August 3, 2008 archive

My mother used to say that I had an advanced case of “Prince Henry the Navigator Syndrome,” and she was more prescient than I think even she knew. When I was a kid I absorbed ridiculous amounts of historical and geographical trivia, even before the onset of nightmarish insomnia made those useful distractions a necessity. Crumpled National Geographics and outdated Britannicas taught me about anything I wanted to know, anywhere in the world, but that didn’t make me want to actually visit any of the places I studied. Home may have been a disaster zone, but it was still home, the devil I knew as opposed to the unknown vast outside universe. The few family road trips I was subjected to as a child were sagas of hellish torture and crushing boredom. One summer, Modesto was a wretched sauna, Yuba City a muggy, sweaty armpit, and Arcata took the crown of Nastiest Refuge for the Crazed Legions of Plague-Ridden Killer Insects-or so I felt at the time. I garnered little sympathy from my stepfather on these occasions; one of the most vivid memories I have of him was enduring his withering, exasperated scowls as I whined pathetically all the way up the highway toward our next rest stop.

Of course, Prince fucking Henry was royalty, so that coddled little bastard could lounge around all he wanted in that cozy castle retreat in westernmost Portugal. He could watch the caravels sail in from India or Africa or America, and he was anxious to leech out the conquistadors’ tales of foreign lands for the sake of his own cartographical amusement. I’d always tried, all those years, to not be insulted by Mom’s unintentionally accurate caricature of me, but it annoyed me then and still rankles today, ten years after her death. I was trying to explain all this to Frankie in her dorm room on the night after I returned to school, still reeling from the potent stimuli of the weekend’s mild rock deviance and harrowing sexual fear. I hadn’t meant to spill out random family history to a girl I that I was apparently-according to Olivia-supposed to mistrust, but like everything else at that time, I had no idea what really mattered, and anyway, I never failed to rise to the challenge of out-weirding anyone else’s exotically bizarre family stories. Anyway, the Italian Front had been quiet for a good twenty-four hours, but I could feel it stirring in its sleep ever since I got back from the train station, so when the action finally began I was more than ready.

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Every few days over the next several months I will be posting installments of a novel about life, death, war and politics in America since 9/11.  Through the Darkest of Nights is a story of hope, reflection, determination, and redemption.  It is a testament to the progressive values we all believe in, have always defended, and always will defend no matter how long this darkness lasts.  But most of all, it is a search for identity and meaning in an empty world.

Naked and alone we came into exile.  In her dark womb, we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother?  Which of us has looked into his father’s heart?  Which of us has not remained prison-pent?  Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?      ~Thomas Wolfe

All installments are available for reading here on Docudharma’s Series page, and also here on Docudharma’s Fiction Page, where refuge from politicians, blogging overload, and one BushCo outrage after another can always be found.

soundtrack:

A Summer recipe:

Take one large grassy field, one half-dozen children, three furry

dogs, and walk along a narrow strip of creek, pebbly if possible.

Mix the children with the dogs thoroughly, empty them into the field,

stirring occasionally.

Sprinkle the entire with daisies, buttercups and dandelions. Pour

creek gently over pebbles

and cover all with a periwinkle sky and bake in hot sun for several

hours.

When children are thoroughly browned, they may be removed.

They will be found right & ready for setting away to cool in the

bathtub.

Like everyone else, I was stunned by the events of 9/11/2001. But pretty quickly I felt very alone in my reactions (that was pre-blog days) as I continued to feel stunned and sad. It seemed like it was only days before the rest of the country moved on to anger and the need for revenge. I couldn’t go there. Perhaps alot of that was because I didn’t understand what had just happened. And I felt the need to understand.

So I did what I usually do to try and understand things that are outside of my previous experience…I read. Specifically, I read what I knew would give me the “behind the scenes story” about times and places that are different from my own…women’s stories.

Postcard from La La Land

Mama Cass:  California Earthquake

I check out of the emergency room early Monday morning, just short of forty-eight hours after blundering into the savage beating that had blown my weekend apart in a frenzy of shame. So much had happened between then and now, but so little of it had penetrated my battered body or wretched state of mind, and simply trying to process everything is now taking up most of my mental power as I limp through the hospital’s massive, hectic waiting room. It’s full of other people’s pain and boredom, but I’ve had too much of both of those things in the past two days to bother with any empathy. I shuffle past the automatic doors toward a bath of impossibly bright sunshine, and the low hum of surrounding commotion inside gives way to the more diluted static outside.

I put some distance between me and the entrance, slumping on a bench fifty feet from the doors. It’s a little warm and my bandages begin to itch as I sweat through them, but I just add that to the massive catalogue of small annoyances that I’ll have to endure before the wounds heal. I resist a temptation to rip the fresh gauze off my face, and am just beginning to sink beneath the haze of muffled aches and pains when an old Datsun pickup suddenly lurches into the loading zone in front of me and rumbles to a halt. The passenger door swings open and a tired, exasperated female voice says “You’re up and out earlier than I thought. Come on Derek, get in. I’ll take you home.” Lisa lifts her eyebrows expectantly, patting the seat with her thin hands, probably hoping that I will yet again be too much of a sucker to not take the bait.

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