sutton

Podcast Recommendations: Man in the Window and Bear Brook

Last spring, I listened to the Audible edition of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. If you like reading about and/or tend toward obsessive behavior yourself (and don’t mind evocations of gruesome crime), it’s a fun read, as well as an informative glimpse into the grinding, frustrating slog of solving motiveless crimes in general and cold cases of such specifically. There are also some provocative ruminations on what draws us to tales of true crime in general.

McNamara died before seeing GSK unmasked and arrested. Now that we know who he is (at least allegedly), we also know that McNamara uncovered not a single clue pointing in his direction.

That said, she made the not insignificant contribution of providing the name “Golden State Killer” for a criminal who had previously been known variously as EAR/ONS (for “East Area Rapist” and “Original Night Stalker”) and “the Visalia Ransacker.”

The reason McNamara’s renaming is not insignificant is because it helped confront and overcome one of the factors that enabled this fellow to operate undetected for so long (really, for as long as he felt the urge to, apparently, and until the age when serial killers tend to retire anyway): His canniness in choosing many different areas to operate in, combined with the technological, political, and psychological obstacles to information sharing among local police departments and with the public at the time, all of which resulted in significant dilution of investigative efforts and public awareness, both during his crimes and in the years afterward.

Her providing this name, her blog posts, her participation in various online true crime bulletin boards, and her eventual book deserve credit, at least, for helping to keep attention focused on the case, which certainly couldn’t have dissuaded either professional or amateur sleuths .

I’d been noticing previews for the Wondery podcast about the Golden State Killer, called Man in the Window, but resisted clicking on it because some part of me sort of thought I knew everything there was to know about the case. Even if McNamara hadn’t solved it, she’d laid out the history—but then I realized that, because she hadn’t solved it, and because her book was written before GSK was unmasked, of course I really didn’t know a damn thing about it—other than what a lot of the crime scenes looked like and what various victims endured. So, a few days ago, I subscribed and started listening.

It is well worth your time, I think, both if you would call yourself a “true crime fan” and if you are leery of the genre. Deft reporting by host Paige St. John, combined with recent and archival interviews with survivors, investigators, and other bit players elevate this one above the usual lurid fare in this genre and offer a fascinating glimpse into a very different time and place.

St. John does a great job of situating the killer in and connecting his ability to operate so freely to the cultural attitudes toward rape of the early 1970s and 1980s (male detectives resisted investigating rape; there were hardly any sex crimes units; many cases took place in the jurisdiction of that weird category of politician known as sheriffs, who of course need to worry about reelection; a prevalent assumption that raped women deserved it/knew their rapists/needed to just “move on”).

The case resulted in the formation of one of the first rape crisis hotlines (or maybe it was coincidentally getting started at the time; at any rate, its volunteers clashed with some downright primordial police officials about the need to do more, share more information, seek more extended prison sentences for crimes of sexual violence, and so on).

Anyway, as a true crime series with a ton more going for it than the mere voyeurism and titillation that blight so many entries in this genre, I highly recommend this one.

I’ll also note here another notable and related entry in the true crime genre: New Hampshire Public Radio’s Bear Brook podcast. The initiating event of the investigation detailed in this one is the discovery of some bodies in barrels in a NH state park called Bear Brook. But, spoiler alert (I guess), the various associated mysteries in this one are eventually unwound through the first use of the same genetic genealogy technique later used to identify GSK.

Footnote: Those of us who are frequent podcast listeners are used to the come-ons of home security system vendor SimpliSafe. Personally, it’s the rare podcast ad I’m willing to sit through, and they are so easy to skip, that I hardly ever actually listen to any of them. Nonetheless, it can sometimes seem that SimpliSafe must be responsible for something like 80 percent of podcast sponsorships. Which, fine, I get it: it’s one of these “technology companies that happen to offer [home security services, in this case],” so podcast listeners overlap heavily with their desired customer base.

But I have to say, given the company’s tagline of “fear has no place in a place like home,” and given that Man in the Window is definitely not to be listened to at home alone with the lights off, it seems almost unethical of the company to advertise on it. At the least, it is unavoidably manipulative feeling. Just saying.

Poor Georgie

The other night, with the household kid level down 50 percent, Amy and I decided to try It (2017), based on Stephen King’s book of the same name.

I never saw the 1990 miniseries, and—although I checked the book out of the library when I was about twelve, I put it down forever (well, so far) at some point during the first chapter. I can’t quickly find any online quotes that sound totally familiar, but it was something about clowns and teeth that made twelve-year-old me think I just wasn’t going to be able to handle this.

Turns out I lasted only about as long with the movie, but for the opposite reason. Before ponying up to rent the movie via Amazon, I did a quick scan of online reviews. Remembering how much less picky we (you know, as a society) once were—i.e., flipping channels in, say, the 1980s, we got excited when we stumbled onto something just mildly watchable, after all—I’m trying to be more that way now. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a score of 85 percent and described it thus: “Well-acted and fiendishly frightening with an emotionally affecting story at its core, It amplifies the horror in Stephen King’s classic story without losing touch with its heart.” I decided to give it a shot.

However, in the course of clicking around, a Google search results page showed me this excerpt of a Tribune News Service review carried by the Daily News (no, not that one, the one that “serves Genesee, Wyoming, and Orleans counties” upstate):

“Skarsgård has Pennywise’s line delivery down pat, the combination of cajoling and creepy enhanced with large, glowing eyes boring into your soul,” wrote TNS reviewer Katie Walsh. “It’s such a great performance that you wish Muschietti had eased up on the CGI and just let Skarsgård do the talking.”

Walsh hit the nail on the head. The first few minutes of the movie shows off strong cinematographic and directorial chops, and, indeed, Bill Skarsgård’s vocalization was deeply unsettling.

Then the teeth came out.

It’s not a very clear picture—sorry, it’s a screen grab from YouTube—but basically, yes, indeed, I immediately saw what Walsh was talking about.

Do people actually like this kind of thing? One can’t help but think so, based on how widely used CGI effects like this are. But all it does for me is warn me off by letting me know I’m in the hands of a director with no faith in his storytelling abilities.

“This is going to be stupid,” I said to Amy, who didn’t disagree.

I clicked back to the Roku home screen to continue the search.

Sun Hunger

J.’s jeans were torn at the knee, and the exposed skin was turning red. People kept pointing this out to her, but she didn’t seem to care. Rooted to her spot on the porch steps, she leaned back against the black iron railing and basked in the sunlight that felt to all of us like a gift. A mid-March Friday, and suddenly it was clear that winter was mostly behind us. What’s a sunburned knee against the pleasure of a moment like that?

Yes, there is a sun hunger that takes hold in Elkins as winter grinds through its last month, and J. wasn’t the only one feeling it.

A few hours earlier, when I’d noticed how warm and bright this Friday afternoon was growing, I’d decided to knock off work early. I lifted the chaise lounge down from its overwintering hook on a rafter in the shed and unfolded it in the backyard, its legs sinking into the mucky ground.

At this time of day a few months later, it would have been difficult to find unshaded spots in our backyard, but today the branches of our neighbor’s towering oak were still winter naked. There was nothing between me and the sun. I took off my shirt and settled down with a book for what I intended to be just one hour—no need to overdo it—but turned into two.

“You look like you got some sun,” Amy said, after she arrived home from work. She had unlaced her steel-toed boots in the mudroom and walked into the kitchen for a kiss. I was unloading the dishwasher so as not to appear completely useless.

Looking down at my shoulders and arms, I was forced to consider that I might have overdone it.

We noticed J. and a few others on T.’s porch, drinks in hand, and walked down the block to join them. A crowd would build steadily for the next few hours, and the cold keg of beer in T.’s kitchen wasn’t the only attraction. His little house faces an empty lot to the west, so his porch keeps the sun later than anyone else’s, and everyone was sick of winter.

With Amy and me, the foursome became six. More neighbors shambled up the sidewalk, carrying six-packs and insulated cups. Eight, ten. We waved at commuters driving home from work, and some of them pulled their cars over to the curb to join us. A dozen, more. “Just one beer, then I’ve got to get home.” The screen door banged each time Tom went inside for more pints.

C. had gotten dressed in a warmer state that morning, driving home from a family road trip to Florida. On the way to return the rental, her husband dropped her off in front of T.’s. She stepped from the minivan in ankle boots, jeans, a long-sleeved pullover. Soon she was barefoot, her sleeves pushed high up her arms.

The sun-hungriest gravitated to the postage-stamp front yard and the porch steps, where there was nothing blocking the rays beating down. For those who wanted a little shade, there were seats up on the porch behind T.’s outdoor blinds. Different hands adjusted these a little lower from time to time, tracking the downward course of the sun.

Amy and I sat on the steps, with J. I was sure the back of my neck was burning, but the most I was willing to do about it was to unfurl the collar of my polo shirt and shrug my shoulders up to maximize the resulting coverage. The heat of the sun through my clothes stunned me, turned me still as a lizard. I leaned my head back against the railing. My friends’ conversations and the perfume of T.’s good beer filled the hot air around me.

A little later, when I walked home to get Amy a bottle of cider, I grabbed a tube of sunscreen from the shelf by the back door. When I offered it around the porch, there were no takers. A breeze was starting to build, blunting the sun’s sharp edge. The sunscreen sat unopened on a porch step until Amy and I decided to walk home and put some steaks on the grill.

When we passed into the shade cast by the houses on our side of the street, I noticed how insistent and cold the wind was getting. I would have needed a sweatshirt to last another hour on the porch steps.

The next morning, as the coffeemaker rattled and gurgled, I leaned closed to a window, cupped my hand to block the reflection, and peered out into the pre-dawn twilight.

There was a dusting of snow on the grass and the tops of the cars.

Blogging and me, we go way back

I’m not claiming to have been a pioneer, by any means, but I became aware of the form early enough to be the one trying to explain it to lots of others.

“It’s basically a website,” I remember telling one of my hipper, younger professors in the hallway of the UMBC American Studies department in 2002, “but it gets updated all the time, and the most recent post is on top, and you can make these subtextual jokes by linking certain words to other pages…”

I had no idea what I was talking about, really, I just sensed some sort of unifying form under sites like Kottke.org, Talking Points Memo (back when it was just Josh Marshall in his living room), Matt Yglesias, etc., and decided to try to imitate it.

Courtesy of Internet Archive, you can see how my first blog, Talking Out of School (“A Baltimore-based weblog of education news and scuttlebutt, with an emphasis on education politics and justice, K-12, testing, and curriculum, updated regularly”), channeled that early combination of linking to real news sites’ articles interspersed with commentary that wasn’t half as pithy as I hoped.

Talking Out of School debuted in January of 2003, an auspicious year in the history of blogging. Jason Kottke had been going strong since 1998, but Heather Armstrong had only gotten fired a couple of months earlier.

As I acquaint myself with the history of that time, I’m tickled to realize that I opened my free account on the Blogger platform (home to all of those sites that are subdomains of “.blogspot.com”) a month before its acquisition by Google and a half-year before the releases of WordPress and TypePad. Not a pioneer, no, but then you couldn’t have said every inch of the information superhighway was paved yet, either.

Rewind a little further. I had operated a personal website called Margin Release since the fall of 2002. Amy designed the site for me, having learned how to use Adobe Dreamweaver in one of her classes. I guess that means it wasn’t quite hand-coded but it was obviously pre-CSS and WYSISWYG dashboards, so even minor typo corrections required their own FTP uploads over a dialup connection. (Remember this sound?)

So when I figured out that you could attach a Blogger blog to an existing domain name as if it were part of your site, I was all over it. Hence, first, Talking Out of School, and, later, a somewhat more personal/writerly blog called Behind the Mule, both subdomains of my original Margin Release website.

Then, in 2005, having fallen under the influence of Tony Pierce , The Pants, Raymi the Minx, OneLifeTakeTwo, and various sex bloggers whose names I can no longer recall, I formed the ambition to diarize and ramble and share potentially shocking personal tidbits about myself online. Why not? It seemed to be the done thing.

In this mood, I launched a new blog-focused site called Margin Notes. The earliest date Internet Archive crawled Margin Notes seems to have been June 30, 2005, which might very well have been the day of my debut post. According to my Dreamhost account records, I had bought the domain name only ten days earlier.

I took Margin Notes in various directions in the ensuing years. (Here’s a snapshot from 2008.) Fortunately for my career, family, and other innocent bystanders I never really went in the shocking tidbits/sex blogging direction (although note that nowhere in this post have I said that I’m offering a comprehensive list of every single blog I ever started, and I’ll just leave it at that).

Sometimes I tended more in the direction of essay writing and other times more in the direction of day-by-day diary. The latter format was most pronounced during 2007, when I fell under the influence of a true blogging pioneer named James Lileks.

Lileks’s Monday-Friday Bleat intrigued me partly for its subject matter—its consideration of the small moments in each day that make up a life—and partly for the low stylistic bar it set. “This isn’t writing, it’s typing,” I’m sure I remember Lileks ~~writing~~ typing at some point. I adopted this as my own motto as I commenced a project of exhaustive/exhausting chronicling of my own days.

The less there is going on, the more likely I am to stay faithful to a diary—that’s been a pattern throughout my life, even going back to the days when I had to make own ink from elderberry juice and scratch my words onto bound vellum with a sharpened rooster feather. So it makes sense that this particular format flourished on Margin Notes during the eight or so months after Amy moved early to Missoula to start a new job and I remained behind in Baltimore to finish out a round three years at my first real job and pack up the house. Leading a mostly interior experience during that time, I found it easy to write about what I did all day, i.e., not much.

I’d had a similar, albeit analog, experience when I was stationed in Miami in the late 1990s. I never managed to develop much of a social life in that city—no non-Coast Guard friends, no particularly strong off-duty connections with any of my shipmates—which was bad for my morale but great for my diary keeping. I would buy large hardcover sketchbooks at Barnes and Noble (I wouldn’t spot my first Moleskine in the wild until 2002, in the gift shop of the National Building Museum) and fill page after page with a fountain pen I’d bought at the old Levenger outlet near Palm Beach.

These details are important because with me it has always been difficult to separate my fetish for the tools and act of writing from the actual, you know, stringing together of words and acquiring the craft and discipline to shape them into something others might find to be worth reading. (I’ll also point out and save for later elaboration another important fact about these and almost all of the dozens if not hundreds of notebooks I’ve kept over the years: I’ve never gone back and read a word in just about any of them.)

So I really can’t say whether I grew up wanting to be a writer (in addition to a cop and a film director and maybe a film-directing cop) or just wanting to inhabit a sort of image of someone writing by hand in a beautiful old blank book, by the light of a candle or kerosene lamp. When I wrote by fountain pen in my B&N sketchbooks, I was keeping a record of my days, yes, but also more or less consciously aping an archetypal image of the pre-modern diarist, head bent over his notebook, dipping his quill, recording his observations and experiences for what would of course be a grateful posterity.

It wasn’t just the tools and the picture they contributed to that excited me, it was also the idea of a time—the times of Pepys, Boswell, Livingston, Darwin, Thoreau—when there were few records of anything and the world felt simultaneously undiscovered and knowable, if you just took good enough notes. When I saw the “Grail Diary” carried by Indiana Jones’s father in The Last Crusade, I sensed a kindred spirit in whoever designed and created it. It seemed the perfectly archetypal physical representation of my fantasy: An obsessive project of inquiry and investigation spread across the pages of a patinated leather-bound pocket notebook worth fighting and dying for. Oh, yes!

These are the various elements that explain why, as the idea for what became this blog tickled into being, it at first appealed to me to do it as a sort of daily diary.

At various points over the last year or so, when I was under influences that especially included Karl Ove Knausgaard, I experienced a longing for what I came to think of as a sort of automaticity in my writing.

From time to time I fell into the flow of just describing a day and it was so pleasurable I never wanted to stop. When, after a year or so of having consciously sworn off blogging, the urge to publish reared its head once more, it seemed only natural to merge both elements into another attempt at a daily chronicle.

After years away from Lileks’s site, I checked back in and was pleased and inspired (if a little concerned, in some ways) to see he is still plugging away.

With no illusions that my old Margin Notes diary had been any good, my thought was that, with ten years more experience as a writer, I’d be better at the line/syntax-level and could also introduce a few refinements, such as letting each day’s entry rest for a week before performing a final round of editing and then publishing it.

Such a schedule, I hoped, would enable me to find the kinds of focal points, organization, and larger themes that had eluded me back when I was just sitting down each evening to lash out a first-this-happened-then-that account of the day. My new approach, I hoped, would allow me to both publish every day and introduce a higher quality level.

Just imagine someone has assigned you to produce a daily diary blog and work within that framework to make it as good as possible, I told myself. It’ll be a liberating restriction, like Pirsig’s brick or Lamott’s one-inch picture frame, from which your creativity can take wing.

I bought the domain name (only later realizing who I was channeling in the form the URL took), selected this year’s default WordPress theme (discarding my old obsessiveness about customization).

This would be a basic, old-fashioned diary blog, hearkening back to those heady early days of the form’s popularity. I wouldn’t monetize with Amazon affiliate links, I wouldn’t try to build a mailing list.

I would just write—like it was 2003 again.

Next: Of course, it’s not 2003 anymore.

Missing the bus

I can understand missing the bus on a normal morning, but on a morning with a two-hour delay?

For the last year or so, I have selfishly reserved the mornings for sitting at my desk and scribbling on endless yellow pad pages that I then carefully file away into manila folders and never look at again. To facilitate this vital writerly activity, I leave it to Amy to get the kids onto the school bus. Then, I take care of the afternoon pickups.

When Amy is running the morning departure, it seems to go like clockwork. I suppose it is a combination of familiarity and experience on her part and the ever-more-successful efforts of the local school to break the children’s spirits and mold them into good factory workers, including a willingness to live according to the dictates of the clock and lunch bell. At any rate, there is hardly ever any screaming—at least none that penetrates my Mack’s Pillow Soft Silicone Putty Earplugs.

Sometimes the morning kid/bus routine falls to me, however—such as when Amy has to leave early for an inspection site on the other side of the state, for example, or when there is a weather-related delayed opening. Considering that this latter circumstance arises approximately every other day January-March, you’d think I’d develop something of a routine myself, but it inevitably unfolds as a bit of a shit show.

Basically I just continue hiding in my office as long as possible, letting them vegetate in front of the TV, thinking it will be the work of just a few minutes to get them bundled out and shove them out the door, but of course it always takes longer than expected to snap them out of their YouTube trances and get them started on finding, donning, and tying shoes, figuring out what weight of jacket is needed, brushing their teeth, running combs across their heads (this last is preceded by a ten-minute argument on good days, so it often falls by the wayside, and I’m always waiting for a knock on the door from CPS in response to a report that the children have been sent to school with matted hair), find and stuff errant papers into backpacks, and so forth.

So it often happens that, in the midst of all of this, I’ll catch sight of the clock and decide that, this time, I really have waited too long and we will be lucky to make the bus, if in fact we aren’t already missing it at that very second.

“Go, run to the corner,” I’ll snap at Axl, figuring if he can just round the neighbor’s big hedge in time the bus driver will see him and wait, giving me time to finish tying Belle’s shoes, scoop her up, and bring up the rear at a run. In fact, it has only ever happened once or twice that we haven’t reached the bus stop before the bus, and even then we had plenty of time as the dozen or so kids who leave from our stop made their shambling way up the three steps and back to their various assigned seats, but that doesn’t prevent me from experiencing these panics nonetheless.

Then came this particular morning: a two-hour delayed opening, not because of weather this time, but rather to allow time for a “faculty senate” meeting (mental picture of the children’s teachers in long black occult robes with multicolored sashes in amphitheater seating, regarding the superintendent in his toga and crown of laurels).

We had already reached the point of my panic, Axl had been sent out the door, Belle was on the threshold, one foot raised to start down the steps—when, no, the jacket she was wearing wouldn’t do. She must have the leopard-print fleece thing she recently received as a birthday present. Exasperated but also a soft touch, I hesitated, then dashed upstairs to where I thought I’d noticed it hanging in Belle’s room, but no luck. I tore through the rest of the house, scanning chair backs and other likely dumping spots. Still no luck. I quailed—would Belle accept this, would I be in for slinging her over my shoulder, screaming, and racing her to the bus stop?

“I don’t know where it is, and if you don’t leave now you will miss the bus,” I said to Belle when I returned to the mud room. Something in my tone seemed to reach through the usual stubbornness, and she assented and turned to go. I leaned out of the backdoor and called after her.

“You’d better just run,” I called, half suspecting I was exaggerating.

“O-tay,” she said, solemnly, and broke into a plodding trot, weighed down by her winter coat and boots and a backpack larger than her torso.

“But still look both ways!” I called as she reached the side walk.

“O-tay!” she called back.

I watched until she rounded the hedgerow corner, then went back inside, looked at the clock. Later than ever before—she couldn’t have made it. I rushed back outside and hurried to the hedgerow corner. There was the bus, and Belle—still running—rounding the front, the white blob of the driver’s head behind the tinted window inclined down toward her.

Later, I would learn that she had, to all intents and purposes, missed the bus. That around the time I’d been shooing her out the door, the last of the line of children already waiting at the stop had filed aboard. The driver had looked in his large mirror to be sure everyone was seated and was preparing to set out for the next stop—ready to retract the stop sign that flips out from the side of the bus and put the vehicle in gear—when Axl rose from his seat and rushed forward.

“My sister isn’t here yet,” everyone agreed later that he had said. Then, spying her rounding the hedge, he had pointed. “There she is!”

Later, I would be unsure which part of the morning’s hectic dance had turned out to be more beautiful. Axl’s expression of custodial big-brotherly care—the least one can hope for, that, for all their differences and conflicts, your children will simply look out for each other—you don’t let the bus leave without your sister.

Or Belle, dwindling in the distance, that enormous backpack bouncing up and down, running because I said she needed to and she believed me. Trying her best to catch the bus.

The moments this life runs on. The moments when it seems possible to believe maybe we are getting some things right.

The Paratrooper and the Bleach Stain

ELKINS, a Thursday—I had a bone to pick with the Paratrooper.

On a recent business trip, I had as usual tried to make up for the unruly beard and piercings by overdressing slightly—and, I dare say, snazzily: my favorite slim fit Combat Gentlemen dress shirt, pink tie, and light v-neck sweater holding it all together.

But on taking off the sweater that evening in my AirBnb, I had chanced to notice in a mirror that the back of the right sleeve of my shirt was marred by a bleach—not stain, I guess, but in a way the opposite of a stain.

It had to have happened at the Paratrooper’s shop. At home, we never use bleach with laundry, and for that matter I don’t think I’ve ever even washed this shirt myself, preferring always to get it professionally laundered and pressed immediately after returning from the business trips that are my only occasion for dressing up these days. Something reassuring about the crisp, plastic-cased shirt hanging ready in the closet, just in case.

So after lunch I tucked the shirt under my arm and set out on foot toward the southern edge of town, the ugly stretch of road where lie our one grocery store, one of our two car washes, the newly redone McDonald’s, the defunct computer-repair shop, and the Paratrooper’s place of business.

But what was my plan, anyway? Did I think the Paratrooper was going to buy me a new shirt? Did I want him to? There was an argument that this would simply be what I was owed, but as I walked I found I didn’t really picture that happening and especially didn’t picture myself forcing the issue. The walk, along busy Randolph Avenue, soothed by the whoosh of passing log trucks and oilfield services vehicles, seemed to calm me and put thoughts of confrontation out of my mind.

“Hey, Sutton!” the Paratrooper called as he emerged from the racks of hanging clothes in the back of the shop. “Sorry for keeping you waiting!”

I spread the shirt on the counter, and he started writing it up as a normal drop-off. I almost hated to bring up the problem—and when I did, he at first took me to be consulting with him as a neutral professional in the clothes-tending business, missing the accusation I was trying to make.

“Well, you got two choices,” he said. “Keep it covered up”—I had already mentioned that I almost always wore it under a sweater or jacket, as an explanation of why I really couldn’t be sure when it had happened—“or you could alter it into a short sleeve shirt.”

“No, I mean, I think it happened here,” I finally broke it to him.

He reacted with muted disbelief.

“Usually the girls are real good about telling me when something happens,” he murmured. “Well…”

He seemed at a loss. I discovered that my heart wasn’t in taking any sort of hard line.

“How about a free wash and press and we call it even?” I asked.

“Works for me!” he said. “How much starch you want?”

As he wrote up the ticket—by hand, on the same sort of little carbon receipt pad I used when I worked at the record store during high school in the early 1990s—he asked how my father was doing.

“I always liked chatting with him,” he said.

From here we got onto the subject of health, and suddenly he was rattling off a list of injuries that was only startling until I remembered that he is, after all, the Paratrooper: “I’ve had both knees replaced, been shot, stabbed, got my nose broken four times, broke my ankles more times than I can count.”

This last, of course, was down to his Vietnam-era practice of jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.

“How many times did you jump, roughly?” I said, wondering if he would even know.

“359,” he answered.

Of course he would know.

“What’s a high career number, you know, for someone who stayed in a long time?” I asked.

“The colonel had something like 5,000 under his belt when I was serving,” he said. “He did every single training jump so he racked them up.”

Then the Paratrooper told a story about when the colonel had had a “total malfunction,” i.e., both his primary and his reserve chutes failing to open on a training jump. If I understood correctly, this colonel had been able to sort of body surf through the air and divert himself from falling toward the hard open field where everyone normally came down to instead land in a marshy area nearby.

“He broke both legs but he survived,” said the Paratrooper.

“What’s the lowest you can open a chute and still make it down safely?” I asked. He didn’t exactly answer that question but told me that, when he was jumping, they were equipped with an altimeter-based device that would release their chutes automatically at 3,500 feet, “in case you passed out or got shot or something.”

The bell on the door jingled as a woman entered and I stepped back to let her approach the counter, but the Paratrooper wasn’t done talking parachuting.

“We had these two guys who were always racing to be first to the ground.”

This sounded like a race you wouldn’t want to win.

“Trouble was, one of them weighed 150 and the other was about 245. That little guy tried every trick in the book but he never won. I told him, he’s got 90 pounds on you, you’re basically just giving them cases of beer away. But he wouldn’t listen.”

I wasn’t so sure, some vague memory of physics class and everything falling at the same rate of speed flickering awake in a recess of my mind. (Later, looking it up, I learned it’s more complicated than that.)

“Well, I’ll let you get to your next customer here,” I said. The woman who’d come in was waiting patiently by the door.

“I’m just here to pick up Girl Scout cookies,” she said, indicating the low table by the counter stacked with boxes of Tagalongs, Samoas, Do-Si-Dos, and gluten-free Trios.

The Paratrooper tore my ticket off his pad and handed it over. “Have a good day, Sutton!” he said cheerfully.

I returned the sentiment and turned to go.

The door closed behind me. The bell rang. I turned left, and started walking home.

Sardines, Kettlebells, and My Aching Thumb

ELKINS, a Wednesday—“Up 0450. First awake 0400, T/T.”

So reads the only entry I made on today’s page in the Moleskine daily planner I use as my logbook. (“T/T” = tossed and turned.)

That solitary entry says something about the day, and how it has ended with my guts burning with what I have independently diagnosed as pent up words. I was so excited about this blog, the blog I am starting, have started by posting a solitary Walt Whitman quote—and am now so flooded and overwhelmed by the possibilities that I can’t seem to get started on any of them.

This is how it always happens. I have only to start to see the shape or possible shape of a new project, a new direction to try to direct my writing toward, before it begins to inflate and grow wildly, absurdly, possible topics and refinements of the project spilling over and filling the horizon, until what felt like a long but clear path toward a far-off solitary peak becomes a trackless wilderness approaching a wall of mountains.

Nothing for it but to knuckle through.

Speaking of knuckling through things, I’ve skipped my kettlebell exercises these last few days. While in Ohio at the end of last week, I started experiencing a pain in my left thumb. Hurt when I squeezed it, hurt when I bent it, and it sure as hell hurt when I tried to use it in my usual grip for both goblet squats and Turkish getups.

And wouldn’t you know Sunday is the one-day StrongFirst Kettlebell Course in Alexandria? Two hundred dollars, no refunds, and now this pesky thumb calls into question whether I’ll really be able to participate. The whole rationale for dropping this kind of money had been that, if I’m going to keep doing kettlebells for years and years, some periodic outlay to check form and refine technique wold be worth it to avoid some kind of injury. Now here is some kind of injury that threatens to keep me from going at all.

When the pain was still lingering at the beginning of this week, I did the first thing one does in these sorts of situations: I wasted money in hopes there would be an easy, effortless answer. More specifically, I went to CVS and wasted $12 on a shitty, generic wrist/thumb brace that wouldn’t turn out to do anything except irritate the sore spot on my thumb more. On the cover of the box it showed a woman’s hand clad in the brace, holding a smart phone, her braced thumb in scrolling position. I had the thought that if the brace would actually allow one to operate one’s phone it couldn’t be doing much bracing but bought it anyway.

Standing in the aisle, considering the choices, I found myself unsure whether I needed a medium or a large. I carried one of each over to the pharmacy prescription drop-off window, ten feet away.

“Can I open this and try it on?” I asked the woman standing there, resplendent in her white lab coat. I pointed out that the box wasn’t sealed with glue or tape, so it wouldn’t do any damage.

She hesitated, her mind clearly racing.

“I have a tape measure back here, you could measure your hand,” she offered, after a pause.

I stared at her. Did the woman really think I didn’t know the circumference of my own hand—did the phrase like the back of my hand have no currency here?

“See here,” I imagined saying, “what matters is not how big my hand is, what matters is how true to size the brace is made.”

Instead I said nothing and relied on my steely gaze to communicate that her suggestion did not work for me. A few seconds passed, then she relented. And thank God, because the large was by far the smallest I could have fit my hand into, and even then—I found out later, at home, when I went to put it on—I couldn’t work the thing’s eccentric hook-and-elastic latch that was supposed to hold it in place without using a fork to grab the elastic—well, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to comprehensibly describe this further without going all Nicholson Baker on you, so suffice to say I’m glad I tried it on in the store.

When, as I should have expected, the brace did nothing except aggravate the sore spot on my thumb, I decided to go to the doctor.There, a PA named Coty talked about ice and ibuprofen, and maybe if that didn’t help we could try a steroid.

I explained about the upcoming kettlebell class, promised I would ice and use the ibuprofen, but asked if we could maybe also try the steroid right away. He agreed, and I returned to the CVS, where I learned that I would have to wait “fifteen minutes or so” for them to place a blister pack of methylprednisolone tablets in a bag, staple instructions to the front, and hand it over.

While I waited, I browsed the aisles, perhaps exactly as CVS corporate hoped I would. Sure enough, by the time my wait was over, I’d decided to drop another $20 on a bottle of Alleve (to eliminate the need of keeping track of doses of the four-hour Advils that were all we otherwise had in the house) and a package of BeKool “non-medicated gel sheets,” which, according to the package, are “doctor recommended to provide cooling relief from the discomfort associated with…”—well, you know, discomforts. The picture on the front suggested that the sheets would be forehead sized, but I was thinking I could cut them down to bandaid size and wrap my thumb with them, as opposed to trying to figure out some other way to “ice” a thumb.

Once home, I took the first day’s six pills all at once, as instructed

“Any side effects or downsides to watch out for?” I’d asked Coty.

“You might feel a little nauseous, we tell parents kids might get hyper but you probably won’t feel much. Might gain a little weight.”

I downed the six pills, chased it with an Alleve, and modified a BeKool to wrap around my thumb. The weight gain prediction did not turn out to be accurate, but of course Coty might not have realized who he was dealing with. Later, scanning the information sheet that had come with the pills, I learned of the following possible side effects that Coty had not thought to mention:

Kaposi’s sarcoma (“discontinuation… may result in clinical remission”)
Rupture of the Achille’s tendon
“Thin facial skin”
Posterior sub-capsular cataracts
Convulsions
“Psychic derangements”

None of which came to pass. The rest of the day I worked hard making money for the man.

I am pleased to report I seem to be developing a good sardine habit at lunchtime.

Today in local media studies. (Color me dubious.)

Permission to suck is hereby granted

Okay, forget all of that noise. No carefully considered “context pieces” after all.

That was really just me worried about quality, second-guessing myself. Finding great reasons to do hold back, do nothing. Missing the whole point of this project.

As I scribbled in a notebook this very morning:

Man, this blog is giving me fits. The tension between publishing every day—with the purpose of forcing myself into at least some review loops so that I can actually get better—and the worry that I’m not better enough and should wait to start publishing every day.
That’s not the point, the point is to see what would happen if I acted like it were my assignment, my restriction, to document every day (albeit with a one-week lead time, as I’m currently conceiving of it. My worry is overblown, it’s all prospective. I will learn as I go, I will get good at this.
So that’s that! Permission to be boring, permission to publish crap, permission to suck—is hereby granted. It’s the only way to stop sucking. Remember, the point is not what I have after any given day, the point is to see what a year adds up to.

What’s going on here, anyway?

(Please note, this post has been superseded.)

I have two, possibly contradictory goals for this blog.

Publish every day
Publish material that has at least a little more shape to it than hour-by-hour diary entries

Why?

As I alluded to earlier, my goal is to find a way to do what I think of as “processing my life in writing.” I want a structure and framework—a writing life—consisting of keeping an amazing diary (privately, because of course a truly amazing diary cannot possibly be made public until I die) and finding material in that that can be shared, can be made into something at least slightly further along the continuum from private diary to essay using personal experiences to illustrate the universal and all of the rest of that memoir workshop jazz.

Call it an art project, call it an obsession. It doesn’t fit any of what A Writer is supposed to do, but it’s the kind of writing that appeals now. Gosh darn it, I’m going to try doing what I want to do for maybe a couple of years and see what comes of it.

Anyway, all of this is to say I haven’t been satisfied with my output over the last week or so, so I’m going to reset and try a new approach. The basic plan:

Keep diary notes each evening
Try to shape something out of each day’s diary notes the next morning
Put aside the “shaped” item for one week, then revisit, edit, and publish

Before I start that pattern—to do it well—however, I need to build up a backlog of pieces that have been processed per the above. And before I start doing exactly the above, I want to run a week of background/introductory pieces so you have some background on me, this town, and other aspects of the context of all of this. If I’m “reporting on the everyday,” I want to start by sketching out the basic circumstances where that everyday unfolds.

All of this is to say, I’m suspending daily posts—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say relieving myself of the obligation to follow the above pattern—effective immediately.

Then, on Monday, March 18, I will start that week-long run of background posts, followed the next week by jumping into the pattern I described above.

That’s not to say I won’t publish anything between now and then, but the pattern I envision for this blog—the Pirsig’s brick/Lamott’s one-inch-picture frame restrictiveness I want to subject myself to—won’t begin unfolding until then.

And perhaps my vision for the precise shape of it will have shifted by then as well. I am anything but constant.

The undersigned

I’ve been thinking about my own death a fair bit more than usual lately, and it’s a great feeling. I’m not enjoying imagining the actual dying, but rather the aftermath, in particular how impressed everyone is going to be about my organization and forethought. This is similar to how I soothe myself on a plane taxiing toward the runway, i.e., by imagining how nice my eulogy might sound.

Specifically, Amy and I are finally getting our wills done, which—as everyone knows—you really must do ~~immediately upon becoming parents~~ within no more than ten years after becoming parents, so we’re right on time.

The other day we went to our attorney’s office to look at the drafts she’d produced. As we arrived, I noticed that the office’s sign featured an image of Blind Justice, and then I was chuckling to myself as a picture flashed into my mind of our attorney’s face superimposed onto the image, like something Saul Goodman would do. How I would respect an attorney who did that, and look for chances to retain her.

The plan had been that we would get there early, review the drafts, have any corrections made, and then sign them with the attorney looking on. As we arrived, we learned that the attorney was delayed by an “emergency hearing” at the courthouse but should be arriving soon, so we got down to reviewing on our own in the firm’s small conference room.

It felt good to be so close to signing these documents, on their heavy bond paper, that would formalize our wishes. There was also the aesthetic pleasure of legal language, full of extremely particular wordings necessary for precision and the avoidance of ambiguity, for example the repetition of “children” in the phrase “appoint as Guardians of my children who at the time of my death are minor children.” Yes, it’s clunky, but try to think of another way to nail down the intended meaning.

I particularly enjoyed the section covering the various possible sequences of Amy’s and my deaths. Obviously, if, as is most likely, we die separately and spaced out in time, the relevant will goes into effect. But the boilerplate language suggested and covered other possibilities, namely that we might “die simultaneously”—okay, as the result of “a common accident”—and, still more intriguingly, “under such circumstances as to render it impossible to determine who predeceased whom.”

I imagined the aftermath of some Mexican standoff from a Quentin Tarantino movie, Amy and I discovered lying toe to toe in some bullet-riddled motel room, both of us still gripping a 1911 in each hand. Or our skeletons, uncovered on some desert island, decades after our hitherto unexplained disappearances…

We marked up the documents with all of the typos we found, checked with the receptionist. No updates from the attorney, presumably still held up in court.

We scheduled another meeting and left for home.