Up Past the Serial Hate

I don’t usually write at night.  I tend to be a sleepy sort, unable to maintain lucidity, for long, as ten turns to eleven.  Concentrated activities like reading, act as a kind of hypnotic Quaalude that yank at my eyelids and invite the lunacy of dream thoughts into my waking hours.  If I read aloud, as I do for example to my daughters, before they head to bed, I might last another paragraph or two.  If I stand upright I might be able to continue for what, another page or three, but the darkness is looming, ready take me off, suddenly, at any moment. 

Writing isn’t much better.  The most likely sign of sleep’s advance is that I awake to notice I’ve drifted off with my thumb or some other finger hopelessly committed to the final sentient key I’d pressed before sleep won.  TV is worse.  Standing, talking, might perhaps extend things for a bit. 

Tonight though, I’m up.  Odd.  I just put my little one to bed.  I read her a synopsis of the “Tempest” from an old Shakespeare collection for children.  She went out like a light.  My wife’s asleep.  My older daughter is still up but she’s reading in bed.  And I am miraculously not tired.  On the mix is that haunting old Billy Strayhorn standard “Angel Eyes.”  This, from the 1962 release “Essence” which has the trumpeter, arranger Don Ellis sounding confident and spacious.  Earlier I’d had on the broad orchestral works of Mssr. Ellis from later in the decade where he utilizes so many remarkable time signatures and sounds like a cub-scout leader in between songs.  Born in LA in 1934, I find it remarkable that this master of irregular time signatures experienced an irregular heart beat problem and wrote about the experience as somehow transcendent, before he died at the age of 44.  This, as has been said, being the only time signature, he never played in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Ellis

Outside tonight it is pouring.  I went out with a glass of Chianti and stood beneath the canopy and just felt the water make its way down to me. Off in the distance rumble of thunder and faint flashes of lightening.  I talked my younger daughter to go out and stand there with me for a bit, which she did.  My wife turned the light on, but I asked her to turn it off. 

I was working this evening while my wife and younger daughter watched TV with my daughter's friend from next door.  She had a show she wanted to watch.  The theme . . . beautiful Chinese women successfully resist Japanese invaders.  Brilliant.  Why didn’t I think of that?  There’s a lot you could do with an original plot line like that.  You could have the beautiful women experience peril and then, through superior intelligence outwit and kill the Japanese.  That would be unexpected and rich as a vein for exploring Chinese history and salving national wounds.   I go to look.    Having 坚壁清野[1] the smart Chinese are once again winning.

Perhaps it is the Chianti.  I took to yelling out from my room: “Are the Japanese soldiers OK?  I’m worried about them. They’re very far from home.  Is anyone helping them?  It sounds like they’re in trouble.”  Our poor neighbor probably thinks I’m deranged.  My wife stretched her head within view and unveiled a hairy eyeball.  “Enough!” 

I went back outside to the rain and stood there.  Across the lane there was a TV on.  I couldn’t really see what it was they were watching, but I imagined it as yet another anti-Japanese theme.  And I imagined it being seared into the eyeballs of half the nation, a sixteenth or so of humanity, night after night after night.  Here is who you are supposed to hate.  A “two minute hate” is not sufficient.  We’ll provide you with serialised, streaming hate to top up on night after night after night.  All the ladies are beautiful, all the partisans are brave, all the Japanese have buckteeth and they can never win when determined Chinese intelligence is applied against them.  Hooray.  Night, after night, after night, on every television in the country.

Arise, Chinese contrarians. 

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[1] to fortify defenses and raze the fields (idiom); to leave nothing for the invader / scorched earth policy。