Foggy Night Epiphanies

Twice in recent nights, I have bought a coffee or a latte, a scone or a doughnut, and sat on a bench by Lloyd Lake, watching the water, the lowering fog precipitating into water droplets, and the street lamps just turning on.

It is close to major roads, but very still. It's the sort of place to take stock of things, to question your assumptions, to take a breath between work and going home for the night to write.

Everyone needs a place like this, especially because it is almost literally across the road from my house, so when I get hungry or get tired of thinking and want a beer, I don't have to be particularly patient.

I've been thinking about the assumption I've made that I've always been doing my very best to treat everyone as well as could be desired. I don't know if I have. I considered making a mental checklist of all the actions that might make me feel secretly guilty, but as my Dad said, checklists are too simplistic for dealing with people. Relationships with people are ambiguous, even when you have--or are pretty sure you have--the best of intentions.

I think the conclusion that I reached is that a checklist, either mental or written, is not a cure-all, but it might provide a basis for self-evaluation, which is always a good thing, if done honestly. Of course, as Han Solo pointed out to Obi-Wan and Luke regarding the avoidance of Imperial entanglements, "Well, that's the trick, isn't it?"

Han also told Princess Leia, "You like me because I'm a scoundrel." So he clearly knew what he was talking about.

Perhaps the real trick is having some place like Lloyd Lake, or at least that sort of routine, where you can step away from everything for a minute or two and take the time to think, rather than just being swept along in a flood of choices and decisions.

Hawaii Blue, Part Three: A Sense Of Place

One of the best qualities about Hawaii is that it is so tangibly there.

This is a deceptively difficult task. A strip mall, for instance, is not really anywhere in particular, so you can't say you are somewhere. The same is true of a suburb, Danville or San Ramon, for instance. Lots of nice houses, well-kept lawns, expensive cement fountains and colorful flower beds, but no sense of place.

When you get over the sense that you are watching a travelogue or computer screen saver, you never feel that you aren't somewhere interesting in Hawaii, at least not where we were for the majority of trip. The last two nights were spent at the Waikoloa Beach Marriott, which was a typical resort and therefore subject to some insularity, but otherwise, Hawaii was definitely there, whether we were looking at
tropical greenery and flowers, such as





or the 420 foot drop of Akaka Falls, pictured above.

When you near the end of the concrete walkway at Akaka Falls State Park, you experience the falls as a vibration, a roar that is more than sound, a buzz that runs up and down your spine. It is this sort of sensation that marks so many experiences in Hawaii; for instance, when you look over the caldera at the top of Kilauea, you feel alone, alienated in a literal sense, because the stark and blasted ground below you hints at something totally different from anything you've experienced before.





There is something in the Hawaiian air that draws a certain temperament, or maybe it creates that temperament once you get there. Either way, that temperament is apparently also quite common in the Bay Area. In the small town just neighboring Akaka Falls State Park, we fell into conversation with a graying, pony-tailed hippie who moved there from Berkeley: apparently, his current neighbor used to run a grocery store in Berkeley, but the two never met until moving to the Big Island. Their only prior connection, according to the hippie, was that the store owner used to bust the hippie's friends for shoplifting, which would have made for a good ice-breaker, I suppose, when they were getting to know each other.

Not that there aren't some irritating elements of isolation. On our first Sunday in Hawaii, we went into a Borders in Kona looking for the New York Times. The clerk seemed puzzled by my request, as if she doubted such a thing existed. "The New . . . York . . . Times?" she repeated. "Yes, the newspaper. Do you have it?" "No."

And they call themselves a chain bookstore.

We did find the paper for $8 at a Safeway, having had the good fortune to meet at the local farmers' market that morning a woman who transplanted to Hawaii from New York after being bought out from her job as a union negotiator, apparently because she was too effective, or something. Of course she knew exactly where to find a Sunday New York Times, and was able to direct us in her distinctive New York accent.

Sometimes, the sense of the place you are in at the moment isn't enough, and you need a sense of the place from which you have come.

For me, though, the sense of Hawaii was a magical thing, especially when we were sitting in wicker chairs at Don The Beachcomber's Tiki Bar, drinking Mai Tais and watching the sun sink into the broad, flat expanse of the Hawaiian ocean waters. I was definitely there.

Changes

Ironically, the random element discussed in this composition is the elimination of one random topic from the pages of this blog.

As a general rule, you will find my discussion of sports topics confined from now on to my new blog. I feel like this is a chance to practice refining my voice for particular settings with particular requirements.

I hope it will also make it easier for people to find what they might be interested in when I write. I don't expect everyone to love sports, so now you don't have to as a requirement for reading this blog.

Let me know if you think this sort of approach has merit or not.

Musings Fit To Delay Laundry

While I sit here, busily not doing the laundry I planned to do tonight, the following random thoughts occur to me.

1) An upside-down laundry tub makes for a fine computer table. It's deep blue, plastic, opaque, and it is the perfect size to support my laptop while I eat a peanut butter sandwich.

2) Oh, baseball. I was so excited there before the All-Star break. Then Pablo Sandoval is not elected to the game--thanks a lot, Hawaii, and your campaign for Shane Victorino--and then the Giants go on the road, where optimism goes to die. We lose a series to the Pirates--the Pirates!--and then get battered around by Atlanta. Colorado, meanwhile, keeps winning, leaping over us into second place and the wild card lead. This sucks, especially because my vanity was once bruised by Colorado.

Still, I won free tickets to Tuesday's Giants-Pirates game in San Francisco, proving once more that going to work can be rewarding, and preserving my project of at least one game attended a month.

3) Ukraine banned the new Sacha Baron Cohen movie on grounds of immorality. This is why no one cares what the Ukraine thinks about things.

4) Apparently the ESPN Network will not be able to televise the US-Mexico World Cup Qualifier in August, because the Mexican network that owns the rights refused the price ESPN offered for rights. Just another reason to say to hell with Mexico.

Then again, it is complicated by the fact that the Mexican network's parent company is NBC Universal. NBC has announced no plans to broadcast the game.

To hell with corporate nonsense.

5) I want to create a blog specifically to handle my sports writings, to narrow the focus, and also so that those people who don't like reading sports can follow my primary blog without being ambushed by vernacular that bores them. (This does not apply to LiveJournal, of course. You people are stuck with everything I want to spill out there) What I need, of course, is a clever title. My primary sports writings will be about soccer and baseball, both of which evoke a childlike passion for the story lines and the action on the field, and I think the title should pay tribute to that sensibility.

But I think A Boy And His Balls can be ruled out, for obvious reasons.

I like the idea of using something with the word pitch, as a soccer field in Britain is called the pitch, and of course, there is baseball sense of the word as well. So I'm thinking of something along the lines of The Daily Pitch Count.

Time for a poll! Hurray! Everyone loves polls. My version won't allow me to insert polls yet, so this is informal. If you want to vote, add a comment. Not that I'm fishing for comments or anything.



What Should The Name Of My New Blog Be?
The Daily Pitch Count
A Boy And His Balls
Playing The Field
something else entirely

Narrating a World Into Being

Tonight I finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman, another novel in the recent string of novels I've polished off, a sudden resurgence of reading productivity of late that has swallowed up a bit of Star Wars brain candy, You Suck! by Christopher Moore, Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami, and The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night Time by Mark Haddon. Something has rekindled the love of narrative in me, which might have had something to do with the five hour flight either side of the trip to Hawaii, which allowed me to put large dents in Kafka and American Gods.

There is something doubly creative about a good work of fiction, which is why, in my opinion, the novel is always going to be better than a movie adaptation; the reader engaged with the novel creates in his own head the world invoked by the narrative. It feels substantial.

It is here that one can find a parallel between reading a novel and following a sports season. And this leads me to a dilemma: I have lost the main protagonist for the upcoming English Premiership season, as Newcastle United were relegated.

Why were they my favorite? For the simple reason that they were Alan Shearer's hometown and final club. Why was Alan Shearer the key to my allegiance? I'm not sure, but when I first saw televised Premiership football, I saw Shearer playing for Blackburn Rovers, and he made an impression on me, much like a totem from the Pacific Northwest might if it showed up unexpectedly in your living room one day.

There's no real rhyme or reason to it: I have no geographical affiliation with Newcastle, other than passing by the city on the train from London to Edinburgh on our family vacation in 2008, and geographical affiliation is really the most sensible basis for sports fan allegiance--if there can be said to be anything sensible about sports fanaticism. And even the path of the talisman, that of Alan Shearer, if he had ended up playing for a different team, Chelsea or Manchester United, I might have cheered for them; more on this question in a separate blog, as I won't torture the non-sports-fanatics with a breakdown of my quest for a new favorite team.

But here's the best metaphor I can find: the football season with Newcastle not playing in the Premiership will be like reading a Sherlock Holmes story without Sherlock Holmes in it: sure, stuff might happen, but it just won't feel the same. It feels wrong.

Bear in mind that as I have no real stake in the matter, my British friends who actually cheer for various football teams have good reason to consider me an impostor, but oh well.

The point is, for a narrative to work as best as it might, you need a filter, a viewpoint that pervades the entire work and that appeals to the reader. For instance, following one sports team establishes a stake in the results of what unfolds on the playing field; this is why I enjoy writing about the baseball games I'm attending this year.

Establishing this filter is key to writing fiction successfully, I suspect, and it may be why I have such a problem writing fiction. So, an experiment. I have an actual blog on which I post many of the same entries I post on LiveJournal; I think I ought to narrow the focus of my blog, or separate the blog into multiple blogs to handle the different subjects that appeal to me: pop culture, sports, reading, etc. The more precise the voice in each blog, the better the chance of developing a readership, perhaps, or learning how to tell a coherent story.

On the other hand, I could be completely wrong about everything ever.

Hmm.

Baseball '09, Volume IX: Remote From Hawaii Edition

The last live game I attended, back in June, I accidentally noted that Barry Zito was throwing a no-hitter through six innings, which of course ruined the whole thing. Tim Lincecum has come close in a couple of starts this year, including a no-hit-through-seven-innings effort on Thursday, July 9th.

There is something magical about no-hitters. That notion of mastery, defense over offense, one pitcher with help from the defense doing exactly what they are supposed to do for nine innings and 27 batters, which is a lot harder than it sounds like it should be, because the offense is always trying to do what they are supposed to do, i.e., preventing the pitcher from succeeding at what he is trying to do. Usually when two opposing forces meet, there is a little bit of give and take, a little bit of destructive interference going both directions.

I've never considered the possibility of a Giants no-hitter. It has never happened while I have been alive. It seems like one of those magical realms that I'm too pessimistic to believe the Giants can reach.

Then Saturday night, we turned on the TV in our hotel in Waikoloa, and Jonathan Sanchez, relegated from the starting rotation three weeks ago because of pitching struggles, only starting due to an injury to Randy Johnson, pitching in front of his father, had thrown a no-hitter.

I love this game. This season, irrationally perhaps, is really getting me excited. The Giants are now being mentioned as wild-card contenders, against all expectations. This no-hitter, the first of the year, in which Sanchez walked no one and overcame a Juan Uribe error that was the only blemish in an otherwise-perfect game, seems to bring a little bit of charm and fantasy into the air.

The season is now half over. Where do we go from here?

Of course, after that bit of perfection, the pessimist in me doesn't want to think of there being nowhere to go but down.

Hawaii Blue, Part Two: Rescuing a Plastic Camera

In old Hawaiian culture, there were certain laws, or kapu, that governed the functioning of society, the violation of which was a capital offense. Condemned Hawaiians had one chance: escape to a place of refuge, such as Pu'uhonua o Honaunau, south of Kona. If they made it, they could be absolved and re-enter society. Imagine that sort of dash for survival, pursued by the people who, stories hold it, beat Captain James Cook to death in the water of Kealakakua Bay.

So to be fair, the culture we overthrew at the behest of sugar farmers wasn't entirely pacific in any sense but the geographical.

The picture above is this place of refuge, lovely white sand, coconut trees, thick walls of a royal residence, remnants of a fish pond, a cove where green sea turtles--honu--will swim or crawl ashore: we did see a fast sideways ripple in the water, and then a small black head poking up curiously.

Here is a view from the sanctuary out into the bay:



Speaking of creatures in the water, not to mention a fear of death, there is a small outcrop of lava rock just around a curve of the shore from the sanctuary, just out of frame in this picture. This outcrop is called "Two Step" for a launching point for divers and snorklers, so called for one particular point where the rocks have been worn into two shelves on different levels that make a gradual transition into the depths.

Here there be fish. And big waves. And rocks. And here I would snorkel for the first time. Did I mention the big waves and the big rocks?

I am not a strong swimmer: if I were to participate in a triathlon--assuming I completed it, and you know what they say about assuming--it would look similar to the Evolution of Man, as in the length of time required for completion.

I was pretty calm about it, right up until we started walking over the hot black rock toward the water, at which point, I probably got a good understanding of what those condemned Hawaiians must have been feeling before they reached the sanctuary themselves. The waves looked much bigger. I remembered just how deep the water actually was out there--over my head in every sense. To the left, a fierce gush of water swept in and out of a stony gap, and I could just see myself haplessly flapping my way in that very wrong direction. When it comes to doing physical activity, if there is a chance to do the right thing or to do a very wrong thing, with me, it is a bit of a toss-up which path I'll choose.

Oh, also, I was responsible for holding on to the disposable underwater camera, simply because I had a pocket in my swimsuit. I just knew I was going to lose it.

So I let Marina go in first, and then I let a few other people go in first, while I paid thorough attention to getting my rented snorkel-mask untwisted. I couldn't well snorkel with a twisted band of plastic on my head.

I nearly chickened out, but that would be kind of lame for a romantic vacation in Hawaii, so I eventually lowered myself into the gentle sloshing of the water on the lower shelf, fit the flippers onto my feet, feeling how tight they were, sealed the mask over my eyes and nose, noted the Darth Vader-esque sensation of breathing through the mouthpiece and snorkel, and then before I could think any more about it, launched forward into the cool water.

As I paddled my way through the rising and falling waves to where Marina was treading water, salt water filled my mouth. I spit it out, cleansed the snorkel, and kept going. I repeated the salt water process, then kept going. I plunged my head into the water and looked down . . .

And wow.

Yellow tangs were the most prominent, but there were sundry other tropical fish, the most beautiful of which were Moorish Idols, with long white pennants streaming behind them. Sea urchins clinging to many rocks. Coral in magnificent colors and shapes.

And that was when I realized that I was floating on top of the water, easily buoyed up by the salt water, staring down through clear water at this world below. It didn't strike me here, but later in the trip, snorkeling at Kealakakula Bay near the Captain Cook Monument, I had this weird sense of the surreal, having to remind myself these were real live fish there, not a screen saver on a computer. It was also at Kealakakula that I floated above the edge of a coral shelf, and found myself staring down a long slope into empty blue far below, where light could not reach. That was amazing.

Snorkeling was something I never thought I could do, and then all of a sudden, here I was doing it. I've loved the ocean since I was a kid, but I have always been a little frightened of it, even as I've been drawn to it; when I was in Wales, I would spend hours at the shore, idly daydreaming about walking out into the water and continuing to walk indefinitely.

As time went along, I was able to relax and drift; we took pictures with the camera underwater, saw amazing fish and splashed around in a free world. The fish were not bothered by the presence of snorklers at Two Step; they carried on their business as if we were not there.

That was when I realized the camera was not in my pocket anymore.

I looked around, couldn't see it under water, not that there would be much I could do if it was gone. Then I surfaced, and there it was, floating two feet away from me, a Kodak kayak, apparently. Just like me, it floated much more easily than I had expected.

We snorkeled for an hour, I would say, and then dried off on the rocks, sitting and looking out at the waves, listening to a woman nearby saying how she had seen a giant "Aloha" spelled out in concrete bricks on a sandy space 'way over there,' and that a sea turtle had been hanging out in that vicinity. The first day of snorkeling was such a success that we came back the next day, and I swam directly to the irregularly shaped patch of light blue water where "Aloha" was to be found. No turtle, though.

We snorkeled throughout the week, at various locations around the island. We saw puffer fish, an eel, a crown-of-thorns starfish, a barracuda--must have been young, about a yard and a half in length, and typically of barracudas in the area, not aggressive unless provoked--and the reef triggerfish, the state fish of Hawaii, among with many other fish I have not yet been able to identify. It was seriously as good an experience as everyone told me it would be.

I would take the plunge again in a heartbeat.

Hawaii Blue, Part One: Arrival And Orange Juice

The last ten days, Marina and I were circumnavigating the Big Island of Hawaii, conquering my fear of the dark ocean, snorkeling with yellow tangs, eels, and barracudas; overlooking a strange and alien plane, the caldera at the peak of Kilauea, with steam hissing from myriad vents around the vast crater, the source of sulfuric vapors or 'vog', volcanic smog; crossing a lava field on a dark and rainy night to view the vents at Kalapana--site of a town destroyed by lava as recently as 1990.

I could write about any of those things to kick off my description of the trip, but instead, I'm going to write about orange juice.

The pace of my life leading up to vacation was a frenzy of wrapping up work, preparing for the trip, wondering what big changes would happen when. So to find a moment on the plane of pure, speculative peace and contentment was wonderful. It was a bit surprising that it came with a Minute Maid label, but such is life. There we were, 300 of us packed into a metal tube being propelled tens of thousands of feet above the vast blue and wind-capped surface of the Pacific Ocean, empty and rippled and unending, heading to Hawaii, the land where Captain Cook died and King Kamehameha invited his chief rival to a sacrificial ceremony dedicating a new holy site, not specifying for just what role his rival was RSVPing, the land where American sugar growers decided that Hawaiian sovereignty was bad for business, and I was savoring the cold sweetness of the orange juice, sloshing it around in my mouth, holding onto each sip for a few seconds longer than necessary.

It tasted like the best fruit juice I had ever had.

Approaching Honolulu Airport on Oahu, I saw an island of low-lying land suddenly interrupted by tall green mountains jutting abruptly as if from nowhere. The picture at the top is looking through a terminal window there. I saw the water transition from royal blue through cerulean to aquamarine before breaking on rocks in white intensity.

Flying on from Honolulu to Kona on the Big Island on a small inter-island plane reached by walking across a tarmac like a K-Mart parking lot, I was surprised to see on the other intervening islands a lot of brown and red, dryer than my notion of the islands. Each notion, each image, seemed to stick in my memory like that taste of juice. Which makes sense, because on such long flights--five hours for the first leg--you can only read for so long, and then you have no choice but to focus on the details to stave off boredom-induced insanity, although the latter would be a better option than watching some film starring Zac Efron.

On the descent into Kona, I saw the surf breaking on white sand beaches with rustic shacks, a genuine hint of blue paradise in all the travel-agent-brochure glory, and I could see the shadows that hinted of coral reefs and coral heads, and I wondered what was under the water. And then just like that, we were surrounded by fossilized lava, like another planet, chunks and spidery threads of dead lava bordering the runway in Kona, an airport made up of several small, connected huts with faux-thatched roofs.

Marina had arrived the day before, and picked me up in a rental car. We drove south along Ali'i Road (The Road of Kings, or something like that), admiring the profusion of tropical flowers, bougainvilleas, hibiscus, and their ilk, and I had a sincere, non-cliche, jaw dropping moment as we passed a small cove of white sand, black rock, palm trees and crashing, ethereal surf. The first four nights of my stay in Hawaii would be at Ka'awa Loa Plantation, the coastal view from which can be seen here:



Greg and Michael, the friendly couple who own and run this guest house, offered refreshments on the lanai, or deck.

And this is where my prior ranking of fruit juices was totally turned upside down by a mango juice to convert atheists, served with a pineapple upside-down cake to corrupt popes. You can see just how relaxed I was already by the purple of the prose I came up with.

This marked the closing hours of the first day in Hawaii, and we sat on the deck and looked out over the water. Given how appreciative I had been that the various aircrafts had stayed out of all that water, it might be kind of ironic that the next morning, we would be hurling ourselves into the teeth of that same ocean. But that's what we call a cliffhanger, or a tease.