Yesterday, at about 4pm, I crossed Sunset, walking north on Hillhurst. While there had been quite a few pedestrians on the block previous, I noticed an empty stretch of wide sidewalk ahead. Slightly suspicious of the quiet but reassured by blue skies, I walked on, the four-lane avenue on my right.

Just as I came close enough to recognize the Mustang logo in the grill of the only parked car on the block, I noticed another pedestrian jog from the east side of the street to the car, pull out his phone, glance back at me, and begin walking north, not far ahead of me.

I was walking quickly, and very soon, I had come close enough to the other pedestrian that he noticed that I was gaining on him.

He slowed, moved to the far left of the sidewalk, stopped, the backs of his legs brushing the little concrete wall that separated our path from a parking lot, looked at me uncertainly, put his phone back in his pocket, pulled out a key-sized, mostly black object, unfolded it, and revealed, in his right hand, against his right hip, a small but unmistakable knife blade.

Having reduced my speed in response to his abrupt stop, about ten feet of space still separated us, and my first thought was to increase or at least maintain that space without making any sudden movements, so I edged as far right on the sidewalk as possible, readied myself to sprint through traffic across the street if necessary, and kept moving north, past my sidewalk-mate and on toward home.

He closed the knife, put it back in his pocket, and, clearly relieved, asked, "Got a cigarette, champ?"

Still walking quickly, I half-turned my head toward him, said, "Nope, nothing, sorry," and increased my speed a little more, creating more separation and starting to feel my heartbeat.

...

I feel incredibly lucky that that was the first time anyone has ever drawn a knife threateningly in my presence. I feel incredibly lucky that he drew it to defend himself, not to attack. And I feel incredibly lucky that I don't live with the fear of violence that he does.

Thinking about fearlessness today. Admiring it. Conjuring it. Asking it to stick around.

Figured I should blog about it too. By posting the first Pink Floyd song I ever loved....

Fearless is track 3 on Meddle.

Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Cormac McCarthy said that. I saw it earlier tonight at the bottom of a gapingvoid blog post.

And part of me wants to agree. Because the better, the higher the stakes, the scarier.

But a bigger part of me sees the word suicide and doesn't want anyone anywhere near anything that would make suicide a serious consideration, ever. Never ever.

And maybe that's because I've never done anything worth doing. Or maybe it's because I'm not Cormac McCarthy, because I don't write beautifully about scalping.

Highly illegal to post this, I guess.

But why would Faulkner want his words hoarded?

He was "using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail among whom is already that one who will someday stand where I'm standing."

I think that counts as permission to share.

Thought about posting Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.

Turns out I already have. It spurred a little discussion about mustaches. Which is often the goal on this blog.

This song works way better anyway.

Gamble Everything For Love is track 2 on Awake Is the New Sleep.

An hypothesis* I heard last night...

There are three kinds of fear:

1. Fear of injury or pain.

2. Fear of losing (or lacking) connections with other people.

3. Fear of not being good enough.

That seem right?  What doesn't it cover?  How does fear of change fit in?  Fear of mystery?  Fear of the things unknown to which change gives rise?

*Note: An hypothesis?  A hypothesis?  H is a good letter.  Lots of possibilities.

For radical transparency's sake...

But, today, we woke to find ourselves in a world where a child might grow up not fearing the unknown.  I don't know about you, but that scares the shit out of me.

It's not every day that sarcasm leaves you teary eyed.

And it'll be fun to see where comedy takes Barack Obama.

I took a break from the early returns a little while ago and read. 

And I happened to read this:

All colors and all blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies.  It's a breed - selected out by accident.  And so we're overbrave and overfearful - we're kind and cruel as children.  We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers.  We boast and are impressed.  We're oversentimental and realistic.  We're mundane and materialistic - and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals?  We eat too much.  We have no taste, no sense of proportion.  We throw our energy about like waste.  In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.  Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture?

Fun place, this country.

Charlie Dean died in Laos in 1974.  A few months earlier, he had been living just west of Cairns, Australia, with my uncle Kim and Kim's best friend Richie on Rosebud Farm, the commune that Kim and Rich had started a few years earlier.

Louella Bryant, wife of Harry Reynolds, who went to high school with Kim and Charlie, just wrote a book about Charlie, and, a few hours ago, she drove up to my grandfather's house, where she's spending the next two nights.

When Hal, my grandfather, handed me the book a few weeks ago, he directed me to one chapter in particular.  It was set on the Great Barrier Reef, and Hal wanted to see how well I thought the author had described it.

I read:

Eager for a swim, they took turns jumping overboard with speargun and snorkel, careful not to brush up against the hard limestone corals - a gash could be disastrous.  Those aboard watched for sharks and box jellyfish, whose tentacles inflicted fatal stings.  The blue-ringed octopus, the size of a golf ball with a poisonous beak sharp enough to pierce a wet-suit, could kill a man in minutes.  All of the fifteen species of sea snakes on the reef had small fangs with lethal venom, and the barbs on a stingray's tail would cut deep.  If any any of the men was adept enough - or lucky enough - to spear a fish, there was real threat of shark attack.  So, the trick was to keep out a wary eye, and if you hit your mark, head back to the boat and climb aboard with all haste before the sharks smelled the blood.

Not well I told him.  Sensationally.  Hyperbolically.  And totally unnecessarily so.

One of the first things I found out tonight, of course, was that Hal had passed my review immediately back to the author, and, as soon as she connected me to the objection Hal had brought up with her, she wanted to hear more.

Luckily for me, as soon as I started explaining, Hal interrupted, told a ridiculous and tenuously tangential story, derailed the train of thought, and accidentally rescued me.

So I stayed quiet and listened.  Louella talked about Charlie, Kim, writing, and the questions she had been asking audiences on her book tour, and Hal, the archetypal 87 year old ex-politician, raved on about Vietnam and India and philanthropy and government, paying little attention to questions asked or subjects under discussion.

And, quietly, off to the side, I developed a little theory.

Louella Bryant, an author quite distant from the story she's telling, has gathered her events and settings and characters from people like Hal.  She has built her book on material collected from incorrigible storytellers, from entertainers whose language sprays out sticky from the sap of their overflowing imaginations.  She is embellishing upon embellishments, and, when she describes the dangers of diving on the Reef at least, she drifts a dangerous distance from the truth of actual experience.

Maybe.  It's the beginnings of a theory anyway.

I started to tell her about it when I walked her to her room, and we'll discuss again tomorrow night I'm sure.