TO FLORIDA FOR THE WEEK
See you on the flip side.

PS. Read Popscratch; I recommend it.

HUMDRUM
Sorry. Have been temporarily in hiding after being profiled in the paper. (Local prominent blogger neither particularly prominent nor really a blogger. Discuss.)

There has been some snow. Not a lot, just a sort of phoned-in thing. A few inches that fall, sit prettily for a stretch whilst the schools cancel themselves and the roadside ditches fill up with SUVs, and then up and melt perfunctorily. Winter arrives today but seems already a bit distant. The house where I now live has oil heat, which involves 1) something ancient and heavy mechanically humming away somewhere downstairs, and then 2) each room’s wall-hued radiator silently turning things toasty. Whenever I am out in the cold and feeling especially chill-bitten I repeat to myself: Canada practice, Canada practice.

I hit the third and final LOTR midnight sneak back on the sixteenth. It was good. It’s been forever since I read the book but it all came back to me. Aragorn meets the Architect and Treebeard goes after Trinity and Agent Smeagol learns to copy himself and the Nazgûl finally tunnel through to Zion and Legolas does more of his trademark 360° arrow-time FX shots and then it’s Mithrandir versus the Merovingian while the scenery-devouring H. Weaving remains in top form as always. Plus there’s the thing with Frodo and Sam encountering Tony Shalhoub at Cirith Ungol. (Think the sound boys went a bit overboard with the Wilhelms.)

FREE MUMAKIL
The other week I made this up and sent it to a Californian friend of mine (intuiting correctly that she occupied that rare intersection of Tolkienophile and liberal-activist type and so would get the doubly-obscure not-all-that-funny quote-unquote joke) and to my delight what does she do but print the thing out and post it on telephone poles around Berkeley. The movement starts here, comrades.

FRICTION

I
Peace Bridge, Ft. Erie, ON.
Friday 21 Nov 2003, around 1pm.
I pull my car up to the border crossing booth.
I don’t have a passport, so I hand over
my driver’s license and birth certificate.
The official in the booth takes them. He looks like
George Wendt as Bill Swerski from SNL’s Super Fans.
Sunglasses, caterpillar mustache, fat, no neck.
He exhibits your basic hard-ass meathead mien.

—Destination.
—Hamilton, Ontario.
—Been to Canada before?
—No.
—This is your first time?
—Yes.
—How long you staying.
—Until Monday, so four days.
—Purpose of your trip.
—Visiting a friend.
—Male or female.
—Female.

Vaguely disdainful pause

—How do you know her.
—From the internet.

He looks at me like I am the scum of the earth

—Is she expecting you?
—Yes.
—Where you staying?
—I have reservations at a motel.

He looks at me like I am the trail of slime
the scum of the earth might leave behind it

—Place of residence.
—Charlottesville, Virginia. United States.
—What do you do there.
—Web design.
—Do you have your computer with you?
—No.
—Any firearms, alcohol, fruits and vegetables?
—No.
—How much money is in the car.
—I don’t know, maybe fifty bucks.
—You drove all the way from Virginia?
—Yes.
—How long a drive is that?
—Like eight hours or so.

Long pause

—OK, just pull your car in over there and give this to the Immigration desk.
—Thanks.

He hands me back my license, certificate, and a yellow
half-sheet form in whose boxes he’s written my answers;
halfway down is scrawled in large, ominous letters:
MEETING INTERNET FRIEND

II
I park my car and go into the building.
The diminutive, dark-eyed woman behind the glass
at Immigration looks like Geddy Lee in lipstick.
I hand the yellow form through the glass to her.
She stares at the form, then looks coldly up at me.

—Purpose of your visit.
—Meeting a friend.
—Male or female?
—Female.

She looks at me like I am the scum on the
underside of the scum of the earth’s shoes

—Is she expecting you?
—Yes.
—How do you know her?
—From the internet.

She looks at me like I am the week-old scum of the
earth that the fresh scum of the earth just ate

—What’s her name?
—Laura Joldersma.

Her face registers 100% incomprehension,
as if I’ve just uttered an oath in Old Norse

—What.
—Laura … Joldersma. J-O-L-D-E-R … um, S … M … A.
—What’s her phone number.
—///-///-////.
—Have a seat.

To my surprise, she appears to actually be calling
the number to confirm with Laura that I’m expected.
Of course, Laura is at work right now, not at home.
About five minutes pass while Geddy finds this out

—Mr. Herman.
—Yes.
—I’m getting no answer at this number.
—Oh. Do you want to try her work number?
—She’s at work?
—Yes.
—What does she do.
—She works for a hospital.
—What’s the number.

Rather than read the number, I pass my handy
phone-number scrap of paper through the glass;
she immediately dials the number and extension,
then waits, gradually grimacing into the phone

—No one’s picking up at this number either.
—Oh. She must be away from her desk.

I become aware as I say this how unconvincing it sounds,
even though it is lunchtime-ish (around 1:30pm) and thus a
perfectly plausible time for one to be away from one’s desk

—Are you getting her voicemail?

She nods; there is a long pause as she presumably listens
to the voicemail greeting; she opts not to leave a message,
but just hangs up and looks at me expectantly; I shrug

—Well … those are the only phone numbers I have, so.

Another pause, lengthy and fraught with mutual
annoyance; we stare at each other through the glass,
brick-faced, having reached something of a standstill

—Have you contacted her recently?
—Yes, I spoke with her last night.

She regards me balefully, then rolls her eyes,
sighs with bureaucratic weariness, stamps the form
with something denoting approval, and hands it to me

—You can go. Have a nice day.
—Thanks.

III
I go back outside and hand the yellow form to one of the
Customs thugs lurking boredly around in the parking lot.
He doesn’t look like anybody.

—Purpose of your trip.
—Visiting a friend.
—Male or female.
—Female.

This official must have missed the Canadian government’s
compulsory class on leveling scum-of-the-earth expressions
at border-crossing lotharios like me, since he barely bats an
eye at this answer, and even seems to nod a bit in approval

—You met her online?

He is glancing down at the yellow form, reading Swerski’s
aforementioned three-word summation of my itinerary

—Yeah.

Again with the lack of scum-of-the-earth looks;
clearly this guy won’t be with Customs for long

—Can you pop the trunk for me please.

I open the trunk, which is empty; he authoritatively
massages and thumps the trunk floor a few times

—Stand over there please.

He looks in the back seat and goes through my travel bag,
rummaging through my clothes and perusing my varieties
of hair care products and personal grooming schwag

Satisfied, he then moves to the front seat and goes
through my other travel bag, examining my books,
my printed-out directions, and my CD binder

I become alarmed that he may confiscate the open bag
of semi-sweet chocolate chips (“morsels”) that I’ve been
munching on for much of the drive up, for the sugar high

—See you later.
—Thanks.

I get back in the car and find to my relief that the morsels
are still there, but that they’ve been dumped out all over
the inside of my front seat travel bag. Fucking Canucks.
(Except you, lovey)

ON A RELATED NOTE
Strike Wednesday’s complaint. After a bit more practice, the problematic two measures’ parts have clicked and are now playable, nothing to it. (The piece is S. Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”, for any non-music-readers who may be looking in.)

LEAF

These two measures have been giving me trouble. They’re not difficult, note-wise. No virtuosic turbo-tuplets or ligament-annihilating arpeggios or draconianly knotted contrapuntal noodling. Just octaves and your basic Joplinian syncopation. Technically, I have the music down pat: I can play each hand’s part separately without any problem, at slow or fast tempi, without looking at the score or the keys while playing. The trouble is that, during just the above two bars, I become incapable of playing both hands’ lines at the same time. Something about the sound, or the rhythmic or harmonic interaction, or the sensation of my arms and hands and fingers moving in such a way, throws me off. My concentration goes to pieces, and one or both hands’ parts dissolve into clumsy key-whacks. It’s extraordinarily frustrating. My fingers know where they’re supposed to go, but they’re impeded by some sort of mental obstacle I have yet to overcome. Am out of practice at practicing.

TEMBLOR

Also: this afternoon we experienced a magnitude 4.5 earthquake. This was my first earthquake. I’d somehow managed to miss the area’s previous major seismic events — one last May, another a few Septembers ago — but this one got my attention. The floor did its trembling bit, the walls and windows did their rattling bit, the tiny glass flower vases did their locomotion-across-tabletops bit. The sound of it was low and wide and deep and encompassing; the word rumble is a sorry faute-de-mieux stand-in. // Central VA’s days are numbered. The quakes of late are getting larger and more frequent. Surely the earth is gearing up to split grandly open and swallow up the whole region any day now. Would nonetheless be compelled inexorably toward each other over time. Until the inevitable moment when.

MUCH HAPPY FUN
Everything and More is some fairly slow going for me personally, being that it’s my favorite author (D. F. Wallace) writing about my least favorite subject (Hofstadterianly abstruse advanced math), and so my whole usual pore-over-the-witty-prose thing mixed with my reread-over-and-over-again-until-it-makes-a-lick-of-sense thing doesn’t exactly lend itself to speed-reading. An artifact of this pace is that I have adopted a reasonably persistent mental association of the book and the book’s subject matter (i.e., ∞) with the potentially limitless consumption of Chinese food.

For some weeks now this book has accompanied me on weekend afternoons to my local Chinese all-you-can-eat lunch buffet of choice. I sequester myself in a booth for an hour or two and graze on plates heaped haphazardly with rice and noodles and chicken and vegetables and other material, and I prop the book up with my left hand and continue working my way through its text, slowly turning its pages and staring with furrowed brow at the diagrams and equations and Wallacian syntactical back-flips, absently bringing forkful after forkful of food to my mouth.

The setting is appropriate, as the restaurant’s lateral walls are entirely mirrored, reflecting off each other, and thus from certain angles give the illusion of an infinitely vast seating area (albeit with a curving regressive line of infinite Scotts peering creepily back at me).

Also, my receiving a primer in the mind-expanding mathematical concepts of infinity dovetails well with my physically being internally notified over the duration of that hour or two, with increasing insistence, that my own stomach’s boundaries are all too finite.

(I can usually only take two buffet plates’ worth, plus maybe a tiny dessert plate of cake and Jell-O. My relatively meager buffet appetite tends to mirror my overleisurely reading rate. I am continually put to shame by peers who read voraciously and blaze through every book they read in a matter of hours or days, much in the same way as I am shown up by the other buffet patrons around me at the Chinese restaurant, many of whom are nearly spherically obese and seem to have no problem inhaling the food off their stacks of plates as fast as the help can refill the buffet bins.)

The fortune cookie today told me, simply, cryptically:
The job is well done.

OBTAINED
during the past week and a half of traveling by car up and down the continent (in no particular sequence):

PUNTA GORDA, FLORIDA: roughly my own body weight in turkey, stuffing, mash’tates, graviness, cranberriness, cider-gelatinousness, Cool Whip w/ pumpkin pie somewhere beneath it; a variety of coffees, wines, champagnes, and mixed drinks over two days and three nights; restaurant-prepared eggy-weggplant parms & breaded grouper fingers; the experience of drinking Merlot from a wineglass while 90% submerged in a swimming pool; two bags of (Lord have mercy) dark chocolate Hershey Kisses; plastic-containered leftovers swaddled in Ziplocked ice & stashed in an Igloo Playmate in the trunk for the long trip home

ATLANTA, GEORGIA: eggy-weggs over easy & buttered grits & toast w/ various jellies & something like seven cups of aggressive black coffee between 11pm and 2am at the Majestic Diner on Ponce (on Ponce being the initially snicker-inducing Atlantan term for any location on Ponce De Leon Ave., downtownish), talking with A. and having to make a concerted effort to not let her Southern twang creep into my own speech by like osmosis right from the very get-go

HAMILTON, ONTARIO: Tim Horton’s black coffee & soup & sandwich (no doughnut or bread bowl, I know, I know); homemade shepherd’s pie; American restaurant-chain pizza & pull-apart cinnamon roll; an approximate understanding of the conversion rates of miles/kilometers, Fahrenheit/Celsius, US$/CDN$; a spectacular purple-black vertical line of a hickey over my starboard sternocleidomastoid & trapezius that for the whole week afterward made me look like I’d had my neck slammed in a car door

IN TRANSIT: 3000+ miles on the odometer; two tiny cracks in the windshield; unfathomable cumulate full-body car-lag; moderate amusement from the following names of places I drove through or by:

• Withlacoochee Bay, Florida
• Mullet Key, Florida
• Experiment, Georgia
• Bottom, North Carolina
• Toast, North Carolina
• Gross Junction, Virginia
• Forks of Cacapon, West Virginia
• Blue Knob, Pennsylvania
• Burning Well, Pennsylvania
• Challenge, Pennsylvania
• Kill Buck, New York
• Winger, Ontario

… and road-weary empirical proof of the somewhat disarming geographical Fun Fact that Charlottesville, Virginia is closer to Hamilton than it is to Atlanta.

SOUTH
Have indeed come back from ON satisfactorily scathed; am now off to the west coast of FL for quasi-festive infusions of sunshine, tryptophan, and cranberry sauce in the shape of a can. Travel notes and evasive elaborations forthcoming.

NORTH

Am off to see my familiar, yet somehow strange girlfriend for the weekend. Will surely not return unscathed.

MANTRA FOR THE DESKBOUND
c. Feb. 2003

I
Your occupation need not occupy you. It slips from you like water from a leaf. It doesn’t bend you low before the ground. It breezes through your branches easily.

II
You needn’t weigh concerns upon your shoulders. The tasks you face are wholly unimportant. Your difference of view advances nothing. All you do will be discarded presently.

III
The people that surround you are but ghosts. They cannot care about the world you see. Make way for them to slip around and past you. The matters that excite them are not yours.

IV
But humor them and grant them what they ask for. What bother you incur will pass the time. Consider it but something else to do. Reflect on the futility of countering.

V
The things that impact you will not persist. Do not fall into caring what you do. Disown what you expend your effort on. The truth is not a language spoken here.

ASCENT OF MANATEE, continued
a flashback to June 2003, Key Largo, Florida

Piloting a kayak, or at least a two-seater kayak, it turns out, is not very difficult. Hardly worth the trepidation I’d felt before sitting in the thing. With four arms paddling you slice quite quickly through the water; with a hair-trigger foot rudder you maneuver very nimbly.

The rudder was my department, given that I was the one in the rear of the kayak. I operated it via the pair of springloaded foot pedals located somewhere down inside my leg compartment, detectable only by feel. I could not seem to get the hang of the super-complicated system of move-right-foot-to-turn-right and move-left-foot-to-turn-left; by some unhelpful reflex I kept pressing with the wrong foot, thus incessantly sending us in the wrong direction for a moment before my error dawned on me. Clearly some wires crossed in the old upstairs re foot-eye coordination.

Once out on the water, we swung the kayak around the perimeters of some of the islands we saw, doing recon, scanning the underbrush for inlets that would allow us ingress. Adhering to my brother’s plan of action, and despite my protests, we then navigated our way up through a few of the islands’ winding channels, and each time, the outside outdoor world seemed to vanish behind us, as though a curtain had been drawn over the entrance.

The waterways were claustrophobically narrow (maybe twelve feet across at their widest), twisty, muggy, thickly overgrown with trees, devoid of human habitation, and eerily silent and serene. The only sounds around us were the quiet ripplings and splashes of our paddles dipping in and out of the water. Every now and then the cry of a bird, or an insect’s dry chirps and clacks, or the distant Dopplering roar of a jetski somewhere out on the bay.

The banks on either side of us were profusely lined with innumerable spidery mangrove roots, spindly and flesh-colored and curling out and down like fingers. Over our heads at all times was an immense canopy of leaves and snarled branches, permitting no direct sunlight through, keeping us perpetually in the shade. The air and water were very still; there was neither breeze nor current. Our kayak glided over the unmoving water as though on the surface of a pond.

Our movement through the water was often checked by tree trunks and branches that snaked crookedly out of the overhead vegetation and down into the water, which trunks and branches we kept having to swerve around and/or duck under; my left-right confusion with the rudder resulted in my steering the kayak directly into more than a few of these obstacles, to the ever-escalating irritation of my brother, who was sitting up front and thus tended to bear the brunt of such collisions, viz. a faceful of viney branches and/or intimate contact with buggy tree bark.

Kayak Bob had warned us with unconvincing ominousness before we left that the mosquitoes up in those overgrown island waterways had the potential to get rather dense and aggressive, and so maybe we might consider hosing our persons down with copious amounts of Off bug spray, available for a reasonable price right there in the Kayak Bob rental shanty. We said thanks but no thanks, we’d take our chances. I did indeed meet with some mosquitoes, but hardly air-darkening swarms of them: just the occasional one whining in my ear, or landing thirstily on the back of my brother’s neck. We were usually moving too fast over the water for the bugs to get much of a grip. Though I did hear my brother react with disgust when a just-swatted mosquito bled his own red blood back all over his skin.

We eventually found the aforementioned Lost Lake and met a manatee while in it. The manatee was coy about announcing its presence. When my brother and I were still threading our way up the channel, approaching the sunlit clearing up ahead that we suspected signaled the mouth of the Lost Lake, we saw a sudden upswelling of water several yards in front of us, i.e. something moving beneath the surface. We saw it at the same time and both said Whoa and jammed our paddles into the water, stopping the kayak in its tracks and backpaddling a bit. (I of course assumed an alligator or a plesiosaur or possibly the Kraken.) Nothing appeared, however, and the upswell’s ripples calmed down, and we continued forward into the lake, gingerly paddling over where the water had been disturbed.

Once we were in the lake proper, after a few minutes of exploratory paddling around, I looked behind me and saw, maybe twenty or thirty feet away, a rotund whiskered manatee snout emerge from the water, snuff an audible breath through its nostrils, then submerge again. Nautical folklore has it that sailors of old used to mistake manatees for mermaids; if this is to be believed, then presumably those seafaring types preferred their mythical women lumpy, leathery, and rather on the stubbly side.

I suppose the Lost Lake itself was notable merely for its existence — the shady canopy of the winding water channel giving way to this bright open-air lake, a few hundred yards long by maybe a hundred wide, enclosed here in utter seclusion in the middle of these jungly woods, nothing on the banks but trees right up to the edge of the water, no beach or dock or signs, etc. — but it was not in and of itself very attractive or interesting-looking. It looked and felt kind of dead. It seemed Lost with decent reason.

There was no other route out of the lake, so we turned back the way we came, retracing the channel’s long wriggling path back out to the bay. From there we then aimed the kayak directly at our distant hotel’s waterfront and raced the afternoon’s gathering rainclouds back to it. And very nearly won.

ASCENT OF MANATEE
a flashback to June 2003, Key Largo, Florida

Kayak Bob was all huffing and puffing and twisting and tugging over this padlock, but he could not manage to unlock the lock on the loops of Hulk-grade heavy-duty chain encircling his rack of fruity-colored canoes, one of which canoes my brother and I were attempting to rent from him. We stood there and watched him work. The keys apparently would not turn.

After a few too many minutes of struggle, Kayak Bob threw it in, and he set down the still-locked lock and stood up to catch his breath and jangle his keys in resignation. He turned to us and apologetically told us that since the canoes were evidently off the menu for today, he would instead give us a two-man kayak at the canoe-rental price. Saving us five dollars.

This made me unhappy. I had plenty of canoeing experience, and even a modicum of outdoorsy enthusiasm for the activity, but I had never been in a kayak before, and was apprehensive at the prospect of doing so, since the one time I’d seen a novice kayaker attempt to even get into his vessel, let alone sit upright in it or perform forward locomotion in it, the poor dude had just repeatedly barrel-rolled the thing and dunked himself into ice-cold lake water with such rhythm and regularity it looked like he was being roasted on a spit.

My having observed this event impressed on me the sense that the kayak took some skill and some getting used to, and but here my brother and I were about to get our crash course in kayaking, not in a shallow day-camp creek or a quaint wooded vacationer’s lake, but in a vast brackish swampy Floridian bay the color and stench of a giant polluted mud puddle, a bay absolutely foaming with drunk-captained speedboats and sinister aquatic creatures and ghastly submerged stinging vegetation, back behind the chicken- and lizard-infested Howard Johnson our family was staying at during our two days in Key Largo.

Kayak Bob showed us to our kayak. I looked at it and was 100% positive that we would capsize and be eaten by alligators. I had not really even wanted to go canoeing, having already had my fill of adventure for the day — we’d just gotten back from having spent a few hours snorkeling, and my back was smarting from sunburn and my stomach was churning from all the seawater I drank — but my brother had gotten this let’s-rent-a-canoe thing into his noodle and had then resorted to an old attrition trick from his toddler days, i.e. badgering me over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again whereupon after time my temporal lobe began deteriorating into a soft jelly and I was compelled to give in. All right, I would go canoeing. Canoeing I could do. Now the canoe was gone. Now we would be shoehorning our lower bodies into an unfamiliar, unsteady smallish plastic tube that sat mostly underwater and seemed poised at any moment to roll us both over into the drink at the merest shift in weight or encounter with a boat wake.

But we would not just be paddling idly around the bay. Earlier, outside the little “Kayak Bob” rental shack, Kayak Bob had shown us a whiteboard with a map crudely drawn on it in dry-erase marker, which map displayed an aerial view of the bay’s various small uninhabited islands. Threading throughout the islands here and there were multicolored dotted lines, which indicated the routes you were free to explore via your canoe or kayak: thin, shallow, flora-canopied arterial waterways that wound their way complexly through the islands’ undergrowth and then (one hoped) let you out elsewhere in the bay. One of the islands on the map, the one that’d captured my brother’s attention, featured what was dramatically labeled the “Lost Lake” — a large inland body of water located somewhere in the middle of this island, accessible only via this one tiny water route.

Too sleepy to finish this; will continue it tomorrow or the next day.

COCKTAIL
OTC cold/allergy anti-sniffle concoctions chlorpheniramine maleate and clemastine fumarate did a real number on me today. They are still doing a number on me. I am woozy. Profoundly woozy. The word woozy is beginning to seem right on the edge of onomatopoeia, approximating the noise my doped-up brain must make slipping mushily around inside my skull. I characterized my motor reflexes in a sluggishly typed email today as being: discombobulatedly marionettesque. Everything my eyes fall upon seems to be sort of drifting upward. Nothing loud sounds loud.

REMOVED
This works. Am now typing to you from a new room’s corner, sitting folded into a cozy makeshift workstation assembled from disparate furniture components, desk end-table speakers shelves, things propped up on things, gloriously filled back-to-back bookcases standing within reach, a pair of warm low swan-necked lamps peering down at me from atop the closest case. The ceiling leans down a little; the hardwood floor speaks when walked upon. There is no room but I gather I need no room. With the door closed nothing else exists in here, intrudes, dilutes. All there is is me and you and our letters dancing the distance and lack of distance between us. All but ready to acclimate and begin and depart.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS
I am moving this weekend. Apartment-hunting was a bit of a chore, what with my indecision re neighborhoods and square footage: came down to a toss-up between a sepulchral studio in the Mare Tranquillitatus and a bleak basement 1BR in the Oceanus Procellarum. (Sinus Iridum, Mare Nubium, and Lacus Somniorum are of course the more evocative locales, but they were never really serious contenders, given the commute.) Before I forget, let me notify you of my new address. I have already ordered the labels. Effective next week, you may send your postal correspondence to me at

Scott David Herman
P.O. Box 1, Sabine Crtr
Sea of Tranquility, The Moon
USA

Please make a note of it.