That Damned Fork

"I've had my freedom/but I don't have much time"

O philosopher-king, what do you say of time in an age where there is none? Where a certain darkness clings to every surface like an undefinable scent? Every day a cigarette, burning towards the filter.

Want to keep smoking this one. Just this one.

Never been too light on my feet. Some seem to float through their days, but it's always been a struggle for me, each morning another lifting into the light. It's hard to let go of the dark; you see such interesting things there. The road forks, one way up the hill into bright sun, the other curving into a shaded grove, I know which way my feet will take me. Because somehow from a very early age, I guess I've always known this ends in the dark. Starts there, ends there. So maybe I've thought there were answers there. Maybe it's just a proclivity. Sometimes it seems like the night is more honest, the days so loaded with bullshit.

When the lights go down in a theatre, it marks a beginning. A demarcation from the ordinary. It's the everyday that cuts, whittles away. Could it be you don't age in the dark? Or maybe it just doesn't show quite so clearly.

Quiet Light

Here we are in the dark season, get up in the dark, get home in the dark. The sun maybe rises, or rather maybe you see it, depending on the Northwest monsoons.

I was recently looking through some photographs and ran across one I might have taken at, say, 19 to 21. A summer day in Southern Oregon, the Siskiyou foothills, with light falling through madrone onto a curving country two-lane, and just enough haze in the air to cut the light into beams. Suddenly, I was there, standing on the road's shoulder, massive old Canon SLR in hand. Or maybe it was that wonderful Yashica Lynx rangefinder I had. My God, what a crisp, sharp lens that had on it (though the built-in light meter was for shit). I remembered that light. That quiet. How you could stand in the road to take a picture and have no fear that a car would come along because you'd hear it long before you'd see it. I couldn't remember exactly when it was taken, but I could remember taking it, the memory potent, overhwelming.

So I figured I'd look around, scan it as an illustration for the blog. Can't find it. It's vanished. I held it in my hands just a few days ago; now it's like it never existed. Just as that time has passed, that place has changed. I don't want to go back. But I do want to stand in that quiet light, and feel the world again as a photograph waiting to be taken.

I can't find that picture. It bothers me.

Fred Patterson, Man of Action

So I get these e-mails...come on, did your dad really look like Sean Connery? Huh? Reeeaaally? Come on.

Well...no.

But when you're a kid...yeah. Kind of. And it's pretty cool to somehow think, yeah, sure dad's going off to work at the newspaper, but what he's really doing is undercover work, just pretending to work at the newspaper, and....

Anyway, here's my dad in his prime, the photo taken in Beaugency, France, in the Fall of 1944. And, what the hell, he's kind of dashing. And he does carry a gun.


And though I'm sure there's no chance of it, if there's anyone out there who might have known him or have a friend or relative who might have known him back in the day (in the army, he worked as an armorer in Northern Ireland, England, and France, went to the University of Montana in the late Forties, and worked for AP in San Francisco in the Fifties), I would love to chat with them.

'Cause I miss the guy. Every damn day.

Steve

How do you feel?

This is another reason why they tell you to avoid the brown acid:

Enough

"...I saw a snail...crawl along the edge...of a straight razor...and survive...that's my dream...that's my nightmare...."

Gitmo inmate cuts throat, but survives

Don't Try This at Home, Kids

Doing a bit of research on a project that will likely not bear fruit (olives, in this case), and learned that Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, died at age 56 after reportedly drinking a fifth of gin and smoking 75 cigarettes a day (triple-band Morley's, of course).

We can't all be Keith Richards.

Of Distant Wars

Thinking of Vietnam. Vietnam. It clings to me, a shadow. Like a shadow, it disappears when you turn to look at it.

See, it's like this: once upon a time, when Bill Clinton stalked the planet and we were all making buckets of money, I wrote a play called "Waiting on Sean Flynn," which was about American reporters perched upon the rooftop bar of Saigon's Caravelle Hotel in 1975, the central dilemma being: Saigon's about to fall to the North Vietnamese, should the characters split with the rest of the Americans or stay on to witness history. The forward motion of the play is illuminated by flashbacks to the main character's (Lee) experiences in the company of Sean Flynn, Errol Flynn's son who became a respected that photojournalist and disappeared in Cambodia in 1970, his fate never firmly determined. The flashbacks increasingly recede back in time until the last one, just before the play's climax as Saigon begins its fall, goes all the way back to Lee's first experience in the field (a pretty neat plot structure, I thought, but hard to explain).

Besides talking and corresponding with a bunch of wonderful, generous people who either covered the war or served there, I read stacks of books on the subject and saw pretty much every film, good or bad, about Vietnam, including documentaries. I immersed myself in the subject, which is what writers do, especially when their imagination has been shanghaied. Sometimes the depth of art is merely a reflection of the quality of obsession. I know more about Vietnam than anyone need know, and, let me tell you, unless you have drenched yourself in that deep water, you don't know and don't want to know; and yet I know nothing about it compared to the people who were there. It's all writerly imaginings. And the wounds, the mental pictures, some of which are rather too stomach churning to share, dear readers, are entirely self-inflicted.

When Iraq was gearing up and it was clear war was inevitable, I went to lunch with a colleague who was firmly convinced the cause was just, weapons of mass destruction, transform the Middle East, all the other utter bullshit she'd swallowed, setting the hook deep, and I just looked at her with calm, hazel eyes while inside churned the most nauseating contempt, summed up as: you don't know what you're talking about, you don't know the cost, your self-righteousness is beneath contempt, and yet you're innocent...you motherfucking civilian.

But that's past, and now only a dark, charred rind of memory remains, which amounts to nothing, just as my words at the time, which were measured, were ineffectual, gnats to be batted away from clouded eyes.

And now...how many years and deaths later...we ease toward a resolution, and though Baghdad is not Saigon, and history follows similar but never perfect patterns, I find myself back on the rooftop of the Caravelle. In the distance, small arms fire. And flames shimmering in the night. And I know that the days to come hold dry throats and tears. Dry throats and tears.

So I've dragged out my metaphoric flak jacket, oiled up the dried, stiff boots, and jacked a round in the chamber, the reassuring clack, and I'm shopping "Waiting on Sean Flynn" around to theatres again, one more time into the cyclone. There seems renewed interest--a number of theatres are considering it, I've even had a few seek me out, and Neanderthal Acting Company (can't beat that name) in Detroit will produce the play in March. That pleases me, but it's not a pleasure without pain.

In the desert wind, Yeats' voice whispers, too faint to be clearly understood. Just enough to shiver the spine.