Of Indolence, Narrative Breakthroughs, and Anti-Semitism

I’ve spent most of the year so far doing absolutely nothing.

The big surprise is that I enjoy doing absolutely nothing. I don’t feel any inner compunction at all to make my life seem more meaningful. I don’t justify my indolence by externalizing the cosmic Nanny persona, telling myself, There, there – you’ve had such a difficult life, such a difficult time of it over the last decade – you deserve a break.

Nope.

I wake up in the morning and think, I’m gonna binge-watch [your favorite TV show starring slightly off-kilter personalities with psychic abilities goes here.] Maybe I’ll get high. Maybe I’ll go for a walk. Maybe for dinner I’ll cook curry. Maybe I’ll skip over the boring math parts in the Alan Turing biography.

I can’t really tell whether this is a phase or a new direction.

But I guess it’s really the reason why if you have ambitions, it’s best to make some headway on them earlier rather than later in life. With age comes this increasing preoccupation with little pools of sunlight. All you really want to do is curl up in them and blink. Like a cat.

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That said, I did actually have a breakthrough this week with the as yet unnamed precog fictional opus.

Believe it or not, the lack of a title and a compelling first line have been serious impediments on this one since those are the two things that usually explode into consciousness when I embark upon a new project, the accelerant that kindles energy sufficient to propel me forward to a fourth or fifth chapter.

But anyway, obviously, Ybel has been through the events at the Buttercup Bakery before.

In fact, she has been through them so many times before that she’s lost count, and that’s the reason why she’s so haunted, so distracted, why she offers up that odd little smile as though the world is playing a series of tricks on her, which she has to pretend are highly diverting.

In most of the iterations, of course, the Buttercup is an upscale eatery. Berkeley yuppies bring their spoiled brats there on weekends. The restaurant’s known for its carrot cake. But at least twice, the Rockridge never became a prosperous neighborhood, the old quarry is still in operation, and the Buttercup is kind of a dive. In one iteration, the Buttercup is kind of a nightspot under a freeway overpass á la Eli’s Mile High Club; in another, as the result of some colossal environmental disaster, it’s a tropical shack on the shores of the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco does not exist.

It always serves the same carrot cake.

And in every iteration, Patrick always jumps out the window after inviting himself over to Ybel’s house to play with her toys.

Ybel’s memories aren’t anchored to chronological markers since time repeats itself for her again and again and again. So she plays out the preordained events in a kind of a daze, wondering why they have to be preordained, making feeble attempts to stop them.

Towards the end of the cycle, she meets up with the agents Stark and DeTomaso; carries the memories of those interactions into the next iteration – perhaps she’s sidelined by a psychiatric hospitalization in one of those iterations so she doesn’t make it back – and finally understands what Stark is saying to her when he leans over amidst the flashing police car lights and casually asks, “Aren’t you getting tired of this?”

That would be the last line of Part One.

The first lines would be:

Objects in motion stay in motion.
Until they hit the ground.

There are still the POV issues to deal with. The events actually read more smoothly if they’re written through Patrick’s POV, but then you’re left with the Sunset Boulevard paradox – it’s very difficult to write a story that’s narrated by a corpse. Particularly by a corpse who’s not germane to the bigger part of the narrative.

It’s trickier writing it from Ybel’s POV since a large part of narration involves the controlled release of information, and Ybel has all the information from the start.

But the Famous Agent did tell me that my quirk of introducing multiple POV characters was very confusing to the innocent bystander a/k/a Prospective Reader.

Yes, yes, yes – George R.R. Martin does it all the time. But Geroge R.R. Martin has considerably more experience at large-scale narrative than I do.

Although even George R.R. Martin, at this point, seems inclined to give it all up and sit in that little pool of sunshine, dreaming the complacent cat dreams of old age.

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Snow event yesterday! I played with the snow-blower and shoveled.

In the evening, we held a tiny impromptu birthday party for C who turned Medicare-eligible. We argued about politics – in a friendly way, of course.

We talked about Sheldon Silver’s arrest.

“There go Andrew Cuomo’s presidential aspirations,” I said.

“Silver got greedy,” said L.

“Well, he’s Jewish,” said C.

I decided that now was not an appropriate time to launch into a tirade about destructive stereotypes. L and C both know I’m Jewish, and that Ed who lives across the street, is Jewish. L and C have nothing but luv in their hearts for Ed and I, I’m sure!

And, for the record, they also make appallingly ignorant characterizations about Catholics.

Nonetheless, the remark disquieted me.

There certainly seems to be a rising tide of anti-Semitism. People who’ve been successfully indoctrinated in the inadvisability of referring to shiftless blacks or greasy Hispanics will still make remarks about greedy Jews. And think nothing of it.