01 July 2003

Parallel Turns

Tropical Storm Bill, the second-named storm of the young season, waded ashore down in Louisiana yesterday. We got hourly updates on the progress of the storm surge on our Blackberry PDAs just in case we had to deploy the resources of the Department in response. Although I think that mission belongs to some other Department these days. All that moisture is expected to track along a big banana that will arc from the Gulf Coast right across the top of my apartment in the next few days. It is a parallel to the crazy weather we have been having for the last year.

Maybe we will have some rain for a change over the weekend of the Fourth.

Highs are expected to be in the mid-eighties today and I heard that comedian Buddy Hackett, the knockoff Lou Costello, is dead at 78. He died at his beach house in California and had been in the business for over fifty years, a headliner in nightclubs when there were such things. There seems to be a lot of departures lately, some odd parallels, at least a luminary a day from the worlds of entertainment and politics achieving room temperature. Or maybe those are two categories of celebrity that mean the same thing. But those deaths have all been expirations from natural causes. From Al Jazeera comes word this morning is a cascade of ambuscade. Four U.S. troops were injured in an explosion at a mosque in Faluja, west of the capital. That was the early news and contained no report of American death, though as many as five locals were killed and many reported injured. Local sources blamed a U.S. rocket attack, which is wildly unlikely. Then an update changed the complexion. There had been another attack on a Humvee in Baghdad and three soldiers were reported dead along with their Iraqi translator. It was either a car-bomb or a rocket propelled grenade. Stamping out this insurgency will be an ugly bit of business indeed, one neighborhood at a time said Vicki Barker in an exchange with her Bush house correspondent Jonathon Marcus who is on the scene.

'There is a sort of Catch-22 in this" he said with the grave nonchalance of an engaged noncombatant. "To root it out you must take action which will only inflame the situation." I thought about the parallels to the Battle for Algiers, an urban conflict the French won with efficient brutality on their way to losing the war in Algeria to Ben Bella's Secret Army Organization.

In the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong there were thousands of people on the street protesting the imposition of a new law against sedition. The demonstrations coincided with the six anniversary of the reversion of the former Crown Colony to the PRC. The street action was intended to embarrass Beijing. That is considered a bad career move if you happen to be in China. Which, as I understand it, Hong Kong is, now. A parallel to that lone Chinese man who stood down the tanks coming into Tienamin Square. I wonder where he is these days?

I let the news wash over me. It is gray on gray outside, the humidity palpable. Last night had been our Rollerblading lesson. The Boss is on the road, and life was sweet all day, save for the strange calls from the West Coast. The three senior people in the office got them, identical in tone, calling for a bureaucratic jihad against the kids who run our high-tech Command Center, our flagship operation. I've found that the only way to deal with these periodic calls to holy war are best treated with deference and the classic Washington slow-roll, complete agreement followed by parallel and complete inaction. I figured the multiple calls were made to ensure that someone would follow his direction. I dutifully typed up my notes and circulated them to the cognizant staff officers to set up the inquisition for Thursday. Then there was eerie calm and I left the ofice at 5:45pm, early.

Which is how I felt as we learned parallel turns on our skates. I am making real progress. This week I figured out that I had been putting on my knee and elbow pads upside down. The skies were ominous but we got over an hour of skills training. We are headed for one more Monday lesson and then the big Skate the Monuments outing on Friday night.

I bring the skills of winter to this hybrid skoprt. I am a aggressive downhill skier, addicted to the pull of gravity and the carved turn. The greatest skill in skiing is the mastery of the parallel turn, and then the joy of linking the little turns into endless flowing motion, off the moguls and down the slope skis hissing like biting skates. I found to my great joy that I can carve hard slalom parallel turns around the cones and still accelerate while doing it. Exhilarating. The pirouette is a concept I am still working on. There is a particular turning move we worked on last night. It requires one of those counter-intuitive moves, like leaning forward down the hill to control your skis. Take either skate and let one lead the other in a little scissor maneuver. Then lean the ankles over to side one edge of the wheels. Then lean into the leading skate and let the body rotate in the direction you wish to turn, arms up for balance just like you are carrying a tray of Labatt's Blue beers in a Canadian bar.

I felt my girlfriend's absence as profoundly as I felt some of the people that were actually there. I have determined that I would prefer not to live without her any longer. No one suffered any significant crashes, though one of our doctors, an ex-hockey player, catapulted himself into a large cardboard shipping crate near the dumpster in a rousing finale to the lesson. Soaked with sweat I drove home in the convertible, an eye on the skies. There was no heavenly event to preclude a dip in the pool to cool down, and the lifeguard was the cute little girl from Prague, in the Czech Republic. Many of our pool staff are from the former East Block, and the demise of that system is now getting so long ago that she was only a Young Pioneer for about six months before the youth group died with the regime. She is seeing the U.S. this summer before returning to study acting, all the way from the Shenandoah to New York.

I swam and left just before the gate slammed closed at the end of the day. I ate something absently over the sink and drank some vodka. Then decided to lie down just for a moment. I did not turn on the television when I came in, since I have my TiVo now, the digital recorder that could theoretically record all my favorite TV programs. If I programmed it. But they say that the digital recorder has the capability to actually change your life. And for me it has. The knowledge that I could be recording all my favorite shows made me realize I didn't really have any and it has liberated me from watching the television altogether. Because it is all there, recorded in an analogous but non-parallel time.

When my eyes opened again there was the sound of crashing and booming outside. I glanced at the clock and saw it was just after midnight. I had slept hard, exhausted from all the turns. I got up to turn out a light and was pleased to see that the TiVo was doing something, watching my television for me. I opened the door to the balcony to look at the storm and smoke a last cigarette of the day, or the first of the new one. I no more than brought the flame of the lighter to the tip when a tremendous crash and a blinding flash of hard white light enveloped the building. The roof had had a connection with the clouds and a hundred thousand volts had rushed up through my building and blasted into the air. Parallel to the other bolts out in the darkness, but dead-on for accuracy.

This wasn't spectacular the way some storms are and there is no parallel to them in my experience. This was like an RPG round hitting three floors above. I waited until I was sure that no parts of the building were going to come down and the power was going to stay on. Then I stubbed out the cigarette, patted the TiVo on the way and went back to bed. The knowledge that the parallel universe was being fully recorded made all the crashing and booming just fine.