Babs

She had been there for a minute, I think, but I didn't notice her until she had actually stepped across from me to complete the diamond the three of us had left unrealized and announced politely that she would like one of our party to help her with a New Years' kiss. Hmm? Flushed, I continued to behave as if she wasn't there. A reflexive glance right and then left to the guys and an equivocating widening of the eyes was all I could manage; a cursory nod to acknowledge her presence froze and died in my shoulders. By the looks of it they'd felt the same, a little taken aback probably by the forwardness of this pleasantly-shaped, attractively-dressed and lightly made-up young lady with unbroken heels and determined features, this bright young thing determined not to remain a cipher tonight in this dark woody bar with all these gropers and fornicators, this firecracker with a stand-up-don't-fall-in approach to NYE barhopping. Well, maybe firecracker overstated her case a little--the defiance in her mouthset played only at the pleasure of the fear in her bright blue eyes.
All the same, we knew right away that one of us would have to man up, dive in, sally forth &c., and though no one particularly wanted the job it was, for better or worse, a drunkard's holiday. Oftentimes, as the stock pickers say, it's so hard to just do nothing. And besides, it just wouldn't have been polite not to reward (indulge) the initiative.
So she waited, looking a shade too nervous or sad both to savor for any rational third party to make the case that she wasn't riding the rebound train just then, while we stood (it was too crowded to mill--ed.) and kept an open line to the bar. There followed some of the strained if ultimately goodnatured jostling for position that occurs between non-alphas in these situations, but it was never going to be particularly sharp given that the other two had already-established entanglements and even with the volume at eleven this just didn't have the makings of a night on which any of us might feel the need to risk any sort of long-term damage for the sake of a laugh. As per tradition, the subject herself turned to her friend with apathetic airs until the dance had completed, after which period, naturally, the work fell to me. I stepped up: a chaste kiss, a break, and another chaste kiss identical to the first. Soft lips, she had, with a touch of pleasantly tasteless applied moisture, and an safe feminine musk-perfume. Good: there was nothing to regret here. A nervous smile, from me as well, and she thanked me, turned back to her companion and with hesitation attempted to insert herself into the flirtatious exchange which had developed between the girl and her muscled young guido mark from Across the River. And I turned away and laughed with the others about the whatever that had just occurred and we all went back to standing in our allotted couple cubic feet doing whatever it is we were doing.
But the ex-cipher had won an important victory and she wasn't going away, standing awkwardly there a few feet off in the in-between and just glowing in her shattered dirty-blonde anonymity. She looked proud of herself and disappointed--really disappointed, so disappointed that the defiance looked to have crept up into her eyes and extinguished those second thoughts--in me. I couldn't even take solace in the notion that the guido was partly to blame as he'd moved on and now it was her friend who stood with hesitancy as she fixed an increasingly tense gaze over at us. I waited. She steamed. I looked away. She smoldered. I examined my phone. She baked. I walked--

--no, skipped around and around the establishment, tracing and retracing steps and throwing careless cross-eyed glances at people and places I'd seen multiple times. I even smacked my way into the men's bathroom once and again, smiling apologetically at no one sober enough to care. Three hours gone by and it the crowd was still pulsing with life in the standing-room-only open semicircle surrounding the expansive bar. What vigor! It's all in the music, I thought and thought and thought and thought and thought and my head pulsed and stabbed with the idea of it, the soundtrack's noisy, bassy embrace keeping me sure I knew exactly what was going on in this place with regards to music and social control and balance-striking. Things had died down a bit in the two satellite rooms to the bartender's left and front, wet snowy grit and drunkenly discarded articles of clothing sullying the polished wood floors and chairs and benches. The couples and small groups left rollicked and thrusted as before, but there was a different tone now, the smallening volume and expanding emptiness in these less-open spaces weighing down the eyelids and heartstrings of those still gathered. This of course was how they wanted it (wanted it-wanted it-wanted it-wanted it pulsing in waves across my viewspace) but that wasn't important enough for me to consider just then and after another even more urgent series of glance-throws I fucking just spun out from the front room for the fourth time in ten minutes or however long and had to stop, dizzy, near my friends just off-center from the bar to catch my breath and fought through the haze to prevent myself from letting on that I'd been deliriously chasing a dirty-blonde whose name they didn't want to know (those fucks!) and whose meaning they couldn't possibly appreciate. They barely noticed me, wrapped up as they were in their cars and beers. Good. Good. Good good good. This was my thing anyway. I got into it and surely I could work my way out of it satisfactorily, I thought--think--thought--think? They had expressed their support for me getting to know her, I remembered, so what more did I need from them? They were like, she's cool, do it man. I did it. I totally did it. Or I had done it...I thought...but then what had happened? Something had happened. I couldn't really remember what had happened, but maybe I was still too spinny from the all the glances I had been throwing, maybe I just needed to catch my breath a little or stop the room from being so unfriendly and loud for a minute. Eyes--
Where was she? I mean...alright. We were talking, right, hours' worth of it; she was telling me all about her shit and we were getting pretty into it, I talked to her friend, who informed me the guido was actually her fiance (didn't see that coming), and--then what? More talk, more talk, more talk; small talk, talk-bef0re-leaving-the-bar-together kind of talk--then what? Talk, talk--where did you come from, where are you staying? Somewhere close, me too me too. Where do we go from here, what do we do now, that kind of talk...
Where was she!? Okay, okay, okay. She wasn't still in the bar, she couldn't have been, must have gotten a jump on me (us?--we were kind of trying to be in this together, me and the guys, right, or were they going to throw me under the bus now that somehow something had gone wrong with the situation; but no, they were supportive types, bros before hoes and all that), just thought she was going to go get her coat. That's right, that's right, that's what happened! Want to go to another bar, I had asked, this place is getting loud you know. And she said yes, that would be cool, do you know anywhere; but I didn't know any other places, so I said well we can just walk around with our friends I guess, wouldn't that be fun, and I seem to remember her agreeing. Maybe she didn't though. She must have equivocated, or maybe agreed with no intention of actually being agreeable about it (funny!) or something like that, you know, maybe not wanting to hurt my feelings about not wanting to hang out more or whatever. But why not just say that? And then--right!--she had to go get her coat, and her friend who was actually her older sister too took her by the arm with this final look in her eye as if she knew that they wouldn't be seeing me anymore. Dammit. The old let me get my coat routine, the old let me get my coat routine, the old but but but where did they leave from--my buddies and I were standing between the bar and the exterior door, the only way out, not that we were really looking for her or them or anything because that would have been creepy but somehow they snuck past us without saying goodbye. They could have said goodbye at least! I mean what did I do wrong, I just asked her about stuff and told her stuff when she asked but we mostly just talked about her I think and she was pretty forthcoming, friendly even, you know kind of damaged and reboundy but really nice and enjoyable to talk to if a little bland but certainly not too bland we couldn't have taken the air together outside on a chilly but not frigid New Year's early morning and maybe done some other stuff afterward if the moment had been right. What did I do wrong to get the old let me get my coat routine response thing, the brutal runaround kind of thing where someone humors you to the point where you think they like you but maybe you've had too much to drink or are too hopeful and underestimate them so you don't realize they're just humoring you. Or maybe it was the friend sister's fault, all her fault maybe when she didn't like me from the start because she seemed kind of unfriendly so I didn't look at her much when we talked, more at her fiance and at the dirty-blonde cool girl and not her. Not almost at all actually, maybe like once or twice when she asked me a direct question to be polite Maybe that was it, must have been, must have told her sister not to go any further, this guy's no good or I don't like him kind of thing, must have been that. Wouldn't have been the dirty-blonde herself, right, you can't make that kind of misjudgment no matter how many vision-field pulsings you're having, right? Fuck dammit, she was definitely gone though. Out the door. What did I do wrong? People are supposed to be honest, right, just say hey I'm not really digging it, or even well hey we have to leave because my fiance's not digging it anymore or never was, you were okay or whatever but we have to move on! But that's not what happened, and now everything spin spun spin spun fuck dammit man. Outside, outside, better outside. Dirty-blonde's out there, dozens of others, millions, not in the bar. HNY HNY HNY HNY HNY everyone said to everyone else but with the winding down of the night it was probably time to do some loss cutting and let's just get out of here, guys, I thought, I remember thinking it anyway, can't remember if I said it though, but I know we left at some point well after the dirty-blonde and we were gone, she was gone, like it never even happened and the bar probably closed for however long bars stay closed in the early morning hours and then something like that probably happened the next night to two other sets of individuals...maybe not the next night actually because who goes to the bar on New Year's Day except people for whom situations like that are going to end way, way way way worse like in the hospital or jail kind of worse, not just sad kind of bad, but definitely the night after that for sure.

Skewered morsels

Writer's block just means you want to slam everything down on the page at once. It's a great problem to have: it reminds you, as if you'd ever forget, that you're a mind never satisfied with the world as it is. It's the one makeshift cloth drawer awry in a stack of six, the five others all perfectly lined up but the reds and grays thrusting out of that one miscreant at crazy angles against the prison white of the unfinished, unadorned walls. But why should that drawer and those clothes against that wall carry any more draw than the rumpled heaps of yesterday's (and yesterday's yesterdays) outfits arrayed crescentwise on the plush grapefruit-red floorcover about said stack? Than the broken peanut butter jar lined up perfectly (feng shui) with the chipped, battered radiator in the corner, used beyond belief? Than the urine-stained mattress piled upon a crushed quilt upon another urine-stained mattress, all found and retrieved on the same block from different parties with similar (no doubt) yet inscrutable objectives (a move? a fight? an accident?), upon which the secrets of the God and the world and the flesh alike revealed themselves repeatedly and forthrightly, with regularity, during the late evening hours over a brilliant melty period of three-or-so-score days?
There is a joy to be had in a world which comes at first blush off as a bit overwhelming and a bit when stone comes to grist paralyzing: beauty pulls and thrusts, tempting us with its mysteries, but its vastness keeps it forever removed from human control. Its depth--its multilayered exuberance, the charm as they say of its infinite redounds--confounds the greatest poets, the sharpest wordsmiths, the most banal indie-rock acts. Seriously! The boundless detail of this flawed world should pause even the soberest, if only for a breath, and direct attention further to the beyond-brilliant miracle realm that envelops it: a universe into which we can peer and poke but nary understand. Where are those points we fix in the sky! And how many skies with their milky points, at how many angles and in how many dimensions and at what cost, must we conquer before we can rightly set about picking apart beauty's multitudinous skewered morsels? We're but cretins, yet we can still so quickly isolate Beauty in so many of its forms, and in this we might call ourselves blessed. Herein lies the task of the writer, blocked or otherwise: to grab and gnash at the beauty-bits flying by in the hopes of knocking them down into some semblance of a coherent expression of wonderment and then, it's hoped, rearrange them and break them and finally beat them terminally into submission to create a fitting if flawed requiem for some small side-section of the symphony. Will she succeed? Well. But it's an honor & a blessing in itself for her even to sit forth at that word processor and try, and she mustn't fear.

Roll through slowly

The snow was coming down real hard tonight, not hard in the sense of thick but hard in the sense that the wind was just whipping it and beating it down, not horizontal exactly like in real serious blizzards but crazy down like because the flakes were so light and wispy you could just do whatever you wanted to them and this wind seemed to want to really spin them around up and all over the place, to really teach them a lesson before it was their time to self destruct, splat smash with all the others on the sharp uneven cover with the blades of grass sticking out in places, cold personified. And slick was back all over the roads this evening after the sun's shine had chased it away for a few hours in the afternoon when the slate gray layers burned off a little and even the pellets themselves softened their tone. This was real slick, not that heavy rainstorm slick or new powdersnow slick but that angry black-ice and repacked-remelted granular slick, the kind of slick where when you try to start from a stop at the intersection and you think everything's going well with your front wheels spinning along but then you realize you're not moving anywhere because your ass end with its useless dead stick axle is sliding slowly out to one side, just teasing you, and you jam on the gas harder because you're so pissed and then you smell the burning coming into the cab from both sides and you sigh. The trick is to roll through the stop signs slowly, looking around cautiously starting from eight or ten lengths back so you can at least try to stop in time to prevent a smash, but of course that brings on a whole slew of other problems you'd rather avoid like where's the ditch aw shit it's right-here. You're only going ten or fifteen so it's not like it's the end of the world but it still sucks when you're face-down or right-side-down in the steaze or planted into some poor lady's driver side trying to pretend like you were stopping from all the way back and this whole thing was her fault. If you're in town you can cheat a little...you just dip for a second into the shoulder-spots where people parked their cars during the early part of the snowfall and then realized they had to move them cause of the emergency being called and that extra little bit of traction you get from the unpacked, unwarmed pavement makes all the difference. Clutchtown griptown we call it owing to the way your wheels clutch and grip the blacktop if you drive right when you're in town during a squallstorm. Regardless though it's best to be inside on a life in your own hands kind of night like tonight. Or if you have to have it both ways you can crunch around on the forementioned grass, maybe roll some snowballs and see if you can get it to the point where when you roll a little patch of snow it grows and grows and takes all the snow in its way with it so it ends up just leaving a trail of bare dead grass behind it, like it doesn't know how to stop growing and sticking, like a giant velcro cancer ball you might call it. Blue moon style event when there's that kind of slick on the roads and that kind of stick on the grass. Shame, shame.

Crowns

Some of the trees here, on the grass between the sidewalks and the pavement and in the thick parts of the unkept backyards that stretch on in long rectangles to the potholeded alleys, are old enough to have multiple appendages one would rightly call limbs. These are not the standard 'biggest branch' limbs every sapling earns on its tenth or twentieth or thirtieth birthday, the first two or four up the trunk that branch off several more times; even newborns have brachial tubes and pulmonary arteries and all that. No. These are limbs: separate, distinct, big. These are limbs that thrust outward and upward from the hearts of trees whose roots have stirred the soil for longer than the feces of any individual man or woman alive today; these are limbs which themselves are probably older than anyone save for a few isolated souls living on that Japanese long-life island.
Most of these limbs belong to the big oak trees spaced regularly along the city's older, nicer residential streets, with tree-age and thus limb-thickness increasing with street-age and residence-niceness. These are the attractive ones, the classic four limbs spreading up at regular angles to form round crowns that look soft, supple and wise from a distance, the product of generations of doting city landscapers doing their best to prune and prod these things through wicked winters and blistering droughts. The oaks and the spruces and the towering elms that fill in the back lots, the park edges and the extra patches are the kissing cousins, the war vets, the robust simpletons, the out-of-sight-and-minders: a missing side here (lightning), a torn canopy there (wind), a catastrophic collapsed crown (rot) just behind that one house's fence.
You can extrapolate a lot from these trees, and you can guess a whole lot more. You can hypothesize based on its size and condition and type who planted a tree and why, but it's much more fun to imagine what sorts of goings-on the tree itself was privy to--whose stories it knows and whose it knows of--all down through the years. These beasts, after all, hang over our town as if to taunt us with the promise of their knowledge-stories, shrouding our cute conservative little city, otherwise unremarkable, in the uncertain forgottens of its past. Things occurred here, they whisper sardonically, conveying their understanding in a way that the ever-changing exhibits at the Past and Present Museum downtown can't. Those oakey-piney things (what are they?) on Newton, south of Broad? Surely some of them, younger and fresher and enjoying a lower and stabler center of gravity, saw those defiant mobsters bleed their last on the streetside at the hands of the Pinkertons, or whoever, during that infamous Prohibition-era gunbattle. Or those brutal ashes, the hulking specimens (always curving one way or another, slowly at first and then almost horizontally to the crown, as if they've realized they've gone too far) whose limbs don't start until half or two-thirds of the way up their diamond-studded lengths, that lord over the woodsy alleyways of the Shelbyville section: they must have been there at the start, maybe seeding fallow fields in the homesteading years or dropping timber for the construction of civilized things as the railroad barons built and improved upon the land.
But death comes for all, even the greats. Even now some of these guys are beginning to succumb to the rot or to one too many dry summers and fall on their own (or at least issue that terminal cry for removal, the leafless-crown-come-Junetime). Already most have outlasted their peers on the open fold; the stands of oaks, elms and maples out on the savanna tend to bow to the wind once they hit their fourth story without a ravine to protect them, and these back-lot towerers would have been no different had the city not pressed them to its bosom. One day soon they will begin to fall in earnest--the whirr of machines carting their skeletons off to the trash-burner supplanting the lusty whisper of leafy bough-wind, the harsh midday glare burning up the grasses on which successive generations of children might have lain to watch the swaying and smiling above. And then to whom will we turn for advice? But no one will remain who might rightly claim to carry a piece of the old times, the beginning times, wrung tight about their core in the literal fiber of their being; but no one with the bones or the wood. New sprouts will fill in the gaps, and in time perhaps beat back the sun and snow and restore the moody shade that so informs these streets, and new children, parents and those-with-no-business-here will dance their dance beneath them. The recycling process will continue, as it never really ended, and this will be well and good and part of the order of things. But something will be different: the leaves and branches, crowns and limbs, may flash their equivalence and smile their assurances, but something will be gone, or at least returned to a form so elemental it will defy identification, and there will be loss.

What it is

The first part of the 4/30/10 NYTimes article about the nascent Gulf oil spill offers a little background on majority-owner and thus majority-guilty-party BP. Intrepid Reporter Krauss starts by drawing our attention to the company's 2004-2010 effort to rebrand itself the "green" oil company (remember pretty "Beyond Petroleum" TV/magazine spots that barely stopped to nod at BP's core business?) Good: that was the first of many cynical campaigns oil majors, petrochemical concerns and their trade/lobbying tentacles launched in the wake of that weird mid-decade mini-awakening re carbon emissions & climate change. Background established, he changes his ink, hits enter a couple times, and then really starts to wade into it.
Turns out BP began neglecting the "maintenance and safety" aspects of its operations around the same time this rebranding thing started. Coincidence? Hardly, assures I.R.K., because an enormous, highly bureaucratized integrated oil company is incapable of managing its corporate image and engaging in the complex business of making sure one's tangled network of rigs, wells, refineries, pipelines, tanker trucks, gas stations and other flammable/toxic things remains not in flames and/or not leaching into the bayou at the same time. Companies like this probably don't even have separate offices for those kinds of things, right? Well. In a perfect world, large corporations would post a framed set of best practices in every every office in every outpost from corporate tower on down to field office 6b and the term "social responsibility" would be something more than the nebulous catchphrase marketing consultants bandy about during the fat parts of their boardroom expository spools. Bad things like tanker leaks, rig explosions and pipeline failures wouldn't happen because everyone would be totally honest about everything and no one would dare to cut corners. Regulations & restrictions would be followed to the letter, t-crosses and i-dots included. No, actually; they'd be exceeded, because you can never be too careful. Good safety records behoove everyone, right? People, profits, wildlife critters: win-win-win?
Sucks to say that the world in which the people who tally oil-major safety records tally oil-major safety records is a world filled with nuance and gradience. No one follows the rules down to the last, but even the guys--and often they're littler, but they're still guys--who mostly play it straight find themselves in shit-water once in a while. I.R.K. knows this, of course. The two well-publicized, unfortunate incidents he outlines in the freshest of inks (it's still not totally dry) were big, preventable, would have been reputationally devastating whether in the vacuum or in concert, and worst of all occurred within two years of each other. It's hard to be on BP's side here. The first incident, a high-visibility Texas refinery explosion that received saturation coverage on cable-news outlets for a couple days, killed 15 people right off the bat and spewed black smoke into the air until America got sick of it; the second, a major failure on a remote pipeline in northern Alaska, surely could have been prevented or at least ameliorated by whatever passes for "routine maintenance" up on the tundra. Ouch. But please let's not the lazy. To suggest that these ugly incidents, occurring in bang-bang fashion as they did, lay bare an established player's disregard for the safety of its employees or the continued existence of the ecosystems in which it operates is facile, maybe disingenuous, and certainly not a great reflection on the reporting techniques employed by "the best journalists in the world, and there's no debating that." Not that this last is of particular concern given that the politics of the moment have turned so mightily against BP--the Times, or anyone else for that matter, could say whatever they wish about those associated with energy exploration at this point. Anyway, I.R.K. backs it up with this half-hearted long-jumper:
Last year, when the federal Minerals Management Service proposed a rule that would have required companies to have their safety and environmental management programs audited once every three years, BP and other companies objected.
Natch. What else would they do? This is how business works in these feast-or-famine sectors. The bad guys, the big evil concerns, play hardball, softball or whatever you want to call it (see MMS scandal) with regulators in the hopes that they'll eventually be able to squeeze something favorable out of them. Not that this is always difficult: before Republicans lost the legislature in 2006 and le Bush admin felt obligated to change its tune a little said squeeze had been a walk in the park for a minute.
BP and its supermajor cousins could always be paying more attention to safety, maintenance, and general good corporate governance; we'll even allow that this ultra-deepwater drilling thing seems like it was conceived hastily & without all that nonsense homework re spill prevention, which is a totally different proposition beyond the shelf. But BP's executive corps being a bunch of dicks shouldn't lull reporters at the paper of record into lazy dot-connections which do little to advance rational discourse--and which, while not perhaps as reprehensible as oil execs' buck-passing re matters of life and death, are both indefensible and terrible for the journalistic image at the worst possible time. The I.R.K. of 4/30/76 would have had more balls.

The Lizard Brain, Take Cat

The cat lays dormant for long periods on the couch behind us, whimpers intermittently into her neck fur and then in a burst leaps from her seat and zigzags violently across the floor to pounce on something that isn't there, eyes casting about apologetically when she realizes her mistake. Her vocalizations vary widely; her whimpers squeaks and mini-meows being rather less common than her hauntingly realistic human-infant mothers-milk cry. Like God speaking through a baby, that whine is, tuned at the perfect frequency to trip off our lizard-brain parental reflexes. (We turn in unison.)
Beyond that she exhibits typically quirky feline behavior. She makes clearing and digging motions outside the litterbox, she meows for attention after and not before petting sessions, she listens at the walls knowing full well she can't hear what's in them. This last might be symptomatic of her most off-putting trait, her deafness. As an indoor cat, she really suffers no ill effects as a result, yet her disability is so obviously total that it is difficult in the course of normal Kitty-contemplation not to feel that bizarre mix of compassion and revulsion we feel when we encounter a situation we don't fully understand. Her deafness informs her personality as well as her physicality, yet there's no equilibrium about her, no adjusted normalcy--her queerness never really turns off. It's hard not to be upset by her actions, decisions, bearing. The erratic cocks of her head; the obliviousness to the everyday sounds that startle, aggravate or inform normal folks (and cats); the way she puts her ear to the ground and kicks around in a circle, pivoting about her head, to pick up extra snippets of vibrations all fail to endear. Then again, she claims none of the pampered complacency most of her adult housecat cousins enjoy. She can't afford it, even as the only non-human occupant of a friendly household. Such complacency robs perfectly agreeable cats of the very spontaneity and fortitude--and, in Kitty's case, the lack of self-awareness--that should make them attractive pets. Kitty alone will not solve the conundrum she presents, but her existence serves as a reminder that the lizard brain rarely supplies us with all the information necessary to make informed decisions on these domestic (and other) matters.

Arr-Ess-Dubs, Thursday 3:30 PM

2 Lam. Gallardo
1 Bent. Arnage
10 valets at each of two Ritz-Carlton resorts
1 ten-mile commercial strip
6 three-story bank branches in a row
2 miles of boxy beach hotel-condos, faux-Mediterranean
30 story, give or take, height limit
12 half-finished structures
26 sandy, puddled clear-cuts once slated for development
0 elevation change

Little discernible primary economic activity (land speculation does not count)
Cute downtown shopping area with shops, restaurants, and shop-restaurants with nice bars. Note to self: locating a gift shop just off the outdoor bar is a good way to grow your bottom line
Magnificent broad boulevards, straight and true, through yet-to-be (ever-to-be) developed jungle. Where land is built upon, communities connect to boulevards at one point (one gate) and stretch quickly back from the road to maintain a healthy buffer. Even trailer parks have gates; said communities' visibility is inversely proportional to the cost of land per acre behind their walls. It's all in the landscaping
High tide line - vegetation line = 0
Lizards by day, possums by night. Result the same