What If?

(A journal entry from April 2008)

Five nights a week I ride the #22 Clark Street bus home from work. Depending on how busy it is I catch the bus somewhere between midnight and 2:30 am. My route is pretty much the same; I walk up Rush Street, turn left on Bellevue, cross State Street and walk about a block-and-a-half to the bus stop at Clark and Maple. Sometimes, if I've got the munchies, I stop at White Hen and get something chocolate.

If I miss the bus, or if it's particularly cold, I'll walk to the Red Line station about three blocks north of Maple and catch the train. I prefer the bus because at that time of night it's actually quicker than the train and leaves me considerably closer to my front door.

Most of the time I sit under the closet-sized shelter and read or do a crossword puzzle. Some nights I bundle up against the cold, some nights I just watch it rain.  Rarely I'll chat on the phone or with someone at the stop (there's usually no one else there).

Tonight I saw a woman get robbed. More precisely, I heard a woman screaming bloody murder while getting robbed.

I was sitting at the bench on Maple and Clark when I suddenly became aware that a woman was screaming. At first I thought it was one of the drunks stumbling home from a night on Division Street.

I looked up and I heard it again, and I realized it wasn't someone who was drunk but someone who was scared. I looked right, saw nothing. I looked left, and about a half-block away I saw a woman standing in the middle of the sidewalk, moving toward me and a guy running between two parked cars into an idling sedan waiting in the middle of the street.

I grabbed my cell phone, stood up, then started walking toward her. She picked up her pace and the car accelerated in my direction. There was no front plate on the car, and all I could see of the driver or passenger was an outline. I tried to catch the back plate, but if there was one person in the area just then with worse eyesight than me I challenge them to step forward.

My lousy vision, the steady drizzle, the speed of the car, my exhaustion (after working 9 hours in a smoky bar) and the fact that I haven't changed my disposable contact in a week-and-a-half (it's starting to feel like a piece of aluminum foil in my eye) conspired to keep me from seeing the back plate. I think there may have been an 8 in it. Or maybe it was a zero. It's hard to tell.

The woman trotted up to me, and I have to say, quite calmly, asked me to call 911. Which I did. She told the dispatch where she was and what had happened. There were wide, red scratches on her neck, and she was obviously experiencing a massive adrenaline rush (though she kept herself incredibly composed).

She was worrying aloud about her lost ID (her passport, she said) and the fact that the person who had just robbed her at gunpoint now knew where she lived. She was thrilled he didn't take her iPod. She said, "He had a gun, and I was screaming." She looked at me wide-eyed with the realization that she could have been shot. "I'm really lucky," she said...and I knew she meant she was lucky she hadn't been shot (or worse), but it was almost absurd to hear someone who had just been assaulted and robbed say they were lucky.

My first thought was that the gun probably wasn't loaded. Armed robbery carries a much stiffer penalty than plain-old snatch-and-run robbery (I think it does). Murder, or attempted murder carries a much stiffer sentence (and I'm damn sure about that one). One way to make sure no one gets shot is to not have a gun at all (kind of like burglary abstinence).

Of course, not having the threat of a gun might make committing the act a little more difficult. After all, if someone walked up to you and said "Give me your money," while simply standing there, it might make a potential victim less likely to comply. But if someone has the business end of a .45 in their cheek, they might be more inclined to hand over their purse (or what have you).

I've been robbed. Burgled, actually. Fortunately, no one has ever stuck a weapon in my face. But my place was broken into once and for the following week I barely slept. It's a sickening feeling, really.

My second thought was, 'Wow, she is lucky.'

My third thought, and the one I couldn't shake until I was halfway home, was what if he had shot her, and what if he'd seen me as he was driving past, wandering into the street to try and see his licence plate...

Not Knowing

I recently read Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden, digesting it in tiny two-and-three page bites. In the first couple of chapters he writes about the structure of DNA, relating in great detail the amount of genetic information locked within our biological hardware. His analogy is made through books. There are 200 billion binary digits (bits) worth of information on only one strand of DNA...in more human terms that's the equivalent of 4,000 500-page books.  I just finished reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (560 pages), which took me about a month to read.  At that rate, it would take me almost 350 years to read the information encoded on just one strand of DNA.

If you read every single book in even the largest Barnes & Noble (assuming approximately 150,000 books) and memorized it all (every recipe in every cook book, every line of every poem, every word of all the histories of every country on the planet), if you listened to every song and memorized every note of every opera, concerto and rock and roll anthem that's about the equivalent of 100 strands of DNA.

The genome is an organism’s complete set of DNA. Humans (and mice) contain approximately 3 billion base pairs. Except for mature red blood cells, all human cells contain a complete genome.

In other words, there's a lot going on in there that we just don't know yet.

I almost drowned when I was 11 years-old. I was swimming in a small lake up near the Wisconsin border. I'd gone up there with my friend Phillip's family for a day trip. Moored at some distance from the shore (the number I remember is one hundred yards (about half a city block) though I can't say with total certainty) was a small raft with four diving boards at varying heights. You couldn't dive close to the shore, but at that distance the lake was probably close to 20-feet deep.

I'd waded out to about waist high, where the drop off was more than twice my height. I'd spent some time in pools as a kid, and even swam in a race or two (I was much better on land where I'd won my share of park-district sponsored 50 and 100-yard dashes).

About halfway to the raft a pain shot through my right hamstring as if I was a speared trout. I reflexively reached back with both hands and immediately sank completely below the surface and took in water. I gagged and sank to the bottom where I became entangled in thick seaweed.

The burning in my leg intensified and my flailing left foot became tangled in the seemingly reaching blades of the seaweed. My gasps of panic pulled more water into my stomach and lungs.

I was drowning.

I could see the surface but was not nearly tall enough to reach it. I'd probably sank some seven or eight feet (a distance that my 11-year old mind exaggerated into 100 feet).

I stopped moving. I don't know why. My foot became untangled. I let go of my cramped hamstring and slowly floated to the top.

I surfaced spitting and sputtering and looking for the lifeguard who had to be, must be swimming toward me at this very instant to rescue me.

No one saw me.

I circled my arms in figure-eights and tread water until I caught my breath. I was much closer to the platform than the shore so I paddled strongly,

Is my DNA encoded with that memory? Did that rush of chemicals racing through me at the time mutate a few cells?  Can my physical being be infused with the fear that I felt when I thought I might die?  Is that why children are afraid of the dark?  Is it some deeply ancestral recognition that we are  little more than soft tissue attached to fragile bones?

It's frustrating to have more questions than answers.  I'll just keep reading (and writing) until the answers present themselves or I've come to terms with not knowing.

Time On My Hands

I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse (not that I ever use such religiously-inspired language, but it's a very convenient shorthand), but I have more ideas than time to write them. Or is it that I have more thoughts than motivation?

When I do the math it seems easy to explain; There are 168 hours in a week, seemingly plenty of time to work, sleep, commute, watch a Cubs game or two, shit, shower, and shave and so on.

I've been working a lot lately. I mean way too much.

The last couple of weeks I've been scheduled 50 hours, which usually turns into 55. 168-55=113.

There's my 10 hours of commuting every week, which leaves me at 103.

Ideally I would be sleeping 8 hours a day (whoever came up with that number is a cruel bastard because I don't know anyone who gets that much sleep). But that's just not gonna happen. We'll call it 50 hours of sleep, or, at least, 50 hours in bed trying to sleep. That takes almost half of the "free" time I have left and leaves me with 53 hours.

In an average day I spend a little over half-an-hour "grooming," that is brushing my teeth, showering, shaving, changing, and whatever else people do in the privacy of their own (and the occasional public) bathroom. We'll call it 4 hours, leaving me with 49.

I probably spend about an hour a day eating (3 meals @ 20 minutes each, plus snacks). I'm down to 42 hours.

Three Cubs games a week eat up another 9 hours knocking me down to 33.

I need a good hour a day to decompress; from work, from my commute, from the world at large, or I will go completely, utterly, bat-shit crazy.

26 hours.

Finley gets taken to the park every day. I don' take him as often as I used to, but I could fairly say I spend 6 hours a week with the dog.

20 hours.

Then, of course, there's time for family and friends. No less than an hour a day between talking to my brothers and mom, hanging with my wife and, of course, Jack and baby Riley, who deserves no less than my full attention. 13 hours left.

There's always something to get for the house: groceries, toiletries, cleaning supplies, all requiring a trip to Target or Walgreens or Whole Foods, which means another 5 hours a week.

That leaves me 8 hours a week, or a little over an hour a day, to write. Unless something comes up. And there's always the random stuff: laundry, haircuts, taking out the garbage, consoling a friend who was just dumped...and so on.

There are times when I'm "multi-tasking." I read a lot while I'm commuting (or "grooming") and I watch the news or sports or whatever while I'm eating. But generally I try to stay focused on the task at hand...not easy to do when all these ideas are rolling around in my cranium, trying to find purchase on a piece of paper (or computer monitor) which I usually don't have at hand.


What it boils down to is this - I have no time to write, the universe, at least for right now, is conspiring against me. (Actually, the universe is indifferent, but whatever). So I have to make time, or, more accurately, find time in this crazy schedule to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

It's either that, or move to Venus (where a week is 40,824 earth hours long - really.)

Small Thoughts - DivineCaroline

Small Thoughts - DivineCaroline

Balance

I used to be a huge Clive Barker fan, but I've since lost weight.  (Sorry.)  Seriously though.  He was among the first writers whose work I impatiently anticipated.  When I heard he had a new book (or movie) on the way I ran out and picked it up (or saw the movie) right away.  I've seen him read twice, and he was great both times.  

But somewhere along the line I stopped reading his books, though I would still pick up copies of his stuff that I hadn't read.  Granted, I no longer spent $24.95 (or more) on the hardcovers; I'd usually find them at the Brown Elephant for a buck or two then place them on my too-read stack, only to move them to a bookshelf after not even opening the cover for months.

Last week I found a copy of one of his more recent titles, Mister B. Gone.  The premise is clever enough; a demon (from the Demonation, of course) tells his (first person) tale of, well, demony deeds, while repeatedly (and repeatedly) imploring you to burn the book, his manuscript, you now hold in your hands, for he is trapped in the pages and is just trying to save you from your own morbid and dangerous curiosity.  (Why couldn't someone have done this with the bible?)

I'm about 100 pages in (more or less halfway) and the only word I can think to describe my thoughts is 'disappointing.'  The demon has no demonic powers other than a high threshold for pain (inflicted in either burns or cuts) and a piercing scream that he calls his mommy voice, or some such thing. 

While researching other readers' responses (on Goodreads and Amazon) I noticed a peculiar balance of responses.  It seems that there's no concensus on this book whatsoever:

105 Reviews 5 star:  (25) 4 star:  (21) 3 star:  (20) 2 star:  (19) 1 star:  (20)

Now I don't feel so bad about my ambivalence.  

To Kill a Mockingbird

I'm enmeshed in a project for work. A writing project that could be considered only marginally creative. It's rewarding, and occasionally satisfying. But it's never uplifting.