Someone showed this to me the other day, I think that it is hilarious.
http://www.dailydawdle.com/2010/09/10-best-lifes-too-short-for-wrong-job.html
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Friday, March 4, 2011
Nelly
A short story about a man who liked to drive buses
Nelly was a horribly boring man. All day he drove a metro to and from the same street corner. Five blocks up, stop at Elm, six more, Harris, five once again, Washington, and so on and so on until finally, Cherry, and then he would return by the same route. Five times a day, six days a week he would make this Oddysey. His works hours were not too bad everything considered, he had after all been working for the city for years now and so had some leeway in choosing routes. When he started so long ago, the idea was to find work, any work, and do that until a painting career could be launched. Painting never really panned out.
Every night after driving for about seven hours, Nelly returned home to his apartment and watched TV. He always felt like he should probably be painting, but never quite got the guns together to run out to the store and grab new materials. CSI Miami was his favorite. Sometimes while he watched he would pay attention to the story, but more often than not he just liked to see the expressions on the faces of the actors. After a few hours of television and a dinner of raman or pasta, Nelly would go to sleep and set his alarm for the next day.
As you may have guessed by now, Nelly was a man of few passions. He was content enough to live one day to the next, and even his strongest ambition, to paint beautiful works that all the world might look on and sigh, was at it's strongest an afterthought. Some of you may find this a repulsive plot, but to Nelly it wasn't so bad, really. To him, why not? He ate, he slept well, he had leisure time, what more could a man want?
There was one thing peculiar though that sometimes rather pleased Nelly. He loved to close his bus door. He would slowly approach a stop, easing into the brakes and hearing that familiar squeal that accompanied the feeling of deceleration, and glance at the assembled bus riders waiting for him to open the door. After stopping, Nelly always glanced back behind his bus to see if anyone was frantically huffing and legging it towards the front door (he ran a pay as you enter route). On spying someone late, or even better several someone's who were late, Nelly's mouth would curl up into a big smile.
Quickly he would usher the riders onto the bus, and then with a flourish, Nelly would close the door, and start the bus slowly crawling off. Often the people who had just been running, Nelly's scorned commuters, would jog up waving their arms to his door, looking at him imploringly, smiling and trying to give their winningest expressions. Nelly would look at them knowingly, grin, and shake his head side to side, continuing to accelerate away. Some people would yell, some would slump their heads, some would look at their watches or the route schedule to see when the next bus could be expected, and Nelly's favorites, they would scream profanities at the top of their lungs, muffled out by the glass and receding away in his rear view mirror.
Why it was that this ritual so tickled Nelly, he could never quite tell. Maybe the years of commuters treating him like a stone object had planted in him a general disdain for public transportation users. Maybe the day was usually boring and emotionless, and the glimpse of their honest reactions was refreshing. Maybe Nelly just didn't like people.
Over time, leaving would-be riders by the stop developed into a nuanced performance for Nelly, and Nelly became the leading star. Sometimes he would add a gesture into his rejection, calculated to be confusing. “Dear rider”, he seemed to say, “I am sorry that you cannot get on my bus, you must understand that it is because” … “hand swirling in circle” or “two hands open, then brought quickly together with a shaking head”. That would leave them to wonder for a bit.
After punching his time clock, but before going home, Nelly would usually go to a local sandwhich shop and grab a mayonnaise, chicken, club, with the swiss cheese. Biting into it, he would reflect on the most interesting encounters with his late riders, and relax his shoulders, sometimes almost giggling to himself.
One day after finishing his club, he finally found the care to head to the art supply store. There he picked out some fresh canvas to go with the empty aisle in his apartment, and a selection of drably colored oils.
He bustled down the sidewalk towards his home, very close to work, holding an armful of supplies that oddly contrasted with the unbroken gray of his urban setting. On entering his apartment, he set to work.
First he drew the silhouettes of three running men, screaming at something, in pencil outline. Then a bus. Then he colored the scene. This process took the greater part of his evening, and he was hungry by the time he finished. He sat there looking at his finished product with a bowl of raman in hand, and thought that it was handsome enough.
The next night Nelly painted again. This time he took a more careful approach, slowly sketching his outline and painting meticulously. The subject was again men and women chasing a bus, but this time in vibrant yellows, oranges, and reds, with a cold blue bus. He only finished about a third of his work before it was time to sleep, and over the next several days he polished away the work. On finishing he was quite satisfied.
That Sunday he had the day off and painted all day. He chose again the same scene, and tried to make a vivid, lifelike illustration.
As the days passed by, Nelly continued to paint. He still watched television, and did so more often than he painted, but this was still a great shift in his use of time. He began to diversify his subjects, working on people waiting in a line, someone being tax audited, a grocery clerk mopping up someone's spilled bottle of pickles in a supermarket, and many more. The walls of his apartment filled with works little by little.
One day at work, his boss Steve talked to him. This was normal in that every morning they exchanged the usual pleasantries, but never had they really had a conversation. They talked about the recent baseball game, which Nelly had watched, about food places nearby, and about their families briefly (Nelly choosing not to mention his in any detail). At the end of their talk, Steve asked if Nelly had any plans for Saturday evening, and that if he didn't, would he perhaps like to come eat with the family?
Steve's slightly worried and patronizing tone told Nelly that his boss found him a lonely man, too old to have no real connections, and that Nelly was to be something of a charity case. He resented this, but at the same time thought that it might be nice to get out a bit. Considering, this was actually an honor of sorts. Nelly resolved to bring a gift.
When he arrived on Saturday night, it was with a painting in hand. More specifically the first he had done, of the men and women chasing a bus. It occurred to Nelly that it would be a funny work for his boss to have lying around, seeing as the man oversaw public transportation and all. He found himself wondering if the gesture might be too much, and realized his palms were sweating slightly at the edges of the frame he held.
Steve loved the painting, and introduced Nelly to his wife, daughter, and a family friend who had also been invited over, Estella. Looking at Estella, Nelly noticed the clear, angular nature of her jaw line, and pretty brown eyes. The company chortled and talked away the evening, and when it was time to return to his apartment, Nelly went with a measure of sadness.
Nelly and Steve didn't say more to one another until the next week, when Steve walked up to Nelly looking like he had something on his mind. He told Nelly that Estella was a curator of art exhibits, and had been quite interested in Nelly's painting, asking if he had any other work. Nelly was surprised, and then anxious, wondering how a curator might judge his projects, but at the same time, she had been interested had she not?
Nelly took pictures of all of his paintings and gave them to Steve the next day. Two days later, Steve told Nelly that Estella would like to talk to him directly. She called him later that night, asking if he would like to do a small exhibit! Nelly jumped a little at the news, and after some confused babbling agreed.
On opening day, Nelly came in a suite, the first he had worn in who knew how long. There was a substantial turnout, evidently Estella was well connected, and Nelly could overhear the various attendees talking. Many of them, Estella informed, were art critics.
Nelly's paintings evidently possessed, a subtle undercurrent of angst, the soul of oppressed urban society, postmodern satire against the something or rather, ironic criticism of the system itself. They were a hit!
The next week, Estella mentioned that there was a buzz about his work going around the city, and that many potential buyers had emerged. Nelly considered what she said, and after a while consented to selling some of his work. Every piece that he listed was gone the next day, and a beaming Estella handed Nelly a tidy stack of checks. Nelly was impressed, this was much more money than he made driving buses.
The next week Estella asked if he would like to paint more works for sale. Nelly said he would consider. Steve even mentioned selling paintings to Nelly, saying he might like one now before they got big, and that maybe Nelly might consider cutting back or even quitting on the whole bus driving thing, seeing as there was this opportunity of a lifetime presenting itself. It sounded like a lot of work to Nelly. The next day Nelly told Estella and Steve that he was out of paint, and would prefer to drive buses, but that they had been very kind.
Nelly was a horribly boring man. All day he drove a metro to and from the same street corner. Five blocks up, stop at Elm, six more, Harris, five once again, Washington, and so on and so on until finally, Cherry, and then he would return by the same route. Five times a day, six days a week he would make this Oddysey. His works hours were not too bad everything considered, he had after all been working for the city for years now and so had some leeway in choosing routes. When he started so long ago, the idea was to find work, any work, and do that until a painting career could be launched. Painting never really panned out.
Every night after driving for about seven hours, Nelly returned home to his apartment and watched TV. He always felt like he should probably be painting, but never quite got the guns together to run out to the store and grab new materials. CSI Miami was his favorite. Sometimes while he watched he would pay attention to the story, but more often than not he just liked to see the expressions on the faces of the actors. After a few hours of television and a dinner of raman or pasta, Nelly would go to sleep and set his alarm for the next day.
As you may have guessed by now, Nelly was a man of few passions. He was content enough to live one day to the next, and even his strongest ambition, to paint beautiful works that all the world might look on and sigh, was at it's strongest an afterthought. Some of you may find this a repulsive plot, but to Nelly it wasn't so bad, really. To him, why not? He ate, he slept well, he had leisure time, what more could a man want?
There was one thing peculiar though that sometimes rather pleased Nelly. He loved to close his bus door. He would slowly approach a stop, easing into the brakes and hearing that familiar squeal that accompanied the feeling of deceleration, and glance at the assembled bus riders waiting for him to open the door. After stopping, Nelly always glanced back behind his bus to see if anyone was frantically huffing and legging it towards the front door (he ran a pay as you enter route). On spying someone late, or even better several someone's who were late, Nelly's mouth would curl up into a big smile.
Quickly he would usher the riders onto the bus, and then with a flourish, Nelly would close the door, and start the bus slowly crawling off. Often the people who had just been running, Nelly's scorned commuters, would jog up waving their arms to his door, looking at him imploringly, smiling and trying to give their winningest expressions. Nelly would look at them knowingly, grin, and shake his head side to side, continuing to accelerate away. Some people would yell, some would slump their heads, some would look at their watches or the route schedule to see when the next bus could be expected, and Nelly's favorites, they would scream profanities at the top of their lungs, muffled out by the glass and receding away in his rear view mirror.
Why it was that this ritual so tickled Nelly, he could never quite tell. Maybe the years of commuters treating him like a stone object had planted in him a general disdain for public transportation users. Maybe the day was usually boring and emotionless, and the glimpse of their honest reactions was refreshing. Maybe Nelly just didn't like people.
Over time, leaving would-be riders by the stop developed into a nuanced performance for Nelly, and Nelly became the leading star. Sometimes he would add a gesture into his rejection, calculated to be confusing. “Dear rider”, he seemed to say, “I am sorry that you cannot get on my bus, you must understand that it is because” … “hand swirling in circle” or “two hands open, then brought quickly together with a shaking head”. That would leave them to wonder for a bit.
After punching his time clock, but before going home, Nelly would usually go to a local sandwhich shop and grab a mayonnaise, chicken, club, with the swiss cheese. Biting into it, he would reflect on the most interesting encounters with his late riders, and relax his shoulders, sometimes almost giggling to himself.
One day after finishing his club, he finally found the care to head to the art supply store. There he picked out some fresh canvas to go with the empty aisle in his apartment, and a selection of drably colored oils.
He bustled down the sidewalk towards his home, very close to work, holding an armful of supplies that oddly contrasted with the unbroken gray of his urban setting. On entering his apartment, he set to work.
First he drew the silhouettes of three running men, screaming at something, in pencil outline. Then a bus. Then he colored the scene. This process took the greater part of his evening, and he was hungry by the time he finished. He sat there looking at his finished product with a bowl of raman in hand, and thought that it was handsome enough.
The next night Nelly painted again. This time he took a more careful approach, slowly sketching his outline and painting meticulously. The subject was again men and women chasing a bus, but this time in vibrant yellows, oranges, and reds, with a cold blue bus. He only finished about a third of his work before it was time to sleep, and over the next several days he polished away the work. On finishing he was quite satisfied.
That Sunday he had the day off and painted all day. He chose again the same scene, and tried to make a vivid, lifelike illustration.
As the days passed by, Nelly continued to paint. He still watched television, and did so more often than he painted, but this was still a great shift in his use of time. He began to diversify his subjects, working on people waiting in a line, someone being tax audited, a grocery clerk mopping up someone's spilled bottle of pickles in a supermarket, and many more. The walls of his apartment filled with works little by little.
One day at work, his boss Steve talked to him. This was normal in that every morning they exchanged the usual pleasantries, but never had they really had a conversation. They talked about the recent baseball game, which Nelly had watched, about food places nearby, and about their families briefly (Nelly choosing not to mention his in any detail). At the end of their talk, Steve asked if Nelly had any plans for Saturday evening, and that if he didn't, would he perhaps like to come eat with the family?
Steve's slightly worried and patronizing tone told Nelly that his boss found him a lonely man, too old to have no real connections, and that Nelly was to be something of a charity case. He resented this, but at the same time thought that it might be nice to get out a bit. Considering, this was actually an honor of sorts. Nelly resolved to bring a gift.
When he arrived on Saturday night, it was with a painting in hand. More specifically the first he had done, of the men and women chasing a bus. It occurred to Nelly that it would be a funny work for his boss to have lying around, seeing as the man oversaw public transportation and all. He found himself wondering if the gesture might be too much, and realized his palms were sweating slightly at the edges of the frame he held.
Steve loved the painting, and introduced Nelly to his wife, daughter, and a family friend who had also been invited over, Estella. Looking at Estella, Nelly noticed the clear, angular nature of her jaw line, and pretty brown eyes. The company chortled and talked away the evening, and when it was time to return to his apartment, Nelly went with a measure of sadness.
Nelly and Steve didn't say more to one another until the next week, when Steve walked up to Nelly looking like he had something on his mind. He told Nelly that Estella was a curator of art exhibits, and had been quite interested in Nelly's painting, asking if he had any other work. Nelly was surprised, and then anxious, wondering how a curator might judge his projects, but at the same time, she had been interested had she not?
Nelly took pictures of all of his paintings and gave them to Steve the next day. Two days later, Steve told Nelly that Estella would like to talk to him directly. She called him later that night, asking if he would like to do a small exhibit! Nelly jumped a little at the news, and after some confused babbling agreed.
On opening day, Nelly came in a suite, the first he had worn in who knew how long. There was a substantial turnout, evidently Estella was well connected, and Nelly could overhear the various attendees talking. Many of them, Estella informed, were art critics.
Nelly's paintings evidently possessed, a subtle undercurrent of angst, the soul of oppressed urban society, postmodern satire against the something or rather, ironic criticism of the system itself. They were a hit!
The next week, Estella mentioned that there was a buzz about his work going around the city, and that many potential buyers had emerged. Nelly considered what she said, and after a while consented to selling some of his work. Every piece that he listed was gone the next day, and a beaming Estella handed Nelly a tidy stack of checks. Nelly was impressed, this was much more money than he made driving buses.
The next week Estella asked if he would like to paint more works for sale. Nelly said he would consider. Steve even mentioned selling paintings to Nelly, saying he might like one now before they got big, and that maybe Nelly might consider cutting back or even quitting on the whole bus driving thing, seeing as there was this opportunity of a lifetime presenting itself. It sounded like a lot of work to Nelly. The next day Nelly told Estella and Steve that he was out of paint, and would prefer to drive buses, but that they had been very kind.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Travel Blog Launched
Hey guys,
I decided to do my daily blogging that I talked about earlier on a different blog dedicated solely to Spain. I will still update this one with the occasional short story, but being abroad has put constraints on my time, so they will be irregular. I'd love to see you on the other site.
It can be found here: http://wilderinspain.blogspot.com/
Best,
Tim
I decided to do my daily blogging that I talked about earlier on a different blog dedicated solely to Spain. I will still update this one with the occasional short story, but being abroad has put constraints on my time, so they will be irregular. I'd love to see you on the other site.
It can be found here: http://wilderinspain.blogspot.com/
Best,
Tim
Monday, January 10, 2011
The favorite blanket
If I had to go on a Sound of Music style naming binge of all the good things in the world, somewhere in there would be the favorite blanket. It's that piece of fabric that on rainy days, after failed tests, with a bowl of icecream, a favorite book, or whatever else is your personal catnip, you are content to curl up with and sit in blissful, comatose lethargy. It's Leo Bloom from the producer's panic button, Linus of Peanuts constant companion, and one of the few things in many childhoods as ever-present as our cell phones are now. If you've ever had one, you know that blanket.
Mine used to be what I called dino-blankey. I found it the other day cleaning out my room before going to Spain and took a long moment to think of days gone by. I would take that thing through mud puddles, living room forts, Pokemon-inspired romps through the woods, and rolling down grassy hills on a daily basis. Understandably it ended up about as bedraggled and grisly as Snooki after a night at the bar, without all of the unfortunate side connotations. My mom, ever the faithful caretaker managed to repair the thing some countless dozen times, but inexorably it grew ever patchier. The memento sitting in my closet is a cobweb of cotton that still makes me smile whenever I chance across it.
Is it just me that hoards these things? I have dozens of similar 'treasures' stowed away in random bags and boxes in the obscure corners of my house. It feels like a Toy Story inspired tragedy where the haunted soul of a once loved possession calls out to its owner begging not to be tossed whenever I consider trimming things down. How could I ever throw away the favorite blanket though? Do you have any relics like that?
Best,
Tim
Mine used to be what I called dino-blankey. I found it the other day cleaning out my room before going to Spain and took a long moment to think of days gone by. I would take that thing through mud puddles, living room forts, Pokemon-inspired romps through the woods, and rolling down grassy hills on a daily basis. Understandably it ended up about as bedraggled and grisly as Snooki after a night at the bar, without all of the unfortunate side connotations. My mom, ever the faithful caretaker managed to repair the thing some countless dozen times, but inexorably it grew ever patchier. The memento sitting in my closet is a cobweb of cotton that still makes me smile whenever I chance across it.
Is it just me that hoards these things? I have dozens of similar 'treasures' stowed away in random bags and boxes in the obscure corners of my house. It feels like a Toy Story inspired tragedy where the haunted soul of a once loved possession calls out to its owner begging not to be tossed whenever I consider trimming things down. How could I ever throw away the favorite blanket though? Do you have any relics like that?
Best,
Tim
Sunday, January 9, 2011
The strangeness of Picasa
Google's Picasa is a piece of photo-management software that has what is simultaneously one of the most useful and most strangely unnerving functions that I have seen in image managers. It can look through a library of your photographs and identify one particular face, then take a close up cropping of that face and display it. This is intended to make it easier to see all photographs of one person, and does, but when the images are aggregated over a large collection, the effect is odd.
When all photos of one person are displayed contiguously, the wall of slightly similar and yet mostly identical faces that result are just plain strange. Have you ever gotten to consider what your picture-time smile looks like in a complete vacuum? Have you ever seen your friends doing it? There's no doubt that the way we grin for the camera is distinct from our real smile, and even for the most photogenic that trend is abundantly apparent with volume.
Here is one small portion of the map of me. I noticed looking at it that I have a fairly distant expression in most photographs. If you're looking to pass some time I advise checking this out. You can find Picasa for free here: http://picasa.google.com/.
Best,
Tim
When all photos of one person are displayed contiguously, the wall of slightly similar and yet mostly identical faces that result are just plain strange. Have you ever gotten to consider what your picture-time smile looks like in a complete vacuum? Have you ever seen your friends doing it? There's no doubt that the way we grin for the camera is distinct from our real smile, and even for the most photogenic that trend is abundantly apparent with volume.
Here is one small portion of the map of me. I noticed looking at it that I have a fairly distant expression in most photographs. If you're looking to pass some time I advise checking this out. You can find Picasa for free here: http://picasa.google.com/.
Best,
Tim
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
2011 and new directions for the Blog
Hello there,
We've spent another year working, playing, laughing, crying and doing all the other random junk that makes being alive worth the time, and now 2010 has come and gone like the fat guy who danced to that one O-zone song.
In the spirit of annually changing relatively minor parts of our behavior and then likely reverting back to our old actions in no time, some new things are coming for this blog.
I'm going to try to post more often and worry about the content less. I mentioned doing this earlier, but every time it came to posting some random evening journal entry, I couldn't just throw it up on the internet since it feels like I should provide at least a semblance of quality to readers. The whole point of this project though is to practice writing, and that doesn't happen in as meaningful a way when I just do not post.
In other news, I am going to Spain in about a week for the remainder of the time until Summer, and will likely transition content here into mostly observations on Spanish culture, its oddities and the experience of a foreigner trying to deal with them.
Finally, here are some pictures of cats that I thought you might enjoy. They are lifted from http://kittenwar.com/. Don't say I never did anything for you.
Best,
Tim
We've spent another year working, playing, laughing, crying and doing all the other random junk that makes being alive worth the time, and now 2010 has come and gone like the fat guy who danced to that one O-zone song.
In the spirit of annually changing relatively minor parts of our behavior and then likely reverting back to our old actions in no time, some new things are coming for this blog.
I'm going to try to post more often and worry about the content less. I mentioned doing this earlier, but every time it came to posting some random evening journal entry, I couldn't just throw it up on the internet since it feels like I should provide at least a semblance of quality to readers. The whole point of this project though is to practice writing, and that doesn't happen in as meaningful a way when I just do not post.
In other news, I am going to Spain in about a week for the remainder of the time until Summer, and will likely transition content here into mostly observations on Spanish culture, its oddities and the experience of a foreigner trying to deal with them.
Finally, here are some pictures of cats that I thought you might enjoy. They are lifted from http://kittenwar.com/. Don't say I never did anything for you.
Best,
Tim
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Stanly and the Boat
This is a rough draft of something that I wrote for a class. I will likely be trying to improve it later, and I think that it would be interesting to show what happens after editing.
- - - -
Stanly and the Boat
Stanly Pentington sat in the tingling morning sun with one hand trailing listlessly in the water and the other flopped across his stomach. His body ached, he was hungry, his two boat mates gave him endless shivers while the waves gave him no measure of rest, he hadn't stood on anything more solid than his raft for weeks, land was beyond sight, and something, something he couldn't understand, might be slithering out there in the dark sea. He glanced over the soft swells and valleys of blue water before him, catching a hint of brine and seaweed on the breeze pushing his unshaven hair before his eyes, and began to chuckle. There really was nothing particularly humorous about the situation save its complete lunacy. A year ago he was on solid land, ate solid meals, and slept in an oh so firmly planted bed, and now, now he was alive at least.
As his stomach growled Stanly considered his current predicament. The whole rotten mess had really begun when he stepped onto that damned ship in the first place. No. No that wasn't quite right, this was his own fault. He knew that ships didn't tend to snare men like spiders, and that it is men who pick their own watery webs in which to be stuck. Stanly had chosen his particular snare months before. He had been sitting on a comfortable white chair on a mild summer day. The wind-born scent of grass hailed his nose as he took occasional sips from a deep glass of tea he had had a servant bring him. Inches from his right hand lay a magazine, pregnant with unread ideas, but at that moment Stanly had found it preferable to lie still save for intermittent grasps at his drink. Lying as such, the sun tickled his skin with its warmth. Away in the kitchen of his tasteful country home, Stanly's wife directed yet more servants as they busied themselves making an afternoon lunch. Soon she, Stanly, and their three children, two of which were scampering about the woods playing at rogues and rebels, the other choosing to nap, would happily eat that lunch. Later the children would be sent to bed with a story, and Stanly would have his time alone with Mrs. Pentington. This dance would repeat for the rest of the weekend, until Monday morning shone and Stanly would go back to work in the city. There Stanly labored managing the tidy fortunes of other men, and no one could say that he did that any way less than excellently. Through work he had ensured over the years that he had those things he desired.
As Stanly basked in his chair that afternoon, the devilish thought that his now boat ridden self knew to be doom entered his mind. His life was nearly perfect. He had money, and from money shelter and servants to see to his needs. He had charm and personality, and from these a lovely wife, and from her beautiful children. The steadiness of his career matched the reliability of his home-life, and both were only rivaled in certainty by the two facts that his existence had become boring and that one day he would die.
Stanly became afraid. He considered that on his death bed he would look back and have only those memories of a life lost. He realized that even then, there on his manicured lawn, what he truly possessed was the past, for the future was uncertain. His past, if arranged as a series of tidy paintings, would have been quite a boring art show to attend. Connoisseurs glancing through that gallery would see two sets of paintings reiterated endlessly; privilege and pretty lawns. As a child Stanly's parents were well off, and watched over him carefully as he played in their country abode, as a young man Stanly studied the arts of managing moneys, and in his current state, he enjoyed some mix of the two former scenes. This was not enough.
Stanly wanted to see what lay beyond his narrow upbringing. He wanted to see the giraffes he had read about as a child, the pyramids and ruins he knew sprawled in deserts and jungles about the world. Stanly wanted to hear foreign tongues surround him, to be a stranger and visitor in someone else's tidy world. The thrill of knavery and the ecstasy of facing probable defeat and prevailing were two vivid wines from which Stanly had not so much as sipped, and of sailing, drinking, riding, painting, poetry and more he knew less. What good was his dull warm box he had preserved from the world for some forty and more years without any knowledge of what sat outside of it? Stanly resolved to see things, to leave behind his wife, children and cozy home, if only for a few weeks each year, and to look, really look, for more specimens to augment his little box-display of a life. Preferably by boat.
Stanly was slapped from his reverie by his boat mate Renwick's mutterings. That whole exploring the world thought, especially the last bit about boats, struck Stanly as poor now that he had tried it and it had gone disastrously wrong. Noticing that Stanly had come to, Renwick looked back at him in his odd sideways sort of way. An abnormally skinny white male of about thirty five years, Renwick possessed thick, bushy eyebrows and lanky, spidery legs. He was prone to many tics, an occasional repeated squinting of his eyes and quick, compulsive jerks of his right fist being among them. His hair was thick and black, and even before their boat had sunk and they had been forced into the life rafts, he had grown a greasy unkempt beard and seldom washed or combed his hair. What was worse, there wasn't enough food for the both of them, which left a grisly issue to be sorted out.
Often when he looked at Renwick, Stanly recalled a chilling conversation he had overheard on the vessel. The ship's attending physician and its captain had been speaking in hushed tones as they walked about the upper deck. Naturally curious, Stanly had pretended to continue reading one of his magazines while intently listening. “What in God's name are we going to do about him?” the captain had demanded. Lowering his voice still further, the physician responded “Heavens Charles, I have no idea. His symptoms continue to worsen, he appears now to be slipping further and further from healthy reality. His words are becoming increasingly violent and just as of yesterday the man started rattling off about how he has some divine lended purpose. None of my medicines have done the least for his symptoms, and I haven't the slightest as to what manner of fit he suffers from. We can't exactly continue to let him roam about the ship as he is, but what are we to say if we lock the fellow up?”. “We'll have to think of something if he gets any worse. For now, just keep close watch over him and late me and the first mate know if the situation...” muttering this the captain stopped and looked quickly up at Stanly whose seat was now quite close to the talking pair. “Good afternoon Mr. Pentington. I trust you are enjoying the morning air on our deck?” Although it was quite clear that both parties where aware of the eavesdropping that had been going on, Stanly managed to muster a sheepish response of “Quite Charles.” With that, the physician and captain strode off with a purpose for the lower decks and presumably the privacy of one of their quarters.
By now Stanly was quite sure that they had been discussing Renwick, but was still as uncertain as they had been over what to do about the man. At night, while the ocean's slow rocking lulled Stanly to sleep, Renwick would remain wide-awake watching him. The last thing that Stanly glimpsed would be those two reddened eyes. In the setting sun they seemed to gleam with unnatural hunger, and when he wasn't twitching, Renwick blinked far less than would have been comforting. Stanly's dreams were filled with predatory eyes, and he often wondered how much his companion actually slept at night.
Stanly had never known a combination of terror and excitement like that of the day their ship sunk. One moment he had been restfully asleep, and the next he had awoken with his oddly door open, probably by the ships tremendous list, and people screaming frantically everywhere. A shallow film of water sloshed to and fro across the floor of his cabin, and when his groggy brain realized what was going on, he sat up electrified and fumbled to dress. He observed the water growing deeper, and now wading, made all haste to the stairs along with everyone else from his passenger deck. An immense throng of bodies shoved, tripped and slid up the three flights between him and the top deck. One unfortunate woman fell in her hurry, and Stanly watched her dissapear with a cry beneath cruel rushing feet. No one seemed to even notice, and while Stanly fought briefly to get to her, the pressing throng forced him away and he thought better of it. When he finally surfaced free from the myriad limbs and bodies of the stairwell, he saw the entire deck nearly filled with milling occupants. The sound of hundreds of worried voices asking questions, crying, and shouting reverberated up and down the length of the ship. He saw the captain standing aloft in his elevated bridge, gesturing orders to the crew who were now guiding the women and children on the vessel into life rafts. Wild faced passengers to whom Charles remained imperious clawed at the windows of his bridge while yelling things Stanly could not make out.
Stanly stopped another passenger by grabbing and swinging around his leather sleeve. The man was just as scared as he, and when asked what in the holy fuck was going on, responded “Captain says someone blew a piece of the hull somehow. Wouldn't say no more.” Hearing this Stanly felt his stomach turn over a few times before regaining composure. The ship had now began to list further sideways, and it became necessary for Stanly to lightly brace his feet as the deck took an incline. The self inflating escape boats the crew were rapidly unloading from their storage compartments were first filled with a small complement of people and then lowered by great white painted cranes along the deck and into the water. Each boat was assigned several crew mates who pushed it off before it was replaced.
Despite there being enough boats for the entire complement of passengers, people again began to push, shove and shout. When it came to be Stanly's turn, and he loaded in and pushed off with some fifteen others packed tightly into his craft. He was one of the last groups loaded, and by that time had needed to grip a nearby railing to brace himself from the horribly skewed ship and gravity working together against him.
For hours, he and the flotilla of assembled rescue craft listened to wails of children and moans of adults as the boat bit by bit submerged. Its crew members scattered amongst the life rafts talked through radios and shouting to one another, and it became apparent to anyone who would listen, which was everyone, that before blowing the hull, whoever or whatever responsible had also destroyed the emergency long distance transmission system, and that no help had been called. This news was unwise information for the crew to share, for the occupants of the assorted rafts were reaching a breaking point of panicked fever in Stanly's opinion.
It was then that a certain greasy bearded co-occupant of Stanly's raft, who he would soon come to know as Renwick, first spoke to Stanly. “So friend, what do you suppose our odds are here then?” he inquired with an off-putting grin. He spoke close to Stanly's face, and his breath stunk of gin. “Well... we are in a shipping lane. I'm sure you have ears just as good as mine and can tell that rescue isn't coming for us, but certainly someone will happen by if we just stay put” Stanly reasoned, as much to comfort himself as to make conversation. The greasy-bearded man nodded and smiled showing straight white teeth, “Aye, true enough. Name's Renwick friend.” Stanly replied “Stanly Pentington. It's good to be of acquaintance. I don't suppose you have a last name Renwick?” “They just call me Renwick friend.” the man replied. Stanly was quite sure he didn't like being called friend by this stranger.
Rescue ships didn't come that evening. Neither did other vessels, and while most of the ragtag flotilla tried to rest, the continued wailing of humanity made that impossible for the lighter sleeping souls, Stanly and Renwick both evidently counting amongst that group.
Deep into the night, with only the moon illuminating the water, Stanly sat awake gazing off deep into the water. The others who remained aware were all lying cramped with the sleepers, sprawled in awkward positions over one another and flailing consciously or otherwise on regular intervals. They reminded Stanly of the fat seals he had once seen in picture books, who sat lazily in colonies stretching for miles along the beach. He had given up on rest and was content to watch water lap again and again against the side of his boat. The water itself was deep beyond sight. It made Stanly feel small. Here he was with several hundred others, the entire lot of them possessing only enough power to crawl across the face of the water at a pace even the tiniest fish below them could match and put to shame. They could see nothing but a horizon and the sky, while from below they must have been vivid specks, visible for miles to the denizens of the deep. They could not see, they could not run, they could not hide. They were as a worm washed up before crows after a sidewalk rainstorm. But were there crows? That thought made Stanly shudder, and as he considered this possibility some corner of his mind fancied that he saw something in the depth over the edge of his boat.
The lines of a vast shadow pranced deep below him. At one moment the darkness appeared formless, and at the next it was as if a great circle of black was slowly ascending from below. He rubbed his weary eyes and smiled to himself at his foolish ideas, but when he looked again the shadow remained. He strained to understand whatever it was, running over possibilities in his mind. A shoal of fish, a drift of plants, the boats themselves casting an image, or just the reflection of light acting strangely with the sea water, it must have been one of those things he told himself. And then he saw its mouth. A great black line stretching from one side to the other, inching closer to the boats, grand enough to swallow the lot of them whole. With a panicked yelp he jumped backwards and sat down. He inched to the edge again and looked, but the shadow had receded. In his ear he heard the words “Sleep friend, sleep” and this time was not quite so unhappy to be called so.
The next day came and went amidst fewer moans and far more mumblings and grumblings. The assembled former passengers and crew mates had resigned themselves to waiting for pickup, and it was during this day that the crew rafted up all of the small lifeboats and divided out the bulky emergency food and supply containers stored on the rafts. They were thickly fortified boxes, each weighing close to 100 pounds between their casing and the food, medicine, and equipment inside. Some conflicts arose, but for the most part people were either too optimistic, too weary, or too stupid to raise a fuss. It was a very hot day, and Stanly found himself sweating often. He wondered what they would do for water were no help to come soon, couldn't provide an answer, and so tried to put the issue out of mind.
Evening fell with the swells beginning to rise higher and with thick dark clouds coalescing on the edges of the Western horizon. The air tensed and from the general hubbub Stanly could tell that people were scared. He certainly was. As the night grew thicker and the light thin, waves began to crash over boats on occasion, and the entire fleet rose and fell on the larger hills of water that would come rushing by. Soon the winds had raged to terrifying speed, churning the water with them, and huge fists of salt and sea pounded the boats. The huddled people in them were plucked by pairs and flung like petals from a flower in a child's hands. As the storm worsened, entire sections of boats were carried off, and Stanly gripped a rope running around the gunnel of his rubber raft as the thing that it was – his life. Each successive wave would make his already numb and barely gripping hands colder, force him to splutter for air, and stick his eyes. Others beside him were not so fortunate, and he watched them be dragged screaming into the depths and out of site. At first he tried to reach out and save those lost to the craft, but quickly his strength was only sufficient to stay aboard. After one brutish wave divested him of three more companions, he looked up to see yet another massive sledge of water crashing towards him. As it struck, the world turned to water, the raft rising in its titanic column. Stanly would have screamed were he able, but instead he only gripped to the guide rope as if his hands were locked in the vice of death. As the boat was flung back downwards, his head struck something hard, and with a flashing of pain Stanly remembered no more.
He awoke to a spinning clear sky. Sitting up dazedly he looked around, and was disturbed to see that all save one of his original companions had vanished. Renwick alone remained, was awake, and was watching him. Stanly looked around the surrounding ocean and it occurred to him that a small raft was really much like a jail cell. By his right ankle lay one of the emergency steel boxes. He glanced around searching for the other three boxes which should have been situated at the bow and mid port and starboard sides of their raft, but the storm had evidently washed them away with the other passengers. Thinking of how many days one fourth of a food supply intended to feed fifteen people for a few days would last himself and Renwick, he began to grow nervous.
It was then that Stanly heard Renwick chuckling. The man's laugh slithered out over his unkempt beard like a gurgle of air escaping a slit throat. It was deep, and made Stanly involuntarily shudder. “Drowned, drowned, the fools I drowned, to win my spot, in clouds soft wound.” rasped Renwick as he rocked back and forth on his haunches, never taking his gaze from Stanly. At this, Stanly's mind began to race. He recalled again the conversation of a crazed man he had overheard between the captain and his doctor, and the account of the ship's radio lines being cut after it mysteriously sprung a great leak. He backed away slowly towards the opposite end of the raft. “A friend he fears, from us he rears, why friend run, our job is done” spat Renwick. This was not the voice Stanly remembered from their first meeting, but rather more frantic and drawn. Seeming to sense Stanly's thoughts, Renwick smiled and winked at him, then lay back on the opposite end of the boat, closing his eyes, and moving towards sleep.
His heart pounding now, Stanly tried to breathe and take stock of the situation. He floated to who knew where an unknown distance from his original course, he had food at least for a few weeks, no idea how or when rescue might come, and a potentially unstable companion. He was hungry now, and so reached for a first meager meal of dried vegetables, their powdery taste wicking the moisture from his mouth. This reminded him of his need for clean water. Digging quickly through the emergency bin, he sighed in relief as he found iodine tablets and a salt filter at its bottom. There certainly were no cups, but he would make due with the discarded wrappers of the food. It took him some forty minutes while Renwick slept to pump his first drink of clean water since the ships sinking, and the feel of cold refreshment coursing down his throat was sublime. Next Stanly surveyed in greater detail what had been provided by the raft's planners. A manner of further dried vegetables, with complementing fruit lay before him, and besides those what appeared to be some form of gravy mix and deyhydrated potatoes. It was nothing special, but would have to do for now. Surveying the limited supplies, a certain partial solution to his problems insinuated itself into his mind; one man would have more food. Shocked at his own baseness, Stanly shoved the idea aside as best he could; he was a civilized man and would take part in no such evils.
The rest of the day passed to the smooth rhythm of waves rocking the boat as ceaseless rays of light bounced off the surrounding water and the two men. Renwick would roll over periodically, and sometimes awoke and quietly watched Stanly, but the man spoke no more. Night set, and now Renwick was more alert. Stanly tried to make himself comfortable and to sleep, but again found it difficult, especially now with Renwick up to god knew what. Finally he slipped away into repose, and that night he thought he dreamed of dark creatures slipping through unseen depths.
The next day passed in much the same style. Renwick had begun to continually mutter things to himself just below audible level. Occasionally Stanly picked out references to drowning and death. He tried to engage Renwick in some kind of conversation, trying to get some explanation or even a foothold of truth towards who his companion was, but was continually rebuffed, his questions serving only to intensify the cadence of Renwick's inaudible drone. Three times that day they took turns pumping water, and act that for one reason or another brought comfort to Stanly, and supped in near silence on their fruits and vegetables. By now the sun had well burnt the two mens' skins. There was nothing to be done about it hoping his shirt provided a fine barrier, and so Stanly consigned himself to being cooked like a lobster. He wondered if whatever he had seen in the deep would like that were he to drown out there.
The week passed much in kind, Stanly worrying about the future, Renwick making him uneasy, and both keeping close watch on the other as well as the horizon, hoping to see some ship, some salvation, but never being rewarded for their wait. Stanly had been resting poorly and was growing weary, the energy drained from his body just as much by the inescapable heat as by his restlessness. He couldn't recall when it started, but several days after their wreck, Stanly had begun to notice more of Renwick's small mannerisms. Each time the man took a bite of food, he would smack his lips, and he chewed like an elephant with a mouthful of grass, not bothering to close his mouth. Every bite he took came with another smack, and the popping noise was as unavoidable as the sun to Stanly. It bothered Stanly to no end. Renwick also would not sit still. While he muttered, he would gesticulate constantly, and twitch his head side to side in his way. When Stanly was forced to urinate or relieve his bowels, Renwick would rarely look away.
The time of the wait itself was beginning to get to Stanly as well. Back home, he had always had something to do. At work he moved towards a goal, finding a new project just as an old portfolio or transaction had been dealt with, and at home he busied himself reading and raising children throughout the day. Here, there was little that could be done save gaze at the horizon and fear Renwick. He would try to make an hour pass by counting as many ridges along a wave as possible before it merged with another, imagining scenes of his old life, and memorizing the thin crevasses and details of his raft, but in the end each minute composed an eternity and the only severance to the monotony was Renwick's infuriating habits, which had themselves come to be expected.
Five days more slipped by, and it became evident that the food supply was dwindling. Of the original stash, the two men had worked through well more than half, and it became quite clear to Stanly that they may run out before rescue. He put his hand to his brow in frustration, sliding the other around his now thick stubble and twisting his head. He wanted to scream or hit something, but that would waste energy and only make him hotter in the endless rays.
Another six days passed, and on the seventh, Renwick was past being an antsy creature caged on the water, and was now closer to an active volcano. His charred, red and flaking skin certainly looked the part at least. It was that dusk as the sun and its damned heat began to flee him that he was startled to hear Renwick speak. The man's speech was now more regular than it had been since the first time they met. “Friend, how are you faring” inquired Renwick. “Well you can pretty damn well see can't you now my silent partner.” Stanly was incensed with the other's idiosyncratic behavior. “I would just have you know, I sunk the ship” confided Renwick. The way he said this was just as if he were telling the news, and by now Stanly was too worn to mount any reasonable reply. Instead he sat there with his mouth soundlessly flapping.
The next day Stanly gathered the staunchness to reply. He probed “Is that bit you said, about the ship, really true Renwick?” “Yes” replied the man. “You vile fiend, why in blazing hell would you?” “It needed to be done” Renwick retorted. At this Stanly slumped, he truly was in the presence of a lunatic, and what was worse, he had so little to sever the days that it was preferable to entertain him than to say nothing. “If that's so Renwick, why would such a thing need to be done?” “Friend, this place we live in has too many people. They are fat. They are greedy. They want us livin for their goals, for their end. They want us spendin our only resource, life, to keep their own security. My bones told me there was a storm comin, we needed less of them, I did what I did and God will look kindly on me.” Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the grinding sameness of the water, but Stanly wanted to understand Renwick. He had taken his voyage to escape living a molded life, and certainly others had tried to mold it, but... this was madness. “Friend, there is only so much to go around. We pretend to share. We don't. Some take what they will, and the rest believe in manners and place, and die by billions to win some small house off somewhere. There are too many.” With that Renwick was again silent. Stanly pondered his preposterous words, and as dusk fell it occurred to him that Renwick was right. Renwick was so very right, there was too little for everyone.
That night was calm and quiet on the water. As Renwick partook in his nightly ritual of watching Stanly, Stanly returned the act. Hours later, Renwick began to dose, still muttering in his sleep. Possessed by a singularity of purpose, Stanly emptied the remaining half of the his food supply, claimed a short length of rope and a knife from the steel box, and set to work. He gently untied the box from the straps holding it to his raft, and cut an even shorter length of rope free. The anticipation of what he was about to do made his head pound, and the waves around him fuzzed away. All that remained was food, Renwick, a box, some rope, and himself. He tied one end of the rope around a handle of the metal container, and quietly, carefully, crept towards Renwick. The man rolled fitfully over towards him as Stanly crept closer. Now Stanly could hear the in and out rhythm of his breathing, and made out his soft muttering. The words “Drowned. Drowned. Drowned. I...I... Drowned” crept in endless cycles from Renwick as if to confirm Stanly's intentions. Stanly tied the rope around the other man's leg, going slowly and gently so as not to awake Renwick. When he had finished this, his clammy hands slipped backwards shaking.
He crept back across the raft, tensing his muscles for what was to come. He had never been a physically fit man, but now he felt alive and fierce as a lion. In his teeth he clasped the short knife, and with both hands he picked up the steel box now tied to Renwick's leg. The stars and moon cast a thin shadow from his form across the sloshing water as he carried his heavy load over to the boatside near Renwick. He looked over into the black water, and was unsurprised to see the massive dark form he had been waiting for. It's maw stretched dozens of lengths of his boat, some fifty feet down. The crooked bend of its jaw appeared to Stanly to be a great hungry smile. Moments later, he struck. With all of his force, he hurled the box over the side, and as it tugged on Renwick, he grabbed the knife from his mount and slashed it downwards. He raised it again, the blade now soaked in red fluid, and slung it again into his enemy whose hands were now upwards in a vague gesture of defense. Several more times Stanly struck, and then, as Renwick tried limply to fight against the assailant, Stanly grabbed the man by his shoulders, and shoved him towards the water's edge. Renwick, struggling, screaming in some unintelligible form now, grasped madly to the edge of the boat with boat hands as his legs dangled deep into the water. Stanly gave a kick to Renwicks head, and as Renwick thrashed to stay afloat delivered further blows. Renwick struggled like this for some minutes, but as the the water around him grew darker still with his blood, he eventually succumbed and sank. Stanly thought he saw the creature swallow Renwick whole, and retreat. He sat down in the boat, looked at the food scattered across the raft, and began to sob.
For two more weeks Stanly floated alone. He had only enough provisions to eat several morsels a day, and he grew exhausted and emaciated. At night he thought no more of great creatures, and saw the thing no more, but yet he could not sleep. It was not long before he could barely raise himself to the boats edge, and spent the day in complete exhaustion on the floor of his vessel. Ten days in the food ran out, and he could only sit and wait. For four days he did not eat, seeing terrible things, and coming to grips with his doom. He had been wrong to off Renwick, and couldn't understand what drove him to. The creature beneath the sea was pure hysteria.
Some thirty days after the sinking of the boat, Stanly was unsure of the exact date, a ship appeared on the horizon. Stanly rubbed his eyes at first, then lurched hazily to his feet and waved his arms as best he could. The vessel was a large fisher, and tooted a baritone response several minutes later as it approached him. Stanly vaguely perceived being pulled aboard by worried faces come to meet him in a launch, and brought onto the ship. He was given a soft clean bed, asked his name and business, and when it was found that he had been on the sunken passenger ship from the last month, the crewmen were shocked. Seeing his poor condition and already possessing nearly a full haul, their captain called off the fishing trip and set for shore. A day later the fast engines brought them to Stanly's home port. All Stanly could think of was his family, and demanded to see them immediately, but the men instead took him to the hospital, telling him that he had undergone great stress and that it was a marvel he was alive. There he sat in bed waiting, just as he had at sea. The doctor's took his insurance information from the battered wallet still in his dirty clothes, asking him many strange questions that he only partially understood, and came and went.
Later that very day, a nurse asked him if he would take visitors, to which he shook his head affirmatively as best he could. When his children came running in yelling daddy and hugging him and shining their blessed little smiles, he felt like he was home. Moments later, his beautiful wife entered with a deeply concerned expression on her face. She took his hand, leaned close to smell his hair, and kissed him on the forehead. Exuberant and crying, she whispered, “Renwick darling, I never thought I would see you again”.
- - - -
Stanly and the Boat
Stanly Pentington sat in the tingling morning sun with one hand trailing listlessly in the water and the other flopped across his stomach. His body ached, he was hungry, his two boat mates gave him endless shivers while the waves gave him no measure of rest, he hadn't stood on anything more solid than his raft for weeks, land was beyond sight, and something, something he couldn't understand, might be slithering out there in the dark sea. He glanced over the soft swells and valleys of blue water before him, catching a hint of brine and seaweed on the breeze pushing his unshaven hair before his eyes, and began to chuckle. There really was nothing particularly humorous about the situation save its complete lunacy. A year ago he was on solid land, ate solid meals, and slept in an oh so firmly planted bed, and now, now he was alive at least.
As his stomach growled Stanly considered his current predicament. The whole rotten mess had really begun when he stepped onto that damned ship in the first place. No. No that wasn't quite right, this was his own fault. He knew that ships didn't tend to snare men like spiders, and that it is men who pick their own watery webs in which to be stuck. Stanly had chosen his particular snare months before. He had been sitting on a comfortable white chair on a mild summer day. The wind-born scent of grass hailed his nose as he took occasional sips from a deep glass of tea he had had a servant bring him. Inches from his right hand lay a magazine, pregnant with unread ideas, but at that moment Stanly had found it preferable to lie still save for intermittent grasps at his drink. Lying as such, the sun tickled his skin with its warmth. Away in the kitchen of his tasteful country home, Stanly's wife directed yet more servants as they busied themselves making an afternoon lunch. Soon she, Stanly, and their three children, two of which were scampering about the woods playing at rogues and rebels, the other choosing to nap, would happily eat that lunch. Later the children would be sent to bed with a story, and Stanly would have his time alone with Mrs. Pentington. This dance would repeat for the rest of the weekend, until Monday morning shone and Stanly would go back to work in the city. There Stanly labored managing the tidy fortunes of other men, and no one could say that he did that any way less than excellently. Through work he had ensured over the years that he had those things he desired.
As Stanly basked in his chair that afternoon, the devilish thought that his now boat ridden self knew to be doom entered his mind. His life was nearly perfect. He had money, and from money shelter and servants to see to his needs. He had charm and personality, and from these a lovely wife, and from her beautiful children. The steadiness of his career matched the reliability of his home-life, and both were only rivaled in certainty by the two facts that his existence had become boring and that one day he would die.
Stanly became afraid. He considered that on his death bed he would look back and have only those memories of a life lost. He realized that even then, there on his manicured lawn, what he truly possessed was the past, for the future was uncertain. His past, if arranged as a series of tidy paintings, would have been quite a boring art show to attend. Connoisseurs glancing through that gallery would see two sets of paintings reiterated endlessly; privilege and pretty lawns. As a child Stanly's parents were well off, and watched over him carefully as he played in their country abode, as a young man Stanly studied the arts of managing moneys, and in his current state, he enjoyed some mix of the two former scenes. This was not enough.
Stanly wanted to see what lay beyond his narrow upbringing. He wanted to see the giraffes he had read about as a child, the pyramids and ruins he knew sprawled in deserts and jungles about the world. Stanly wanted to hear foreign tongues surround him, to be a stranger and visitor in someone else's tidy world. The thrill of knavery and the ecstasy of facing probable defeat and prevailing were two vivid wines from which Stanly had not so much as sipped, and of sailing, drinking, riding, painting, poetry and more he knew less. What good was his dull warm box he had preserved from the world for some forty and more years without any knowledge of what sat outside of it? Stanly resolved to see things, to leave behind his wife, children and cozy home, if only for a few weeks each year, and to look, really look, for more specimens to augment his little box-display of a life. Preferably by boat.
Stanly was slapped from his reverie by his boat mate Renwick's mutterings. That whole exploring the world thought, especially the last bit about boats, struck Stanly as poor now that he had tried it and it had gone disastrously wrong. Noticing that Stanly had come to, Renwick looked back at him in his odd sideways sort of way. An abnormally skinny white male of about thirty five years, Renwick possessed thick, bushy eyebrows and lanky, spidery legs. He was prone to many tics, an occasional repeated squinting of his eyes and quick, compulsive jerks of his right fist being among them. His hair was thick and black, and even before their boat had sunk and they had been forced into the life rafts, he had grown a greasy unkempt beard and seldom washed or combed his hair. What was worse, there wasn't enough food for the both of them, which left a grisly issue to be sorted out.
Often when he looked at Renwick, Stanly recalled a chilling conversation he had overheard on the vessel. The ship's attending physician and its captain had been speaking in hushed tones as they walked about the upper deck. Naturally curious, Stanly had pretended to continue reading one of his magazines while intently listening. “What in God's name are we going to do about him?” the captain had demanded. Lowering his voice still further, the physician responded “Heavens Charles, I have no idea. His symptoms continue to worsen, he appears now to be slipping further and further from healthy reality. His words are becoming increasingly violent and just as of yesterday the man started rattling off about how he has some divine lended purpose. None of my medicines have done the least for his symptoms, and I haven't the slightest as to what manner of fit he suffers from. We can't exactly continue to let him roam about the ship as he is, but what are we to say if we lock the fellow up?”. “We'll have to think of something if he gets any worse. For now, just keep close watch over him and late me and the first mate know if the situation...” muttering this the captain stopped and looked quickly up at Stanly whose seat was now quite close to the talking pair. “Good afternoon Mr. Pentington. I trust you are enjoying the morning air on our deck?” Although it was quite clear that both parties where aware of the eavesdropping that had been going on, Stanly managed to muster a sheepish response of “Quite Charles.” With that, the physician and captain strode off with a purpose for the lower decks and presumably the privacy of one of their quarters.
By now Stanly was quite sure that they had been discussing Renwick, but was still as uncertain as they had been over what to do about the man. At night, while the ocean's slow rocking lulled Stanly to sleep, Renwick would remain wide-awake watching him. The last thing that Stanly glimpsed would be those two reddened eyes. In the setting sun they seemed to gleam with unnatural hunger, and when he wasn't twitching, Renwick blinked far less than would have been comforting. Stanly's dreams were filled with predatory eyes, and he often wondered how much his companion actually slept at night.
Stanly had never known a combination of terror and excitement like that of the day their ship sunk. One moment he had been restfully asleep, and the next he had awoken with his oddly door open, probably by the ships tremendous list, and people screaming frantically everywhere. A shallow film of water sloshed to and fro across the floor of his cabin, and when his groggy brain realized what was going on, he sat up electrified and fumbled to dress. He observed the water growing deeper, and now wading, made all haste to the stairs along with everyone else from his passenger deck. An immense throng of bodies shoved, tripped and slid up the three flights between him and the top deck. One unfortunate woman fell in her hurry, and Stanly watched her dissapear with a cry beneath cruel rushing feet. No one seemed to even notice, and while Stanly fought briefly to get to her, the pressing throng forced him away and he thought better of it. When he finally surfaced free from the myriad limbs and bodies of the stairwell, he saw the entire deck nearly filled with milling occupants. The sound of hundreds of worried voices asking questions, crying, and shouting reverberated up and down the length of the ship. He saw the captain standing aloft in his elevated bridge, gesturing orders to the crew who were now guiding the women and children on the vessel into life rafts. Wild faced passengers to whom Charles remained imperious clawed at the windows of his bridge while yelling things Stanly could not make out.
Stanly stopped another passenger by grabbing and swinging around his leather sleeve. The man was just as scared as he, and when asked what in the holy fuck was going on, responded “Captain says someone blew a piece of the hull somehow. Wouldn't say no more.” Hearing this Stanly felt his stomach turn over a few times before regaining composure. The ship had now began to list further sideways, and it became necessary for Stanly to lightly brace his feet as the deck took an incline. The self inflating escape boats the crew were rapidly unloading from their storage compartments were first filled with a small complement of people and then lowered by great white painted cranes along the deck and into the water. Each boat was assigned several crew mates who pushed it off before it was replaced.
Despite there being enough boats for the entire complement of passengers, people again began to push, shove and shout. When it came to be Stanly's turn, and he loaded in and pushed off with some fifteen others packed tightly into his craft. He was one of the last groups loaded, and by that time had needed to grip a nearby railing to brace himself from the horribly skewed ship and gravity working together against him.
For hours, he and the flotilla of assembled rescue craft listened to wails of children and moans of adults as the boat bit by bit submerged. Its crew members scattered amongst the life rafts talked through radios and shouting to one another, and it became apparent to anyone who would listen, which was everyone, that before blowing the hull, whoever or whatever responsible had also destroyed the emergency long distance transmission system, and that no help had been called. This news was unwise information for the crew to share, for the occupants of the assorted rafts were reaching a breaking point of panicked fever in Stanly's opinion.
It was then that a certain greasy bearded co-occupant of Stanly's raft, who he would soon come to know as Renwick, first spoke to Stanly. “So friend, what do you suppose our odds are here then?” he inquired with an off-putting grin. He spoke close to Stanly's face, and his breath stunk of gin. “Well... we are in a shipping lane. I'm sure you have ears just as good as mine and can tell that rescue isn't coming for us, but certainly someone will happen by if we just stay put” Stanly reasoned, as much to comfort himself as to make conversation. The greasy-bearded man nodded and smiled showing straight white teeth, “Aye, true enough. Name's Renwick friend.” Stanly replied “Stanly Pentington. It's good to be of acquaintance. I don't suppose you have a last name Renwick?” “They just call me Renwick friend.” the man replied. Stanly was quite sure he didn't like being called friend by this stranger.
Rescue ships didn't come that evening. Neither did other vessels, and while most of the ragtag flotilla tried to rest, the continued wailing of humanity made that impossible for the lighter sleeping souls, Stanly and Renwick both evidently counting amongst that group.
Deep into the night, with only the moon illuminating the water, Stanly sat awake gazing off deep into the water. The others who remained aware were all lying cramped with the sleepers, sprawled in awkward positions over one another and flailing consciously or otherwise on regular intervals. They reminded Stanly of the fat seals he had once seen in picture books, who sat lazily in colonies stretching for miles along the beach. He had given up on rest and was content to watch water lap again and again against the side of his boat. The water itself was deep beyond sight. It made Stanly feel small. Here he was with several hundred others, the entire lot of them possessing only enough power to crawl across the face of the water at a pace even the tiniest fish below them could match and put to shame. They could see nothing but a horizon and the sky, while from below they must have been vivid specks, visible for miles to the denizens of the deep. They could not see, they could not run, they could not hide. They were as a worm washed up before crows after a sidewalk rainstorm. But were there crows? That thought made Stanly shudder, and as he considered this possibility some corner of his mind fancied that he saw something in the depth over the edge of his boat.
The lines of a vast shadow pranced deep below him. At one moment the darkness appeared formless, and at the next it was as if a great circle of black was slowly ascending from below. He rubbed his weary eyes and smiled to himself at his foolish ideas, but when he looked again the shadow remained. He strained to understand whatever it was, running over possibilities in his mind. A shoal of fish, a drift of plants, the boats themselves casting an image, or just the reflection of light acting strangely with the sea water, it must have been one of those things he told himself. And then he saw its mouth. A great black line stretching from one side to the other, inching closer to the boats, grand enough to swallow the lot of them whole. With a panicked yelp he jumped backwards and sat down. He inched to the edge again and looked, but the shadow had receded. In his ear he heard the words “Sleep friend, sleep” and this time was not quite so unhappy to be called so.
The next day came and went amidst fewer moans and far more mumblings and grumblings. The assembled former passengers and crew mates had resigned themselves to waiting for pickup, and it was during this day that the crew rafted up all of the small lifeboats and divided out the bulky emergency food and supply containers stored on the rafts. They were thickly fortified boxes, each weighing close to 100 pounds between their casing and the food, medicine, and equipment inside. Some conflicts arose, but for the most part people were either too optimistic, too weary, or too stupid to raise a fuss. It was a very hot day, and Stanly found himself sweating often. He wondered what they would do for water were no help to come soon, couldn't provide an answer, and so tried to put the issue out of mind.
Evening fell with the swells beginning to rise higher and with thick dark clouds coalescing on the edges of the Western horizon. The air tensed and from the general hubbub Stanly could tell that people were scared. He certainly was. As the night grew thicker and the light thin, waves began to crash over boats on occasion, and the entire fleet rose and fell on the larger hills of water that would come rushing by. Soon the winds had raged to terrifying speed, churning the water with them, and huge fists of salt and sea pounded the boats. The huddled people in them were plucked by pairs and flung like petals from a flower in a child's hands. As the storm worsened, entire sections of boats were carried off, and Stanly gripped a rope running around the gunnel of his rubber raft as the thing that it was – his life. Each successive wave would make his already numb and barely gripping hands colder, force him to splutter for air, and stick his eyes. Others beside him were not so fortunate, and he watched them be dragged screaming into the depths and out of site. At first he tried to reach out and save those lost to the craft, but quickly his strength was only sufficient to stay aboard. After one brutish wave divested him of three more companions, he looked up to see yet another massive sledge of water crashing towards him. As it struck, the world turned to water, the raft rising in its titanic column. Stanly would have screamed were he able, but instead he only gripped to the guide rope as if his hands were locked in the vice of death. As the boat was flung back downwards, his head struck something hard, and with a flashing of pain Stanly remembered no more.
He awoke to a spinning clear sky. Sitting up dazedly he looked around, and was disturbed to see that all save one of his original companions had vanished. Renwick alone remained, was awake, and was watching him. Stanly looked around the surrounding ocean and it occurred to him that a small raft was really much like a jail cell. By his right ankle lay one of the emergency steel boxes. He glanced around searching for the other three boxes which should have been situated at the bow and mid port and starboard sides of their raft, but the storm had evidently washed them away with the other passengers. Thinking of how many days one fourth of a food supply intended to feed fifteen people for a few days would last himself and Renwick, he began to grow nervous.
It was then that Stanly heard Renwick chuckling. The man's laugh slithered out over his unkempt beard like a gurgle of air escaping a slit throat. It was deep, and made Stanly involuntarily shudder. “Drowned, drowned, the fools I drowned, to win my spot, in clouds soft wound.” rasped Renwick as he rocked back and forth on his haunches, never taking his gaze from Stanly. At this, Stanly's mind began to race. He recalled again the conversation of a crazed man he had overheard between the captain and his doctor, and the account of the ship's radio lines being cut after it mysteriously sprung a great leak. He backed away slowly towards the opposite end of the raft. “A friend he fears, from us he rears, why friend run, our job is done” spat Renwick. This was not the voice Stanly remembered from their first meeting, but rather more frantic and drawn. Seeming to sense Stanly's thoughts, Renwick smiled and winked at him, then lay back on the opposite end of the boat, closing his eyes, and moving towards sleep.
His heart pounding now, Stanly tried to breathe and take stock of the situation. He floated to who knew where an unknown distance from his original course, he had food at least for a few weeks, no idea how or when rescue might come, and a potentially unstable companion. He was hungry now, and so reached for a first meager meal of dried vegetables, their powdery taste wicking the moisture from his mouth. This reminded him of his need for clean water. Digging quickly through the emergency bin, he sighed in relief as he found iodine tablets and a salt filter at its bottom. There certainly were no cups, but he would make due with the discarded wrappers of the food. It took him some forty minutes while Renwick slept to pump his first drink of clean water since the ships sinking, and the feel of cold refreshment coursing down his throat was sublime. Next Stanly surveyed in greater detail what had been provided by the raft's planners. A manner of further dried vegetables, with complementing fruit lay before him, and besides those what appeared to be some form of gravy mix and deyhydrated potatoes. It was nothing special, but would have to do for now. Surveying the limited supplies, a certain partial solution to his problems insinuated itself into his mind; one man would have more food. Shocked at his own baseness, Stanly shoved the idea aside as best he could; he was a civilized man and would take part in no such evils.
The rest of the day passed to the smooth rhythm of waves rocking the boat as ceaseless rays of light bounced off the surrounding water and the two men. Renwick would roll over periodically, and sometimes awoke and quietly watched Stanly, but the man spoke no more. Night set, and now Renwick was more alert. Stanly tried to make himself comfortable and to sleep, but again found it difficult, especially now with Renwick up to god knew what. Finally he slipped away into repose, and that night he thought he dreamed of dark creatures slipping through unseen depths.
The next day passed in much the same style. Renwick had begun to continually mutter things to himself just below audible level. Occasionally Stanly picked out references to drowning and death. He tried to engage Renwick in some kind of conversation, trying to get some explanation or even a foothold of truth towards who his companion was, but was continually rebuffed, his questions serving only to intensify the cadence of Renwick's inaudible drone. Three times that day they took turns pumping water, and act that for one reason or another brought comfort to Stanly, and supped in near silence on their fruits and vegetables. By now the sun had well burnt the two mens' skins. There was nothing to be done about it hoping his shirt provided a fine barrier, and so Stanly consigned himself to being cooked like a lobster. He wondered if whatever he had seen in the deep would like that were he to drown out there.
The week passed much in kind, Stanly worrying about the future, Renwick making him uneasy, and both keeping close watch on the other as well as the horizon, hoping to see some ship, some salvation, but never being rewarded for their wait. Stanly had been resting poorly and was growing weary, the energy drained from his body just as much by the inescapable heat as by his restlessness. He couldn't recall when it started, but several days after their wreck, Stanly had begun to notice more of Renwick's small mannerisms. Each time the man took a bite of food, he would smack his lips, and he chewed like an elephant with a mouthful of grass, not bothering to close his mouth. Every bite he took came with another smack, and the popping noise was as unavoidable as the sun to Stanly. It bothered Stanly to no end. Renwick also would not sit still. While he muttered, he would gesticulate constantly, and twitch his head side to side in his way. When Stanly was forced to urinate or relieve his bowels, Renwick would rarely look away.
The time of the wait itself was beginning to get to Stanly as well. Back home, he had always had something to do. At work he moved towards a goal, finding a new project just as an old portfolio or transaction had been dealt with, and at home he busied himself reading and raising children throughout the day. Here, there was little that could be done save gaze at the horizon and fear Renwick. He would try to make an hour pass by counting as many ridges along a wave as possible before it merged with another, imagining scenes of his old life, and memorizing the thin crevasses and details of his raft, but in the end each minute composed an eternity and the only severance to the monotony was Renwick's infuriating habits, which had themselves come to be expected.
Five days more slipped by, and it became evident that the food supply was dwindling. Of the original stash, the two men had worked through well more than half, and it became quite clear to Stanly that they may run out before rescue. He put his hand to his brow in frustration, sliding the other around his now thick stubble and twisting his head. He wanted to scream or hit something, but that would waste energy and only make him hotter in the endless rays.
Another six days passed, and on the seventh, Renwick was past being an antsy creature caged on the water, and was now closer to an active volcano. His charred, red and flaking skin certainly looked the part at least. It was that dusk as the sun and its damned heat began to flee him that he was startled to hear Renwick speak. The man's speech was now more regular than it had been since the first time they met. “Friend, how are you faring” inquired Renwick. “Well you can pretty damn well see can't you now my silent partner.” Stanly was incensed with the other's idiosyncratic behavior. “I would just have you know, I sunk the ship” confided Renwick. The way he said this was just as if he were telling the news, and by now Stanly was too worn to mount any reasonable reply. Instead he sat there with his mouth soundlessly flapping.
The next day Stanly gathered the staunchness to reply. He probed “Is that bit you said, about the ship, really true Renwick?” “Yes” replied the man. “You vile fiend, why in blazing hell would you?” “It needed to be done” Renwick retorted. At this Stanly slumped, he truly was in the presence of a lunatic, and what was worse, he had so little to sever the days that it was preferable to entertain him than to say nothing. “If that's so Renwick, why would such a thing need to be done?” “Friend, this place we live in has too many people. They are fat. They are greedy. They want us livin for their goals, for their end. They want us spendin our only resource, life, to keep their own security. My bones told me there was a storm comin, we needed less of them, I did what I did and God will look kindly on me.” Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the grinding sameness of the water, but Stanly wanted to understand Renwick. He had taken his voyage to escape living a molded life, and certainly others had tried to mold it, but... this was madness. “Friend, there is only so much to go around. We pretend to share. We don't. Some take what they will, and the rest believe in manners and place, and die by billions to win some small house off somewhere. There are too many.” With that Renwick was again silent. Stanly pondered his preposterous words, and as dusk fell it occurred to him that Renwick was right. Renwick was so very right, there was too little for everyone.
That night was calm and quiet on the water. As Renwick partook in his nightly ritual of watching Stanly, Stanly returned the act. Hours later, Renwick began to dose, still muttering in his sleep. Possessed by a singularity of purpose, Stanly emptied the remaining half of the his food supply, claimed a short length of rope and a knife from the steel box, and set to work. He gently untied the box from the straps holding it to his raft, and cut an even shorter length of rope free. The anticipation of what he was about to do made his head pound, and the waves around him fuzzed away. All that remained was food, Renwick, a box, some rope, and himself. He tied one end of the rope around a handle of the metal container, and quietly, carefully, crept towards Renwick. The man rolled fitfully over towards him as Stanly crept closer. Now Stanly could hear the in and out rhythm of his breathing, and made out his soft muttering. The words “Drowned. Drowned. Drowned. I...I... Drowned” crept in endless cycles from Renwick as if to confirm Stanly's intentions. Stanly tied the rope around the other man's leg, going slowly and gently so as not to awake Renwick. When he had finished this, his clammy hands slipped backwards shaking.
He crept back across the raft, tensing his muscles for what was to come. He had never been a physically fit man, but now he felt alive and fierce as a lion. In his teeth he clasped the short knife, and with both hands he picked up the steel box now tied to Renwick's leg. The stars and moon cast a thin shadow from his form across the sloshing water as he carried his heavy load over to the boatside near Renwick. He looked over into the black water, and was unsurprised to see the massive dark form he had been waiting for. It's maw stretched dozens of lengths of his boat, some fifty feet down. The crooked bend of its jaw appeared to Stanly to be a great hungry smile. Moments later, he struck. With all of his force, he hurled the box over the side, and as it tugged on Renwick, he grabbed the knife from his mount and slashed it downwards. He raised it again, the blade now soaked in red fluid, and slung it again into his enemy whose hands were now upwards in a vague gesture of defense. Several more times Stanly struck, and then, as Renwick tried limply to fight against the assailant, Stanly grabbed the man by his shoulders, and shoved him towards the water's edge. Renwick, struggling, screaming in some unintelligible form now, grasped madly to the edge of the boat with boat hands as his legs dangled deep into the water. Stanly gave a kick to Renwicks head, and as Renwick thrashed to stay afloat delivered further blows. Renwick struggled like this for some minutes, but as the the water around him grew darker still with his blood, he eventually succumbed and sank. Stanly thought he saw the creature swallow Renwick whole, and retreat. He sat down in the boat, looked at the food scattered across the raft, and began to sob.
For two more weeks Stanly floated alone. He had only enough provisions to eat several morsels a day, and he grew exhausted and emaciated. At night he thought no more of great creatures, and saw the thing no more, but yet he could not sleep. It was not long before he could barely raise himself to the boats edge, and spent the day in complete exhaustion on the floor of his vessel. Ten days in the food ran out, and he could only sit and wait. For four days he did not eat, seeing terrible things, and coming to grips with his doom. He had been wrong to off Renwick, and couldn't understand what drove him to. The creature beneath the sea was pure hysteria.
Some thirty days after the sinking of the boat, Stanly was unsure of the exact date, a ship appeared on the horizon. Stanly rubbed his eyes at first, then lurched hazily to his feet and waved his arms as best he could. The vessel was a large fisher, and tooted a baritone response several minutes later as it approached him. Stanly vaguely perceived being pulled aboard by worried faces come to meet him in a launch, and brought onto the ship. He was given a soft clean bed, asked his name and business, and when it was found that he had been on the sunken passenger ship from the last month, the crewmen were shocked. Seeing his poor condition and already possessing nearly a full haul, their captain called off the fishing trip and set for shore. A day later the fast engines brought them to Stanly's home port. All Stanly could think of was his family, and demanded to see them immediately, but the men instead took him to the hospital, telling him that he had undergone great stress and that it was a marvel he was alive. There he sat in bed waiting, just as he had at sea. The doctor's took his insurance information from the battered wallet still in his dirty clothes, asking him many strange questions that he only partially understood, and came and went.
Later that very day, a nurse asked him if he would take visitors, to which he shook his head affirmatively as best he could. When his children came running in yelling daddy and hugging him and shining their blessed little smiles, he felt like he was home. Moments later, his beautiful wife entered with a deeply concerned expression on her face. She took his hand, leaned close to smell his hair, and kissed him on the forehead. Exuberant and crying, she whispered, “Renwick darling, I never thought I would see you again”.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Why the news will give puppies cancer and generally rain unpleasent doom on the world
I've recently come of the opinion that our democracy is hosed. The goose is cooked, the acorns thoroughly burnt, all has been said, and everything has been done; it's curtains.
Ok enough of that. Hopefully I've won your attention my fine reader. I embellished a bit above, but daily a potential trend towards our undoing does grow unchecked. We aren't providing good news information to Americans and few care. The essential problem lies with media outlets who profess to be news agencies and really are opinion mills. Jon Stewart and a few others harp on this point on a semi-regular basis, and you should watch Stewart's interview on Crossfire if you would like to see harping well done in the face of opposition.(Which if squirrely for some youtubes, you can find here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE)
As for me, while I had heard this point numerous times, I discounted it as a threat until several days ago. Fox News did a segment on the inefficiencies of the US Postal Service. They assembled a panel to create a 'debate' around the issue. Their primary speaker was some slimy sounding pundit who evoked nationalistic racist tendencies against Africans to support his point. He also suggested that we ought to privatize operations like homeland security entirely. Engaging the privatized security debate here would be bulky and distracting, but I hope we can agree that racist rhetoric has no place in news, opinion, or any other legitimate attempt to suggest policy. (If squirrelier still, you may find it here. Bonus, the title is a pun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi19yLcGk8c&feature=player_embedded)
The panel agreed, and spent much of the discussion speaking briefly to support an attack on the USPS, and then arguing about how racist his statements were. One panel member, senator D'Amato, openly roasted the racist rhetoric and made the video quite popular. While the most interesting thing about the segment was seeing a pundit ripped up like a piñata, it also eerily reminded me of something else.
A debate happened, an appearance of two sides was created, and both of them supported one agenda. One opinion came across as quite radical, and the others as moderate by comparison. Glenn Beck, a popular commentator on Fox, released a ghost penned novel called The Overton Window this June. The fictional book details a world in which a political ideology based on the theory “The Overton Window" runs rampant. The theory states more or less that a certain range of views are acceptable in any given political dialogue. The corollary to this, and the one that the book interests itself with, is that extreme views expressed frequently shift the window. A quick wikipedia search yields that the theory is an actual one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window. The Fox segment was doing what Glenn Beck suggested.
This alone would hardly be cause for concern. From what I have seen though, Fox constantly misstates critical facts, makes highly opinionated and partisan arguments, and generally supports a determinate agenda. Certainly some of this is not labeled as News, but people take it that way. In the USPS segment alone, large portions of information were equivocated, such as the USPS needing to deliver to areas that private firms can charge higher rates for, or that various private firms even looked into using USPS as a cost saving measure to ship non-profitable items. People take this so called news as their reality, and believe strongly that what they hear is the truth.
Think to the debates surrounding creationism vs. evolution in textbooks. Without engaging the discussion itself, we still know that it was often ugly and that resolutions were difficult to find. The core problem was that the two sides were operating under fundamentally different premises; their conceptions of the world were different. Now imagine if someone could actively mold people's core beliefs. What if their entire political and world view was informed by a deliberately constructed narrative. This is where we are headed.
Before we blame Fox as the source of all evil, we should note that they are hardly alone. Liberal outlets like the Huffington post and MSNBC are well enough known for biased coverage. Just go to Huffpost and look at the pictures and headlines they use, you will find the images of those politicians they do not favor to be quite ugly. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/. Fox is just a juicier target because they put up all appearances of intentionally telling a partisan story and cut more corners with the facts.
These media outlets alone are not the root cause of the problem. As long as wealthy interests have an incentive to build narratives in the news, and a means to do so, they are going to. If we cut down Fox somehow, a new hydra would spring up eventually. I believe firmly that we can't have much of a representative democracy at all if people don't have good information. When their truth is corporate truth, their votes are corporate votes, and we begin catering to the fattest wallet instead of the people's interests.
This is a dialogue that demands immediate attention. As a starting point I would advocate a greater focus on discerning good information from bad information in schools, and some basic legal requirements for news stations. As I understand it, there are few now. We could for example place fines in cases of chronic fact-check failure for major outlets, or label news like we label our delicious, sometimes healthy, breakfast cereal. If these solutions seem contrived and doomed to failure, that is partially because the system itself is awkward and in a position where solutions are difficult. Regardless of what action we take, we must do something. If we don't solve this pollution of our society's basic political awareness, it will soon solve us.
Ok enough of that. Hopefully I've won your attention my fine reader. I embellished a bit above, but daily a potential trend towards our undoing does grow unchecked. We aren't providing good news information to Americans and few care. The essential problem lies with media outlets who profess to be news agencies and really are opinion mills. Jon Stewart and a few others harp on this point on a semi-regular basis, and you should watch Stewart's interview on Crossfire if you would like to see harping well done in the face of opposition.(Which if squirrely for some youtubes, you can find here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE)
As for me, while I had heard this point numerous times, I discounted it as a threat until several days ago. Fox News did a segment on the inefficiencies of the US Postal Service. They assembled a panel to create a 'debate' around the issue. Their primary speaker was some slimy sounding pundit who evoked nationalistic racist tendencies against Africans to support his point. He also suggested that we ought to privatize operations like homeland security entirely. Engaging the privatized security debate here would be bulky and distracting, but I hope we can agree that racist rhetoric has no place in news, opinion, or any other legitimate attempt to suggest policy. (If squirrelier still, you may find it here. Bonus, the title is a pun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi19yLcGk8c&feature=player_embedded)
The panel agreed, and spent much of the discussion speaking briefly to support an attack on the USPS, and then arguing about how racist his statements were. One panel member, senator D'Amato, openly roasted the racist rhetoric and made the video quite popular. While the most interesting thing about the segment was seeing a pundit ripped up like a piñata, it also eerily reminded me of something else.
A debate happened, an appearance of two sides was created, and both of them supported one agenda. One opinion came across as quite radical, and the others as moderate by comparison. Glenn Beck, a popular commentator on Fox, released a ghost penned novel called The Overton Window this June. The fictional book details a world in which a political ideology based on the theory “The Overton Window" runs rampant. The theory states more or less that a certain range of views are acceptable in any given political dialogue. The corollary to this, and the one that the book interests itself with, is that extreme views expressed frequently shift the window. A quick wikipedia search yields that the theory is an actual one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window. The Fox segment was doing what Glenn Beck suggested.
This alone would hardly be cause for concern. From what I have seen though, Fox constantly misstates critical facts, makes highly opinionated and partisan arguments, and generally supports a determinate agenda. Certainly some of this is not labeled as News, but people take it that way. In the USPS segment alone, large portions of information were equivocated, such as the USPS needing to deliver to areas that private firms can charge higher rates for, or that various private firms even looked into using USPS as a cost saving measure to ship non-profitable items. People take this so called news as their reality, and believe strongly that what they hear is the truth.
Think to the debates surrounding creationism vs. evolution in textbooks. Without engaging the discussion itself, we still know that it was often ugly and that resolutions were difficult to find. The core problem was that the two sides were operating under fundamentally different premises; their conceptions of the world were different. Now imagine if someone could actively mold people's core beliefs. What if their entire political and world view was informed by a deliberately constructed narrative. This is where we are headed.
Before we blame Fox as the source of all evil, we should note that they are hardly alone. Liberal outlets like the Huffington post and MSNBC are well enough known for biased coverage. Just go to Huffpost and look at the pictures and headlines they use, you will find the images of those politicians they do not favor to be quite ugly. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/. Fox is just a juicier target because they put up all appearances of intentionally telling a partisan story and cut more corners with the facts.
These media outlets alone are not the root cause of the problem. As long as wealthy interests have an incentive to build narratives in the news, and a means to do so, they are going to. If we cut down Fox somehow, a new hydra would spring up eventually. I believe firmly that we can't have much of a representative democracy at all if people don't have good information. When their truth is corporate truth, their votes are corporate votes, and we begin catering to the fattest wallet instead of the people's interests.
This is a dialogue that demands immediate attention. As a starting point I would advocate a greater focus on discerning good information from bad information in schools, and some basic legal requirements for news stations. As I understand it, there are few now. We could for example place fines in cases of chronic fact-check failure for major outlets, or label news like we label our delicious, sometimes healthy, breakfast cereal. If these solutions seem contrived and doomed to failure, that is partially because the system itself is awkward and in a position where solutions are difficult. Regardless of what action we take, we must do something. If we don't solve this pollution of our society's basic political awareness, it will soon solve us.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Journal - August 15
Why geeks are in general better
I'm told that that this term geekdom refers to those possessing of deeply set interests in random topics. Look it up on urban dictionary if you don't believe me. Actually don't do that, it completely undermines my point, but that's not important now is it.
What does matter, is that geeks are in general better. For one thing, they tend to be literally better at things. Who wants to be around a bunch of people with only healthy interest in normal subjects. Did anyone ever compose great masterpieces without obsession, bring audiences to tears with a perfectly balanced life, or brand by sheer force of language ideas into our minds that will never be erased with only passing interest? Mozart - probably never left his study, Socrates - stared blankly off into space for hours - willingly accepted a death verdict for his ideas, Picasso - let's not even start.
On a more practical level, the geeks of the world, to me are just more interesting. I'll go into depth more on the subject another time, but suffice it to say that we can talk about ideas or we can talk about objects and things. Most conversations are the latter, and so many of these are the same. It doesn't matter whether we discuss Nascar, Wine and Cheese, or South Park if the same descriptive phrases and emotions are being expressed with only a swap of the nouns connecting their respective adjectives. Sure small talk can be jolly swell, but if you want to break the mold, the easiest way will almost always be to find some geek and ask them about their favorite subject. Unhealthy fascinations breed more than just 'book good, author good, prose good' and 'show good, joke good, surprise good' like none other.
Also - people being excited about their stuff contracts through a conversation like zombie bites in a crowded city. Sure we can spend our time kibitzing about the regulars, and listening to explanations of the same old things that have been repackaged and resold countless times so as to cast their teller in a fashionably positive light, but without genuine enthusiasm all of these stories feel hollow to me at least. I don't care what people talk about; I just want their eyes to light up and their smiles, their real honest grins, to let me know that they are interested. It's just less dull.
Take HDstarcraft. A guy who just loves video games posts commentaries on all things related to Starcraft II on a Youtube channel by that name. You can find it here if interested: http://www.youtube.com/user/hdstarcraft?blend=2&ob=4. A year ago, his videos were grossing maybe 1k hits each. About five months ago, the page exploded, and now everything he posts receives 100k+ views. Starcraft itself is hardly that interesting, and there are countless other pages much like his that have failed to become popular. I believe it is hardly content that brings viewers slobbering by the masses to his page, but his attitude. Even if you are not a Starcraft, or even video game fan, I recommend that you go watch a few minutes of one of his videos. It should be easy to tell that he is pleased to be commentating. His attitude reflects itself in more ways than just with a happy voice though; his attention to detail and general obsession for Starcraft lead him to spew forth gems of wisdom like some kind of free wisdom gem spewing super-geyser. Much of what he says takes on relevance to our shared struggles to improve and our mutual triumph in achievement. Concepts like this would never be communicated so honestly and so simply by anyone without a consuming, brain eating, unquenchable sense of geekdom like his.
I take from HDSC and all the other fanatics I have met of late that balance is overrated. We aren't breaking any new ground without rabid commitment, and we certainly are not spending the majority of our time doing what we enjoy without it. Everyone has some geek in them, and most nourish it to some extent. Do it more. Geeks are in general better.
I'm told that that this term geekdom refers to those possessing of deeply set interests in random topics. Look it up on urban dictionary if you don't believe me. Actually don't do that, it completely undermines my point, but that's not important now is it.
What does matter, is that geeks are in general better. For one thing, they tend to be literally better at things. Who wants to be around a bunch of people with only healthy interest in normal subjects. Did anyone ever compose great masterpieces without obsession, bring audiences to tears with a perfectly balanced life, or brand by sheer force of language ideas into our minds that will never be erased with only passing interest? Mozart - probably never left his study, Socrates - stared blankly off into space for hours - willingly accepted a death verdict for his ideas, Picasso - let's not even start.
On a more practical level, the geeks of the world, to me are just more interesting. I'll go into depth more on the subject another time, but suffice it to say that we can talk about ideas or we can talk about objects and things. Most conversations are the latter, and so many of these are the same. It doesn't matter whether we discuss Nascar, Wine and Cheese, or South Park if the same descriptive phrases and emotions are being expressed with only a swap of the nouns connecting their respective adjectives. Sure small talk can be jolly swell, but if you want to break the mold, the easiest way will almost always be to find some geek and ask them about their favorite subject. Unhealthy fascinations breed more than just 'book good, author good, prose good' and 'show good, joke good, surprise good' like none other.
Also - people being excited about their stuff contracts through a conversation like zombie bites in a crowded city. Sure we can spend our time kibitzing about the regulars, and listening to explanations of the same old things that have been repackaged and resold countless times so as to cast their teller in a fashionably positive light, but without genuine enthusiasm all of these stories feel hollow to me at least. I don't care what people talk about; I just want their eyes to light up and their smiles, their real honest grins, to let me know that they are interested. It's just less dull.
Take HDstarcraft. A guy who just loves video games posts commentaries on all things related to Starcraft II on a Youtube channel by that name. You can find it here if interested: http://www.youtube.com/user/hdstarcraft?blend=2&ob=4. A year ago, his videos were grossing maybe 1k hits each. About five months ago, the page exploded, and now everything he posts receives 100k+ views. Starcraft itself is hardly that interesting, and there are countless other pages much like his that have failed to become popular. I believe it is hardly content that brings viewers slobbering by the masses to his page, but his attitude. Even if you are not a Starcraft, or even video game fan, I recommend that you go watch a few minutes of one of his videos. It should be easy to tell that he is pleased to be commentating. His attitude reflects itself in more ways than just with a happy voice though; his attention to detail and general obsession for Starcraft lead him to spew forth gems of wisdom like some kind of free wisdom gem spewing super-geyser. Much of what he says takes on relevance to our shared struggles to improve and our mutual triumph in achievement. Concepts like this would never be communicated so honestly and so simply by anyone without a consuming, brain eating, unquenchable sense of geekdom like his.
I take from HDSC and all the other fanatics I have met of late that balance is overrated. We aren't breaking any new ground without rabid commitment, and we certainly are not spending the majority of our time doing what we enjoy without it. Everyone has some geek in them, and most nourish it to some extent. Do it more. Geeks are in general better.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Journal - August 14
Why Alaska Airlines is Blowing It
Today I took a two-part flight from San Francisco to Seattle, ran into a Whitman student in the bathroom of an airport in Oakland, met someone from Iowa, had an above average ham sandwich, and decided that Alaska Airlines is the devil.
Ok maybe that's an exaggeration, but how can they be forgiven for the woe that their airport lines sow?
There I was, early for my flight, bright-eyed for Seattle, ready to go through a short line and board my plane. To my side were Kiosks, unlabeled, which I chose to ignore as I had a bag to check. The line took surprisingly long, as periodically the two clerks managing the 40 waiting persons would shout out the name of a party, and that group would cut to the front and receive service. As I got to the very front, the line slowed even more. Hoards of people had their names called in turn behind me, and I continued to patiently wait. As even more were summoned, I would have been quite irritated were it not for the pretty girl just ahead in line who kept smiling at me in a pain-sharing sort of way.
This travesty of a queue continued as detailed for another 10 minutes before a clerk finally had the decency to look up and mention that they were calling the other parties because they had gotten their tickets at the kiosk.
My mild aggravation was as mighty as an average cow, deep as a pond, and fiery as bell peppers. How dare they!! Not only was there no official recognition of this system to let flyers know what they were missing out on, but the marginal time saved by electronic check-in was more than erased by having to wait for the called persons to hear their call, and awkwardly bustle through the entire line, cutting everyone.
I wanted to complain but didn't feel quite adamant enough to say anything. I wanted to throw my bags down in light disgust, but that would serve no purpose. I wanted to voice my disapproval, letting ring clear the resonating notes of truth and justice across that fetid swamp of ignorance and bureaucracy embodied in the clerk smirking before me, but that would create a small outcry. My voice was trapped by the non-severity of Alaska's transgression as was my body by their oppressive line-system. Alaska, let it be known that you, of all airlines, are doing it wrong.
Today I took a two-part flight from San Francisco to Seattle, ran into a Whitman student in the bathroom of an airport in Oakland, met someone from Iowa, had an above average ham sandwich, and decided that Alaska Airlines is the devil.
Ok maybe that's an exaggeration, but how can they be forgiven for the woe that their airport lines sow?
There I was, early for my flight, bright-eyed for Seattle, ready to go through a short line and board my plane. To my side were Kiosks, unlabeled, which I chose to ignore as I had a bag to check. The line took surprisingly long, as periodically the two clerks managing the 40 waiting persons would shout out the name of a party, and that group would cut to the front and receive service. As I got to the very front, the line slowed even more. Hoards of people had their names called in turn behind me, and I continued to patiently wait. As even more were summoned, I would have been quite irritated were it not for the pretty girl just ahead in line who kept smiling at me in a pain-sharing sort of way.
This travesty of a queue continued as detailed for another 10 minutes before a clerk finally had the decency to look up and mention that they were calling the other parties because they had gotten their tickets at the kiosk.
My mild aggravation was as mighty as an average cow, deep as a pond, and fiery as bell peppers. How dare they!! Not only was there no official recognition of this system to let flyers know what they were missing out on, but the marginal time saved by electronic check-in was more than erased by having to wait for the called persons to hear their call, and awkwardly bustle through the entire line, cutting everyone.
I wanted to complain but didn't feel quite adamant enough to say anything. I wanted to throw my bags down in light disgust, but that would serve no purpose. I wanted to voice my disapproval, letting ring clear the resonating notes of truth and justice across that fetid swamp of ignorance and bureaucracy embodied in the clerk smirking before me, but that would create a small outcry. My voice was trapped by the non-severity of Alaska's transgression as was my body by their oppressive line-system. Alaska, let it be known that you, of all airlines, are doing it wrong.
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