Dennis Lehane, "Since We Fell"

Dennis Lehane has written over a dozen novels and I bet none of you out there has read one. Or maybe one of you has read one, maybe "Gone, Baby, Gone" or "Mystic River" because those were made into movies. He is a terrific writer and this, his newest novel, is excellent. So good that I had to pace myself in reading it so as to not finish it in two or three days.  Had I had a sprained ankle, I could have devoured it in a day.

Why readers discount crime/mystery/police procedure novels is a mystery (no pun intended) to me. Any of you read Elmore Leonard?  Don Winslow? James Lee Burke? James Ellroy? Michael Connelly?  No?  Why not?  You think the genre is beneath you?  Maybe it is, maybe you don't read a lot of fiction, but you are missing out on great writing. I have written about James Lee Burke many times, he is a poet (in my mind) writing about life in New Orleans as seen through the eyes of an ex-cop.  Gorgeous prose, good plots, excellent characters. 

Dennis Lehane is right there as well.  Gorgeous prose, excellent plots and characters.  In this book, "Since We Fell" we have snake charmer characters, rather unbelievable plot maneuvers and it's just a fucking great story.  And the story is bookmarked by sentences like this:  She marveled at her will, the resolve, the balls it took to become someone else so completely that the battle for dominance between the captive self and the captor self couldn't become anything but unwinnable. Each would surely subsume the other in a forever war, and no matter how it ended up, neither could ever return home. 

Or this:  She was surprised at how calmly she took in all these souls hurtling toward her, past her, and streaming on tiers above and below her with their aggressive need for goods and services, for the itchy satisfactions to be found in acquisition for its own sake, for human connection and disconnection in equal measure, for someone, anyone to tell them why they did it, why they were here, what separated them from insects moving underground right now in colonies that bore a remarkable resemblance to the three-tiered mall in which they found themselves wandering, roving, stalking on a Saturday afternoon.

Maybe it's just me, but I love sentences like those, where you read them a second time just to get the cadence and the thought into your mind-bloodstream as you continue to follow the story.  Those sentences always make me stop, think and marvel at their clarity and their awareness of human weakness, strengths and basic human actions.  

As I said in the beginning, Dennis Lehane has written about a dozen novels and I have read all of them over the past 20 years.  They are not all crime fiction, he has several that take place in the early 20th century about history and about the formation of underground criminal mobs and the bosses of those mobs, about life in Boston and other East Coast cities, different genres.  But all are so well written.  If you ever find one of his books in a used bookstore, just buy it.  Put it on your shelf. Take it on vacation with you and read it.  Or just read it at home.  I promise you that reading any one of his books will make you a fan and you will read more.  

Among the losers at the laundromat, getting a contact high while cleansing one's clothes

No judgement here, of course, because I am one of those laundry-losers, one who has reached the ripe old age of 67 and still takes dirty clothes and a stack of quarters to a public place to wash and dry.  However, the age demographic at my personal laundromat is way younger than 67, more like 27 or 22.  But we are all polite, sometimes even loaning a fellow launderer a quarter for that last bit of drying.

Because smoking weed is now commonplace and legal and thus bordering on boring, everyone (except me) in the laundromat is either high, getting high, losing the high or just carrying a ton of product on them because I swear it smells like a cargo plane full of weed smoke.  I am surprised my clothes and I don't exit the building smelling like a soggy high school joint that has been relit a dozen times. It isn't an unpleasant smell, but it is very strong.  But still, it is way better to smell skunky weed than smell the occasional borderline homeless person who hasn't bathed in a month, reeking of body sweat, pee and other unmentionable fluids and solids.  The last time that happened I had to hold my breath while I took my clothes out of the washer and put them into the dryer.  How the person didn't smell himself and gag constantly was bewildering.

But going to a laundering place has its benefits (other than getting high) because you can wash and dry every single thing you own, including sheets, towels, blankets, in under 90 minutes.  That takes into consideration that some of those heavy things will need to  be in the dryer for at least two cycles. If you have light things, just regular clothes, you can be in and out in less than 55 minutes!  Yes, it costs some money but it takes so little time to do a ton of clothes. I go about once a week, sometimes with one load (like today) and sometimes with six loads. 

Would I like laundry facilities where I live?  Sure.  But do I hate laundry day?  Nope. There's a camaraderie about maneuvering around other people's loads of laundry and jockeying for dryers and giving someone the last five minutes of dryer use that you don't need and acknowledging that hey, we all have dirty laundry to air and there's no shame in it airing it in a public place because in the end, we go home with clean stuff and everyone is happy about that. 

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Hot, hotter, hottest

It's boring to talk about the weather but it's so all encompassing right now that it's difficult NOT to talk about it. This heat is too intense and relentless. I don't care what people say about the "dry heat isn't as bad as the humidity" because right now that's a load of crap. This heat is really, really awful. My little cement duplex absorbs the heat and holds it like a trophy. The house does not cool down. When I came home from work on Saturday it was 86 in the house. I tossed the dogs in the car, went to dinner at a friends where it was also 86 in the house (no AC). When I returned to my place at 8:00 it was 92 in my house. I kid you not. I got into the shower with all my clothes on, turned on the cold water and stood there until I was soaked. It was miserable all night long. In the morning, at 6:00 a.m. the temp had fallen to 86. Wow. 

Same thing on Sunday. Same thing on Monday. Today I am spending the night in Pt. Reyes because I am working there for the next several days. It will be at least ten degrees cooler there and the nights will be nicer as well.

There is a small window AC unit being delivered this week and I will figure out how to install it in my front window. It won't help the bedroom but that's fine. Worse case I will sleep in the living room, on the floor, AC and fans running. 

Yes, whining about the heat is a stupid act. I have a house, water, electricity, a toilet that flushes, all that stuff, I am lucky in many ways. However, this heat exhausts me. It feels like being wrapped in hot plastic most of the time. I go to sleep in a wet tank top with a fan aimed at the bed.  I, for one, miss the winter rains, the need for blankets, the joy in turning on the oven.  I have not cooked anything in a week and my love of salad has waned because it's too hot to rip lettuce into pieces. My dinners consist of crackers and cheese, sometimes augmented with Beer-Nuts. It's too hot to even fry an egg. I eat a lot of apples and drink a lot of French rose wine. At least that part is pleasant. 

OK, thanks for listening. Time for another cold shower.

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Birthday blues and the Cooper Stalker

Walking Cooper in the morning, we have encountered many cats, most with their backs up, some ignoring us and a couple who want to be friends. Cooper fancies that he could chase one down and ..... do what?  Eat it? Lecture it? I am not sure.  But a few days ago Cooper stopped and sniffed under a bristly bush and a cat popped out, very suddenly and surprisingly! A black and white cat, medium size, and jumped right into Cooper's face.  Coop screeched like a 3 year old and backed up as far as he could go on the leash.  I said something like "oh, my, look at that cat....." but before I could speak another word the cat jumped three feet straight out, towards Cooper.  Coop danced around on the end of the leash, making little scream noises and so we walked on.  However, the cat had other ideas.  The cat acted in a rather bold, uncat-like manner, following about six feet behind us, whisking its paws at Cooper as it walked. Needless to say, Cooper was in a big hurry to move swiftly down the street.  But the cat kept it up, that cat followed us for two blocks, making rude comments about Cooper's butt (and probably mine, too) and his general fear of felines. It was the most aggressively stalker cat I have ever seen!  Now Cooper refuses to walk down the street where the cat appeared from under the prickly bush.  Cooper has seen the devil and does not want to anger it again.  Wise.

Every year for the past five or six years, since I have turned 60, I have a great time on my birthday, see my kids, laugh and am happy.  But then a day or two after my birthday I fall into this funk, sort of pissed off, sort of disappointed and very uncertain about everything.  I now recognize this mental, emotional and psychological state of mind for what it is and just wait for it to play itself out.  In the meantime, I feel down in the dumps and stressed out and pissy.  This feeling will vanish, it always does, but for the moment I am carrying it around like a spider bite. Can't do much about it but watch it swell and then abate.

More to follow in the next days. 

Mom shares from the other side.

Yesterday, as I was coming back from my early morning walk with  the dog, I noticed a large, colorful hot air balloon drifting closer and closer to the air space above my house.  This had never happened before.  I often see the balloons in the distance because they take off at the Sonoma Airport, ten miles north and a bit west of where I live.  They stick around that area for the most part.

But this one was definitely on a different trajectory.  And it was very low.  By the time I returned to my house, it was right overhead.  My sister Kate was at my place, she had spent the night, so I grabbed Kate and made her come outside and see it. The big yellow balloon was low enough that we could see the fire in the middle of the opening and we could tell there were many people on board.  We waved.  We watched it for a few minutes, it hovered above us, then drifted off.

Our Mom had always wanted to take a hot air balloon ride. In fact, we had scheduled a ride for her about ten or fifteen years ago, in Napa.  We took Mom out to dinner in Napa, spent the night at a motel and at 5:00 a.m. we called the balloon company to confirm whether or  not the ride was taking place.  Alas, they had to cancel that morning's trip because of low clouds.  Mom was disappointed, but hey, weather does what it wants.  There wasn't really another opportunity to do the balloon ride because we all lived in different places and coordinating such a thing took too much time and energy.  Now I wish we had tried harder to make it happen.

But Kate and I both had the same idea at the same time: the hot air balloon we saw over my house was a little sign from Mom that she was happy and getting to do what she wanted, dead or not.  We both laughed softly, shook our heads, and watched the balloon travel on.  It was a nice moment. 

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