Cat Attack

We’ve got a kitten.  “S’mores.”   S’mores is a few weeks old.  S’mores is a she.  Her claws are emerging and she is learning how to use them.  She’s been here for about a week or so and as it turns out, I end up spending most of the time with this young lady, as I’m the one who’s home most of the time.  

I’ve raised children.  Kittens are different.  Kittens arrive on earth with a preset for certain activity that aren’t as important for young humans.  Kids and kittens both eat, defecate, cry for attention, and sleep.  Check.  But kittens need to learn how to fight, early and always.  It’s cute when they jump on your foot and try to bite it.  It’s adorable when they chase balls of yarn around, but clearly they are in training to chase, feint and catch prey to survive.  This, and escape from lager animals.  S’mores knows somehow to drive this agenda from dawn to dusk.   One appreciates both the allure and the stupidity for trying to raise a tiger cub, for example or any other cute species that might eventually meet or exceeded your own body size.   

Alas, she isn’t sparring with a wise master.  She isn’t even sparing with a fellow feline.  Sparring with me must be odd.  But that’s all she’s got.  I type.  She jumps on my foot, unannounced and begins to gnaw it.  No.  That won’t do.  I’m trying to type.  At this juncture I can escort her outside and close the door or “play” with her for a bit.  I bawl up a fist and gently roll her on her back and borough it into her belly singing a song I’ll call “cat attack.”  (Based loosely form the head in Sun Ra's song "Saturn" from "Jazz in Silhouette.") S’mores digs this immensely.  Should she face off against a large, old bear with a thorn in one foot, she might stand a chance.  She bites my hand, claws my palm and as we pause, runs away and turns immediately around for more abuse.  We do the “cat attack” tune again and it is funny.  I laugh.  She’s cute.  I try to work again, and she has leapt upon my right foot, as I knew she would.  Now I escort her to the door. 

I’ve seen the big tabby cats climbing along the walls in backyard.  I suspect they’re wild and live as best they can off of families that put things out for them and the rats and birds they can catch.  They’re rough survivors who no longer evoke much of anything “cute.”  And what S’mores really wants is teachers like that.  Because if you’re on your own in the Beijing winter you’d need to outsmart, out fight, out run cats like that to get a bite to eat.  Here in the terrarium however, S’mores will keep returning to me for more specialized training in the art of the hunt: bite and scratch the hand, until it feeds you. 

Looming Out of Nothing

You're never quite sure you’ll wind up with a novel.  I’m standing on a bus driving slowly, into the arrivals area at the Beijing Capital Airport.  The plane has seemingly been parked at the airport’s furthest perimeter many, many kilometres from the arrival hall.  Plodding we approach the main terminal, lit, looming out of nothing, and then waddle along down underpasses and through connecting alleys until we are let off at a spot that is still a few hundred yards walk from where we’re heading.  I imagine for a while that more competition would teach Air China to treat its passengers better.  Yeah.  This is bad service.  Why in this, the nation’s trophy airport, arriving on the airport’s flagship carrier, is it so hard to park a plane near a gate?  Realism then beckons.  I remember that I do have a choice of airlines and I don’t exercise it and I regularly return for more punishment here with Guo Hang.  The alternatives aren’t any better.  And cutthroat competition hasn’t exactly solved the service challenges for the U.S. domestic carriers, either. 

But fortunately my aching feet and stiff back are trifles, compared to the sorry lot soldiers I’m reading about. We are off on the island of 'Anopopei' and the folks I’m stuck in the jungle with have it much worse.  Waiting and waiting in a South Pacific downpour.  The battle has been about to start for seventy pages now of Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead.” 

I’ve never read any Mailer.  I’ve considered him from a number of angles.  I’ve heard him speak: sometimes in “When We Were Kings” authoritatively, and sometimes, on the Dick Caveat show, like a violent bore.  I’ve read bits of other things he’s done, and of course considered what many other people have said about him, little of it flattering.  But this, his first work was always lauded and I can understand why. 

My older one was asking about ‘books about “World War II.”  I’d gotten her a used copy of “Slaughter House Five”, when I was home over the summer.   I ended up rereading it myself. That was the horror of Dresden.  And now it is the remarkable tenacity of the Japanese.  These are not the flimsy, two dimensional Japanese who fall like ninepins in the Chinese TV shows.  These are the people who sprang forth and conquered the Pacific in a flash and held on to each rock tenaciously.  And these are men, we find, who missed their families and wondered why they were marked to die. It is strikes me reading this work, how so much of what we assume is normal in this region, this "order" that was established, the current fluidity between some nations and not others, was paid for in considerable quantities of blood.  

In a manner perhaps a bit overt, Norman’s cast of infantrymen and officers collide as American stereotypes: the bitter Irishman Gallagher, the cold cruel Texan Croft, the pensive Mexican “Japbait” Martinez, the drunk hick Woodrow, the introspective nebbish Goldstein.  In a manner perhaps unexpected, they all seem to speak to the contemporary America of the 2016 election with great acuity.  I find myself diving these enlisted men in to Trump and Hillary camps.  And you wonder reading through all the racist, sexist, bigoted vitriol, how America ever voted in an FDR, how it was that Joe McCarthy or J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t simply elected president for life, or that we’ve inherited our democracy, down through to us from a time that was so pungently intolerant.   War like a flash of lightening, illuminating everyone's raw make up.  

Caught My Attention

I recall reading about someone who said he was late all the time and couldn’t help it.  Another person, perhaps the therapist, asked:  “Do you arrive on time for plane flights?”  “Yes. I do.”  Replied the tardy man.  “Well then you can help being late.  You just don’t concern yourself about the people you are making wait more than your own needs.”  A deeper order then of lateness management must be plumbed if in fact you do miss planes.  I fly so many of them the odds for missing one go up, I suppose.  It usually only happens to me once every year or so.  I had it happen two weeks ago and then, again, today. 

One trip influences the next.  Last week I made my way out to security early and was forced to corral into a thirty-minute queue.  I returned to the idea with every bend of the cattle procession, that, I could be sitting in a cafe back near check in.  In China the way the queue system works, is such that if you arrive at security when your boarding has already been called you can get in a special expedited line.  This time, I enjoyed my time in a cafe, writing and . . . then talking, on the phone.

I was a few minutes beyond boarding call, when I headed down the escalator.  It was then that I noticed I had brought my luggage with me.  A bag one could easily bring on board that I usually check, but hadn’t.  I showed the guy my ticket and mentioned that my plane was boarding and was shown to a smallish line of four people.  I made it through and then, was stopped as they found my toilet bag, a container of Kiehl’s Silk Groom.  This stuff is precious.  It’s the best thing for guy hair and its now, only available when I go back home.  It ain’t cheap and I usually make two tubes of it last a while.  They pulled my tube out and said it couldn’t go any further.  I pursued through the predictable process of pleading, joking, and asking I could just squirt a bunch of it out to pass regulation.  Nope.  I could squeeze some into another, smaller vile and take that.  OK.  I had such  vile and proceeded to try this.  They then offered me a chance to sign a form and claim it later.  Fair enough.  I’ll be back tomorrow.  Why not?  I accompanied a pleasant older lady over to another counter to do this, chatting as we went. 

We got to the ‘register your illicit goods’ counter and the lady there took one look at my ticket raised her eyebrow and said: “You don’t have time for this.”  This caught my attention.  I’m thinking I still had at least a good five minutes.  Remarkably, the older lady simple told me to shove it in my bag and go.  I did this and ran over and found the gate closed.  And, I learned there and confirmed later that doors did not close ten minutes before departure, as I’d have told you yesterday, but rather at fifteen minutes before boarding.  Oh.  I’d a made it but, it seems, the rules done changed.  If you’re going to game the system, you need to know the rules.

Landed then a few hours later than intended just as the sun set.  I proudly walked from along the moving walkways listening to Willie Colon’s remarkable “Eso Se Baila Asi”, which sounded as mighty and distinct as it once did walking along Rivington St.  And then a call came.  I was using 4G data.  The person couldn’t hear me well.  I called back with Skype.  Still couldn't hear me.  He called back with FaceTime and that didn’t work.  I was in a long cab queue and figured I’d try again.  He couldn’t hear me.  And then, it dawned on me to try him on We Chat.  Then suddenly, it worked well enough to talk.  There would appear to be a particular genius to making poor connections work behind the Chinese firewall, which Tencent have mastered and all international services are flummoxed by or made to suffer a flummoxing by.

Form Literal Floods

This driver hasn’t shaved in a few days.  Neither have I.  He’s been efficiently cutting up the side lane of Jing Mi Lu and we’re paused at the penultimate light, before the entrance to the highway.  He seems tired.  This job must be cement.  I’ve suggested a few directional matters.  He’s taken them all in silently.  Another cab just cut in front of us, with a move that would have elicited a Ginsburg howl back home.  This guy was nonplussed. The two-hundred and thirty-eighth dick move I’ve endured this afternoon. All in a day’s work.  

The other day I came up upon this exit in the opposite direction and the entrance I’m now approaching was completely backed up.  They’d closed the entrance on account of a dignitary’s visit.  Our sun goes down earlier now.  It pops back up later and later.  This will all get worse.  I must check as it is almost certainly quite close to daylight savings in the USA.  Then we’ll be back to calculating eleven hour (or is it thirteen?) hours of difference with our time out here.

My older one is reading “Like Water for Chocolate” at school.  My wife had read the book when we visited Mexico a few years back.  Years ago it seemed like everyone was reading Laura Esquivel’s novel.   But for some reason, I had never dug in.  My daughter’s teacher was kind enough to lend her a second copy so I could read it when she did and so I set aside some time this weekend to read it. 

It was pleasant to suddenly be in Mexico for a while where the revolutionaries are civil and the mothers are tough and the food preparation is meticulous, evocative, the love repressed and then destructive.  Happy as well to spend time in a novel of magic realism where tears form literal floods and flatulents can be fatal.  I was drawn to Tita, but like most readers I spent most of the twelve months explored wishing she’d tell Pedro to go get lost.  That they died making love in the end wasn’t terribly sad to me.  But that the decent, loyal doctor was thwarted and disposed of, after years of waiting, in favor of the opportunistic Pedro, this was melancholy and that this doctor’s name was “John” elevated things to proper tragedy.  

  

More than once though, I found myself wishing for the magic realism that had left me gobsmacked.  It’s been years since I’ve read Gabrielle Garcia Marquez or Isabelle Allende.  Rushdie’s "Midnight’s Children" had that quality, as did Mo Yan’s “Republic of Wine.”  Beijing traffic reports are ripe for magical disruption.