Peeking into the rock

So anyway, I wrote a thing for the Day of Porn, which was yesterday as of an hour and a half ago, but it's not actually all that pornographic.  It does take place in not-Prague, in the universe of not-Poland, and it involves a Zelnik.  I will explain that below the cut, and after the story, because I want to see if the story is readable without the explanation. Or at all, given that I have written most of it after midnight.
( onward to the not-porn, in not-Prague )
On another front, Truffle needs a tooth pulled and it's almost a month's wages to do it.  Fortunately, she's not in pain now.

part one
part two

The wind blew harder and harder: the rain fell harder and harder: till it was slicing horizontally through the premature twilight. Ben, soaked past the skin to his bones, wearing only a shirt because his sodden jacket was protecting the bones of dead creatures, made his way as best as he could along the footpath. Usually crowded with walkers, skaters, cyclists, stroller joggers, dogwalkers, jugglers, and surfer voyeurs, the footpath was empty. The waves rattled at the barrier. The ground beneath his feet trembled with the force. This cliff had lost twenty feet in one storm, not so long ago: Ben thought it quite possible that it would do so again today, despite the piles of riprap piled along the coves.

Where was he going? He really didn't know. Not home. Not for this . . . art project. He just kept walking. The storm seemed to be driving the bad mood out of him. What was left was strangely exhilirating. Like the rush from surfing, but he was barely moving against the wild water up here and he'd never try to catch one of those waves down there.

Somehow he had gotten far: past the Lighthouse, past Its Beach, past Mitchell's Cove, past the shuddering blowhole and right up to the end of the footpath looking over Natural Bridges Beach. He wasn't going there. He turned inland here, and with the wind at his back and the wall of water pushing him, he knew where he was going. Antonelli's Pond. It would be deserted and nobody would be there. Maybe a biologist. He could hide from a biologist.

He had nothing to hide. Had he?

Even with the cleansing rain the pond had its requisite rotting willow smell. Good, Ben thought: the earth here would be very potent.

Where were these ideas coming from?

Another good thing about the willows is that they gave him a little protection from the rain. But he was so wet and cold now that it made little difference. Shivering, he examined his pile of bones. Did it matter if they were put together correctly? He thought not: the pictures he had seen the night before seemed to have the bones connected any old way. Of course the pictures he had seen the night before had been carvings, not amalgamations. ANyway, he knew what to do.

He was shaking so hard he could barely get his thumb and little finger together as he was supposed to. He picked up a long pointy bone and worked it into a hole in a pelvis (a rodent? a bird?) It stayed much better than he expected.

It was getting dark. Ben had a bright little flashlight in his pocket. He didn't stop.

first, a quote: The aim of the Eskimo storyteller is to pass the time during the long hours of darkness; if he can send his hearers to sleep, he achieves a triumph. Not infrequently a story-teller will introduce his chef-d'œuvre with the proud declaration that "no one has ever heard this story to the end." The telling of the story thus becomes a kind of contest between his power of sustained invention and detailed embroidery on the one hand and his hearers' power of endurance on the other.


It was the fault of the storm. Really. He'd never have thought of the thing otherwise.

After just too many unsurfable days in a row, and small craft advisories still racing in urgent little letters across every local TV channel, Ben went sulking over to Cowell's -- the only halfway safe beach to walk on right now this side of town -- just to glare at the choppy grey water and brood. The weather was appropriate to his mood: dark, cold, dangerous, and blinding. The air was full of caustic water. The beach was scoured away, bringing to the surface half-rotted things buried in the cold currents of summer. Mingling with wrack and jetsam, menacing piles of trash scoured from the mountain streams and the coastal terraces and flung onto the beach by the jeering surf.

It wasn't the foul weather and the inability to surf that pissed Ben off. That just gave flavor to his sullen mood. The real source of his anger was his supposed partner Fred. For years they'd roomed together, copped their waves together, studied together. Trolled for work and girls together. Just here lately Fred just had to be a little bit better. All the time. Ben got a job: Fred got the same job, only better, with a better company, better hours, better pay. That was okay. Ben got an apartment. Fred got the next apartment available in the same building: of course, a better one, at a lower rent. Okay, it happens. Ben got a car. Fred got the same car, only better. And he talked the dealer into adding on a bunch of stuff for free. And he got better terms from the lender. Okay, Ben was still not jealous. Even though Fred gloated like a self-satisfied seagull all the time.

On the water it was getting painful. Ben's wetsuit wore out. He'd had it since tenth grade. So he got a new one. Not the fanciest available, but sufficient. Fred showed up next weekend in a better one. Even though Fred's old suit was perfectly fine, and only a year or two old.
When Ben's favorite board showed a hairline on it, he didn't want to bother with getting a new one -- because he really didn't want to start hating Fred. But the third time Fred came out of nowhere --flaunting all sensible safety practices -- and stole Ben's wave from him, despite having plenty of opportunities without endangering them both, Ben had to admit he was furious with the thieving gull-head.

All that was bad enough. But it got worse. Ben had been seeing a girl -- a lovely young woman who worked at a bookstore and made great coffee and rode centuries on her mountain bike -- and out of prudent instinct had kept that fact on the down-low. Not that Fred had ever quite acknowledged that he was deliberately planning all these one-ups and petty thefts. But the pattern was emerging. Anyway, it was a secret that didn't stay kept. The girl herself, initially turning down a date with Fred, mentioned Ben. What Ben didn't know, couldn't, was that she'd as good as come out and said she was in love with him. It didn't do either one of them any good.

The day before this lull on the storm Ben went to get Malena for a movie and pizza date. What he discovered when he got to her house was Fred's slightly better car parked in the driveway: Fred's slightly better jacket slung over the armchair in the livingroom: and Fred's slightly better patter nattering through the slightly more sophisticated music Fred had brought for Malena to listen to.

Malena was telling Fred off, but that only halfway cheered Ben. When she turned to him, Ben realized the damage was done anyway. Whatever had gone on before he got there may not have endeared Fred to Malena, but it had turned her off to Ben. "I'm sorry, I just can't do this," was all that she would say.

Ben was up all night, past the bad movies on the television and into the infomercials. He surfed the net till long past dawn. It wasn't like him to read sites unconnected with his sport of choice, but searching for other water sports took him from canoes and kayaks to reading about Inuits of Greenland, and now he was stomping on the sand at Cowell's, thinking murderous thoughts about Fred and blinking his eyes against the spray -- just the spray and the wind -- and the visions of violent Arctic spirits.

But if it wasn't for the storm, he would never have seen the bones. And without seeing the bones, no part of his foul humor or his newly-acquired obscure knowledge would have meant a thing. (Part Two)

Thinking about James's question about stories with generation ships that don't have spectacular failures of mission, and the subesquent claim by some of his followers that you don't get a story unless you have mission failure.

---------
Ron and Don and Lina are poking at their futures. Don's got it stitched: Lina's not so sure: and Ron's ready to declare himself mass for the compost.

"It's not that hard," Lina says. "There's seven hundred and thirty-two of us in Approaching Track, and there's seven hundred and eighty possible slots for us to step into, counting the Long Training and Waiting List slots as well as the Short Training and Immediate Opening slots. There has to be something there that appeals."

Ron makes a face. He hasn't told anybody that there is something that appeals, it's just not on the lists. Anywhere. There's only one person at a time who does it, and that person has just taken on the job, and she's healthy, sane, young, and happy in her work. There's no way that he'll ever do it, not in this lifetime. The one lifetime he has.

Other than that, what he'd really like -- he'd really like to travel. He used to say so, until he got tired of hearing the obvious answer. "You are travelling, Ronnie, we're all travelling, every minute of every day we're passing vast distances of the universe."

Yeah, right, and all he got to show for it was different coordinates when he looked up the generation ship's position. The view never changed. The air never changed ("you should be glad of that, kid," his big sister said, "because if the air changed you might only know about it for a few minutes."). And the people never changed. Not really. Individuals replaced each other, over time, yes. Somebody died. Not very often. Somebody was born. Not very often, and usually in small drifts, several at a time, so they would have a cohort.

Like Ron and Don and Lina, who were part of a larger cohort of fifty age mates, within a still larger group of close age grades -- three hundred of them within several years of age, almost half of Approaching Track -- everybody older than infancy and not yet tracked in their adult jobs. The ones not yet locked in.

Ron didn't want to be locked in. He wanted to be moving, getting out, seeing things different from his little world. "It's not natural to live like this," he said. "We evolved with five hundred and ten million square kilometers of surface area to move around on. Not counting the air or below the surface of the land and water --"

"You'd better not count it," Lina said. "We didn't evolve burrowing and diving and flying."

"You only even know those words from history," Ron complained, with an air that implied that this somehow proved whatever point he was making.

"So what the hell do you want?" Don said, finally impatient. "You want to go back in time and stay the fuck back? You want to get in a little pod and take off on your own? What?"

"I don't know," Ron said. "But I sure don't want to be trapped into some stupid little job counting cleaner viruses my whole life like my mother."

Ron's mother had already told Lina's mother how worried she was. "He's just like Sandy," Seesee said. "I hoped and hoped he'd be different, but it's not like that at all."

"He's different," Maxine said. "He's much smarter than your brother was. And much more restless, at a much younger age. Ever since he could walk and talk."

"You're not making me feel any better," Seesee said. Sandy was a terrible tragic story. He went off the rails in his late teens, and by the time he had succeeded in figuring out how to destroy himself, he had put the whole ship at risk several times.

"But somehow, Ron seems more stable than Sandy was. I don't know how he could be more restless and still more stable."

"Seeming never tells you much."

Lina's face shimmered before them. "Momma, find Seesee -- oh, Seesee, come on over to High Jade, hurry, before we have to call Cleanup! It's Ron --"

"What's he done?"

"Just come!"

........................

Sonny leaned back and put his feet up on the chair next to him. Pete didn't bother telling him to put his feet down: the deck of the coffee house wasn't going to fill up today. The clouds were just sitting up there right now, but they were churning around the edges, as if debating the question of rain.

"I've been thinking," Sonny said. Pete didn't bother to say the obvious: he let his eyebrows say it for him. Sonny was looking seriously contemplative, which was maybe a first. But he was no more forthcoming than usual. He stirred his coffee, grimacing as if he expected the milk was sour.

Finally Pete said, "What have you been thinking, Sonny?"

Sonny didn't look up. He bit his lip, hard enough to make a white mark. "You ever read a romance novel?"

"Not unless they've got AI and FTL," Pete said. "Bujold, at the very least."

Sonny latched on to this admission as an excuse not to continue. "Faster than light travel is such bullshit," he said.

"Yeah, but it makes good stories, and that's not what you were talking about," Pete said. "What about romance novels?"

"I figured out I've been in a bunch of romance novels, but I'm the other guy."

"What other guy?"

"There's always a suitable lover and an unsuitable lover. They have contrasting characters. One's dangerous, one's safe. One's funloving, one's serious. One's dashing, one's modest. It can go either way. The difference is that the suitable lover is inherently lovable and has integrity and loyalty and the unsuitable lover is a schmuck. When the protagonist figures this out, she dumps the unsuitable lover -- or sometimes she figures it out because the unsuitable lover dumps her. Anyway. That's me, the unsuitable lover."

"You just figured out that you're a schmuck?" Peter asked. "It's not news."

"No, I've known I was a jerk for a long time. But I just figured out why I can't change even when I do different things. It's because I have a mission in life. I'm the guy you date so you can recognize the real deal when you find him."

Pete snorted. Taking time to clean his coffee off his shirt, he said, "Did I just hear you justify your bullshit by saying it's good for the people you fool around with?"

Sonny shook his head. "No. There's no excuse. But man, look at the dumbshit things I've done. How can one man make so many bad moves in one lifetime? It can't be an accident."

Pete nodded his head. "Well, it's no secret that all your exes have been a lot better off without you."

About the last chapterlet of Jackson and Marek . . .

I got it off the rocks and turned in another direction, and it's kind of floating, but it's sort of somewhat becalmed: there are breezes blowing from two contradictory directions, but neither quite enough to blow it into port. I've got a pilot out there but it's not entirely sure where the channels and shoals are, so we're doing a lot of semaphore work with the shore crew (who we suspect of being pirates). In other words, it's almost done, again, for the third time. The original ending I had talked about -- the creepy one -- didn't develop, because the creepy midstages didn't happen. Then the ending I was complaining about last week -- I don't mind telling you it was Marek meeting Jackson's parents -- well, I learned a lot about Jackson and Marek and their respective families (Marek, for example, has a three-year-old half-sister! Who knew? Not me, until then!) but it wasn't exactly a story with that scene in it. I really like Jackson's parents. But the one with the stereotypical Chinese relatives is, of course, Marek: that affinal uncle is a farmer in the Delta, and his children are a dentist and a software engineer. And there is a great-aunt who lives in that apartment building just above Grant Street, you know, the one with the strange inset dragonish ceramic breezeblocks and the amazing red and green color scheme. She has the "Chinese grandmother dishes" that Kate Gould and Mark Yim used to talk about.

I miss Kate too, Ken. I might miss Mark more, if only because I think it's possible I'll see Kate again someday. It has been years, and I still get upset when I remember hearing that Mark was dead (just now I decided not to trust hearsay and I searched all over for any evidence of Mark living or dying, but I only uncovered a younger Mark Yim who is a roboticist at U Penn). Mark made me eat lap cheong and moi, and while I never developed a taste for them, it was fun trying them with Mark.

When Kate and Mark and I used to truck around Chinatown -- and Kate said "You have to truck when you're in Chinatown" -- he used to get the bitter comments. He looked much more Chinese than Kate, and he wore his hair to his butt (it being 1969 and all), and he was accompanied by these two hippy girls. I think at that time it was worse that Kate was "some of each" than that I was definitely not Chinese. I think that's mostly changed now. It was this culinary thing we did on Saturdays. Kate and Mark -- who were some kind of cousins -- would call various relatives and get instructions for cooking things and then we'd take the Number 30 bus and buy food we'd bring home to cook. Including the infamous crab in black bean sauce.

At Fisherman's wharf they'd boil the crabs, crack them and clean them, and charge you some multiple of what you'd pay to get a living crab from a Chinatown shop (as I recall, the animals to be eaten were mostly set up in boxes and tanks on the sidewalk -- this is definitely different now, because of animal-welfare activity in the City. I am not complaining. I hated that aspect of Chinatown). So we got this living crab and carried it home on the bus along with a pile of veggies and things. Nowadays you buy these little jars of fermented black bean sauce with garlic and chili oil. Back in the Ice Ages when we had to walk five miles in the snow uphill both directions to get anywhere you might mention, we also had to start with a tiny can of extremely nasty-smelling fermented black beans. While we were washing the black beans and cutting up garlic and stuff, that crab walked right out of its paper bag on the table and on to the floor, reducing Kate to hysterics. Mark came to the rescue with a really long pair of cooking chopsticks, which he used to pick up the crab and dump it into the boiling water.

I don't truck with live crustaceans anymore, myself. That's what we pay butchers for.

On another front, Keith(the guy with the painted face), the young man who's staying with us while he earns enough money for an apartment of his own, has just heard back from Harvard saying that they will accept his law school application. Last week he was struggling with their website and he couldn't get part of it to work on his computer, Frank's computer, or mine (pcs, and both Mozilla and IE): later, he was able to get that part to work on Emma's Mac, but there were other parts that wouldn't (website monkeys not talking to each other, maybe?) -- anyway, it took him till an hour past the deadline to get all the parts submitted. Harvard said "we're not picky about the deadlines, and we certainly won't disqualify you for 50 minutes." He's cheering and grinning and stuff. And Frank has finally gotten in touch with Peter Nash, our old GP, and he's arranging to go up and "shadow" him at his clinic up in Humboldt County. There's long reminiscences about Peter and his wife Judy but I will save them for another time.

Okay, before anything else: Floridian landscape plants.

Aren't they wonderful? Don't they make you just an eentsy bit curious about living in the tropics? These are so -- dang, I can't say exotic, can I? That's just redundant. Anyway, I especially liked the part about planting for hurricanes. Also, trees called "stoppers" because their bark and fruit are rumored to be useable as antidiarrheals.

I have a question. Anybody here know Cantonese? Thomas Yan, I know you struggle with Mandarin: do you also have any Cantonese? I'm going to need to translate four or five short sentences into clumsily constructed Cantonese and two, very short ones, into appropriate Cantonese.

Livejournal should have a feature where they tell you if someone mentions your name, like they tell you if someone replies to your post or your comment.

Oh, and another thing: I finally participated in Wikipedia. I pointed out an error in the Solanaceae article. It was fixed right away!

Saturday's storylet, possibly because it was painfully composed on Emma's recalcitrant apple powerbook, grew, and grew, and grew, so that it subsumed Sunday's storylet and today's storylet and still is not done at 4K.

I will post it when I have forced it to cough up a conclusion.

On another front, I did escape seeing "Happy Feet" with my Rosemary and Maia (who is eleven and was being given "Happy Feet" as a consolation prize for not going to Circle), but I also missed out on the 40th anniversary showing of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and I didn't go to the deYoung to see the Ruth Asawa exhibit and the quilting exhibit, but I will do that last thing, and drag the nice fellow with me because while he is bizarrely untouched by the magic that is Ruth Asawa, he is not untouched by the magic that is the deYoung.

Remember how I had found two references to my personal storage space on google? They were on dead pages, but the display clearly showed the path to the file. I thought I had hit error messages when I asked google to remove them.

Today I received notification that they had been removed. Yay!

( yesterday's story. another not so satisfactory one: I think it's too opaque, and I'm not sure the conclusion is a conclusion )

The thing about these is that while there's a story each day, it's not a finished piece, it's just a draft. I try to get them all to a conclusion, though.

On another front, I spent a couple hours calling for my man Bruce last night. Mostly nobody's home. Where do they go on Sunday evening? The restaurants are, by and large, closed, since the tourists have gone home.