Lorenzo Vincenzi, PI -- Introduction

First of all, I know this won't look great just copy & pasted, but it is getting too long and I want to post it. Detective Vincenzi is a character I have been thinking over for a few weeks now. After a brief foray into Butcher's character of Harry Dresden, playing with the idea of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and wanting to get more into pulp detective stories for the past year or so, I ended up with Lorenzo here.

Lorenzo Vincenzi lives in a Lovecraftian world. There are creatures in the darkness, evil presences in forgotten cities, cosmic beings playing out intricate games of chess in which we are simple pawns. Vincenzi, though, has figured out a knack to confront these bumps in the night while handling the psychic backlash of doing so. Vincenzi is an expert at forgetting. This introduction seems too alluring to pass up since forgetting is neither thought of as a skill nor an admirable attribute for a detective. Forgetting and amnesia, though, are often associated with Lovecraftian characters when they come up against the weird reality beneath the veil of the normal.

The introductory story takes on a shallow sort of spooky bedtime story that are characteristic of short works by Lovecraft, but it carries on into a rounder, more developed identity. Following a childhood event, Lorenzo's life and work is about balancing his own well-being with combating the dark forces afoot in the world, forces that will inevitably drive him mad if he recalls them. I think that I'll be able to use Vincenzi to tie together a number of story ideas and characters I want to write about, but who I do not want to stand alone in the suddenly crazier world.

To keep it up, I'll need to make time to read up on pulp detective stories so that I can work with that tone and diction. With the Lovecraftian references and style, though, the recollection and journalistic style will mean using those over-the-top and archaic terminology involving the creeping entities littering his work. I can also write Lorenzo Vincenzi as a frustrated, anti-social, sarcastic, and unreliable guy who tries but is not all that great at being a do-gooder.

I hope that this introduction is, in many ways, a lure for what is going on presently. It starts out with explanations and one story that leads into another, with the intention to bring it back around to the present. All the while, great big gaps in time allow for Lorenzo to go back and bring up other events that were glossed over before. For example, Lorenzo manifests "sight" which is a sort of out-of-body experience/astral projection that gets him into a lot of trouble in his youth, and is a sickening last-ditch effort later on. That doesn't have much precedent in Lovecraft's protagonists, but it does in other supernatural fiction. I want to add, though, that he isn't a wizard like Harry Dresden. Even using sight gives him some nasty motion sickness usually, and that is probably the extent of his paranormal powers. (I allow this in part because, in some ways it could be an extension of powerful intuitive skills and a knack for observation. Really understanding people, when one is really listening, isn't all that difficult and some people are just really, really good at it.)

Anyway, if you're interested, I hope you enjoy it. If not, pass it by. I have a few ideas for some short essays to come up soon and I have some introspection to do about graduate school ahead, as well. Expect a new post tomorrow, or the next day at the latest.

~~~

Lorenzo Vincenzi, Private Investigator of Special Cases
31 March 2010

Forgetting is an underappreciated skill. Remembering is an insanely chaotic, hit or miss venture. When you recall a memory, you retell it and, in that narrative, sculpt the original episode into a story. When you forget, you make space in your mind for a reality distinct from your now displaced memories.
I am an expert at forgetting. A practitioner of artful amnesia. A wizard, you might say, of failed recollection.
Why take pride in such a skill? Well, if it weren't for that, I would have gone mad long ago.
You see, I am a P.I.—though some prefer to just call me a dick—but not one who focuses on the usual cases fictionalized by the likes of Chandler. I take on special cases. Special cases? you might ask quizzically. Yeah, special cases, I would subsequently reply.
Years ago, a woman came into my office in the Towne Building. She was gussied up a little, but obviously unaccustomed to being so, and inquired as to the meaning of special cases. At the time, my reputation for the weird had not yet been founded, so it came off as an innocent question. I told her, “Ma'am, if you don't know that you have a special case, then you don't have one.” And, indeed, she didn't. Her case was straightforward enough; her long-term boyfriend had been undergoing a few drastic mood swings which could not be accounted for, that is, until I started tailing him and discovered the usual: A secret lifestyle with drugs and kink and another woman. She paid good money and, in those early years before established infamy in the trade, you can settle for that.
Those are the sort of cases one can remember without a hitch. They come roiling out of the city streets and you dive in after them trying to discern their secrets. What you find is generally in the shallows, in the rich, colorful, lively surf with its obvious if camouflaged threats and bountiful if obscured light. It is when the rumbling and the diving leads you into the depths, that is where you find the special cases.
That case—the dame with the mid-life crisis boyfriend—led me into one of those really fundamental stories of my career. It was a case that demanded forgetting. My practice in forgetting came long before that, though, when I was just a boy, about twelve. That episode, that halcyon childhood recollection so thoroughly scarred, has come back to me over the years in dreams and fragments from family and friends. Most of the records tell of a traumatic murder, an escaped perpetrator, and a shocked prepubescent witness. That, though, is far from the story I've pieced together.
An older boy in the neighborhood by the name of Ashley, though we called him Ash, had a penchant for getting into trouble. He was of average height and slender as a rail with that sandy brown hair that looks blond by the end of the summer but never looks clean. I had known him forever and for a few weeks or months out of every year, he took me on as a sort of protégé in his tomfoolery. When we were younger, it was the usual despoiling and looting from construction sites and peeping on the women and girls with well-suited windows. As we grew older, his interests became increasingly, shall I say, esoteric. Most of these endeavors he sheltered from me, however that only inspired greater curiosity in me, which only spurred him on the more.
Our neighborhood had been built from a much older one that had become dilapidated and decayed. A few residents stayed behind, unwilling to sell their property to developers, thus pockmarking our streets with a half dozen tall, towering, eccentric looking homes. Next to the fresh paint and playful greens of the new houses, these other appeared distinctly out of time, out of sync with the world. One by one these houses were remodeled, repainted, refurbished to when the elderly owners passed and their disinterested progeny inherited them; except for one man, Old Blake, the local curmudgeon who taunted us children and grouched perpetually at the noise.
Blake was a powerfully built man in his youth, however long-ago that may have been, and he managed to hold his posture and strength through the years. No one could recall him being any the younger and so, we children came to think of him as having always lived as an old man in that slanted, unkempt house. Though he offered none of the lurid imagery we boys often lusted after, Old Blake did have an elaborate collection of antiques, artifacts, and books to spark the attention of whoever was brave enough to peer through his cockeyed shutters or unevenly drawn curtains.
Despite the grave, sore-throated threats Blake would raise against anyone found in his property—firmly brandishing his silver-headed cane in our direction—Ash could not resist the long pull off the ancient abode and its secrets. I watched Ash from the adjacent yard as he leaped the high wooden fence between and vanished from my view in the hedges. Shortly after, a creak whistled in the wind like a secret, followed by a gust that stressed the rusted hinges of a shutter. My ears strained, at first cautiously then painfully for some sign of my friend, all the while knowing that he was more sly and deft than I would be able to detect.
I noticed my breathing was fast and nervous and made a point to slow it down. I was prone to asthmatic episodes and worried that if I had to flee unprepared, I would be paralyzed by a fit. After calming myself, lowering my breaths to a whisper, the distinct whine of a heavy wooden door followed by the clatter of a screened door broke my concentration. The long, low, thrumming breaths of Old Blake echoed like a mute organ and his cane tapping—once, twice, then a pause before setting more quietly on the wooden porch—arhythmically in the night. Unknowingly, I held my breath, certain that any rustle or twitch would give me or my stealthy companion away.
A whistle, like birdsong, then a rustle in dry grass followed by the fluttering of faint wings in the now quieted air. The thin clouds shifted away from the moon, revealing a surprising clarity to the night, and I slowly released my breath, somehow sensing a passed danger. Again, the tap-tap of the silver-headed cane and the sharp shudders of worn doors opening and closing; somewhere, not for off, the startled bird rested amidst leaves and made a small, unhappy call in the night. A shadow moved off to my right, from behind Blake's house and over the fence. At first, I thought it was Ash, but as I stared at the spot where it had gone, an guttural rumble arose inside me that felt—if I could say it felt like anything—like uncommon indigestion. I crouched, unable to breathe again, feeling an ambiguous gaze on me, when Ash scaled the fence and we were off, running together feeling the relief of companionship and action if not security.
Sometimes I think a day or two passed—the dreams do not easily account for the time in between—but that flight, that potent, invigorated movement from that unsettling house, the anxiety of Old Blake's presence, and that terrible sensation that had preceded Ash's return, I think that time moved differently then and confounded my sense of time that night. Together, Ash and I chuckled and ran, vaulting low fences and slapping each other on the back. I thought, perhaps, we would run all night, then all day and still be laughing. We were filled with boundlessness, not just energy, but a feeling for unlimited spaces and movement, for the falling away of assumed boundaries.
Eventually, in thirst and exhaustion, we did come to rest at the neighborhood park—its iron gates closed, we must have scaled it or squeezed through its generous bars—where we took turns drinking from the frugal drinking fountain. We rested on the rectilinear logs surrounding a sandpit with darkly shimmering metal play equipment, polished by the passage of children. It was then that Ash brought out his loot: A heavy, leather-bound book with coppery spinal binding that curved around into a clasp as well as a small, tightly woven amulet suspended by a similar copper strand with a small arrangement of stones set in a pentagon. That tome and the necklace remain clear in my memory still; I remembered them through everything, through every forced and attempted forgetting, as keys—or, rather, one key composed of two pieces—to an unwanted future.
We sat there, recovering our breath and transfixed by the way the amulet caught the sickly yellow light of a nearby, flickering streetlamp. Its subtle undulations and the clever, elegant placement of the bluish gems simultaneously suggested the cephalopods of the deep ocean and the abysses of space. I thought of the rumored giant squid, its innumerable arms reaching out from its inky ocean bottom, laying claim to its prey like a bolt of lightning, followed by the eerie disc of its enormous eyes passing like thunder echoing in deafened ears. Ash said nothing. We watched, awed and stupefied.
Movement, a shadow passing, and an indistinguishable form. It shook me from the stupor and I patted Ash on the shoulder to bring him back again. I quickly decided a bird or squirrel had flung itself through the rays of the streetlamp, but felt that pressure in my stomach again. I was suddenly anxious again, but felt certain that Old Blake was still at his decaying home. A laugh rose up in me, followed by Ash's own, and the stone of fear inside of me settled.
Ash stuffed the amulet inside his pant pocket and I felt a tug toward it, wanting again to peer at it, but I did not act on it. He unclasped the book, pressing a small button of a simple mechanism, and flipped through the pages.
“Some light reading for ya, Lo'?” he said, setting the book between us. It appeared to be written by hand, elegantly, in a slightly faded black ink. The letters flowed beautifully around one another and I thought of the half-obscured images of a family trip to Italy and the stain glass windows of cathedrals. He stopped flipping and turned back pages to see more clearly an immense, illuminated letter “L.” Around the letter, spilling out of the box dedicated to its illustration, were horrendous, creeping movements that at first resembled the amulet's braiding, but with a flickering of light and cloud became clearer.
Surrounding the “L” were long, scaled tendrils slithering over one another and the minuscule forms of people in various states of decay. Despite their size and morbidity, all of the forms seemed to be alive, experiencing unearthly pain at the hands—or rather tentacles—of the monster or monsters depicted. Small thorns or teeth raked long wounds in the flesh of the victims, revealing still bright crimson muscles underneath. Their faces, though, were drawn and harrowed, with circles of unknowable fatigue beneath their eyes and the mouths open to unnatural degrees and at broken angles. The tendrils and victims wrapped around the “L” and filled most of the page, but in the top-right corner, a shadow dwelt with bulbous suggestions and demoniac red, slitted eyes.
For a moment, we were lost again in our focus. Then, I thought of a slasher horror movie Ash had sneaked me into a week or two before. In it, a killer with apparently superhuman strength wreaked havoc on nubile young people with awful violence. The gore had decorated rooms to be discovered by others before their eventual deaths, as well. Ash ran out to purchase me a 7-Up to calm my stomach partway through, therefore missing one of the most gruesome scenes. I had not been able to sleep for two days after. Then, I thought of this cosmic beast with its horrible dimensions, its overwhelming malevolence, and absentmindedly compared the two. I giggled, then I chuckled; and then I guffawed.
Shaken, Ash asked, “What is wrong with you?”
“Remember that movie? That killer guy with the mask?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“He's got nothing on this guy,” laughing again.
Ash joined me in an overloud roar of amusement. At first, I worried we would wake a sleeping neighbor, but then I noticed Ash's volume and length. Ash, I realized, was scared. Perhaps he too had seen that racing shadow, felt the weird indigestion, seen deeply into the strange abysses of the amulet; and now we shared an awful anxiety caused by that awful illuminated letter, that tentacled, unfathomed beast cast in darkness. I shivered and was quiet again.
“What do you think this is?” I asked.
“I don't know. I think it is in Latin.” Ash's family was Catholic and I generally accepted his linguistic knowledge as being the result of that. I had once gone with him to his church and was dumbfounded by the peculiar, cultic singing in an unknown language. Later, I asked him what it meant, and he plain-faced lied to me which I dumbly accepted to be true.
“Can you read it?”
“Well, the lettering, it is weird. It is hard to read.” He fidgeted, then shoved the book over to me, and fished in his pocket for something. He pulled out a small flashlight, handed it to me, and took back the book. “Hold that up so I can see it better.”
I held the light as evenly as I could. A cold wind swept in, but I knew that I had been shivering already, and was ashamed to see my fear in the bouncing circle of light.
“Steady,” Ash commanded. He ran his finger of the text, moving his lips just a little. My eyes darted between his face and the text. The speed of his hand and the volume of his lips increased. He flipped the page and I was glad to see the creature disappear, its gaze now obscured by the yellowed page. Ash made another noise that was not quite a word. I noticed in the margins of the page were a small scrawl, annotations of a former reader or translator. In the notes, I could discern an eszett—the capital-B like letter meaning a sharp “s”—and umlauts, so I decided it was German. Elsewhere on the page, I saw other languages, other readers leaving their marks with their own languages and accents. When Ash flipped the page again, I could hear him beginning to speak the words aloud and saw many of the same handwriting and language, but also three more. By the next page, I had counted a dozen distinct readers, one of which was in English.
“Wary are readers of 'C' and his power. He has come before and will come again,” I read aloud, clashing with Ash's own Latin verbalizations. The “f” was tall and “s” like and I wondered when it had been written. Ash's own reading was at a conversational volume and growing. Distracted, I had moved the light away but he was still reading. He flipped the page again and his voice took on a frightful, alien depth. I punched his shoulder but he did nothing.
“Ash! Stop it!” I dropped the light and stood up in front of Ash. I grabbed his shoulders and shook him, but he would not look away from the book. I took hold of the book and tried to wrench it from his hands, but his hands were white with the tightness now. Frantic, I tried to tear out the page he was reading, then the other before he could turn it, but they were suddenly strong and firm and I thought for a moment that I must be dreaming, that I had fallen asleep and this was a nightmare after running from the house. Or maybe I had fallen asleep waiting for Ash and I had never left the neighbor's yard. What if we hadn't gone out at all, I was just having a belated nightmare after the slasher movie.
“Help! Someone help me!” I shouted, my hands cupped around my lips. A light came on somewhere and I began to walk to it, but then the light flickered again and I was afraid to leave Ash. He was holding the book up now, closer to his face, almost shouting himself. His voice, though, his voice was low and potent and rumbling. I was scared of him, scared for him, and so shocked that I could not move. I tried to call out again, hearing somewhere in the darkness a window slide open, but my voice caught in my throat and I felt the hot, painful tears on my cheeks.
The shadow of something moving to my left, just out of range of the faint, anemic light of the streetlamp. Clouds fell suddenly, painfully over the moon, and my tears hurried down my face, dropping from my chin, running down my neck and clashing with the cold sweat there. I wanted to scream, to run, to slap Ash, to fall down. I felt, suddenly, the hot weight of shame as I peed myself. The shadow without any form moved again and the streetlamp flickered again, weakening into nothing.
Ash was shouting now, reading in an inhuman voice, possessed by something in the pages of that awful book, those awful pages with their horrific creatures. The shadow moved behind me, just out of sight, but I could feel it, like something breathing, hot and phlegmy, all over me. Disgust welled up inside of me, the roiling, rumbling mass in my stomach rising and I felt certain that I would be sick. This creature, this horrible, shapeless shadow behind me would descend on me and devour me or I would be sick and it would tear me to pieces. I was sobbing and felt the piss on my leg and the sick rising in me while my best friend, my brother-in-arms against the neighborhood and the world, my guide for growing up was in front of me, no longer reading but intoning deep ancient secrets into the air of a darkened space that was no longer anywhere familiar.

It was many months before I was communicative again. For two weeks afterward, my minor wounds were tended to in a hospital's children psych ward. I was catatonic—silent and unmoving—and diagnosed with extreme shock and likely severe psychological damage. After the thirteen days, I began to respond to commands again, but I did not speak, only robotically doing as I was told. A month later, my parents and younger brother distraught and discouraged by my lack of improvement, they took me to a psychiatrist. They were recommended to someone else, then to another specialist, who decided on a course of treatment for me. That is where I remember things from that period.
You might not know this, but electroshock therapy has an odd habit of falling in and out of vogue in medical psychology. It seems that, what little we know of the human brain, it uses both electrical and chemical means to communicate. Electroshock therapy, well, it works on the electrical side of the equation while psychopharmacology—using drugs to effect the mind—works on the chemical side. I have no doubt that it has improved since its heyday, but let me say this, shock therapy hurts like hell.
When you experience a heavy shock that inundates your body, the most obvious impact is on your muscles. Your muscles respond to the electricity by tightening up, which is similar to an epileptic seizure; this is generally bad for your body because muscles work in tandem, one tries to flex and the other tries to slacken to make room. When all your muscles in your body try to flex simultaneously, all of those muscles are essentially fighting one another for dominance. In your jaw, for example, the muscles to close are much stronger than the muscles to open, so you have to put in a mouthguard to keep those muscles from shattering your teeth or biting off your tongue—meanwhile, your tongue is virtually all muscle and so it is flexing out in all directions pressing up against the roof of your mouth and your front teeth.
I remember that pain. It went on sporadically for months. After about eight months—I stay out of those records as much as possible these days—I began to write. Though not the first thing I wrote, the most common thing I scrawled was, “Stop. No More Shock.” It took on a few different forms and took advantage of expletives that my parents were appalled I had picked up, but it was essentially that. When my parents saw my writing, they prohibited any further electroshock—the doctors insisted it had worked after all and did not desist on their own—and my treatment took on a gentler approach.
As I said, writing came first, and over time I lost my artificial movements for smoother action. I refused to speak for over a year following the incident. After about ten months—the investigation was on the backburner but the police and parents were horrified over it and its lack of leads—they tried to show me pictures of Ashley to “help” me remember. At first I whimpered, then I began to scream. I screamed for an hour, then my voice went hoarse, and I mutely screamed like panic with laryngitis. I was semi-catatonic for three days before coming back. At just passed the anniversary, I began to quietly respond to my parents kind words. Then, a week later, I laughed at a joke my brother told me. They took me home where I improved greatly.
I was plagued with dreams. Some were nightmarish recollections of that night. I mentioned the shadow, the book, the amulet, the strange mocking presence of the birds; I was told to keep a journal and try to gain some lucidity over my dreams. Most of the story I've here recounted is the result of these journals and the critical analysis of them. With the early lucidity came the other aspects of my dreams. I began to experience strangely life-like dreams in which I was body-less and surveying the lives of my friends and neighbors and parents. These I would later call out-of-body experiences or early exercises in practicing the sight. They gave me a nickname amongst my schoolmates: Larry the Finch because I would know things I wasn't supposed to know.
It is not good to know too much in your adolescence. It takes some time to practice secrecy, and teenagers just aren't very good at it. More than once, I received a beating for knowing that Joey had made out with Natasha who was dating Owen. I blabbed that Hank had sneaked into a movie with Sonny, Louis, and Mary when he had promised to go with Shane and Bobby. I did manage to hold my tongue when I saw Owen's mother sleeping with Hank's dad when Owen was out fishing with his dad and that time that Louis and Jacob made out after sneaking a few bottles of beer from the fridge in the garage. Those, thankfully, came later.
My youth, as it is for nearly everyone, was a hostile place. Many of my friends before Ash's death—I eventually forced myself to see the photos—distanced themselves, some even openly blaming me for his violent passing. That reputation preceded me, as did the academic delay it caused. I graduated a year and a half following my class and only with special circumstances because of my continued inhibition to speak. I was either a freak—disposing me to ridicule and fear—or a joke—resulting in ridicule and emotional distance. In either case, forgetting was my most powerful weapon.
Old Blake came by one day when I was still learning to manage my newfound secrets and social vantage. He neither smiled nor made any warm-hearted gesture. He came up onto our front porch, tapped his cane twice as if clomping mud from his boot, and sat on my family's porch where I silently read. He had made no accusations or claims following the incident and this was over two years after that night, so I could make little immediate sense of it. Though, the tap-tap of his cane had an air of familiarity about it that had showed up in my dreams and vague recollections. Old Blake was to tell me of forgetting.
“Lorenzo,” he always sounded as if he was about to call me “Lawrence,” but added just a hint of an o at the end, “you have survived a very harrowing event. For what it is worth, I know something of those events in a way no one else here does.” He paused and chewed or sucked on something in his mouth. Blake was known for his spitting, but I think he did so now out of thoughtful habit, not because of anything in his mouth. “They tell me you've been keeping a journal.”
“Yes,” I said, mumbling, then haphazardly tacked on, “sir.”
“Good, good. That is a good habit for you. Dreams tell you a good deal if you're willing to listen.” I nodded and placed my book down, certain that Blake would not be dissuaded now. “You see, dreams aren't memories. You've forgotten things that you needed to forget. I think most of that time in that hospital was you trying to forget. At your age, well, forgetting takes longer but its more... effective. When you're my age, forgetting is never exactly forgetting; it is more like misplacing something, you may find it again when its more inconvenient than when you lost it.”
Blake had my attention. It was clear he knew about the book that had surfaced again and again in my dreams, about that strange amulet, perhaps even about the shadow that chased us in my dreams. I had gone through that night so many times, each time with increasing confidence and clarity. Blake was not looking at me when he spoke. His eyes were misty but not blind; he was obviously seeing something in front of him that I could not. I waited quietly, earnestly for him to continue.
“If you hadn't forgotten, Lorenzo, I don't think you'd be in much better shape than your friend. There are things”—he cleared his throat and coughed into a pale, yellowed handkerchief—“things we ought not rightly know. The safest thing we can do for ourselves is forget them. Though, the safest thing we can do for everyone else is remember them.”
He turned, then, and looked at me. The color of his blurry eyes sharpening suddenly while his eyes dilated in the cool shade of the porch. I had been staring, unabashed, but now he had me locked on him. Neither of us moved as a gust rippled my mother's hedges.
“Lorenzo, you will become very skilled in forgetting and in putting those pieces back together. Know, though, that you will never have all the pieces. This sort of thing, the image is bigger and it is badder than you or me.”
He stopped, his eyes losing their focus again, and turned away. I followed his gaze but saw only across the street, the roses grown over the iron-work fence, and knew that he was seeing much further than that.
“Blake,” I whispered, not afraid but seemingly humbled, “how do I remember and forget?”
“Well, boy, you are on your way. Keep records. Keep many, many records. When you forget, use those records to know what happens in the dark places of your mind. Knowing, you see, can bypass memory.” He stood up then, rapping his cane against the floorboards. “And practice. Anything you want to do, learn to do it. Skills work differently than memories and they will serve you best.” With that, he breathed deeply the summertime air. “Can you smell those roses? Boy, I can smell those roses from here,” and with that, Blake walked home as if all he had meant to do was come over and talk about Mrs. Daniel's gardening with me.

Dangerous Cakes

I had to post this here because I very much want to bake some of these. Unfortunately, I am not baking it during Lent because I appreciate practices of fasting (no snacking, essentially). After Easter, though, expect a party with hilarious cakes such as these. Hopefully I think ahead enough to provide photos.

Raining Blood Cake


Bird Flu Cake


Global Jihad Date Cake


The article--and subsequent links--have descriptions by the cakes' creators.

Also...

Baking.

I know I haven't been posting much about baking of late. I have been baking infrequently, but with the grain mill, I inevitably improvise more than before. Also, I have managed to misplace two recipe notebooks in all too short a period, which has discouraged me from keeping up with recipes. Just today I made buns with kamut flour and flax seed as well as caraway rye with fresh hard red wheat flour. (The rye flour was store bought.) It is Lent and I have been fasting/not snacking so making bread has been less common because I cannot always eat it right away. And without sweets, well, that means many fewer baked goods, too. I may post soon about some daydream plans concerning baking of late, but for now I wanted to apologize for the absence of recipes and related exploits.

Rupture

I woke at 4:45 am breathing heavily with the weight of an incredibly cogent and painful dream on my mind. I am not recounting that dream. This post isn't about dreams. This post is about the lines in the sand that fade in the ever returning tide.

I was shaken deeply by the dream, shivering for a few minutes after recording it, hiding under the comforter in the vague hope that my anxiety would fade. I am still anxious and shivers still run down my skin, though the worst of it has passed. The subject of this dream, well, it touches on old, scarred nerves; soft spots that were quickly made raw again. For what reason, I cannot say.

Certain people, certain events, certain episodes mark my life, not in deleterious or jubilant ways, but with an alarming, even frightening potency. I have spent a good deal of time trying to mend or shield those moments, recollections, realities. Most of the time, those methods feel like a success. Success is always measured in days or weeks or months before some sentimental sea change looses my grip, the scartissue, whatever and it starts again. I am a house built on sand.

Some repose comes in Buddhist practice and vantages. The emphasis on passing away, the impairment of attachment, and the importance of others in making a life--not exactly whole but, complete--aren't just notions to learn, but concise comments on my own experience. In a way, any rupture with myself is just a further affirmation of Buddhist doctrine. Some relief may even come knowing that the stinging nerves themselves will eventually be overwhelmed by the flowing tide. The tide itself, well, it is more a matter of perception, of perspective than something that itself might fade.

Strange, though, that it would occur with a dream. With lucid dreams, one can manifest greater control than over any other phenomenological experience. On the other hand, they generally defy any of the usual rules of causation or physical laws we expect of the world. It recalls Hume's comments and criticism on theories of natural religion: You cannot suppose that the world is so wonderfully the way it is because a deity made it so because even if everything were infinitely random (of unending space or unending time), this situation and all of its bounty or apparent perfection would eventually come about anyway. Therefore, the world may potentially be completely without rules altogether (like a dream) just as it may be sharply defined by some divinity or another.

Perhaps it is in the chaos of dreams, even the remarkably lucid ones, that we risk to lose so very much. Have you not dreamed of losing someone dear to you? Is it not in dreams that we relive the painful episodes of our lives over and again? In dreams, we explore fancy and fantasy, delve into the unexplored world of our psyches and discover unknown and unknowable depths of the abyss. So much is potentially open to us, so much unruly power that waking so violently from a dream, that losing the control over old knots of awful memory is more likely to happen there than anywhere else. It pains me to think that no matter the order I place, the boundaries and statements I assume, what lies underneath will remain tender, soft, and unwilling to outgrow me.

Mistaking Memories: Flight

Someone once asked me if I had ever had recurring dreams. I told her no, I hadn't. Now, I realize, it is likely that I misspoke.

Today, I recalled a dream, or perhaps a few dreams, I have been having. The only thing is, is that I had begun mistaking them for memories. In this dream (only one episode, not even a narrative, is particularly clear) I sort of "catch" myself in the midst of falling. That may not even be especially accurate, I may also compel myself through the air. That is to say, in these dreams, I am flying. This is, most of the time, not a common trait of my dreaming and I cannot recall any dreams of flight I might have had as a child. My experience of flight in these dreams is extraordinarily mundane and might be described very similarly to Douglas Adams a la the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. Its knack lies in learning to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that provides the difficulties."

And on "How to Fly":

"One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else then you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.

"It is notoriously difficult to prise your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people's failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.

"If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination), or a bomb going off in your vicinity, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above the ground in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner." (Thanks to the Guide Wiki for the excerpts.)

In the dream, I manage to avoid some, shall we say, hard contact with the earth by simply forgetting to make contact with it. In every other convention, these dreams are pretty much like everyday life. So, if you want more interesting reading than a haphazard dream journal, you should pick up the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Trilogy" and read it.

Other than that, I don't really know what to say. This dream had slipped unbeknownst into my memory, sometime between sleeping and waking, and likely heightened by hitting the snooze button a few times. I have a habit of recording my dreams, but this one is not--as far as I can recall--one of them. That part, is odd. The writing or other retelling of an episode solidifies a memory in certain ways, even dreams which are especially short-lived in our memories. In fact, though we think of memory as a sort of rerun of the live action version of our lives, every recollection of a memory contorts the episode somewhat to fulfill the expected criteria we have, at the time, of that memory. So, it is like editing those old episodes and maybe adding in a character or scene bit by bit. (This is only how some forms of memory work; skills-based memory, like learning to play chess or ride a bicycle, become hard-wired independently from narrative memory.)

In a way, I am thoroughly shocked. What I think happened is that, upon or shortly after waking, I considered the dream or dreams I had involving flight. Shortly thereafter, with the dream-narrative rapidly fading, I thought of flight in the context of certain vague memories. Then, the two coalesced. Suddenly, I had odd, ill-fitting memories of me flying--or, as Adams might put it, missing the ground--which did not exactly fit the jigsaw puzzle of my personal narrative, but were not glaringly foreign either. They went unnoticed. In addition, I have a sneaking suspicion that I dreamed of having memories of flight that I used in other dreams to "recall" how to fly. If that were the case, then the original dream may never have happened at all; I may have just intuited the "original" memory later on through preconscious memory narration.

So, yeah, a little spooked.

If this made any sense, then you may enjoy reading Beyond the Wall of Sleep by H.P. Lovecraft. Then again, you may not; Lovecraft is not for everyone.

Lifted from My GoodReads review

David Owen is part of what I have come to think of us critical environmentalists. These types are thoughtful, trained, and involved thinkers and activists--as well as whatever profession that might actually pay them--who generally share the tenants of environmentalism at large, have some pretty weighty critiques of their own. In one way, Green Metropolis is for an earlier generation of environmentalists than myself. It may just be me, but his thesis that urban style population density is good--in that it makes so many other, more obvious environmental issues easier or redundant--is not earth-shattering. Rather, what Owen manages is an insightful, well-researched argument to convert the anti-urban back-to-the-landers of his and later eras, which does include some among me, too.

Take, for example, the absolutely keen criticism of LEED certification and "green architecture": On one side you might find a corporate campus with wide, lush lawns, rain barrels, green roofs, CFL bulbs, thorough insulation, and bike racks; on the other you have a tall, decades old skyscraper, knee-to-knee with similar buildings, without a patch of green on any side in an asphalt metropolis such as Manhattan. Well, the former could pick up some level of LEED certification and the other, well, it probably won't, not because it is less green but because "green architecture" doesn't account for some of the easiest stuff a building or city might support or accomplish. How do employees get to work at either locale? How far do the employees have to commute to work? How effective is heating and cooling? And, for that matter, how effective are the bells and whistles like solar paneling or employee showers for bikers?

Owen manages to cut through what is essentially the recently born technological prowess and sets it aside, pointing out the many successes already around us. In addition, he deals heavily with the conflicts of driving less (fewer cars, less exhaust, less asphalt, etc.) and greater gas mileage (driving more cheaply, going farther, more traffic, greater commutes, etc.) and similar, counterintuitive environmental issues. Owen successfully and concisely challenges our expectations for greenness and environmental sustainability. He also, potentially, intertwines a larger argument about how we want our lives to look and what not only sustainable but satisfied communities ought to look like.

Kurzweil on Avatar & My Two Cents on SciFi

Futurist, Inventor and Generally Sharp Guy, Ray Kurzweil Reviews Cameron's Avatar

The Secret History of Science Fiction, with a preview of the introduction care of Amazon - Don't buy from Amazon, patron your local booksellers.

In summary of the above article, Kurzweil is pretty thoroughly disappointed with Avatar. Sure, the film is an entertaining, action-packed and visually appealing work, but its plot and believability or pretty tired and suspect. Cameron obviously had the goal of an "environmental movie" with plenty of action. I do agree with Kurzweil's disappointment in the Hollywood portrayal of indigenous Nature worship (TVTropes on Avatar), particularly for its apparent drawing on and incredible simplification of a general--i.e. bland--native faith tradition. He makes a few smart remarks about aerial combat and the epic action-packed climax, but I want to move on from there.

Kurzweil suggests that the technology used in Avatar is pretty, well, present day. You can see some 3D modeling, some fancy pants medical imaging models, and the outstanding avatar technology itself, but after one hundred years, what is with the missiles and gas canisters? Kurzweil would probably like to see a sonic blast the likes used on American college students and Honduran protesters mixed up with some ion cannon action a la StarCraft to take down that otherworldly tree of the Na'vi. The automatic rifles maybe traded out for plasma guns or some Predator shoulder laser cannon. And what is with the oxygen masks, can't they just shoot up so nanorobots into their longs to scrub the air as they breathe? After all, isn't it the FUTURE?!

Sidenote: I read and enjoy Ray Kurzweil's work and definitely respect the work he has and no doubt continues to do to revolutionize the human-technology interface. He was, after all, the inventor of a text-to-voice machine to assist the blind and has developed pretty slick electronic music instruments to boot. I antagonize him here because, as I will get to, I think he is missing the point.

Okay, if the role of Cameron's Avatar was to show us a setting and story taking place on a far flung world a hundred years in the future, then Kurzweil may well be right on track complaining that the Avatar roughnecks aren't beaming up and phasering one another. But, and here I stretch my vantage a little, science fiction usually isn't about telling us how it is going to be in the future. (I am going to stop linking here because I will be doing a lot more name-dropping and less TVtroping.) With a few exceptions--like the mythical Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke--science fiction isn't trying to provide accurate prophecies of the world that is to come. Rather, science fiction has generally been about the world as it actually is right now, which one might pick up The Secret History of Science Fiction and read the introductory essay to find out. Whether you pick up a book by Robert A Heinlein or Ursula K le Guin, watch Star Trek or the Matrix, or even--well, heck--have read X-Men or Spider-Man comics, they are about issues and ideas concerning the present.

Is this a little too much to say? Well, Heinlein was well-known for mixing up racial identities and throwing them around the galaxy to explore. Le Guin just can't help but play around with gender identity and roles or utopia and anti-utopia. Star Trek was the first broadcast of an inter-racial kiss. The Matrix, well, I don't want to get carried away like I might in my adolescence, but trust me here. And hey, guess what, X-Men is even on the very surface confronting issues about racism, nationalism, homophobia, and the like. In the Eighties, Spider-Man was one of the first popular, fictional media means of talking about drug problems in the marginalized inner-city that actually played into a young, wealthy, intelligent, white dude's life. Even, if not especially today, you can pick up The Yiddish Policemen's Union and, under the clever guise of an alternate history, Michael Chabon ties in anti-Semitism, Jewish identity and Judaica, indigenous rights and identity, and have a lot of fun with a neo-noir detective story. (Note: Many science fiction styles, most notably cyberpunk, are drawn heavily on the detective stories and Film Noir character tropes that flourished following World War II.)

What does this have to do with Avatar? Well, Avatar isn't actually about encountering an alien moon, encountering new cultures, and mining minerals for commodities on Earth. It is more accurately about the treatment of ecosystems, indigenous cultures and people, land rights, the use of coercive methods, and genocide. Of course it draws heavily from Dances With Wolves because, though marked as they are with their own particular eras, they are dealing with the same issues. As most present writers and critical readers would recognize, a good story isn't about novelty, but about substance and style.

Avatar isn't my favorite movie, but it does succeed in having pretty hefty quantities of both substance and style while bringing environmental and post-colonial issues to a pretty immense audience. My personal criticism of Avatar is that its effort at being a spectacle, a thoroughly enjoyable one I acknowledge, detracts from any potentially enlightening or motivating intention. That is, upon leaving the cinema, I was more interested in riding sweet, giant, armored jungle cats (maybe the Na'vi will start an ecotourism bureau) than I was in saving the rain forest or researching ethnobotany--both of which are already interests to me. What hope, then, might I have for the average theatre-goer to take from it anything more than that? One might even leave with a lingering voice saying, "Well, we already lost all of that stuff here, hopefully we'll know better when we make it to Pandora." That, I would say, would be a grave disappointment.

Space & Stuff... And Lincoln, NE

Having just finished David Owen's Green Metropolis, I have a few things on my mind concerning stuff. Stuff, well, it's everywhere and we keep getting more of it. One of my few regular expenditures is on food. I enjoy food; preparing, eating, sharing, improvising, I enjoy it. All the same, between my mother and I, we have a refrigerator that regularly has spoiled fruits and vegetables showing up in it, as well as forgotten dinners and lunches secreted in the back recesses. Neither of us are particularly wasteful people, I might add. My mother seasonally adjusts the thermostat, I bike everywhere when the roads aren't icy, and we like fresh food at meals most of the time. When I came home, I coerced my mother into the curbside recycling program for our neighborhood only to discover that we only need pickup every other week because we have so little to worry about.

When my mother goes out of town, I do not often go to the grocery store except for something specific like limes for gin and tonics or some ingredients for baking. I don't need to because we have a full pantry most of the times, complete with stale chips a expired boxes of tea. Yes, expired tea; who knew it was even possible? At school, our fridge was usually between one half to three-fourths full for the five of us; though we had our share of dried goods stashed in various nooks and crannies. We had potatoes that sprouted and some cheese that molded in the back, but we had very little problem eating most of it. We didn't have much choice because of our limited space there. At home, we have more stuff to fill our amount of space, and it has become quietly, insistently irksome.

I have a penchant for used books and heavily discounted films (DVDs in the pre-viewed shelves at Blockbuster mostly) and even right now, I have a stack of books to my left on my desk and a row on the floor next to my full bookshelf. I even have a few too many DVDs for the space I have right now. But, given the space I have, I am allowed to spread out my books and movies to fill it. One odd aspiration of mine--particularly after reading Green Metropolis and Whole Earth Discipline--is to have less space, not more. What I feel like I earnestly need in a living space is a kitchen and a real bed. (I think of Henry's apartment in The Time Traveler's Wife and his futon bed, or Miss Linnea's regular futon bed at her parents' home.) as for the books and movies, I can stack them on shelves as much as needed or give most of them away; the latter of which happens accidentally as I loan them to unreliable or well-traveled friends and family.

In tighter quarters, I conceive of having a more orderly existence. This was both true and misleading at school, which abounds in its scheduling necessities and its frenetic episodes. I might lose something at school because something or other was tucked away in a box I needed to keep around for packing things up at the end of the year or because a friend had moved or borrowed it, but most of the time I could find everything I needed. It was, after all, right there.

David Owen relates a story of a friend of his opening a self-storage facility and finding it essentially filled from Day One, because we have so much stuff these days. Most of the stuff, Owen recalls, is just junk accumulated over our consumptive lifestyles, stuff that well ought to be thrown out, repaired, or given up. My mother and I similarly argue with my father for keeping his old textbooks and science fiction paperbacks in a storage and shipping facility around Houston. My mother's common remark is, "You know I would charge you less to store it here." After the phone is hung up, we point out that most of the stuff wouldn't last long around here anyway and would makes its way to the dump. We may be a nation of packrats now, but some of us are better at parting with other people's things, at least.

This is all more of a rant than an essay, but it is inescapably on my mind. At home for the year, I increasingly frequently want to organize my life into accomplishing something productive. I write and read and work, but I cannot ignore the issues that I feel under-qualified to deal with that need attentive care anyway. Presently, I am pondering how I might approach Lincoln City Council about plans to fund and refurbish buildings downtown into apartments. Downtown Lincoln is a rather pleasant place and with a few additions--a small grocery and school bus routes, perhaps--it would be a fine place for most Lincolnites interested in giving up their cars. In addition, the senior center is downtown and many elderly, with the aforementioned grocer, might be interested in moving downtown where they could take care of themselves rather than move into the various old folks' homes away from the city center.

Through these, I am realizing more and more that I might end up in Lincoln for the long haul. Not right away, for certain, but I feel that with a little guidance and criticality, Lincoln can nurture itself into a rather fine community. As most Midwestern cities, Lincoln spreads out into former farmland. This sprawl strains the public school system, which functions quite well, and the municipal infrastructure. It has a surprisingly thorough public transit system that, if the demand were there, could certainly mature. Surrounding farmland has plenty of organic or sustainable models for growing food and supporting locavorism, too. The University, independent businesses, art galleries, and Farmers' Market all make downtown bustle with live music, foot traffic, commerce, and pedestrians. It is no metropolis, but its modest spending habits (Nebraskans are frugal and uncertain of borrowing much money) feels a little like Curitiba with its necessary penny-pinching. This isn't an advertisement, Lincoln has its problems, but it could so easily accomplish something worth doing; something that I feel will be increasingly necessary in the years and decades to come.

What I Learned from Whole Earth Discipline

What began as an attempt to scan an important but suspect work of critical environmentalism--that is, it deviates from the culturally accepted norm for "environmentalism"--became one of my more significant reads this year so far. Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist's Manifesto by Stewart Brand is a powerful, eleventh hour-style work on four strategies that can jointly mitigate and relieve the damages we have caused to the biosphere. It draws heavily on Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, but even more so on Brand's personal experience and interviews with experts. The four strategies are: 1) Invigorated urban centers the world over as population, economic, cultural, and resource foci; 2) Contemporary nuclear power to provide base-level power safely and consistently; 3) Using genetic engineering critically, scientifically, and safely to feed people and remediate already accrued environmental damages; and 4) Geoengineering is able to soften the impacts of catastrophic climate change to save lives and the landscape.

Some of his points are directed toward an earlier generation than my own. Brand supported the activism against big cities, nuclear power, and genetic engineering when he was a younger man. Between research, interviews, and the onset of the present social, economic, and historic reality, he has reversed his positions on these and other points. Part of his project is to correct his own path and to do so with the vigor with which he once opposed trends and technologies. Doing so is a difficult and dangerous process, possibly leading him into the No Man's Land between progressive environmentalists and climate deniers. More often than not, Brand asks us to see these possibilities in the eyes of experts. With the changes in technologies of our modern world, come the possibilities for new outcomes and political realities; realities we must examine clearly.

Picking up the book, I can say myself that I am more optimistic toward urbanization (not to be confused with sprawl, suburbs, and exurbs--which are resource and effectively climate nightmares) than most environmentalists. Many friends of mine are back-to-the-landers and similar types and I am among the first to shout that agriculture and food systems are necessary for healthy lives, livelihoods, and communities. Cities, though, can focus knowledge, culture, economics, food supplies, waste management, and energy to manageable scales. Also, I have come to accept the potential realities of genetic engineering a better world and geoengineering it to be more stable than the one we have been bequeathed--those latter two I state with more hesitance than what I have to say about cities, but I affirm them all the same.

With nuclear power, well, I have to say that my knowledge is out of date. I am hesitant about the technology and for reasons that Brand does talk about (safety, storage, efficiency, management) and reasons he does not (security, economics, and I doubt I'll ever be completely satisfied with safety). In the end, like his later points on genetic engineering and geonengineering, we can't play the "First, Do No Harm" card because we are already in the midst of it. Nuclear does provide a viable replacement for coal and we simply cannot keep burning coal; coal will necessarily lead to global catastrophe while nuclear very well may lead to localized disasters. The difference is not one of split hairs, but one of degrees: Whether we can change power generation from coal or we can keep burning coal and watch our thermometers rise.

Often, I found myself displeased with Brand's brevity on certain issues and righteousness on others, but as he addresses in the final chapters we need louder foxes and fewer hedgehogs. That is, we need foxes with widespread, critical knowledge who make flexible but more reliable predictions than hifalutin experts arguing with us over statistics and datasets and their field who often get the important stuff wrong. To accomplish his goal, Brand may feel that he must speak beyond his position in order for people to really hear him out and change their minds. I am interested in the right path forward which will mean changing my mind and my actions.

I fear many things, but what we must learn to do is act to avoid what will be inevitable, even if it means placing bets on the future. We have to do so because, if anyone hasn't noticed, everything is already on the table. We are playing one hell of a poker game with our planet on the line and I am interested in seeing it through. Despite myself, I earnestly believe in a bright future. On the way, we can all expect hard times. The difference will be in hedging our bets appropriately and gambling when and where we have the good hands. For the most part, I think that Brand has the right ideas for our gaming.