more Theroux...

I figured that Paul Theroux title from yesterday needed a little explaining...so I went to Taps for lunch again and did just that.

So I should probably explain that title from yesterday. I started reading Riding the Iron Rooster wednesday night. Evidently Theroux, back in 1986, decided to journey from England to China via rail. Why he did this remains somewhat of a mystery to me. Every railroad book of his that I have read thus far make rail travel sound uninviting, an exercise in patience, tolerance, and iron will. His descriptions make it sound as though he's doing this as a sort of warning, so that his readers don't make the same mistake as him by taking a trip. Theroux seems to have no wonder at the human condition, no fascination with human behaviour. Doubt, annoyance, and frustration

Paul Theroux is a pessimist...

Wrote this over at Taps:

Makes for a great warm up to the blog writing back in the office later: a pint of California Gold, a BLATT sandwich, and writing at the bar. Great escape from the slow morning of the office. Those break-room type lunches, where we all sit around and discuss something other than what's been playing on my mind for a few hours before heading back to our desks just seem so trivial. A whole lot of discussion about nothing. Somtimes I feel like I don't fit in with anyone outside of the university type academics.

the following tuesday...

So I'm having a difficult time getting into the habit of this. The writing itself isn't the hard part...I think it's that I've gotten so used to writing physically that to type out my stream of consciousness seems somewhat disingenuous, as though there's something lost between the weight of the journal and paper versus the soft click of the keyboard. Plus I can sit on my porch and journal, while here i'm surrounded by steel grey carpeted cube walls, which do little to lend themselves towards reflection. I've still got the same music going though that I would have coming through the open windows at home. The Miles Davis Quintet, Winter In Europe 1967. Bag's Groove is up next. Bag's Groove is one of those albums that, from the first few notes, puts me somewhere far from wherever I might physically be and gets my mind out of it. It's the sort of music that i expect to hear coming out a window while i walk up the narrow staricases from the Embarcadero to Coit tower. Up through the little alleyway gardens and shadowed benches, little bamboo watercatchers and mossy tiles hidden in little corners that I never even knew existed. It's not the music for the top, looking out at the bay or the bridges, standing on top of the city. Nor is it the music for back down on Market or at the ferry building, too hectic and distracting and busy. Rather , it's the music for those little hidden spots, the quiet places you never knew existed and yet that some anonymous person in one of those windows with a cat in it tends to, reflects upon, and somehow has put a quiet energy into without ever knowing you'd share in it.

Prelude to a beer tasting...

Sat down last night and read the ending of Garden of Eden again. Hemingway's last work. Whet I never realized was that there is. or was to be, a second part of this that never was published. It was unfinished when he killed himself, and came to Charles Scribner Jr in a paper bag, along with the mostly finished manuscript of Islands in the Stream, and most of A Moveable Feast. I can only imagine the gold mine he knew was in that bag, and being the first to delve into the final workings of that mind...

monday...

I'm bored at work...really bored. Bored enough to start the blog that I'd been meaning to start for, oh, since I started to get bored at my last job. Actually 2 jobs ago I started once which immediately failed, since i quit the job and then had things to do.

See, geology has that ring to it where you'd think "ooh, he's a geologist. He must live a life of high adventure and rollicking good times, out there in the mountains for weeks at a time. How rustic...", and then swoon. Which does happen, and is the reason that most geologists won't tell you that it's a whole lot more time sitting behind a computer than you'd ever think. I never thought it when I was in school either. The mountain part still does happen, it's just when I'm not at work!