the old man with his boat full of bones

are Josh Ritter and Cormac McCarthy.

ninasaurus:

made me realize something tonight.

I do not know how I feel about infant baptism.

Whole can ‘o worms.

Hmph.

Is this your way of telling us you’re pregnant?

The Iliad is pretty good.

So is The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri.

The Iliad is by Homer. Wouldn’t want him to feel left out, not being named and all.

Here’s Jhumpa:

She won a Pulitzer.

Here’s Homer:

He didn’t win a Pulitzer, partly because Pulitzer hadn’t lived yet.

And visit Brittany, while I’m there.

Bought a plane ticket yesterday.

For those who don’t love

Jason Elam as much

as I do, that

means I’m

going to

Hawaii.

A short bit of non-fiction about being in New Zealand and finding out about the VT shootings. I’ve tried to write about it four times, and this is the time that worked. I may have posted this sometime in the past, but I forget.

—-

Pretend that you’re in a another country, one that is an island and not a continent, one that is all green hills below you and snow-capped mountains above you and you’re somewhere in the middle, in a place called Queenstown, where there are wooden buildings against the rise of those hills, edges leading upward, and everything is beautiful.  It reminds you of ski lodges in Colorado and elegant tourist towns in Michigan and is thousands of miles away from both.

Pretend that you’re staying in a hostel and one of your friends has just gone bungee jumping with the black sky behind her and the city lights laid out below her, and she didn’t tell anyone she was going. Now she is back and you are all laughing and you’re eating thin soup, but it’s hot and free because that’s what the hostels do here. You are on a tour of the country, through the highlands where you climbed a glacier, balancing over crevices with spiked boots and athletic shorts and sometimes a rope handrail that the guide never used, and the valleys, where the jungle was all around and you expected dinosaurs.

Pretend that you go to the store, because you need to buy something to eat for the bus tomorrow: peanuts, maybe, or Maori Hu-hu larvae, which are said to taste the same. You’re planning ahead, is all, just the little bit of planning that you still have to do.

Pretend that the streets aren’t even that full, and it’s nice. In America, this town would be packed from end to end to end with tourists and they’d all have cameras and packs around their waists and they’d be screaming at their crying children to stop crying and their happy children to watch where they were walking lest they be struck and killed by a car. But here, the streets are just pleasantly occupied. There are couples walking along the peer with space around them; the grass runs up to the docks, darkest green, to hit the stone wall that people are walking on, balancing, further along, and until it reaches the monument to a war that has passed. Below that, a quick crescent of sand and gravel, mixed, then the water, lapping at the shore where it looks like the bays you’ve seen all your life even though you know it’s the ocean. There are people who live here, chatting, their accents thick and swelling around you. It’s that ideal combination of activity and inactivity that leaves you feeling relaxed though not alone. Further downtown there is the beat of music, the shouts of people just drunk enough to be happy about it.

Pretend that you’re willing to lose yourself in this world, and it both scares and excites you. You like the crisp feel of the air, where winter is coming. You like the lights and the noise downtown, but also the quiet streets that climb the hills, the roads buckling back in on each other, what they call a switchback, lined with houses. You like that the cars drive on the other side of the road and that the people say rubbish instead of trash.
Pretend that you know you’re disconnected from the rest of your life, but that it’s all right.

Pretend that, just maybe, you haven’t even really noticed yet, because nothing has been there to make it stand out in such stark relief.

Pretend that you’re basking in it, forgetting.

Pretend that someone goes to the front of the store and gets a newspaper and then they’re coming back to you with their eyes wide and their tin of peanuts forgotten near the newsstand and their lips parted in a look that is surprise, horror, sorrow, unspeakable. They’re holding the paper up, just reading the front, and everyone is crowding around, all of your little group from the hostel, and you’re reading the headline and it says there was a shooting. There’s a picture of a student lying on the grass, face down, arms at the wrong angles. There’s no blood that you can see but maybe it’s just under them. Maybe you think it’s there, just soaking into the grass, because the student is dead. Pretend that the paper says the shooting was far away, in America, and it’s still on the front page, even here in this town, the perfect mix of everything, and you’ve never felt so far away in your life.

adamichael:

It’s a beautiful day.

Don’t let it get away!

Tell me a story, the boy said. He was sitting on the floor and the fire was hot behind him and the flames were in his eyes and the old man thought he looked like he’d just been born, born at the age he was with all the world lying before him.

A story, said the old man.

Yes, said the boy. He smiled and his hands were folded on his knees and he was stretching upward like he thought being closer would make the story come faster.

And it would, the old man thought. He folded his own hands and he looked at the fire and he heard the winter outside. It was the heart of winter in the mountains and the wind was bringing the clouds down and filling the pass and they were still awake because there would not be school the next day. The man watched the fire on the wood, the shine off the rafters, the flickering movement on the black panes of the windows.

A story, he thought. What a damn request that is. He sat and the chair was suddenly not under him anymore and he wanted to tell the boy about the war. He wanted to tell him about coming up the road to the camp, the snow caking their boots, the frost on their lips and on their eyes, the cold in the barrels of their guns. About the way the sun felt like it had died, as they came up that road, as they saw the beaten trees and the scared ditches and then the chain fence around the camp with its abandoned gun towers like the skeletons of giants. About how they came to that fence and there were bodies behind it, corpses, smaller skeletons that were standing and breathing and watching them come. Men who were dead but who were not yet dead. How they came up to the fence and opened the gate and then, only then, the men realized that the other soldiers were truly gone. He wanted to tell the boy how they’d wrapped those men in their blankets and taken them out to meet the trucks and how the men had been looking back both with hate and with longing, because of what they’d left there.

But he couldn’t, the old man knew. He couldn’t. So he said: Once Upon a Time. And he told the boy about a knight who’d never lived and how he’d saved a town full of people who’d never lived from a fire-breathing dragon who’d never lived. He told the boy how that imaginary knight had killed the dragon and ended its fire and thrown its bones into the lake, and how the people the knight had saved had watched those bones sink with both hate and with longing.

When he was done, the old man sat back and the chair had returned and it was hard against his back and he could feel the snow still caking his feet and the fire warming his face at the same time. He sat and he remembered the way they’d brought those broken men to meet the trucks, and, when he looked down, the little boy had fallen asleep on the rug and the light was in his hair.

khughes:

You can’t turn it off once you’ve turned it on.

More to come.

Sort of like this Doomsday Device I’ve created….