Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Arrived home late last night after spending a chilly week in Milwaukee.  I took my usual Friday commute on Northwest, leaving Milwaukee around 6pm for Minneapolis, then leaving Minneapolis at 9:45 to land in Seattle around 11:15.  It’s starting to be holiday travel time, but that’s one of the last flights out on Friday and the airport was pretty calm.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’d been upgraded at the gate in Minneapolis.  I settled into my window seat and exchanged pleasantries with my seatmate, who was returning from Indianapolis. 

He showed me his Blackberry mother-ship communicator - I’d never really paid attention to them, and I had to acknowledge that some technology has passed me by, as it performs functions that I carry 3 or 4 different devices for.  He then proceeded to tell me this joke.  Usually, jokes go in one ear, I laugh, and then they head out the other ear and I can never remember them to relate again.  But this one was pretty good, I thought:

A fellow is sitting alone at a bar with his head resting on his right hand.  The bartender notices that he’s speaking animatedly right into his palm.  The bartender sidles a little closer to overhear, just as the fellow is saying, “OK, dear, I’ll be home in an hour or so.” 

The bartender approached him and asked him whom he was talking to.  The customer said he’d been talking to his wife on his cell phone.  He said he’d lost so many cell phones that, when he saw an ad offering to implant a phone in his hand, he answered it.  The bartender arched his eyebrows and was deciding not to sell him any more drinks, but the guy said, “here, look.” and opened his right palm to reveal a dialing pad.  “Tell me your home phone number.”

The bartender gave him a number and the customer punched it into his palm.  A moment later, he put his palm up to the bartender’s ear, and the bartender heard his wife’s voice answering the phone.  Amazed, he greeted her, told her he was just testing a phone, and the customer ended the call.  The bartender apologized for his skepticism, and comped him a drink.

Later, the bartender noticed that the customer had left for the men’s room some time ago and hadn’t returned.  Concerned, he headed for the men’s room to check on him.  Opening the door, he saw the customer stark naked, standing with his hands against the far wall with a roll of toilet paper jammed up his butt.  The bartender was aghast, and asked the customer who had so abused him and offered to call the police.

The customer waved him off and said, “No, man, I’m waiting for a fax.”

Later, as we started descending for Seattle, I gazed out the window looking northward.  Night had long ago fallen, but the sky was clear and the moonlight was so intense that its reflection off the snow-covered Cascades created a twilight in which details on the ground were clearly visible, if in a ghostly chiaroscuro.  Many valleys had clouds tamped down into them, and lights from the towns below created spots of incandescence in the cottony cloud cover.

The usual approach to Seatac airport in the winter, or whenever weather is bad, is from north to south.  Sitting on the right side of the plane, I was treated to what I consider the “money shot” for landing in Seattle, flying past my house near Greenlake, over Lake Union, past the Space Needle, past the glittering downtown with the black void of Elliott Bay for a backdrop, ferries floating on seeming nothingness out into Puget Sound.

It’s good to be home.

I had the opportunity to read through Harold Pinter’s Nobel essay the other day.  He explored his theme, truth and falsity, as it applies to art and to civic colloquy.  He posits that, in art, there is an elasticity to truth, that things “may be both true and false”, and that the artist’s task is to probe and explore reality to elucidate the truth in its infinite variations:

But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other.

He will brook no such relativism in the hands of politicians, however, and the greater part of the lecture excoriates the United States for the Iraq war and its way of dealing with the world since WWII.

the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition: playrights and artists use a set of inventions, or falsehoods, if you will, in an attempt to present truth, or the version of it that they apprehend.  Politicians attempt to use real people and events to obfuscate.

It may be an overly naive view of artists, and an overly jaundiced view of politicians.  Maybe not.  I guess I accept the need for both artists and politicians to frame reality using fact and metaphor in order to sway a target audience.  It depends, in the end, upon whom you trust with this task.  Haven’t you come away from many a play or movie saying, “Huh?”.  On the other hand, I definitely do not trust the current U.S. leadership’s representation of much of anything, even the weather.  So, the lesson may be that one must never abandon critical thinking when anyone is spinning out what Joni Mitchell long ago called “pretty lies”.

The lecture will always be remembered for its political content.  But what struck me as really radical was what Pinter put forth as his method of writing.  I have much more experience as a consumer of literature than as a manufacturer of it, I have only a vague notion of how that particular kind of sausage is made.  My presumption has always been that someone has an idea to convey, a set of situations to represent and, most important in my view because I was never very good at it, multiple characters with strong individual voices.  Whether by using a storyboard, an outline, or sleepless nights of turgid imagining, the writer then creates the sinuous linear stream of words that will be reconstituted in our brains as sound and visual image.

Pinter, on the other hand, says:

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’

In each case I had no further information….In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

If we are to believe Pinter’s “creation myth”, then, we have to accept that his plays reveal themselves to him much as they are revealed to us when we see them.  A fellow in my book group always urges us to never believe an author when he talks about his work, and I have more than a little scepticism about what Pinter has told us here, but I’m fascinated with it and am tempted to try it myself.  It’s sort of a “trust the force, Luke” idea - you essay the task unburdened by doubt or baggage, armed only with the notion that your talent will suffice.

Our Saturday Cavalcade of Parties was a lot of fun, and well worth getting only 3 hours of sleep before heading for Seatac. The party at our Nautilus club was a pleasant surprise. It was very well-attended, and I talked to many people that I’d only identified with the sweats they wear to work out, or the machine they seem to gravitate to. For instance, Stepmaster Guy turned out to be a Princeton/Wharton graduate and a possible business contact (not that you have possess such a pedigree to do business with a mongrel like me).  And I chatted amiably for the first time with a couple that has lived right around the corner from us for 20 years, one of whom is a published author.  We were surprised to find that it was hard to tear ourselves away in order to head for our second party of the night.  I find myself wondering, however, if I’ll be more self-conscious about the paltry weight I lift on each machine now that I’m better-acquainted with people who may be following me onto a machine.  It’s one thing to have Mrs. Perils follow me and discreetly add 30 - 50 pounds onto the leg press machine I’ve just vacated.  She’s already forgiven me my manifest weaknesses.  At least the ones she knows about.

The marquee event of the evening was the white elephant party given by Mrs. Perils’ climbing buddies.  It’s always a great feed, as both partners are terrific chefs.  There were sashimi tartlets, Thai shrimp, kalua pork, chocolate pot de creme and a ton of other dishes.  Then the gift process began.  Each of us was supposed to bring something naughty, or nice, or both.  We were, frankly, disappointed in the “naughty” components.  Only a couple met our standards (Mrs. Perils The Demure furnished a set of Pecker Pushpins, purchased at our neighborhood Erotic Bakery).  Below are two gifts that stood out as unique. (click to enlarge)

This one’s a live lobster pleading its case to a crowd that had just gorged on, among other things, shrimp and raw tuna.  The justices found its appeal lacked merit.  It’s unclear whether it fell into the ”naughty” or “nice” category, but it was inventive.  Interestingly, it wore the same yellow wristbands that its recipient wore.  Social consciousness probably will not buy much of a reprive from the boiling pot.

Perhaps the best (if one of the few) “naughty” present was this one.  There was a gratifying reticence among participants to make deposits.

A couple of bumper stickers espied on a short walk today:

Does this week seem really long to any of you guys?  Maybe because I’ve worked pretty late Monday and Tuesday.  Well, the weekend holds some promise, at least until Sunday morning when I have to pack up and head to Milwaukee for the week.

Saturday night, we have two (two!) parties to attend.  The first is at our gym, Anderson’s Nautilus.  We’ve been members there since about 1985.  It’s located right by Greenlake, and our routine is to run from the house most of the way around Greenlake, dip into Anderson’s for a Nautilus workout, then run the rest of the way home.  I haven’t even priced other gym memberships, because if I had to get in my car and drive to one, I just don’t think I’d use it.  Despite going there for all these years and seeing many of the same people working out, I hardly know any other members by name, and haven’t said more than a few words to them.  The combination of my approach to my workouts, and the fact that the club doesn’t have a juice bar or social scene, I think, is responsible for that.  They’ve been having Christmas parties for many years, but we’ve never attended one, but this year it seems to fit into our schedule, and I thought it might be interesting to switch the paradigm a little and engage these folks in their street clothes.

Later in the evening, some of Mrs. Perils’ rock climbing buddies are having a white elephant gift party.  They’ve done this for a couple of years now.  Lots of people come, the food is terrific, and the action is hilarious.  The theme this year is Naughty and Nice.  At my age, 50-50 odds are compelling.

How about the rest of you?  What’s your party schedule?

156 1/2.  Holding my own.

156 - It might be working!

Yesterday featured an open house at http://www.826seattle.org/, where I’ve done some volunteer work.  Its mission is to provide after-school tutoring and a forum for kids to develop their writing skills.  Since it wasn’t a “running” day for me (I run and hit the gym every second day), I decided I’d walk up to their site on Greenwood.

You had to know that if I was walking, I’d have my camera along.  I walked up through Woodland Park (home of the zoo).  The picture above wasn’t an impromptu wrestling session between dogs and man - the guy had a pad with him that he purposefully laid down and oriented toward the wan sun, and then let the dogs crawl all over him.  It’s not sun-tanning weather here.  It was about 40 degrees. (click to enlarge any of the photos).

The storefront site that I was helping paint and sheetrock is now open for business.  Part of the site is a quirky retail store with a space theme.  They’ve gone to impressive lengths to design themed packaging for a wide array of products and knick-knacks.  Note the arcane mathematical formulae on the blackboard.  I believe the bulk of their revenue will come from book sales, though.  I picked up A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, mostly because Eggers is the father of the 826 movement, and I’d like to see what his head is about.  I also bought something called Believer Book of Writers Talking To Writers, which features essays on writing by the likes of Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Joan Didion, as I’m always up for examining and marveling at the elusive mysteries of the writing process.

Today’s Seattle Times has an article on 826 and the opening.  It appears, both from the article and from my conversations with administrators, that they are way overstaffed with volunteers and are waiting for kids to show up in workable numbers at the tutoring center, so I don’t think I’ll be inflicting myself on vulnerable youth for a while.  They say it has taken 6 - 8 months at the other locations for a working ratio of volunteers to kids to develop.

157 3/4

Well, snow finally did start falling here in Seattle Thursday afternoon, and is supposed to continue into the night.  If I don’t miss my guess, Friday will be a Snow Day and everyone will be making it a 3-day weekend.  Everyone gets a little bit giddy when they see snow sticking on the ground.  We’ll want to go walking around later, as I’m sure it will be a party atmosphere with people sledding, throwing snowballs and getting their tongues stuck on iron handrails.

Here’s Chez Perils at 3:00 this afternoon (click to enlarge):

And here’s our garden sphinx (California girl, I think) providing visual evidence of the chilly temperature: