More Parries
December 2008
Stop Yesterday
Is the goal of Israel’s assault on Gaza to discourage Hamas from firing rockets, or is it to render Hamas incapable of firing rockets? These are two very different projects, yet we are hearing about both from the government, which worryingly suggests that the government isn’t quite sure.
Short-circuiting Place-based Longing
If there is one tangible benefit to having lived in a variety of places it’s that it furnishes evidence of the futility of longing to be elsewhere.
October 2008
Ebullience, Please
A President of the United States must be ebullient. At the presidential debates we should have seen McCain like we saw him at the Al Smith dinner.
September 2008
History Tonight, McCain vs. Obama
McCain pulled through but he’d better improve, better get relaxed. This was the big one, and Obama came off a 21st century Brat Packer.
Encounter at Wetherspoone’s
As if those glass double doors belong to a wild saloon wherein one must repulse brigands just for a peaceful drink.
August 2008
A Crawl Across Crawley, Part 1
Irit, the Jam and I walk from Brighton to Gatwick Airport.
July 2008
Suddenly Seymour
Time was, Seymour Hersh’s dispatches were a cause for minor celebration. They were full- and deep-throated journalistic tours de force, possible changers of paradigms. But his latest, “Preparing the Battlefield” on funding covert ops in Iran, leaves too many clues that reveal precisely where he’s coming from.
June 2008
Another End of Times
With the recent reported training exercises over Crete, perhaps Israel’s strike on the Iranian regime’s machinery of genocide has already begun.
Dead Till Eilenspiegel
Beyond steadfastness and vigor in prosecuting Islamofascism, John McCain seems an American president I’d love even more than the great liberator George W. Bush (most of you just left, I know) because he is more American on immigration than either his party or the other.
All So Simple
First, there is a general moode and desire to write.
March 2008
Why AAPL
Apple’s operating system will, I believe, become in time the dominant one, and with a current market share of only 6% or so, that’s a lot more computers to sell. And as the only operating system seller that also sells the computers it runs on, as well as owning the shops they’re sold from, Apple stands to become a colossus, even a frightening one.
Clash of the Midgets
My phone! One of the reasons I didn’t want an iPhone is that I’m invested in the T9 text entry method and like it. But while I do like the Nokia N95’s slider, it creates discomfort when entering text because all the weight in the phone is further up.
January 2008
Dangers of the Gaza-Egypt border breach
Hamas may try to use Egyptian territory to stage cross-border attacks on Israel, aiming to operate in parts of the Sinai as Hezballah does in southern Lebanon.
Glick Dismisses Gaza Border Breach
Caroline Glick, the strident Jerusalem Post columnist, seems to see the Gaza-Egypt border breach as yet another in a long line of Israeli strategic disasters by incompetent leaders. I’m not convinced however of her arguments, mainly because she doesn’t make any.
Israel’s Greatest Victory Since Osirak
The great tactician Ariel Sharon steamrolled through Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and today we see another step in the unfolding of this masterplan to staunch the damage caused by the victory of the Six Day War in 1967.
I Do Like Mondays
First procedure: clean out the 2-cup mokka from the previous usage. The sink here is metal and I enjoy lightly bashing the coffee holder against it to knock the damp grains out then putting them in the rubbish before swilling out the remains under the tap. The sound is just the same as baristas make in cafes.
December 2007
The Small Adventures
Of course we were late for the train. We enquired frantically among the taxis for one who would accept the two dogs—mine and Davide’s—and take us to Termini Station so I could catch the 11pm train to Milan that would be one third of our journey to Britain.
Tony Blair and the Four-State Vision
Ariel Sharon’s disengagement policy reflected an understanding that ownership of the Palestinian issue is shared with Egypt and Jordan. Once Tony Blair acquires this view, he can help facilitate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Spooked, They’ll Annoint Rudy
Because of the recent US National Intelligence Report, the electorate will turn to someone who demonstrates not only the ideological conviction required to continue to prosecute Islamism, but also the administrative savvy to reform entrenched bureacracies.
October 2007
A Restoration and Return
There she was, sitting outside the apartment block! How did she do it? Dogs must have some sort of navigational sense we don’t understand.
Curs to Fate
Yesterday I lost Jam in Villa Borghese, the central park here in Rome. She has not turned up since.
This Trip’s Last Day
I went to Astor Place Haircutters. I crossed Manhattan Bridge on foot. I walked west along Canal St, seeking a bamboo steamer.
I, Thou and Pastor Bob
At Rome I felt queasy that they would paint and revere scenes that occured in Israel, but here, looking at the Calvary Church campus, I felt that the religious energy is actually here, that we are far enough away from the places of the events themselves that they can finally become abstracted and spiritualized and kept relevant. An ocean and a small continent separate Fort Lauderdale from Afula.
September 2007
The Big and Easy
The moon is shining through these tropical September clouds, directly above a neighbor’s palm tree, and it’s completely full. An airplane is landing at a nearby airfield. I ramble, unable to reach what I mean, perhaps because what I mean is an almost meaningless jumble of contradictory thoughts that are less thoughts than incomplete attempts to label fleeting tumbling emotions.
Flightblogging
With the squeaks from the front and the clatter from the bulkheads and the smell from the toilet, there’s a reason to prefer Gatwick and the train over Heathrow and the bus. It’s very misty but we’re here. Korean Air Cargo. A parking lot.
August 2007
A Drop in Time
To have a camera back again a personal epoch later feels like a time machine squared. Your chronicling device—itself a time machine of sorts—is suddenly back to what it was years ago, before much was changed, which in itself somewhat returns you to those times.
Sauna Losing Heat
Rather than reaching the heights, to exciting thoughts and feelings, I tend increasingly in the sauna to just sit and think about the work I’ve just done and the work I’m about to do after. Something’s missing.
A Ride to Gatwick Airport
Gatwick is my airport now, largely unchanged since 1986, so it now looks tawdry. Airports. They’re so charged, so symbolic, and so empty once you’re at one; I dream of them often.
July 2007
Busy, Busy City
There’s a bridge in London’s St. James’s park where you can see Buckingham Palace at one end of the pond and Whitehall at the other, with the London Eye behind. Whitehall looked less a thumping fast haven for bureaucrats than a fairytale town, with the improbable slowly-moving Eye completing the fantasy.
First Time in this House All Day
One reaction (in The Times) to Islamist terrorist doctors: “Nowhere can inequality be so devastatingly stark as in a well-resourced British hospital.” So now we know: it’s understandable that after removing an annoying woman’s varicose veins, why, one sets a car alight and drives it into an airport departure hall.
The Soft Ache of Cold Hotels
The back yard is now set up and quite effortlessly picturesque, with its greenage and raw brick walls. Until we start trying to grow wee vegetables nothing else need be done except the daily maintenance of clearing the butts from the ashtray and the leaves from the ground.
June 2007
Only the Rustle in the Trees
We all, like twinkles on a sunny day’s waves, shine briefly. That I do know to be true. Other perspectives are futile. Grief, loss—these are the great teachers surely. Understand that what one has will pass.
A Rash Appointment
I have a rash on my face these days, reaching from my forehead down the sides of my nose and to my mouth. It went away while I was in America but now back in Britain it’s returned. How can that be?
A Cabaret Old Chum
It’s a last bastion of civility, Brian mused ruefully (with that inability of his to be really rued), as we had a beer walking through Penn Station to his train. I realized that I don’t know people like him anymore: libertarian Democrats.
Fatahland and Hamastan
Wherein I obsess about developments in Gaza rather than recording the sights and sounds of New York City in the springtime.
Squelching in a Bath of Me
I rode the Metro subway for the first time—didn’t even known Los Angeles has one. It’s cheap and clean, but the problem is there just aren’t that many trains, as if the city sabotages its own public transport system and wants you to have a car.
Stars, Stripes and Superlatives
Here in Los Angeles I am bombarded with superlatives. Daniel’s record collection. The Bikram Yoga College of India world headquarters. Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Cutting-edge web applications by people down from the Bay Area. All mixed in with the most ravaging mediocrity.
Pursuit of Hashemesh
Welcome to three weeks in America. Top story in USA Today: Tiger Woods is going to design a golf course.
May 2007
Bikram’s Yoga, Meet David Allen’s GTD
Both systems are comprehensive in their respective realms and, controversially, ground-up rather than top-down.
Notes and Chords on the Levant Right Now
Palestinian Arabs, quasi-sovereign for the first time, are descending into civil war in Gaza. Lebanon, acting militarily for the first time, is going after al-Qaeda cells within its Palestinian camps. And Israel is undergoing political convulsions, hammering out a new political system it seems. And all these developments among the neighbors are in play each with the other.
My City to Your City
A bunch of loud white kids came running down from the promenade shouting vilely to each other. I was reminded of El Topo (we saw it yesterday at the fabulous Duke of York cinema) and I was reminded of the scene when the three bandits gradually build up their cackling harassment of the man in black as he rides into their valley.
Shite on Brighton
“Like many provincial towns,” the Private Eye reviewer stabs, “Brighton, as depicted in this hacked-together tribute, defines itself more by what it isn’t than by what it is. It’s not London, for one thing.”
From DisneyWorld to Watford
I needed my wallet more than the gypsies did.
Back in Black
Please pardon the unannounced, unplanned and unbecoming two weeks off. Following are some memorable moments from them in the order they popped into mind.
Daily Yin
For my first test of the day as day, I open the back door and step outside to the little patio to see the sky and feel the air. I realize not everybody does this, so if people tell me I’m a miserable bastard then perhaps this little habit will correct their impression.
April 2007
Wetherspoones and Raisins
No that’s not right, said I, sipping strong tea just brewed. Klement wanted me to read over an email he wrote. “Thank you for taking your time to interview me,” it began. My Dad also called to tell me of his new socks.
Mind the Dream
Dreaming about our passed companions as if they are alive requires tricks to the dreaming mind to overcome what it believes and knows to be true.
The Meaning Addiction
I’m reading Shardik by Richard Adams, famous for Watership Down. I chose it because it’s about religion, and Adams demonstrated such insight there with the rabbits’ religion—“Oh Frith on the hill, he made it all for us!”—that he’s clearly a contributor to our understanding of ourselves and our meaning addiction.
Short Stuff
Persian civilization typefaces, Palestinian innovation, Flood worries, that’s life with websites, Brighton is slow, and bad Jajah.
e slept, and it was reasonably comfortable, and soon enough it was 5:30am or so, and the train was approaching Milan. In Rome there are much comparisons with the rival up north that actually works, the city that even tried to wrest from Rome the laurel of being Italy’s capital.
It was cold. I had two hours or so before my connecting train to Paris. Walking along the platform and to the station, Jam’s lead in one hand, the suitcase handle in the other, I began my search for a nice cafe and sit down with a coffee, sandwich to read my book and watch the folks. But as I criss-crossed the station, I became increasingly mortified to discover that there was in fact nowhere to sit at all in the entire station, and not one of the cafe stands sold tramezzini (sandwiches). They were all for standing at the bar only.
Rome’s Termini Station, for all the unpleasantness outside, is rich and modern inside, with a variety of cafes, fast food restaurants, a shopping mall, department store and supermarket. Milan Centrale’s got none of that, even if it has 19th century architectural grandeur reminiscient of Chicago’s Union Station. I had one quick cappucino then decided to venture out to the station environs and see if I couldn’t find somewhere more amenable.
It was rainy. There across the road was a triangular patch of grass, around which the pristine stubby green modern trams circled, and I took Jam over there for her morning craptacular. Across the road I spied what looked like it might be a good cafe bar in that brown 1960s style, so I entered. Again, no seats, but there were at least tall tables one could lean on. I had another cappuci here, this time with a cornetto (croissant), and it was a much better coffee. The men working there were all older, with bonhomie or gruffness that comes from decades on the job. This place had the atmosphere. The door chimed as working men and women came in from the cold for their morning’s delight and pick-me-up, and I did read there for a while, but oh I did so want to sit. There was a seating area but it was blocked off and the lights were out, the chairs on the tables; only open for lunch I guess. So soon enough I told the Jam it’s time to go, and we returned to the station and up the escalator. I think by this point Jam was a bit bewildered and upset by this new and seemingly pointless place.
Back in the station I bought a panino with cheese and proscuito, and was kind of surprised by the introversion of the attractive woman working there with her Subway-style plastic gloves and supposedly hygenic paper hat. But she warmed up and by the time she gave me the bun, now toasted, I got a lovely smile that gave me a nice boost as I walked away to sit on a bench in a grand hall at the top of the escalator—I’d spotted it on the way up. The opposing bench was occupied by a group of drunken hobo-looking fellows. I suppose that’s why there are no places to sit in the station. Jam jumped up on the bench and sat there with me, shivering a bit. After a while one of them came over to say hello.
Then it was time to board the train and it was delightfully clean and new and I took a little separate area that on a British train would be first class, the plush brown carpet riding up some of the wall. From there it was a pleasant, not-very-memorable trip all day up through what was probably Switzerland then France.
Paris. I’ve not been here for years. At the station I queued up in the ticket office to buy the ticket for the next leg of the journey, a regional train to Dieppe. It was rush hour and the station had the woosh, human concentration and contained impatience of a major world city, with the people appreciating the furry animal intrusion. To catch the train it turned out we had to take the subway to another station with about an hour to do so. The ticket seller, who spoke impeccable English, said that shouldn’t be a problem on the Metro. In a bit of naming that can make life seem as tightly put together as a dream, the station was called Madeleine. Having Jam on the subway was allowed, but she was bewildered by the amazing flurry of people, some of whom tutted with irritation as they had to move around her, the suitcase and I.
The Metro was as full of rich characters as a New York, and I felt that I’d love to get back here to Paris sometime soon. Then we arrived at the station and I had time to spare and bought a coffee for the next leg of the journey. Dragging Jam around with me on the lead was becoming a bit of a drag.
Then we were off, with one change, and it was dark outside and the train was older and less comfortable. When we arrived it was a cold windy night as the Jam and I walked out of the station and towards the port, the town quite empty. I could smell the sea air and was reminded of another cold evening just over three years ago when the Jam, her mother Maddie and I arrived from the bus at Cesme in Turkey at night to take the ferry to Italy the following morning. And though I was looking forward now to be getting home, the Jam with me at last, it was of course sad as well to remember that more hopeful time, when the thrill of a new life in a romantic country lay ahead and the catastrophe and horror or Maddie falling to her death from the balcony had not yet happened, nor the tears and deflation of those first few weeks in Italy, when I had to give the dogs over to someone in the countryside because I had nowhere to keep them in the city.
Of course, Cesme had also been the result of failure and defeat, having given up the hike through Turkey and ridden a bus there from the seaside town of Kas. Nonetheless it was a happier time; the period after it in Rome really took the wind out my sails. There I was, fulfilling a dream and ambition I’d nurtured since graduating from college in 1995, nearly a decade earlier—to live and work in Italy!—and it was just crumbling in my hands; without security, without the things I’d grown to love in Israel, it lost its glamour and I just felt sad and anxious. Once I got a job there things got increasingly comfortable and pleasant and routinized, but then Maddie died, and I never did regain much interest in the country.
Walking the streets of this dark empty cold foreign port town towards the ferry brought this all back after the recent accomplishments and comforts—living in familiar Britain, going on trips to familiar and exciting America—and yet it was as exciting as it was melancholy, bringing back breezes of that promise and excitement, that brief and yet really pretty big adventure into Turkey and to Italy. Maybe I will pursue nice big travels again in the future.
And I realized: I’ve been here before! My college friend Boris and I had met in London back in 1999 or so and taken a road-trip from Amsterdam down into France, and we’d stopped at Dieppe for its quaintness and wandered around its streets and had dinner.
I walked up the street full of restaurants along the river and decided upon one of them—a family was just leaving it together with their little dog. I asked if Jam was welcome inside. But of course!
So I settled down with glee in the empty restaurant and ordered a nice dinner, Jam at my feet, pleased to have a comfortable place to pass the time until it was time to go to the ferry. Toast with foie gras, a carafe of red wine, a huge plate of mussels and chips, and finally a creme brulee. My goodness, how nice it would be to take brief road-trips from Brighton, bringing the car across Channel on the ferry, just to get a bit of nearby Europe, so different from Britain, so full of its own successful cultural customs and food. Somehow it felt very good to be able to pay for this, for this independent idiosynchratic travel, having a functional and under control credit card, nobody on earth knowing what pleasures and luxuries I choose to spend on. Certainly it wasn’t a huge amount, this 15euro set dinner, but somehow, though I’ve eaten in restaurants hundreds of times, I felt grown up sitting there, a bit of a man of the world.
After some halting attempts to chat with the proprietor, we made our way back around the water and followed the signs to the ferry port. There were two mechanical bridges on the way, one of which rose up, the other rotated. Because fishing boats were arriving, both happened to be operated just as we approached them. Jam went under the barrier of the first one and I had to sharply call her back for fear she’d get caught in the cracks. I felt a bit ridiculous holding her and telling her to Look, look, while the bridge operator talked into his walkie talkie, like I was treating a dog like a child, but I wanted her to understand that the world isn’t unpredictable but that this is just another one of these mechanical marvels we sometimes come across.
The town faded behind us as we walked the winding way in the cold fresh night to the ferry port on a road that led nowhere else, my suitcase trundling along the smooth road, Jam trotting on ahead sniffing the grass, the fence. The occasional car sped past us. I was reminded for some reason of the approach to the Eilat border with Egypt.
A new port. I didn’t have my ticket—Irit had them because she was making the journey out to Dieppe from Newhaven with a rental car to meet us, as the dog couldn’t come aboard unless we had a car to keep her in for the journey. The clerk understood and waved me in to the very proletarian waiting room. There was a restaurant/bar run by a heavyset blowsy woman. I was sure she was English, but she wasn’t. In northern France it seems the stock is not too different from southern England.
I bought a coffee and a roll with brie for the Jam. Bored, I wandered outside, where there was a cute enough Irish redhead girl in her early 20s on her way back. We got to having a smoke and chatting and just then Irit called me from through the metal fence. She’d driven off the ferry and out the port and to the roundabout for the way back in. I was quite pleased she saw me chatting with another woman—keep ‘em on their toes eh what? (She wasn’t to know this is the most I’d talked with anybody the entire trip.)
Well—another strangeness for Jam, seeing Irit for the first time in 14 months out here in the middle of nowhere. I’d been warning her she’s about to see a “visitor” (my doggie word for “human being other than myself”) but that doesn’t go very far in explaining who. So I excused myself from the nice girl, whom I never saw again, and exited the building and hugs all round and we got into the car and drove back into the port.
We stopped at the security gate and the young fellow checked our papers. All was in readiness—or so I thought. The dog can’t travel, he told us. What? The 48 hours has already elapsed, he explained, and pointed out the date on the vet’s stamp for the tick and tapeworm treatment I’d had done some 28 hours previously back in Rome. Sure enough, the date was wrong. The vet, eager to be helpful, must have thought I was leaving directly from Rome last night, and helpfully wrote the previous day on it, the 21st rather than the 22nd. I had looked at his date and stamp in her passport but not actually thought about it. I could have easily make the 21 a 22 myself, but I hadn’t realized it was wrong. So we couldn’t go.
∞
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