WFJ Book Club # 8: The Hunger Games

 I sometimes wonder why, in a world where young people supposedly never read and the printed word is fashionably considered obsolete, the most visibly popular fiction seems to be from the "young adult" section.  We had the long decade of Harry Potter mania, which was mostly fun and helped turn a generation of children into sometime-nerds.  On its heels came the dismal twilight of, well, Twilight, which was much creepier and nearly ruined vampire fiction forever.  Regardless of their relative merits, books like these and their many imitators have sold many copies and made their authors very rich people. 

Why all the popularity?  I think we can say, without speaking to the quality of any particular book or series, that young adult books are written at a level that can be clearly understood by a typical high school student.  It follows that, mechanically speaking, they are not particularly challenging reads for anyone looking for something light and entertaining.  They are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the hungry consumer who doesn't actually want to cook anything.  And you know, there's nothing wrong with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!  I don't really care for them myself, but they are certainly tried and true.

I had one such sandwich recently, digested slowly over about a month in audio form (the latest in sandwich/book delivery technology).  Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games is, like many young adult books, a story about "young adults."  The basic premise is of a nightmarish future America, ruled by a totalitarian government that calls once a year upon a handful of teenagers to fight to the death on live TV, to entertain the masses and remind them of the power the government wields.  It is, you might imagine, pretty depressing, as the heroine (Katniss Everdeen, sixteen years old) spends most of the book dreading, avoiding, or inflicting death.

It's not hard for me to realize why The Hunger Games became popular, because I like it pretty well myself.  It's a very competent piece of science fiction that doesn't get too hung up on the speculative science to tell a compelling story.  It is filled with violence but doesn't really glamorize it: most of the violent deaths occur "off screen," and much more time is devoted to the more mundane aspects of survival.  Best of all, the book is intelligent, critiquing social institutions and reflecting the harshness of inequality.  There's little holding back against the powerful and the privileged.

The prose of The Hunger Games is not especially artful.  It is effective and communicative, but not subtle or very interesting on its own.  If a character makes a sarcastic and patronizing remark to Katniss, she will go on at length in her narration about how the comment was especially cutting because it was delivered sarcastically and patronizingly.  It isn't awful, although one wonders how Katniss, a girl of few spoken words, can maintain such a detailed first person, present tense monologue at all times without being stabbed by a fellow contestant in the games. 

The generic prose style has some strength: it doesn't usually get in the way of what is otherwise a well-plotted story.  It's not exactly perfect, but it moves from place to place in a series of credible events.  The story never drags or lingers in one place too long, and is seldom repetitive. It has the forward-thinking pace that a good adventure story demands, and it keeps the action rooted in the plausible.

The book also has a number of interesting supporting characters, but the nature of the Hunger Games competition does not allow the story to do most of them justice.  Of the twenty four teens fighting for their lives, Katniss manages to have real conversations with only about four or five of them, and some of the more compelling ones are not given nearly enough time to develop.  Katniss herself is a good lead character, though she is too consistently lucky for the good of the story.  In a game that is supposedly about killing off the entire competition, she is never forced to murder anyone who isn't clearly set up as a "bad guy." But she is capable and intelligent and easy to root for, without being idealized to the point of annoyance.

As frequently noted, the games themselves are a cruel mixture of the Olympics, ancient gladiatorial contests, and reality TV.  In fact, the most fascinating aspect of the book is the weird disconnect between life or death moments of truth in the arena, and the morbid voyeurism and vapid celebrity culture outside.  "The Capital" is a term with many meanings in The Hunger Games, but two are primary: a center of absolute political and economic power, and the home of a privileged class of people who regard the suffering of the lower orders as potential entertainment.  They tend to have Roman names (like Flavius and Caesar) and speak with ridiculously affected quasi-British accents, which of course are common shorthand for imperiousness and superficiality.  But the Roman and British empires are history, and Collins' story was written against the backdrop of America's imperial adventures in Asia. There's not a lot of question as to who she's actually critiquing.

Katniss's weird imperative to constantly seem loyal and even grateful to her oppressors in the Capital, even as she seethes at them in her heart, puts the real plural in "games."  There's never any doubt that Katniss, who hunts with a bow for a living, has the ability to kill her opponents.  The open question is whether she can survive the machinations of the Capital, or win the support of her audience by affecting a compelling personality.  With her every move recorded on hidden cameras, the book recalls 1984 in predictable ways.  When Katniss does rebel on camera and defy her oppressors, her actions can be edited out from the broadcast, or spun in a more acceptable light.  The goal is not to destroy Katniss outright, but to first make her into a celebrity in the process: that means redefining her image. 

From the selection of the Hunger Games contestants to the mutilation and slavery imposed upon political prisoners, the book is dotted with instances of cold, inexcusable cruelty by the powerful, and contrasted with the drudgery and plight of the poor.  In fact, the games themselves are a kind of ritualized class warfare, waged by the rich against the poor.  The contestants are raised up, and one by one knocked down at the capricious whim of the game makers.  Whether even the winner has any say in the matter  is the most politically significant issue as the story comes to a close, setting the stage for further conflicts in the book's two sequels.

All of this is rather ponderous to think about, but it's lightened by the accessibility of the text and a few standard elements of the young adult genre.  There are a few moments of humor and mild sensuality to lighten the gloom, and a love triangle for all the busy shippers in the audience.  But these are thoughtfully integrated with the story's central themes: Katniss's romantic feelings are as subject to media manipulation as any part of her performance, and the question of who is truly in love with whom remains somewhat unanswered by the end of the book.

So, is The Hunger Games worth reading?  In answering that question, I find myself confronting a bias.  As a well-read, proudly literate man, I instinctively believe in a hierarchy of high and low literature; books for teens are not often grouped with the high.  But that's a prejudice, and I think The Hunger Games offers more intellectually than anything that could be considered a base form of literature.  I don't want to call it a guilty pleasure; instead, I'll call it a welcome surprise.

There's a line in children's art and literature, between works that respect the dignity and intelligence of its audience, and those that do not.  The same should be true of art and literature for teenagers (not to mention adults).  Suzanne Collins may not be a "great" writer of prose by a more elevated standard, but there is a sincerity and depth to her story that demands a modicum of respect.

A note about the audiobook: the story I listened to was narrated by Carolyn McCormick, of Law and Order fame.  Having never evaluated an audiobook before, I don't know exactly what grounds I should use to judge her performance.  All in all, the experience was something like a cross between an old-timey radio show (minus the awesome sound effects), and simply being read to; being quite used to reading independently, I found that a small bit uncomfortable.  McCormick adopts a distinct voice for nearly every prominent character and speaks their lines with a certain degree of nuance and intonation, but there are limits.  Is it possible to read a line like "Noooooooooo!" in an audiobook context without sounding horribly, horribly fake?  I'd like to think it is, but my heart goes out to McCormick for trying and failing.

The Pet Sounds Sessions

I don't think it's far-fetched to say that discovering Pet Sounds, the 1966 studio album by the Beach Boys, was one of the happiest finds of my life.  I first came across the album in its entirety when I was fourteen, on a long airplane flight, through tinny earphone speakers and a crackling barrier of static; I don't believe I listened all the way through.  When I was seventeen I bought the CD, curious to verify the rumors I'd read of its artistic brilliance.  Alongside Brian Wilson's recreation of his lost masterwork, Smile (which I discovered at about the same time), I listened and I listened, and I was soon satisfied that the rumors were true.  The band that I'd been lead to believe was largely inconsequential had made a work of art that I wanted to carry with me for the rest of my life.

Listening to Pet Sounds changed the way I thought about art; in many ways, it made me really think about art for the first time.  I realized in a moment of clarity what beauty there was in desire, loneliness, and sorrow.  There was life in those feelings, spilling out of my stereo in rays that illuminated the room with glorious harmony.  There was license in Pet Sounds for me to feel those emotions, rather than deaden myself to them, or bury them where they couldn't be seen.  In time my whole worldview came to be colored by these songs, and I heard echoes of them in my life and everywhere else.  And whenever I felt truly sad, and I often did, I could listen to those songs and feel the same life affirming force like I'd rediscovered them all over again.

It's pretty obvious that I love Pet Sounds; I've baffled many a roommate with the depths of my devotion, but even more casual acquaintances have heard me preach its gospel.  This year, for my twenty fifth birthday, my girlfriend bought me The Pet Sounds Sessions box set, a four disc compilation of outtakes and alternate versions.  At that point we had only known each other for about six weeks; but in that short time, she seemed to have no trouble determining what would touch my heart the most.

To say I was happy is an understatement; I was positively inarticulate.  It was as though I had the vocabulary of a child, which was just as well because it felt like Christmas when I was ten years old.  The one thought I managed to express coherently (apart, perhaps, from boundless gratitude) was that we needed to listen it.  Right.  Away.  God bless her, she agreed.  I don't know if she could hear the album quite the way I did, but I wanted desperately for her to hear the heartbeat of the music that was so incredibly close to mine.

In a certain sense, there was very little in the box that was new to me.  I wouldn't describe three discs of sessions highlights, studio chatter, and a cappella tracks as essential for casual listeners; as for the album itself, I still have the same CD I bought nearly eight years ago.  But that didn't matter to me.  For one thing, I am exactly the sort of hardcore fan who is meant to listen to this sort of box.  More than that, I the box set is a way for me to reaffirm my connection to the music, and the special place it holds in my library.  I won't try to convince everyone in the world that they need to buy this box, but I do want to talk about what makes it worthwhile for me, and why I'm glad to assign it precious shelf space.

Disc one contains a stereo mix of the original album, which had never been done until 1996; the Beach Boys did all of their 60s recording in mono, for aesthetic and practical reasons.  I'd heard it before, of course; the CD I already owned contained the entire album in both stereo and mono.  As to whether the stereo is better than the mono, that is a question I've turned over in my mind multiple times.  When you've listened to them both as many times as I have, there are marked differences: the lack of double tracking on the lead vocal in You Still Believe in Me, or the removal of the quiet studio chatter from the bridge of Here Today are only the most obvious changes made to the stereo version.  I find both of those changes to be more or less positive, but I much prefer the mono version of God Only Knows; it seems to have a more restrained, intimate, sound than the stereo.  I'd rather not be forced to pick between them; suffice it to say that whatever the abstract concerns of a purist might be, the stereo remix is expertly done.

Spread out over discs one and two are highlights of the recording sessions for each of the thirteen songs from Pet Sounds, plus their finished backing tracks, sans-vocals.  Also included are sessions for Trombone Dixie (an unreleased instrumental), and Good Vibrations, which was meant for Pet Sounds, but ultimately held back and rerecorded from scratch.  It's this section of the box that I find most fascinating, because it reveals so much about the creative process: there's Brian, tweaking arrangements and guiding to completion the ingenious compositions he'd made in his head, with infectious enthusiasm and humor all the while.  The backgrounds themselves are stunningly beautiful and sophisticated, and I was even startled by a few of them.  How could I have never noticed how angry those horns sounded in the chorus of Here Today?  These songs contain worlds, and it's almost always worth following the path of any one instrument in the whole arrangement, because each is full of clever surprises.

Disc three begins with the isolated vocal tracks from each song, and they make a decent listening experience on their own.  The Beach Boys could sing a cappella beautifully, but these aren't a cappella arrangements, and unaccompanied voices always sound strange.  Still, these tracks represent the only contribution by the non-Brian Wilson members of the band, apart from some lyrics and a few guitar parts.  There's no mistaking that it's his album though and through, but the sound they produced when singing together was by no means worth losing: on an album noted for the technical achievement of its arrangements, the sound of multi-part harmony is always the defining instrument.

The Sessions end with a collection of demos and alternate versions, which are mostly of historical value rather than a pure listening pleasure.  God Only Knows never needed a saxophone solo, and hearing Mike Love make an attempt at the lead vocal of I'm Waiting For the Day is something between bizarre and unsettling.  On the other hand, it's very interesting to hear Caroline No in its original key; the released version was sped up by a half step, and while that may not sound like much, the difference is enough to make the song sadder than ever seemed possible.  As for Hang On to Your Ego (an early version of I Know There's an Answer), it isn't terribly different from the final product, but it does have a more interesting title.  This section of the Sessions is probably the least essential, and it requires a high degree of knowledge and familiarity with the band to really appreciate. 

Finally, disc four is the album itself: Pet Sounds in the original mono.  It goes without saying that it sounds good, because it always has.  You Still Believe in Me continues to rise into the heavens like an earnest prayer.  Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder) still sounds like the hidden music of silent, post-coital bliss.  I Know There's an Answer vibrates with nervous alienation and paranoia, even without the explicitly psychedelic jargon that originally informed it.  And sometimes, I still tear up when I hear the heartbreaking bridge of Caroline No.

Brian Wilson was twenty four years old when he produced Pet Sounds.  It shouldn't be possible to make something so timelessly beautiful with so little life experience, but it wouldn't have been possible to make Pet Sounds without the sensitivity of youth.  Given the economic realities of the music business, it would have been easier not to make this album.  But miraculously it exists, and I'm forever grateful for that.  It's the crystalline standard of pop music: a transcendent representative of the genre, and a window toward what lies beyond.

Learning Languages with Duolingo

I think we, as humans, take language for granted.  We spend our whole lives talking and writing and otherwise producing an endless string of words, but we do most of it on autopilot.  We treat it like a sterile, practical medium for ideas, without stopping to appreciate the beauty of the medium itself.

Isn't that crazy?  A simple analysis of language is an absolutely brilliant and wonderful thing: it makes fascinating questions in philosophy accessible to anyone with the ability to hear or speak.  What is the real relationship between sounds and the things they describe?  Why do we use the sounds we do?  How do these sounds actually get put together?  Spend a day thinking about these things, and you'll begin to see how language is possibly the single most interesting thing that humans have ever invented.

Of course the best thing about language is that there are so many of them.  With thousands in existence we have a vast number of possibilities to consider in our musings.  A tree may be a tree, but it's also een boom, un arbre, një pemë, and any number of delicious sound-concoctions.  And it's not just words: relationships and events can be symbolized in any number of ways, depending on which language you use.  Learning multiple languages can give insight into the nature of meaning itself; and I get chills just typing that!

Being fascinated by languages, but limited in my knowledge, I spend a great deal of time looking up etymologies, foreign words, and translations.  As rewarding as this is, it's also very time consuming and leads to a lot of retreading of familiar ground.  Much as I'd love perfect knowledge of every language, I can barely claim meaningful knowledge of two.  Quick recall of at least a basic body of words would help my linguistic explorations tremendously.

All of this is a painfully indirect way of introducing Duolingo, a website which promises to teach languages quickly through simple translation exercises.  It's currently still in beta, and I waited a long time to get invited in, but it's something I think most people should definitely get in line for.

I have two Duolingo accounts, each of which I use for slightly different purposes.  The first one is dedicated to Spanish, a language I studied in school for more than five years, whose basic grammar and vocabulary I am comfortable and familiar with.  The second is dedicated to German, a language I know only through generalizations.  These are the only languages presently available, but the sign-in page promises French, Italian, and Chinese very soon.  I initially believed that each account could learn only one language, but that is because I am a very silly person who doesn't read everything before he gets started on nifty projects.  You can learn as many as you want!  Hopefully they'll have more than five choices in the future, but considering the scale of work necessary, I'd call it an adequate start.

Spanish of course is a very useful language.  As a sometime classroom teacher in public schools, I often encounter students who come from a Spanish background.  Understanding their language is a clearly valuable skill.  The case isn't quite as strong for learning German, but that isn't really the point here.  Learning languages for their own sake is what draws me to Duolingo, but the site is also there for you if you only want something practical.  There's no reason that fun and useful can't be one and the same.

You progress through the system by completing a series of translations, incorporating text and spoken words. Vocabulary builds up slowly, and it's always possible to mouse over a word to find a list of possible meanings, so there's very little pressure to memorize.  Learning the words by heart is obviously the goal, but this happens through familiarization rather than cramming. 

Once you get pretty good at the canned exercises, you can try your hand at some real world examples from foreign language web sites.  Duolingo will hold your hand, offering literal translations of every word, but assembling them into a grammatical and natural English sentence can be tricky regardless.  User submissions are being used in the actual process of translating these sites, so there's a real tension here between sticking to the literal meaning (to conform with what is "correct" by consensus) and coming up with something a little more idiomatic.  Most of the users seem pretty on the ball with their efforts.  A few, however, could probably use a few more lessons in writing their first language.

Duolingo is, of course a fantastic way to learn a new language on the cheap and on your own schedule.  But all good learning requires discipline, and Duolingo's primary mode of discipline is the guilt trip, as delivered by their cleverly named mascot, Duo.

To quote the website: "Learning a language requires practice. Duo will cry if you don’t practice every day."  My guilt is steadily rising.

I think Duolingo is pretty damn awesome.  I'd like to see it grow, both in number of users and in number of languages.  It's not hard: it's actually very inviting to use.  It does require some level of commitment to actually get anywhere with it, but that goes without saying. 

Refreshing my Spanish skills has been mostly old hat; my greatest obstacle in that regard has been typos committed while answering too fast.  But learning German has been a very stimulating experience indeed.  I'm still on the basic vocabulary, but it's filled with cognates and morphological similarities to English, and learning them has answered some of my lingering questions about the relationship between the two.  I've also spent a lot of time repeating that das Mädchen isst einen Apfel, but you've got to crawl before you can walk.

So give Duolingo a try, everyone.  Revel in the joy of learning new words, and maybe think about English in ways you never have before.  It might not inspire as much curiosity in you as it does in me, but it is a fun and easy way to do something that's usually much harder.  That's got to be worth checking out.

The Prettiest Blog

Let's be honest, this isn't the prettiest blog.  I'm not going to pretend it is, or offer a conceit as to why, hypothetically, we might pretend it is, as though that could prove some larger point.  That would be a silly thing to do, and blogging is serious business.

But even so, wouldn't it be nice if it were?  Supposing I had the design sense to actually produce an appealing layout or color scheme or, God forbid, a logo?  Perhaps a more appealing default text, or a more readable flow might bring some joy to the proceedings.

Sadly, I'm not a visuals guy.  I'm more of a goofy words and sounds guy.  Strange noises get in my head, and after a fitful period of teasing and re-contextualization, they turn into blog words.  Blog words are a lot like regular words, except they echo endlessly into the meaningless void; regular words, being sounds (or physical symbols), generally drop out of existence in the lack of a physical medium.

See what I mean?  I do crazy stuff like that.

The point of all this is that my blog is not optimized for good looks.  But that doesn't mean that it couldn't be, or that I couldn't try harder.  In fact, lately I've been trying to do just that.  Months ago I made some archive pages for the top of the screen, for Essays, Reviews, Fiction and Poetry; just the other day, I finally finished putting all of the relevant items on those pages.  All it took was, like, two hours of work!  And most of that was dawdling and procrastination.  But it got done, and it helps bring the whole blog together.  Things like that just make the blog a little prettier.

And you know, there's other things I can do to make it prettier.  I could trim all of the links sections, move some templates around; hell, I could even have a guy who knows colors help me fix the visual stuff.  Because I do know a guy.  I know a couple.  And I'm sure they'd have opinions if I asked.

Oh, and also, more content.  That's kind of the whole point of all this, right?  The internet (or the Internet, as it pretentiously insists on being capitalized) hungers constantly for new content, and rewards us when it is fed.  The rewards are abstract and often of dubious value, but it's nice to feel needed.

This month will probably see a few more reviews, as there are some things I'd like to do some analysis on and spread my thoughts.  I've probably mentioned this before (I'm pretty sure I have), but writing reviews is hard.  If you like something, it's hard not to praise it to death.  If you hate it, well... genuine, juicy hatchet jobs don't always come easy to me.  And of course, the tendency toward abstraction is so overwhelming, you can end up writing sentences that only barely qualify as English.  The words are all there, but the meaning is not so very much.

I say "you" because I assume at least someone else has these difficulties, but I really mean "me."  You don't have to assume I was talking about you.  In any event, I want to get better at reviewing.  So I'm going to practice it a little bit on a couple of different things.  If I get really confident, I might try it on something I don't like!

Once I've gotten those reviews out of my system, I'll get back to generating really original content, like poetry and fiction.  That is the ostensible reason I do this, after all.  It's probably vanity and it might be a little weird, but above all else, I like the idea of having a written corpus associated with my name.  Organizing all of my work on those pages, I started realizing that I had actually produced a few things I'm genuinely proud of.  If I've got nothing else in this world, I can at least say I made some art, in my own way.  I put in a little thought and a little focus, and I made something a little good.  Maybe even a little pretty.

I think I'm mostly talking about Rabbit Bar.  What a cute little story that is!  I'm proud of that one, I don't care what anybody says.

Chairlift - "Met Before" Interactive Music Video

First of all, thanks to my buddy Bau Kim for bringing this video to my attention.  He writes a music-sharing blog called Tastes Bad, and it's pretty good, so you should definitely read it if you want to know what's what and which in the indie music scene these days.

A bajillion years ago when this blog was new, I gave a little review of a neat interactive music video by a Spanish band called Labuat.  Being a lover of music and a lover of games, you can imagine that I think an interactive music video is just about the coolest thing ever. It's not really startlingly new or original anymore, and it may not even have been back in 2009, but I don't think it will ever stop being just about the best way to have fun with your speakers on.

Today's joyful bit of internet ephemera comes from an electropop group called Chairlift for a song called Met Before, with a video that is evidently about the multiple universe interpretation of quantum physics, as it applies to chasing after attractive people on a college campus.  Put the video in full screen, then use the arrow keys to pick a direction whenever the arrows appear on screen.

It took me three tries, but I managed to unite the heroine with a ruggedly handsome fellow who chases storms (or something) in the woods.  Other paths took me to the brink of a major breakthrough in neurological research, as well as a crazy psychedelic snowflake freakout in the sky.  That is to say, there are many interesting choices to be made.

Interactive videos make good music sound better, by forcing you to involve yourself in a way that's really just a step below playing the instruments yourself.  I'm not especially keen on electropop, and if you aren't necessarily down with warbly synthesizer madness you may find the music to be a little weird.  But a great melody is a great melody, no matter how you record it, and the use of synth in pop music has come a long way in the past few years.  I'd listen to this gladly, even if I didn't get to press buttons and direct the singer's world as I saw fit.

The choices you get to make are generally straightforward; they usually seem to be about moving toward or away from someone.  The results of those choices come in a remarkable variety of tones, but they always seem to hang together as a complete narrative.  That kind of attention to detail is a real joy; you never really feel dissatisfied with any of your decisions, even if curiosity compels you to go back to the beginning and find out what might have been.

Speaking of which, I just played it a fourth time, and wound up doing science with a cute girl and a swarm of bees.  You can't tell me that's not a good time.

St. Valentine's Day

Like many people, I never used to like this holiday.  Much like romance itself, Valentine's Day can be very cruel.  The holiday's purpose is to celebrate romantic love, which is indeed one of the best things in life.  Unfortunately, it is also turbulent and transitory.  People pass in and out of relationships all throughout the year, but Valentine's Day sticks a little heart-shaped pin on a particular day in February, as though the world of romance revolves around it.  Any time is nice to have a lover, but Valentine's Day is apparently when it really counts.

The result is our only major (secular) public holiday that categorically excludes certain people from participation, and it excludes them because they are lonely.  There's something kind of messed up about that.

But it just so happens that this year, I'm one of the lucky ones.  Yes, I'll actually be seeing someone for Valentine's Day this year! Instead of quietly bemoaning my solitude, I get to spend this singular, critical, all-important day growing closer to a girl who thinks I'm nearly as cool as I think she is.  Ordinarily I try to avoid writing sentences that convoluted, but right now my brain is too overwhelmed to rewrite it; I'm so overcome at my good fortune, I could just write "happy" over and over again and it would express my feelings about as well as anything I could ever thoughtfully compose.  In fact, I think I will do just that.

Happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy happy.

That's about twenty five happies worth of happy.  I don't think it's enough.

Of course, Valentine's Day isn't really that singular, critical, or all-important.  Any day ought to be good enough for romance, and I know from long experience how annoying a ridiculous holiday devoted to the exaltation of significant others can be when you don't have one.  It is hard to be concerned with all of that, however, when you're as much awash in pleasant sensations as I am.  Valentine's Day can go on being ridiculous, because I intend to be quite ridiculous myself.  I do believe that's the whole point of it.  To all my lonely friends, believe me; this is pretty great.

Anyway, since I know she's been reading this blog, I'd like to say a few things to the person who's inspired me to write such a silly post.  In the time we've spent together, you've taught me more about the possibilities of human relationships than I could ever have imagined.  You've brightened my outlook on life, and made years of lessons on maturity make sense all at once.  Right now, I feel like the best person I've ever been.

Thank you, and happy Valentine's Day.

A Southern California Song

The sun sank slowly into the southwest, burnishing the smog and blinding motorists for miles around.  Ten lanes of ashy cement held them up in a sea of smoggy cars.  Ordinarily, they flowed in either direction as conditions permitted; today, however, one side was stagnant.  Millions of cars stood motionless on the southbound road, leaking fumes of rage and carbon monoxide.   It was getting late, and it was still unseasonably hot.  Two young people languished in a blue Honda Civic, idling in the afternoon stillness.  Particles of ash from the far distance wafted through the air.

“Hand me a water, will you?”

“They're right back there.”

Sighing, he turned back and reached his arm behind the passenger seat.  He struggled, one-handed, tearing into the plastic wrapping that kept the bottles packed tightly in their crate; the crate itself packed tightly between her seat and some stray baggage.  He managed, after a moment, to extract one, and he looked forward through the dirty windshield.  There was no change, no movement in the line of traffic.  He unscrewed the cap and drank the water, but it tasted bad: too warm, like plastic and dust.  Her cup holder was empty, so he placed the bottle there.

She looked at him wearily.  “Hey, how long since we've moved?”

“About an hour.  I think I see lights up ahead.”

“Lights?”

“Police lights.  Hell with it, I'm turning off the engine.”

“Great.  Great.”  She turned away, her eyes resisting the murky orange glare.  Her long, blonde hair gave some protection, casting feathery shadows across her cheeks.  She lay partially reclined, staring into the distance, away from him.  She looked tired, and angry.  She looked amazingly, incredibly beautiful.  She looked as though she were a million miles away.

“I don't want to waste gas just sitting here.  It's ridiculous, how much we have to pay for it down here.  I hate it.”  He watched her face intently, waiting for a reaction, or a hint of conversation.

“Whatever.”  Still angry. 

He looked down, afraid that she might catch him staring.  He didn't want to provoke her.  There was garbage on the floor, strewn casually through weeks of neglect.  The bottle was likely to end up there as well, but it was still half-full.  An ache throbbed in his leg, and he clutched at it, wishing he could stand.  Her legs were bare, in no apparent discomfort, and it was all he could do to look elsewhere.

The lights were coming steadily closer.  Shortly, he could see the source: the Highway Patrol, officers on patrol bikes, moving slowly toward them between the congested lanes, stopping to interview the idle motorists.  A drug bust?  Border patrol?  This wasn't how it was done.  Ash settled on the hood of the idle Civic, and the smell of twisted chaparral filtered in through the air conditioning. 

“The police are coming,” he said.  He rolled down the window, anticipating their arrival.  The smell was not pleasant.

“What do they want?”

“I don't really know.  Nothing, I hope.”  His fingers squeezed the wheel.  “I don't know, I'm a little nervous.”

“Why?  Is something wrong?”

“I don't think so.  I mean, we aren't doing anything wrong.”

She closed her eyes, murmuring, “then there's nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah.”  Nothing to worry about, except perhaps the effects of his persistent fantasy of persecution.  “I just hate having to justify myself to the authorities.”

“Justify what?  You don't have anything to justify.”

“I guess.  But sometimes I worry that I will, and if I can't do it, they'll take everything away.”  He looked at her face, hoping for sympathy.  Pity would do in a pinch. 

“That's silly,” she said.  “They can't take anything away just like that.”

“Maybe you're right.”

The CHP officer loomed unannounced, rolling slowly past the stately Dodge Ram that held the forward ground.  The young man smiled as the cop approached, but he didn't smile back, absorbed as he was with the paper on his clipboard.  Despite having recited its contents to the occupants of many sports cars, trucks and SUVs, he clung tenaciously to the printed words.  With nary a greeting, the officer (whose name was Snerk) launched into the official communication.

“Sir, ma'am,” he began in his flabby monotone, “I'm here to inform you, that, this section of the freeway is, closed, indefinitely.  Although you are, currently, in no danger, an orderly evacuation of the area is, currently, being conducted.  Please, remain in your vehicle, until, evacuation crews come to assist you.”

“Where are we evacuating to?” the young woman asked.  “There's nothing out here but shrubs and dirt.  Where are we going?”

The officer clutched his paper, annoyed by the latest deviation from the approved script.  “Arrangements are being made.  Please, just wait for the evacuation crews.”

The young man felt uncomfortably small beneath the imposing officer.  “Why exactly are we being moved?  Is everything alright?” 

“There was an accident about two miles up the road, a couple of trucks got knocked over.  There's some chemicals on the road, it's not safe to drive through.”

“Is anyone hurt?”

“Believe me, you're safe for the time being.  Just stay in your car, please.”

“Well, do you know how long we'll have to wait?”

“About, a few hours.  Four, I think.”

The couple were understandably incredulous.  “Why on Earth would it take that long!?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am.  Please, just wait in your car.”  Without another word, the officer was rolling forward, clipboard in hand, to inform the occupants of a shiny new Silverado.

Demanding, she turned to the young man, her eyes in a wild panic.  “How could it take four hours?  How could it possibly take four hours?”

“I don't know.  Maybe they're short handed.  They've got all those people dealing with the fires in East County.”  The intensity of the question was a little too much; he turned his head out the window for a moment, watching as Snerk delivered his report to the man in the truck.

“I think they've got their B squad out for this one.”

“B squad?  What do you mean?”

“He didn't seem very smart, is all.  Like he was just talking, didn't really know what he was saying.”

“Oh, I don't think so.  I think he knew exactly what he's saying.  What a dick.”

What a dick.  He looked out the window again, but Snerk had moved on.  He couldn't see him anymore; only Rams and Silverados, their headlights flipping on at odd intervals.  Why headlights?  No one was getting anywhere soon.  It was getting dark, though.  Maybe they just wanted to see the ocean, or the clouds, or the grey bushes on the darkening hills.  But definitely not the cars.

The sky got darker, fast.  The sun was coming down, and the flakes of ash moved to settle on the ground without the hazy beams of light to keep them aloft.  It got a little cooler; he could tell she was uncomfortable.  He could always tell, because she would grab her arms just a certain way, and her eyes would be cast down in some corner where no one could see them.  Sometimes she got goosebumps, and tonight she had those as well.  The two of them sat silently for a while, as the young woman looked this way and that; the windshield, the dashboard, the waves breaking on the beach.  From his seat, the young man couldn't quite see them.  But he saw the way her shoulders would shiver, and he couldn't concentrate on anything else.

“Are you cold?  I can turn on the heater.”

“No, don't do that.  It'll waste gas.”  She wouldn't look at him at first.

“OK.  Well, we'll probably be here a little while more.  We should get some rest.”

“I think I'm too cold to sleep.  I don't think I want to sleep, anyway.  I just want to go home.”

“I know what you mean.”  But he didn't really know.  He heard the words she softly spoke; he imagined that he could hear a hint of tears in them.  He understood those words, but it was as though they fell apart in the air.  She could be speaking in a foreign tongue, and he wouldn't have felt any more isolated from her thoughts.  He didn't know what she meant.

All he knew was sadness and frustration; he could see them in her face.

“We've got blankets on the back seat, I could get you one?”

“I guess.”  She looked exhausted.

“If you're tired, we could probably get some sleep back there?  There's a lot more room.”

“There's no room for two people.”  She was in no mood for this.

“No, I, I guess not.  Let me get you a blanket.”  He reached back and grabbed two, handing one off to her as she reclined her seat further back.  She took it, and wrapped it tightly around herself like a fuzzy red cocoon.  Only her face and her hair were uncovered, but she didn't look warm.  He felt guilty, for making her suffer by sitting so long in such a miserably cramped, cold little car. 

“Listen, babe.  I'm sorry.  I'm sorry we came out here.”

“It's fine.  It's not your fault.”  She hid her eyes under her bangs, looking at nothing.  If she could wish herself anywhere, she'd have been gone somewhere else; anywhere she wouldn't have to look at him.

“I know, but I'm sorry.  I hate it out here.”

“It's fine.”

“I was just so happy to get the chance to do this with you.  I've missed seeing you.  I think about you all, well, I just wish I saw you more.  I want to make you happy.”

“It's alright,” she said.  “I'm happy.  You don't need to do anything.”

“I'm sorry.”  He looked pleadingly, hoping to catch her eyes, but she turned her face away.  She looked vaguely out the window, perhaps at the muddy beach.  It was difficult to see now; the stars were not shining through.

“Are you warm enough?”

“I'll be OK.”

“It just seems weird that it should be so cold in here.  Like we'd be warmer if we went outside.  It's too bad we have to stay in here.”

“Yeah, it's too bad.”

“I'm just, I don't know.  I don't know.  I feel pretty, horrible I guess.”  He looked at her, and she was so far away, but under the red blanket he discerned the slender shape of her shoulder.  He hadn't dared to touch her, not since fifteen miles and so many endless minutes back, but in spite of himself, he reached out now.  He slowly, gently touched her shoulder; she didn't move.  She didn't acknowledge.  “I love you, babe.”

She turned back, slowly, to face him; his hand snapped back and he was momentarily unbalanced.  Her face looked sad, and her bright blue eyes were gently shaking.  She looked at him, and then down again; somehow, he found the nerve to take her hand, and touch her fingers softly.  She looked at him again, and smiled slightly.  Somehow, he smiled back.

“It's OK,” she said.  “Everything will be OK.”

The young man answered in silence, having run out of words to say.  His sentiments choked in the heavy air, and his hands hung low.  At last he covered his eyes with lazy fingers and smiled, wry and unhappily.  “Yeah, I guess so.”  His heart was so twisted inside, he worried it might pop out.

She glanced back to the rear of the car, shadows crossing her face.  “I think I'm going to try sleeping in the back.  This seat isn't very comfortable.”

“Yeah, OK, sure.  I'll wake you up when it's time to go.”  And he watched, blankly, as she climbed back between the seats.  He watched as her arms, her legs, and all the soft fabric slid gracefully past him.  He made sure to look away when she was all settled in, wrapped in the relative warmth of her cocoon.

In a few minutes she'd fallen asleep; he thought he could tell by her breathing.  He had no such luck in drifting away.  The hood of the Civic was dusted with ash, and he could swear he saw the hint of an orange glow behind the hills.  The sound of helicopters?  Perhaps not.  The smell drifted in somehow, and it wasn't pleasant; it made him feel parched.  The sound of her breath was unsettling.  Uncomfortably, he adjusted himself in the seat.  Nothing helped.

It was night, and many other people were sleeping.  He looked out the window for something beautiful.  Out over the sea, into the sky, he searched for the hint of a star.  In silence he remembered things, trivialities he'd forgotten for longer than intended, and he remembered her.  The way she laughed at every little thing.  The way she asked the oddest, most interesting questions.  The way she looked for adventures like they were the most ordinary things.  The way her long, brown hair looked different from everyone else's.  He could hardly believe that he'd almost forgotten that.

Many minutes passed, and lights flickered between the lanes again, blue and red and white.  They were a long way off, but he thought he could see doors opening, and tired drivers clumsily falling out of them.  He turned back over his shoulder, and saw that she really was asleep.  He couldn't bear to look.  The lights advanced slowly and he waited for them, quietly.  He looked for his keys; did he need them?  Or was he supposed to leave them there?  When would he get the car back?  The lights came closer, and there were more policemen, thinner than the ones before. 

“Baby?  Hey, babe,” he said, as loud as he could manage.  “I think it's time to go.  We have to get ready, they're almost here.”  If it weren't for her breathing, he couldn't have told whether she was awake or not.  She didn't move, she didn't say a word.  “Baby?”

She restlessly tossed under the red blanket.  “I don't really want to go.”

“I know,” he said.  “I don't either.  But we've gotta go.  They're coming.”  He closed his eyes to block out all the lights.  They were coming, and soon they'd take them all away.