Category: Before

Washington Post headline:
U.S. Defies Judge on Enemy Combatant

Front-page Seattle Times headline for the same story:
U.S. balks at judge’s order in terror war

Excerpt:

The Justice Department yesterday defied a federal judge’s order to provide him with documents that would have supported the government’s classification of a U.S.-born man captured in Afghanistan and being held in a Navy brig in Virginia as an “enemy combatant.”

“U.S.”, as it’s used in both headlines, doesn’t refer to the American public at large. (The reaction of anyone outside the court room isn’t described in the article.) Both papers are equating the Justice Department with the United States as a whole, and implying that the federal judge is somehow non-U.S. (Perhaps he’s un-American too?).

Even passing this off as a copy-editing oversight on the part of both papers, it seems like a pretty telling Freudian-slip.

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Justin on the Bush administration and slogans.

A guy came over to talk to me. “How long have you been wearing those Old Schools?”

I was sitting at the Japanese noodle place staring at a newspaper. He had a soul patch.

“Excuse me?” I looked down at my clothes for something that someone might call old school. My shirt was fraying in places, but it didn’t seem notable in any other way. Levis are too old to be old school. “My shoes?”

“Yeah, your shoes.”

I shook my head. “Uh, I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“I work for Vans and we always like ask people a few questions when we see them wearing our shoes. How long have you had them? Six months? A year?”

I thought for another second, dully. “I don’t remember. Six months – A year – That seems about right.”

He hesitated, not sure anymore how to proceed with his marketing pop quiz.

I turned our exchange over in my head, my brain still moving a little slow. I remembered the circumstances in which I’d bought the shoes. That was kind of interesting. “I bought them because all the other tennis shoes in the store looked like they were made for aliens’ feet.”

Aliens feet, this didn’t seem to mean anything to him. “How do you mean?”

“All the other shoes were made of weird pods,” and I gestured trying to conjure up an image of the over-thought ergonomic running shoes I’d looked at, “They had traction pointing in directions that I would never need.”

“Do you skate at all?”

“No.”

He backed toward the door and gently flicked his business card at me. “Thanks. It was nice talking to you.”

I felt especially disheveled today. I like that word, disheveled. When I say it, I pronounce it correctly aloud – “di-shev-old”, but at the same time I sound it out in my head incorrectly – “dis-heave-old”.

I realized, in the early afternoon, what a state of dishevelment I was in after I noticed that my fly was open. I thought back, trying to figure out how long it had been unzipped, and realized that I must have had it down since leaving my apartment in the morning.

Last night, as I finished reading a story, I got up and ran into the kitchen to get a glass of water. I pulled a glass from the overflowing drainer beside the sink. The dishes left in the drainer shifted around the glass. My teapot lid was displaced, it rolled out the front of the drainer, hit the counter, and tumbled down, spreading itself across the floor. Somehow I let go of the glass too – it smashed against the floor, it’s pieces mixing with the teapot’s.

That pretty much makes sense, the way things have been going, I thought. I picked the largest few teapot pieces out of the wreckage and set them on the counter, cleaned up the rest of the mess, and went back to reading.

Surveying the remains this morning, I see that the two big pieces could still fit together into an adequate lid. But I discard my optimism after seeing the toxicity level of my glue options.

It’s time for a new teapot.

The break-up conversation stung almost as much as the break-up does.

Ingrid and I hadn’t had one of those difficult frank discussion in awhile – the kind where I, stubbornly but honestly, had trouble understanding how everything had reached such a straining point. Instead of forgetting about them, I guess I should have wondered why it had been so long since we’d had one.

I was at a zoo with my family, watching monkeys swing around in two big side-by-side cages. This was when I was very young.

I watched them do the usual monkey-things and make the usual monkey-noises for awhile. I really liked it of course, who wouldn’t have? Then one of the monkeys in the right-hand cage jumped onto the wall of bars between the two cages, the wall that both cages shared. He stuck his head between the bars and squeezed his body through.

I was surprised. He climbed into the wrong monkey cage. Just like that. The monkey from the one cage. He went into the other cage. Are they supposed to be able to do that?

I didn’t know what to do. I looked at the people around me – but no one seemed to be concerned, if they’d even noticed. I may have tried to articulate the dilemma to my parents, but if I did they couldn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

That’s what I remember. For awhile, I associated this memory with a story my mom told about my dad losing track of me during a visit to a zoo in Spokane. But that connection was eliminated when my mom clarified that my dad had lost me at a petting zoo, no monkeys. She hypothesized that I might be remembering our visit to the San Diego Zoo when I was four.

I’ve told the monkey story several times over the last few years, trying to shape it as a memory with some personal post-modern meaning. But I falter every time, the story falls apart as soon as I try to describe exactly how the monkey jimmied himself into his neighbors’ cage. That’s where I want the story to end, but I just can’t explain the significance. But even the people who were there didn’t see it.

We joined Ingrid’s mom and a former student of her’s, a French teenager, for a big many-course dinner.

I was asked if I spoke French and I repeated my oft-used response, “I know enough to order one, two, three, or five croissants.” That’s a real crowd-pleaser. (The Spanish version by the way, effective only about fifty percent of the time: “Do you speak Spanish?” “Un poco.” Then wait a moment for those present to absorb your answer, “Actually I don’t know how to say anything except ‘un poco‘.”)

The evening continued. Dinner was excellent. I listened carefully to the French-language conversation, imagining that I might be able to understand every third sentence. At first, besides the occasional mention of cheese, I was getting nothing. But suddenly, right in the middle of a sentence, I heard a word that I’d retained from high school Spanish, “facile“. “Easy”. Something was “easy”. I scrambled for traction, listening for another word, any word, to pair with facile. But they’d moved on. No one wanted to talk about easy anymore.

I got over it. I kept listening, now a little less attentively. But I didn’t expect to pick up on anything, unless they ever wanted to count croissants. If they had, I would’ve be right there with them.

This morning I was driving home in Ingrid’s car. My mind was still moving a little slowly – I was under-caffeinated. The next stoplight turned red. I flinched slightly as I released the gas pedal and eased my foot down onto the brake. I knew that the brakes were bad and was hoping that I wouldn’t careen into the intersection like I had been doing recently. But I came to a stop pretty quickly. The brakes weren’t bad, and I had complete control of the vehicle. Furthermore, I had not, I realized, been losing control of any cars recently. It dawned on me that that had been happening in dreams. I’d been driving around for weeks in my dreams in a car with bad dream-brakes.

One of the pitfalls of not really remembering my dreams is that I can’t digest them afterwards. They’re floating around in my head, unlabeled and not yet picked apart.

One morning a few years ago, I hadn’t had my morning tea and I was thinking about walking to work. I considered the route I usually followed and some of the small variations I could take. I thought about that thing I sometimes did along the way – where I’d jump forward, then as I reached my apex and started descending, I’d pull back against gravity and skim over the sidewalk for a few extra yards. Wait a minute, I thought, I can’t fly. Then I remembered that I’d been getting around in my dreams using those gravity-resistant jumps. Since I caught myself, I haven’t been able to fly in my dreams.

A long walk around the city and I’m almost home. I haven’t walked the edge off my mood as I’d hoped, I’ve just worn my body down. I take a good look at the sky when I get to the busy corner by the park. There’s a blanket of grey-orange tinted cloud covering the eastern two-thirds of the sky; and there’s a long crack cut through the cloud, north-to-south. The street corner is bright, so I head into the playing field to have a better look.

It’s definitely not natural phenomenon. They aren’t fuzzy organic cloud edges. They’re straight and sharp.

I hear the drone of a plane coming in from the northwest and turn to watch. As the plane plows into the cloud, the cloud dissipates around it, leaving a distinct curving path of black sky. I now understand that the clouds are at the altitude that planes descending into Sea-Tac reach when they’re over Seattle. I watch another plane come in, it slips right through the original path, not disturbing any clouds. Air traffic controllers, I figure, bring planes in along just a small handful of flight paths.

My back is stiffening up and it’s time for me to walk the last three blocks home. I give the flight paths one more look and half-yell, “Blah,” at them. A shooting star falls as if in response to my weak grunt.

I flip through Harry Mathews’ The Way Home. (A book I bought three years ago at City Lights Bookstore on the first evening of my first real business trip. Victoria and I skipped our Silicon Valley hotel’s social hour, in favor of a good Italian meal in North Beach and the requisite stops at City Lights and Vesuvius.) I stop on the last page of The Orchard and read the final paragraph. I notice something hiding deep in the crease between the pages, along the book’s spine. I dig inside and pull out a narrow strip of paper. The phrase “Complimentary Bookmark” is printed in tiny red letters across both, followed by words to the same effect in French, German, and Spanish. (The words are about half the width of the bookmark. The top two-thirds of the same words are repeated just below the first line, cut off at the edge of the paper. This allows the manufacturer to cut several strips out of one sheet of paper without having to line up the text carefully – as long as the strip is cut at the correct width, an uninterrupted line of the text will appear.) The pliability of the strip betrays the fact that there’s a strip of metal embedded inside. It is a once-magnetized theft prevention device, half-heartedly disguised as a bookmark.