For the Coming Tomorrow

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, 1993

The suffocating power of this book isn’t just it’s total command of what our present was in the past, nor is it the harrowing and compassionate and gripping journey out of right-now. It isn’t that Butler will not let you forget how horrible humans can be to each other, or how quickly we accept becoming animals. Butler has mastered every detail and breath of surviving in a world not that far away from ours, but so much worse.

America two-steps into a reality of slavery, prostitution, rape and murder as a daily backdrop to the walled in cul-de-sacs left over and surrounded by the chaos of the majority poor. Every face is a thieves, but a thieves driven by desperation and unending hunger. But the most dangerous are the addicts killing for a narcotic which transmutes fire into an experience better than sex. And, so, they burn everything. All while wholesale and unpoliced murder rampages through the last illusions of civilization.

What makes this book so eviscerating is the Balanok, the much older lover to Lauren Olamida the protagonist and leader of a survivors colony as they daily escape robbery or carnivorous rape from fellow escapees heading north out of California to a larger disaster. It is a world plagued by climate change; it hasn’t rained in Los Angeles in six years. It is one where community is the sole means of survival, even if everyone you know is burned to death. We may pray that Ms. Butler’s vision is never realized, because she has put before us something terrible and perfect. And even on her last page’s salvation, you cut your finger on the inexorable finality

Prix Renaudot

Leaden penetrations, as when a hard and horrible truth finally bashes its way in front of your attention, are the most burdensome but blessedly, the most rapid to pass. The big stuff; getting shitcanned over a ludicrous idea; the death of a pet; a compound- fracture car accident; being foreclosed. Or an insidious thin noise, everpresent, heard just behind every word being spoken to you, as what happens during a slow and maschocistic break-up. This is how Separation, by Dan Franck, makes every page ring in sadness and anger, but all the more so, by making his essential truths draw out in cathartic strokes.

The breakup realizes immediately on the first page, and as you look through the smoke of the bomb that just blew up in your hands you spend the next two hundred pages trying to fathom the casualties. Not one thing ends happily, and Franck makes it detestably good. Each page squeezes the heart a little tighter, as the narrator and his wife of seven years separate. The one-up-manship thrilled and disgusted; the couple break-up all over Paris and the melancholy rollick which by the end has your lungs as wet as the slaughtered couple.

The book was found for me at the library, when we were looking for books set in France ahead of an upcoming trip. Franck scores wonders. Each savory place and setting was kept crisp and inspired, and it kept me awash in memory. The narrator's battlegrounds with his wife are made just the more evocative. I finished the book with scortched hands.

I piss here too!

Fuck me if it isn't tough finding a proper toilet at 5:30 on a Monday evening. I know, I know, Nate you say, I've been drinking all afternoon to forget my problems and I forgot to go behind the dumpster where I stash my fifths of Barcardi. Drunk friend, I dig! You have nothing to explain to me!

The cops however, will want an explanation. Especially after you shed your clothes, whip out your dong and write your name on the disabled passenger seats. I know! If they're disabled they have their own seats, the ones with wheels, so by all means, dump your pisser there. So what if the police don't understand. So what if they make you put on your clothes and a pair of handcuffs. You went out of your way to show us working tool-bags that we too could be wrecked at 5:30 and naked down to our socks if we wanted to. Friend. America and I salute you.

Red State Hangover

Oh man, awesome. The canker sore that's blown up in my mouth is truly a sight to see, so calloused from rubbing up against my rotting molars that it looks like the bottom of my worn-out foot. When it comes up for air, it bears a striking resemblance to Rudy "noun, verb, 9/11" Guilianni, who yesterday had a bad day to end all bad days.

Also, go read History of Love, and if you can ignore the fact that Krause is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, you'll really enjoy it.

Oops, I moved

Wound up in Brooklyn, Park Slope neighborhood where I come to find that YES! The MTA B Line is my closest subway stop. Huzzah. The cat and the missus survived the journey. For the record, the move to New York was the right decision. The sushi alone is worth the trip, no matter if you turn into a mercurial tunnel beast from over-eating the yellow-fin.

Read a book about a president.

8 Degrees

That's the high today in Boston, MA. I had to take the T this morning, against all my better wishes, as there was almost no physical way I was going to be able to make the 6 mile walk to Chinatown this morning, where I had to go to get my license renewed (away on business next week).

8:00 am and all of 6, count 'em, 6 degrees outside the coldest day of winter so far. I knew this was going to be the walking test, whether or not I could really balls up and walk in the New England cold, and sure enough, with my long-john suit on and some good layering, I was pretty warm.

Only, I would be warm if I was moving - no, instead, I got the pleasure of waiting 15 minutes for an inbound Greenline; those of you who don't know Boston, the MBTA above-ground trolleys have a maximum of two cars per train service. Imagine being in NYC where each subway car was only an eighth to a quarter as long as it needed to be for efficient service. Now take away one of those cars, for, due to some unimaginable reason, the second car sat in the dark, not accepting passengers. Why even have a second car?

In such, the first car was so packed that no one could get on, and the OrangeJacket trying to maintain order shrugged with sheepish impotence as he collected the recently increased T fare.

I'm not getting on, as I see another T cresting the hill behind it. By the next stop (and I live pretty far out along the subway lines), the train was overfull and remained that way until I completed my grim commute the DMV - like out of the frying pan and into the fire right?

I would be remiss though if I didn't compliment the Mass DMV - they are actually, and efficiently run, pleasant group of people, willing to make strange exceptions for idiots like myself who let their license expire and need something to pick up a rental car.

Oh, and the ride back involved 7 D-line trains in a row. How many people are headed out to Riverside?

I don't even know what to say about this

Here's today's must read.


I mean, holy Christ, this is a major metropolitain transit system and we are relying on fucking BLACKSMITHS? After we get done turning the Wayback Machine to 1910, perhaps we can all mount our trusty steeds and see if, on horseback, we can beat the B Line from Packard's Corner to Kenmore.

...Blacksmiths.