Relentless

Cast your minds back, oh long-time readers: any of you remember this, or this?

From XENOVERSE, JUNE 08, 2005...
Home again, at last. Not bad, all told?

To be clear, recall that we had to drive fifty freeway miles this morning to arrive at the Federal Building in Downtown L.A. by 8.15am, just to ask a question of the Immigration Service - or USCIS, as they are now known. I thought the "C" stood for "Customs", but it doesn't - "Citizenship".

...

Well, just thought I'd let you know we did get an answer to our query. We received it yesterday; some two/three months after my daughter receiver her actual Green Card and everything was cleared-up.

What did it say, this letter? It said "Re: your inquiry of Jun 8, we see from our files you got your card", in a nutshell.

They may indeed grind slow on occasion, but it is heartening to learn that the Wheels of Bureaucracy do indeed grind inexorably.

Of Course, You Realize...

It seems, by Gawd, that there's a War on Fitzmas! - a real war, this time, that even we portly chickenhawks with a gammy leg can fight in? Well, sign me up as a Colonel, give me a regiment of the Dark Brigades and we'll give them What For! How selfish, how self-absorbed, indeed, that with all the scandals there are for us to celebrate at this time, we should have this Rovian Fitzmas stuffed down our throats. Bugger me, but you can't step into a supermarket these days without some chintzy cheezy Fitzmas carol jingling out of loudspeakers, be it "Away in the pokey" or that awful "Si-i-lent Dick".

What of our songs, our hymns? Where is "Hark the Herald Scanlon Sings", our "Arreste DeLayis"? Have you ever, in your wandering of these "festive" aisles with all their hideous Trumped-up decorations, have you ever heard play of "Deck the Halls with Blood of Captives"? You have not.

I swear, the next red-nosed "greeter" who shakes a tin at me begging contributions to the "Scooter Defense Fund", whining about how "it's for the pwesident", I'm going to plank him one in the puss.

A pox on Fitzmas, says I: say it loud, say it proud, say it with me -

Happy Fallidays Everyone!

The sooner it's all over, the better.

A Rose By Any Other Name

This is so meeeeee that it isn't even funny.

Nah: 'course it is.

Killing the Mystery

Must have been five, six years ago - it was the first time we'd gone to the opera together, Downtown LA - think it was Nozze di Figaro, no matter; we made a night of it, anyway, took a room at the aged Biltmore, hoped for a nice dinner afterwards.

Came out around 11.30, decided to walk back to the hotel, look for somewhere nice to eat: gotta be somewhere, right? This was Downtown Los Angeles, second largest city on the continent, right? Wrong - this was Downtown L.A: it has no nightlife; everywhere closes early. Los Angeles is unlike any other city I've ever visited, a vast sprawl 50 miles x 50 miles that has no center, no focus: not to the casual suburbanite visitor, anyway. You need to know where you're going, and that could be twenty miles away. I don't know this city very well at all; not casually; just enough to get to three or four places.

Walked back to the hotel, hungry. The street, the road, was soaken, though it had not rained. Somebody out to shoot a movie, says my wife, and sure enough there they were, trucks and lights and people filling a side street. Setting-up, not shooting: but setting-up a shoot takes forever. Setting-up a nighttime shoot, soaking the streets. They do that, she says to me, she who knows everything, They always soak the streets when they shoot cars driving at night.

I had never noticed.

But since that night, I have never not noticed - just like I can spot the Universal back lot wherever it appears, so too do I recognize, always, the soaken streets in a nighttime drive. Some of the magic, some of the mystery is gone: a movie calls attention to itself, there's a wrinkle in the spell of disbelief. One might expect, as one small wire in the suspension cable snaps, an increased tension in the viewer, as though: My God! This might be a movie! Will it collapse? Fainthearts flutter and fail. Others, like me, prefer the bounty of Denial, though we must fight to receive it.