white space

white  space 

whitespace

clearly

blank

  empty

  negative

  space

off  white

off  color

outer  space

square  one

ground  zero

white  noise

static  free 

 room  to  breathe

elbow  room

no  time

to  spare

personal  space

cling  free

opposites  attract

 

 white  smoke

recalling the future

 ... and as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know -- trying to see things as you will remember having seen them). 
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

In the bleachers during the World Series, October 2012, San Francisco. I will remember this. I will remember it like this, as starkly and irretrievably happy, as I am in this film being filmed right now. The smell of beer on the metal floor. Moody clouds as the sun set. The fans in front, back, and sides of me. The frenzy. The crack of the bat. Roars of the crowd. My coffee. The manic shouting (by me). My weeping as the Tony Bennett recording played. Texting back home. All of it. Framed. Sealed. Under glass.

Are such recollections a forced inevitability? Can you will this tape into memory edited in the way you prescribe? Or does that make it a foregone conclusion a self-fulfilling prophecy?

And was it really like that? There is no way to prove or disprove it, the subjective parts. Maybe by hypnosis. 

I would suggest we do this with Big Events: birth, death, marriage, hiring, firing, divorce, travel.

But now I'm confused.

It's never as you imagine you will remember it, not exactly. Yet sometimes it is, or seems to be. Is it like the Werner Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, whereby the observer, the very act of observing, influences the outcome, the results, of the measurement? (I just butchered the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Never mind.)

I said we do this with Big Events.

I take it all back.

It's not so much a super-hyper-future recollection as a super-hyper-experience.

I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. I don't even know what point I was trying to make.

Maybe you can help me out.

ghost in the machine

It is 2018. Election Day. The Feast of Choices. I voted, made my choices. I had uncharacteristically backed into the parking space outside the Hazard branch library. I won't hazard here a guess as to the 5Ws and an H of the hazard. Turn the ignition. No push button. The engine starts. Wait. Hold it. I'm not ready but I'm rolling forward, sliding as if on black ice. I'm pushing down, down, down, pumping on the brake. To no avail. Huh? Hold it. Can't stop the forward motion, the inertia. Panic. Sweat. Brake. Brake. Wait. The car is in park. What? Oh. What? Hunh? The car to my right, parallel to me, doing the sliding, the gliding, the creeping forward. Rapid heartbeat slows. Reorients. Back to normal. Things in their proper place and time. Back to normal, whatever that is.

It is 1956. I know it is 1956 because later in the journey, after Mom, Dad, Jack, and I, and the Kandas visited Washington Crossing State Park in New Jersey, a mysterious conversation ensued in the car. "Are you okay, Josephine?" The dialogue among the adults was confusing. I was 7 years old. The words "morning sickness" were uttered that summer day in the car, in New Jersey, where at the Kandas' for vacation I would enjoy buttered and salted corn on the cob that has yet to equaled in sweet and salty succulence, a trip so satisfying I saved sand in a Dixie cup from Ocean County Park in Lakewood after wading in its tea-colored lake water. After Bobby was born, in January 1957, did I hearken back to Mom's car-sickness obliquely discussed? Doubtful. It was more of a mosaic, a gestalt portrait painted in stages over the years since.

It is 1956. We are on a train in Stamford, Connecticut, bound for Trenton, New Jersey, for a family vacation. One could only hazard a wild guess as to the costly burden this put on our family. We lived in a city housing project, well kept, reasonably safe. We moved there in 1955, part of a seismic postwar transformation unknown to the scared and curious kid in the front passenger seat with cousin Joe Kanda driving. How did six of us fit in the car? No bucket seats, no seat belts. We are on the train ready to embark on our adventure. Some kid in school (for all I know, it was a teacher not a classmate) once told a story of someone being sucked under a train and dying. So, when steam burst forth from the arriving New York, New Haven and Hartford line (the New Haven line; oh, how I would long for a gorgeous serial comma inserted there, seifs or not) engine, what else could I ponder but swift death and extinction by locomotive vacuuming? A terrifying prospect.

Not sucked under but alive, oh, the excitement of sitting in a train chugging toward Manhattan, solid and rhythmic, stoic and hypermuscled, iron in its will and movement. Passengers on a train, human cargo -- living and breathing after not being mercilessly sucked into its abdomen!

We arrived at the terminus of Grand Central Terminal (not Grand Central Station, which is a post office). Presumably to change trains for the Pennsylvania Railroad, a coveted ownership property in Monopoly.

I am sitting near the window, the window is on the right. We start moving slowly, pulling out of the station. We are underground. Here we go. A gentle rolling sends us toward Trenton. Wait. Something is wrong here. What's the train on the other side of my window doing? Going backward? I don't get it. I stamp my feet on the floor, as if I could step on my own personal braking system to set things right.

"Mommy? Daddy? What's the train do -- ... ?"

Did they see it too?

Some kind of secular miracle. Movement not movement. We weren't moving, the other train was. What's going on here? Did you catch that? Was that for me to see or does everyone see it? As if my beloved Willie Mays wasn't tracking the ball over his shoulder in center field but instead the outfield and the stands and naturally the batted ball were conspiring to move while he was stationary.

And a seven-year-old boy doesn't know where to begin so he swallows his words and buckles up, so to speak, for the ride.

Who or what authored this vection vision of illusory movement? 

Tell me.

Don't tell me. 

Not yet.

What's It To You?

You can't put a price on it. You can't put a price on him, on her, on them. The Price Is Wrong. The cost of medications, of healthcare, of surgery. A matter of life or death. A pauper's grave. A penny for your thoughts. How about a dollar? Or a million dollars for your thought? That single unspoken thought, the dangerous one you can't speak even to yourself, the perverse and criminal thought that will shame and ruin you -- and you didn't even know it was a floating subterranean tidal whisper. A living wage. The cost of living. The wages of sin. Thank you for your time. Paying for the privilege of your time. Our shared time, and space. How much is it worth to you? The meter is running. Stop the meter. Rare silks and spices from exotic lands. Explorers, navigators, plunderers. A lunar rock. A Roman emperor on a broken coin. Fragment of fossilized bone. Anonymity. Secrecy. Mystery. Coin of the realm. The crown jewels. Cupidity. Need. Want. Bartering this for that. Transaction. Gold. Dust. Silver. Rust. What's it worth? What's it worth to you? And to me. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, crystal. Paper or plastic? Ultimately, what's it worth to them? Currency. Flow. In circulation. Streaming. Exchange. This for that. You for me, me for you, us for them, them for us. David Hockney's "Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)," $18,000 in 1972; $90.3 million in 2018. Off the grid. Unavailable. Digitally absent. Gone. Missing in inaction. Flood of images. Verbal inundation. She of few words. He of sphinxlike silence. Rare blood type. Bloodlust. Donor fatigue. Daylight Saving Time. Daylight Saving Space. Saving for what and how? Freedom isn't free. Currencies of blood, time, space, platitude, demagoguery, faith, courage, history, and myth. Terms and conditions. Are you available Thursday? They're never available. I can never reach her. He never answers. Rarely. Rara avis. Rare bird. Rare book. What am my bid? Going once, going twice. Sold. How much was that again? 

'No' Is a Complete Sentence. Or Is It?

You can debate it. You can logically and persuasively argue yes or no as to whether "no" constitutes a complete sentence. Your answer depends on context, communication theory, and linguistics. (Go ahead and Google away at "the Gricean Theory of Conversational Implicature" as you're waiting for your Americano at the coffee shop.) Also entering the equation (oops, that's math; wrong subject) is whether you are a strict or loose constructionist in how you define a sentence.

Yes or no, either one works for me. I don't care, as long as I can continue to say "'No' is a complete sentence" and apply it to the matter at hand.

And what exactly is the matter at hand?

Two matters come to mind:

1. People who have a hard time saying no to demands imposed by others
2. People who feel the need to explain, defend, or justify their refusal of a request they want to reject but can't 

Enter a play within the play, as in Hamlet:

Can you lend me $500?

No, I can't because my counterfeit money-making machine in the basement stopped printing when the black-ink cartridge ran out, plus I need to reorder the special paper from my 'friends' at Treasury.

No, the triplets need formula, diapers, binkies, onesies, and meds. And I owe our upscale, artisanal photographer a down payment for the quasi-royal official portraits of the triplets.

No, not today; can I get back to you after I check with my accountant, my lawyer, my therapist, my Zen roshi, and my local arms dealer?

How about $300. Can you lend me that?

No, I'll never get it back.

No, I just spent my last $275 on Mega Millions, and I have no gas in my car, and I forgot to buy my pain meds.

No, I won't. I would but I can't. No, I might but might not. Not sure. I sometimes can and sometimes do but I usually can't and don't. 

Dude. Just give me fifty effing bucks until Monday when my effing ship comes in, okay? Can you do that?

No, my ship is coming in too, at the same dock.

No, because when your ship comes in I'll be at the airport.

No, because Monday I'll be tied up all day in bankruptcy court.

Dad/Mom, can I have the car?

No. Dad has a date.

No. Mom has a date.

With each other?!

Now, answer each of these questions with the monosyllabic no.

Start with an interior whisper to yourself.

No. 

Practice it.

Out loud now.

Mantra it.

No. No. No.

How do you feel now? Feel better?

Yes. 

"Because if you can't say no, your yes doesn't mean anything." Regan Walsh

trench warfare

They've been out there day and night. Bright lights run by portable generators keep the operation going in the dark hours. The backhoe burrows its way up the street, or down or around, carving a narrow path parallel to the sidewalk. The trench is no wider than the backhoe's digging bucket. A trench box sits idly by; no one is ever in the trench when I stroll nearby. From the look of it, they dig, fool around down in the dirt, add or take out pipes or cables or who-knows-what, and then cover it up with dirt and zip it up with some asphalt. It looks shitty afterward, bumpy and lumpy; unfinished.

You can hear them when you try to sleep.

They say you get used to it, in the way that people who live near train tracks do. 

What are they digging? Why? What is taking so long? What are they putting in? Or taking out? When will it stop?

UTILITY WORK AHEAD announce signs on every corner from every direction in the neighborhood of a dozen or so streets.

At first, the backhoe (always just one, on its solitary mission and journey) was accompanied by two or three vans from the local power utility with its crew of hard-hatted men smoking cigarettes, lolling, laughing, and pretending to play their roles as Official Construction Voyeurs (OCVs).

Then, on the same streets, rectangular tree-lined city blocks, east and west, north and south, hill and dale, flat and sloped, a new squad of support trucks arrived. The same trenches were dug again, in exactly the same manner, sequence, and pattern. Only now, the vans and hard hats were ostensibly with the phone company, if that's what they still call purveyors and providers of phone service, be it cellular, land line, or any other kind of phone service, such as it is.

In a span of fourteen days (I started counting by making daily notes on my wall calendar, opposite the window looking down onto the street they always start and end with), day and night, night and day, the trenches are dug, inserted or lifted or subtracted or added, bright lights illuminating, generators gurgling, chewing up and chugging the recently excavated miniature dirt-filled canals.

Fiber optics?

Then the water company came in. How did I know it was the water company? The blue vans displayed the logo of the water company, as did the hard hats, the jackets, and the vehicular warning signs.

I wanted to talk to the OCVs or a foreman (no women ever join the crew, not yet).

'What's going on?" I shouted.

They looked at me blankly amidst the din, as if my vernacular is foreign and unintelligible, as if they couldn't read my lips.

During the next fourteen-day cycle, the yellow backhoe was accompanied by white panel trucks with no identifying name or signage or license plates. The six-man crew wore white work pants, white vests, white hard hats, white boots, and white gloves. Three of the six wore white balaclavas.

During the most recent fourteen-day cycle, the yellow backhoe was accompanied by black panel trucks with no license plates and no identifying name or signage. The six-man crew wore black work pants, black vests, black hard hats, black boots, black gloves, and black balaclavas.

Then the streets went dark, no power on any street light or in any house. 

No car driving by shone its lights.

The only light shone from the pole-mounted surveillance cameras on the two corners, their iridescent blue eyes blinking silently.

And the UTILITY WORK AHEAD signs are gone.

book list

I used to list the books I had read at the end of every year. I still do, handwritten, but I haven't posted such lists here in a while.

So, here goes. My 2018 reading list, sotto voce, in ejaculatio praecox form, if you will:

1.  Debriefing: Collected Stories by Susan Sontag, edited by Benjamin Taylor
2. Andrew's Brain by E.L. Doctorow 
3. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
4.  Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
5. A Live Coal in the Sea by Madeleine L'Engle
6. A Legacy of Spies by John le Carre
7. Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet's Journey by Stephen Kuusisto
8. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
9. Does It Fart? The Definitive Guide to Animal Flatulence by Nick Caruso and Dani Rabaiotti; illustrated by Ethan Kocak
10. The Informer by Craig Nova
11. While I Was Gone by Sue Miller
12. The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth
13. The Fig Eater by Jody Shields
14. My Ex-Life by Stephen McCauley
15. Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose
16. This Is It by Alan Watts
17. Haiku: This Other World by Richard Wright
18. The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser
19. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le Carre

... and counting.