...suspense...

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.

© 2010 by Mathew Paust

Primrose Lane

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

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

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

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

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

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.