perhaps a tad more than if you were not armed. I realize this might sound illogical, as an unarmed person should be even more wary of his or her surroundings than should someone with lethal protection. What I'm thinking of here, tho, is that when you're carrying openly you have not only the prospect of danger to yourself and companions to keep in the forefront of your mind, but also the danger of a predator who can see that you are armed, and might be looking for that instant of inattention on your part to get the jump on you - even to the extent of sneaking up from a blindside and grabbing your gun.

Thus, it would seem that the focus should be more toward the "orange" side of yellow than solely on yellow.

Of course, some of these admonitions also apply to folks who carry concealed. You don't pick fights, you try to deescalate confrontations, you make it a point to silently think "yellow" periodically so that you in fact maintain a focus on yellow.

As for me, I carry concealed, and I don't want anybody to know this (except you). So, in addition to these other precautions, I also must concern myself with not allowing my gun to clunk against anything that will tip off anyone who might recognize the sound, and I always try to position myself so that someone won't inadvertently feel the gun under my clothing - no matter how clear it might otherwise be that I'm happy to see them.

Bottom line: I don't see this as a debate so much as I see it as a different-strokes-for-different-folks sort of issue. I admire the people who are making a political statement and are helping to raise public consciousness beyond the general hoplophobia that exists in many parts of society. More power to them.

As for me, I share the point of view expressed recently on Michael Bane's Blog by "Farmer" Frank James: "OC is a lot like Public Nudity....Only a 'Few' can do it well."

Stump Time #4 - Close Call at Flat Rock

2009-10-14T08:19:00.016-04:00

My dad loved to dabble in politics - "dabble" being the key word, as he never enjoyed much success at it.

But a couple of friends and I enjoyed some success from his efforts once, during a Saturday hunting episode. We were teenagers.

It was a gorgeous autumn day. We had driven a few miles from home to the country to hunt on some land owned by a relative. It was one of the steadily growing areas where hunting was restricted to shotguns. Not sure if we were after anything in particular, but I'm guessing rabbits mainly or possibly squirrels or crows or their ilk.

Regardless of what we thought we were hunting, our luck was zip. Not even a shot. We enjoyed our manly pursuit nonetheless, prowling gamely through the woods and pasture, our guns at the ready, expectations full to the brim with hope.

Come sunset, the hope had curdled. We sloughed back to our car and stood around, peering intently at anything within range that seemed to be moving. A dead leaf or two waved in the breeze of approaching dusk, but nothing with blood in its veins appeared.

So, with ammo at reasonable prices in those days, we decided to empty our shotguns by firing off each gun's chambered shell or two instead of removing them to hunt another day. There was a huge, plateau-shaped rock upon which we climbed, one at a time, to execute this impromptu ritual conclusion to our unproductive hunt. We aimed at the clouds.

"Boom!" "Boom! Boom!" "Boom"

We returned to the car and dispiritedly sheathed our guns. Right about then, the game warden's dark green car crunched across the gravel road, appearing out of nowhere, and blocked our exit.

Fully uniformed, including his revolver and Smokey the Bear hard-brimmed hat, the warden eased out of his car and swaggered over to ours. No, he didn't say, "You inna heapa trouble, boys," but we sensed that this is what he was thinking.

He told us it was after the legal hours to hunt. We said we knew that, and that this is why we were no longer hunting. He said, but you fired your guns. We did not deny this, and explained that we were simply wasting ammunition by shooting at the sky.

He stared at us awhile, then shifted his gaze to the ground around us, presumably looking for evidence - feathers, blood, rabbit hair, something incriminating.

"I've been watching you since you arrived," he said, startling us in a new, queasy way.

"We didn't see you," one of us croaked back.

"I was in that field," he said, pointing at a stand of yellowed cornstalks across the road, "watching you through binoculars."

I imagine the three of us immediately began scrolling through our memories of the past several hours, wondering what the hell we might have done or said - assuming the guy could read lips - that could get us into a heapa trouble. I know I did. I also experienced flashbacks of movie scenes involving potbellied southern sheriffs finding any excuse under the setting sun to put whomever they wished on a chain gang forever and ever.

"Yikes," I'm sure bubbled up somewhere inside my head - if, that is, my vocabulary included the word "yikes" in those days. If not, the spirit of "yikes" certainly bubbled up and floated around awhile.

We knew who the warden was. He was notorious locally for being a strict by-the-book prick, who reputedly had busted his brother-in-law moments after enjoying Thanksgiving dinner the warden's sister had prepared including some ducks her husband had shot out of season.

We knew this jackass wouldn't hesitate to write us up - meaning he could then seize our guns and keep them - if he found anything, any microscopic iota of violation any of us might have committed, inadvertently or otherwise. Advertently?

So far as we knew, he hadn't yet found anything, but I wondered if he was the sort of cop who would kick out a taillight in order to justify an arrest if he really wanted an arrest. And after sitting in a cornfield all afternoon watching three teenage boys through binoculars, you had to figure he'd want to find some way, any little way, to justify the effort.

"Open your trunk," he ordered, undoubtedly figuring he had us cold now, that if he could find anything in there that might be construed as illegal, he could write us up. Teenage boys? Of course, there would be something compromising in the trunk. He'd watched enuf Dobie Gillis to know the likelihood of evidence being in there - a six-pack, girlie magazines, a body. Marijuana was unknown to us back then. Only the migrants who came from Mexico to work in the canning factory knew about "funny cigarettes."

We'd come in my dad's car, so I opened the trunk, wondering myself what might be inside that could incriminate us with this desperately cynical cop.

What we all saw were some campaign posters from my dad's most recent unsuccessful campaign for public office. A judgeship or a state senate primary, come to mind. Whatever it was, he'd been smacked down by the voters because he was an awful campaigner (I was his campaign manager) and he never did anything to curry party support or raise money.

We all looked at each other. Ideas were forming. The game warden, studying one of the posters he'd plucked from the trunk, muttered something like, "Is this your dad?" He'd forgotten which one of us had the same last name, but he evidently remembered having seen that name recently.

One of my friends seized the moment. "Oh, yeah! That's his father!" He pointed at me. I nodded, feeling squirmy, but gradually sensing that we just might have passed some sort of crisis apex.

We had. The warden muttered some more words, finishing up with an admonition to obey the laws, etc. etc. He gave us our hunting licenses back, shuffled to his car, got in, backed out and drove away. Even his car looked disappointed.

Thanks again, Dad, if you can hear me up there. Many thanks.

Scent of the Elephant

2009-10-11T10:56:00.017-04:00

"Everybody stand still. They've got guns."

Paul said it calmly, but with an unusual tension in his voice, and loudly enuf so that we all could hear him. "We" were about two dozen youngsters bumming around Europe in the summer of 1970. I'd finally gotten my degree, worked a year double shifting as a skycap and a security guard at the local airport and saved enuf cash for a Eurail pass and a couple books of travelers checks.

It was the same summer of my discontent in East Berlin, as described in the first of these "elephant" posts. The Berlin bust came first, because one of the friends I'd been waiting for there was Paul, who had been one of my college roommates.

Our group of summer wanderers had started aggregating in Barcelona, where Paul and I decided to take the slow boat to Ibiza, a famous party place - one of a string of islands in the Mediterranean called "Balearic" - that we knew nothing about but had decided to visit at the prompting of one of the group we'd met while sipping wine in a local cafe. We were sort of doing the Hemingway thing, as I recall.

By the time our boat slid into its Ibiza berth our little serendipitous troupe had grown to about half a dozen. We set out to find a hotel, and quickly learned that, as the tourist season had just begun, all rooms were taken. One of our group, whom I remember only as "the German guy," had been to Ibiza before. He led us through a brick-paved courtyard, down some stone steps and through a sort of alley/tunnel, under the buildings and out into the open air of the grassy bluff that sloped down to the sea from the ancient walls of what's known as the "old city of Ibiza town."

I learned that just now, doing the Google search to find out where the hell I'd been back then, when we were under the impression that the walls were what was left of an old Norman fortress. In fact, the old city of Ibiza town had been built by the Phoenicians in 654 B.C. (thank you, Wikipedia!)

Anyway, the weather was, as I recall, quite comfortable. We found these little hollows in the bluff, rolled our sleeping bags out in them and cooked supper over campfires in front of them before bedding down. Supper usually consisted of soup made with fresh vegetables and a skinny chicken that had cost us less than a dollar at a local market. Our beverage of choice was called "herbas," an anise flavored alcoholic drink that we bought for pennies at a local bodega, where they would fill a bottle from a large barrel that was filled routinely by locals who brewed their own stuff from herbs and sold it to the bodegas. Each day's blend, therefore, was a tad different from that of the day prior. We wouldn't have known, as the anise overpowered any other nuance the nectar might have offered.

Each night we were guarded by the wild dog that had adopted our particular cave, the price being a handout or two or three from our supper. A quick Google search turned up nothing about these dogs, but ours and the others that hung out around the caves were, according to "the German guy," indigenous to the island and were unable to survive anywhere else. I doubt this now, but, hey, it was a good tale and the dogs, yellowish tan and skinny - sort of resembling a blue tick hound - were friendly and loyal.

Not necessarily loyal to us, tho, as we began to suspect one morning after spending several days and nights in this idyllic interlude, one of the high points of which was waking each morning to watch the sun rise over the sea down the bluff in front of us, warming our caves and welcoming us to a new day.

On the morning our welcome ran out, the dogs were nowhere to be found. Instead, men in black suits emerged out of the morning mist and began closing in on our position.

Paul had risen before us, and had climbed the bluff to pee and to check out the "fortress." He was the first to see the approaching men in black.

Evidently his alarm was compelling enuf to alert the other cave dwellers, as they were all clustered near us by the time the black-suited men had us neatly surrounded. There were about as many of them as there were of us -- about two dozen each -- but they had hands under their jackets, and we didn't. I saw no gun, and I don't think Paul did, either, but none of us needed such a graphic representation to know damned well we'd soon see guns if we didn't behave as if we knew what was under those jackets.

We saw no steenking badges either. I, for one, wondered if these guys were gangsters, that maybe they kept drugs or other contraband stashed in the caves. We tried various languages, but they seemed not to understand a word of any of them. Eventually one of them said a word we understood, which sounded something like "passports." We quickly surrendered our passports. Somehow our captors were able to communicate to us that we needed to be at police headquarters at noon. Then they left, with our passports.

We kept our appointment, were herded into a large room where someone who could pronounce English words called us out one at a time to exit through a different doorway than we'd entered. This led us into a garage, where perhaps the only English-speaking cop on the force had our passports neatly stacked on the fender of a car. He returned the passports with an order: be off the island by sunset or face formal deportation, emphasizing that the word "deported" stamped on a passport was not good.

In a daze, we shuffled across the street to the port office and inquired about tickets to leave Ibiza. The very merry ticket agent told us there was only one boat leaving that day, for the next island up - Majorca - and that the rate had doubled or tripled over the cost of coming there from Barcelona. Some of us paid, others stayed behind to try their luck. We never saw them again.

Our group of six or seven did buy the outrageously priced tickets and sailed to Majorca, where our adventure continued, but without any further incidents elephantine.

I told this story to friends when I returned to the states, and one of them said he'd read in a brief news account about our mass eviction from the island. I was still several months away from getting my first news reporting job, and I obviously didn't know a good story when it bit me.

Better late than never, tho, surely.

Planning on lying low here today...

2009-10-09T08:30:00.003-04:00

Chapter Five of First Shot is rolling right along. I'm gonna try to finish it and get it posted later today.

Nature's suppressors

2009-10-08T08:40:00.010-04:00

Found my topic this morning when I flipped to today's page of my Civil War 2009 Calendar (Penguin Putnam Inc., 2008), which addressed a curious phenomenon that affected the Battle of Perryville (Kentucky) on 8 Oct. 1862. The calendar and other accounts say that "acoustic shadows" suppressed the sound of battle two miles away for Union Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell and a large contingent of his Army of the Ohio. Thus, Buell did not rush to reinforce his troops, contributing to a battle conclusion most historians consider a draw.

Was this a case of mass denial or one helluva "dog-ate-my-homework" excuse for oversleeping? Not according to Mark Boatner in the Civil War Dictionary (David McKay Company, Inc., New York, 1980) which defines acoustic shadow as "a phenomenon that results in sound being inaudible to persons a short distance from the source while the same sound may be heard over a hundred miles away...."

Charles D. Ross, in his book Civil War: Acoustic Shadows (White Mane Books, Shippensburg, PA, 2001) argues that this phenomenon played a role in at least seven battles of the War for Southern Independence. Ross concludes from a mix of terrain and weather conditions, along with official reports, that, whether God was on one side or the other in this war, Mother Nature certainly clapped her hands over some combatant ears in the fray from time to time.

This brings to mind a personal experience that might relate to the acoustic shadow phenomenon. It took place about three decades ago in the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. I was on assignment with a photographer to document a day with a retiring congressman. During a stroll around the Capitol, the congressman offered to demonstrate the legendary "whispering gallery," where, it is said, conspirators could communicate with each other without being seen together.

As instructed, I walked across the two-story-high, half-domed, marbled amphitheater where the House of Representatives had met for the first half of the 19th century, and took my position, while the congressman and the photographer stayed put. The congressman murmured something so softly that the photographer, standing next to him, couldn't make out what was said.

Across the room, however, I heard it clearly. I don't recall what it was the congressman "whispered," but he made his point. His barely audible voice had caught some kind of acoustic jet stream that served as the equivalent of a wireless tin-can telephone, and floated across the amphitheater right into my ear.

So, next time your spouse or boss says something you didn't want to hear, your humble "honest" smile can appear nearly as pure as a virgin's when say you didn't hear it.

Blame it on the shadow.

Spruced up First Shot blog!

2009-10-07T09:10:00.001-04:00

I've added a blurb-type sticky and a provocative header. First Shot

Well, that was quick!

2009-10-05T12:58:00.002-04:00

Got the new blog set up and running. All four chapters are posted, each one separately, most recent one first. Have at it. Lemme know whatcha think.

First Shot

First Shot's looking for a new home

2009-10-05T10:41:00.002-04:00

I closed down the Thoughts.com blog, as it wasn't user friendly. Either that or I'm too cyberdumb to figure it out. Either way, I don't have the time for such unnecessary complications. So, I'm looking for a friendly, easier place to put my novel-in-progress.

Maybe I'll start another blog right here. This system seems to be working just fine.

I'll keep you posted as soon as I figure something out.

Hüte dich vor dem Elefanten!

2009-10-04T08:21:00.015-04:00

Um, sorry 'bout that. Flashbacks can be horrible. I believe the above is German for "beware the elephant!" or something along that line.

This might even be what the old man shouted at us as he clicked back the hammer of his drilling and swung its three barrels past our torsos to emphasize his momentary absolute superiority. Too heavy to hold horizontally for long, tho, he rested the butt of his massive weapon on one of his leather-clad feet after making certain we understood where we stood, so to speak.

Fortunately for all three of us, Frank spoke pretty good German, and he and the old man carried on an uneven conversation for awhile - uneven in that it came in spurts of spittle-spraying earnestness and vehemence, interspersed with hesitations, hand gestures and halting efforts to clarify this or that nuance, which evidently had not been clarified for one or the other.

Frank and I had gotten into this predicament while trying to re-enter our post near the West German village of Rothwesten. It was a small post that had served the Luftwaffe during WWII as an airfield, camouflaged to resemble a small resort or exclusive school campus. The buildings were of a Swiss chalet design, and the airplanes - Messerschmitts, we believed - were housed beneath a sheep-grazing pasture, to emerge for flight exercises up a ramp and out a trap door.

The field itself consisted of a wire mesh through which grass could grow for the sheep to eat, theoretically fooling Allied surveillance from above to not suspect that this quaint pastoral setting concealed mighty warplanes bent on wiping democracy from the face of the Earth. Jawohl!

Whether or not it fooled anybody from the air, eventually troops under the command of Gen. George S. Patton, according to the legend we were taught, found the place and were rolling thru the front gate as the beaten Nazis skedaddled out the rear.

It was this rear gate that Frank and I were planning to enter after a walk thru wood and field, over hill and dale to Rothwesten for a bowl of oxtail soup, a locally brewed beer or two and some mild flirtation with indigenous fraulein possibilities.

As dusk settled over the countryside, we trod back to our post thru wood and field and over hill and dale, sated gastronomically, a tad tipsy and our egos mildly flattered and hopeful, and decided to hell with walking all the way around the post to enter the guarded front gate, where we might have gotten written up for one thing or another.

It was as we spproached the barely visible, unguarded, swinging gate in the fence that a shadowy figure popped out from behind some shrubbery and confronted us with the uniquely German long arm that usually consists of a shotgun barrel affixed to a couple of rifle barrels - one large caliber and one small. At that moment, at that range, even at that time of dying day, our kraut-chewing interloper could have taken both of us down, shooting from the hip, with both eyes closed, while screaming maniacally, "Veddddy eenterestink, but dumb!"

I imagined him as one of the Nazis who'd fled Patton, who'd never surrendered, who lived in a nearby cave awaiting just this moment to assert the last bitter gasp of his Fuhrer's furious Reich. Achtungaufweidenhoserschplatzerkeugelheffenpfeiperplunk! I think.

This grotesquely armed apparition was decked out in the ubiquitous lederhosen (with suspenders), a waist-length jacket, wool knee socks, clodhoppers on his feet and a felt hat that sprouted what presumably had been the most glorious tail feather of a large bird of prey.

Whatever Frank was thinking, he kept his emotions largely in check, reasoning with Fritz in Fritz's own tongue, pretty much, and ultimately succeeded in persuading this rear guard Herr Somethingorother to carefully lower the hammer of his triple threat boomer and correspondingly soften his voice to approximate a more civil approach to his NATO allies.

He watched while we slipped thru the gate and fled with measured, tho brisk dignity into the sanctuary of our Army brethren.

Frank waited until we were out of earshot, in the event that Herman could speak excellent English and was waiting for some smartass remark to propel his thumb backward on the hammer once again, to give me the lowdown.

It seems that Schultz was a minor government official, the equivalent of a game warden, who had merely suspected us of poaching. Most likely he would have let us off the hook, regardless of Frank's impassioned defensive chattering, once he realized we were unarmed and unburdened by any ill-gotten game.

In retrospect, I wish I'd had the presence of mind to ask Frank to ask Adolf if I could pop a cap or two or three at a large tree.

As it is, I have yet to fire a single drilling barrel, and most likely will never be able to afford to do so.

Chapt. Four really is in the can now. Really!

2009-10-03T21:28:00.003-04:00

I think it's ready. But remember, this is just a draft. A lot of changes could come as we go along. The main thing now is to get something down. Fill the white space. Any suggestions will be appreciated. If you think something doesn't work, tell me. If you think a particular character sucks, please, tell me. If you have any questions, ask them.

You're my muses.

(BTW, the title of this post is the hyperlink to First Shot.)

Stump Time #3 - Palatine Massacre

2009-10-02T15:48:00.013-04:00

A jury will be deliberating Monday on a sentence for the second asshole convicted of murdering seven people nearly seventeen years ago.

It took police nine years to make the arrests of the two pieces of subhuman garbage who did the deed. They forfeited their right to be treated as human beings because, according to one of them, he wanted to "do something big."

One of the victims, as you might have guessed, was Richard, my childhood friend and first shooting buddy. The other six victims were his wife, Lynn, and five of their employees. All seven were shot to death after being herded into the cooler at the small restaurant Richard and Lynn owned in Palatine, Illinois.

This nightmarish end to seven people's lives came on Jan. 8, 1993.

Richard was unarmed at the time. I assume this, because to be armed would have been unlawful, and Richard was a law-abiding man. But I can also only assume that had it been lawful for him to be armed, he would have had a gun within reach and could have prevented the annihilation that befell him on that deadly night, shortly after he closed his restaurant for the day.

Richard might well have changed his view of such elemental things over the years. We went our separate ways after graduating from high school. I went to college just to go to college, flunking out and joining the Army. Richard went to a different college to become a minister. He abandoned that pursuit, gravitating instead to politics.

He served as an aide to a Democratic Wisconsin governor, and later to a Democratic U.S. senator. I learned through family and classmates that Richard eventually left politics for a sales job with a cablevision company near or in Chicago.

I saw him twice after high school. Once, when he was still working in Washington, he brought his family to Virginia for a visit and a day at Busch Gardens. Richard had grown mature - more so than I had. I was still single. Our conversation was a tad stiff for lack of commonality.

He was not the same Richard who had shot the redwinged blackbird hovering above our heads, or the Richard who dropped me and a couple other friends off at a stone quarry where we knew crows would gather during their cross-country flights. I had read in Field & Stream that crows were pretty clever, and that to sneak up on them on a snowy winter day, hunters should wear white and debark a vehicle that would keep moving.

This we did, draped in white sheets, which also concealed our shotguns. Richard rolled slowly along in his dad's old blue Buick convertible - the Blue Goose - while we crept toward the quarry. Someone coughed or giggled or did something careless to alert the crows, which took off in a mighty woosh of wings and caws, and nobody got off a single shot.

Nor was he now the Richard who had partnered with me in a bait business back in our early teens, kneeling on our lawns at night with flashlights and grabbing huge earthworms before they could dart into their nearby holes. We fed them coffee grounds and newsprint in the bin we kept them in behind his dad's drycleaning shop, in a windowless cinderblock enclosure that had once been a boiler room.

The warm wall of the new boiler room next to it attracted huge cockroaches from a neighboring restaurant, which was owned by a reputed Mafia don. Richard and I filled a jar one night with roaches three or four inches long. We gave them to classmates to include in insect collections we'd been assigned as projects by our science teacher.

I last saw Richard in a bar a couple of our former classmates owned. We were home for Christmas, maybe a year or two before his death. We sat in a booth, drank a couple of beers and had, I've little doubt, a rather stilted conversation.

My mother called my wife and me to tell us to turn on the TV and watch the news about Richard and Lynn having been murdered. I'm not sure if I even knew then that they owned a restaurant, but I'm pretty sure I was aware they were somewhere in Illinois.

I remember thinking that if he had been the Richard I knew way back, and somebody was shot to death in his restaurant it would have been the bags of gutter filth that were dead, not Richard and his people.

Unless he was simply being law abiding. That would be easier for me to handle.

Here are some links: Dirtbag convicted
Massacre background

One less shooter in the house

2009-10-01T06:53:00.008-04:00

We moved my stepson and his girlfriend to their new (first) apartment yesterday. Other than teaching him to ride a bicycle, shooting was about the only interest we shared that help us bond - and this fairly recently.

I gave Mike a Marlin Model 60 .22 for his 19th birthday a couple of years ago. Before then, when he was in his early teens, I'd taken him to the range a couple of times. He had a natural ability to shoot accurately, but he wasn't interested enuf to keep it up. Much more interested then in skateboarding. But evidently I'd planted the seed.

What really sparked his interest of late was his growing desire to become a cop. Watches a lot of NCIS and the ubiquitous CSI shows and has taken a couple of community college courses in criminology. Did well in both. Has applied at several different sheriff's departments. But nobody's hiring these days, unless they can find somebody with experience who's already been thru the academy.

He's now looking at applying to be a correctional officer at a nearby regional jail. This would be one way to get into the academy.

But back to shooting. Shortly after his 21st birthday I found a SIG catalog in the kitchen. It disappeared later in the day, so I didn't mention anything, figuring he'd come to me if he wanted to talk about it. I was secretly pleased that he was considering a SIG, which meant that he'd been doing some research or been getting some decent info from somebody. Then, not long afterward, he asked me to take him to the range. Hell, yes, I said calmly, eager to see which SIG he'd gotten.

Turned out it was a new Glock 19. SIGs were too expensive, he said. I told him he'd made a good choice, that the Glock was an excellent piece. We went to the range.

We've been there twice now, and he hasn't yet been able to hit a standard Shoot-N-See pie plate target at 25 yards, which is the nearest we can shoot on the outdoor range. Thinking there might be something wrong with the sights, he handed it to me. I put five rounds into a six-inch group sandbagged.

Finally we went to the indoor range. I use it as seldom as possible in summer, because there's no air conditioning and it quickly becomes a smoke-filled sauna. But at ranges of 5 and 7 yards we soon found out that he was pulling his shots low and to the left.

Back at the outdoor range, now out of 9mm, I set up some clay birds on the berm behind the 50-yard targets, which Mike busted easily with his Marlin (iron sights). This helped restore his confidence.

I hope we can continue hitting the range even tho he's moved. He actually lives closer to it now than when he was at home. I'd like to see him learn to shoot the Glock.

I'd like to shoot it some more, too.

Off topic - Sears repair

2009-09-30T10:54:00.003-04:00

Am sitting here not knowing when the repairman will show up to fix the vegetable crisper in our refrigerator, which is now our vegetable "freezer." The Sears folks will say only that someone is scheduled to arrive "between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m."

I called earlier this morning to inquire if the window of stay-at-home responsibility could be narrowed somewhat, as I have things to do away from home today, considering that I'm down to one beer and need to mail some checks and get some pork chops for dinner. After answering more automated carousel questions than I'd have hurled at me in a Guantanamo Bay interrogation, I finally got to speak with a live person, who assured me that she would immediately call the technician, who would then call me to give me the narrower window.

This was at 8:3o. It's 11:00, the window is narrowing and I'm still awaiting the call.

Should I mention a gun or two to be faithful to the reader or two who might just stumble onto this blog expecting gun thoughts? Sure, why not: I'd like to take my S&W Model 29 or my Ruger Vaquero .45 LC and put a round or two into the Sears answering carousel to shut it the hell up. I'd consider doing this, of course, if I knew where it was and if it were within driving distance.

But then I couldn't leave to take ballistic vengeance on the damned machine until I knew for sure when the "technician" was due to arrive.

Might as well go watch NCIS, which we taped last night.

Hey!

2009-09-29T06:54:00.004-04:00

Not planning on spending a lot of time here today, as I had some good ideas last night for First Shot and I want to get going on the next scene - will do a second part of Chapter Four instead of starting a new chapter, as Four, thus far, ends on kind of a "duh" note. Not a good thing in the novel game.

Besides, I'm not sure anybody's even reading this. No feedback lately. Hey, guys, if you are checking this out, and liking it even a tad, please give me a sign. A comment under one of the posts will do. Just a "like it, keep it coming," or "sucks, but has potential" or even, "buh-bye." Otherwise it feels like I'm the guy in the woods saying something and his wife isn't around to hear it, so is he still wrong.

Something like that.

Sting of the Elephant

2009-09-28T08:27:00.020-04:00

This story smacks of the classic feud between Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny, the "wascally wabbit." Glenn and I were the wabbits - 12 or 13 or so years of age - and a neighbor of Glenn's, whose name has vanished into the deep subconscious, was Mr. Fudd.

Glenn and I were goofing along the banks of the Crawfish River, which runs through our town in Wisconsin and past the house where Glenn lived then. Its dam powered our generating plant at the time. The river also contained reliable holes for catching bullheads, and, when the water level was low, a kid could fill pails with clams stranded in its muddy bed.

On this day we had ventured nearer Mr. Fudd's property than usual to sample the blackberries that grew abundantly between the road and the river. Glenn had cautioned me that Mr. Fudd, who seemed always to be at home, wasn't especially liberal about folks messing in his blackberry patch.

We hadn't eaten more than a handful of the succulent tangy black morsels when, indeed, Glenn's cautionary note was confirmed by the appearance in denim overalls and straw hat of the dreaded Mr. Fudd. What really got our attention, tho, was the long-barreled gun he was holding.

"Run," ordered Glenn. We ran, scratching our thighs and arms on the briars that blackberry bushes brandish as a first line of defense against poachers such as we. Mr. Fudd was the second line.

"Boom," we heard from behind us, a sound until that moment unlike any other I had experienced in my short life. We ran harder.

"Boom!" This time Glenn yelled, "Ouch!" I was too dumbfounded to yell, but I felt a stinging sensation across my back, just below the shoulder blades. We ran, stumbling, giggling, spitting berry juice onto the foliage around us, until we made it to safety behind the flowing branches of the willow tree that hid us from Fudd, which was as good, at this point than if it had provided serious ballistic cover.

I told Glenn that I had been hit. My back still stung, but not as badly as I'd thought it would with a mortal wound. Nor did I feel the inevitable hot liquid streaming down my back as it likely would were I bleeding to death on the Crawfish River bank this lazy, crazy summer afternoon.

I felt Glenn's hand on my back, scraping. He held it out in front of me. Little white chips lay nestled in his palm.

"Salt," he said. "He was shooting salt."

We peered into each others eyes, then back at the salt in Glenn's hand. I checked his back. As he wasn't wearing a shirt, there were no chips of salt to be found. There was blood streaming down his arms, but this came from the blackberry briar scratches. On his back I found only red blotches, where presumably the same projectiles that had lodged in my T-shirt had blasted his skin.

After a moment or two we cautiously peeked out through the willow branches to see Fudd still standing in his blackberry patch, holding the shotgun in both hands and staring hard in our direction.

"YOU'LL BE SORRY WHEN MY DAD GETS HOME!" Glenn yelled at him. "HE'LL CALL THE POLICE, AND THEY'LL ARREST YOU!"

That would never happen, of course. Glenn knew full well that he stood to get some far more serious blotches across his back if his dad ever learned of our adventure.

Old Fudd yelled something back at us. We didn't hear clearly what he said, but no doubt it was something along the lines of what the police would do to us when he, Fudd, told them we'd been trespassing. We expected he was bluffing, too.

No, I didn't tell my parents.

To this day - until now - the matter has remained a secret between Glenn and me, and Mr. Fudd.

Chapter Four is in the can!

2009-09-27T19:57:00.002-04:00

But I still haven't figured out a way to post the chapters separately - if it's even possible on Thoughts.com When I looked at it tonite, it seemed that I'd hafta setup a whole new blog for each chapter, which, of course, would be insane.

So, unless I'm missing something I'll keep adding them to the end of the original post. If I figure out how to set up individual posts in the same blog, I'll then break out all the chapters and post them separately.

Oh, yes, the Packers won, but I'm still disappointed in their overall performance - the run is mediocre at best and the OLine, while improved over last week, is still shaky. Next Monday, against the Viqueens, I tremble to think that Favre could whip our butts.

Nuttin of note today...

2009-09-27T07:27:00.006-04:00

I got a pretty good start last nite on chapter four of First Shot. Gonna try to wrap it up today, but prolly won't post it until Monday. I may also do another installment of Spotting the Elephant.

Also, can't miss the Packers/Rams game midday today.

Some cheers we had at Wisconsin:

1 - "Step on their face and twist, hey!" (repeat again and again again, until you realize you're being an asshole).

2 - "Repel them! Repel them! Make them relinquish the ball!" (do this less vigorously as penance for the first one).

Stump Time #2 - First Shooting Buddy

2009-09-26T08:44:00.007-04:00

Richard and I met by the gun. He was "Richie" then. We were in grade school, but I think he had just transferred into our school system from a neighboring town. We met on the stairs inside the front entrance, connecting from there to the main floor of the schoolhouse. I was heading up; Richie was coming down.

He was carrying a German Luger. A real one. All it aroused in me was fascination. I'd assumed, correctly as it turn out, that he'd brought it in for "show and tell."

That's the way it was back in the '50s. Innocent in certain ways by comparison with today.

Richie saw me staring at the black pistol in his small hands. "I will deaded you," he said, which tells me now how very long ago this was. We couldn't have been much older than 6 or 7.

He let me hold the Luger, bonding us instantly as best friends. It was most likely the first time I'd held any firearm save my father's 12 gauge Iver Johnson single shot.

Events immediately following this sea change moment in my life fade mostly into disjointed murmurs in my memory. As for Richie, he and his family moved within a block of us either soon after we met or, perhaps they'd already been living there unbeknownst.

The next gun he brought to school was something he called a "buffalo gun." I'm thinking now it might have been a Sharps, or perhaps even a Spencer. All I remember of it is that it was surprisingly short, heavy and had a hypnotically sinuous, curly hammer. We never fired it. Probably couldn't get cartridges for it then. Richie said it had been a gift to his father from an aunt who'd found it in her attic. This, I think, was several years after we'd met.

Richie was nowhere near as smitten by guns as I was. One of my earliest magazine subscriptions was to Field & Stream. I devoured each issue when it arrived. A distant uncle, whom I never met but who had the same unusual last name, had an occasional byline in the magazine.

My all time favorite feature in Field & Stream was Corey Ford's column, which he called "Minutes of the Lower Forty Shooting, Angling and Inside Straight Club." Ford's column was purported to be a whimsical series of accounts of a group of quirky geezers who had little in common except a love of hunting, fishing and poker. I knew nothing of poker then, and had little interest in card games, but I learned much about the lore of outdoor pursuits involving firearms and fishing gear.

The ambience of the Lower Forty percolated into the marrow of my bones, where it resides today, sparking a pleasant tingle from time to time. A whiff of pipe smoke or of Hoppe's Nr. 9 can bring out that ambience full force to this day.

So far as I know, Richie's interests didn't extend to the fantasy world of outdoors - at least not to the extent of sitting for hours immersed in a magazine devoted to these pursuits. But, while I was a pretty good marksman then, Richie, with probably less practice, was better.

I remember once at the Stump when we were shooting red-winged blackbirds with pellet rifles. A flock of the birds had chosen our "shooting range" as a place to hang out, which meant cackling, flapping about and pooping whenever and wherever they pleased.

After picking off a couple of them, which seemed to have no effect on the flock's intention to stay, other than to move temporarily just out of pellet gun range, we noticed that one bird was directly above our heads, circling, calling and either trying to run us off or, as we believed, intending to spot us for the others to warn them where we were.

Rich, as he'd become to me by then, calmly raised his rifle to his shoulder, pointed it straight up, aimed and fired, scoring a direct hit on the scout bird, which dropped to our feet, dead. As I recall - and my memory might be augmenting now what really happened - this persuaded the flock to get the hell out of Dodge. What I do remember clearly is that my admiration for Rich's shooting ability was enshrined from that moment on.

I mentioned that Rich and I met by the gun. This was an intentional construction, meant to evoke the far less innocent expression that we've all heard applied to men in the past who "lived by the gun..."

Rich, although he never lived by any gun that I know of, did indeed perish according to the second part of the old expression. He was unarmed at the time.

I grieve for him and his family. We'll visit this sad part of the story in a future Stump memory.