I've told you about Carbo; he's an angry man.  Always has been, and will be. There's nothing he enjoys more than needling people, than undoing them in some way.  His father was a college soccer referee, a little bitty guy and famous for giving out red cards at the beginning of games.  Normally, a referee would give a warning and then if that wasn't heeded, a yellow card, and if that didn't instill order, red. But Carbo's father didn't give a damn about protocol and he would wave a red card with no warning. He told Bernie once he did that because he wanted the players and coaches, and of course, the fans to know that he was in control, that he was never going to be invisible.  He wanted to be part of the show....  But above all, he liked to piss people off.

We were on the phone on Halloween and Carbo asks me what I'm doing.  I shrugged.  He said, you get down here, I want to show you what these fucks are doing. He was so excited, I couldn't say no. Where are you? I asked.  So I go down to Market Street.  The place is on fire, weirdos galore, and there's a long line for a rock concert.  Right away I notice somebody wearing a sandwich board, which looks like an I-phone.  Very elaborate costume.  And the person in the sandwich has a doll in his hands and he's sticking the doll the way people do when they're texting. But he's doing it with pins so it's actually more like voodoo.  I get closer and who is it but Carbo. He's walking up and down while the people in line are texting and he's doing his own texting. He stands next to this group of boys and starts 'vexting' — that's the term he told me later.  'Yea, I vext 'em. After you text and sext and do any fuckin' thing, you vext. Put the curse on 'em. I hate those people.'

Meanwhile, the kids didn't really notice him; occasionally they would just turn and watch him and maybe laugh and they have no idea he's ridiculing them. He's just another weirdo.  I told him, let's go get a drink. Fuck that, he said, I want to piss some people off.  When he's like that, there's nothing you can do, so I just left him there, vexting, and went to a dive I know around the corner.

“It’s the ‘fake life’, she began.  “That’s what I call it now.  Don’t you think that’s a good book title?  I know it sounds a little down and maybe too simple. But don't you think?  It’s the ‘friend’ who calls to talk to you for five minutes, but there’s no conversation.  They tell you all about their lives, and it’s usually about one problem in particular.  Something won’t start or turn off; maybe it’s a mental condition or it's the kid, the car.  Menstuation. They make a few observations and that's the conversation.  There is no conversation.  And it all began on such a high note.  You were so happy to hear from this person but then just as suddenly the joy disappears and you’re thinking, why am I even friends with this person?  And the answer is because you don’t have a lot of friends and everyone is telling you to stay in step, stay tuned, stay up, get the latest gadget to stay in touch.  “Otherwise, we worry about you.” So you fake it up. All I really want to do is say, “I love you” and hang up before I can be disappointed.  Just take that one true thing, throw it out there, and leave it…. Here’s the worst, though.  I have these friends, and they’re well meaning.  They’ll call me and say, so Cassandra, how are you and we haven’t heard from you in a while and we just hope you’re getting out.  And you think to yourself, ‘you hope I’m getting out?’ That’s the last thing I want. Going out is just like the phone.  You’re so excited at the thought and then by the time you walk in the front door you just want to keep right on going, through the foyer, the den, the living room, the kitchen, the guest bedroom, and out the back door and back to your car.  So what I do is this:  I lie. I say, ‘I went to the most fabulous party the other night. I don’t know why you weren’t there.’  And they’re caught off guard and you make up some scripty thing about the agent you met or the cute guy who swept you away and actually did all the things he whispered he would do, and isn’t that unusual, because usually men these days always never do all the things they need to do for long enough and then they’re back to sleep in a flash and you can’t even wake them up to send them home.  But see I don’t have that problem anymore. Yes, I am withdrawing from sex, but at the same time I’m longing for romance, and then sometimes I’ll get in heat but then that diminishes and it’s just the thought of romance that’s enough. That’s what I realize. I’m happy with just the thought…. But here’s what happened this morning. I was going out for a walk, as I do every morning, I go out to the university, and there was this woman standing in the street weeping.  I don’t know what was the matter.  She lives across the street. I don’t think she's Hispanic; maybe Portuguese, but I just went up to her and hugged her and we just stood there for about 10 minutes in the middle of the street.  Incredible.  I felt so good later and it just stays with you for the whole day.”  There was the sound of ringing in the background. ” Okay, my friend, I love you.  Gotta go……

Often, there is a metaphor to capture the essence of calamity.  For the attack on 9/11 and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, the metaphor is the 'falling man': that anonymous business man falling from the North Tower at 9:41 a.m. on that September morning, stopped in a remarkable photograph by Richard Drew. And stopped also by Don DeLillo in his novel, Falling Man — "then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life."

Everyone and everything was falling then. Falling from and away. Symbolic landmarks,  institutions, policies, the illusion of being isolated from the rest of the world, all falling to smithereens. People falling to the cement but also to fear and anger, to mistrust, and at the same time unity, for a moment, but then inevitably perhaps, to faulty judgments, to war and ambiguity, to a hunger for clarity and security, never satisfied.  It was all summed in the zeitgeist horror of the falling man.

The revelation from the metaphor was a reminder that like the man jumping out of the building, forced by fire or blown out, we have no control of our fate, and to make matters much worse we may have lost the faith to help try to win it back.

Now, ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State — the very lack of an agreed-upon name is emblematic of confusion. The metaphor here is the beheading.  That's a zeitgiest horror. And if there is just one beheading, to match the falling man, it's not that of the two American journalists, or the British aid worker, or the French tour guide; no, for the moment it's the beheading of Colleen Hufford, 54, a worker at Vaughan Foods in a south Oklahoma City suburb.  She is nearly as anonymous as the falling man and her death is equally horrific. That she is a woman tops the horror.

And the revelation? It is that we have all lost our heads, and so survive by other means, by runaway emotion, by passing passions — and thoughtless rhetoric.  Which, of course, is true in America as well as Iraq and Syria.  In that sense we are cut off from our humanity, from ourselves, form reason, from evolution itself.  How can we argue for evolution when some of us are still feeling their way through the Dark Ages.

This is the other problem with suicide.  First, you give up your life for a pittance, the cost of a few flimsy synapses gone awry. Then you undermine everybody else. You put a fine Moorish arch on a cave-like little doubt. And, frankly, it becomes another key hole for the wrong key. Of course, it's the last thing on your mind when you're beyond recall, when you're gathering your belongings, whatever thoughts those might be...  That's the problem, particularly in this case, with someone so beloved.  Is that too strong? Cherished, certainly... The problem is that you set the trap for others also at wit's end, a gossamer away... "My God, if he gave in, what hope have I?"

But then by strokes of luck, completely out of the blue, you make your way into the dark, that lovely blackening, to your movie seat, to watch Calvary, the new Irish film by John Michael McDonough, best known for The Guard.  Starring Brendon Gleeson, in this film as well.  First, a cop; now a priest. Written and directed by McDonough, which is always a wrong for some filmmakers I know, who insist you must never direct your own script.

But discard inside double-A baseball: here you become the old, wise, once-married priest, in the hell realms, in amongst demons, all thoroughly possessed. Each by turns renounces your church, your priesthood and you. And finally, there is no escape and you are stuck with your integrity. In the end, your sad fate is that you do care for your flock, and not to fuck, and as fucked up as they may be. And so you grasp your Christlike moment, you endure that, it's your fate and desire, although suicide by any other name.

Still, the story rings true, even if the faith in that story is not enough to save you.  Even you.  No solace that somebody already did what you're doing, to save you from it. That's the real problem, you have to know what you're doing at a moment like that, but how could you. That's the absurdity.

But if you care to see it that way, if you're willing to stop watching the waves break and just walk home, then it's enough to get you through another day.  You just wish the poor man, with all of his dexterity, had seen it, seen the nature of true demon possession and how ephemeral that is, and how hopeful faith can be, not religious faith, but human faith, all that was born in the bang, the slime, the cave paintings, all of it.

Peet’s at Franklin Square. Two men at the next little round table. Big guy; little guy.  Ethnics.  Little guy: no distinguishing features, barely visible, impossible to remember even as you're starring at him.

Big guy: jowls in a baby blue t. With a tourist gallery of low-brow body painting. Don Quixote hanging on one arm.  SCOTUS on the other, in big letters. And then in the neck area, where the tie knot goes Lady Liberty with big tits holding her scales but gingerly.  Some writing you can't read. Code maybe. But not prison scratch.

"You know what I mean?" says BG.

LG nods but it doesn't look like he knows. 

"It's absolutely atrocious.  Some of the investors are fucking suing us.  And this is what it is, these fucking bastards have no fucking patience.  Know what I mean?

LG nods but he has no idea.

And they're saying, 'can’t you walk us through some of this shit?'  And I'm saying how hard is this. We have an idea for a site. The idea is you sell this to people who are dying.  What do they need? Hospice, a lawyer, mortician, a hug from the nurse, calls from people they knew in grade school. They need somebody to take care of all  that.  That's what we do.  Deathcalm.com.  We do everything you need in those last days, months, what have you.  One stop shop.  You go out feeling great about it because you know, everyting is taken care of.  Boom.  Secure. The kids, the wife, the dog.  All done. Boom.  But now Dick Tracy doesn't get it and so we have to explain and they're saying but you told us something else and we said, what something else, this is what we told you.  Take it or leave it and you said, and I'm quoting, "We'll take it."  How you gonna miss with this.  Everybody dies right. Everybody needs things taken care of.  We have a mailing list of people on medicare, people in the hospices.  Eberybody north of 50.  We send out a note. How hard is all this shit?"

"Speaking of the Holocaust," someone said when the movie, a German comedy, had concluded, "apropos of nothing, what do we think of these new Himmler letters?"  

Our hostess nearly fell out of her chair in a paroxysm of laughter. " 'Speaking of the Holocaust', she mimicked, and added, " 'Am off to Auschwitz. Kisses, Your Heini.' "
"Did he actually write that" the somone continued, referring to the newly released Himmler letters.
"Absolutely," replied our hostess. "Love you mommy. Your Heini.'"
"Your heinous," she added and now, in an instant, her temper switched.  She is not a little bi-polar.

"Yes, I read that too," said someone else getting up from the sofa to stretch. "Didn't he actually call his wife, 'Mommy'? How bizarre." 

"The unbearable lightness of being," our hostess replied, referring to Kundera's novel.  No one in the room seemed to understand the connection, and Margrit was in no position to explain. This late at night she's gone to the moon, even without substances.
Her husband pushed a button and the movie screen rolled up into the ceiling. 

In the silence, people in the room drew on their cigarettes and brandy. Our hostess scratched her right forearm where years ago she'd had a six-digit number tattooed.  You can barely see it now. At one point she decided she didn't want to live with the number after all and tried to remove it. The number had been on the arm of her mother, who was among the last Jews sent to Sachsenhausen from Warsaw in September, 1944 — when there should not have been any more deportations, and the Russian army was idling just on the other bank of the Vistula, and the allies were dropping money and supplies, nearly all of it landing in German hands.

Margrit is herself an expert on the Holocaust (And one of the peninsula's most distinguished psychoanalysts). She's read every book, seen every film, and visited many of the historical sites in both Belarus and Poland.  She can tell you all about Anna Klein, the chief supervisor at Ravensbruck, and Arthur Greisser, as well as those particular horrors, Reinefarth, Kaminski, and the incomparably evil, Dr. Oscar Dirlewanger, who you may remember started out as a convicted pedophile.
A friend of hers told me once that Margrit has erlentless nightmares where she is at the train station at one of the camps and the Gestapo captain is signaling, 'this way'; 'that way.' Over and over, 'this way'; 'that way'. And all the while the line is getting shorter and she's summoning up all her wiles, recasting herself as Scheherazade, and it works.  But always only for a moment and then she's back in the line, dreaming up ever newer, more provocative stories....   

The other day my friend Carbo and I were catching pastries down at Tartine's, and talking about the difference between Wolf and Hustle, and whether Scorcesse had gone over the top with his portrait of Wall Street.
Well, it's partly metaphorical, I said.  They didn't actually do all those things. Right?
"Oh yes they did," said Carbo. "Absolutely they did. I did. I was there."
I hadn't known that.
"I was an insurance broker down on Water Street and there was all the fucking and coke you could handle. And doing lines on the girl's ass? Sure. The breasts. The candles. It all happened. That wasn't exaggeration."
He had to stop to take in his almond butter croissant with sugar on top. And perhaps out of habit he began sniffing the white sugar off the top of the croissant.
"You really need a hundred dollar bill to do this right," he said. "But here's the thing, all those people, you know what?  Actually, you didn't want want to spend any more time with them than you had to.  That's the problem with the movie; he made those people a lot more interesting than they really were."

This happened several days earlier, he said.  He was flying in a small, low-wing, monoplane up the Nile River.  On one side, the white cliffs of Dover, and set in the chalk were huge tablets, hundreds of feet tall, each filled with Egyptian Hieroglyphs. The tablets were endless; the cliffs stretched off to the horizon. At the bottom of each tablet was a translation. Like a caption. But they were difficult to read and he had to keep circling.  The messages were like, "I come from the underworld." But then there were also crazy ones like, "Hey, tell Vinny I want the ova-and-unda."
"Is that what tipped you off?" I asked. "That it was a dream."
He shook his head and went on with this story, which was that when he woke up he was wheezing like mad. He'd been ill for several days.
"You know how sometimes when you wheeze," he said, "you hear things in the rasping. Well, I heard someone crying for help. Yes, in this squeaky little voice but it was clear as a bell.  There was no distortion. Crystal clear! And every time I took a breath there it was the same word, and so for a while I thought, 'well, it's just some kind amazing anomaly', but then I heard, 'Help me.' It was saying help me, and that's when I realized I was into something weird and some part of the exoskeleton must have come loose or God knows what. At that point I just wanted to get back in my plane and continue my journey...  But I woke up my wife and asked if she could hear it.  She got

Naturally, there was a question of whether to go at all, since we'd not seen her in several years. And the truth is, she was never a close friend, although my wife may have felt a distance I did not.  And so yes, we said, we'll go, we'll do it, why not. After all, it's the right thing.  And so we did, rolling up to Santa Rosa, listening to the game, the sound of the fog horn after each touchdown, and simultaneously trying to see through the nature of her struggle, and imagining what we would say to her, and how long we would stay....

At the hospital, we walked down one long corridor after another until finally we reached her room.  It was crowded, everyone moving around like communicants, coming to the rail, backing away, she, perfectly still, now completely disconnected,  save for oxygen.  She looked different of course, death was tucking her into its embrace and removing the last bit of furniture in what had been a castle of a woman.

Bones and kidneys were now baked from the chemo.  No white blood cells left.  For weeks the doctors had held out hope.  Well, we'll see, they said. We'll take it day by day and see if we can't round the corner.  But the corner was already rounded.  And still now, as we sat there, the oncologist was telling her husband that maybe tomorrow, if the white blood cell count went up, they could get back to the chemo.

Everything to keep the woman alive, at all costs, with no thought to her real condition, or to the preparations she needed to make for such a crossing.

Her husband was seething.  He'd believed the doctors for too long.  The nurses knew, of course. Now, he was ready to smite them all.  He's fired, he said to me after the oncologist left the room.  He doesn't know it, but that bastard is gone. 

The woman herself lay still, surrounded by her paintings and children, her lips chapped hideously, accepting slivers of ice, with the tranquilizing music in the background, and above her bead, photo panels in the ceiling showing the sky and leaves in autumn, the self-administering morphine in her hand. And for moments she was there and good, still with humor and clarity, to underline both the tragedy and the naturalness of it all.   And the meanness of it, we agreed later.

For a moment she recognized me and I held her hand.  She was telling me something but I couldn't hear, the sound of words was so subtle. I leaned in and still couldn't quite make it out.  "In another life," she kept saying and squeezing my hand, just barely.

A few days after he died my father sent me a message. It arrived through a family friend named Ulrich who for years would drop by my father’s house to have a drink and play backgammon.  This was 25 years ago. Ulrich always wore a school-boy blazer and an ascot; he’d once been a Broadway actor and appeared in several musicals. Later, he became a horticulturist. He married my father’s long time literary agent, Lea, and eventually they left Hollywood for a secluded life up the coast, in the foothills above a place called Zuma Beach. They had a fabulous garden, and occasionally we’d drive up for the afternoon to see it, and also to have a ‘Martini Bugler’, which Ulrich named after the Scarlet Bugler you find in the chaparral of the coastal mountains. He would give you a chilled glass, plunk in a huge red Moroccan olive, and then like a priest at the rail mumble, “This is my body of the New Testament given for you and for many, for the pleasure of our sins….” A couple of those Buglers and you were done. Afterwards, we’d go across the highway, down to the beach to swim...

In the eye of the eye of the beholder,
And a worthy beholder of skillful means,
Still another eye, behind closed gray lid,
the heart’s aperture, a mindful glass,
It sees no parody, no ill, no anomaly;
only the trapeze and two ariel artists,
mysterious, fragile, like two small ships
plying their trades, leaning on a breeze,
and a tight reach across the faces below.

Western Approaches, Eastern Empire;
Northern Alliances, Southern Command;
Lady Drake drawn from the four corners,

In your admiral’s blue tunic,
top button unbuttoned;
The scent of salted skin and windless passage.
And above it all, that watchful smile,
Part beacon at land’s end. And yes,
To mix all metaphors,
twin hearts ever on a reach,

But joined in beauty and sensibility,
A completely unchartered anchorage,
Known only to black freighters,
men soaring by on their machines,

‘It’s all alright,’ you want to say,
Listen to a plumb bob come to rest.

Believe your sextant’s eye and fix….
“it will be alright’  as you always say.
Ever grace, gracious and kind.

Grief, coming out of nowhere.  Something you forgot to do years ago, maybe tried and couldn't; the lines were busy, now suddenly it's here. Appearing like a letter slipped under the door. The writing is so familiar. But is it genuine? That's always the question: where is this coming from? 'Have you some identification, sir?'
'I'm sorry, I don't.'
And that's the fear. But then you look at something as plain as a library's beige brick wall, and for no reason, the tumblers fall into rhythm. And suddenly breakdown, Edvard Munch time, you've been hit, all hands will be lost, and thank god because you'd begun to wonder about that, and whether you'd ever record that death properly, accurately, in full proportion.

Letter to the Near East:  ... And for the countless time will you tell us again where is the intersection between the ideal and real in the 'Arab world.' Tell us once more how we are to reconcile such things as Assad's joke about how he should have been nominated for the Nobel Prize with yet another ghastly video of a paramilitary execution; and reconcile those with an alluring new pop hit — or the life and times of Malala, although of course, she is not Arab...

There an infinite number of extremes to throw in the pot.  And of course don't forget the interminable lights of Cordova and the wisdoms of Ibn Khaldun.  But how do you make sense of any of it?

Oh, what you've brought to the world. Oh, the romance entwined in your gift; and oh, the horror. And still again, looking in the window, you wonder at the reawakening and you shudder.  If only someone would intervene and change it all... Isn't that the hope?  That some outsider, or some kindly tyrant come and clamp down a piece.  Like the Prophet did.

It never occurs to you that you are your own Prophet.

But looking at the paramilitaries, Hezbollah perhaps, dragging the wounded civilians, all men in this case, out of the back of a lorrie, then shooting them and howling in the glory of it, you think, 'but why not just let them all kill each other, why interrupt that dream.

And you think, you should be so much more ashamed than you are, than perhaps you are capable of.

And Islam?  It's become your veil but nothing else.

When will you have had enough of your predispositions.  When will you understand the real meaning of surrender....

Here are directions to Dante's Inferno from San Francisco. Take Hwy 280 south to San Jose. Look for the 9th Circle exit and follow that to "Round 2".  Not 1 or 3.  They're easy to confuse. From there go to the corner of Sunol and Auzerais. People in the neighborhood don't pronounce it the way it sounds.  They also can't describe where the entrance to the Inferno is. You'll have to find that yourself.  The word above the door is nearly unintelligible. Look closely: Mater Dei Towing (not the actual name but the same shenanigans). This is Round 2. You've arrived. Ask for Virgil. He'll be expecting you.  He doesn't look anything like you'd think. Go inside. It's very dark. He'll leave you at that point.

The place is nearly the size of a football field, with the ceiling as high as an old Hollywood sound stage.  Off to the right you may notice Count Ugolino gnawing on the pate of his one time colleague, Archbishop Ruggieri delgi Ubaldini. You remember the story of those two!  Well, that's why the nickname for this part of the Inferno is "Treachery."

Naturally, you'll take in the very tasteful decor.  There are may be 30 limos for hire, for all the local Kardashians; and then a dozen wrecks for ordinary people. Everything is neat and lined up. There's the sound of tow trucks getting ready to go out; engines revving, radios blaring. And heavy metal coming from somewhere else. There is also a large mobile home, at the end of a ramp — for those who arrive in a wheelchair. This is the devil's office. There's fake grass here and there. And fake plants. And a giant fan. And the lights from the mobile home make you think it's night, even though it's broad daylight just out the door. There's something vaguely cinematic about the whole thing; a place Rod Serling would appreciate immediately.

Now why would you ever come to such a business? Let's say you are in car accident. It's not your fault, and this is a no-fault state anyway, and here these people have been kind enough to tow your badly wrecked car to their business. But there's a little more to it. Hwy Patrol officer, Broderick Crawford at your service, complete with raspy, angry voice, arrives on the scene and with all the charm of a mortician's dead father asks for your information. 'What happened here?' 'Exactly how far were you from the car in front?'

Now let's say that there are three cars in the accident and it will take about 15 minutes to write up a report from each driver, do a visual inspection, say any inane thing that comes to mind, and offer no sympathy to the poor woman standing beside her totaled vehicle, and after all that, complete the report.  You're an accomplished officer. You've done hundreds of these.  And while no one notices, you call up Count Doldrum down at Mater Dei Towing.  You've asked the weeping woman who has no idea what's going on if she's okay. She has no idea but she doesn't want an ambulance so you follow your procedure.  You tell the Count to get right over with a truck.  You scratch my balls, I scratch yours. The truck comes. But the truck can't leave with the lady's car until all the reports have been completed.  That's the gimmick.  I call you as soon as I get to the accident, knowing it's going to take at least an hour, and you come right over and start that clock, and nobody's the wiser. It's all official. It's on triplicate. It's like clocking in.

The candy for the towing company is $200 an hour.  And remember they always round up.  Two hours and 15 minutes is two and a half hours. Two hours at 35 minutes is 3 hours. And then you pay an $80 storage fee per day.  Now let's say this accident happened at 7 p.m.  Well at midnight that's one day.  Any part of the day is a whole day.  Before you can say Ruggieri delgi Ulbaldini you owe the inquisitioners $380.

Now let's say this is a Friday night. The storage facility is closed until Monday, unless you wish to pay a $100 gate fee. So let's say you get there on Monday first thing — because you're donating your vehicle to KarsforKids, if only to get away from that ad, which is like stuffing earwhigs in your ears. So you get there on Monday and you ask the lady behind the counter what the damage is and she says that will be four days plus $300, so that's $620.

You mean 'what's the damage' facetiously because there are all sorts of damages already associated with this wreck. Time lost, job endangered, vehicle destroyed, marriage made uninhabitable. Insurance won't cover any of that or reimburse you for letting the fake priests take you away.

Are you kidding you want to say. But you look at the lady who is a 400-pound chunk of flesh and tattoo.  And lip rings, cheek jewelry, all the lewd and lascivious ideas you can record on one human's body. Diderot's human encyclopedia. And clearly a totem in this part of the world.  You look at her and suddenly all questions and answers are absorbed. Her presence is too overpowering. You have to take her in.  Like coming into a dark room late at night.

Naturally you want to appeal.  No problema. It means waiting for the boss. He's not back from the gym. But he will be. And then suddenly there he is. Just back from the gym, with what looks like two bodyguards, UFC types.  Not caucasian, not asiatic, not black. All three genetically wired together in a video-gamey sort of way. With muscles drawn as it were.

The boss is friendly, forties, ear ring in the left ear, in black attire, black court shoes. You wonder what sort of gym he goes to. The S&M Gold Gym perhaps. 'Where we put your imagination on the wrack and you love it.'

You say to him, 'your driver quoted under $200 for the tow. Your telephone person agreed to $200 for the tow.' And this lady, and you are hardly able to look at her, now says $300.  How can that be? That doesn't seem fair, you say.  And how can you make five hours into a whole day. That is black magic. That's unfair.

By golly.

And later you have to smile, as though fairness was ever a value in the 9th Circle. You forget where you are kind sir. Oh you endlessly naive bastard; and so you make your case. And along the way you try anger. You've already pleaded with the driver, so add pleading. You throw in indignation and outrage, and all of your most cutting Black Irish charm. You throw in ideas and threats and the meaning of it all. You nearly make a rude remark about Rush Limbaugh. But finally you just look at him. You make him your judge. And now everyone is looking at the boss. And he's loving this moment. Oh my God, does he do these moments well, is he not Ray Liotta, bless his pock-faced soul; the power of the owner of a big tow company in a mid-sized town, with his little 'agreements' with Broderick Crawford, with his power over his folks, just out of prison or wherever: meth heads, car thieves, fraudsters and gangstas. He's got them, and they're all smiling faintly. They know this scene so well and they owe him.

Well maybe there's hope, you think. There isn't and you can see what this but you can't do anything about it. He looks still again at this homies standing with him, he's got that quizzical expression, this is when you have to watch out, and that weird, rippling little smile, like something coming apart, and then with the speed and force of Queen Mary's executioner, he comes down on you.

There's always a new trick. A year ago, three Chinese ladies approach you in the street. Out in the Avenues. They tell you bad news is coming and the only way to deter it is to let them bless your moneys and valuables. Now, in Fremont, the trick is that a man or a lady, or both, come to the door. Usually, two people. They are in uniform; they're from a utility.  PG&E, Recology, sewer cleaners, telephone line maintenance, animal retrieval. They tell you there is an outage in the block caused by a runaway python. Oh my God, you say. Could we check your backyard and we'll take care of it? Of course you can, please come this way, and as you lead them to the backyard through your house the less memorable person in the background is picking up whatever there is, a wallet, a phone, an ipad, an itouch, a knick or a knack, a watch, cash, and the more memorable man quickly looks through your backyard and nope, I don't see one, but it's important that you stay in doors and be careful.  Do you know where your pets are? And suddenly the two people are gone, in their truck, but I don't remember what it said on the side, but then i noticed things were missing. I have a terrible fear of pythons....  How did they know that?

Notes to myself on creativity, based on Richard Diebenkorn's, "Notes to myself on beginning a painting"

1. attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.
2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued — except as a stimulus for further moves.
3. Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.
4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
5. Dont “discover” a subject — of any kind.
6. Somehow don’t be bored — but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.
7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.
8. Keep thinking about Polyanna.
9. Tolerate chaos.
10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

"Do you know what I'm saying? she asked again, and over her shoulder, a view of all the world, from Feiffer Pt., 120 degrees of horizon, and now with the evening coming in, ocean and the marine layer became indistinguishable. As she appeared in her way.

"Do you know what I'm saying," she asked still again, always looking to her right and up.  Is that the indication of a liar? I couldn't remember.  Or else she was like a renaissance figure, those longing eyes and her arm outstretched, to a swan perhaps.

In fact, a clothing designer, at 43.

Still, I kept asking questions, and to those who say, 'you ask way too many', I respond, 'but don't you see that everyone wants to be asked, everyone wants to be on Fresh Air?' And not asked, 'what do you do', but 'who are you?'  Young people don't ask those questions of each other these days.  So she herself implied.

"I'm telling him the story of my life," she said to someone standing close by, a championship skateboarder it turned out. And she meant it.

She asked if I'd seen the Charlie Rose interview in June with John Galliano, the bad boy designer from the House of Dior who made anti-semitic remarks in 2011 and not just once — someone else who has never read the history of Poland during WWII, and not of the ghetto in 1939, but of the rest of the city in July and August, 1944. I hadn't seen the interview but since then I skimmed it. Galliano seemed beaten, undone, a man capable of only modest reflection.  And what was the point? He admits he's an addict and in recovery for the rest of his life, and he's trying to make amends however he can.  And so what. Charlie Rose's curiosity this time seemed an unworthy bet.

My father is an alcoholic, she went on.  Along with one of her brothers.  She went on at some length to say she could understand perfectly well that Galliano, the addict, could say such things and yes they were horrible, but to ban a man of so much talent for the rest of his life? That seemed unduly cruel.

I didn't agree but said nothing, and then like a loyal brushfire the conversation jumped back to her father, and how she remembered so well every nuance of his affliction, she knew just when he was drunk and coming by the sound of his feet on the stairs, the pattern of his step down the hall, the way he turned the doorknob, the very first sound of his voice, and all the bits in between...

Later, when asked, she said really didn't want to have children, and now it was too late anyway, although she spends time volunteering at an organization that helps the children of addicts.

So there have been all these abductions and stories of missing people. The BBC journalist in Gaza, the 3 soldiers taken prisoner south of Baghdad, a four-year-old girl last seen possibly in Morocco, and then Ingrid Betancourt, who has now been held for close to 5 years by the FARC in Columbia. She was a Leftist candidate for president; they are a Leftist organization. Go Figure. A man escaped a few weeks ago and said that because she has tried to escape 5 times Ms. Betancourt now wears a shackle around her neck, which is linked to the other prisoners by a chain.

I am thinking of a film in which all these people appear at the same time. Here is the micro screenplay....

Less than an hour ago, I returned from Beijing. Yet was I there at all? I have no proof. I may have been. But don't ask me true or false questions.  One day let's say I may have gone to the 18th floor of a building in downtown.  In the middle of the day, you could barely make out buildings a few blocks away; buildings that are home to all the world's greatest corporations.

If I was there I had no sense of the city whatsoever. The sun was no more than a yellow peephole in the gloom.

"It's complicated," someone said. Referring not merely to the city, referring to everything Chinese. To simplest thing, to the tiniest detail. Such is the refrain in China these days. Or has it always been. But perhaps especially a refrain among Chinese-Americans, caught by the endless paradoxes, the discrepancies; above all, the desire to go home and yet once there the longing to get away; the strangeness of the place even to those who know it. The forbidding quality... And all the while life underground, a Blade Runner's world of modernity and small comfort.

"It's complicated", she was saying one evening, just the two of us in a restaurant a thousand miles west of Beijing.  She was about to say something personal, as though to a friend, which she reminded me I was not. But then she held up. It's complicated, she said again.

If that's true it is because you can never let your guard down China (I say that, having never been). Even for a moment, even though you would like nothing better. Betrayal is on every corner, on the tip of your tongue. And so you have no choice. Otherwise, you will be compromised. Someone will have an edge over you.  Or else you will have to go back to the beginning. Or worse they will leave you and your anonymity will be all the greater.

Such is the rhythm in Beijing. But I was never there. I intended to go; I was all set, I had my ticket, I had planned and gathered expectations, but I was never there. Such is the rhythm of thinking you were in Beijing — although not in Ningxia Province, 13 hours by fast, overnight train to the west, and then a bus riding north to where the Hui farmers live. They have little or nothing to hide, and so their dramas are huge: rain, good health, enough food to get through winter.  Forget the corruption, the government reservoir never finished. I was there in spirit certainly, but I can tell you honestly I have never been to China.