IMG_3518

IMG_3518, originally uploaded by R. Ducharme White.

IMG_3507

IMG_3507, originally uploaded by R. Ducharme White.

   

HOUSE

   

     “Nature comes through.”

     My dad walks ahead of me into the house. It is grown over with ivy and blackberry.  A feeling of dread and excitement - ecstasy - fills my body.

     Inside it is cool and damp feeling. The light through the windows, long bereft of glass, grows white hot as our eyes adjust to the deep shadows within.

     It is an old house, somewhere in the woods that take up a large portion of my grandfather’s property. My dad and I have come upon it while hiking.

     There are vines and branches growing through cracks in the wooden slats of the walls, and for the first time I start to comprehend the nature of walls. The blackberry cascades in through the windows and doors. Tree roots arch upward through the dirt floor and then disappear down, back below the ground. Their shape presents itself to my young mind as like the rough-scaled backs of the sea serpents in the artists’ drawings that I stare at in the pages of books for hours on end, at home in my bedroom.

     “Given enough time, nature comes through.”

     This is what my dad tells me when I ask him how this house came to be this way. To my young mind houses are things for living in. They are warm, safe, insulated from the outside. It strains my imagination to comprehend the fact that if left alone for only a few decades the walls and the roof and the thick carpet I’ve come to depend on could deteriorate to this. To me - six years old on summer break - this is a place of dreams. This is one of the dark places on the maps. It is the place where monsters are born.

- An excerpt from my previous novel, The Heat Death of the Universe, finished in 2006.

Fritz Oliver S.

Ghosts

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end.  Could dedicate their entire lives to it.  It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic.  We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.  God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it.  A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.  Flight from exactly what?  These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat?  To what purpose?  This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws.  It was kind, in a way.  Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than is its mongrel cousin.  The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually.  To devote one's life, plunge in.   I had researched this.  Stice had asked whether I believed in ghosts.  It's always seemed a little preposterous that Hamlet, for all his paralyzing doubt about everything, never once doubts the reality of the ghost.  Never questions whether his own madness might not in fact be unfeined.  Stice had promised something boggling to look at.  That is, whether Hamlet might be only feigning feigning.  I kept thinking of the Film and Cartridge Studies professor's final soliloquy in Himself's unfinished Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms that Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space with Mind-Boggling Efficiency, the sour parody of academia that the Moms had taken as an odd personal slap.  I kept thinking I really should go up and check on The Darkness.  There seemed to be so many implications even to thinking about sitting up and standing up and exiting V.R.5 and taking a certain variable-according-to-stride-length number of steps to the stairwell door, on and on, that just the thought of getting up made me glad I was lying on the floor.

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 900.

Two Tickets to India

We are buying our tickets to India today.  As if to make me regret my decision, dear friend "A" posted the following picture on his Bangalorian blog today:

This picture truly begs the question: how does one defecate a wall?  Taken literally, it's an impossible feat.  Even taken figuratively it is difficult to imagine how one involves a wall in such a thing, absent some highly improbable (at least in the first world) speed-and-vector scenarios.

Jaime's Birthday

Jaime turned 25 on Thursday.  That night we went to Re:Public and ate pigtail for the first time - also a bison tenderloin that was very good, though a bit chewy.  I took Friday off and we flew to LA for the weekend.  Went to Santa Monica and stayed at our friend Sarah's house in Manhattan Beach that night, where we ate awesome sushi at Sashi.  The cougars were out in force.  Then we went to a club where Jaime and Sarah danced.  On Saturday we drove to West Hollywood, checked in to the Standard, walked around Sunset, got lunch at the Counter and went back to the hotel.  We met some friends at their house in Westwood, then drove back to Hollywood for dinner at Cube, where the waitstaff hurried us and then, when we commented, comped dessert and a round of digestifs.  Then we went to a lounge called Winston's and had more drinks and danced some.  Beyonce's "Single Ladies" seemed to be playing in every bar we went to and I have lots of memories of Jaime, late at night, waving her hand in my face while Beyonce sang "If you liked it then you shoulda' put a ring on it..." &c.  Sunday, brunch and shopping on Robertson, then home.

Didn't take a ton of photos.


That's the iconic Koenig Case Study House 22, with the prominent roof overhang, above.  First time I've ever wished I had a telephoto lens.  I had no idea this was right above the Standard, until I checked in and spotted it from the balcony.

tCL: Imagespiration

LM002

I stumbled across this at the Satsop festival and thought it ought to be its own post.  Tim Holderman's friend Bob owns it.  It is an LM002, one of the many cars I can recall gazing upon dreamily in the pages of the car magazines I coveted as a kid.  I was seven when these came out and I can remember being blown away by how cool they were.

In short, it is Lamborghini's one and only truck ever made; they made 301 of them, over six years or so.  As you can imagine, they are now coveted by collectors.


They adapted the V12 from the Countach to run in these things.  Dual air filters to deal with the desert sands - the Saudi military ordered a few dozen of these.

Satsop River Rock Festival &c.

We spent most of our weekend in Grays Harbor County.  Jaime's dad was putting on a music festival in Hoquiam, with headliners Wishbone Ash and Eric Burdon (the latter, I had to be told, was the frontman for the Animals, who had a bunch of 70s hits).  It was pretty fun and interesting.  I had not been to Aberdeen or Hoquiam for years - they are culturally interesting places.

Today is our 3rd anniversary, which we celebrated by driving up to Lake Quinault and then to Ocean Shores.  Actually, these were only incidental to the Hoquiam trip - the thing we celebrated most was returning home to the City.


Packing - all the accoutrements of a modern Ubermensch.




Wishbone Ash

The second stage.


Jaime and younger brother, Brandon.

Jaime really embraced the whole rock festival, er, well, she got cold and resorted to an Afghan.

Tim Holderman and crew working, Jaime drinking.

At the back-of-the-house sound booth - Tim, Jaime and Steve - 3/5 of the Holderman clan.  Susan was a blur of activity all night, making sure the many band members and entourages were happy.

Steve working the lights.




Eric Burdon







Lake Quinault