Stories from the bus

               When you ride the bus as often as do I you tend to see many of the same people over and over, day after day.  And for the most part, you tend to see them doing the same things each time.  Some are readers, some talkers, some gazers (out the window), some gazers (at others) and some just stare at the seat in front of them. A few knit, more in winter than in summer seems to me but I have no data. Some talk incessantly and loudly on their cell phones, as though everyone around them would be interested in the details of their lives even if we could hear both sides.  

               I’m a reader. Occasionally a chat-with-one-of-the-regulars-er but mostly, a reader. I’m sure some of the other riders consider that boring.  The lady with season tickets - and how do we know she has season tickets, you ask? Because during football season she feels we will all benefit from her play by play recapping of the most recent football contest – once asked me what I found so interesting about ‘words on paper.’ This from someone who considers high drama to involve grown men running around on a big lawn, throwing and kicking a misshapen ball and pushing each other down.

          

               I suppose, to her, I am boring. But not, I tell myself knowingly, not as much as the guy staring at the seat cushion in front of him for twenty-five minutes each way, five days each week. And of course, my judgment of him is no more valid than my own inner comments about Football Lady. Or hers about me.  Because we can’t know what the other is thinking, can we?

               Of course, as a writer of novels – which is to say, a fashioner of stories from whole cloth – I enjoy imagining what the stranger might be, you know, imagining. So sometimes, when confronted by a Seatback Starer I find myself taking off on a flight of fancy based at least in part on unmerited judgments I make about the fellow rider. One Seat Starer in particular has actually provided kindling for several stories because he’s truly that rare combination of Everyman and Unique Soul that we all imagine ourselves to be. His could be almost any story, albeit with a few obvious caveats. The ample waistline probably rules out competitive body builder. And the well-embedded wedding band most likely eliminates gigolo from the realm of possibility. He walks with a cane, so I’m guessing not a pole vaulter. But he’s something and therein lies the rich loam in which my story will grow.

                 I wonder about the lives of the people on the bus, wonder what shapes their day. Their lives. With a few, I’ve become friends of the sort you see regularly but not for long and never privately. I know Marsha teaches maritime subjects to mates and captains. Andrea is the CFO who recently survived a takeover to beat out their CFO for the spot. The tablet guy is a lawyer. But for the most part, I don’t know their true stories and that’s the way I like it.

               I like making up their stories for them. Not to worry, I’ll be gentle.

               Usually.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Fast pitch

              I wish you all could have taken part in the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Association conference this last weekend. It was far and away the best time I’ve had outside of family in longer than I can remember. Lots of great sessions, good presenters and panels and I learned so, so much. Made some new friends, enjoyed soulful conversations with people who understand the monkey on my back because they have their own simian riders.

              I filled a notebook with my scrawls, purchased several books written by folks I’d actually met and had lunch with a gentleman in his seventies and a woman of forty whose commonality of passion erased the thirty-year experiential gulf. I joined - quietly and somewhat guiltily - in group speculation as to the motives of the guy who showed up dressed as a (Harlequin?), complete with jester cap, mask, robe, lighted wand and a noisemaker. It was a great time because these were my people. Except for maybe jester boy, that was weird.

              Okay, so some of it was stressful. Doing timed cold pitches to four editors and six agents over the course of three hours is not something I would choose to do as recreation. Something like the stress interview I had to go through in the Navy those decades ago. Except that in this case, the interviewers are rooting for you. They truly want you to bring them a manuscript with which they can fall in love. And better yet, sell. And they want you to be someone with whom they’d like to work.

              I prepared for this thing like an Olympic runner. Write and edit and practice and edit some more and practice some more and then get there to learn that a four minute pitch actually means telling the story of your book in ninety seconds so as to allow time for questions. All that prep and training and it’s over in a minute and a half.

              But time after time, thanks largely to the warm generosity of the folks across the table, it was a really good four minutes. It turns out this is my tribe.

              As a kid, I was far and away the worst player on my little league team. Never could hit to the fast pitch. This time, I think I made the team. 

He must go

"It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it's very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said -- and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said, "What system are you going to be-- "Sir, we're staying with digital." I said, "No you're not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it's no good," Trump said.

This is the Commander-in-Chief discussing the aircraft catapults aboard the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier. You see, the USS Gerald R Ford incorporates an electromagnetic launching system to replace the steam catapults that have been in use since the 1950s. As is often the case with new technology, the new system has had its share of failures in early tests. And as is also usually the case, improvements are underway.

 Trump heard of the early failure rates and jumped to uttering the words quoted above. I’m not surprised but I am horrified.

Forget (if you can) the lies, the misogyny, the racial bigotry, the playground-bully attitude toward anyone who incurs his wrath. Set aside his demonstrated belief that it’s okay to mock persons living with disabilities or other challenges. Give him a pass, if you must, for the nepotism and cronyism that brings a wide circle of incompetents and malefactors into his sphere of advisers and employs a cadre of liars and frauds to provide a defensive ring around this Klown Kar collection of self-righteous nincompoops.

At the bottom line, this is a person who has no sense of his own limitations, which are profound. And this is a person whose reactive temperament has already created a rift between our nation and our longtime allies. He is the embodiment of the old saying about ‘he who knows not and knows not that he knows not.’ This is a man (term used loosely here, but that would be another whole essay) whose deficits are both legion and utterly unimportant to him, so long as he can continue to feel powerful.

This is a person who knows no more about electromagnetic propulsive technology than he knows about international diplomacy but who makes and tries to enforce his decisions with the confidence of a fool. And there is no buffering effect to be found in the people around him. He surrounds himself with sycophants, the same crowd of nodding, guffawing buffoons who can be seen in photos of the worst despots of the modern age.

He must go. But for the moment his position is protected by the calculating, agenda-focused enemies of the people who have taken over the Republican Party. Now, many of you know me as a lifelong, fairly conservative Republican. I don’t apologize for that – you vote where and when you find yourself with the information then available. But my allegiance has been to ideas, never to the party. And the party has become a cabal that put Donald Trump in office and continues to shore him up so long as he provides cover for their agenda. And make no mistake, they are using him as a stalking horse – the true horror is in the machinations of the party power brokers.

I’m not a fan of many of the actions of Democrats over the years. But I do consider myself a pragmatist. And I always go back to my first aid training when responding to a crisis: breathing, bleeding, bones. Concentrate first on the things that can kill. In this case, that means depriving Trump-Ryan-McConnell-Breitbart of their stranglehold on policy.

I don’t like either party having total control. We have a lot of repair and rebuilding to do – in our social policies, education, infrastructure, international relations and our treatment of the environment in which our grandchildren will live their lives. The Trump-Ryan-McConnell cabal has done obscene damage to us as both state and symbol. We have to fix this, for ourselves and for the world. And we can’t make a start when one party shamelessly deprives all others of a seat at the table. We can’t make things better for all when the people who decide who gets a seat and what gets discussed are driven by selective, misinterpreted readings of the Constitution and the Christian Bible.

As a recovered former Christian and a recovering Republican I readily admit to having my own agenda. But whether we agree or not as to policy, surely we can agree that the current trajectory is not leading us in a direction the framers envisioned or that we should embrace. In the 2018 Mid-term elections, 33 of 100 Senate seats and ALL 435 House seats will be filled by the voters. Please, if you’ve a soul and a brain, vote Democrat in the next round of congressional elections. Deprive the evil giant of his legislative power and Ryan-McConnell of their rubber stamps.  

And whether you agree with me or not, keep in mind Trump’s own words: “What is digital?” This guy has the launch codes. 

Paddling

I’ve been busy this week, working with the folks at a non-profit in Boston, which involved a great deal of preparation, three long flights, nights in a sub-par hotel (sometimes you guess wrong but what the hell, the sheets were clean) and working on some editing evenings in bed.

My mind has been well occupied with my day job and also my writing. Even so, my thoughts keep returning in idle moments to the day last weekend when our whole family was together for an hour paddling kayaks on Lake Union. It was one of those mornings when the water is calm, not much traffic and the weather perfect for paddling. And of course, the really perfect thing was all of us being together.

I know everyone has their own favorite pastimes and each family has those special things they do together. But I can’t imagine any better memory than the one I’ll have of that morning on the lake with four people about whom I care deeply and in whose company I feel at home.

Whattup

While da book is out making the rounds of folks who are able – and might be willing – to help it find an audience, I am turning my sights to the next one. The challenge for me is never finding something about which I’d like to write, since I’m curious about most things and dearly love lying… er, making up stories. The problem is choosing a next plot and character set. Too many floating around in my noggin and if I open up my ‘Writing starts” folder in the old confuser, I am led to recall too many possibles.

When I started my second book back in (1980?) it was based on an apocalyptic vision of what would happen to the world and its organisms in the months and years after a major nuclear exchange. ‘Nuclear exchange’ was a ridiculously benign term in vogue at the time for describing the detonation of many thermonuclear weapons at various locations in the Northern Hemisphere. I had written my first full length book, By Other Means as a cautionary tale of the ramp up to nuclear war and this follow-on with the working title Winter was to be the tale of life in the aftermath. But since BOM was never published I was not pushed to finish Winter. Then with the collapse of the former Soviet Union, it seemed moot and I moved on to other writing projects. The current political and international climate have convinced me that the time is ripe for just such a cautionary tale. So-o-o-o, one of the books I’m considering for my next major project is an updated version of Winter.

Another plot crying for attention in my pea brain is a story about two young people, one male and one female who are aging out of the social welfare system (read: foster care) and how they face life without a safety net or really, any support system. This is a major problem in this country and with the catastrophic shift toward a less caring society – yeah, don’t even try to argue – the future prospects for kids caught in this situation will be less than deluxe. So, anyway, that’s another idea that really wants me to listen and give it voice.

Mary suggested a book based on my own life experience of having achieved adulthood late in life and by a rather circuitous route. It would be fiction-based-on-real-life-experience and would be a hoot to write. But it would also be a rather difficult trick to turn, as it would involve a series of metaphorical vignettes describing a journey with no real plan. Hm-m-m…

The trouble is that either of the first two ideas I could probably have editor-ready in less than a year, while the third seems to me more of a two year job. And agents and editors being pitched by first-time authors (they care only about what I’ve actually, you know, published so in their eyes I’m a virgin) want to know that a new client’s writing prowess has legs. That is, they want to know that having worked hard for relatively little return to get your first book published, there will be some hope of you actually producing a next book and a next after that, of building an audience over time, and thus earning them money. A reasonable concern but creates more cognitive dissonance than I might have hoped for.

I don’t know which I will start but will likely be deciding before the month is out. Meanwhile, building the website, getting the house ready for sale, hosting visiting daughters, traveling for work. And that’s the haps in Michael World. I hope this finds you well and happy. 

A dark room

Bill Nye says it better than ever I could.

A perfect word

Judder.

I looked it up while editing a piece, just to make certain I’d used it correctly. So happy to confirm I have because I lo-o-o-ove onomatopoetic words. And if any word sounds like what it means, judder is one.

I recall the time years ago when the front landing gear of my plane locked up before reaching takeoff speed. Shook the bejeesus out of the plane and contents, yours truly included. And you can reproduce the sound it made if you say judderjudderjudderjudder… really fast over and over.

It really is a perfect word. 

Of course, the sounds the passengers made that night were of a different nature.