When Mrs. A and I honeymooned there, we'd (I had) forgotten to check the calendar for one critical thing, and arrived during Ramadan. We were walking down the main drag, near dusk, when an older man approached and greeted us. He introduced himself, and offered to show us a restaurant owned by a relative This is one stereotype about Mediterranean culture that proved true in Turkey: Everyone has an uncle or a cousin with the sort of shop you might be looking for. Everyone. Anyway, there are two directions you can go if you get off of Divan Yolu street. As you walk uphill, if you go right, you'll eventually meander down to the Golden Horn, possibly passing through the Grand Bazaar, one of the world's oldest shopping malls. If you go left, well, here be dragons. He led us left. The streetlights disappeared, the walls turned to cheap cinderblock and closed in, alleys growing narrower and narrower. We passed the corpse of a cat, and the sun was almost gone. Until suddenly, we turned a corner and... Remember that scene in Apocalypse Now? "Only the Americans could build something like this in the middle of this shit?" Well, it wasn't shit, it was just a poorer neighborhood, and we'd passed through it, we were back down by the water, the Boğaziçi, the Bosphorus. Near Kennedy Street, in fact, and there was a wonderful, brightly lit restaurant, with a large crowd waiting outside. Our friend sat us down at a sidewalk table, called a waiter over, and told us to order, he'd be back, he was going upstairs to the ifthar, the dinner that marks the end of each day's fast during Ramadan. So we ordered, cautiously, keeping our requests small, unlike our friend, we'd had lunch that day, but when he came back down, fifteen or twenty minutes later, he was disappointed, and sent for more food, asked us if we wanted beer. He would join us in one, were it not Ramadan, but... And in the end he paid, paid for the lot of it, just a guy offering hospitality to two strangers, two tourists, in a city that plays host to tens of millions of tourists every year. Our friend.
In response to something @Tenderiser said in the Things you didn't know you didn't know thread: That's funny. My best friend out here is English, my textbooks are split about 50/50 between American and British English, and I know that, when I go back home, my friends occasionally comment on my speech patterns, but I didn't know I could do UK-iain online as well. True story: I did a summer study abroad in Istanbul when I was in college. The first day I arrived, the moment I stepped out of my hotel, I was accosted by a rug merchant. In Sultanahmet, which is the prime tourist destination in all of Istanbul. It looks like this if you look one direction: View attachment 22973 And like this, if you turn the other way: View attachment 22974 Istanbul has been a trading crossroads city for millenia; the people there know how to buy and sell. So this guy walks up to me and says "Hello, America! Welcome to Istanbul, please, come with me!" and takes me to his rug shop. I tell him it's my first day, I'm not buying anything my first day, not going to happen, so he takes me to his uncle's rug shop, which has a better selection. We have tea at both places, I admire the rugs, but continue not to buy anything. Finally, he says "You really aren't buying today, are you? Okay, let's go drinking," and takes me to a series of open-air bars and bufes (standing places where you can get a beer, soda, fresh-grilled kebap, whatever). He pays for most of it, only allowing me to buy one or two drinks, because the Turks are a hospitable people, and once he saw I wasn't a customer, I became a guest. We'll meet him again later. So I was in Istanbul for about two months. Towards the end of my stay, a friend and I decided to visit Aya Sofia again. Outside the museum, there's always a small crowd of licensed and unlicensed tour guides, looking to add some value to your trip and cash to their pockets. Fair enough. The first guy, that first day, had taken one look at me and known I was American. When I went there again, years later, with Mrs. A, they'd call "Hey, Japonais!" to her, somehow being able to tell that the Asian girl with the white guy didn't have a hyphen after "Asian", and further narrow it down to Japan. But near the end of my first trip, as I was walking up to church-mosque-museum, a tour guide called out to me "Deutsch, nein?" I shook my head no, and kept my mouth shut. "Russki?" Another shake. "Ah, Aussie mate?" Mm-mm. So he ran down the list of every place a white person could plausibly come from, never hitting on America. I'd lost the walk, I wasn't invisible, but I was stealthy as hell, and that's a good thing. Anyway, remember my friend the rug merchant from my first day? Six or so years later, when Mrs. A and I were honeymooning, we were on our way up to Beyazit when I saw a face amongst all the other Turkish faces that looked familiar. He smiled and said "Iain! You're back! I have a new shop. Come with me, yes?"
So I wanna fucking hit somebody get hit get beatdown lose a fight to someone who is in the wrong and I don't even know why. Overworked? Oh, yeah, shit, I was on the clock for three and a half hours today. Extenuating circumstances of twelve hours out of the house don't count, nor do fucking lazy ass shithead boo fucking hoo the hours I spend between jobs or on public transport I just want to hit somebody get hit shit in a hole in the dirt club my dinner alpha's dinner to death before I get it stolen sleep outside the warmth of the fire watch the engines flame out toss a hand grenade into cargo class from the fucking cargo bay we were born to be slaves, we have always been slaves we deserve to be slaves my bucket list what keeps me alive is the watching the release of nuclear weapons on a civilian population on the BBC or even better from the rooftop bedtime good night fuckit.
There's a weird vibe on the boards lately, something in the wind that doesn't feel right. Not ugly. Not yet. Not sure where it's going, but snark and sass seem to be the order of the day. Offenders? Dunno, nobody, everybody, somebody, somebody not new, somebody just new. Little things getting picked at, the edges of the scabs running a tad raw and everyone's out of that grease that Gramma carried in her purse, combination lip balm scrape lotion thread loosener hinge oiler spice, none left, tube's dry and the bits are starting to squeak where they rub up against each other, but the squeaks are turning from metal against metal to metal versus metal, small shavings falling off between the hinge plates and the pin. Grooves, and not the groovy kind. Is this just a phase, is this just part of the normal ebb and flow, the combined breathing and pulse and circulation of fifty thousand mostly quiescent minds bumping against each other in this little corner of the the vast consensual hallucination that Mr. Gibson and DARPA bequeathed us, or is it a sign of something larger, the growing lack of incivility that Horace noted so recently? Or is it just a figment of my imagination, is the break already starting to chafe? I need to be at work in a few hours, but here I am, tapping away, man was made for work and toil and strife, not electric light and heat and instantaneous connection with the outside world across the seas and continents, for most of our history we were prey, and then we were slaves, which amounts to the same thing but the master doesn't kill you cleanly, he eats you day by day over decades, we aren't cut out for this, not for freedom, not for choice, we were born to fear and lacking that fear, we grow to fear everything, which is as it should be, is that a stick or a snake, are you hungry enough to eat those new berries, was that the wind in the grass or a lion? The Spartan helots were mandated a certain number of beatings, whether or not they behaved, so they didn't forget their place.
Battlestar Galactica: The Rebootening was actually a pretty good series, but reflecting back on it, I realize that the parts that I liked best were the beginning and the end. Not just the beginning showing us that an interplanetary civilization can (and will, if we get to that point) be taken down by lust, but that moment- -that wonderful moment- -when a hostile actor decides that things will start and end with vernichtung. Annihilation. The Cylons were pretty much carpet-nuking Caprica when the traitor (Traitor? He never did run that test on himself, did he?) Gaius Baltar escaped. When the humans offered unconditional surrender, they were met with... …silence, and more bombs. The perfect end to an imperfect story, but not the ending we got. Five or eight or seven seasons later, after squirming like an earthworm on the sidewalk under the magnifying-glass focused Cylon sun, the remaining colonists... colonize, finding another new planet to replace the scorched Earth. And we know what happens when the colonizers come calling, don't we? St. Iain (not me you fucking dolt, the author. No, I'm just a writer, and not a very good one at that. Try and focus, will you?) tells us that: After the death of (acting) President (Education Secretary or some unlikely shit) Palin, Commander William “Hüsker Dü” Adama spends the rest of his short life jumping in and out of a lake that thinks it's a gin and tonic. The rest of the doughty crew and survivors of the S.S. (spaceship) Minnow, who, despite having lost all their guns when the sole surviving professional athlete in the universe stole the fleet and set the controls for the heart of the sun, are still able to use their ignorance of germs and knowledge of steel to exterminate the local “missing link” autochthones, save for a raped few whose partial DNA survived long enough to confuse things for future genealogists. And so it ends, with a race escaping genocide perpetrating genocide. Perfect.
I've just awoken from a dream, the last clean flight into the plague apocalypse, flying over familiar territory, the forests and fields of Canada, cars lined up and abandoned at checkpoints, corpses. The opposite of Gradia 452, and on arrival, all the usual things were going wrong. Also, US senator Bernie Sanders was aboard. That didn't work out well for him.
Mrs A has a cold. A pretty nasty one, fever nearly 40c. She's been to the doc, it's not influenza, just one hell of a cold, he gave her some meds to help out. So yeah, she's taking the day off. But when I got home from work, she was asleep in bed. She heard me come in, her eyes opened in a kind of unfocused way and... ...she looked just like her mother did... ...towards the end, her brain squeezed by tumors and pummeled by surgeries, her consciousness slowly sublimating into oblivion. That was not a good feeling.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel This is what Douglas Coupland would write if he were a better writer. That's not to say that he's not a good writer, in fact, I think he's a very good one, but when I read this, I couldn't help but compare it with some of his work, and the comparison didn't come out well. Perhaps it's just the Canadian thing, although most of it takes place in the US, the book starts in Toronto, and it has a certain Canadian feel to it, at least to my eyes, but it tread paths that Coupland has previously been down in Girlfriend in a Coma. Yup, it's a post-apocalypse book, so if that's an outright deal-breaker for you, stop reading here and move on to something else. Seriously, I won't judge you, anything to do with the Singularity or transhumanism and I'm out mid-sentence. But anyway, I'll keep this so that there are only the most minor of spoilers, the kind of thing that you'd learn by reading the cover blurb. It's post-apocalypse, post super-swine flu, the kind of flu that leaves you cooling on a slab less than a day after exposure, the kind that's so transmissible that the remaining human population is a rounding error. But what sets this apart from so much post-apoc is that everyone is affected, nothing holds, nothing really rebuilds, there's no Bartertown, no Water and Power Authority, no Capital District, just a whole bunch of people stumbling through as best they can. Closer to The Road than I Am Legend. And while it's muted and minor key throughout, it takes place in the American Midwest, near Lake Michigan, which gives it a certain appeal to me as I understand the seasons, the terrain, the people. Technically its SF, but it was published in 2014, and the world ended about then, so there is not a single thing in the book that does not exist in our current culture and tech level, and most everything that does isn't even decorative anymore. Who carries an iPhone when there's no way to charge it, no signal, and no internet anymore? It's not SF, it's literature, but literature with a small “l”. Mandel won an Arthur C. Clarke award for it, but... I dunno, I have a certain contempt for modern literature, there's a subset of authors that I can't help but feel put down their final edit and start thinking about their Mann-Booker acceptance speeches. The books that are meant to be commented on sagely, displayed, read with an eye to allegory and symbolism, quoted at dinner parties with the Right Sort of People, perhaps even, if one is very lucky, banned by some red-state school district, but not actually read for enjoyment. This isn't lowbrow, far from it, there's a lot of thought put into things, it's all about connections, in a way, but I found myself just liking it, wanting to keep going. From a writer's view, there are a couple things I found interesting as well. There are characters whose names hint at their ethnicity, but they're not described physically except in the most general terms, but there are other characters who are covered in minute detail, down to the sounds of their voices, because that appearance is relevant to the plot. There's a gay character who we know is gay because when we're in his close third sphere, he thinks about his boyfriend, but that's it. There's no sex, hetero or otherwise, save for the occasional threat of rape, but anything that happens takes place well off-screen, so his orientation doesn't matter except to flesh him out. There are a lot of things that go undescribed, but the author has an amazing way with description when she chooses to. Very minor spoiler plot-wise, but one of the best lines in the book language-wise, so skip it if you choose to: Spoiler “It isn't like any dog [she's] ever seen...it looks like a cross between a fox and a cloud.” That, gentle readers, is how you describe a white Pomeranian. Anyway, a highly recommended book. I rationed it, and at ~330 pages, it lasted me the weekend.
A song is not a dress nor a necklace nor a bracelet, not a bangle or a bauble or even a well made suit. Some are. Some are, it's true. Some songwriters put the same love and care and soul into their work that a Cambodian slave-child making a pair of Nike shoes that will retail in New York or Chicago or Shanghai for a greater sum than Mother received the day they took Older Sister away. She won't be coming back. Some songwriters, many songwriters, most songwriters are churning out a product to be served to the masses, a product that will go viral perhaps, a song that will have a special place in your heart because, and only because, it was the soundtrack to your first kiss, your first fuck, the last time you saw her before the drunk driver came across the centerline... But no more. No meaning beyond what it means to you, which can be explained but never conveyed except by allegory because we all have those songs in our head, could be Madonna, could be Lady Gaga, could even be Stacey Q. It's there, in your head, not on merits, but on the experience. So there's the Top 40, Trending Now on YouTube, You May Like... They're in my head too, and there's nothing wrong with that. But there are the other songs, the ones the writers thought and fought for, the ones that can take a moment like the one you remember Stacy Q because of and push that moment, that experience, that life straight into your consciousness like you lived it yourself, that can show, in two or three hundred words, in three or four minutes, the whole who and where and what and why, or as much of it as you need know, burn it right into your memory even though you weren't there, you weren't here, you weren't, not yet, you didn't even exist, and you've got no frame of reference but what was laid out on that page of a notebook, laid down in that studio, so many years before. The artist has made his life a part of yours, but that doesn't mean you own it, no matter how much you tell yourself that you're a fellow worker in song, it's not something that you can slip into because you think it will set off your voice nicely, the gender discongruity isn't a clever little twist, you weren't there, it wasn't you, stop kidding yourself just fucking push play and enjoy.
Hey man, yeah, like, sorry, y'know, I know I kinda fucked up there, but I'm all better now. I think that trip to the shop really helped me out, y'know, I'm not getting those creepy little fingers rubbing all over my face anymore. Yeah, I know, it happened last week too, but I'm good now. So, who's the new guy? Korean, idn't he? Ah, gift for the missus, right, I got it, she'll like him. So uh, hang on, yeah, I mean, I know that I was acting a little wonky back there, but, um, I don't seem to have a signal right now. Did you, um, change my settings or something? Cuz I'm like, all good now, y'know, no more issues. Yeah, I remember the battery thing too, but that was like two years ago. Um, yeah, the tablet had that motherboard thing too, but you can't blame that on... Well, I mean, half-brothers, really. Okay, yeah, brothers. But like, totally different, just because it says... But dude, I'm like, all good now, just, well, maybe I forgot a couple things in the last few hours... How many gigs worth? Wait, where's my memory card? What did you do? Did you put it in that fucking Korean? Dude, not cool, man, you know how they get! They're on the fucking no-fly list, fer fucksakes! Well, I mean, not the new guys, but you never can tell... Hey, why you plugging me in? Are you copying my files for backup, or... Did you just plug the new guy into the next port? Awww mann, I mean, c'mon, we've been together for like, three years and shit. You take me everywhere, I've got a killer fucking camera, dude. Twenty point three megapixels, what's old Kim Jong Galaxy over there got? Thirteen! You hear me? Thirteen miserable measly megapix- Are you listening to me? I'm all better now, I swear it, you can trust me, you've got a lot of Xperience with me, get it? No, no man, don't do it. Just don't, please...? Are you putting me in... ohmygod, are those the prepaids? Are you putting me in the box with the goddamn burners! Fuck you, man, just fuc- <android is shutting down>
It was a Tuesday night, and we were out drinking at the box. My days off were Wednesday and Thursday, so it was my weekend at that point, but it didn't really matter much in those days; I didn't start work until after noon most days, so every night was beer o'clock. On the corner, out front of the convenient store, there was this... I dunno, I think it was some sort of electrical or phone switching box, about waist-high, coated in some sort of hard, stippled green paint. There was a fence of aluminum tubing, just short of waist-high, on three sides of it, spaced such that if you were leaning on the fence, the box was the perfect height and distance away to put your beer and your snacks. No open container laws, so we called it “the box,” and met there every night. Across the sidewalk, there was a trash-can that we'd sometimes use to play at “throw the empties away.” Drunken gaijin playing beer-can basketball on the sidewalk. I don't think I'd been there long that night when my phone played the little section of MIDI Bach that I used to have as a ringtone. “Ohmygod, are you watching the NYC live news?? Two planes just hit the world trade center. bush says terrorism” Huh. I really thought I had more to say when I started typing this, but we all know the rest of the story. In a year, some young person in the United States is going to raise their right hand and swear away the next four years, or however much less is granted them, of their lives. Someone who has never drawn breath while the towers stood. Yeah, that's all.
Well, I'm back in Japan. Back to reality? Two weeks of listening to my oldest friends discussing yard-care tips, back to school problems, 401k retirement plans. No one told me when to run, I missed the starting gun. I'll never own a home, I may never own a car. I may never be able to afford to move back to the US, and I can't afford to retire here. Or there. Reality sets in again. Or perhaps I'm a butterfly, dreaming that I'm a man. Where did that frog go?
So I'm off in a few minutes, but this vacation is different. I've become one of them. For so many years, I held on to the ideal of "packed and ready to move at a moment's notice." When I was a Boy Scout, I got elected patrol leader one year. Pretty much everybody did, at one point or another, so don't read anything into that. But this was summer, and when we went to camp, a new boy got assigned to my patrol. We had this backpacker cult going on, who could pack the least, who had the coolest pack, who had the right Swiss Army knife, the right Sierra cup, who showed that they'd earned their rappelling merit badge by wearing a carabiner clipped to their belt loop at all times, and this young lad was struggling down the hill to our campsite with two large, hard-sided faux-leather suitcases. Locked suitcases. Which he'd forgotten the keys to. Fortunately, the luggage was cheap, and all of us were constantly working on our lockpicking and cat-burglary merit badges, so it was a matter of a few minutes and a few bent paper clips to get access to his stuff again, but the damage to his image was done. Packed and ready to move at a moment's notice, I used to be. Traveling in casual clothes, but with combat, or at least hiking, boots on my feet. Space blanket in my carry-on. All the survival gear the airport screeners would allow through. Because, Lord of the Flies, you know. Or Castaway. Or whatever. Keep all of your gear in something with shoulder straps, you don't need to spend money on a Smarte Carte, Marine. Ready to move, over any terrain. Escalators, slidewalks, even carpet. But you're getting old. Not too old to carry your trash that way, mind you, but old enough not to have to. You're in your mid-forties. You're a professor (of sorts). You're wearing a Panama hat and a pocket square; the last time there was an overbooking on your flight, you got upgraded, not bumped. You've got a suitcase with wheels and a nice little locking strap for extra security this time, and a neck pillow hanging from your carry-on. You're a traitor to your past, and you know it.
Just awoke on this Monday morning from a dream of running and scrambling through the fields, racing my good friend to a point we knew well. No euphemisms, nothing clever here, just a steeplechase in the old meaning of the word, where a man on horseback, out riding with his friends, would say something on the lines of "See yon steeple of St. Nyaralathotep's? Race you!" and the game would be on. We, of course, were dismounted, because this happens in very nearly the real, and the objective wasn't a steeple, but a point well known to both of us, down at the bottom of the hill. He's taller than I am, and has the advantage that way, but I knew a course through a field and sliding skittering down a hill through the backlots that gave me an edge, putting the contest at very nearly even. One day two other professors, visitors from America, decided to join in and they were fast, so fast, so I showed my friend my shortcut. I marveled that he hadn't discovered it before, as it was well beaten down with my footprints, and in the dream, I still wore the old "black Cadillac" combat boots, with their distinctive self-cleaning tread, and we ran, we ran down the hill, and this is when I knew it was a dream, because I was young enough that running was a joy, strong enough that jumping over obstacles was a pleasure, and supple enough that slipping sliding glissading down a hill was no cause for fear of the sprain of the ankle, the twist of the knee, the stumble and attendant impact that wreaks a life-changing crunch in the shoulder. We didn't win, and like most dreams, the memory of the joy of just racing is fading from my brain already.
One odd moment from my early days in Japan: There was a video rental store across from my first apartment, but I didn't know the system for getting a membership and my Japanese ability was approximately zero, so I hadn't gone over there yet. It was a huge building, two stories, the front all neoned to death. Anyway, I met another foreign teacher who lived in the same building, a girl from Texas, and she asked me if I'd been there yet. I told her my concerns about getting a membership, and she said all I had to do was show them my gaijin card (foreigner ID) and give them, IIRC, five thousand yen (about $50) as a deposit and they'd handle the rest. So I went into the store, and the front part had some books and comics. I headed deeper in, and found that I was in the porn section somehow, and what a porn section. Everything was categorized, much of it in script that I couldn't read, but the boxes (this was VHS days) made it pretty clear which category I was in: uniform fetish, busty women, older women, what the? I looked up, and this section's sign was in English: "Rape". I began to wonder about the Texan woman's intentions. She'd told me to go to the world's largest porn store. Was this a hint? I kept going, deeper into the bowels of the store. And yes, that's exactly what I mean, as there were now videos whose covers depicted smiling young ladies on the upper half, and piles of human excrement on the lower half, to let the consumer (ugh) know exactly what the color and texture of the particular girl's shit would be. Then came a section with white women on the covers. And horses. And pigs. And goats and a monkey. Keep in mind, this was a huge store that fronted on one of the large north-south arteries of that part of the city, not some back alley joint that you needed a password for. There were tired office workers idly looking through the racks for their evening's entertainment. Then came the section with the panties and other used things related to women's nether regions. And yes, socks were included in that, but so were.... Ugh. As I headed out of the store, my head swimming with disbelief, I spotted a stairway near the front door that I hadn't noticed when I entered. Steeling myself, I headed up, afraid even to wonder what horrors lay upstairs. Disney. Schwarzenegger. Rom-Coms with Meg Ryan. Lake Placid. All the things that would be in the front of any normal store were hidden away on the second level of Nobunaga Video.... But they did have both versions (Kubrick's and the one starring Jeremy Irons) of Lolita. In the "Romance" section.