Let X=X

tonithegreat @ 2024-09-04T18:59:00

2024-09-04T22:59:20Z

tonithegreat @ 2024-09-01T19:32:00

2024-09-01T23:32:09Z

Southern Red

2024-09-01T23:00:57Z

LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Kuchisabishii - Week 5

2022-04-09T03:17:15Z

Janie sighed and took her hair down from the ponytail she typically wore. She closed the lid of her laptop, taking a moment of joy in the collection of stickers she had spangled across it, before considering again the videoconference she just finished and searching the room with her eyes for a hairbrush.

Ugh. She didn’t want to admit it, but she felt nervous. She was, in fact, definitely afraid of Mx. K, which was not auspicious. As it turned out, Mx. K was not anything like the work-study scholarship sponsor that Janie had expected based on the application she responded to. Outside her dormitory window, Janie could see the breeze shifting the branches of the oaks that bordered the edges of the central common area. Storms were expected for the afternoon. She wished she could open the window and let fresh air into the room, but of course, the dorms weren’t designed like that. Students opening windows would throw off the efficiency of the central air and heat. It was almost autumn of 2029, and despite Janie’s recent transition from high school to college, everything was still just a bit dystopian.

And this work-study program she’d signed onto, it might be a whole lot dystopian. But then again it might also be the start of something that felt like a solution to some problems. It was a little bit mind boggling. But it was certainly well funded. Janie’s parents had encouraged her to look for undergraduate research opportunities, and she’d been very excited to find herself rising through the interview process for this opportunity, which looked for all the world like a conservative company throwing some research dollars around on campus, maybe aiming at creating goodwill with the young people that would soon be entering the field. A work study program that paid twenty-five dollars an hour created a lot of goodwill.

It had been couched as an opportunity to help gather and analyze data in ongoing psychological and sociological research. The vetting process for candidates had been rigorous, and before the last round of interviews, the candidates had been asked to sign very robust nondisclosure agreements, which had been a bit of a red flag for Janie. On the other hand, Koch Smith Kuchi Kline checked out as a big name biotech firm that did all kinds of research and one that was particularly active on her campus, even endowing a chair in the biochemistry department. The chair they endowed even deigned to teach an undergrad course each semester. And it was a popular course. Maybe the company really was all sunshine and rainbows. Maybe they were going to solve some significant part of the clinical depression epidemic that was plaguing the nation. Maybe they were just extra careful. Maybe they needed to be.

***

Ben Donegal was frustrated and exhausted and had too much to do. He reached for the styrofoam package on the far corner of his second desk and then stopped himself. Why, oh why had he gone to lunch with his team? Yes, he liked his current team a lot. Yes, things seemed to be running pretty smoothly these days, if at a fairly breakneck pace. It was the late 2020s, though. What else could you expect at a state environmental agency.

Unfortunately, Ben felt that he couldn’t trust himself around food. He knew that he loved it too much. And then he felt miserable worrying that his colleagues were noticing him loving it too much and just generally obsessing about it. The very faint good smell of the leftovers was enough to pull his mind away from the complex problem in front of him.

Why had they gone to Main Street Meats? Why had Cari ordered the pork rind appetizer, acted like she loved it and then insisted on packaging over half of it up? She claimed to have enjoyed the fresh fried airy crunch, but then she only ate one of the oversized rinds- claiming that she was saving room for her big salad with the pile of brisket on top. She’d insisted on sharing the rinds around the table, but it turned out that only Cari and Ben liked them. Pork rinds were one of those texturally polarizing foods. Also a food that people probably didn’t enjoy listening to other people eat. Cari had remained oblivious to these concerns through lunch, though. She lacked guilt just like a skinny person would. Ben shifted in his big old office chair and grimaced as he felt the mechanism on the left side of the chair grinding again. There were so many things to feel guilty about that skinny people and normal sized people just didn’t understand.

He forced himself to stop thinking about how good it would feel to crunch into the remaining pork rinds in the package, one after another. There were two hours left in the workday. His belly should have felt full after the lunch he’d enjoyed just a couple of hours ago. He did not need to snack. And even if he did need to snack, he could wait until almost everyone else had gone home for the day, so not to burden them with his crunching. He could do this.

He needed to figure out how to allocate about thirty emails worth of work that were sitting open on the screen in front of him. It was frustrating because his team was already all feeling overworked. And each one of them had their own good reasons to be stressed. Ben prided himself on being the glue that held a strong team together. His job title did not list him as a writer for the press office, but rather as the administrative assistant for the small department. He’d never finished his degree, so his chances for rising higher were squashed. But Ben had stuck with the agency for almost 20 years now, and knew better than the younger writers how the agency worked and what was expected by the various higher-ups. He could put the right people on the right projects. At least he could when his team had enough people to cover everything that needed to be covered. He might have to talk to his team-lead about how to allocate some of what was sitting in his inbox today. And he needed to think carefully about how to do that. Mr. Brunner sometimes had different ideas about how to distribute things that didn’t work as efficiently as Ben thought they should.

He wished he could stop thinking about the pork rinds.

***

Janie pulled the brush through her long hair, wishing she could chat with her mom or her roommate about the “research” assignment Mx. K had put in front of her. The nondisclosure agreement she had signed prevented that, though. Mx. K had suggested that in time, Janie might work with other researchers who had related subjects, and that when that happened they would be able to discuss their cases, but that everything would, of course, remain confidential within the company.

Janie had been given her first test subject, one who was a real person with a history of mental health issues. Her task was to delve deeply into this person’s data file and try to figure out some ways that her subject’s life could be changed that would help them to feel more fulfilled and in turn perhaps more motivated. The data file on the subject was the creepy part. Some very sophisticated surveillance algorithms had been used on her test subject. She had thorough data. Very thorough data. Photos. Videos. Average time spent browsing different parts of the internet. Types of media consumed and when. Detailed work habits and eating habits and sleeping habits. And she could request even more data if something interested her in particular.

“Sort of like some kind of stealth-mode life coach?” Janie had thought. “But people aren’t going to respond to life coaching that they haven’t asked for are they?” It all seemed very invasive. She found it hard to believe that the subjects really had given permission to participate in this kind of research. But then that made her think about the nondisclosure agreement she had signed in her quest to get this job. She realized that she couldn’t remember now. Just how much of her ability to talk had she signed away? Maybe her subject had signed something equally sweeping, because maybe he wanted a fix and was willing to trust that one could be found and that his permission would be used wisely.

She thought of Mx. K in the videoconference. They hadn’t left time for many questions about the assignment. Mx. K’s energy was all “This was an exciting opportunity! This was a chance to help the company make a real difference.” K had a very high wattage smile, with perfect bright white teeth. Maybe their incisors were a little too prominent for perfect teeth. Those teeth were set in a medium tanned face with pleasant looking youthful skin, shiny brown eyes and a stylishly androgenous short haircut. K’s shirt was white and their jacket was tan, both with standing band collars. Janie wondered how tall they were.

She had asked, “Will the subject be asked to implement our recommended changes?” and K had responded that those weren’t the kinds of changes the study was looking for. “We need our young researchers on this project to think outside the boxes these people have worked themselves into,” they replied. “So while we’re open to fixes that our subjects could initiate, we have a certain latitude within the environments of these subjects and an ability to implement a range of solutions from the outside. So what we are looking for are suggestions of changes that would make the subject feel more integrated into the parts of their lives that they value the most. Things that would make them feel fulfilled. Maybe at work, or within their community, or family. Whatever they appear to value. Part of what we are studying here is people’s inability to see what could be changed that would improve their lives and the system. We think that getting fresh eyes of young researchers on some key subjects might result in important improvements without expending as many resources as traditional methods might use. You will find a list of some sample changes that other researchers have suggested that have been of some value in your materials, but we hope that you don’t find it limiting.”

It seemed crazy. It seemed less like research than spying. Spying and busybodying. Maybe so that a big corporation could do even more busybodying to make a difference for some subjects. But it also sounded like it was genuinely intended to benefit the subjects. Janie took a deep breath. Her roommate wouldn’t be back for several more hours. She opened the file on her first subject, a man named Ben Donegal.

LJ Idol Three Strikes Edition - Week 4 - The axe forgets; the tree remembers

2022-03-24T01:19:07Z

“What you failed to see Adara, is that ‘as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.’”

Zedekar was lecturing her. Zedekar was angry. She had misjudged everything.

Adara fervently wished she were anywhere other than the wizard’s stone tower. His eyes shone as he warmed to his topic. Outside the intermittent rain continued between gusts of wind and occasional, still-far-off peals of thunder. Wild weather was headed their way, but the gusting wind was the least of Adara’s worries.

“You were so busy thinking short term, little apprentice, that you forgot who is really in charge. You thought of this year’s crop yields, and this year’s fat larders, but you didn’t think about where that would leave us.”

“But sir,” she couldn’t believe that she was daring to argue. On the other hand, her advice to the grain-master had been good! “If they plant all eight of the East fields in the new wheat, instead of just two, they are almost sure to double the yield in all eight of the fields, just as they did in the one that they tried last year. Not only that, the seed for the new wheat is still cheaper than the old seed. . .”

The old wizard glared as he advanced on Adara and her words died in her throat. This was the man who had beaten her predecessor within an inch of her life. Adara still had a knot on her left forearm from one of his lessons over the winter. She clenched her jaw to keep from cradling that forearm away from him.

Short term. Long term. . . What was Zedekar thinking? Now it was early spring. All winter, they’d measured the snows and rains, and the icy mornings, only to conclude that winter was much the same as winter had been the preceding year. It followed that the weather this spring and summer was likely to be very similar to last summer, so that new wheat really should have been the best choice. . .

He stopped his advance and lowered his voice. “Come here and listen to me, you little fool. Really listen, because this is the kind of lesson you won’t have many chances to learn.”

Reluctantly she stepped forward. Three long slow steps until she was close enough that she had to tip her head up to meet his eyes. He glared at her, but didn’t reach for her with anything but his terrible low voice.

“If we harvest a bumper crop of wheat this year,” he asked, “what happens?”

Adara’s mind raced. Extra wheat was wheat that would ensure that everyone had plenty. Extra could be sold to neighboring estates, resulting in coin for the Baron’s coffers. Coin in the Baron’s coffers might mean many things. Repairs of equipment, additional livestock, metal for the foundry. . .

She couldn’t see the dire thing he was about to tell her. She didn’t want to see it. Her eyes shifted away from Zedekar’s face, briefly touching on Jace’s downcast gaze before skating back to the old wizard. Her fellow apprentice wasn’t going to be helping her out of this situation. He wouldn’t even look at her, and his mouth was twisted into an expression that she thought of as his grin-grimace. He might have an idea of what Zedekar was thinking, and he might have been dismayed about it, but he was struggling not to show that he felt any sadness. His eyes looked dead. Jace had been apprenticed to Zedekar two years before Adara. He didn’t pick up magic or reasoning as quickly as she did, but he was better at predicting Zedekar and his moods. Adara’s stomach dropped at the grin-grimace. This was going to be very bad.

“You don’t want to answer me, Adara?” Zedekar almost purred. “I’ll give you the answer.”

“If we double last year’s harvest, everyone in the Barony has plenty of bread all winter, and the Baron makes some extra coin. The men of this hold are fat and happy and they have extra time to think about what they want, and how they want the Baron to spend that extra coin. Maybe they start to question what I’ve told them about when to clear the next West field and when to let the East fields lie fallow. Maybe they suggest to the Baron that he should talk to other witches or wizards that might help him increase his holdings even more.”

Adara wanted badly to step away. Zedekar was really working himself up and his voice was rising. The hand that carried his staff was raising up, too, which scared her even more. He had struck her arm with that staff in his last frothy fury, just when she dared to step away.

“You think of ‘us’ as the whole Barony,” he sneered at her, “But the ‘us’ that matters is the three of us in this tower. ‘Us’ is not you and the harvest-master, Adara.”

Her cheeks colored at the mention of the soft-spoken harvest-master, and she hoped beyond hope that Zedekar hadn’t really noticed how much she enjoyed dealing with harvest-master Belen. But her heart sank even more as he continued.

“I’m afraid that the harvest master will be the most hurt by the bad advice you’ve given him without first running it by me. He will not be permitted to sew all of that new wheat. Some of it will have to be ground at once, at a loss, for we’ll only sew two fields with it. We can supplement the coin we need to buy the rest of the seed with coin from his personal coffers, which means he will be relegated to many more years of saving before he ever has a dowry. Young women probably won’t even look at him by the time he saves a bride-price all over again. But that’s what happens to people who don’t listen to. . .”

Adara knew that her face had gone completely red. Bad enough that he was punishing Adara, but Belen didn’t deserve any of this, and had come to the same independent conclusion that Adara had about the new wheat. He only wanted what was best for the Barony. Adara’s eyes stung with anger and fear, not just for herself, but for. . .

Wait a minute, why wasn’t Zedekar continuing?

Adara looked up and this time she couldn’t keep from stepping back as Zedekar stumbled forward, toward her, his lips moving. He dropped his staff, and his hands grasped toward his neck. Something black protruded under his chin, with red blossoming around it.

Adara stepped to the side as he fell to his knees then slowly collapsed onto his face.

Adara and Jace stared at each other wide eyed.

Then their attention was drawn to the big window beside Zedekar’s desk. A slender but strong looking hand and forearm covered in a battered leather bracer grasped at the lintel and then with a loud thump and grunt another matching hand and arm gripped on beside it. With a mighty heave and groan, Marantha, the huntsman’s spinster daughter, pulled herself up into the open window and then leaped down into the room. She swept the room with her eyes, taking in Jace and Adara and Zedekar. In three easy strides, she crossed the room to Zedekar, knelt beside him and then tore the crossbow bolt that protruded from the back of his neck back through his neck with a jerk. Roughly, she flipped him over onto his back and before anyone could say anything, she used the still-sharp head of the bolt to slice his throat open, cleanly and deeply, from one side to the other. His eyelids fluttered and his blood flowed in regular gushes as Marantha stood.

“You can never be too sure with wizards,” she said in a low voice, swiveling her gaze between Jace and Adara.

Jace broke the silence with a voice that Adara would later liken to the squawk of a chicken.

“You told me you needed a charm-breaker because you were afraid for someone you cared about,” he squawked at Marantha. “I thought. . . I thought. . .” The thought was clearly caught in his throat.

“You thought I wanted to break a love charm that someone cast on someone I fancied, I know,” Marantha answered him with a sympathetic laugh, “not a protection charm that someone cast on themselves. But if you think about it, I did need that charm-breaker to protect people I care about, so you did sell me exactly what I needed.”

“And,” she kicked at the now still body of Zedekar, “My thanks to you. It worked.”

Jace staggered to Zedekar’s chair and collapsed into it.

“Now you lot have got to decide how you’re going to play this,’ Marantha continued.

“You climbed the outside of the tower?” Adara asked, “Even though it’s been raining?”

Marantha grinned, “Well, this is actually the fourth time that I’ve climbed it. This evening was the first time I climbed it while it was damp, though. And this is the first time I made a one-handed crossbow shot while hanging from the side of the window, too. That was really the tricky bit. Well, it was the tricky bit, once I had the charm-breaker. Without that, the bolt probably would have bounced right back at me.”

“But honestly I think I got up here just in time. That old git going on about bending twigs and growing trees. As if he’s some kind of woodsman or woodwife. Ha! And after what he told the woodwife to do with the South forest eight years ago, too.” She shook her head in disgust and beads of rainwater scattered around her.

“The idea of Zedekar as a forest steward is just rich. High time we had a new wizard or witch is what I’m thinking. I’m thinking it’s a good thing he had a couple of apprentices about ready to take over. . .”

LJ Idol - Three Strikes Edition - Week 2 - What Really Matters

2022-02-20T20:14:41Z

Adara Ellis lifted her head from her hands, looked around the laboratory, sighed mightily and lowered her face back toward her hands. She could not win for losing today, and she was pretty sure that she was about to start crying. She had to figure out how to shake herself out of her funk. She was so close to a final solution and she didn’t want to be the person that screwed this one up. Nobody other than her closest partner seemed to realize it, but this one- this proposed innovation that she was testing was potentially for all the marbles. This was a solution that might just turn the tide in the battle against climate change. She just had to get her proof of concept finalized and this discovery could revolutionize inexpensive carbon capture.

She really thought that the science behind their new methodology was sound, but things just kept going wrong this week. It was almost enough to make her think that someone was out to get them, the way things kept stacking up. But that couldn’t be. Things were weird at work sometimes, but she didn’t want to believe that she lived in a world were someone would actually interfere with the kind of research she was doing.

Adara took a deep breath. She reminded herself that 43 year old research fellows at federal agencies did not cry into their hands when they needed to be checking gas lines and triple checking the equations that told them the amounts they would need for this final confirmatory experiment. She looked up at the clock. Her friend Milo was going to stop by in twenty minutes and he always made her feel better. It was a strange friendship that the two of them had developed back when her lab was audited over a year ago. Researchers didn’t usually make fast friends with their auditors. Especially when it was unclear what had triggered the need for an in-depth audit of her work in the first place, something that Adara was still uncomfortable with her management about. But Adara hadn’t been worried about any audit findings, knowing that her work was solid and neccessary, and she had found Milo Stepanovitch to be someone who asked good questions. He was a quick study, too, when it came to figuring out the necessary parameters for what she was doing.

After his investigation was finished, Adara kept trying to recruit him back into research figuring he was too good a chemical engineer to continue on picking apart other people’s work. He needed to be innovating! He countered that the cheaters of the world were innovating, too, and somebody good who understood the details needed to be there to make sure they didn’t get away with too much of the dwindling supply of good will towards researchers, not to mention hard earned research dollars.

She busied herself making sure that everything was in order in the lab and ready for her to start taking measurements on the new system. The gas chromatograph had been testy last week, necessitating multiple recalibrations until the rf values were as consistent as she could get them. It was almost as if either her eluent or her samples had been contaminated at some point, because with fresh batches of everything, she fairly quickly got the machinery back into a pattern of consistent results and measurements.

The chromatograph last week had been the first of a number of odd setbacks this week, culminating in the need for Adara to be in this particular lab on Friday evening, as all of the other available time there had somehow been blacked out this week. She was tired of wondering where the setbacks came from and whether they were happenstance or part of a pattern. She wanted to do the work.

As she checked a connection on one of the gas lines, her partner from the geotechnical side of the house, Gillian bustled in. “A Friday night lab appointment makes me feel like we’re back in college, so I brought some of what got me through my last degree,” she pointed with her chin toward the coffee shop drink carrier she had balanced on her satchel, “Caffeinated goodness for everyone. Did I remember correctly that you like mocha and Milo is more about the Chai life?”

Adara’s stomach rumbled as she went to take the proffered cup. Lunch had been rushed and long ago, and she was very grateful for the coffee. “Gillian, you’re a godsend,” she said as she took the beverage, and the two of them set to work making sure that the test chamber they had put together was all in order.

***

Milo laughed at himself a little as he headed into his friend Adara’s lab on a Friday evening. His wife had been disappointed he wasn’t going to be home for all of pizza and movie night with the family, and his squash partner was annoyed that he wasn’t going to be at the gym. But Milo still really enjoyed watching science happen, and maybe foolishly he kept getting the impression that something more than good work might be happening with all of the mishaps that kept stacking up in his friend’s lab.

It had been years since he left the contracting job where he regularly needed to carry a pistol and gone back to school to pursue an engineering specialty and then auditing. But after he pulled into the parking lot of the lab where he was meeting Adara and Gillian, he opened his glove box and removed the pistol he kept there, checking the weapon before putting it into the underarm holster he’d had to let out a little bit before donning it that afternoon. Everything felt secure with it there and there was nothing wrong with being cautious.

He braced for the bite of the cold outside his car through his light jacket and started to walk toward the closest entrance. It wasn’t a bad parking lot sunset, he noticed as he pulled out his badge for entry into the building. He swiped the badge and then was surprised as the pad flashed a red light at him, denying him entry. He looked at the face of his badge- as part of the IG’s staff, he’d never had a building come up as off limits. He wondered if he’d missed an email about a necessary update and started to pat down his pockets in search of his phone. Before he got very far he was startled by a quiet voice right behind him.

“I can let you in, auditor,” Milo was surprised to see that it was Ezekiel Biggs, with his face cast down at the ground as usual and his shoulders slumping in that direction as well. Zeke was the man in charge of requisition of supplies for all of the labs in this building and because he was so quiet and kept to himself so much, a whole mythology had sprung up around him. If Zeke liked you, it was said that all of your supplies would be plentiful and on-time. But if you annoyed him, it was a different story.

Milo had always found Zeke to be helpful in whatever he investigated and figured that his reputation as the sometime lab ogre was mostly a result of what Milo read as painful shyness. Zeke didn’t typically look at people when he spoke with them, and it was rare to see him outside of his basement offices. But he typically knew what was going on in each lab with a great deal of familiarity.

“Thanks Zeke, I didn’t see you there. You scared me for a minute.”

Zeke snort-laughed a bit as they went in.

“Isn’t it a bit late for you to need to be tracking supplies?” Milo asked the other man. But Zeke didn’t respond and Milo realized that he was already moving off toward the stairs that led down to the basement. Zeke _was_ kind of a weird dude.

***

An hour later, the three friends had finished their drinks and run through all of the prep for the experiment one last time. Gillian had caught a potential stumbling block or error in the setup that Adara missed and they worked through a tweak that would take care of it. Milo wondered if he might be about to see something of a historical moment as Adara walked over to one of the gas cylinders with its bright stickers identifying its contents, ready to turn the valve and start the flow.

She put her hand on the valve, but before she turned it she turned back to her friends and said, “I really hope we get the readings that we expect for this system today, and if we do, I just want you guys to know that your work and your support here have really mattered to me. It’s been a rough week or so, and. . .”

Her voice trailed off as the door swung open and in walked Zeke, pushing a trolley loaded with gas cylinders.

“I hate to interrupt you, Dr. Ellis,” he said to his shoes, “but I was looking at our gas supplies and I noticed a discrepancy between what you had checked out and what I still had in stock.”

He had everyone’s attention as he wheeled the trolly closer to the cylinder that Adara was standing by.

“I know you need a specific gas mixture for the kind of chromatography you’re running here, and I’m pretty sure that I brought you the gasses you need in these cylinders earlier in the week, so I was surprised to see them back in supply this morning. I think what really matters for what you’re trying to show, is.. . .”

Milo had to smile as Zeke tried without success to suppress another snort-laugh mid sentence.

“Well what matters here is the matter that you’re measuring, and it looks to me like someone has set you up for something other than success by switching your cylinders.”

Milo began to pick at the corner of the bright sticker declaring the mix of the gas in the cylinder that Adara was about to turn on and he didn’t seem too surprised when he was able to pull the label off to reveal a slightly different label underneath it.

Adara and Gillian stared at him wide-eyed. This had to be more than another annoying coincidence!

________________________________________

tonithegreat hopes that you can forgive the use of a “matter” pun as inspiration for this story! Who doesn’t like a touch of intrigue laden science, though?! Hopefully not the Idol voters this week!

LJ Idol - Three Strikes Edition - Week 1 - Black Rainbow

2022-02-07T02:52:28Z

Lunchtime is lonely by choice. Kas could probably find a colleague to eat with most days, but her work is a lot of talking to people, and talking them through very tangled problems. So it’s nice to escape to the solitude of her car with it’s heated seat and maybe some kind of healthy drive through window and some NPR or a podcast for a little bit each day. It’s especially nice on days like today when it seems like very little of the world makes sense.

The mountain of work that’s waiting for her when she finishes this lunch seems never-ending. Kas knows that even when it doesn’t feel like it, her work fits her into the world in a way that has meaning. It’s just that people are doing so very many things that don’t seem to make sense or that just seem to be hurting other people- hurting the world. There are days when Kas’s job feels more like a part of broken society than a part of society.

She takes a sip of her iced tea and enjoys the cold liquid in her mouth and the clean bite of the bitterness. She knows that she’s probably mostly just down because she has a lot on her plate- more to do this week than is realistic. And she is tired. It’s been more than three weeks since she tested positive for Covid, and since that terrible first week of headache and fever she’s been steadily mending. But she still isn’t quite back yet despite all the negative tests. It is taking forever for her sinuses to clear.

She pulls into a city park near her work and finds a parking spot in the dirt and winter leaves under the trees. It’s just cold enough that she doesn’t want to open the windows all the way, but she cracks them and hears birds and barking dogs and kids running across the boardwalk that crosses the pond. She feels like she should recognize the voice on the radio- a movie director who has completed a film about an evil grifter, a man who joins an old fashioned carnival and learns the art of the con.

The director- ah! It is Guillermo del Toro- is making the movie seem palatable even though it is dark stuff- not Kas’s cup of tea. He’s talking about a theme of the fortune telling carnies selling false dreams through trickery, how they learn to sell what he calls the dark rainbow by making the right kinds of promises that appeal to everyone. Kas is convinced that Guillermo del Toro is a genius, even though she hasn’t seen that many of his films. He always seems to find a way to make a story about something that’s off-putting into something intriguing.

***

Saturday! Kas made it to the weekend. True, she still has more to do- dishes, laundry, workouts, dog walks, cleaning- than the weekend could possibly contain. But it feels good to have choices about when to do what. It feels good to get up early and sneak out alone.

What even is the dream she’s chasing, now, Kas wonders, in this moment of relative morning calm, ensconced at the bar at the breakfast joint just outside her neighborhood. Definitely having a minute to sit and let someone else cook for her is part of it. But not all of it. She’s also looking forward to making something good for her family tonight.

The wait staff here and even the line cooks that she can see all have their own distinct fashions. Pretty tats and facial jewelry and makeup expertly applied. There’s one waitress whose red lipstick is a beautiful bright orange-red, perfect for her skin tone. Kas tried to explain to her daughters how lipstick is one of those things where you have to pick the right shade for you, and so picking a color for their whole dance troupe to match costumes was always going to be difficult. But Kas doesn’t wear lipstick enough to even know what color families work best for her. When she sees herself reflected wearing lipstick her eye is always caught and jarred. Whose great big highlighted lips are those, anyway?

So Kas almost never wears lipstick. And though it’s true that she prefers a natural looking lip, it’s also because she just never really learned the habit of lipstick, or any makeup for that matter. She dabbled a little, sure. When she was younger, she loved to cosplay at science fiction conventions and she started to try to learn makeup for that. She did a character once that wore lipstick with a bright purple-pink hue. She would never have guessed that the purple would look nice on her, but it had.

Her daughters were mortified when she told them about the conversation she had with another mom from their dance troupe regarding makeup. This year the team was all supposed to buy liquid eyeliner, which Kas thought was needlessly difficult to apply. “I’ll buy whatever they tell us to buy,” she’d said, “But nobody at my house knows how to apply that. I don’t even think that liquid eyeliner is s skill that humans need to cultivate. I mean, we could be using those brain cells for something else.”

She hadn’t meant anything against people who chose to use liquid eyeliner. It just seemed like a needlessly difficult choice. She figured that you’ve got to pick your battles in this life. But not everyone chose the same battles.

Kas’s waitress came by with a full glass of tea for her and Kas smiled. Her waitress was one of the few who didn’t seem to be wearing makeup, but her eyebrow piercing and nose stud and outfit all still looked just right. There were a multitude of ways to look put together.

***

Monday morning and it is cold, wet, and grey, but Kas is feeling put together again. It’s funny how some weeks Monday morning turns into a good place to start after a weekend of introspection. Maybe things will soon seem out of control again and maybe they won’t, but there’s a nice rhythm in the start of a normal work week.

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tonithegreat is hoping for some normal workweek rhythm herself. Hopefully this little vignette vibes with your rhythm this week. This was a tough prompt from my perspective!

Hello, is this thing still on?

2022-01-04T00:13:11Z

Hey, livejournal is still a thing? Idol is still a thing? Sure, count me in!

LJ Idol - Week 24 - Intersection - "I’m the Usain Bolt of Running from My Problems"

2020-06-15T23:29:54Z

Humans were still idiots. As a race, they always had been. Crystalyne Regina hated that she’d had the bad luck to be born one of them. The fae had much more healthy and realistic perspectives, and on the whole were a lot more interesting. There was so very much in the universe that her fellow humans were always overlooking in favor of their own needlessly narrow versions of reality.

Crystalyne studied her face in the rear view mirror of the custom built sprinter van that she had hoped to share with Kai for the last few nights, right up until yesterday. Her peach and ivory hued skin was still dewey and completely flawless, except for the tracks of her recent tears.

Her thick platinum hair with it’s pale blue streaks was still artfully messy, arranged in a bun and half hidden under a blue hand-knitted wool beanie that warded her against the mountains’ morning chill. The jeans and worn merino turtleneck that hugged her lithe body provided dark contrast to the light airy interior of her home on wheels with it’s window-shutters open to the crisp morning light. She still looked great, at least. And she couldn’t help but start to smile a little at the jagged white-topped peaks she could see out the window. Goddess but she loved these mountains.

The pictures she’d set up this morning would form the backbone of a gorgeous instagram story about summertime #vanlife options on the Argentine side of Patagonia on her Sn0wQween account.

Ad revenue and sponsorships related to her Instagrams were funny things. They would never come close to bankrolling her lifestyle, but social media was a fascinating sandbox to play in. It opened up opportunities for her that she otherwise wouldn’t have known about. Social media wasn’t unlike magic in that respect.

Social media was also a lot more fun than her career had been. What young people like Kai didn’t understand was that a person had to provide for themselves first. Sure, Crys had been granted a bit of a head start on securing her own future with the Regina family fortune in hand. But her parents hadn’t really been interested in increasing their riches the way she was.

Crys hadn’t allowed herself the freedom to seek followers and friends until after she secured an empire of her own. Sure, people had called her cold in her hard-charging youth. She hadn’t even discovered her passions for mountains and road travel and snowboarding until after she sold her third tech startup, despite her early proximity to the Sierra. And in the old startup days she had scoffed at people who wasted time and became entangled on social media, especially as crude as it had been back then. Now that she was in her mid-forties and one of the richest women in the Americas, though, she had time to look down and see what other people were doing. And other people were all over social media in all of their spare moments, it seemed. So many of them were so disconsolate spending their energy there.

Kai was certainly a fool to go back to his little artist life with his artist friends. They were begging to be noticed by any media, trying to get their starts without any empires behind them. It was backward. That life even seemed more transient than usual to Crys, with the world in an uproar the way it was now. Everyone was looking forward to the turning of 2020 into 2021 with hope in their hearts. But the city Kai had gone back to was bound to remain a pandemic playground even after the way it had suffered in the first wave of the disease that it weathered in spring.

Crys gave herself a little shake. She had shown that foolish man magic; real magic. The kind that had required years of very well-funded research for her to harness. But apparently authenticity with a dear friend who wasn’t even physically attracted to him was more his speed than Crys’s precision passion had been. She shivered a little even now, thinking of their passions, when she’d first discovered him. Kai had been seeking a soul that understood beauty almost as much as she was. But experiencing the beauty of the world was not going to be enough for him. He wanted to capture it in art, too, where Crys was happy just to experience it.

It was her own fault, she supposed, for getting caught up in scrying, seeking first a soul who could appreciate the beauty that she saw all around her and then somehow shifting into a search for a lost and longing soul to compliment her own. Lost and longing? Longing maybe, but why had she thought of herself as lost? Crys met her own gaze in the mirror and shook her head, feeling herself slip back into melancholy as she replayed the last few days again. That guy had really gotten to her.

From her perspective, it started when Crys came upon a perfect alpine lake last week, with one edge still frozen, even as close to midsummer as it was here, and when she realized that the moon was full that night, she thought of the lake as she had first seen it with the sunset reflected on it’s glassy, icy surface and knew that the lake would be perfect site for an esbat scrying. The ley lines were strong beneath these wild mountains, and her midsummer longing, even though she’d already experienced midsummer this year in the northern hemisphere, was particularly intense.

She conjured red roses to use in her spell, since the mountain meadow flowers were such a riot of color around the lake and she always loved red roses the best. They would help link her back to Patagonia if she traveled the ley lines. As she swirled the petals along with those of the mountain flowers into the icy water around her legs, she had a strong premonition that she was going to find exactly what she most needed, but also that it was going to come with a price.

What Crystalyne had shown Kai after she found him had been authentic. But sometimes the real face of the world, even without arcane underpinnings was just too much for people. She had tried to show him the cold beauty of her beloved Patagonian mountains and the precise beauty of the magic of the ley lines that she had used to bring him almost halfway across the world. But as much as he wanted to believe in magic, he wasn’t ready to believe that it could be used to actually travel between continents. Because of his disbelief, she couldn’t fully bring him into her scrupulously clean van. She had to keep him frozen in a bubble of winter from his northern hemisphere- a simple enough task this high in the mountains.

He was so young. When she first felt the depth of his longing and followed it to the dingy apartment from which he stared up at the muted stars from his small open window, she’d expected a man or woman of twice his age. But she had to admit that his undertones of hunger for physical love were part of what made it so easy for her to follow the energy of the cold lake water into his space. The temperature there was even colder than the night air had been in Patagonia. The steam she brought with her as she met his hunger coalesced into banks of snow, covered in ephemeral flower petals. As he’d passed his hand through insubstantial columbine and into the very real snow that had formed beneath it, he asked her, “Are you the muse I’m dreaming of, or a substantial seductress?”

Crys had conjured one of her roses for him, and answered only “yes” as she kissed him while simultaneously bringing the force of her will to bear on his young open mind. She also did something else, something that she’d recently found made her connections with those that she scryed upon deeper. She let down the barriers to her own mind to him, so that he could tell and feel what she was thinking.

With only two kisses, he was ready to follow her back to the moonlit lakeside in the mountains she had come from. They half merged in the ether as she snapped them back to her body floating in the cold lake. She could tell already that their life experiences had some jagged differences, but their lakeside lovemaking was still frantic and sweet until he let himself start to slow down enough that logic and doubt crept into his thoughts.

That was when she’d had to construct an ice palace around him, pulling magic up out of the lake and cold air down from the mountains to spin a sort of stasis around him until she could explain to him how everything worked, and why it made sense for him to start a new life with her. But that task had proven beyond her. Even though Kai had been sad in his old life, he wanted to find his own happiness. As if there were such a thing.

Crys realized that she was crying again, and she was glad she’d finished the photo shoot. Even her magic enhanced skin would start to redden soon if she kept this up. The crying felt cathartic in a strangely good way, though. Almost as if it had loosened something behind her eyes that had been bothering her. Maybe she’d needed to lose something to remind her what was important.

Maybe she should think again about what she wanted to do in her comfortable “retirement.” Maybe connection with others wasn’t something to be avoided anymore. Kai’s youth had reminded her how it really felt to commit to something like a friend. Maybe there were causes she should be considering outside her her current existence. Or maybe she should go into the climbers’ camp just a bit farther up the valley from where she had her van, and see if anyone wanted to boulder nearby. She wasn’t confident with alpine climbing, but she did have a crash pad and pretty good acclimatization to the altitude. And maybe what she needed more than anything was to spend some time with people with other ideas about how to find happiness, that were different from her own.

___________________________________

This week’s entry is an intersection with awesomely patient and talented me_sonrei. Click on her username and scroll down to her related Week 24 entry to check it out. She and her partner last week did a beautiful fairy tale retelling with the topics we were given, so we decided to try for paired Snow Queen inspired pieces this week.

I hope you enjoy them both!

LJ Idol - Week 23 - Intersection - "If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn"

2020-06-02T03:28:38Z

Carrie sat in the sand and listened to the surf. The sun had set behind her ten minutes ago. Her surf board was close by her feet. Her son was bodysurfing in the last of the reflected sunset light. It had been a very long week. She picked up the beer beside her and took a sip.

Was she fiddling while Rome burned? Was it wrong to be out enjoying her life for several hours while others struggled with Covid and protested police violence. She hoped not. It felt like she needed this evening. She took a deeper pull of the beer and sighed. She definitely needed something. Her son whooped as he caught a wave and it brought a smile back to her face. Watching him loving life in the last reflected bits of pink and purple sunset was definitely part of what she needed.

Believing that she lived in a society where other people had the same chances to enjoy the world this way would be nice too. But she didn’t believe it. Not tonight. Yesterday the United States had launched people into space again after a long hiatus. Today, cities across the country were seeing violence between police and peaceful protestors. In her own city, just as she’d been considering joining a march downtown, she’d heard reports and seen video of someone driving a truck into the crowd of protestors. “Good thing you didn’t head down there, right mom?” her son had asked. But she didn’t know the answer. Maybe it was even more important in that case for her to stand in solidarity. But how did you explain that to an eleven year old?

Carrie wanted so much to feel like she was making the world a better place. Instead, she’d just received a text from a friend at home asking her to be careful when she drove back into town, because a curfew had been instituted. A curfew, not for Covid, but because of fear that the peaceful protesting would still somehow turn violent.

Carrie looked out at magenta reflections on breaking waves. She’d been slightly afraid that there would be enough people at this beach that it would be difficult to stay socially distanced, but she and her son had arrived late enough that there was no issue at all. There were only about fifteen other people that she could see scattered up and down and shore. The red flags were flying for rip currents, so other than waders, she and her son seemed to be the only ones in the water. But she had tired after 45 minutes of surfing that had pulled them about half a mile down the beach, and was just watching Sam, her son, now.

She thought about the experience of catching a wave just twenty feet from Sam who’d caught the same break- and of turning to see his smile as they sped in parallel toward the shore. Sure, she hadn’t actually fully stood up on her board a single time tonight, but she and her son had caught some great waves. She would always remember his smiling face looking over at her in the sunset light.

On nights like tonight, it felt like parenting was the only thing Carrie was getting right in a world gone mad. She wanted to call her best friend Xena again, but they’d just talked for an hour on Carrie’s drive out here, and she really didn’t have anything more to say.

Xena wasn’t just a great friend. She also managed to live so authentically. Xena’d moved in with her wife and was comfortable with her identity as a witch inside and out. She managed to make ends meet by running her bakery and she managed to bring her customers joy and nutrition, and, yes, carbs and sugar, but she fed their souls, too. She dispensed heartfelt advice to her customers and was a fearless part of her community. Carrie wanted that for herself, she just hadn’t ever taken the time to nurture it somehow.

And now it seemed like the world was on fire.

Carrie loved her job, but it wasn’t like Xena’s bakery. It wasn’t a place where she felt authentic every day. Carrie worked for change every day, sure. But the world also needed authenticity so much right now.

But Carrie needed to keep her paycheck coming in. And she actually liked her work. When she’d first started her job with the state, it had seemed like a place of relative tolerance. But Carrie just hadn’t ever talked to her coworkers much about her pagan leanings. Religion didn’t come up at work and she didn’t bring it up. She’d never found herself a place in the pagan community and life got busy over the years. So more and more through he years, she just smiled and nodded when her coworkers mentioned prayers and church services.

Was it better to work on the problems of the world from inside the agencies that could make a difference or was it better to make a comfortable life from which it was more possible to work on change? Carrie didn’t know the answer.

Off to the south a bit of lightning flashed cloud to cloud in the dark mass of clouds that had been gathering.

“C’mon Sam! It’s time to get out!” She called down to the quickly darkening surf, and he came jogging up with his board under his arm and a huge grin on his face. The clouds lit up with some lightning again and he exclaimed, “Light show! I guess it is time to get going. Mom, I am never going to get tired of this. When can we come back?”

Carrie felt a lightness in her heart. Sharing this place and one of her favorite ways to enjoy it was something. And she and Sam could talk and work on thoughts about other things that maybe both of them could do on the long drive home tonight. And maybe she would call Xena again.

“Mom, I thought of the beginning of a song while we were out there,” Sam continued, “Do you mind if I work on it with my uke’ a little on the way back?”

Her smile grew large as she hoisted her board up from the sand. The world was still a complicated place, but maybe she and Sam would come up with some things to do about it. And maybe some of them would also help her feel better about her place in everything.

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This week’s entry is an intersection with the talented d0gs. Check out her paired piece by clicking her username and scrolling down to her entry.

I am both deeply disappointed and filled with resolve by current events. Those of us in relative privilege are allowed our grief at where we are. But we’ve also got to mobilize and work toward where we need to be. Which, my girls and I think, can include surf breaks.

LJ Idol Week 22 - Double Sudden Death! - Open Topic

2020-05-25T22:56:12Z

Memorial Day, 2020. A long weekend in the midst of months where work and school, the things by which I usually measure the turning of the year, are all off kilter. My daughters finished school at the end of the week before last. There was no race to the finish line right before this holiday as there usually is. The school year, despite nigh-heroic effort on the part of all the teachers, kind-of went out with a fizzle. I was loathe to send the girls down to their grandparents’ this weekend because school gave hints of some kind of online end-of-year celebration that I didn’t want them to miss out on. But nothing ever really materialized with that.

My daughters, a pair of wild Tallahassee Tree Monkeys, in their natural environment last Thursday, after we decided school was over.

So finally because my mom wanted them so badly and because they wanted to go, I met my dad partway to Yankeetown on Thursday and let the kids go with him. So far, mom and dad’s sometimes spotty internet has worked well enough for the sports meetings they’ve wanted to attend. And I have spent most of the long weekend in bed, reading Babylon 5 novels about the Psi Corps, and future wars and future plagues of that universe, which I see through different eyes in 2020 than I would have back when the show aired. I also might have had a touch more sangria than was prudent on Friday night, sitting distanced from close neighborhood friends, doing our best to solve the worlds’ problems. So for me, the weekend started very slowly indeed on Saturday morning.

It wasn’t until today, Memorial Day, that I ventured out of my neighborhood at all on this holiday weekend. I wanted to go for a run somewhere special, because today’s run is the last run in my current workout block. Today, I finish the 8 weeks of the 5k Pacer program, and while the program hasn’t improved my speed and pace to the point where I am knocking on the door of my 2020 running goal (a sub 30 minute 5k), finishing the program is still a nice milestone for me. It isn’t easy for me to find time to run, even though I much prefer the way I feel when I’m working at running regularly. Finishing the 8 week program and getting back into the range of a 35 minute 5k is something, and hopefully if I go through the program again, I’ll shave another few more minutes off before fall when maybe our local run club will start doing races again.

So, this morning I headed out to the National Wildlife Refuge at the coast, where I know there is a trail I haven’t trod before that I will likely find beautiful. It starts in low pine flat-woods, and then turns toward the even lower coast, out across the salt marsh flats along a low levy road that was filled long ago. A few of my naturalist friends have been taunting me with gorgeous wildflower pictures all week long on social media, many of which were taken in the refuge. So I’ll finish my run training in a place that I love, even knowing that there’s a decent chance I’ll have some yellow-fly and mosquito company.

Swamp Hibiscus was blooming in different spots up and down the trail I ran.

***

I am surprised when NPR isn’t broadcasting some kind of Memorial Day programming as I make the thirty minute drive out to the trail I want. Instead, the morning show topic is the fifty year anniversary of the Kent State protestors being shot. I wonder what my grandparents would think of that. Lately I wonder what my grandparents would think about a lot of things. Both of my grandfathers served in World War 2. Mom’s dad was an engineer in the Army Air Corps and Dad’s dad lied about his age in order to enlist in the Navy in time to serve in the Pacific. Mom’s dad stayed in the reserve for a while, but not long enough to be caught up in Korea. I’m very lucky that they both came home.

Sometimes I think about how both of my grandmothers proceeded their husbands in death by long stretches, and I wonder which was ultimately more wearing- being at war or holding things together at home. I think it was probably being at war, during those war years, but I also think that holding things together was anything but easy for my grandmothers, both of whom were the siblings tasked with caring for their own aging parents along with their own families.

The announcement of my mom’s parent’s wedding. My grandmother had finished her degree at that point, but she looks so young in the pictures. I thought the lady-centric headline was fun and appropriate for my navel-gazing about the roles of the sexes back in the day.

***

For the last year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we chose to live and about my relationship with the land. I love being outside. I love to camp and hike and climb, and I do those things primarily on different kinds of public land. I like being out among the king’s deer, I suppose. Sometimes the king is the state, and sometimes it is the federal government. Or, my favorite place to sport-climb semi-locally is even a county park in Alabama that also allows primitive camping. But communities I started to discover online last year and the work that I’ve been doing for Florida lately have made me think more deliberately about how I relate to the public land that I use and enjoy.

Only recently have I started to think about how much privilege is implicit in my ability to travel and camp freely, without feeling unsafe or threatened. I want everyone to have the ability to enjoy the natural spaces that I love so much, but I’m also very aware of the danger those places face of being loved to death. When I first started camping on my own, in high school, it was never very hard to get camping reservations at the state parks I loved, except at certain holidays. And it was affordable.

Now a lot of the parks where I used to make last-minute plans are hard to get any weekend camping in, even months in advance. And I have climber and hiker friends who find the state parks to be comparable to commercial camping, too expensive and amenity-based to make sense. I didn’t realize how much road-life culture there is that prides itself on not paying extra for things that aren’t necessary.

Normally, there aren’t that many weekends that I spend at home, so these pandemic months have been a real change for my little family. We have a truce, my husband and I. Roger would prefer that we spend every other weekend at home, but I have promised only one weekend a month at home. Most months (pre-pandemic) we get two weekends at home, but not every month. And some of my weekend trips are solo or just with climbers, so the rest of the family can still rest up then. It’s not that I don’t like our home. It’s just that it is so nice to escape the complexity of normal life. Normal life can start to feel like we’re just living for stuff maintenance sometimes. Like our little house has become our only destiny. Like it has been illuminated that our highest purpose is sitting around and grooming our stuff.

I just counted them up. This is my tenth weekend in a row staying at home. I think that’s surely a record for me.

***

There for a while, and still now to a lesser degree, it felt like some people wanted me to gain a lesson from this time of quarantine that I just think is all wrong. It’s hard to explain because I think that for the most part, people are well intentioned. But I am afraid that the hunker-down mentality might be encouraging us all to think of our homes as isolated safe spaces, and as the only places that we belong in, and I think there is a big fallacy in thinking that way.

The property that we own doesn’t really stand on it’s own. It’s really privileged even to look at living situations in terms of people owning property. Higher and higher percentages of Americans live in rental properties every year. Fewer and fewer people own houses. Even in Tallahassee where I would imagine percentages tend more toward home-ownership than in true metro centers, I have professional friends with families who have considered selling the homes that they own in favor of going back to renting, because home maintenance isn’t cheap or easy (also our public school districts are terrifically gerrymandered, but that is a longer rant for another day).

But even for those who own property- you can’t get to your house without the streets in the neighborhood. You don’t get water and power without utilities. The myth of a place of your own rests solidly on shared common resources. Everything about the way we live is founded on shared common resources, whether you close your windows and use climate control or keep them open.

I feel like there a few people who want me to look at these ten weeks of being at home, and see the light of how I should always enjoy spending my free time working on my house. But as nice as it has been to sleep in a tent in the backyard and grow some pretty and useful plants, I find myself even more energized about running the neighborhood streets again, instead of the ones around my office, and enjoying the neighborhood green spaces, even if I do it with a mask on now, as long as I’m not running.

Yes, it’s fine to slow down and enjoy the space around us, but I’m afraid that the ethos of every-homestead-for-itself is part of what got us to this point of unsustainability where we’re facing a crisis with this pandemic. If we were better at thinking about things in terms of “we” instead of in terms of “me,” it seems like we would be better positioned to bounce back from this than we are.

***

The gate at the wildlife refuge isn’t manned today, so I just pull out my year-long pass and put it on the dashboard when I park. I glance at the map at the trailhead to confirm that I can get a good 45 minute out-and-back on the trail I was thinking of and begin. I got a later start than is ideal, but the wind is blowing through the treetops and while it is very humid, it isn’t that hot.

I walk for five minutes, thankful that the bugs aren’t horrible, and then I begin to run. Five minutes into running and I know I’m not very fast today, but I’m so glad I came out here. I hurt my right heel earlier in the week, jumping out of river trees with the girls, and it’s healing up, but slowly. I have to think about keeping my strides even not to favor it. But I love blustery days at the coast, and the wildflowers are everywhere.

Wet pine flat woods at the start of the run.

Clyde Butcher style cumulus-filled skies over the salt marsh and artificial ponds that are part of the refuge.

So many wildflowers out there today!

Pleased with myself at the turn-around point.

—————————————————————————————————————-
I hope you readers are enjoying your Memorial Days and getting outside a little if there’s a safe place for you to it and you’re so inclined. For me, it was nice today to be out there and to think about the things our soldiers fight and die for, and what they really mean.

LJ Idol Week 22- Sudden Death Write Off- Open Topic

2020-05-23T00:04:14Z

Erin sat at her dining room table and felt broken. She thought she’d been working hard all day, but when she looked down at her calendar and at the list of completed items her supervisor had her keeping, it seemed like she couldn’t legitimately claim that she had completed anything. Between phone calls and emails, it felt like she hadn’t even been able to make substantial progress on any single issue, and some of those phone calls and emails requiring her advice had really drained her.

She breathed in, one slow breath.

There were pretty flowers in a vase on her table, behind the laptop she’d been able to bring home from work. She had these things, unlike the quarter of American adults who were now on unemployment. It was May 21, 2020, and she still had a job- one that she liked. Some days it was just really frustrating. Some days it was like too many things were coming in without answers at the same time, which made it hard to keep continually trying to make progress with all of them. Then throw in a client or two that didn’t even really want advice, but sought instead a rubber stamp on something. . .

Erin tried to step back and look at things from a fresh angle when things seemed especially bad. So, she told herself the newish lady who normally worked on the floor below hers that was always pointedly mischaracterizing things she said wasn’t after Erin’s job, so much as she was socially awkward. Yeah, that was it. Surprisingly ignorant and awkward. Honestly, it was just as potentially legitimate of an explanation as personal attacks were. Her husband had a saying; “Never assume malice, when it might just be ineptitude.” She tried to remember that saying when people made her hackles raise. She tried to always take a deep breath and move on.

Today, though, she was running out of fresh angles and tolerance for ignorance.

So, yeah, work was crushing.

Plus this week, she had also managed to screw up her mom’s birthday present. And her 5th grader wasn’t getting much of an elementary graduation in the heart of the pandemic, after watching his sister’s big ceremony last year. Yes, he had managed to finish out the year with straight As, and good comments from his teacher. But it felt like nothing was going quite right, and everything was just a little bit wrong. Plus Erin was supposed to submit something to that weird online writing contest she was doing with some interesting friends tonight and she didn’t have the first idea as to what to write. . .

Before the pandemic, there had sometimes been days when Erin pulled into her driveway at the end of the workday before the start of the home shift and she almost couldn’t physically get out of the car because everything felt so heavy. She would sit there after turning the car’s engine off, knowing that she ought to run into the house and start getting the kids ready for whatever after school adventure each of them had that day. And she would just rest her head on her steering wheel until something broke her reverie and she had to go in.

Erin wanted to pull in somewhere and turn off now, but she still half a day to go.

Half a day that wasn’t even going to include any driving to pull in from. In a weird way, she missed driving. But, the only way out from under everything was to start climbing. Sometimes crap converged. And those days you just had to dig extra hard to dig your way out.

She shook her head as a calendar invite appeared for the afternoon on her Outlook. “No, no, no!” She heard herself breathe. The one possible saving grace for the upcoming afternoon was that she didn’t have any teleconferences scheduled. No skype meetings. There was hope of getting a bunch of work knocked out.

What was the time frame on that invite?

Before she could get it open, she heard the bubbling alert for a skype message, come in so she clicked on that. It was from her paralegal, who she hoped wasn’t somehow in a bind. Her paralegal’s job was almost certainly harder remotely than hers was. Erin did not want to contribute to that.

“Hey before you take a look at that appointment that I just scheduled for you,”

. . . was the first line of the message.

Erin hovered with her fingers over the keyboard waiting for more.

“Know that it’s optional. Someone asked for it on your behalf, and boss is good with it. But you’re also fine to work this afternoon if you prefer.” 

What. The. Heck???

She looked across the dining room and into the living room at her husband, where he sat on the couch. He was grinning like the cat that ate the canary.

“Anything interesting happening at work?” He asked.

Before she could answer, he continued, “I might have called your boss yesterday while you were in the shower. You’ve seemed so down lately, and some of us are worried about you. You said that you didn’t want to plan anything for the holiday weekend, because you figured all the outdoor spaces would be crowded with foolish pandemic spreaders.”

“And that’s a fair point. But I think you need to get outside a little. So I arranged for you to take the rest of today off if you want to, and a couple of friends arranged a trip so you could get out to the river.”

At that, their dog began to bark raucously, throwing herself toward the window behind the couch.

“That,” said her husband, “Is probably Max and Leila, loading up your kayak onto their trailer. You know Leila’s furloughed now anyway, and Max had some time off coming, so they thought you might like a nice long point to point paddle day today. If you drive too, you guys could still get ten river miles in, and Leila says that includes several primo rope swings for swimming along the way. I think they may also have packed a six pack of that mango hefeweizen that you like.”

Erin was speechless. Suddenly the afternoon had become the opposite of interminable. Unsure of what to do, she clicked on the meeting invite, just to be sure. Sure enough, it was for the rest of the day, and it was that purple color that indicated leave time outside the office. The subject and the place had been filled out with the same words, “Well Deserved Time Off!”

She toggled back to the skype window and typed:

“Wha. . . . Ohmigosh! You guys are amazing! Thank you soooooooooo much!”

And then she kissed her husband soundly and changed into a bathing suit and quick dry shorts, because surprise convergences like this one really didn’t happen all that often and she wanted to make the most of her weekday uncrowded river afternoon.

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Readers, I hope that you’re all staying safe this holiday weekend! And also that the convergences that come upon you in these strange days are mostly good! I myself have had to plan all my own convergences, but I have managed to spend some nice uncrowded evenings on rivers with rope swings, and I definitely wish you those kinds of vibes if you dig them.

LJ Idol - Week 22 - Hiraeth

2020-05-17T18:50:58Z

It has come back to me now, that as a child, I wasn’t always the bastion of strength that I mostly remember. It is true that as a kid I spent a lot of time on my own. I roamed the woods, and rode my horse, explored the swamps and paddled and boated all over the river. I jumped out of trees that I shouldn’t have, took risks with 1,000 pound animals, and occasionally I got hurt.

But I got scared sometimes as a kid, too. More scared than I should have been given my relatively stable life. I remember lying in my bed, with the river that I loved flowing not 50 yards away and feeling waves of anxiety wash over me. What if I disappear completely from this world when I die? What if aliens are real and they come for me first? What if I can’t calm down enough to sleep?

Sometimes I would creep into my parents’ room and watch them sleep- wanting comfort, but not wanting to wake them up for nothing. We all had lives to live, roles to play in our community the next day. I also used to lie in my bed and tell myself stories, usually of long epic adventures that I took with my dolls and animals, until I finally fell asleep.

I worry sometimes about my girls’ anxieties and fears when they seem illogical or extreme, but then I remember that I wasn’t without similar feelings in my youth. I didn’t have the same vocabulary for them that we have today, but the feelings and fears existed.

***

I’ve been reading a lot of Charles deLint lately. At some point in the last couple of years I was searching for one of his books on Abe books and the only way it was available was as part of a large set of used volumes. The set was expensive, but it had a lot of books in it, several of which looked intriguing, and so in the long run I justified the splurge figuring I’d want to read them all eventually. Now I think it was like the universe knew I was going to need some magic over the next months of a specific sort.

deLint’s characters often seem to have very solid connections to the places they choose to call home. I like the way that they connect to magic that it is part of the land around them. I like the way that a lot of them love the places that they live and the way they create intentional community.

They make me long for that kind of connection. The magical traditions of the British Isles have been featured in so much fantasy that it’s easy to pigeonhole stories involving those traditions. But those traditions are part of my heritage. On my mom’s side, we know the village and even the cottage that my ancestors grew up in. I had a great uncle who played the bagpipes and he would always bring them when he came and visited and we would do a walking tour of our little Florida town, sharing his music. I read deLint’s stories and I want to visit standing stones and wilder, colder coastlines than my current Florida gulf coast. There’s a connection there that I long to explore.

I want to find a connection to magic on a windswept tor, or even through the fireflies outside my warm Florida window. I long for a connection that makes sense.

***

This, I suppose, is the springtime of longing. Winter seems like it ought to be the season of longing for most things in my wheel of the year. I long for warmth in winter. For relief from the responsibilities of work and the responsibilities of the holidays that fill the days and sometimes become oppressive.

Spring is usually a wonderful season of striving and quickening and of actualizing. We shake off the dreams of winter and we do things. I try to get strong and go places to climb. But this year, there’s this extended dreamtime. This extended lack of going. A time of doing things only at home. We’re all trapped in home-shaped chrysalises. But maybe we knit them, not as places for us to transform, but in hopes that the world would transform while we stay locked away from it. I’m afraid that’s not how any of this works.

Are we just going to stay in our homes and keep taking the same things in from the outside and hoping really hard for change, while we still roll the garbage to the curb each Sunday evening? Or is there a way to spin something out of this that will give us the wings we need?

***

Like everyone, I keep working on my house and my yard. I suppose my family is forging a greater connection with this half acre we live on. We camp out in the yard sometimes. I’ve planted some native flowers. We see hummingbirds and bees. The girls play in the sprinklers. We cull through belongings, trying to declutter and get rid of what we don’t need. I keep trying to knock back the jungle of exotic plants that have taken over the backyard. Maybe I’ll get it under some kind of control this year. Maybe it will happen.

A friend of mine with very different political views suggested that we try doing a Jefferson dinner via Zoom. I wanted to feel like I have the energy to try to make this happen, because I enjoy heartfelt debate with my friend, but I know that adding even more people in is a nonstarter for me now. Polite debate is hard enough in person. I don’t think I have the bandwidth to take it online.

Community and connection in real life are hard.

***

I have a recurring nightmare where cruise ships have come too close to the shore in the keys. It’s something that has actually happened, resulting in reef destruction far off the coast. The physics of what happens in my dream aren’t even possible. In the dream, giant ships chew great channels through the shallow sea grass beds near the shore that are only a few feet deep, leaving muck and destruction in their wake. People come out on the decks of the ships, delighted with their proximity to the islands, hoping to be able to see more. Maybe they can jump to shore or come into the water.

***

One of my best friends works in the office of the inspector general for an agency I won’t name. Both of us vacillate between frustration with and gratefulness for the jobs we enjoy. Both of us want so much to be part of solutions that actually makes things better.

She is a short lady with small feet. My girls are quickly catching her in height. But for now they are close in shoe size, so she gives us her old running shoes. She only lives a couple of miles away, and she’s always logging miles, running and walking through our two neighborhoods.

On Thursday she texted me after work because she had a couple of pairs of shoes to give the girls and then she walked over to drop them off. We chatted from a safe distance in the yard, like we do from time, and we each consumed a beer. At a certain point I told her, not for the first time, “This is not what I thought end-stage capitalism was going to look like.”

It’s still true. I still think this is the beginning of the end of an era that was built in large part on unsustainability. We haven’t yet figured out how to base a society on anything other than exponential growth in a finite space. And now we’ve got this disease running through it all too. We shouldn’t be surprised. I had a biology professor who was known for his great talks on the specter of evolving disease almost 25 years ago, now. It makes me wonder which other cautions we’ve been blithely ignoring are about to rise up and remind us of them.

***

I had just fallen asleep after a good Saturday evening of reading with Roger and the girls, and watching some episodes of the final season of the new She-ra and some episodes of Babylon 5 last night. Rog was asleep in his chair in the living room. I was sweating in my bed with the windows open to the cool night air. Soon we will have to give in and turn on the air conditioning. I hate closing the windows and buttoning up the house. But we’ve had several days of temperatures in the 90s now.

I woke with a start and a little yelp. Jasper isn’t usually my child that gets scared in the night, but she’s there in my bed. She touched my shoulder. She isn’t saying anything. But I tell her, “Hey it’s okay. You’re okay. You can stay in here with me.” And she worms her way under the sheet.

As my adrenaline starts to fade, I think about how we’re all longing for something. I hope I’m taking the best steps I can to deliver what we need most.

LJ Idol - Week 21 - The Way Back

2020-05-05T22:31:14Z

In the first dream, there was a delicious sense of ease. There was only blackness but it felt so good not to be striving anymore. Somehow everything had become relaxed. No more aching shoulders. No more tight neck. Her ankles and knees didn’t ache anymore and it felt so good to float without form.

Some time later she realized that she wasn’t cold anymore which also felt amazing.

***

The next dream had a smell. It was the smell of spring blooming jasmine mixed with humid air. It was the smell she remembered from her house with all the windows open during the first week of quarantine. It smelled so good.

But wasn’t that wrong? Hadn’t she burned off the jasmine blossoms at the front door early when they’d done that soft wash treatment on the house? And then the smell had been replaced with that of bleach and organic life experiencing chemical death. Hot chemical death smell. Decay mixed with chlorine, sickening in its intensity.

Spiraling. Spiraling down and away from dreams of bleach and antiseptic and hot chemical death into warmth and blackness.

***

The third dream smelled of a hot summer day with rain on the way and she was flying. Flying up and away out her window, high above the neighborhood. Over the spruce pines and magnolias. High enough and the roads became indistinct below the spreading trees. High enough and she began to feel the wetness of clouds.

Shouldn’t they be icy cool? Shouldn’t she be shivering? And shouldn’t she come back to the big building instead. . .

Instead of darting, turning, dodging away to the south and the coast. Spinning and skimming the tree tops and the clouds alternately. Why would anyone go back? Experiencing the world that she loved like this was. . .

Was. . . living? Wait, that didn’t seem right. . .

Was exhilarating. Flying over marsh lands now and out over the sparkling gulf. Eventually the water beckoned and she splashed down into it. It was sun warmed and brackish and somehow she had a mask and snorkel now. She floated and gazed down at a turtle grass meadow just a foot below her. As she kicked forward she scared a few pin fish, their yellow and blue stripes flashing in the sun as they headed away from her.

Below, she caught the flashes of the many blue eyes on a pair of scallops nestled in the grasses. Where the grass gave way to a little cleared area some sea urchins ambled and grazed. A batfish poked its strange triangular about out of the grasses, crouched frog-like on the bottom. It had been so long since she’d seen a batfish. This was her happy place. Why had it been so long. . .

Maybe because things were so out of balance in reality. Maybe because she hadn’t seen an area of sea grass this healthy in years, but it wasn’t like she was really looking for it much, either.

The dream of sea grass meadows lasted a long time. Something about her snorkel felt wrong, but she kept kicking along, over sea stars and cowfish and occasional sponges.

***

Her chest didn’t want to rise the way it was supposed to. It hurt strangely. One of the cats must have climbed up there. They could be so sweet in the morning. She wanted to open her eyes, shake off the sleep and reach for her soft cat, but she couldn’t.

The fourth dream was lying in a hammock, body sore, hands chapped. There was a fire not too far away, and a cold bottle of beer on the ground beside her, she just needed to reach down if she wanted a cool sip.

The night was growing cool around her, but she had her sleeping bag there. Over by the fire she could hear her friends. Someone had a ukulele. She was tired and headachey from climbing all day. But she still wanted to join them. She was going to get up and move over there any moment now. But it was also nice just to look up at the stars.

***

The fifth dream was camping on the beach. Her tent was pitched beside her parents’ camper. Her kids were in that camper. They had showered and now were changing for dinner.

She sat in a beaten up old lawn chair, legs kicked out in front of her. The chair was uncomfortable, hurting her back, and she was tired. It must have been an older chair. She must have been snorkeling for a long time this morning.

The box fan beside her pumped the air at her sun warmed skin. The air was almost uncomfortably cool even though it was hot on the beach. She bent to turn the fan away from her, more toward her husband and her mom who sat a little further away.

Today was day 13, so of course she was tired. They’d been loading up camp all day.

Well, day 13 for her parents only, surely. She hadn’t taken two consecutive weeks of vacation in how long? Was day 13 even still a thing? Did anyone take two week vacations anymore?

The chairs they were in were one of the last things that needed to be packed. The cooking gear was all packed up, and they would decadently head out to a restaurant tonight instead of cooking on the beach. But how would everyone fit without firing up the big camper?

“You haven’t completely filled up the back of your car yet,” said her mom. “I’ll ride back there.”

It made her laugh to think of it. Of course, they’d done it before in a pinch. A couple of people could ride in the way-back. Maybe one of the kids would ride with her mom. Her stomach rumbled thinking of pan fried snapper and hush puppies and she struggled to try to get up and head for the shower house.

***<~>***

Rebecca sighed as she finished filling out the chart for her second to last patient in the intensive care COVID 19 unit at Tallahassee Memorial. The sigh succeeded only at making her face even hotter under her mask and face shield. There hadn’t been much change with Mr. Johnson since the last shift. She patted his shoulder with her gloved hand, trying to imagine the respirator dreams he might be having, if any. She hoped there would soon be a positive change for him.

She straightened and moved toward her last ventilated patient. Her hot sigh had apparently wafted far enough down that now she could smell her jasmine perfume. It was a gentle scent that had been a gift from her fiancé a few months ago. It still made her smile whenever she thought of it.

The next patient, Erin Sommers, was getting better, or had been the last time Rebecca saw her about 24 hours ago. There was a chance that Erin wouldn’t need a ventilator much longer and Rebecca looked forward to a chance to log those observations.

She looked up at the clock as she crossed to Erin’s side, hoping that the physician was due soon, so she almost missed the flutter of movement at the woman’s hand. Erin’s right hand was already restrained, Rebecca saw, and it was a good thing. Her torso was rocking up a little and her eyes were open too, alternatively squinting against the light and trying to take everything in. Rebecca made the last step over quickly.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” she intoned, taking her patient’s hand. “Dr. Wheeler will be here any minute, and maybe we can make you more comfortable. You’ve been through a lot.”

LJ Idol - Week 20 - Boondoggle

2020-04-28T22:42:01Z

Erin let herself sigh deeply as soon as she was sure her mom had hung up. Sometimes there was no winning. Sometimes there was really just no winning.

The worst thing about quarantine was that it seemed like things slowed down for almost everyone else. And Erin was a blessing-counter. She was the kind of person who considered herself thankful for the good things she had. So when many of Erin’s mom friends were finding all the silver linings on the quarantine cloud, she wanted to join right in with them. She had, in fact, been hoping for some kind of slowdown in her fast paced life for several months before the quarantine. But stuck at home in quarantine for Erin, it just seemed like there were more different things to balance now, all of which landed squarely on her shoulders.

The quarantine was less of a slow-down and more of a balancing act. Erin’s normal fast-paced life was a balancing act, too, but one that she had developed lots of props and coping mechanisms for. Now it was a whole new, but actually also boring and old, world. Even though she was enjoying things like curated media consumption with her kids (something she hadn’t had time for before), or work on the plants she loved in her yard, it was hard to jump on the “slowdown is great” bandwagon. It didn’t feel like slowing down when there still weren’t enough hours in the day to get to everything. And it felt like no matter how hard she tried, there were essential things that still didn’t get done.

Erin had not broken quarantine in six weeks. For six weeks, she’d worked from home. Her daughter and son had done virtual school from home. Her husband was home with them too. They were all together, all day long every day and for the most part it went pretty well. Despite close quarters, no one had come close to killing anyone yet. At least no one had come closer than they typically came during normal life. It helped that the kids were ten and twelve. Erin felt the worst for her friends and clients with preschoolers. Sure, her son would be missing the end of his 5th grade year and elementary graduation, but that paled in comparison to 12th graders who were missing the end of their senior years and actual high school graduation.

Erin knew she was among the luckiest of the lucky. Her job wasn’t in danger unless she screwed up, the same as during non-quarantine time. She could work from home. Their home wasn’t in danger. Between her check and her husband’s disability retirement they were covered.

But man, work was intense. It turned out that a quarantine for COVID 19 didn’t cut down on land use disputes. If anything, it seemed it had intensified them. Erin had one dispute where one of the homeowner’s legal counselors claimed knowledge about a navigational channel in front of the client’s property going all the way back to a grandfather’s service as the President of the Florida Inland Navigation District.

Usually Erin was able to shrug off those kinds of claims and evaluate the facts of situations before her without a second thought. But the navigation districts in Florida had always fascinated her. It was probably in part because Erin’s first litigation had been against one of the Navigation Districts and in part because one of Erin’s own great-grands had also been a leader in and President of the predecessor agency to the Florida Inland Navigation District. Erin’s great-grand had been intent on the creation of the Cross Florida Barge Canal- a project that never came to fruition. If it had, and if Erin’s little hometown had become the bustling portside hub that it might have been in that universe, maybe Erin would have had her start as a boutique Palm Beach attorney full of righteous ire and indignation. Erin grinned at the thought.

Instead, most people thought of the Cross Florida Barge Canal as a dream of the past now. It was a dream for which the ecological cost would have been far too great to conscience in comparison to any economic benefit gained from having a shipping canal cutting across the peninsula of Florida. And Erin, in her humbler reality, also happened to do some work for the group that managed the state owned lands of the Cross Florida Greenway; today’s legacy of the dream of the canal. It wasn’t an irony so much as it was the natural evolution of things. Erin figured that she cared about that land and how it was managed for the greater good as much, if not more, than her great grand had.

Erin took a swig of her beer and sat up in the porch chair she was occupying. Her mom had just sealed her fate to help out a cousin who’s daughter was destined to start college in her town in the fall. And because of COVID 19, the cousin and daughter had no idea what that was going to look like. Erin had been tasked with helping to give them the local low down. Her cousin would be calling soon, and though Erin was a proud alumnae of the university too, now she needed to find out what she could about the situation on campus, which she wasn’t really attached to anymore. Erin also needed to figure out a tour that they wouldn’t get in trouble for.

Erin had almost screened her mom’s call, because she already felt like she was capacity for the week. But she loved her parents and worried about them. She had been overdue in bringing her kids down for a visit to them before COVID 19 hit, so she really needed to keep up communications. Now here she was, committed to being a quarantine tour guide. It would actually be fun. She just needed to get into the right mindset for it.

She was about to finish her end-of-workday back-porch beer, and then she would need to get dinner started for her crew. She took a deep breath, smelling the jasmine from the front yard and the pineapple sage she had recently started on the porch beside her. She would manage to get it all done somehow.

Her phone whistled beside her with a new text and she picked it up to see a meme sent from her professor friend who she was just thinking of calling to find out about the state of things on campus. The meme made her laugh:

Erin picked up her empty beer bottle and held onto her phone to head inside. They would all get along, she figured, with a little help from their friends.

————————————————————————————————————
This week’s very late breaking inspiration came to me from an actual work incident that caused me to look up my great-great-great uncle and verify that he had been involved with the predecessor agency to FIND (scroll down to the part about the Cross Florida Canal if interested). I didn’t do anything with the knowledge except hold it in my head, until I realized that the old Cross Florida Barge Canal was on topic for this entry. Also, I’m still getting by with a little help from my friends here. I hope you readers are, too!

LJ Idol - Week 19 - I can’t get calm

2020-04-19T22:32:41Z

The sun was beginning to filter through the trees at an angle. Bryn pedaled harder and checked her watch. She was almost to the spot where she wanted to make the call. It looked like she still had ten minutes or so. Her plan was going to work out.

She smiled, glad to be out in the fresh air and feeling like she was getting away with something. Technically the bike trail she was on was closed to the public. The parking areas and restrooms for it were all locked up and taped off. But she had passed several other bikes on the trail itself. People were still getting outside. People still needed to get outside, maybe now more than ever. Maybe a third of the people she passed wore masks over their faces. People were cautious. For the most part, they gave each other wide berths. It was a strange mix of emotions watching the faces of the people she saw. Of course the whole point of being out here was probably to get away from other people. Bryn imagined that in that, it was the same for many of them as it was for her.

She thought she recognized the spot she was seeking and slowed, then turned off the paved trail. She hopped off her bike, backpack slapping against her back. She walked a little farther, wheeling her bike along beside her over the pine-needle-carpeted ground. The stump she thought she had remembered was still there. She looked around, decided it was a good enough spot and chose a side of the big stump to lean her bike against. She was maybe 25 yards from the trail. The patch of pine wood she was in was part of a tract of national forest, she was pretty sure. There was a set of mountain bike trails not too far away. Technically the national forests were still open to public use. It was only about five miles from her house to this spot, and that was part of the charm of her great green city.

She pulled off her backpack and set her water bottle on the stump. Then she emptied her backpack of her big comfy foldable chair (a splurge she’d made last year for a big camping trip- God, how she missed going camping this month!) and the little stand for her phone, and an extra phone (or headlamp) battery, just in case. It looked like she had three or four bars of service here. She figured that should be plenty for a zoom meeting call.

Over the course of the last four weeks her family had made countless zoom meeting calls from their little house. She’d helped her daughters hook into weekly meetings for their elementary school classes and for their dance team. She’d done zoom meeting happy hours with friends and zoom fitness classes with her sister and her mom, all with her daughters and husband in easy listening distance if they wanted to listen in. During the nine-to-five weekdays, her family listened in to countless skype calls and meetings that she attended for work. They’d even done a family zoom meeting with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents for Easter. But Bryn hadn’t wanted to do this meeting in the little 3:1 house she shared with her daughters and husband.

She positioned her phone in the folding phone stand and moved the contraption around a little on the stump. She was trying to get a good angle where her caller would be able to see her well and where she could see the caller. She felt nervous, but not as awkward as she would have felt trying to have this conversation ten feet from her family. She opened up the camera and looked at herself in selfie mode. Her hair wasn’t too crazy from the miles in her bike helmet.

Bryn hadn’t sought out a therapist for years. Her last experience with a therapist had, in fact, been pretty terrible. She’d been seeing a therapist regularly when she had her mental breakdown, now seven years ago. That therapist had not helped her then. If anything, looking back, she figured that therapist might have contributed to the speed of that breakdown. But she hadn’t known until she started to lose it how utterly useless that old therapist was, right at the moment when she really needed someone.

It was this attitude, Bryn knew, that had prevented her from seeking out therapy again after she picked up the pieces from the breakdown. For the seven years since those very dark days, she’d continued very occasionally to see a psychiatrist- the same one that had helped her after her breakdown. He had let her pick up the pieces and heal at her own slow speed. Though he’d recommended meds, he hadn’t pushed them on her. He hadn’t forced her. He let her go at her own speed. It had been a long swim up from dark depths, but Bryn had slowly come back to herself. And she’d kept thinking that since it was so hard to really find a good match with a therapist, that she wouldn’t try again.

Until now. Now it was 2020. Now it was the middle of the Corona virus outbreak. Now the world was upside down and Bryn was almost grateful that she’d had her mid-life type of breakdown some years early so that she was on relatively solid footing now. Now, in a way, the whole world was turned upside down. Before the virus got crazy, Bryn had started seeing a new doctor for her GP. Her regular GP had moved across town and didn’t seem to be on the same wavelength with Bryn anymore in a lot of ways, so she had finally switched doctors. And she had talked to this new doctor a little about her very hammer-down life and her history of mental illness, and how she’d been hearing a lot of ads for for remote therapy on the podcasts she listened to about outdoor adventuring. Her new doctor, in her low-key way, had been like, “Yeah, that might be worth checking out if it isn’t too expensive and you think it would be helpful.”

So, a month or so before people really started to worry about Covid 19 in North America, Bryn had done some research, found a therapist who worked remotely that a fitness friend out west recommended to her, and scheduled an appointment several months out, trying to stack the payment for the session into her month of bills in the best way possible.

And now, two months later, here she was, about ready to try talking to a therapist remotely. It was weird because despite the fact that work-from-home was stressful for Bryn- definitely more stressful than working in the office- Bryn felt like she was on pretty good mental footing these days. Yes, there was worry and a lot of sadness as she watched her daughters missing out on things, but everything seemed to be within reason.

When she’d been broken before, she hadn’t been able to calm down. She’d been stuck in a rut where everything felt do-or-die. The adrenaline switch had been stuck on. Today her feelings weren’t like that. She figured she was maybe a little depressed, what with the slate of things she normally looked forward to wiped clean. But she dealt with that sadness in what she thought were normal ways. She was letting herself sleep a little extra, trying to make sure she talked to her friends plenty, hugging her daughters more; things like that.

As she watched her state and nation respond to the epidemic, she felt pretty sure that she was also seeing the beginning of the end of a lot of old ways of doing things. A close friend of hers loved to intone, “End stage capitalism, baby. We’re seeing the first fitful death throes of the oligarchy in this, and make no mistake, the throes are going to hurt us a lot more than they hurt them.” Bryn wasn’t sure she thought that there was an “us” and a “them” in the picture. But she did things were changing, and in a lot of ways, she hoped that things were changing too. Certainly, there seemed to be room for improvement.

Bryn checked the clock on her phone. Therapy call would be starting in just a minute. “You don’t have to stick with this person if they don’t seem to be a good fit for you,” she told herself. She opened up her texts and found the zoom meeting invite she was supposed to open up for this meeting. She closed her eyes for a minute and listened to the sounds of the breeze through the pines and a few birds, and distant traffic.

She took a couple of deep breaths and smiled, then clicked the link in the text message.

LJ Idol Week 18: Choice of Unused Topics - Glass Cliff

2020-04-05T22:38:25Z

By the third week of the pandemic, my partner didn’t even mind when I snuck away to walk with my work-wife on a Wednesday evening. I mean, I guess I wasn’t even really sneaking. Evan knew that plague or no plague, I wasn’t going to leave him for a lady. Plus there wasn’t really anything wrong with going for a walk through a relatively nearby neighborhood with a friend that I stayed six feet distant from. You know, so long as we also remained distant from anyone else we saw. And also so long as we didn’t walk through any clouds of aerosolized sneeze particles that anyone left for us within the last few hours.

But that didn’t bear thinking about.

After the most recent three workdays of Evan and I sharing our midtown 2:1 through hectic eight -to-five days, we really needed a couple of hours apart. Ev likes to have the kitchen to himself when he cooks dinner at the end of the day anyway.

Honestly, I don’t know how my coworkers and friends with kids are doing it. I guess a lot of them have bigger houses. Although I’m not sure how they’re paying for those on state-worker salaries. Anyway, that’s part of why I like to keep my little rendezvous with Maude. She has two kids and a disabled husband that she’s spending her long crazy days with. Her stress levels when we meet up always make me feel better about mine.

Maude, my work-wife, is a singular sort of person. I always figure she needs the outlet of a walk more than I do. Today she really got slammed by our management in a teleconference, and I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve only been with the Department of Health here in Florida for a couple of years, but Maude’s been here forever. Apparently her fifteen plus years have been long enough to make a few enemies, although I’m not sure how she did it, or why she sticks around if she has burned bridges with key people. I’m also not sure why she hasn’t risen any farther in the agency than she has. She basically functions like a manager, helping with training and providing suggestions for how to allocate work that are good suggestions. But they overlook her for management positions every time.

I always park at a little city park that’s less than half a mile from her place and then walk around the short block to her place to pick her up. Her neighborhood is reputedly the in-town hippie neighborhood of our town. HOA membership is optional, and the neighborhood has big rambling yards and older ranch style houses from the fifties and sixties. Occasionally a house has interesting architecture, but for the most part they’re pretty cookie cutter. Maude’s place has interesting mid-century style architecture, but at the expense of being small. It’s a 3:1 of the sort that maybe was luxurious in the 50s. Today it seems tiny. And she and her family are pet people. So they have a dog and a couple of cats in there with them, too.

Maude grins when she sees me. She’s sitting in a folding camp chair in her driveway with a long-neck bud light lime in her hand. I wrinkle my nose at the sight of it as she finishes the last swallow. Normally she drinks decent craft beer, but she’s been joking that the pandemic has her on austerity measures. There’s also a running joke in our social group that if a type of beer is bad enough that no one else wants it, eventually Maude will drink it. I guess her good beer taste doesn’t always engage. She lets her old dog walk to the end of it’s leash to greet me and then takes her chair and the dog back inside while I wait. When she returns she has a little backpack on that I know contains a half gallon knock-off yeti full of some kind of homemade libation.

“Did you remember your cup?” she asked.

I point to the steel double-walled camping mug with a carabiner clip handle, clipped to my belt loop. Of course I have. We walk at a fairly brisk clip, but I notice she’s favoring one foot pretty heavily.

“I ran over lunch,” she explains. “I had to do something after that call.” She sighs and her shoulders slump some. I’m not sure what to say, but she goes on. “I’m finally starting to get into pretty decent 5k time range. For me, anyway. But I’m so heavy now. I think I need new shoes- something with more support. My left foot is hurting pretty bad. Let’s just go to the bridge and if no one is there we can do drinkees and I’ll elevate it.”

We’re not very far from the bridge. Her neighborhood has a green space running the length of a couple of the longer blocks following a little stream. We’ve come back to where I parked, where the little park marks one end of the green space. We turn off the road onto the trail that follows the green space. There’s a wooden bridge spanning a side creek about halfway down the block on the trail.

“Not a bad sunset,” I point out as we turn onto the trail. Behind us the sky is turning magenta, with the silhouettes of big pine trees a stark black in front of it. One of my favorite things about Tallahassee is all of the trees. It’s a green city 12 months out of the year, whereas Colorado, where I’m from seems to go brown for over half the year. Maude usually agrees with my tree love, but I don’t point out the majesty of the pines tonight. She’s still paying off debt from having to remove a big diseased pine that was right on her property line last year.

“Not bad at all,” she agrees. “If we’ve got to be quarantined, this neighborhood is definitely not a bad place for it.”

I feel bad for my friends back in Denver, where the quarantine is on similar footing, but it’s still cold. At least here we can open our windows while we work from home. And in a smaller city like Tallahassee, people just aren’t as on-top of each other as they would be in a major metro area. I find myself thinking about population distribution and the incredible diversity of population styles across Florida’s counties. But these are work thoughts. I’ve come here to decompress. I try to let the sounds of the creek and the evening birdsong and insect noises wash over me.

We make our way to the bridge, and we haven’t seen anyone else on the wide trail. Maude takes off her little pack and sits with her back against one stanchion of the bridge. She opens the yeti and I hear her pouring herself a tall, icy drink in a cup that’s similar to mine, but higher volume.

“Today it’s Cuba Libres,” she says, “I hope you like a lot of lime.” I’ve gone off the trail and picked my way down to the creek bed. There’s a nice rock for sitting here. The mosquitos were starting to be problematic down here last week, but there was a cool snap last night, so I’m hoping that has knocked them back. It feels like it may have dipped into the 60s this evening already.

Maude waits for me to get comfortable, then tosses the re-capped yeti down gently. There’s just enough left for me to fill my cup. She’s made them strong, but not obnoxiously so. We won’t be stumbling back to the car.

“I’m glad the rain’s held off,” I tell her. “It sprinkled on me on the way here. I saw a homeless guy walking down the side of the parkway with half a watermelon on my way here. He was just walking along in that slight drizzle with the watermelon half held cut side up over his head. I hope he didn’t get too wet.” She laughed a little mournfully.

“I hope he didn’t have too far to go. I hope he had somewhere to go,” she said. Then she shook the glass in her hand, enjoying the clinking of the ice in her drink. “Over the weekend I picked up pastries for the family at that Cuban place; Chi-Chi’s. I know it wasn’t absolutely essential, but I really want that place to survive this thing. Anyway, they gave me a free cafécito while they packaged up our stuff. It was delightful. But that’s not why I started to tell you this. Your story reminded me. . .”

She paused to take a long drink and then pointed up, “Look, a bat!”

Sure enough there was one flitting across the sky above the creek bed with it’s tell-tale erratic jigs and jags. I hoped that didn’t mean the mosquitoes would be descending soon.

“Anyway as I came out of Chi-Chi’s there was a skinny little fluffy orange cat and I think he could smell my savory pastries. And then I remembered that I’ve still got wet cat food packets in the car from traveling with my little old man cat before he died. So I grabbed one of those and opened it in the parking spot next to me for the cat. That cat had almost decided to start licking the food when a fricking taxi full of people pulled into the spot and scared it off. I mean, the taxi didn’t run over the food, so I think the cat will get it eventually. But, you know, I try to do a good thing. . .”

She swirled the ice in her glass again. I could hear that it was getting emptier.

“I don’t know why Frank wouldn’t adopt your idea today,” I said, referring to our direct supervisor. “It makes a lot more sense than what we’re being told from the top down.”

Her bark of a laugh was bitter.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said, “Frank is going to get picked to serve in the Emergency Ops center this week, so I’ll probably be reporting in for us. He’s trying to help me, in a way, by making sure that I do it the way management wants it.” She rubbed at her temples. I wondered if she was about to talk to me about the chip management seemed to have on its shoulder for her, but she didn’t open up.

“If Frank gets promoted out of this, I don’t understand why they don’t put you in his position,” I said.

“He probably will get promoted one more time, eventually,” she said swirling her ice and laughing bitterly again. “But they won’t put me in his place. I’d be able to do that job, and do it well. They aren’t going to give me the chance to get into management where I could make a difference. That’s not how it works. At least that’s not how it’s worked for the last 8-10 years.”

I finished my drink and I could hear her starting to stand up. It was starting to get dark. Time for us to go. And time to talk of lighter things. Or at least of different things.

“Toss me that yeti,” she said, and then with a bit of genuine laughter, “Did I ever tell you about the time Carol was tossing a container to me, but everyone was several more sheets to the wind? This was before the yeti days, and let me tell you- cheap plastic bottles from publix can shatter on impact. . .”

I smiled and straightened, ready to give the faux yeti a gentle toss, and then to clamber back up the stream bank. Maude and the whole team here in Tallahassee had a kind of resilience that was more than a buzzword. On evenings like this, with a generous serving of Cuba Libré in my belly, it was almost enough to make me think we were going to come through this pandemic and maybe make some changes that would make things better in the long run.

Idol week 17 - Negative Reverse

2020-03-26T22:59:32Z

Ben wasn’t in the mood to listen to anyone’s crap anymore. He was tired of his dad, absolutely sick of his mom, and one hundred percent through with his younger twin sisters. If he had to hear his mom tell them all that they should be thankful that they lived in a nice big three bedroom house one more time he was going to scream. No house was big enough for the five of them for even a minute longer. But Ben wasn’t an idiot, so he waited for his mom to re-engage in the board game she was playing with his sisters before quietly slipping outside. They could stress over a stupid game without him. The world had enough real problems. It didn’t need to also include three hour long European board games with trains and colored goods to move, where everyone fought over the rules.

Technically the curfew didn’t start until tomorrow night at 11:00 in their town. So tonight there shouldn’t be any problem with him getting some fresh air and walking down to the park. And if his mom flipped her lid again when she realized he was gone, that was her problem. Ben executed a little skip as he passed out of his driveway and into the neighborhood street. It was a perfect spring night for a walk. A breeze stirred the leaves on the big White Oak at the end of the driveway. With the sun down for a couple of hours now, Ben could almost trick himself into pretending it was an autumn night instead of a spring one. He halfway wished he could somehow skip ahead to autumn and not be stuck in a house with his family for months on end to finish his Junior year of high school. He was ready for Senior year and less stupidity.

Stupid virus. The problem though, was that it was not a stupid virus. It was a virus that had evolved to spread really effectively through the human population and now the humans weren’t reacting logically to it so they were making things worse. Ben shared his parents concerns about that even if his parents were dumb about stress management. He felt bad for his little sisters in a way, too. They were missing out on the last months of their last year of elementary school. No 5th grade graduation for them. But they were still pretty annoying.

An owl hooted off toward the south. Ben kicked some weeds growing beside the ditch. Why did everyone have to be so annoying? One of his sisters had come absolutely unglued earlier in the day. Dad had pointed out a great big caterpillar that was trying to dig itself into the dirt in the yard. When Ellie, curious as to what it was trying to do, tried to pick it up or dig it out with a trowel, she accidentally sliced it apart. In that moment she went from being a tough kid inquiring about the world to completely inconsolable. Mom had just yelled at them all not half an hour before it happened to leave her alone for a work call, but Ellie’s stupid grief for a stupid worm brought her out onto the front steps where mom almost started crying too. His family was a hot mess. And he was stuck with them. Covid 19 was the worst.

His other sister Jasmine wasn’t much better. She had discovered the world of fan fiction on the internet, so she just tended to ignore all the rest of them for hours and then get yelled at for not helping out enough. Which was pretty much how it was for Ben, too, come to think of it, but he had better things to do on the internet than read and write dumb stories about dumb cats.

Ben’s spirits improved as he walked. The far off sounds of sirens were halfway normal in the night and the nearer sounds of crickets and insects and the breeze in the leaves made him happy. He remembered some song lyrics he was working on and lost himself to musing on the right rhyme, right up until he found himself turning into the park that was halfway around the block from his house. It was kind-of creepy there in the night, especially since the city had come and wrapped plastic netting around the swings and jungle gyms to ensure that the park stayed closed and didn’t make anyone sick.

Ben wasn’t interested in the playground or picnic tables anyway. He headed across the park and down toward the little stream that ran through it. As he left the circles of light the streetlights produced, he pulled his little battery operated camping lantern out of his pocket and switched it on. He picked his way down the steep dirt and limestone banks of the stream carefully. He squatted for a moment beside the shallow water, letting its sounds wash over him. The flow wasn’t very great because they hadn’t had any rain for a while. Ben was 17 years old, and he’d been playing in this creek for his whole life.

At least corona virus hadn’t changed the creek appreciably. There was still plenty of green moss here. The azaleas still drooped long branches down toward the mud and rock. In the muddy places he could still see evidence of crayfish holes for the crayfish he’d taught his dumb little sisters to catch. He followed the creek in its little chasm upstream, back toward the road where the stream was contained in a great square concrete box of a culvert. His mom loved the creek but was always warning them away from the part where the road crossed. Why was he thinking about her? Her and her dorky friends who liked to talk about the creek in terms of it being a stormwater conveyance, and liked to wonder whether it was part of the city’s permitted system. They made everything so needlessly complicated.

He decided he definitely needed to check out the graffiti under the road. Maybe there would be some song-writing inspiration there. The flow of the creek was so low that he could almost step under the road without getting his feet wet at all. The square tunnel was so tall that he didn’t have to duck. He raised his little lantern to check out the graffiti near the other end of the tunnel and almost dropped it because he was so surprised at what he saw.

Sitting against the wall of the tunnel was an old guy with long silver hair and ratty layers of clothes, with a paper wrapped bottle in his hand. He grinned as he saw Ben’s look of complete surprise, wrinkles forming into smile-lines around his eyes and mouth. He didn’t have a full set of teeth, but the ones he had were fairly white. “Welcome to my corona squat, young man,” he said, and he took a swig from his bottle with a flourish. “I just need a place for a few nights, you know. TPD broke up a very fine spot we had going over by the pool at Trousdell.”

Ben struggled to regain his composure. The man didn’t look very clean but he seemed to be breathing fine. And he was easily more than ten feet away.

“You planning to put up some tags down here? Is that how k. . . people talk about graffiti these days?” The guy leaned forward, readjusting his position sitting there. Ben realized the old guy probably wasn’t all that comfortable there, and that he was trying to make Ben comfortable.

“Naw man,” Ben tried to be casual, though it felt dumb to just blurt out the truth. “I’m just getting out of my place for a minute. Just checking things out.” He didn’t want to retreat but he didn’t know what else to do.

The guy smiled at Ben again. “Well, I’d offer you this,” he brandished the paper-wrapped bottle, “But you don’t look dumb enough to want to share germs with a stranger this week.”

Ben took a step closer to the colorful words splashed across the wall opposite the guy, feeling reckless and brave. He might as well look at what he’d come to see. As pretty as the designs were, the words were all just names that didn’t mean anything to him.

“So, you probably wouldn’t be the kind of young man that goes blabbing to parents and authorities about dangerous old men under bridges, right?” The guy was saying, “I mean that kind of talk just gets a person in trouble for skulking around under bridges themselves, am I right?”

Ben took a step back. This was parental style reasoning coming at him out of a decidedly non-parental looking corner. “No trouble to be had here, man,” he said in a rush of bravery. “But my folks might be able to spare something that’d help you out.”

Who knew, maybe finding some help for this guy would help break the tension back home? Ben liked the idea of thinking of something other than quarantine, anyway.

LJ Idol - The Streisand Effect, take 2 - Week 16 extended deadline

2020-03-17T22:59:00Z

Friday the 13th, March of 2020. The Ides are almost upon us and it is such a weird day. I don’t feel well, but I can’t decide if it’s allergies or a mild cold or sheer exhaustion or if, perhaps, I am a fool who should be pressing my medical community for a test to see if I carry the dread disease. I did just do a weekend trip to a swim meet in San Antonio. But the base with the quarantined people was on the other side of town.

I message my supervisor and request leave and permission to work from home. My husband made a neurology appointment for this morning at our big midtown hospital. I don’t want to go to it and risk exposure but Rog twice confirmed the appointment without reminding me that he’d made it and I also don’t want to relegate him to a taxi each way and even more chances of exposure. We drop the girls at school and head to the hospital.

It turns out there’s a new Parkinson’s drug coming online that the neuro wants Rog to try. I am always skeptical of such things, but they give us a starter supply and ask us to sign for permission to wrangle insurance to pay for more. I ask about side effects and am given the explanation “well yes, those are always possible.” My research later indicates that there is reason for hope that the drug will help, but that it causes hallucinations for some people.

The late morning and afternoon pass in a flurry of work and calls and its time to grab the girls from school. Spring break is on! The school carnival, their last run at this right of passage as elementary students, was a delight. But also the teachers all sent home extra work. They are forewarned that things are closing down with Covid 19 fears. They want the kids to be ready for standardized testing even if there are closures.

I have a camping reservation for tonight on the Atlantic coast, three hours from home. Anson is signed up to climb in a competition at the Jacksonville rock gym tomorrow morning and the gym didn’t cancel the competition. Do we stay or do we go? All signs point to Covid 19 continuing to blow up. But camping is relatively safe. And we haven’t got any other spring break plans. We take Jas home, grab our bags and go.

We make it with twenty minutes to spare before sunset. I set up the tent while Anson runs to the bathhouse to put on her swimsuit. We race to the beach with the sky going pastel above us. Low tide. Low tide at Anastasia is breakers right on shore with another line farther out. We lament our lack of bodyboards and surfboards. She bets it’ll be too cold for me. I think about all the ocean plunges in my life, and I’m mostly glad she doesn’t know my history with this kind of foolishness. We run up and down the waterline a few times and then make for the first sandbar. It is colder than this old body prefers, but I still love it. Annie is delighted.

Just as I make it to the sandbar, I spot a moon jelly caught in the shallows, trying to right itself, and try to call Annie over to see it. To stay with it in the current, I’m walking fast in thigh deep water- waist deep for her, and it’s hard for her to catch up. She makes it over and sees the ghostly creature. I swirl the water near it allowing it to pump for a moment upright, and consider the hopelessness of my action. A jelly inside the breakers isn’t going to make it back out to sea. Annie and I talk about jellyfish until she shouts, “I love it here!” And we run up the sandbar in shin deep water watching the sky darken to magenta behind us.

We start to play wave games- kicking the tops of waves, trying to leap completely over some of them. I turn circles in the wind scooping up water and tossing it. “I love you ocean!” I shout. “I’m sorry humans have done so many dumb things! We’re trying to make the best choices! Well, many of us are!” Annie grins at me and takes my hand. “I’m so glad we came here,” she says.

***

Three days later and it remains to be seen how the Covid 19 saga will play out. Have we hamstrung ourselves by not having testing infrastructure in place sooner? I can’t decide whether I think willful decisions were made at some levels with the thought that not knowing how many cases we had would somehow be better for us- that, in effect, hiding the true number of cases out there would somehow be grounds for less panic. If that was somebody’s logic, I don’t think it was good logic. Regardless, we are where we are now. And we’ve got to make good decisions going forward.

LJ Idol - The Streisand Effect

2020-03-14T22:57:48Z

This is my first trip to the San Juan and Orcas islands. Ariel was excited at the possibility of seeing whales from kayaks here. But now it seems unlikely that we’ll get to do that. It’s evening. Mother and papa have two groups of people that they’re meeting with here and tonight is to be a special dinner. Mother hired a cook to prepare a special dinner for everyone.

We are standing in the suite of rooms where I’ve been staying through this set of mother’s meetings. Ariel is wild eyed, but there’s a sparkle in her eye that I’ve never seen before. I knew before she told me that something must have finally clicked into place with her memories, but she has scared me with her intensity now. I don’t want to ask what she’d found out.

“Lila, I don’t have much time, can I have your backpack? Please let’s go out on the balcony. Please,” she ducked below the level of the railing and put her back to it, sitting on the tile in her pretty black linen pants despite the damp, “maybe play some music on your phone.”

She unzips my backpack looking through it like she’s making sure I have everything I need for the day, but I realize she’s starting to pack for herself.

She was here now talking with me, but also obviously trying to hide herself. Why? She pinned me with an intense gaze. I shivered despite the balcony being slightly warmer than my suite. But I pulled up my music on my phone and hit play on Lord Huron’s Strange Trails album. I increased the volume when she looked at me expectantly. Strange old music for my strange old friend.

“Lila, your mom is wrapped up with the people that caused me to disappear,” she said in a rush. “I have to get out of here. Can I take some of your clothes- jackets, I need jackets. I really have to go. But,” she reached up from where she sat and took my forearm in her hand, “You’re a good person Li, and I’m not sure this will be over when I run. I want you to know who I am.” There is a smile on her face, but she’s crying. There aren’t sobs, but tears are running. The breeze shifts and intensifies.

“We were right,” she says. “I’m from Florida. I’m. . . My name is Tammy Pierce. I have,” she closes her eyes with the pain of this, “I had a husband and a son seven years ago. My son Brian is older than you are now.” She’s rubbing her face, scrubbing at her eyes. She swallows. “I used to practice law,” she says. “Those men, the ones from Florida. . . What they’re probably selling your mom. . . Lila, it’s very close to magic, what they can do.”

“I went into the great room where they were all chatting and one of them kept looking at me. I finally looked back and then everything. . . Everything. . . I know your mother is careful, but these guys are too Lila. I can’t stay here. What happened to me is proof of too much. There’s a reason it was easy not to remember. But I have to go back now. And I think Gary Steel might totally remember me, too.”

She grabs my hand and pulls me inside to the wardrobe where my outdoor gear is stored. What I have will be tight on her, but she is past caring. Strange Trails sounds even more tinny than intended coming out of my phone:

They took my life but it isn’t the end
They put me in the ground but I’m back from the dead

****

Mother arrives about forty-five minutes later, also full of strange energy. I’m not sure if she knows Ari came to me, or only suspects it.

“Darling,” she tells me, “I’ve known who our Ariel really is for two years now.”

My heart sinks when she tells me this. I think of Ari- rather Tammy, crying at the thought of her husband and motherless son. But mother’s tone sharpens as I look away.

“I would have told her everything. She really has been good household staff. But her situation- her disappearance is complicated. I needed to solve those complications for her to be able to go back and that’s what I’m trying to do now, but there are certain opportunities that have presented themselves.”

She pulls me over to the bed and sits, her warm hand on my leg. It’s rare for her to turn her complete attention to me. I anticipated this, but it’s still intense.

“Once I knew her identity- and it was the security team who finally figured it out- a simple matter of running her fingerprints in the right place. But Li, I knew that I needed to keep it to myself until I could explain the situation. But the situation is bizarre. I knew I should have sent her away these weeks, but I had hoped I could keep the meetings secret from her but keep her here so I could get her take right away.”

Mother is looking down now and I really don’t know if she’s conflicted or feigning internal conflict really well.

“Sometimes I find the more I try to hide something, the more it sticks out, so I treated these talks like anything else. But Lila the force that put our Ari in Halifax is something to be reckoned with, even for us.”

LJ Idol - Week 15: Busman’s holiday

2020-02-29T23:53:51Z

The music coming out of her phone speakers surprises me with its sound quality. She doesn’t have the volume up very high, but the brassy 80s beat comes through clearly, curling up into the cool dry evening air. Mir has kind of an off-kilter and eclectic taste in music, but so far on this trip we’ve been able to enjoy each-other’s tastes. Jimmy Buffett is belting out life lessons gleaned from matchbook covers:

Fly down to Miami
Get yourself a boat
Fill it full of suntan oil
And rent yourself a goat

The 80s were so over the top. It must have been strange beyond imagining to grow up in that decade. People today blame the excesses of those years for a litany of sins, but there are definitely people in the 2040s that look back on those times with nostalgia, too. I’m pretty sure my companion falls somewhere in the middle of those positions, but we’ve never discussed her childhood much. She didn’t climb as a kid so it doesn’t come up.

Mir is occasionally singing along. She has a slender cutting board balanced across her lap and she’s dicing an onion and a cucumber. Part of the onion goes into the pot balanced on her little canister stove. The stove sits on the big flat-topped red boulder that we’ve pulled our camp chairs up to. A blow-up LED solar lantern next to it provides the circle of cheery light we’re sitting in.

“I’ve only ever really had two jobs,” Miriam says. On some level this is a complete lie, and we both know it. I’ve seen her resume. Seen her digital footprints across the internet. But I can tell she is feeling expansive, as she takes another sip from the beer at her side. She’s ready to share some wisdom. And I am here to learn.

“Teaching and writing,” she continues. “Yeah, I know, few of my job titles were actually teacher or writer. But that’s what advising people boils itself down to if you’re doing a good job as in-house type counsel. You’re teaching them how the law should be applied to their decisions. And writing’s just essential no matter what one does. It can be the most efficient but also the most insightful way to get to someone.”

The tang of the onions mixed with the warmth of the oil smells delicious. We already discussed the balance between packing light and packing the things that make the trip worthwhile. I can tell that Mir enjoys a bit of food preparation ritual at the end of the day. I don’t usually savor this part of camping, especially when I’m working, because I favor the fast and light approach that doesn’t require cooking.

But Miriam isn’t out here for a big alpine push, devoting every last bit of energy to the physical. She worked hard today, and improved some techniques, and I showed her some routes she should be able to come back and lead when she can find other partners. At a little over 60, she isn’t my typical guiding client. But I’m also not really guiding this weekend. I mean, I am guiding, in that I’m the more experienced and proficient climber. At least in terms of routes climbed. True, Mir’s been climbing for forty years, but she also went months and sometimes years between outside trips for many of those years. She raised a family and practiced law and worked with an environmental agency, and that last point is why we arranged this trip.

Ain't no registration
Ain't no student loan
You may not learn to read or write
But you will surely learn to roll them bones

She tosses another handful of onions into the pan as she sings “roll them bones,” with a flourish, grabs a can of beans and a can opener and goes on.

“It’s been teaching and writing all the way down, the whole way along. And I’ve both loved and hated both jobs every step of the way,” she says.

“You are a very good teacher, Jim,” she tells me, “Guiding has given you that. In a small group environment you can definitely keep people on track.”

It’s a little uncomfortable to get feedback this direct, even when it’s positive, and I can tell it’s weird for her too, but she pushes along because the point of our trip today was a trade. She’s been a paying client in the past, but I offered to give her a day of climbing this week in exchange for her help a few months ago on my resume and interview preparation and now for her thoughts about the job they offered that I’m thinking of taking.

“The track can be a lot less clear in the meeting room than it is on the rock. Do you think you’ll still be able to enjoy it when the stakes aren’t safety and enjoying the outdoors but are the way environmental regulations are brought to bear? They’re both heavy responsibilities, but in different ways. Tell me which things you like the best about the program you would be working with.”

The dry Utah air stirs as I consider how to describe my favorite things about the Washington State position. Miriam hums along and then sings:

Oh there ain’t no graduation from this kind of education
Back to school

LJ Idol - Week 13: Fan Death

2020-02-10T23:52:49Z

I’m thinking of her now because it seems very likely that I’ll soon be loosing her. Ariel’s presence in our lives has been one of the few constants over the last several years, and as strange as her appearance was, I know I’m going to miss her fiercely.

***

We found her on the wrack line.

I say we, but I was actually the one who found her, when I was only eleven. I was going through a stage of intense curiosity about the sea, then. Especially, I was fascinated by coral reefs, but in a pinch, any beach or marsh would do. Papa nurtured this fascination and even re-certified in SCUBA diving so he could go through the course as I went through it for the first time. We spent a lot of time in the Caribbean in the 2020s. There were many dives and snorkel trips.

I remember mother one night, after one of the rare events from which she came home with us from, kicking off her kitten heels as she crossed the penthouse suite and telling Papa, “We need to enjoy it all while we can, you know. Show her as much of everything as you can.” And I remember Papa just looking very sad and not answering her as he mixed them some drinks.

But we weren’t in the Caribbean when I found Ariel, nor even in the states, though we think now that Ariel probably came from the states. We had just come from Bermuda, where my passion for coral reefs had been fed with some of the best diving I’d ever experienced.

Mother had some kind of business in Halifax. She had business everywhere, but we traveled most frequently to America and Canada for her meetings. I was homeschooled, of course, with enrichment from St. Simon’s School online. We always had an au pair with some kind of undergraduate degree at the least who facilitated my teaching. Mother usually rented houses when she was working somewhere longer than a week, and the place she found in Halifax was a little ways out of town- a big house along the rocky coast with a fleet of outbuildings that had formerly supported some kind of agricultural operation.

There was quite a bit of wild coastline and I got up early the first Saturday that we were there determined to explore it. Papa provided me with guidebooks for the local flora and fauna of the coast and I had a notebook in my backpack along with a day’s worth of water and snacks. Maybe two or three hundred yards from the dock, just as the shoreline was starting to get interesting, I encountered a member of mother’s security team. They could sometimes be stuffy, so I gave him a bright smile and prepared to launch into a story of a mandatory school project that required me to push on down the coast.

But he was soft spoken and kind and informed me that it was a couple of miles to the next house so I was free to ramble, though I should, as always, be careful.

The coastline was rocky- more like Bermuda here than the beaches I loved in the Caribbean. There was little to no sand. In some places large rock faces tumbled directly into deeper water, making it hard to traverse right along the coast. Even though it was summer, it was cool where the trees provided shade. But about half a mile from the house I rounded a rock outcrop to see a pebbled cove stretching ahead of me that was almost beach-like. I remember thinking that this was where I would spend the day, checking out the wrack line and maybe wading a bit into the shallows to see what I could see there.

There wasn’t much seaweed to poke through washed along the shore. What was there looked tough. More like kelp from the pacific than the algae species that I was more familiar with. There were a few pieces of driftwood in interesting shapes. But just as I was about to give up on seeing much, I ran into a patch of that seaweed that had a fish in it. The fish looked very wet still, almost like it could still be alive. But what surprised me the most was the kind of fish it was- something I was used to seeing much further south, a spiny box puffer. They could be found on reefs as well as in aquariums because they were strangely cute, with their large eyes and cartoon-like mouths. I reached down and picked it up to find that it was cold and beginning to stiffen, it’s big open eyes just starting to cloud over. I carefully set it back down and continued along, realizing that along this patch of rocks, there was also sargassum mixed in with the green and grey seaweeds I had been seeing all morning. I wondered if there had been storm prior to our arrival that might have brought these things north, as I spotted a sea fan that had been uprooted, still purple with just a few tinges of bleaching in the middle and a bit of a sponge.

As I moved closer to examine the sea fan, I suddenly realized that the large of piece of driftwood nearby that I’d been considering for a seat wasn’t a piece of driftwood at all.

I remember dropping my backpack and giving a little shout as I realized it was the naked body of a person. A woman. I shocked myself by reaching out toward her, grasping her shoulder where she lay curled on her side. I know I was babbling and afraid, asking questions, trying to remember what I knew of CPR.

I had seen naked people on beaches before and in spas, but the nudity of this cold body was different and much rawer somehow. I remember elation as she she turned onto her back easily but dismay as I saw that she wasn’t as pristine as her arms and back made her out to be. Her abdomen and belly were strangely shriveled, the skin there loose and laced with stretch marks. She was hairy in ways that made me think she wasn’t ready for swimsuit season. And her face was more lined than I’d expected it to be from the view of her legs and back.

As she turned over I thought and hoped I felt some resistance that might be from living muscle. The shoulder was cold but not as cold as the little puffer fish had been. My own heart hammered as I realized she was breathing. And then her face took on a whole new set of lines as her eyes fluttered open and I heard her take in a big breath and exhale the words in a whisper, “I’m alive.”

***

It turned out she could stand and walk. She drank deeply from my water bottle and did her best to fashion the towel I carried into a skirt. She was faint. She barely whispered and didn’t seem well able to focus. She seemed to know what hypothermia was, but seemed confused as to why I kept applying the term to her that morning.

She couldn’t tell me her name or how she’d gotten to the water or the rocky beach. She knew the year, but not where she was from or what she did when she wasn’t waking up on cold rocky shorelines.

She walked tall, but slowly. I’m tall- one of the few traits I seem to share with mother. At eleven, I topped 1.7 meters. But she towered above me, something I’m not accustomed to. I know mom feels the same way. But even on that first crazy day, having gotten a shirt from the security man as we came back to the house, mother approved of her posture. It was hard to read any emotion in her at all that day, but I remember her, wrapped in blankets, seeing a doctor that we called out from town, and seeming hazily surprised to be in Halifax.

I remember asking Papa about the lines on her face, of why she seemed so much older than he and Mother in her face and no where else. He laughed and responded that was what faces looked like in middle age when you couldn’t afford to have work done.

It is, I suppose, weird that she stayed with us rather than trying to solve the mystery of her appearance on her own in Halifax. It’s rare for me to think of anything our family does as weird, though, because our family is so weird. Mother and papa are among the luckiest of people because of the wealth they control. Papa takes less of an active hand in business and likes helping people on a more personal level. But mother is a true power player in the world. A lot of our friends consider themselves lucky.

Papa was intrigued by this mystery woman. I think he wanted to help her. So, when her memory still hasn’t returned ten days later and it was clear she felt no connection to Halifax, we made her part of the household staff and she followed us back to Scotland, glad for the job.

She never remembered her name. Under hypnosis, Ariadne and Tam came out as possibilities, but she didn’t think either was right and the hypnotist didn't think she had really gotten through. She was apparently in her mid forties, with what seemed to be an advanced education and a c-section scar that was about ten years old. She knew a lot about Florida and the mountainous western states, and spoke very poor Spanish in addition to English with little accent and a large vocabulary. She was curious about everything but less apparently driven to solve the mystery of her history than we were.

We settled on Ariel Smith as a working name for her. Ariel because it was close to that strange Ariadne and because of the little mermaid way in which she’d appeared. When my au pair got into a medical program at Duke and left us, Ariel stepped into the au pair position.

I used to try to help her in the search for her past when I’d finished up research for school. We both seemed to enjoy the work. I would never have guessed what finally apparently jogged her memory.

LJ Idol Week 12: Failure

2020-02-01T03:05:21Z

Failure? Failure is sitting here on a cloud-shrouded-moon night with this bottle of sweet cheap port wine, eating a grocery store picnic with numb fingers and talking to you. Yeah, we’re far from the city. Far from home and in a beautiful place. But what are we even doing? It’ll likely be too wet to climb tomorrow, even if I can find a partner. Shit, it’s not even Friday. Do you think my boss will try to call me when I don’t come in tomorrow or just assume? And what would he even assume? Hell, maybe nobody else goes in tomorrow either. This 2020 world has gotta feel something like the end of the world to some of them, too.

And, yeah, a part of me is thinking maybe I’ll get up in the morning and call in and explain that I’m really not feeling well and another part of me really wants to know what it would look like to let it all burn. That’s what everyone else is doing, or at least that’s how it seems. Just getting theirs and watching the rest burn.

I think failure is not picking a side. Not picking any side but your own. Not knowing which side you want to win, or even knowing of a side of this mess that you think deserves decision-making power. It’s all so broken.

I don’t even know what side you’re on. I guess that’s part of why I wanted to meet you all the way out here.

So what do you say? You used to be in the military, and I guess I just hoped that because of that, you’d be able to tell me something about what forces are really at work here. Maybe you could tell me about a side worth being on. Talk about dumb. I've always been one to fall into magical thinking.

Who the hell am I even kidding. I miss you. I miss my imperfect memory of our friendship. I miss being the person that I was when we were friends. I miss being someone who thought they understood how they were making things better. And I also wanted to show you this beautiful place.

But you didn’t even really show up. Probably because I never even really invited you.

I’m just up here, sitting on the edge of a mountain. Living on the edge. Surrounding myself with beauty when I can. Striving always. And drinking all alone.

These are maudlin thoughts; these thoughts of failure. And anyway, I’m one of the luckiest ones. It falls to me to create a good side if I can’t find one to support. I need to stop whining and pining for rescue. But it is pretty much exactly like Jimmy Buffett wrote in He Went to Paris. The business of just living life will take over if you let it. Summers and winters scattered like splinters and, yeah, twenty more years slipped away.

Failure is not knowing, I suppose, whether you’re balancing things correctly. Whether you should be working this job, supporting your family this way, or whether there’s some other, better option. Maybe you should have gone with something easier, something that would leave you with just a little more time and energy for something other than your career. But is anything ever easy if you do it right? I don’t think so.

So “Cheers!” my old friend. “¡Salúd!” Someday we’ll meet again and I’ll fill you in on all of this, and with any luck the theme will be something other than failure.

LJ Idol Week 11 Part 2: If the Creek Don't Rise

2020-01-21T23:35:14Z

Ariadne sat at her desk and tried to force herself back into thinking about work. It was so hard now that her eyes were open to a whole new world.

She hated to admit it, but some part of Ariadne’s mind was still anchored in disbelief. It was all a little too pat, her feeling melancholy and a bit hopeless and then running into someone like Chiv. However, even on that first night last week, the great majority of her was ready to hear what the man with the bat wings had to say. He’d told her he had a feeling that if he went to the park that night he would meet someone that would make something portentous fall into place. And while, yes, something that vague did seem too good to be true, the park was pretty full of people and Ariadne just didn’t feel threatened at all as they walked the well lit paths and spoke.

The man’s name, improbably (and according to him, unimportantly) was Chivalry West. He quipped that his mother had a much greater than average interest than usual in the renaissance and left it at that. He’d come to the capital city years ago for college, which he said hadn’t worked out. But instead he’d discovered magic and gotten wrapped up in that world. Disappointingly it didn’t pay the bills for him, but it did allow him to influence others in ways that helped him pay the bills, or so he said. But what he stressed the most was that it also came with a moral obligation to use it to make the world better, and he happened to be in a position where he needed help.

“Let me show you,” he had asked that night, and then he’d reached for her hand. “Just imagine letting your walls down- letting your guard down, and if you can share just a little bit of your aura with me, I can show you a few things about how magic is influencing everyone around us.”

Her first impulse was to pull away, but her second stronger one was to offer her hand, and not only welcome whatever he was looking for, but sort of imagine providing him with a burst of energy. He took her hand and she was just finding his palm to be much rougher and more calloused than she expected, about to ask him what was supposed to be happening when. . .

She had an overwhelming sense of energy surging up at her from the earth, and down into her head from the sky and through her hand to this person she’d just met. The surge was so great, her knees buckled and she would have collapsed had Chiv not grabbed both her arms to hold her steady.

She had the impression of him in her mind reaching for a rope of energy that she tried to hand to him, and then suddenly instead she’d thrown a deluge of energy at him. In this impression, it was like he pulled a shield out of somewhere that blocked most of what she showered him with, but he was able to hold onto just a strand. This he concentrated on for a bit and then tossed above them into the sky, where it dissipated and when she pulled her hands off his arms and straightened herself up again she realized the park had gone completely silent. No one was moving but the two of them.

“Whoa,” Chivalry said. “You apparently have the ability to access a lot of energy. You’re going to need to work hard on technique to control that. You’re probably going to have a wicked headache later tonight. But,” he brushed off his left and then his right shoulder, “That’ll hold everyone around us for a good couple of minutes. Come with me and see what some of these other people have going on.”

With the world stopped, they’d walked into the fancy restaurant on the green and he’d shown her manifestations of magic on others. A bedraggled pair of white-ish feathered wings on a young woman who seemed preoccupied at a table full of sorority sisters dressed for a night out. Predatory looking shadowy ears and a tail on an older businesswoman who was leaned across a table talking animatedly with a younger man. She caught a glimpse of her own wings in a mirror that night, too. They were short and dark, with slight iridescence on their feathers. A bit like crow's wings crossed with some kind of parrot.

He had explained that most people with a magical connection didn’t even realize they had such a thing. That for them it might only manifest as a bit of extra cunning or charisma or luck when they most needed it. But that once you became aware of your connection you could usually see evidence of the connections others held. “It’s not as simple as angels and devils among us,” he’d said, “Except that it kind-of is.”

After they discussed a few of the people quickly, with an emphasis on how hard it was to tell what kind of intent any of them might have for their magic, he’d grabbed her hand again just in time for her to experience a terrific lurch only to find the two of them standing back in the middle of the path where they’d been when everything stopped, with the world humming around them again. And Ariadne’s sinuses had felt weirdly raw, kind of like they did just before she got a terrible headache. Indeed she’d woken the next morning with a headache like one she might expect after a night of serious partying.

Like the rest of life, this magic thing was frustratingly vague and came with very few instructions so far. When Chiv had sent her on her way again that night it had been with the reassurance, “Hey, this is likely going to be just as fine as anything else that ever happens to you. You know, given that the world doesn’t suddenly get a lot worse.”

“New friend,” she’d thought to say, but hadn’t, “The year is 2020. This is a dumpster fire with no end in sight. Are you kidding me?”

She’d met up with Chiv a few more times since that night. He was working toward something that he thought was important, she could tell, but he didn't seem to trust her enough to provide any details. In just a few meetings she had started to refine her grasp on the energy she seemed to be able to access. But she couldn't really use it for anything yet. He seemed more interested in her observations about who held power in different ways. He really seemed to think that she they would be able to help each other on some kind of project that involved someone she already knew.

She forced her eyes back to the bill analysis she was working on. She found it unlikely that a program attorney at the Department of Agriculture who worked on aquaculture issues was going to have any magical connections in her everyday life.

Suddenly, her boss appeared in her doorway.

"Ariadne, have you finished that analysis yet?" he asked. His southern drawl would have been a little comforting even without the smile that seemed to somehow reach his eyes. "I know you've got a lot going on," he continued, "But legislative affairs has to make some tight turnarounds during session."

"It's close," she said, but he continued talking right over her, so she curtailed her explanation.

"It wouldn't do to get too wrapped up in thoughts about power other than the estimates that financial put together for that analysis, you recall, right? I just wanted to stop by and make sure you were clear on that," he said. And then he turned and moved away as quickly as he'd shown up.

Ariadne was clear on that, always had been. But she had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, because as he'd turned she caught a glimpse of three things behind his searsucker suit-clad self; an extra pair of vulpine looking ears folded back alongside his head and a long and ghostly catlike tail that twitched manically from side to side. She'd always thought him a powerful figure, but hadn't realized until now what kind of power.

"Sure, Chiv, sure," she thought as she tried to calm herself down. "Everything's going to be just great."

LJ Idol Week 11: Wild Goose Chase

2020-01-15T23:30:59Z

Ariadne has been tired all day, but something always wakes up in her as she settles into her evening run. This morning when she got up, her feet and ankles were still sore from her longer run a few days ago, but now it feels like her body’s warming up to this. Her steps don’t hurt, though her side is aching a little. She straightens her torso and tries to think of circles with her feet, and of keeping the cadence even.

The air is cool and damp on her skin. The sky is almost completely dark. Her son has another hour of Ju-Jitsu practice. She already started cooking a dinner that will be easy to complete when they get home. This time is hers.

The damp air over the city smells like it is in from the coast. It smells of salt overlaid with dense swampy organics. She imagines how it would feel to run the 25 or so miles to the coast. Not tonight. Maybe she won’t ever be that strong again.

Ahead is the massive retention pond the city created when it redid this road with the multi-use trail beside it. By day it’s a great place to spot birds nestled among the tall buildings downtown. At night it’s psychedelically lit with bright rainbow color changing LEDs all along the retaining walls. Urban art. Also something to prevent homeless from camping there when bits of the pond are dry. Something to prevent bodies from mysteriously turning up there.

It’s a dark thought. This isn’t a particularly dangerous part of town, though she has coworkers that would chide her for running there alone after dark. There are likely cameras in the area. But there are also a string of emergency call beacons- bright blue steel columns under bright lights with buttons and speakers that will call the police. There are also usually some young people, some scruffy, just hanging around. Maybe with loud music or smoking things with various scents.

Ariadne wonders when she started thinking of the urban loiterers as young people. At 41 she feels comfortably old jogging along in the evening air, but she felt uncomfortably old at her office earlier in the day, struggling to be heard. It’s certainly not what she’d thought it would be; this stage of life.

Was it this much of a grind for her parents?

She thinks of her son, tall for his age and practicing martial arts now with a mostly-older group of kids. Occasionally he’ll run with her. She remembers once when he was very small. She had just taken up running and was doing a few laps around the block her house was on, sticking to the schedule dictated by an Ap on her phone, trying to get stronger. As she came by the driveway her husband brought him out and he broke into the biggest smile when he saw her running. “Chase me, mommy, chase me!” he shouted, running back toward the house. She still had a few minutes more of running on the schedule, so she shouted "Hey!" and ran on by to his dismay. “Mommy,” he shouted looking puzzled, “Who are you chasing?”

“Great job, runner!” exclaims a bright feminine voice from her hip pocket, “Keep it up!” It startles her out of her reverie. She can’t help looking around embarrassed. This is why everyone uses earbuds. She has trouble keeping track of earbuds, though. The trail is pretty deserted, so she smiles. The tyranny of the running Ap continues through to today, eight years or so after her memory. Somewhere in the cloud there’s a robust dataset of her cardio endeavors weather anybody cares or not. She hasn’t been really strong; half-marathon or fast 5k strong, for a long time now. But she also hasn’t completely let things go. She smiles a bit thinking about the question of who she’s chasing, still. She’s chasing a future where she needs to be fit enough, whole enough, to keep experiencing the joy of motion rather than pain. There are trails to be walked and bays to be swum.

But running here so close to home makes her think of more mundane adventure, and of seeking magic and art in everyday life. There are people who would say the city’s project in creating this trail was a boondoggle. To be sure, it benefited some property owners more than others. But it is beautiful. The native plantings along the multi-use trail and the strange shapes of the shades on the pedestrian bridge over the highway that runs past the capital come together to make modern art. The lighting, bright blue interspersed with warm yellow, soothes the senses.

She watches her shadow bouncing along between pools of yellow light, becoming fuzzy and indistinct as she moves toward shadow and then forming up again in the pools of yellow. The head and shoulders are the hardest to make out. Maybe it’s her hair somehow, but her shadow looks almost like it has wings budding up out of her shoulder blades. Urban fantasy, then. That’s something she can get behind. But she’s been so blue lately, and her favorite local author’s been writing a gritty future that everyone describes as eco-horror. It’s quite believable, too.

She realizes that she’s crossed the bridge now, and is nearing the high point of the trail. She’s going to finish her workout in good style. She just needs to work on her mindset about the rest of life. There’s room to believe in urban fantasy somewhere between Jeff Vandermeer and Charles DeLint, perhaps. Artists and bikers coming together to face the eco-horror? It could happen. Maybe there’s even room to create something like that. She just needs to think of a good hook. Here in the ever-moving capital it shouldn’t be hard.

Just as she crests the high point, a loud tone chimes at her side. “Slow down and walk now!” commands her Ap. She sighs and tries to keep her walking steps light with a good cadence and her breathing even.

“Aw, you better keep running,” intones a deep voice from the shadows ahead.

A youngish looking man in an unseasonably heavy jacket and dark sunglasses melts into the pool of light ahead of her where the trail joins other trails surrounding the park. He reminds her of no one so much as a young Samuel L. Jackson. There are plenty of other people around this part of the trail enjoying the park’s amenities, so she’s inclined to pinch herself as she realizes that rising above his shoulders, through his shirt and coat, it appears that this fellow, who’s looking right at her, sports a pair of slightly iridescent brown bat wings.

He smiles and continues, “Ariadne, you never know who you might catch running out here.”