I sent the following as texts while watching first nine episodes:
(start)
Up until the last ten minutes of ep1 I still don’t know if Willis is imagining Detective Lee. It’s good. There’s a subtext by the behavior of Audrey and others that implies none of that is really happening.
The portrayal of his invisibility is brilliant. Subtle and effective. The way Turner and Green seem like NPCs at moments and TV cops at another is intriguing. Good show.
Interesting how he speaks Cantonese to his mom but his uncle speaks to the Dad in Mandarin. And the Dad has spoken both already so far. Pretty cool.
also, the portrayal of “the white man’s gaze” is as powerful as the absence of his vision (times they don’t even see him). Two sides of the “white man’s gaze.”
If you use a website view instead of mobile version, you can see posts here date all the way back to the 1970’s in a column to the left – that’s the archive.
It has only been a dozen years since FB went public. Twitter followed. Then Instagram, then Snapchat and Tik Tok. Facebook went live twenty years ago, but … I never joined.
I’ve had computers, tablets, laptops and PCs throughout all those 20 years but just never opened or posted to Facebook … or to Instagram, nor Snapchat nor Tik Tok … just skipped all these “social media” ones. I didn’t want someone else owning all my content -and the restrictions that come with that.
So instead of posting to social media since 2012 when Facebook went public, I began posting to this blog, I also collected stuff from years past reaching all the way back to 1977 and posted these here, using publication dates corresponding to the archived material.
So I’m the publisher not Zuck or Jack or Elon and I retain intellectual property rights and copyrights.
Please do read and share if you find something of interest here, and credit me, MTK. Thanks.
I’m out on Long Island, NY, where I’ve spent a couple of weeks visiting my friend, Tom, who was my neighbor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 25 years ago, when we were both childless, unmarried and young.
Well, I was in my early-30’s. Tom and his roommates were recent college grads, starting their careers in the biggest city in the world. NYC was spectacular and singularly massive at the turn of the millennium. We were intoxicated and alive.
Tom is younger than me by seven years. In the time since I saw him last, he climbed the ladder in two separate career paths that crashed due to financial crises and has now climbed the ladder in a third: wine and spirits. He is an accomplished and successful Director of middle management.
He’s raised three children and supported his mother, and theirs. His father passed away; and his brother, an Iraq War vet, committed suicide.
Tom tracked me down four years ago after his father died. He told me he thought a necklace I gave him, cursed him. It brought him so much bad luck.
Close readers of this blog will remember when I threw the accursed necklace into the sea, but click the Tom and the Opera link and read about it if you haven’t.
When we reconnected, Tom and I had both just lost our fathers. His brother died some years before, and I have since lost my sister. We are brethren at mid-life. We often have half-hour to hour long phone conversations about enduring this world in our times. Since we reconnected, I’ve tried to give my friend a way to separate himself from his troubles.
In the last two and a half years, I showed up to help Tom move into his post-divorce apartment – when we went to the Metropolitan Opera for Rigoletto from center box seats. I flew him to Amsterdam for a four day vacation before the first ‘Thanksgiving and Xmas with split households’. And I paid for him to go to Africa to build a school with his daughter and her classmates.
I’ve also treated us to several lush meals in diverse locations. The latest was at Blackstone here on Long Island. We had really delicious oysters from Canada, tuna sashimi, a Vietnamese-spring-roll-style sushi roll, lump crab, and a tomahawk Wagyu steak. I had a beaujolais. Tom had the banana cream pie.
It’s a fine dining restaurant in an area of strip malls. The interior was made to feel old-school, wooden, warm. Yet, the exterior is contemporary suburban monoculture – sigh, I guess that’s everywhere now. Here though, they take things they want and put them together for the convenience and then make them at the highest quality available in the same place … good steakhouse and good sushi, has emerged. The fish was fresh, prepared very well. The steak, unique, delicious.
Spending time with Tom has been exorbitant fun, controlled chaos and a good re-bonding experience. I know we’ve been helpful to each other, though we don’t discuss it. I worried about him when things were looking bad, I don’t now.
Tom, like many New Yorkers, does for himself and his own, but won’t ask for assistance. He will take what’s offeredwithout guilt and enjoy it lustfully, which I find fun and uplifting. Until it’s not. Then he gets arrogant and deaf.
I was walking through Golden Gate Park two weeks ago when my cel flashed, indicating my phone was ringing. Seeing it was Tom, I answered.
“Thought you were coming out this summer, ” he said.
“Well, there’s only Labor Day pool party left, unless you want to come New Year’s Eve for Phish.”
I put the phone down, bought a one-way ticket to JFK, booked a hotel in Long Beach for a week, and bought tickets for Arthur Ashe Stadium at the U. S. Open tennis grand slam.
It had been a year and eight months since we hung out and I knew I wouldn’t make NYE in NY. I rationalized, too, that Tom wanted me to visit so I could see that he’s cool now and things are going well.
I had been trying to help get him away from it all to process his thoughts. That’s why I took him to Amsterdam and the Opera and supported his travel to Africa – to wholly extricate him from his own life as a break.
Our meals in Manhattan, in Amsterdam and here, are all, in part, a separation from our lives – to talk deeply about things that matter. I was thrilled to help him travel with his daughter and their class to Senegal.
The Labor Day Pool Party at Tom’s townhouse in Lido is the final party at the pool before it’s closed for the off-season. All the families and friends of families enjoy swimming, food, drinks, music, a raffle, and the most important events: games!
The table tennis and cornhole tournaments are highly anticipated and competitive. Yet from the moment I arrived, Tom told me, “I’m winnin’ that.”
He crowed to every neighbor we saw for two days that he was winning the cornhole tournament. It got so ridiculous, at one point when we were alone in the car, I said, “Yo, man, you are talkin’ a lotta smack about this cornhole thing.”
Now cornhole, like shuffleboard, requires team play. I know these tournaments use random selection for team mates. How could he possibly guarantee he’d win? But the thing about Tom is …
It was done and dusted.
That’s something Tom gives me – and I think he gives it to everyone he knows – chutzpah.
It was a great time. I saw Tom’s mom and family. We all jumped in the pool together at the end of the party, by tradition. The food was great. Lovely day, wonderful people. I felt welcomed.
So for my contribution on this trip, I took Tom to the USTA Center in Flushing for a match at the U.S. Open Grand Slam tennis tournament, something he and his neighbors would never do.
I grew up with tennis because of my Indian parents. Tom’s people prefer hockey, football, basketball and baseball. I know I expand Tom’s cultural landscape, as I know he expands mine.
Through luck of the draw we got a match featuring perhaps the greatest tennis champion ever, Novak Djokovic, and, in a stunning upset, Nolé was defeated by Australian Alexei Popyrin.
I concluded it was because of fatigue from playing in every previous Grand Slam Final and then meeting in the Olympic Gold Medal match that Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz, world number two and one respectively, were eliminated in the early rounds at New York.
Apparently the men’s endurance limit is four championship tournament finals. But it was pretty cool to see Nolé combat the Aussie Popyrin at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
By contrast to my material gifts, Tom has been generous with things that have no calculable value, including counsel and trusted conversation. He has picked me up, dusted me off and demanded I go at it again more than once.
On brief occasions, over the last four years, we’ve enjoyed food, wine, weed and travel as single men in mid-life.
We’ve shared meals and conversations and consulted one another on these occasions, separate from our responsibilities, to decide how we will make our way. He has lifted my spirit and confidence. This is priceless.
Tom has introduced me to his friends and family, who keep a tight circle. I am, for the first time, meeting his oldest friends and the people he has known for four decades, a community within which he is now the eldest surviving male of his family.
We both battle depression under the weight of our self-perception. We both do it in solitude, often not sharing it with anyone else.
Instead of staying in the city and visiting for a night, I’ve come out to LI to stay in Long Beach, with Tom for a couple of nights and in local hotels .
It’s now the season they call “locals summer,” when the tourists leave and the weather is pleasant and locals get to enjoy what the island has to offer before it gets too cold. It is a lovely, peaceful beach town now.
Long Island’s a place that has been described so often by others that it’s hard to put it in original terms anymore. From The Great Gatsby to Jaws to Everybody Loves Raymond, the literary, artistic, social, and now digital, presence of the place masks the reality.
The reality, which I am gaining an understanding of through Tom and his community and my extended visit to the area, is private, energetic, vibrant and physical. Long Beach is more diverse than I imagined. Other areas of Long Island are not.
Meanwhile, many helicopters and private planes still pass by the beach and overhead daily – shuttling the wealthy back and forth between the City and the Hamptons, or Montauk or wherever.
It’s half-September.
Many of my friendships have faded because all I do is get really close to people and then leave disgusted with where I am. For example, I could never live here.
New York remains a place that repels and attracts. I hate the way people look at me here for my long hair and wearing bright colors. I feel an almost constant basic racism of otherness. It’s a famously white and restricted place that demands you behave to belong.
My unwillingness to be treated less than for being exactly who I am has meant friends have faded from my frame of reference away into their own lives.
Now, at mid-life, some old ones re-appear. I find they are younger than me by just a few years and they are all going through what mid-life brings us: break-ups and deaths and a powerful existential energy.
The French call it “l’energie d’age.” Which is such a better term than “mid-life crisis.”
This was a really cool kite flown at Long Beach, Long Island
Since I’m on the East coast, I decided to try and see some other friends who, like Tom, reconnected with me just after Dad died, in that fateful Spring when the pandemic plunged us all into various solitudes.
These friends, a married couple with two sons in college, have been dealing with enormous soulache from numerous deaths in their family and community, including a fraternal suicide and a very recent loss to cancer.
The emotional weight of it is staggering. But when I saw them I was inspired by their resilience. It falls to us, in our 50’s to bear and manage the circumstances. We’re the adults now.
My rediscovered friends here on the East coast impress me deeply with their strength and fiercely organized approach to the spiritual and practical demands of mourning. They press on.
Though busy with funerals and memorial services, they were able to break away for a couple of days to spend time at a forested property in New Hampshire, where we had a good walk in the woods.
and lovely vistas of trees.
Though the visit was short, it was affirming. It’s good to trust others again.
When we returned from New Hampshire, I was in a suburb of Boston, with time on my hands. This gave me the opportunity to visit Fenway Park, the oldest major league stadium and a baseball-lover’s bucket-list destination.
This was indescribably wonderful. It’s an intimate place where they adore baseball. You can read about my first trip to Fenway on Giants Baseball Corner, my baseball blog, if you click that link.
and here are the Red Sox fans, in their glorious baseball Ashram, enjoying their song, Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond:
And here are some stills of Boston I took from the windows of various cabs:
I also managed to sneak in a visit to MFA Boston, the Museum of Fine Art which is, remarkably, open until 10pm on Thursdays and Fridays. I’m sure Friday it’s packed, but to have that place all to myself on a Thursday for four and a half hours was fantastic.
I will write a separate blog about that when I get a chance. Here’s the train back from Boston:
People at the top share information and power sparingly, and only with those willing to learn the system and play along. Even at the highest levels of education, students are programmed.
You have to have more than curiosity, or a desire to know it. The deciders have more than money and power. They have a collective desire to sustain the narrative with its untruths sequestered.
And the cost is the forced agreement with the column of empty spaces between the plates – where omissions define what governance and society hide.
This is how the general notion of truth is composed. It is littered with untruths, and composed of fantastic, illogical agreements authored by untrustworthy men.
They seek to make an image of truth like a singular, linear thing that leads back to the past and on into the future, with the empty spaces between of their denials and lies making it more like a columnar, circling line than anything, a coil.
I was given more access than most because of how I chose to target my intellect. I studied history and political science at school and then the development of our information media during the past thirty years.
Before the Internet, their truth seemed far less universal or evident. It seemed suspect
But what has been hidden, the layers to which I am not read-in, are what I fear defines our society now.
The Colonial Era, which defines this world from the vantage of white people, is the author. Almost everything about our accepted history is an exaggeration told to substantiate and support a system that is corrupt and favors the white, European perspective.
The history of the winners of the last 500 years is insane.
The attempted genocide of entire Nations – begun with their navigation of the seas in massive ships designed to plunder and oppress – continues, abated only slightly by their perception of having mapped the entirety of our world’s territory.
Yet it is substantiated as legitimate by the creation of the context within which discussion occurs. “We must move past politics now and deal with the facts on the ground “
The authoritarian fascists and right-wing elements arising throughout Europe and the USA are coldly expressing their denial of the consecutive and continuous untruths and attempt to make the entire world accept their narrative.
In it, ancient peoples and billions of them throughout Asia and Africa are still considered barbaric hordes of heathens. There is a firm unwillingness to shatter the absurd fallacy.
Worse, the engine of the world is being driven, at an alarming speed, to blow past truths to accept the narrative. We must stop. We must stop now.
An honest reassessment of the Colonial Era – including a full reassessment of the validity of nations and states from Palestine to Park City, Utah – is an imperative of truth.
Reparations and reconciliation cannot begin in a climate of international denial of truths for contractual agreements between corporate entities that control the most important of our planet’s resources.
Humanity has exceeded the capacity of nature to control us and, for at least a hundred years now, at an alarming speed, become the greatest force of damage and destruction and violent rape of the natural world. We must stop.
The invention of a society willing to ignore truths to support a fantasy projection of a nation state emerged from the creation of information media that directly contradict the truth and program people to believe their narrative.
Individual free-thinkers who know better exist everywhere. Riding the information media, one can see we exist, but we are neutralized by an inability to overcome the massive noise that drowns out the truth.
How can we get this whole thing to stop and look honestly at the lies? How are we to unpack the propaganda and jingo?
The USA isn’t anything it says it is anymore, in the same way the Soviet Union wasn’t when it fell apart.
Yet we are all forced to call it the greatest country in the world, obliged to praise and never criticize how it has come into being or what it engages in globally to protect the powerful corporate interests who compose the narrative.
Even to say openly that the attempted genocide of the First Nations in the Americas is a far more terrible thing than the attempted genocide of the Jews by Hitler’s Reich is considered wrong-minded.
We are forced to accept that shit just happened to the red man.
To the brown man.
To the black man.
They lost. “We” won.
The USA just exists.
And now the same narrative approach is taken with Israel.
Only it’s not a 275 year old continuous lie, it’s a hundred year old one.
The single coiled line of their historical narrative cannot stand the suggestion of the truth that these nations do not and can not legitimately exist without massive, international brain washing.
Every “citizen” of the USA – born here or not – is responsible for this giant, coiled stack of lies of omission. The only way forward is to admit it is a house of cards.
The Republicans will never do this. The spook George Herbert Walker Bush and his powerful, secret society seized control to ensure the narrative will not die
If the Democrats represented a chance for the truth after Nixon and led by Carter, Reagan covered up for Bush and his cronies to crush that and the Clinton Establishment destroyed it further through the compromises and contracts of Globalism – with alliances in Israel, Europe and around the world.
Both parties now represent the cementing of the false narrative in order for the USA to exist. They are in fact one party – much like the Soviet Union when it ended.
We must be honest. We must stop the train of this madness and reassess the entirety of the project. We must have the courage to lead the world in self-critical assessment of our society, identification of its wrong-doings, and in reparations and reconciliation for these.
We must lead other nations to this before a true globalism can exist.
I am unlike everyone else on this planet because I have done nothing but travel, read, think and party. I have avoided jobs, family and friends because they all demanded I compromise myself. but I read Emerson at 14:
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.“
So I have been myself for at least 43 years and it has cost a lot of relationships. I won’t play along with things I don’t agree with.
I don’t blame all of you for buying in. I blame some of you for selling out. But the thing I resent is that since you bought in or sold out you decided to apply condescending judgements against me as an outsider to what you chose to be a part of.
You married assholes all expect me to revere married life as some higher place. You people with families have a LOUD, UNIVERSAL CLAMOR about the virtues of family. Families are mostly fucked collections of bullshit responsibilities to people who share some DNA.
Your recriminations and requests for me to “grow up” or to join your so-called society are an offensive affront. Your societies are horseshit. You are filled with lies disguised as social truths.
You are so deluded now that you wouldn’t know a truth if it came up and bit you on the nose.
You think Oswald killed Kennedy. You think those towers fell down by themselves. You think democracy exists and capitalism hasn’t OWNED it for decades. You think you have free will.
You believe in gods out of fear of looking at the truth.
There is no God. There is no anthropomorphic he or she to praise or punish we.
You are so profoundly manipulated by your compromises that to speak to you about truths is impossible because – and this I just can’t believe – you will deny it, call me crazy and cover your ears.
You maintain the falsity out of fear of looking at the truth and being responsible for it.
The only sad thing is the lack of shame you have for all this.
I may be totally alone. But I know the truth and I fear nothing. Sucks ta be you.
It’s a narrow but quiet and well-appointed spot just off Union Square on Post. My sixth floor room has windows that open and I can see the back of the immense billboards that surround the square and the bronze woman atop the Philippines War Dewey Monument within it.
Dedicated to Admiral George Dewey, it commemorates his victory in the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish–American War. I want to replace it with a massive Foucault’s Pendulum.
The ‘coffee at 8am’ is in a small, cramped area and the guests all stood around trying to get what they wanted from a selection of muffins, bagels, bread-y treats, yogurt and fruit – or created plates to carry back to their rooms. I grabbed a slice of cold bread stuffed with spinach and a coffee and left.
It’s meagre and the coffee is plain, boring. They had oat milk, though – amazing how swiftly that became popular in the last few years. I came back to the room and discovered this is a hotel owned by The Oxford Collection. It is quiet, and tucked away.
It’s the weekend of Outside Lands, a music festival held in Golden Gate Park that I protested when it was proposed. It’s a terrible idea to have drunk, drug-addled youth partying to loud, crazed music sets in that idyllic microsystem.
I have never been and will never go. In any case, of the hundred or so acts appearing this weekend, I have heard of exactly two. I am old and irrelevant to pop culture. It doesn’t interest me either. I use Radio Garden to find new music or vibes. I use playlists that I mix to listen to otherwise.
Speaking of the drunk, drug-addled tech crowd that have ruined San Francisco for a decade, the company formerly known as Twitter, to which we gave the insane tax-break in 2012 that allowed them and Zynga and the rest of these assholes the ability to move here … is now leaving San Francisco. As announced by that ignorant, half-wit Elon Musk this week.
So what was the point?
This town has been made worse, less humane, less sensitive and cultured, less tolerant even, by the social media crowd who came here, used it like a snot rag, and now spit on it as they leave. Good riddance. I will always hate you. Stay away, you ruinous ignorant cunts.
Desert Hot Springs, or the DHS as it is known to locals, is a cottage community set in the small rising hills to the East of Palm Springs. It’s where the workers who serve the community live. It’s also home to the spring-fed spas for which the place is named.
The ghosts of Hollywood’s past haunt the streets and locations of Palm Springs – Bob Hope, Dinah Shore, the Rat Pack – but it’s the digital generation that travels to this community now, most significantly when they descend upon the city once a year for the music festival at Coachella. They have no idea who Bob Hope or Dinah Shore were. Los Angelenos still use Palm Springs as their getaway and that’s whom one sees (and overhears) here most: the prattle of their superficial, unexamined lives.
After driving 1500 miles from central Texas, across New Mexico, Arizona and the Mojave, I have come to a spa with spring-fed waters to relax, while Sylvie, my beloved automobile gets a full work-up for inspection and smog certification and registration at the Palm Springs Nissan dealership so she can become a Californian. We are both getting pampered.
This trip has been a ratification that I exist and I am well. I mustn’t make excuses for not being well-adjusted anymore. I have survived the blows and it is time to rise above them.
In 2022 I went around the world as a reminder that international air travel was still possible after coronavirus. This summer I proved to myself I can still road trip. These acts slowly rebuild my psyche after the death of my father, the Covid Pandemic and the death of my sister last year – blows that weakened and reduced me significantly. As I sit here in the healing waters of the desert and reflect on the side-effects of these sad years, I realize I have gained weight from the depression and slowed down significantly from a kind of ‘softness.’ I allowed myself to succumb to life instead of maintaining my position as master of my own fate.
Why?
When life deals us blows, how do we react? Why?
In my case, I tend to fold up and retreat from existence, a tactic I adopted as a child in a foreign place surrounded by strangers with strange views and values – Americans. Worse, holed up, I tend not to exercise and rather to eat too much. These are both mistakes that I have to combat actively. Just as negativity is something one has to defeat actively. The essence of emotional retreat is giving over to depression and negativity. But the mind is far more powerful than that. It can, through practice, effort and training, create positive coping mechanisms. These are the ones I must develop to continue this existence.
My plan is to hire a personal trainer, a doctor and to begin micro-dosing mushrooms.
She’s 17 years old. I’m 57. So it’s a May/December relationship.
Last August, I put a search bot on Craigslist with three terms: “manual transmission, high performance, under $10,000.”
On Leap Day, February 29th of this year, after six months of poor responses, I received pictures of Sylvie from San Antonio, Texas. I flew there, and met, fell in love with, and bought her.
Sylvie and I have just completed the 1100 miles from San Antonio, Texas to Sedona, Arizona by traveling in the early morning and at night to avoid the heat.
The highlight of the journey was when Sylvie achieved 100,000 miles on her odometer at 7,000 feet altitude in her 17th Year!
We stopped in Pecos,
Albuquerque
Roswell
and Sedona.
It’s a route I’d recommend and will take again so I’ve named it (PARS).
Here’s sunset on US285 between Roswell and Albuquerque
I am no longer on social media. And recently I have started turning my phone off entirely. For days at a time. I’m unemployed and without any need for it.
I feel very lonesome much of the time, but I don’t think much of the artifice of friendship and camaraderie projected by text messages and social media whatnot. It’s pointless drivel.
The only thing that’s real is presence.
Nobody ever knew me in reality, so dispensing of the bogus social media artifice leaves me alone with myself, a condition to which I grow accustomed. It will be how it is until I’m dead. It’s kind of how it has always been.
The world in my time has been a decaying disappointment. No one from my family or the nation of my birth cares for me, or if I live or die, I’m an irrelevancy to them, or worse, for what I have become away from there.
The nation I was dragged to as a child, considers me an idiot immigrant. I have always felt horrifically trapped, surrounded by ignorant, deluded zombies who loyally parrot jingoistic or corporate slogans to promote to me a pseudo-nation, invented by profoundly racist and genocidal Europeans. They don’t care a thing about me.
I have no home. No family. And no real friends. I sleep mostly in hotels now. Alone
Moving now, through this world, I see things from an outsider’s perspective – slower, more deliberate. I feel it’s a more honest appraisal of these strange people all around me, who act progressively more superficial, less caring. They live in echo chambers of limited truths.
I have trained myself to think freely for decades and am proud of my independent understanding of our world.
I wish I could communicate my thoughts to … well to anyone, really.
But I am a failed writer.
I make things I feel few understand, but which to me speak loudly about my perceptions. But worse, deep within me are trapped four decades of painful and brilliant thoughts I cannot get out because of the complex social barriers the digital generation erects to being able to consider them.
It’s irrelevant because I have no audience and most people think I am crazy or ill – which I firmly deny.
I am the direct product of my circumstances which were a bullshit Truman Show of selfish, arrogant morons telling me lies about the world and my place in it
We’ve all heard of heartache. We know it’s a part of heartbreak, but that you could feel heartache either before or after heartbreak, making it an enduring pain, difficult to overcome.
After your heart breaks you feel heartache, or, you feel heartache and seek ways to prevent heartbreak – either way it lasts.
But I suffer though from something else now:
soulache.
and I dread soulbreak.
The world decays because we humans suddenly increased in population over the last 150 years. We are the middle children of the human population explosion, the witnesses of the terrible burden we now place on the great organism we call our earth.
We are out of control. I witness it.
It hurts my soul.
My family was destroyed through immigration and divorce and cultural oppression. No one I ever thought loved me, does. I have lost all my friends and family. I am alone. I have no feelings of trust for any of you anymore.
These personal abandonments hurt my soul. I endure them.
My soul aches for years now.
I know there is no God to comfort me. These are the circumstances of my time on this plane.
I sense an interconnectedness, a spiritual linkage of some kind behind the math of it all. There is good. Truth exists. I keep and tend to truths myself. Others do, too. I read them as possible.
But my soulache is exacerbated by the fear there is no hope.
Meditation to empty my soul is the only respite from the ache. It works. But lasts so briefly.
I have read that if I continue this process of meditation I can overcome the misery. I hope so. Which means at least that small amount of hope exists.
I offer that to all of you. Each and every soul on this plane.
Every night and every morn Some to misery are born Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight Some are born to sweet delight Some are born to endless night
from “Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake, 1806
Some people get to do whatever the fuck they want. That is just how life is. We see moments of fairness or justness or equality, but in truth there is little of that.
Most people are under the weight of existence, and some people get to do whatever they want.
I have met those people, been with them, in some cases inside of them. And then I have traveled alone and have emulated those who can do whatever the fuck they want for short periods of time, have enjoyed richly.
I achieve this by control of my desires and by moving more deliberately than others. I rarely sign up for things. I go off-season, off-hours, weekdays. I collaborate less and less. I control my expenses and take on no responsibilities.
Reading is good.
Read read read read read rare breed.
Being under the weight of existence is managed in innumerable ways to greater and lesser degrees of success by all people. But there are clear biases, prejudices and inequalities without reason – save corruption.
Religions are suspect. Governments are increasingly fascist – using technology and media to program and control societies rather than serve them.
Authoritarian oligarchies seek not to unite and improve the lot of all, but now instead to arm themselves for impending conflict.
Resources are dwindling. The globe itself now relies solely on us, humanity, and our management sensibility – the Anthropocene rolls onward.
Nature is exquisite in its mutability. The tumbling, sidelong evolution of everything explodes in all directions seeking paths that succeed, but the entirety is unknowable.
Woody Allen completed and released his fiftieth movie, writing and directing this time in French, por le premier fois. When I typed that sentence it became at once, the first thing I’ve written since I submitted my last piece of fiction to The New Yorker (a habit I’ve had for thirty years as an endpoint to process) and the first blog post I’ve written sitting in comfort at a keyboard in San Francisco, my preferred place of residence, in many years.
I would just sit here noodling a story ad infinitum if I didn’t use the New Yorker that way. Some past submissions can be found on this site under the category fiction … here
I am at last Hipolito, the failed writer.
Though to many I have not tried because I refused to participate in the hijacking of literature we have endured under the commercial models of the digital generation. Rest assured, I am finger-peck typing onto “Notepad” software that has NO artificial intelligence or generative tech. When you get MTK, it’s ONLY ever MTK.
In November and December of last year, I contemplated participating in or covering the 2024 Election in the USA once again. I made 15 eps of a podcast as prep, trying to motivate myself to step up to it. But I just can’t do it.
I am at last Thompson.
I cannot cover Trump and Biden, a racist farce run by religious cults; reality and truth masked and drowned by leagues of bullshit, science and the Constitution ripped to rags.
I’m the atheist who screams, “Why, oh Lord, Why have you forsaken me?” and immediately crack up laughing. Works every time. If I’m depressed, quite useful.
I have recently, after many years of never mentioning it to anyone, told some young people the story of meeting Mr. Thompson at the airport hotel bar that rainy night in ’94, when it was sheeting outside and nobody was going anywhere and the monitor on the wall read “DELAYED,” next to every flight.
It was as if the ocean herself took a gulp. The wave was instantly far above him. The riptide churned and he tumbled in the suck.
Kiran let himself roll until struck by the terror he had not taken a deep enough breath. He unrolled parallel with the wave and opened his eyes but saw only pulses of light.
At last the pull lessened. He strained to the surface, broke through into the bright sunshine and gasped, swallowing air. He breast-stroked to the shallows, crawled up on the sand, and collapsed, exhausted.
A wrinkled old man wrapped in cotton squatted on the sand a few feet away. He remained unmoved. Kiran lay face down, beached, sputtering. The man spoke.
“Good. You did not panic.”
The old man shifted slowly. His eyes narrowed. He returned to staring out to the distant horizon.
Kiran lay in the sand, breathing hard. The waves lapped up the legs of his trunks, chilling him. His cheek was pressed into the speckled sand. His open eye focused on the tiny grains.
When he was younger, most likely stoned, he’d have concentrated on the microverse of color and texture, aimlessly. Instead, at 45, he found himself reminded of the article he’d just read about this beach. He propped himself up with both arms, peered at the sand.
“Is this monazite,” he thought, “What color is monazite?” He seemed to remember it was a reddish-brown.
It wasn’t the first time he’d misjudged the tide. The last time was years before, but the feeling was discretely precise: the grip in his chest and his mind screaming, “I’m out of breath!”
But instantaneous to the panic was a knowledge not to. His rational mind took charge.
His heart was pounding. He shuddered and felt older. Kiran gathered himself and stood. The Indian Ocean licked his ankles. A brahminy kite, Haliastur indus, screeched. He turned to see it dive into the tide. It emerged with a fish. It hunted in the sea, on land, in the air, a masterful omnipresence. The mated pair that nested in a palm tree near his hut were apex predators. He watched the male fly off toward home with his catch.
Haliastur indus (photo: MTK 2007)
Kiran was master of little, apex of nowhere. He had come back to his birthplace to resurrect himself, but thus far all he had resurrected were memories that burdened him. He swam twice a day and stayed fit but his spirit flagged. He was shiftless. Soon, he’d have to leave.
“But not yet,” he thought.
He stumbled to his towel, grabbed his novel and sunglasses and headed back to the hut he called home the past three months.
Kiran plodded up the beach warily, avoiding the shits of the villagers and pied-dogs. His mind twisted in the blistering heat. Summer on this coast culminated in hot winds; Agni Natchathiram, the hottest period of the year on the Tamil calendar. It was way-offseason, which was why he could afford to return to India at all. Now, he was broke.
Kiran stopped at the gate to the gravel road that led back to the village. He shook the sand off his chappals and dusted his feet. Children ran about. No one paid him attention. He had almost drowned. He wondered if the old man would have let him.
There was a narrow pathway between the beach and the village, fenced off by wind-bent bamboo. He turned the corner to the path and the tintamarre of the beach dropped dramatically. It was the mid-morning calm.
Dawn was the loudest time of day, from cock’s crow, through crow’s caw, multiple staticky jam-boxes and at least one television set every hundred feet projecting bhajans and popular songs. Through it all, Kiran lay awake in bed or sat at his desk with coffee. The clatter came to an end abruptly – when there was a brief silence into which the cow next door lowed – an enormous sound.
Kiran had seen his neighbor wash the ass of that cow with her bare hands and water with as much care as she gave her own child.
It did not go unnoticed in the village that Kiran bought fish from Ambika, and at least once a week went into town and had a steak at the French restaurant, or a burger or a chicken sandwich.
Despite being born a local Brahmin, he wasn’t a vegetarian – yet another count chalked up to his Americanism, like the western accent he had when speaking Tamil.
He’d traveled on a U.S. passport, a citizen for decades, but here in his birthplace, unemployed and divorced, he was untethered. That was why he had returned: to see if he still belonged, or to discover for certain he no longer belonged, here.
Within days he knew it was moronic to think he could answer such a question, in three months, ten years or a lifetime.
The trouble was, with the changes in the U.S., he no longer felt he belonged there either.
A respite from the war on terror seemed to emerge with the election of a well-educated and earnest black Democrat – who had voted against the Iraq War.
He and the First Black First Lady breathed fresh air into the nation for nine months, when <wham> slammed the financial crisis of 2008, plunging the country into deep recess.
Bad economic times dispensed by a personable and intelligent President numbed everybody Kiran knew further. They began to ignore the drone strikes and Iraq and Guantanamo and the incessant war.
Suddenly the pressure to buy-in was real. They succumbed to the insistent crush of the seductive digital economy – joined Facebook and Twitter and put increasingly complicated phones in their pockets and then in their homes, devices that spied on them freely.
As Kiran’s friend Siva, a professor of culture and media studies put it, in his book on Facebook: “It isn’t Orwell, it’s Huxley.”
When he decided to return to India, Kiran felt on the cusp of something. He was desperate for direction but earnest no one else should author it.
He wanted to know what he was supposed to have learned by now. What was life supposed to have taught him?
He walked through the village quickly and swept through his gate. He rinsed off his feet with the hose on the cement patio and wondered if the reddish water swirling down the drain was monazite.
Months before, a stone carver he’d invited over had pointed out the mineral’s value, but Kiran had done nothing to investigate. He didn’t act on the possibilities right beneath his own feet until it was too late.
“Shit or get off the pot,” Phillipe had said, but with his accent, it was hilarious.
Kiran cursed his sloth as he showered. The hut and its small yard were surrounded by an eight foot wall which allowed Kiran to live unobserved by the villagers. This contributed to their speculatory gossip about him.
He took advantage of the privacy to walk around naked after a shower. He liked drying off openly in the hot Tamil air. It was something he would never do anywhere else. It felt so natural and normal here. Everything felt more base here.
He felt more like the animal he was. Yet he was no longer that animal. Knowing it was like a sting. Had he loved at all?
The sting and that question were immediately followed by a flood of images – Jim Carrey smiling like a tool in The Truman Show. He wondered if his entire American life was a simulacrum.
If he felt more connected to the animal he really was here, then what had he been there?
Who had played hoops and spun records?
Who had loved Sara, and planned with her and fathered Dash?
He wondered if his whole personality to this point was merely a projection he’d created to function in the U.S.
The thought that emerged these past three months in his birthplace, where he felt like a foreigner in practical society and profoundly himself when alone, never progressed. It only was.
He walked in circles around the small hut and yard, naked.
India was exploding with possibilities as the U. S. downspiralled.
For two and a half months he’d been walking in this circle, going swimming twice a day, and walking in this circle.
Because he knew nothing ends he had no answer.
He stopped walking and snorted aloud, “Yeah, right, I’m going to start mining thorium from the sand.”
Kiran drew the curtains and lay down on the mat. He was still. The fans turned. Then nothing moved. The power was intermittent.
With the power cut it was too hot to sleep or work and when he heard a high-pitched, “eeeeeeeeeeeee!” – the whine of the first mosquito – he leapt up.
Lying naked in a still hut by the beach mid-morning was asking for months of nasty joint pain: the blood-suckers carried chikungunya. He’d have to go into town.
Kiran wrapped himself in a cotton lungi and took a long-sleeve jibba from the second drawer of his dresser. As he pulled it over his head, he heard the call of Ambika, the fishmonger: “Meee-eeeeen!”
The woman sat patiently awaiting him on the dusty patio outside his gate. She had a wide, shallow, stainless steel dish on her lap. There was usually little left to choose from by the time she got to his hut because Kiran woke later than everyone else in the village and went swimming with the sun well up
Ambika woke with her husband long before dawn. She made him capi and saw him off to the sea. She received him back after sunrise. The men divided the day’s catch and she cleaned and prepared her dish with the wives of the other fishermen. They each walked a separate route through the village to sell their share of the ocean’s bounty.
Ambika wore a sea-green and midnight-blue sari with thin, gold lining that matched her nose ring and the gold chain that hung around her neck signifying she was wed. She had dark skin and deep blue tattoos on both arms in the style of the older tribes. She was just two years older than Kiran, but years in the sun in this beach village, gave her a wizened look.
Today she had a single white perch and two giant tiger prawns. The mid-morning sun glistened and flashed brightly off the stainless steel dish as she swiveled it to show him. He bought the perch but then asked if he could take a picture of the prawns.
Ambika loved when he did this. Despite the ubiquity of phones in the village nowadays, no one used them to take pictures of food. It was something foreigners did. This time she posed, which was a first.
Kiran had eight pictures of Ambika in his phone, documenting seven different species on her dish. In the initial snaps she looked wary and stoic – on occasion suspicious. Now she took time to position herself. She turned the dish to prevent glare. She drew the top of her sari from her shoulder up and over her head to shade her face.
Suddenly, Kiran realized that she, and therefore all the villagers, must think he was leaving. He imagined her saying to the fishermen’s wives that next time he asked to take a picture of her fish, she would pose – because ‘who knew where sir was going and who all then would see her?’
He bent down and zoomed in on the dish, eliminating her from frame. The prawns were huge, at least ten inches long. Green and dark gray at the tips of their tails, their color grew lighter along the fat crustaceans’ bodies over the swimming legs, and pink toward the fore. The walking legs were striped a cartoonish pink-and-white beneath the dull, gray-pink carapaces.
Two round black eyes sat like little black caviar roe placed atop the rostrum above the wiry, red antennae that swept out before them. “Decapods,” Kiran thought, as he set his left hand beside the dish and stuck his index finger out for scale. He had never seen prawns this size before – not in the U.S. He suddenly felt he couldn’t think of anything better about the USA at all.
He stood up, and thanked and paid Ambika. Then he took the perch back inside. He had leftover rice from last night’s meal. He warmed it in the pan as he fried the fish. He stirred in some diced green onion and ginger, finally adding some cut spinach and chili paste. A squeeze of lemon brought out the flavor of the whitefish. It cut flaky and tasted delicious.
As he ate, Kiran thought again about Ambika. She saw much more clearly than he did despite all his travels and his western education. She and the other villagers were lighting-quick-witted. Their connection through daily process to thousands of years of Tamil made it so.
His mind was filled with the ceaseless noise of his Facebook, Twitter and IG scrolls.
When he arrived he never said when he’d depart. They knew before he knew himself. They were reading him as they read every tourist who came to stay.
The villagers’ lives were unchanged for centuries. They’d seen many come and go, among whom he was no more or less unique – to them he was a simpleton.
Kiran finished eating, washed up and changed into trousers, replacing his chappals with closed-toed black loafers. He had to go to the bank.
He wheeled the bike out, locked the gate and pushed off. He took the main road only as far as the first circle road. He did not want to pass the cafe on the way in. He wasn’t ready to face the gossip pit of expats and regulars yet. Cutting east, he headed down back alleys to the bank.
Emerging from one of these alleys into the round that diverted lorries and buses to the highway, he crossed but got caught between lights at the auto-rickshaw stand.
“Dey! Merica-sir!” a voice yelled at him. He turned to see the autorick driver he’d been buying ganja from standing among a cadre of his fellow drivers. He called him “Merica-sir” because he knew he hated it. It was both respect-building for his local familiarity with Kiran, a foreigner, and it was a dismissive dig.
The driver waggled his hand in a combination hang-loose and call-me sign. His head swiveled in the back-and-forth bobbling unique to South Indians that asks, implies and gestures, at once.
Kiran shook his head and waved him off as the light changed. If he hustled, he could make the light at the next round while all the lights between were green.
He drew a gulp of dusty, earthen air, the grit and residue of thousands of souls, and pushed hard. The auto-rick driver squeezed his rubber air-horn in a honkedy-honk-goodbye which Kiran was surprised he could pick out from the tumultuous roar of the busy street.
He made the lights, swung into the next roundabout and shot out into the bank parking lot. He pulled onto the front patio and chained his bike to the end of the crowded stand. There was a mall adjacent to the bank. The bike rack was always crowded.
Kiran loved coming to the bank. It had an entrance way – mirror-tinted double glass doors let you in to a small foyer and another set of glass doors that led inside. It was a glass air lock – an area to shake oneself of the dust and heat before entering the cool A/C and the clean confines of the bank.
There was a water fountain in the foyer and even a small, single-stall restroom with a sink. Kiran went in and rinsed off, wiping the sweat and dust from his arms and face. He dried his hands by pushing back his hair, took a deep breath and looked at himself in the mirror. He was older.
His temples were flecked with gray that contrasted sharply with his long black hair. His scruffy beard was equally salty. He knew he’d have to shave it all before going back to the U.S. He pulled down the skin under his eyes and stared into himself. When he let go he pored over the extent of the bags.
Kiran had opened the bank account from California over the net. They overnighted him a card international express. When he arrived at the airport in Chennai, he withdrew 120,000 rupees. He used it to get situated. Only then did he use the card to buy sundries in town.
He knew the e-trail of his purchases was being closely observed by the bank. If he spent money at Western fast food chains and checked into a 5-star hotel it meant one thing. If he bought groceries and supplies from local shops, it meant something else. He paid for the hut in cash.
After a few days in the village, he made his way to the bank on a bicycle, covered in cotton. On a Tuesday, a week after he had been in town, Kiran made a showy first appearance at the bank to “meet the manager” and be seen by those who had been watching his purchases as a non-resident Indian.
It was standard practice: make it seem you have plenty of money in the U.S. and are here to share it with family and explore business opportunities. Behave as local as you can. He used the card to buy his bicycle. He used cash when he rented a moto.
He never used the card at local bars. It was the first arrangement he made with Phillipe. He left a deposit, ran a tab till an agreed upon limit and then paid in full in rupee notes. Keeping currency fluid was an invaluable skill of travel.
Mr. Srinivasan was a prototypical South Indian money manager: balding on top and clean shaven, with a round face and baby cheeks. He wore thin wire spectacles that could have been a decade old. He wore a brown suit. It was 42 degrees C outside and this guy was in a suit.
“It is vonderful to see young men doing well in America and coming home to invest,” Srinivasan had remarked as they signed the paperwork. There was an old wooden abacus at the edge of his desk. In the corner, unused, sat a typewriter. Kiran gave him a thumb impression for the bank’s records. “Will you require transfer account?” Srinivasan had asked.
“Not at the moment,” Kiran had replied, “We’ll see.”
The manager bobbled his head at him, “India is booming, sir. You will do very well here now. And your vife, sir?”
“We’re divorced,” Kiran had murmured, signing and initialing paperwork. It was another tight, efficient lie, that pegged him as American.
Srinivasan immediately fired off the excessive tsks that were so common here, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk” – a rapid-fire nine tsks was considered more empathetic – “terrible,” he had concluded.
Now, as the interior glass doors slid open before him, Kiran realized he looked forward to seeing the old man again. Srinivasan would testify to his goodness if called upon to do so while he was away. Kiran was confident he’d left an impressive e-trail of purchases and relationships.
There was a podium placed beside the doors as he entered. This was new. A tall, thin, mustachioed young boy in uniform stood at the podium and greeted him. Kiran asked to see Srinivasan. The boy furrowed his brow and looked down at a nonexistent list. “There is no one here working by that name, sir.”
Kiran then asked after the manager and was told he would have to make an appointment. He told the young man to go and ask the manager if he would see him now. Being pushy at the bank exhibited the confidence of both a wealthy American and a local Brahmin. It couldn’t hurt to try.
“Madam is a madam, sir.” the boy replied.
“Fine,” Kiran threw on the frustrated voice, “ask her.”
The young man dropped his head to his chest and ran to the back offices. “The new India, “ Kiran thought, “where turnover is high and smart women make moves to gain control of their lives.”
Now one of them appeared. She was young. “Maybe not 30,” Kiran thought. She was 28: “I’m Urmila.”
Like the bank manager before her, Urmila dressed in western attire, though considerably more sensibly. She wore a thin, black, linen jacket over a light white blouse and a medium-length, business-cut, black skirt. She wore a string of silvery-white pearls. Her gold name tag read: “Urmila Narayan, Manager”.
She extended her hand. Her hair was tied up in a tight bun. She had a sharp but elegant nose over which she now assessed him with searching, dark-brown eyes. All business. They shook and he noticed she looked him-up-and-down before saying, “Come on back to my office.”
Urmila spun around quickly and strode off to the back. Kiran hop-stepped to catch up. He called out after her, “Hey, listen, I didn’t realize I needed an appointment-”
“It’s no trouble,” she called out over her shoulder, not breaking stride.
Her office was small, but one wall was a window treated with the same mirror-tint on the front of the building and when she closed the door the space was cool, well-lit and humming. There were two wall-mounted monitors overhead which ran livestreams of BTVI and Bloomberg Global and two monitors on a desk crowded with a keyboard, mouse and documents. She sat behind the desk and indicated a chair opposite.
There was unopened mail on the chair. He handed it to her and she glanced at the envelopes as she set them atop all the documents on her desk, put her hands together, looked at him and asked, “What can I do for you?”
“I’m headed back to the States briefly and want to maintain my account. I just wanted to touch base with the bank about that. Clarify dates, if there’s a minimum balance or …” he trailed off.
She looked up his account on one of the monitors before her and said, “I see you opened this just a few months ago. How long do you expect to be gone? Because we have some options.”
Kiran was not prepared for this. It was a long way from balding Srinivasan and his abacus and typewriter of a few months ago. “Uh, I don’t know for sure. I have to go back to take care of a few things. Of course I’ll be in touch from there and I can still conduct operations with my account through transfers and the net, right?”
“Right,” Urmila replied, curtly, as if suddenly realizing exactly whom she was dealing with.
She sat back and spoke quickly: “You’ve taken our most basic account, which you opened with a principal balance you deposited as a lump sum from your account in California before you arrived. The monthly fee for the card and other services has been taken out of this principal. So if you continued with this basic account, you’d have to keep paying the monthly fee and maintain a balance,” she paused, scanning the monitor, “I think it’s like 100,000 rupees. There would of course be penalties if you didn’t manage this.”
“Sure, I understand,” Kiran replied.
“Alternatively,” Urmila continued, swiveling in her chair to a shelf behind her, “I would encourage you to consider investing with us.” She pulled down a glossy folder from the shelf and passed it to him. It was filled with printed pages and charts. “Here’s a simple explanation of some of the opportunities we have. You could leave as little as 5,000 US here and it would be working for you.”
Kiran tried to look cool. “Oh, I see,” he took the folder and pretended to flip through it. His ignorance wasn’t lost on her. “But I guess there would be tax implications …” he trailed off again.
Urmila sighed and grabbed a business card, flipped it and deftly wrote her number on the back. “This is my mobile. It’ll be easier than trying to use the appointment line. Call me direct to discuss and we can do the needful.” She handed the card across the desk to him and sat back.
He realized this was all the time she had and stood. He thanked her as they shook hands and he left. It was all cold, swift, mechanical and delivered exactly as it might have been in Modesto. “The new India,” he thought.
He put the folder in his backpack and headed out of the bank. The second doors opened and the heat hit him like a wall. He craved a drink, but knew he had to visit the Internet cafe first. He had to look up flights and let Sara and Dash know he was headed back. He unchained the bike and set off.
He pulled up to the cafe and was pleased to see there weren’t that many bikes out front. School hadn’t let out yet. In the afternoons the place was swamped with teenagers. There were only 15 cubicles, stalls really, so groups of kids hung around each, spilling over.
Kiran checked in and slid into a stall. He ran a Kayak search on tickets and checked every box: Cheap-O air and ijustfly and orbitz and priceline and whatever Indian options they added. There were nearly a dozen windows to sift through to get an idea of a price range. He would use the range to negotiate with a local travel agent for a lower price or a better flight. After a half hour of collecting data, his mind swimming with flight numbers, fares and connections, he shut down all the sites and put away his notes.
He wrote Sara first. Short sentences. Their relationship had decayed to where only the most pertinent info was exchanged. It was like writing a telegram in the last century: “Home next month. When can I see him? – K.”
He thought about writing to Dash to tell him as well, but realized he didn’t have concrete dates to share. Instead, he sent him a few snaps of the beach and of an elephant he saw on the road. “Wish you were here. How are the A’s doing?” he wrote. Kiran wondered if Dash even kept up with baseball.
He spent a few minutes looking for articles about thorium in the sands of Tamil Nadu. He stared at images of monazite-laden sand. He couldn’t tell anything from comparing the images. They all looked different from each other and the sand by his hut.
The tiny bell on the front door of the Internet cafe began ringing periodically and insistently, as teenagers and their posses kicked it open and filed in. Many of them were Dash’s age.
To this Gate I gave the name of Chrysopylae, or Golden Gate; for the same reasons that the harbor of Byzantium was called Chrysoceras, or Golden Horn.
John C. Frémont, July 1, 1846
——–
On a half empty flight returning to SFO from Costa Rica, in seats 17B and C, Freddy Pico held hands with a stranger. She was in her mid-30’s and trying to get back to Vegas. She approached him at Juan Santamaria International and quietly asked if she could sit beside him on the half-empty, wide-bodied jet, confessing hapless fear during takeoffs and landings.
Her name was Elizabeth and she waited till he was alone. Freddy stood off apart from the others in front of a floor to ceiling window pane.
The harsh tube bulbs overhead were oddly made more stark by the rectangular plastic covers meant to serve as flat sconces. The ultimate effect was that everyone waiting to board, latinos y gringos alike, appeared undead.
Freddy was twisting his body around in front of the window, trying to position himself to actually see – to avoid the harsh glare and make out the fiery volcanic glow of the Poás in the distance – when Elizabeth approached and stammered her request.
Now, twenty years later and 3,000 miles away, standing on Ocean Beach, Freddy suddenly remembered what Elizabeth said during that takeoff, when she death-gripped his hand while their 747 banked slowly out to sea, leaving the ribbon of coastal Nicaragua behind.
She murmured, “I live in the desert because I don’t like change. People who like change need the ocean.”
Freddy remembered her looking up and away awkwardly to avoid any open blinds and the thousands of feet between them and mother earth. Her dishwater brown hair was tied up in a small bun. Her pale hazel eyes jumped to the no-smoking and fasten-seat-belt signs, the personal fan and light, the dull gray of the plastic stowaway bins – anywhere but the windows.
People always asked Freddy to do things like that: hold their hands during takeoff, or mind their stuff while they ran outside to feed the meter. He was easy-going. He wasn’t short or tall. He had a round, welcoming face, warm eyes. His paunch appeared and disappeared, a tide of the seasons, not the hustle of jogging.
The marine layer sat thick overhead. It made everything dark; the sea, the sky, the stone outcroppings in the gate. This contrast gave the sand a clean, beige hue. Freddy saw the boys running around on the sand and tried to implicate them in his flight mate’s analysis of what different people need, from so long ago.
Marcus, the eldest, liked change. Ricky was in constant change. Really, all the kids were.
“Kids,” Freddy thought, “need the ocean.”
“C’mon! Let’s go,” Freddy yelled at the sinewy black shadows running against the gray wall of sky and surf down the beach. He raised his hand when he saw Ricky looking back at him and swirled his finger in a wide circle in the air, reeling them back in. Ricky waved, turned away and chased down the others. Today there were four of them.
Two flying forms blew past Freddy tearing up the long beachhead. He didn’t get their names. Earlier, Marcus showed up at Freddy’s place with these two – brothers, maybe three years apart – easing in behind him. “Oye, Mr. Pico, I told these guys they could come along.” Freddy realized Marcus liked being the gatekeeper – bringing kids from the neighborhood around to his place.
It had started with one of Marcus’s classmates three years before, and today Freddy didn’t know these two brother’s names, but he knew their mother and had seen them around the neighborhood. As long as he knew the kids’ parents, Freddy never asked questions. He just gave as many as fit in his Gran Torino a ride to the beach and back, some fruit, a couple of bottled waters.
“You got towels?” the elder brother asked.
“Uh, yeah, sure.”
Ricky strolled up with his shoes in his hand, eyes sparkling and blurted, “Man, the sand’s actually cold!” Freddy turned and looked back for Marcus, whose shadowy form he made out slowly trudging toward them. The fog and swirling sand intermittently swathed him in mist.
Marcus looked up the windy beach and made sure Mr. Pico turned back around before taking out the joint. He had been unable to light it on the beach without it being obvious. He spent a frustrating twenty minutes trying to get it lit before finally giving up.
It was the first time he had ever sneaked a joint on a beach trip and he’d brought matches, which he got free from the goldfish bowl at the hostess stand next to a dish of individually-wrapped, red-and-white peppermints in the foyer of Aldo’s, the Italian restaurant in his neighborhood.
He hadn’t thought about the wind at the beach and only now realized he should have bought a lighter. As a result, he never managed to get an actual hit. He brushed the charred, crumbly bits off the end of the pinner, pinched it and twisted it closed. He slipped it back into his shirt pocket under his hoodie and shell jacket.
As he approached the cement ramp that eased up out of the sand to the car and the others, Marcus felt a sharp spasm of guilt. If he had been successful, he realized, he’d have felt worse. As he approached the big Ford, he feared Mr. Pico would smell it.
Unlocking the doors, Freddy called out ,”Hey guys, dust the sand off before getting in.” Ricky sat on a bench beside the old sedan, swatting the bottoms of his feet with his socks.
“So what’d you think?” Freddy asked the two new boys.
“It’s hecka cold, man!” the younger brother erupted, grinning. The elder boy shrugged. Freddy could see the kid was carrying something heavy all day. “So where am I taking you guys … to your mom’s?
Marcus walked up and interrupted before they could answer: “Just take us all back to your place. We’re gonna walk down to GameStop on the way home.”
The younger boys careened into the backseat, falling on top of each other. They fell asleep before the long, low Ford even hit the panhandle. In the passenger seat, Marcus had his ear buds in, his hood up and his face turned to the window.
Freddy noticed a recent change in Marcus’ demeanor, a posture of urban defiance. Marcus wanted people in the city to see him as East Bay: low-slung and closed-off. But Freddy knew he was drinking everything in, peripherally – Oakland style.
A guy in his mid-20’s with thick, black, designer glasses, wearing a gray scarf around his neck and a long, black overcoat that hung to the knees of his cuffed designer jeans, was standing on the corner texting someone, ignorant that he had the light. He stood just at the edge of the curb, tantalizingly close to stepping off, and yet … not doing it.
An Indian cabbie trying to make a right at the corner, was left hanging. Was the guy going to walk?
The Gran Torino was in the middle lane, paused at the light for traffic, so Marcus’ passenger window was immediately beside the cab and he could hear the woman in the back seat barking in rage at the cabbie to get a move on – unaware he could go nowhere until the guy on the corner either moved or looked up from his I-phone.
The full-bearded Sikh, who filled out the driver’s seat like a massive blue tuber, puffed his cheeks and let out a sigh that emptied his breast and crumpled his shoulders. His turban sank. Marcus sighed sympathetically.
“What’s up?” Freddy asked.
“Nothing,” Marcus murmured, “Just fools in the city.”
The marine layer lay thick across San Francisco as the big sedan slowly edged forward through traffic toward the bridge. The skyline was waist deep in it. The Pyramid, BofA and Salesforce were all masked in gray.
But as they came up on the 101, the gray evaporated. Halfway across the water, the fingers of the marine layer were melted away. Skies were clear over the East Bay and it was sunny; windows with views of the ever-changing chrysopylae reflected the sunlight, peppering the Oakland hills with white dots and shimmering lights.
Freddy reflected on how little the boys knew about the hills, or the city. Their world was the flats of Oakland, and only a few block radius. That was what had inspired him to take these trips to the beach; how it came to pass that Federico Ignacio Pico was the first person to introduce Marcus, Ricky and a half dozen other local kids to the Pacific Ocean.
He enjoyed watching them the first time, approaching the sea boldly, then as they got nearer the waves, more cautiously, until at last they put their toes in the water, yelped with frozen joy and leaped backward.
As his big Ford crept up the onramp to finally enter the bridge, Freddy noticed a man behind the wheel of a little gray sedan in the lane beside him, with an intense look of stress on his face.
“Driven near-blind chasing the cost of living.” Freddy thought.
It’s the same anywhere there’s hills and flats, cities and burbs; where there are people overlooking the overlooked. The hills have treasured views, and the flats get unaffordable rents. But here there’s a treasure in the flats – a glittering gem of silver and gray, blue, brown and green: the San Francisco Bay.
As the crazy, bastard pathfinder noted, at sunset from the Oakland hills: it’s golden at times, too.
The Pacific pours through this ever-changing chrysopylae under Our Lady of Perpetual Suicides. It breathes up the delta and down the South Bay, brackish. There’s continuity. If you stick your toe in Lake Merritt or Corte Madera Creek; San Pablo Bay or the Carquinez Straits, you always feel connected to the Pacific.
Freddy glanced at the boys in the rear view mirror, then tapped Marcus and spoke up to get through his music. “They don’t need to go to GameStop – they’re all crashed out. I’m taking ’em home.”
Marcus didn’t turn to face him, “Yeah, all right.” The bay rolled by.
“What’s the tide doing?”
Marcus sat up, pulled out his earbuds and leaned to look: “hustlin’ out.”
“How’s the chop?” Freddy could see the water, but he feigned focus on driving. Marcus had learned a lot in three years.
“Hella caps … gotta be 20 … well, 15.”
Changing lanes across the wide, gray asphalt of the maze to the 580, and easing into Oakland, the white of the bridge, the cranes and the road stripes shone brightly – it was warm.
“Yo, man, just let me out on Telegraph,” Marcus added.
Freddy nodded and eased the GT through the criss-crossing traffic of the thousands homeward bound.
*******
Barbara Carter rented one side of a duplex in the middle of a typical East Oakland block. At one end there was an empty warehouse building. The other end of the street crossed a busy avenue. The corner had a pizza delivery spot, a bodega, a coin laundromat, a gas station and an eight story, glass and concrete condominium rising above them all.
The units in the condo were mostly 700-square foot studios. The tenants were all unmarried singles who either didn’t have much patience for kids, or feared them. They walked city-fast, headphones in, head down to their phones tapping apps on the way to BART to the City.
The kids had no place to be. The pizza spot had no tables. It was just a stand for delivery drivers, that served $5 gourmet slices to the condo residents. The corner store owner was fascist against kids hanging around his shop. The bodega and laundromat were no loitering zones and the gas station … well, it was a gas station.
The playground for the kids was the empty end of the block with its decrepit warehouse wrapped entirely in barbed-wire fencing. Realtors signs were tied to the woven metal with metal twist-ties every thirty feet, but none of the signs were legible as each had been tagged “Paloma” in sweet, lyrical, Belton Molotow Premium Azure Blue.
Barbara’s duplex was halfway up the block. The houses on either side were all single family homes. She had a housemate, Michelle, who was obliged to pass through a small common space, a foyer, to come and go. Michelle had closed the front door to the foyer and spun to face the street just as Freddy pulled up. Her pony tail whipped around and hit the screen door as it closed.
Seeing it was the boys, she turned, opened the screen door, unlocked the front door, and then, ponytail whipping back-and forth, turned and walked back purposefully in front of Freddy’s car to his window. She leaned in and lowered her sunglasses, shaking her head: “You don’t want to go in there.”
She saw the two sleeping brothers in the backseat. “Aw, look at that! That is so sweet what you do for these kids.”
Freddy smiled, “Whose Volvo ?” He nodded to the black EX-30 parked in the driveway they shared.
“PTA,” Michelle whispered, “They’re saying Eric stole something.”
“Which one’s Eric?” Freddy asked, as he emerged to let the kids out. Michelle helped rustle them to the sidewalk. “This,” she patted his head as she gently nudged him to the curb, “is Michael, he’s eleven. And that,” she said, nodding at the elder brother, “is Eric, he’s thirteen. What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Eric murmured, half asleep, half-defiant. Freddy wondered if the kids’ sullen attitude all day had something to do with whatever was going on inside.
“Did you have fun at the beach?” Michelle asked the boys as they slipped out of the big back seat.
Michael turned and smiled weakly, giving a thumbs-up, then continued after the slinking figure of his brother toward the front door. Michelle gently patted Freddy on the back, “Good to see you Freddy, I’m telling you: Stay out of it.”
She crossed the street to her Honda and Freddy watched her start up and pull out, before turning to the duplex. He had already dropped Ricky off and, since Marcus had gotten out at Telegraph, this was his last stop.
The door to the foyer was ajar, and he could see Barbara inside as he walked up and heard her: “Oh, good. Come in,” as he waved through the screen door before swinging it open.
“Have you got a few minutes, Freddy?”
Michael and Eric’s mother was a formidable woman. She stood nearly six feet in heels and was thus slightly taller than Freddy. She had dark skin which gave her form broad, statuesque features. She stood in the entrance to the kitchen and didn’t move nearer the door as Freddy entered.
Eric was standing at the front of the living room, between them, head down, staring at his shoes. There was no sign of his little brother. A man and woman were seated on the couch. Freddy did not recognize them. Both rose when he entered.
Barbara quickly added: “How was the beach? Were they good?”
Freddy glanced about. Michael had dragged himself off someplace.
“They were great. We had fun.”
Eric stood in front of a big, flat, wall-mounted monitor. When on, it dominated the small, neat living room. Off and silent, the monitor created an immense black backdrop for Eric, who looked even more isolated as he faced the interrogation taking place.
Barbara walked across the room to Eric’s side: “Well, I’d love to hear all about your first trip to the beach, but unfortunately, we’ve got to address a problem.” She took her place behind him, supportively, and put her arms on his shoulders before turning to the others.
“This is Mr. Pico. He took the kids to the beach today,” and, turning to Freddy: “This is Lynn Chen and Paul Wallace, with the PTA.”
There was a low, round table in front of the couch, and the two stepped out and around to greet Freddy. The Asian woman seemed to be Chinese, but Freddy couldn’t tell her direct heritage. She wore a simple black dress, with white shoes and a simple medium length string of pearls. She put her hand out confidently, “Nice to meet you, I’m Lynn. Are you the boy’s guardian?”
“The boy,” Freddy thought, as he shook her hand before replying, “Oh, no-” but Barbara interrupted:
“No. He’s a neighbor.” She stopped full then added, “and a friend.” There was tension for a half second before Barbara turned to Freddy, “But I may need you in a professional capacity.” and then to the others, “Mr. Pico is a police officer.”
Freddy let go of Lynn’s hand, shaking his head, “No,” he demurred, as he turned to the tall man with thinning brown hair and glasses beside her. Middle-aged, in brown slacks and a beige blazer over a rumpled but clean, white-collared shirt, he looked a little lost.
Freddy continued, “I’m a graduate of the Oakland police academy, but I’ve never served as an officer.”
“Ah.” the tall, clumsy man said, noncommittally. “I’m Paul. Paul Wallace.”
Freddy explained, “They needed bilingual candidates and I signed up, but I was in the graduating class after the budget cuts. There were limited positions, so I deferred.”
As they shook hands, Paul nodded vigorously, approving, “I see, I see, well …” He was the type that trailed off. Freddy wondered if it was because Wallace was often in rooms filled with opinionated parents. Freddy imagined he’d grown accustomed to being deferential at the PTA.
There was dead air as they continued shaking hands and staring at each other. Seeing Wallace wasn‘t about to say anything else, he continued: “Please, call me Freddy.” He turned to find a place to sit. Barbara took Freddy’s arm, “What I meant was we may need your services as an investigator.”
There was an empty armchair to the right of the couch and Freddy took it as Paul and Lynn returned to the sofa.
“Yeah, they needed either Chinese or Hmong or Tagalog speakers so I gave up my spot.”
The tone in the room, unreeled carefully by Eric’s mother, had shifted with Freddy’s arrival. She now asked, “Would anyone like coffee?” and to the general lifting of mood and nods all around, “Great, just give me a second. Eric, honey, why don’t you come help me?”
“Terrible business, this … ” Paul muttered, trailing off.
Lynn looked to Paul but was obviously used to him, because she waited only a brief, perfunctory moment – it was like she was staring at him counting to some number in her head; a limit – before she shook her shoulder length hair and turned to Freddy to take charge of the situation.
“I think the boy’s involved with whoever has taken a valuable sculpture from the grounds. They melt them down and make good money – it’s happened before.”
“They,” Freddy thought.
“Now, Lynn,” Paul was used to this role, already back-tracking, “Slow down. Until there’s some clear-cut evidence, we shouldn’t go accusing …”
“Until,” Freddy thought.
Not knowing what else to say and eager to turn to someone else, Paul looked to Freddy, “Honestly I didn’t want to come …”
Lynn stopped short and looked at him, wounded, as he continued, “The police came when we reported it of course, but they have no leads or …,” his voice disappeared again into thin air. Then he started fresh, “The District will be conducting our own investigation,” and then he paused again, before muttering, “but perhaps you could be … of some … “
He was like an engine that just won’t turn over. “Well, I’m happy to do whatever I can for Barbara and Eric,” Freddy replied, “But I’d be working on their behalf. We’re neighbors.” He paused and looked at Lynn, “And friends.”
Lynn, visibly exasperated by the sudden appearance of someone even less allied to her views than Paul, realized she had to be diplomatic, “Well, it’s just we need to act fast because whoever’s got it is going to melt it down and turn it into cash as fast as they can. They’ve got to get rid of the evidence. And I think that boy,” she said, pointing at the kitchen, “knows where our Cooper’s Hawk is at this very moment.”
“Hmm, well,” Freddy said. “I can tell you I spent the day with Eric and his little brother, Michael, and they were great on our outing.
“I began giving kids from this neighborhood monthly rides to the beach a few years ago-”
“Oh wait-” Lynn said, “I’ve heard of that.”
“of that,” Freddy thought, before continuing, “Different kids, and if there’s room, some kids come back.”
Lynn smiled and sat back. Paul nodded vigorously, incapable of an appropriate response. Freddy let them off the hook:
“So this is one of the bronzes in that series the school commissioned last year? The Cooper’s Hawk is just one, right? of several that depict native flora and fauna reproduced in bronze?”
“That’s right,” Lynn responded, “I was on the selection committee. It’s an important work. We can’t have elements of it just walking away-”
The need for increased security for the remaining statues hadn’t struck her yet and she interrupted herself, trailing off, “The other statues …”
Barbara returned with a coffee pot and a tray with cups, which she set on the low table. There was creamer in a small, cylindrical metal pitcher with a hinged lid and spout and brown sugar in a crystal bowl with a spoon, rather than lumps. She poured Freddy a cup, handed it to him, then poured coffee into the remaining three cups on the tray and took one for herself. She gently added a dash of creamer. Paul and Lynn quickly and mindlessly did the same, as Freddy continued:
“Those statues are installed along the creek, I believe. But I’ve noticed the Cooper’s Hawk has a vulnerability in its design. At the point where the legs meet the branch, the metal’s quite thin. It has delicate talons.”
Freddy’s crisp, direct investigative approach silenced the room. The quiet unassuming fellow who strolled in like the driver or sitter was gone. In his place, a shrewd and observant local emerged. He took their silence for agreement and pressed on.
“So that’s the weak point. But it’s installed at some height, I believe.”
“Yes, that’s right,” answered Paul, “It’s meant to be seen from the ground at rest on a branch, perhaps like it’s hunting for mice. It’s probably fifteen feet up there.”
“So how did the thief get up there unseen?” Freddy continued.
“That said, it would’ve been pretty easy to break the sculpture off the branch at the thin point near the talons,” he paused, “Once you were up there – you wouldn’t need a torch.” Freddy looked directly at Lynn, “A child could do it.”
Lynn sat back smugly and listened to see where this was going.
“When was it taken? Who first noticed it missing?”
Paul replied, “It was discovered missing by a student and his father who bike the creek to school together. They noticed it on Saturday, on their way to the farmers market. The father called me to report it. So …”
Lynn interrupted more quickly this time, “So it was taken sometime Friday night.”
“Or early Saturday morning,” Freddy concluded.
Since his mother had taken her coffee cup to the other armchair opposite Freddy, Eric looked even more isolated, standing, awkwardly, staring at his shoes.
Freddy turned to him, “Eric, do you know anything about this?”
“No.”
Lynn sat up straight with alarm, “There are a group of kids who hang out together every afternoon. They hang around the campus and they … they …” she sighed, constrained by language, “they get into a lot of who knows what?
“I’ve been told for seven years now as my kids grow up in this neighborhood that we don’t use the word, ‘gang,’ because it’s inappropriate and stigmatizing, and in fact, ” she quickly turned to Barbara before continuing, “I agree with that, I do. But we need to admit we have at least one group of kids that hang around only with each other and roam about doing mischief.”
Barbara looked as though she might explode in reaction had she not immediately stood, taken a large deep breath and returned to her son’s side. Instead, she asked simply and slowly, “Do you have some specific evidence against my son? Or are you singling him out for hanging around campus after school with his friends?”
“We’re not singling him out,” Paul countered, “We’ve sent parent/teacher pairs to each of the other parents, too. So we’re not … ”
Lynn again jumped in, “On Friday afternoon, Eric and his friends were seen not just hanging around, but standing under the Cooper’s and throwing rocks at it. There were a whole lot of kids who saw them. They said they probably knocked it off the branch with a rock and took it. We’re following-up on what the eyewitnesses-”
“Eyewitnesses?” Barbara retorted, “To what?”
Freddy spoke up, “Eric, were you and your friends throwing rocks at the Cooper‘s Hawk statue?”
Eric shifted weight and looked at Freddy, “Yeah, we were trying to hit it.”
“See?” Lynn spat triumphantly.
Freddy put his palms out, face down, and patted the air between them, saying gently, “Hang on, now.” He turned back to Eric, “You didn’t knock it down?”
Eric sniffed, “No way,” he shook his head, “It’s bronze. I mean we were just throwing tiny little rocks …”
Barbara turned to Lynn sternly: “So you interviewed a bunch of little kids who wouldn’t know a bronze like that can’t be knocked off a branch by a pebble and that’s why you’re here?”
“Do you know how bronze statues like that are made, Eric?” Freddy asked, in part to ease the tension.
“Um, no.”
“Well, the metal is liquefied and poured into a form, a mold. The mold is made out of a material that’s sustainable.”
Eric listened and shrugged.
Freddy turned to Lynn, “Which means the artist can reproduce the work, right? I mean, they still have the forms for each of the pieces.”
Lynn Chen was not pleased with the direction this was going. “That’s not the point-”
Freddy continued, “I’m not sure on what criteria you made your decision on this project … delicate bronzes in public space? and he paused, “but I guess it’s a good thing you can secure a replacement.”
Lynn stared at him coolly. “That’s true.”
“And maybe the artist can strengthen the point of contact,” Freddy continued, “or make the work more secure somehow,” Then he shook his head, “But I just don‘t think Eric here would have any idea what to do with a bronze to make money off it. Can’t speak for his friends …”
He turned to Paul: “Can I get a list of the other parents whose kids are involved?”
Paul shifted uncomfortably, “Oh. Well, see. You understand, Mr. Pico- I mean, you’re not even a parent. It’s just not something …”
This time it was Barbara who seized the empty space of Paul’s indeterminacy. “I’m going to get on the phone tonight and find out what’s going on.” She turned to Eric and said, “Honey, I know you must be tired and sandy. Why don’t you go up and take a shower and get ready for dinner?”
The gratefulness in Eric’s eyes belied no trace of guilt. He turned and ran. “Make sure Michael gets cleaned up too!” Barbara shouted at the shrinking form of her eldest son.
Lynn sat back on the couch as if to fix herself there and crossed her arms. “We need to ask him what he was doing with those kids on Friday afternoon. Did he go back to the campus later that night? Where was he Friday night, Mrs. Carter?”
Freddy interrupted, “I’ll talk to Eric. I’ll ask him about it.”
“Right.” Lynn was skeptical, “and you’ll tell us if he and his friends did it?”
Freddy replied, “It doesn’t serve my business reputation to cover up crimes. If there’s more to discover, Barbara and I will let you know.”
Barbara stood to imply the meeting was over. Wallace stood immediately thereafter. Freddy slowly rose and gestured, and finally, begrudgingly, Lynn stood to shake his hand.
As they left, Freddy remarked, “I think you’ll find kids’re more forthcoming to their own families. You really ought to let the parents of the other kids talk to them first. I’ll be happy to help.”
Lynn softened, “If it wasn’t Eric, I’m sorry. I just feel we have to hold the kids responsible for their campus.”
Barbara spoke more gently as she walked them out, “I don’t want to believe he’s involved in this, but if he is somehow, I promise you, we’ll get to the bottom of it and Eric will take responsibility.” She shook hands with Paul and Lynn once again on the porch, a considerably more amicable air between them.
*****
Freddy pulled into the driveway and noticed his housemate wasn’t home. Raj had a separate entrance and the porch light over his door was on. His bicycle, usually locked up on the side of the house, was gone. Freddy went in and turned on the radio. The evening news had just begun.
Before they left for the beach, Freddy had left a filet of wild caught salmon to thaw in the refrigerator. He pulled it out and a shallow dish, which he sprinkled with salt. He squeezed half a lemon into the dish and laid the fish in it, flipping it so both sides absorbed the marinade. He let it sit covered as he filled and set the rice cooker.
He pulled a head of broccoli out of the refrigerator, cut and washed some florets and tossed them into the inner vessel of a range top steamer. He found two carrots in the crisper and diced them in.
Then Freddy pulled down a pan, set it on the range and drizzled it with avocado oil. He turned on the burner, and when the pan was sufficiently hot, set the fish inside, pouring the excess marinade from the plate on top. In a few minutes the aroma of the salmon filled his flat. He flipped on the fan in the hood and turned to peel and dice a chunk of fresh ginger which he tossed in with the fish.
Freddy drew a bottle of white wine from his makeshift stores: a cool, dry cupboard under the stairs that led up to Raj’s flat. It was a 2011 gewürztraminer from Navarro he’d bought the previous month, when he passed through Anderson Valley on the way home from a fishing trip to the North Coast. He uncorked the wine, poured a glass, then flipped the cork, reinserted it into the bottle and put it in the door of the fridge.
Sipping the gewertz, Freddy turned the fish and peeled back the skin, stir frying it separately in the edge of the pan. He diced a serrano pepper and tossed it in with the bits of skin at the edge of the pan. In the end he’d add the spicy, crispy, fried skin to the cooked rice. Freddy poured a shallow amount of water into the outer vessel of the steamer, put it on another burner and waited for it to boil. Then he gently set the inner vessel into the steamer and closed it.
Freddy’s cel rang. It was Raj. He answered: “Hey man, I‘m making fish and rice if you’re hungry.”
“I’m good,” Raj replied, “Meet me for a drink after.” Freddy agreed and stabbed at the face of his phone with his little finger to hang up.
The rice was finished. He removed the lid from the cooker and flipped the salmon skin up into the rice with the spatula. He broke up the filet in the pan to reveal the bones, then plated the rice, vegetables and half the fish. He turned off the burners, put a lid on the remaining salmon, refilled his wine glass and took his plate to the bar in the living room to eat and listen to Minds Over Matter, the radio quiz show.
He called in to answer but his guess was wrong. It was Margaret, queen consort of Malcolm III who was “first to cross the firth at Forth.”
*****
The lights of the logos for Walgreens at the corner of Telegraph and 51st had the ‘W’ of the scripted neon blown out for years. So it said “Al Green’s” for so long that’s how people liked it. The Ethiopian manager was down, so he let it be. Tricked out strip mall lighting and rolling graffiti are often misread as blight rather than culture.
Marcus strolled in under the watchful gaze of the security guard by the door. The older African recognized him as one of the neighborhood kids, knew he didn’t steal and gave him a head nod and a big smile. He wanted kids like Marcus to like him.
Marcus went straight to the counter and asked for a black Bic. He tested it with a flick, like he’d been taught to do by the kid who gave him the joint. He paid for the lighter and took it outside where he peeled off the white adhesive warning label and tossed it in the trash can on the corner. He fingered the joint in his pocket and looked down the block.
He walked to Bushrod park and found a stand of trees set off away from the playground. He stood under an oak, alertly looking around for cops or nosy adults as he lit the joint. This was only the third time in his life that Marcus had ever smoked weed, and it was the first time he was doing it alone. He coughed and struggled to hit the joint. A thin, twisting line of whitish smoke drifted upward from the tip. After just a few tokes, his mind went blank. He stubbed the joint out against the trunk of an oak, twisted the end closed again and dropped it back into his pocket. In the waning glow of twilight he wandered out of the park toward home.
*****
Barbara could see the boys were exhausted. After nodding slowly over the course of dinner, little Michael finally just fell asleep in front of his plate. His chin rose and fell on his chest as he snored lightly. Beside him, Eric was just staring into his remaining food, stirring what was left of the vegetables.
During dinner Barbara had exchanged texts with most of the other parents. Sunday evening was precious relaxation time for all the families. They collectively agreed – through a quick series of texts – to put the kids to bed and discuss the missing Cooper’s Hawk by email, or when convenient on a call, within a day or two.
“You guys must have had fun,” Barbara said quietly. “Go ahead and take your brother to bed, Eric. I‘ll come and tuck you in after I clean up.”
Eric woke Michael up with a nudge and the boys headed off to the room they shared. Barbara cleared the table, brushed the leftovers into the organics, rinsed the plates and loaded them into the dishwasher. She wiped down the table and countertops and put her smaller kettle on for tea.
Checking the time, she calculated so she could program the television. She started a Netflix show she’d saved, then paused it. Then she scheduled a new episode of her favorite show on HBO to interrupt when it was due to begin later that evening.
She went to tuck the boys in, but found them both passed out on their beds with the desk lamp on. Percy Jackson’s Battle of the Labyrinth lay splayed open across Michael’s chest. Barbara picked up the novel gently, grabbed a baseball card from the bedside table and used it as a bookmark. She set the book on the table and gave Michael a kiss. Then she drew the blankets across her two beautiful sons, turned off the lamp and left them to their dreams.
The Five-Year Plan to decriminalize cannabis and return it to its status as a traditional medicine of Thai culture – initiated in 2018 by Thailand’s Minister of Public Health Anutin Charnvirakul – comes to a close with an impending Parliamentary discussion and vote over new regulations concerning the plant.
Anutin and his party, the Bhumjithai, gained seats in the previous election riding cannabis decriminalization on their platform. Anutin cast his vote wearing a shirt printed with pot leaves.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic intervened. It’s bad. They’re not back. Thailand’s economy tanked, and the election in May last year saw a new coalition government put in place by a nation in an economic depression.
The Thai economy, which relies heavily on tourism, had shown robust growth for several years and by 2019, was around 7% annually. It fell to under 2% in 2020, and ended the calendar year 2023 having grown less than 2.5%.
The cannabis industry has been estimated to have garnered $80 million in 2021, a relatively small figure, but is projected to bring in as much as $1.5 billion by 2025 and more than $10 billion by 2030.*
Sometime soon, possibly this month, the new cannabis rules will be published in the Royal Gazette and become law. There is wild speculation about what will happen.
Many believe the herb will return to the quasi-legal state it has in other nations, restricted to medicinal use only.
Others believe the recreational marketplace has grown too large to curtail because cannabis income has become a necessary part of Thailand’s post-pandemic pursuit of the return of tourism.
The election last year threw the matter into further confusion. Though new Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin publicly supports returning cannabis to only medical licensing, coalition governance has allowed Anutin to be kept on as Minister of the Interior and Thammanat Prompao, who served as a deputy agriculture minister during decriminalization, to serve as the new Minister of Agriculture.
There is good reason to believe in a measured continuation to Thai policy liberalizing the production and sale of cannabis, but … the recreational free-for-all could come to an end as swiftly as it started.
Alex Haze, a Thai journalist says: “When they legalized it, nobody saw it coming. It happened in one night. (But) the same thing happened with Kratom, thirty or forty years ago. One day. Then, it only took them one day to end it. They just said, ‘It’s illegal, put them away. We’re clearing everything out.’ They can put it back.”
It is apparent Thailand is producing cannabis in volume with intention to export. They’re propagating huge quantities of high quality cannabis they’ve grown using the best strains from California and around the world at low cost. After all, they can sell abroad even if they return to legalizing it solely for medicinal purposes … that’s what England does.
The export value is immeasurable.
It’s a market other nations are leaping into and in which California cannot possibly compete – despite having the highest quality product – because current cannabis export license fees are absurdly high due to the lack of a federal policy on cannabis in the USA.
Smuggling is an inevitability of the economic circumstances. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Thai authorities, led by Anutin Charnvirakul, based the new policies of the Thai FDA on the medicinal value of cannabis as supported by Thai culture and a long history of cultivation and use. Ganja, as such, has been used in traditional medicine here for more than 2500 years, as evidenced by remedies prescribing the herb found sculpted into ancient temple walls.
The shift in perspective from ‘harsh penalties against possession of a narcotic’ to ‘establishing production of a medicinal herb’ seeks to make Thailand a cannabis hub in Asia.
The Public Health Ministry plan under Anutin progressively ended prohibition of cannabis in stages:
They first decriminalized the production of hemp in 2018, then CBD for medicinal purposes in 2020. Since June of 2022, THC has been legal for both medicinal purposes and general sale, making Thailand the third country, after Canada and Uruguay, to decriminalize cannabis nationwide.
The Thai FDA began by promoting growth of cannabis for medical research. They gave Thai farmers one million seedlings and, with the aid of experts from abroad, taught Thai farmers how to propagate and cultivate them.
Thai culture has always used ganja, but Thailand began conducting medical research on the health benefits of the plant, first focusing on CBD, then, by removing THC from the schedule of narcotic, Thai public health officials spent the last year and a half investigating what it means to allow marijuana to be sold by farms on the open market.
All of this led to the emergence of cannabis agriculture in a recreational-use consumer marketplace that has rapidly grown oversaturated and filled with foreign product.
Through both legal acquisition and the smuggling of dozens of strains, infusions, vapes and oils from Northern California into Thailand, the highest strength product from California is now available at most dispensaries in Bangkok.
California farmers who had nowhere to ship their surplus product from our own oversaturated marketplace, found a perfect venue. Smuggling has ensured the world knows NorCal still has the best – Emerald Triangle.
Thai farmers complained that decriminalization brought a lax attitude toward smuggling, resulting in more potent varieties from NorCal and elsewhere selling better than the marijuana grown by the nascent Thai industry.
As I write this in December of 2023, the Thais are on their second or third cycle of outdoor (greenhouse) cultivation and third or fourth cycle of indoor production.
They have been successful at propagating clones from California, Oregon, Colorado and Vancouver because of the ideal climate and rapid free-marketization that led to competitive aggressiveness by farmers who would come to Bangkok and see a gram of the material selling for up to a thousand baht ($35).
It is reasonable to believe that product here will soon match or exceed California’s in strength and variety.
“When it was legalized a year ago, June, there was about 90% imported, 10% local,” a 72-year-old, licensed medical marijuana patient told me, “Now it’s up in the neighborhood of 90% local and 10% imported – and the imported is only specialties.”
They have been so successful at farming cannabis in such a short amount of time, that Thailand has begun producing high-grade product in volume for export.
The Thais are producing tons of cannabis, and cannabis exports are a growing economy around the world. Uruguay, the first nation to legalize cannabis, now exports millions of dollars worth of hemp – primarily to Portugal, Switzerland and Israel, but also to the United States.
Remarkably, since 2019, the United Kingdom now leads the world in cannabis exports. Despite that it only legalized medical marijuana, the majority of the export material from the U.K. is high-percentage THC, around 60%.
Namwan, a budtender in Bangkok reported that, “The first two days after cannabis was legalized one of the most famous seed banks from Europe, the Royal Queen, opened their shop. Within 48 hours of the law. They had everything set up.”
That’s the market the Thais seek to enter, knowing they can export high grade medicial cannabis product globally, unburdened by the steep cost of the export license faced by California producers.
The glut in the cannabis economy here in California led to a downturn in income for the state and the recent return of illegal cannabis farming and smuggling. This is the direct result of an inability to inexpensively export California product.
We urgently need to lower fees for export licensing.
Exportation requires meeting international standards and the Thai government knows it. They have prioritized the importance of testing throughout their legalization process. Testing and reporting of cannabis properties has proved to be excellent.
Thailand is about to undercut everybody in one of the fastest growing sectors of the global health economy.
It has only been a year and a half. The rapid, orderly progress of the Thai government on this issue and the agricutural expertise Thai farmers have brought to pivoting to cannabis production and sale is an astonishing turnaround. They are taking it seriously, conducting their own research and development, and producing high quality material in Thailand.
The world awaits the regulations these five years of research will bring. In a flip, California, the rest of the USA and India could learn a good deal from the Thais.
This age-restricted playlist contains an hour of my documentary footage from Thailand on cannabis decriminalization:
* “The Thailand legal cannabis market size was valued at USD 80.3 million in 2021 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 58.4% from 2022 to 2030. The growth can be attributed to cannabis legalization and its rising usage for medical purposes.” – source: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/thailand-legal-cannabis-market-report
Bienvenue, Welkom, Wilkommen, Saludo and Greetings:
This site is mostly in English. It covers about forty years, using a free WordPress template from 2012. I pay for the dot-org myself and it is completely non-commercial. If you have patience, there is much to see, hear and read here. It’s like a book.
Know that this site is not selling anything. You can peruse peacefully.
This site’s best viewed on a computer, laptop or pad. There’s an ABOUT page.
I joined Twitter for exactly ten years. I was @mtksfbay from 4th of April 2011, until 4th of April 2021.
I’ve never been on F*cebook. FB has done more to steal people’s creativity and individuality, and their ability to think for themselves, than any invention in history. I never wanted them to own my content, so instead, I stuck to blogging. But feel free to share anything you find here on FB or elsewere. By sharing it from here it’s tagged with my handle.
I ended this blog in 2017, but restarted it just for the year of 2022 in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. I continue to use my Youtube channel @MTKarthik but other than that, I can’t be found on social media. What you find here are all original thoughts, art and writing, made from without that world.
This blog has had a few thousand readers. Thanks to each and every one of you. Occasionally looking at stats and seeing you exist has meant more to me than you can know. As a writer and artist this has been a safe place to post freely, unburdened by political or commercial demands or the need to satisfy the “social media” construct – the entertainment content.
After a hiatus of many years, I hope to publish long form writing and produce large scale art. I am 55 years old now, remain generally unknown and continue to produce content that follows the methodologies and ideation you can find here: pacifism, internationalism, syncretism, and transcendentalism.
Hope I run into you someday and we can collaborate to help this world. Til then, good bye and good luck.
whew. After ending this archive blog in 2017, I resurrected it in 2022, to declare my survival through the pandemic. But this will be my final post unless a pandemic or something wild of that sort brings me back. Thanks so much to all of you who have read my posts or enjoyed my videos. Best wishes for good health to you and yours in ’23 and beyond.
I don’t usually make resolutions, but, after two years of pandemic protocols and wildly different opinions expressed from every quarter about how we ought to behave in the presence of Covid-19, the nastiest respiratory virus in human history, I felt the need to motivate myself to act and not to be afraid, so I made a resolution on New Year’s Eve last year: I wanted to travel again.
I always find myself on the road. It’s what being homeless most of my life, placeless, has given me – a love of the road. I had followed CDC protocols and had my shots. I still have never contracted the disease to my awareness. If I’ve had it, I never had symptoms.
First, I went to New York to see what it was like “post-pandemic”. Manhattan was a ghost town amidst the Omicron wave. I was afraid to ride the contained space of the subway, so I didn’t even go to Brooklyn, but at least I got a taste once again of the uniquely special energy of that city – that last month was declared the most expensive city in the world.
I spent most of the year in my beloved San Francisco, spending money liberally at businesses that had suffered months and months in the absence of tourists. Saw some really special performances at the Black Cat. Caught some ballgames at the yard, now called Oracle Park.
I went with native americans, to Alcatraz on Indigenous People’s Day for a sunrise ceremony. Held every year on Thankstaking Day, a second day has been added with the acknowledgment of Indigenous People’s Day – on what was only called Columbus Day.
I chose Amsterdam, first. Things felt crowded, busy and back to normal – nobody even mentioned Covid or the pandemic. I saw very few masks. Social distancing was a thing of the past. I enjoyed the city for weeks and you can see that: Herfst in Amsterdam was wonderful.
From Amsterdam it was off to India and my beloved Pondy – Puducherry! Thank you mother India for welcoming me to the secure comfort of your bosom where I know myself. There’s lots more here on India and content on my youtube channel.
You can use the category 2022 to see all the posts from this year. I also added some Time Travel pieces that group content from months over the last forty years: Time Travel Posts.
But it’s time for me to spend energy on other things.
This is the fourth of a series of posts entitled Time Travel in ’22 with MTK (categorized 22TimeTrav) in which I link back to the archive to posts from on or around today’s date. Meta. In this case it’s links from the month of December over the last 34 years.
San Antonio, New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and India.
I never sought recognition or made much of an effort to promote myself. That’s why I put everything here. I still seek help to publish and produce both work from the past and current work and am, as always, open to proper collaboration that could get me wider reach, without compromising the identity I have worked so hard to maintain.
MTK The Writist 