Notes On a Quest
Looking for Tupperware, secret postal systems, and a vague understanding of entropy.
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I can only imagine how sick my roommate must be of my New York City stories. I miss NYC like hell…and I only got to live there for really only two years. People here in Seattle look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them that things were just easier in NYC. Most Seattlites I meet only have a rough imaginative take on New York that seems to primarily be derived from movies.
Anyway, that’s not what NYC is like. Well, maybe I just had a particularly wonderful time there… By comparison, Seattle is one tough city to figure out, to live in and to feel happy about.
But I’m continuing to try.
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Nursing Home
The trains went by for their final time yesterday. Sepia toned muscles of rust and iron and grease. Fred had been in the Marines for eight years and now he was not. He tightened the neck of his rucksack. The gun breathed with its own life in there. A gun. The prick of bullet.
The world had ended only a few weeks prior. And when he rose on the day where that began, he rose up among the barrels of fire in the cold with all the cast-offs of men gathered around them. They were, perhaps, the last men left.
He left them and wandered the plains and then the coasts for a very long time. Trains everywhere sat silent. Impotent. After a few months, he found a nursing home and knew his grandmother was in there. There were people alive there. A few men, a few women of various ages. They seemed unconcerned except for one man. He was tall, slightly stooped with a mustache. His eyes were concerned, but Fred doubted his motives. He doubted everyone’s.
The man said, “I’m Cory and I’m the psychiatrist here.”
Fred recalled his grandmother might be there. ”Is my grandmother here?”
“Yes. She’s been waiting and frankly we became worried you wouldn’t show up.”
“Ok.”
Fred sat in the waiting room. People came in looking disheveled, wearing rags, clutching empty bottles. They asked in whispers about their kin and orderlies disappeared down the long white hallway. Then, after a spell, their grandparents or parents, siblings or even friends, were wheeled out and handed over to them.
Fred waited. Later in the day, a tremendous dust storm rolled through. White sand spilled through the broken windows covering everything shroud-like. A woman who seemed to know the psychiatrist slowly glided from the front room to the waiting room and then to the psychiatrist’s office and repeated this for a few hours. It was unsettling and mesmerizing. Eventually Cory reappeared wheeling Fred’s grandmother. She was dead.
“She passed while waiting for you,” Cory explained and without another word, joined the woman and they proceeded to talk in low voices with his office door closed. The dust storm had subsided and the air outside was now still. Fred was covered in white.
Fred looked at the desert, a strange desire stirring. Then took the gun and gave it to his grandmother. He put it in her hand, a hand that was already losing warmth, and closed her fingers around the barrel. And then he waited. In a way, he wanted to be told something, given directions, offered orders. He was stateless. Gazelles galloped past outside. Since when did Africa make it into this desert? Surely, they had to be in what he had once known as California. But he wasn’t sure.
Cory appeared by his side. He looked at Fred and slowly sat down. He handed him a book.
“This is the last instruction manual,” the doctor said, “so keep it close and use it when you can. There are dangerous people out there,” and with this he stood and pointed out the window and they both watched as two giraffes plodded past, “and you need to know some things.”
“I know some things,” Fred replied, “I was in the Marines.”
“I know,” Cory said and nodded at the tattoo on Fred’s right arm.
Cory stood next to Fred and thoughtfully stroked his mustache. The sun was setting and smoke from the fires bloodied the horizon.
“We were here when it happened,” Cory said, “Many died of shock in the first day. The heat killed off the others. My wife and I knew of a place, a small farm in the woods where we could hide. So we did and we tended to ourselves and cultivated a small shrine to memories of ourselves, our people, things we had once known.”
He paused. The moon lifted a ragged visage over the desert. Carcasses of cars and animals and people lay dark underneath the bland light. A bone scattered garden.
“And she and I, we wrote things down with the last pen we could find,” he reached over and gently took the book from Fred. He opened it. Smiled sadly, closed it, and handed it back. With that, the doctor stood and walked swiftly away from Fred. He joined his wife and the both of them stood for a moment in the dark of the waiting room gazing at him. Then they were gone.
Fred could see them, the two impossibly small figures holding hands and stumbling over the land of annihilation. They were gone into the mouth of the moon within an hour.
In the distance, Fred though he heard a train. A faint chugging sound and possibly a horn and then all was silent.
So, he opened the book.
Photos courtesy of Square America.
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Dear Friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.
-Cormac McCarthy -SuttreePhoto is from Square America.
Great site. I use it for writing ideas. -
I’m primarily a web developer with 11 years of programming experience with Vignette templating systems using TCL (yes TCL) and also programming with PHP/MySQL.
This new contract wants me to learn Java in a Struts context. I’ve got a dev machine with the Java SDK, Ant and Glassfish server.
Now what? I did configure stuff…but I don’t know what tutorial might be the best one for the likes of me. Anyone?
I want something that teaches me Java fundamentals with Struts and using Ant, Glassfish and Eclipse as an IDE. Is it possible?
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Photo reblogged from Ruines Humaines
Aurora borealis taken 13 of december 2010. (by Jóhanna Kristín Hauksdóttir)
A WINTER NIGHT
The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to produce a note.
I sleep uneasily, turn, with shut eyes
read the storm’s text.
But the child’s eyes are large in the dark
and for the child the storm howls.
Both are fond of lamps that swing.
Both are halfway toward speech.
The storm has childish hands and wings.
The Caravan bolts towards Lapland.
And the house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.
The night is calm over our floor
(where all expired footsteps
rest like sunk leaves in a pond)
but outside the night is wild.
Over the world goes a graver storm.
It sets its mouth to our soul
and blows to produce a note. We dread
that the storm will blow us empty.
- Tomas Transtromer (Sweden, 1930-)
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My whole “thing” in life, up until this moment (and by saying that, I’m recognizing I may have not changed), has been being a rootless nomad. Well, not completely true when one considers my 11 years in San Francisco. That was a long time…longest time I’ve spent anywhere. It was because of the whole dot.com thing. In 1997, I became a programmer. To be an internet programmer while living in SF, it was fun. Sure, I bitched and whined about all the SUVs coming into town with the new wave of money, but we had no idea how good we had it or how hard it was going to crash.
Anyway, here’s the summary: 5 years in Eugene, Or. 1 year in St. Louis. 3.5 years in New Mexico. 11 yrs in SF, CA. 1.5 years in Manhattan. 3.5 years in Massachusetts. Now…1.5 years in Seattle, WA.
I find myself wondering if it’s the right place to die. You know, where it’s comfortable and where I’m surrounded by friends, a beautiful landscape…all that jazz. Seattle is a terrific city in some respects. But unfriendly. Not angry like New England. But sometimes, I’d rather die in the embrace of Manhattan. Or with the hillside vistas of San Francisco. Perhaps even by the McKenzie River outside of Eugene. If I were to die by the Rio Grande, I could join the three men I knew in New Mexico who have gone before me.
One walked off into the desert with no water (on purpose..he was a suicide). One died of a strange, undefinable disease (he was also in the Army and it seemed like a variant of Gulf War syndrome). The last was a boyfriend who was knifed at a concert for peace by racists.
If I choose the Rio Grande approach, my ashes might be carried to Mexico. A border crossing I was familiar with in the 1990s as I went backpacking down there a lot. We didn’t have the problems with the cartels and blood shed we see now. I mean it was there, but one could travel through it.
Once I rented a Volkswagon in Juraez, MX so my friend and I could quickly go south of Juraez to a small village named Creel on the rim of the Copper Canyon. From there, we were to catch a bus (the drive was far, far too dangerous to do in a car with no knowledge of the canyon roads) that left only once a week, and head down into the canyon to an area known for its drug smuggling and poppy fields and so on. But it also had great scenery, a nice little village and no electricity. Perfect for the likes of us back then.
Juarez had one last checkpoint for us to go through. One last border crossing twenty miles south of the Ciudad. We waited in line with the other vehicles and slowly, painfully inched our way forward to the checkpoint. The trucks around us were full of rowdy cowboys, guys out drinking, and some families. Everyone minding their own business more or less.
Until someone Moltoved the checkpoint. It happened suddenly. The bottle made a high arc from a truck and in retrospect, I don’t remember seeing the flame coming from it. But the gate became bright with the initial punch of flame and another bottle followed. Cheers erupted. It was pretty dark out, but this thing was now becoming a torch. Cars and trucks immeditately started driving off of the road and into a dark field.
We followed.
At one point, in a strange homage to an attempt to keep order and to do one’s job, the border police began running into the field asking for people to hold up documents. One man caught up with us as we slowly bumped our way around the checkpoint in this rutted field. He asked in English for our papers. Without stopping, I handed them to him through our open window. At a slow jog, he took them, examined them briefly with a flashlight, and handed them back and made his way to the next car.
On the other side of this thing, it had really felt like we crossed more than a simple check point. In the rear view mirror, the structure burned like something unholy and in front of us was a long stretch of dark highway spilling south deep into a foreign land. We punched the gas and drove into the moment.
