some note I wrote about a day at work well over a decade ago in another place and another life

Seby walks over here to Jason at least once a day and walks up real fast. The last two or three steps he drags his feet.

DJ got another job. I said to him I half expected the boss to tell him he didn't need two weeks, to go ahead and leave today or tomorrow. But DJ said No, that they only do that for layoffs, and explained to me that the laid-off can be disgruntled. Only he took a long time to explain that.

Seby and Cindi were talking and Cindi said, "We're talking about the bombing in Russia."

We were waiting for a meeting to start and Roy saw a cake in the next room and said "That looks like a good cake" and Doug said "You should go have a piece" and Roy answered "No, I'm trying not to have a piece" and Doug said "That's how you do that—you admire what a fine cake it is."

something about “Heart of Darkness”

I read Heart of Darkness as an undergraduate in college. The class was asked if the book was racist. I have no idea what academia thinks of this question now (I have my suspicions), but I recently reread the book and thought it pretty obvious that it is an indictment of European colonial rule in Africa. And, furthermore, the story told in the novella, published in 1899, is narrated by a third character, sailor Charles Marlow, and this simple storytelling technique distances the author, Joseph Conrad, from the narrator’s views and language.

Marlow’s descriptions of Africans are ugly. They are savages. But the Africans appear ugly and often inhuman because they are being dehumanized. Marlow sees the white European bureaucrats as brutal, and Kurtz is the ultimate company functionary-inflictor. Kurtz was the worst savage of them all, and no doubt.

The story Marlow tells his listeners is about his experience assigned as a steamer captain for a Belgian trading company in Africa. When he sets out, Marlow is advised about Kurtz, an ivory trader working far upriver (probably the Congo River), and the possibility that Kurtz is sick. Kurtz has reportedly "gone native" and is the object of Marlow's expedition. Marlow suffers a hellish journey and discovers the horror of European colonization.

The prose throughout Heart of Darkness is great, although Marlow waxes philosophically during his narration, which can fray the thread.

‘You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies—which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world—what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough to it by letting the young fool there believe anything he liked to imagine as to my influence in Europe. I became in an instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims. This simply because I had a notion it somehow would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see—you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...’

He was silent for a while.

‘… No, it is impossible, it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence,—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone …’

He paused again as if reflecting, then added—

‘Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know …’

Notes:

• Conrad drew on his own experience working for a Belgian trading company, taking a steamer up the Congo River.
• Heart of Darkness inspired Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 masterpiece “Apocalypse Now.” That film is might be the better work—the director’s cut, anyway.

(posts) the little speech in Rocky Balboa

Martin, trainer to Mason Dixon, and this speech—

There's always somebody out there. Always. And when that time comes, and you find something standing in front of you, something that ain't running and ain't backing up, and it's hittin' on you and you're too damn tired to breath? You find that situation on you, that's good. Because that's baptism under fire! Oh, you get through that, and you find the only kind of respect that matters in this damn world: self-respect.

 

creative exercise 7J, blending fantasy and reality

I smoked my brand far enough to hide blood. Doc says they will zap me hard, says dying is nothing to be overly concerned about. Just a hard spot all the time. That was the giveaway. Once we dig it out, gravity could cause the remaining mass to collapse back in on itself—that's if you can build the excavating equipment out of material that doesn't melt when you hit the mantle. Even cold, dead Mars has more love and heat than me. I know because I was in the Dollar Store at Federal Plaza in the Grove when a female tried to get my attention for help in finding an item, but I was busy with someone else. Maybe I can help you now, make you mine. Her flame-green eyes traffic drugs and turned-up lips at champagne sidewalk art that says Unity Against. Am I witch doctor? Never study what I say and then think the medication wore off. I basically just flew off the handle again and professed surprise. Halloween kids who run out of money will come to our door dressed as firemen, and I feel good suddenly as from room to room princesses and pumpkins and clowns lie still.

about takeoffs and landings

The first hour slips under our wings. The next hour peels paint as it angles us higher and farther from anywhere, locking us out of your homes from 35k feet. We wave through windows, untethered, until, washed up on the rock-strewn shore of our futures, we meet again.

about a scene from "Boogie Nights"

He finds himself sitting in a strange room surrounded by firecracker explosions, unsustainable highs, men with guns hidden behind waistbands and shirts. Sitting in that room, waiting for what seems like an imminent, inevitable, violent end, he disappears into the last 5 years—through a keyhole he sees it—the first half, the good half coaxes a smile that dissolves into the second half and lost eyes find a narrowing range of options and an expanding sense of desperation. Time to go.