Balls and Walnuts
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Go figure.
I can’t throw a frisbee to save my soul. When I aim it at Jake, it veers right by thirty to forty degrees. When I try to compensate by aiming thirty degrees left, the damn thing goes thirty degrees left. Just when I think it’s hopeless, I get one right to him. Then it’s back to the same ol’ crap.
But somehow, I know how to play badminton.
Badminton’s next on Jake’s PE torture wheel, so I bought some rackets and shuttlecocks a while back, and after our frisbee fiasco we futzed with badminton. And I know how to serve and hit it and all of that. When did I ever play badminton? Sis, didn’t we have rackets and a net when we were kids? Or perhaps it’s because I played some tennis in high school. Not much. Some. Enough, perhaps.
You have to understand, I can’t throw, catch, swing, dunk, hit — none of that. So to find out that I can not only serve a shuttlecock but do it accurately and consistently is nothing short of mind-boggling. Jake’s having a hard time serving, though, but on the other hand, he’s got me beat in frisbee. If we can figure out a game where he throws me the frisbee and I slam back the shuttlecock, we’ll have a great time.
D.
Ripping good yarn
Just finished Charlie Huston’s Six Bad Things, sequel to Caught Stealing, which I micro-reviewed here a little while ago. Six Bad Things is even better than Caught Stealing — funnier, bloodier (maybe; I didn’t do a body count), more poignant. Hank Thompson is back, and we get to find out exactly what he’ll do to protect his parents, who have been not so subtly threatened by the Russian mob. Along the way home he’ll meet up with a drug-dealing stripper, a truckload of mullet-headed subgeniuses who recognize Hank from his America’s Most Wanted episode (an entire episode devoted to Hank, that is), a variety of crooks both blood-crazed and half-witted, and a dog named Hitler.
The appeal of Huston’s Hank Thompson series lies in Hank, of course. On the one hand, he’s a guy who’s fell into the shit purely from doing a favor for a friend. On the other, he’s a guy who is finding it easier and easier to kill strangers and friends alike. Watching Hank’s devolution from nice guy to “dangerous man” (the title of book three in this trilogy) is a lot like watching the wreck of the Hindenburg. He never stops caring about his parents and the other innocents who get swept up in his violent whirlwind, so he never quite loses his appeal — his humanity, if you’ll forgive another Hindenburg reference. He seems like such a nice young man even when he’s shooting holes in people’s bellies.
I do have a few problems with this book. Hank is just so damned stupid sometimes. I mean, here he is one of America’s Most Wanted, and he thinks he can protect his parents by going straight to them? Not a wise play. And Huston also violated (to a mild degree) Chekhov’s Law, inasmuch as he trotted out Hitler and then failed to use him to maximal effect.
Quibbles notwithstanding, this was one of those rare books I had to take with me to work and read to the wee hours of the morning. I’ve already ordered book three.
D.
Craigslist again
From the ages of 4 to 11 I was an immigrant potato farmer. I grew up in a migrant fsmily and live a nomadic lifestyle. I’m in a semi-pro all women’s all contact rollerblading league. it’s my passion in life. someday i want to be an olympic bobsledder, which is something i do in my spare time. i own a luge. i’m looking for a special person to put the whipped cream on top.
Hey, I think I’ve seen this woman. Second from the left.
If I were single, I think I’d write back to her,
Small world! From the ages of 4 to 11, and sometimes later, I ate potatoes. I grew up in an immigrant fsmily (well, children of immigrants lolol) and used to watch women’s professional rollerskating on TV. you know those women buitl like halfbacks who’d crash into each other on the turns? That’s the sh!t mama! Don’t know much about bobsledding, but if you’re looking to play “hide the luge”, let me know.
Hmm. Too subtle?
D.
What are you playing?
Not like I need more distractions . . .
I bought a little black book. It’s for writing down ideas pertinent to a particular story I have in mind. I’ve lost track of how many such little books I have lying about, each with a few handwritten pages, stories I’ve long since forgotten. It’s fun to reread these (not) and wonder what on earth I was thinking about that made me think it was worth 2 to 5 dollars to buy that book.
Anyway, I keep meaning to write the word nephilim down in my little black book, but I am distracted.
I am distracted by Bubble Spinner. It’s at the top of my frequently visited list, beating out gmail and even xHamster. Yes, I would rather toss colored bubbles around than watch xHamster. Where are my priorities?
So what distracts you?
D.
Enraptured
I’m playing through Bioshock. Again. Bioshock 2 comes out in February, so I want to relive the experience before it’s old news.
For those of you unacquainted with Bioshock, here’s a quick intro.
Conflict averse
So I’m wondering, to what extent do we have control over our neuroses? Can will power alone undo ingrained personality traits?
As I think I’ve written (albeit long ago), I grew up in a war zone. The arguments were constant and high stakes, and since my bedroom shared a wall with my parents’ bedroom, I heard everything. How my brother (who shared my room) slept through it all is beyond me, or perhaps he did hear it and chose to keep quiet. I used to bang my fist on the wall and scream at them to be quiet. I don’t recall it ever doing any good.
I’ve always attributed my conflict-averse personality to this aspect of my childhood. It’s a pervasive trait, and I consider it a neurosis since it does impair me, at least to a mild degree. When I was in private practice, I made Karen do all the firings. Not that there were many, but she got the job. I would leave the office when she was ready to do the deed. I’ve never been able to watch more than ten or fifteen minutes of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Crazy shit like that. In public, at work, in the hospital, if folks are yelling at each other, I’ll run the other way.
The thing is, it’s sometimes necessary for me to stay. To not run the other way. To endure, to listen, to keep my head together. And it’s damn difficult.
If this were a phobia, I could cure it by gradually ramping up the intensity of the exposure. Start by watching Bill O’Reilly interviews, perhaps, and then graduate to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Eventually, I would go on the Maury Povich Show.
I wish there were an easier way.
D.
Kitty!
This one is probably old news to many of you, but I saw it for the first time today. (They were making a point about bonding between doctors and their patients. I wonder, who is the lion?)
Christian the lion reunites with his owners . . .
D.
A kaleidoscope of years
What I always forget about the LA basin is its scale. If I drive 20 minutes in Bakersfield, I get from one side of town to the other. If I drive 20 minutes in LA, I get from one suburb to another. On the map, they’re next door neighbors.
We knew our neighbors when we were kids. We knew everyone on the street. We knew their occupations, the names of all their kids; they had nicknames; each dad had a characteristic whistle to call his kids home for dinner. We even knew whose dad was pissed (the whistle changed pitch). The adults weren’t friends with one another but we knew them. And the kids hung out together, of course. Nowadays, I don’t know my neighbors. Yes, I’m as much to blame as they are. It was a little better in Crescent City and Harbor, but not much.
In Texas, we knew our next door neighbors. We met the wife when Sydney, my tortoise, dug under the fence to see if there were any female tortoises in their backyard. The wife liked to feed the deer; huge scads of deer came by for the free food, the parasites. The husband was an emeritus prof at the med school, in the Family Practice Department. Nice people. But we didn’t know anyone else there.
So I had in mind eating at Cafe Santorini tonight, since I have fond memories of their smelt appetizer — my “pile of little fishies,” as in, “Karen, I want a pile of little fishies tonight!” I was so eager to get there that I took the Colorado exit from the 210. Big mistake. I should have stayed on the 134. Not only did the 210 exit put me in the wrong place, it pointed me in the wrong direction. It has been so long since I lived in LA that everything looks unfamiliar now. The fact that I passed first the Eagle Rock Plaza and then the Glendale Galleria should have told me I was going the wrong way, but finally I had to come to a dead-end to figure it out. Fortunately, I found the 134 East, got myself turned around, and soon found myself in Old Town Pasadena. Huzzah!
Old Town Pasadena is a product of end stage gentrification. In my childhood, Colorado Blvd. was a string of seedy bars and pawn shops. You wouldn’t stop there, you would drive through. Fast. In the 90s, it went through a lovely in-between phase where pawn shops and adult bookstores intermingled with Il Fornaio and Gordon Biersch. Now Gordon Biersch lies vacant, and what was once a stodgy and ancient cigar-and-top hat restaurant on the corner of Fair Oaks and Colorado is now a Cheesecake Factory. Abercrombie and Fitch, Barnes and Noble, T-Mobile, an Apple store, Victoria’s Secret . . . I want to know who gutted a mall! I might as well be back in Walnut Creek.
But Cafe Santorini is still open, and my little fishies are still on the menu.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’re still open,” I told the hostess.
“Oh, we stay open until 10 on weekdays!” she bubbled back. I suspect she was 10 the last time we ate here.
Overheard at Cafe Santorini: one twenty-something woman telling another, “I feel settled now.” I didn’t catch the details, but she proceeded to tell her friend how everything in her life had fallen into place. And maybe she is settled. Maybe she’ll still be in the same place, doing the same thing sixty years from now. But it struck me that it’s far more likely that she’s settled only because she has not yet become unsettled.
I was settled once, too. I had free food and rent, a girlfriend, a job that paid me enough for gas and date money, a certain amount of homework to keep my mind busy. Then I left home for college, and since then nothing has been the same.
It seems to me we live many lives, each in blocks of ten or five years, sometimes less. Certainly my first ten years felt like an eternity, and the next ten weren’t much better. Berkeley was only four years, yet it was and is a huge part of my life. Texas? Little more than two, but it made a big impression on me.
What fascinates me is the selectivity of memory. I’ve spent something like 40% of my life living in the San Gabriel Valley, yet I got lost trying to get to Old Town Pasadena. But once there, I walked straight to Cafe Santorini (which is a bit out of the way), and the place looked and felt like I had been there only a few months ago.
And my little fishies were just as tasty as I had remembered.
D.