I fought the law

I got pulled over by the Navy police on Monday morning, for the second time this year. The first time, it was because the rental that I was driving while my car was in the shop turned out to have expired tags. They inspected the car from top to bottom, and then sent me on my way after advising me not to drive on the base with an unregistered vehicle again. I teleworked for the rest of that week. The Navy doesn’t play. 

On Monday, which also happened to be my birthday, I drove on to the base as usual, made the usual wide right turn at the stop sign to drive past Walter Reed, and then heard the sirens. I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the police car and knew immediately that I didn’t need to ask for whom the siren was tolling because it was tolling for me. I pulled over right in front of the hospital, turned on my flashers, put the car in park, and waited. 

I waited for seven minutes, and nothing happened. I know that you’re not supposed to get out of the car when the police pull you over but I had started to wonder if I’d mistaken their intentions, and they weren’t telling me anything, so I opened my door and started to step out and heard an amplified voice ordering me to stay in my vehicle. Hands in the air, I shouted “I just wanted to make sure you had pulled me over. Did you pull me over?” Yes, they had pulled me over. I had no idea what they were waiting for until the second police car pulled up. Back-up - that is what they were waiting for. I texted my husband, and then texted my boss and coworkers to let them know that I’d be late for our 0800 meeting. One of my coworkers texted back: “Stay calm!” Lol. Has he met me? I was already freaking out, and by the time the second police car pulled up, I was shaking like I had Lalo Salamanca’s bail money piled up in my trunk. 

All’s well that ends well. They let me off with a verbal warning, after a slightly sarcastic reminder that there is another stop sign at the left turn onto the road that leads to campus (I KNOW!) and I went on my way, careful to count to three when I came to a full and complete stop at that stop sign. Did they notice that it was my birthday? No one said “Happy Birthday” or anything, but it’s right there on my driver’s license and after almost 20 minutes of sitting in my car pretty much surrounded by police vehicles, I had expected at least a ticket if not a first-hand look at a Navy brig. So maybe they noticed that my date of birth made Monday my 59th birthday and they took pity on me. I’m glad. Because I’m pretty sure I also got a speed camera ticket on Connecticut Avenue earlier that morning, making this an already unreasonably expensive commute. And I’m sure I wouldn’t survive on the inside. 

Doomsday reading

First, a correction of my earlier comments about the ending of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. While not exactly a happy ending, it was not an altogether sad ending. I would describe that book’s ending as “fitting.” 

Full disclosure - I had not quite finished the book when I was writing about it. I counted my chickens when they hadn’t yet hatched. 

*****

Right after I finished T and T and T, I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which I had never read before. And then I started on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which I’m still reading, but almost finished. 

Both of these are great novels, the former a classic that is part of almost every literature curriculum (I have no idea why I never read it before last week) and the latter a newer classic published in the 90s that has gained a wide readership thanks to the internet. It was a critical mass book for me; one of those that enough people whose opinions I trust have mentioned as worthwhile that I finally started reading it. 

Aside from being great novels, these books are both grim and even terrifying (especially Parable). Slaughterhouse Five is about the bombing of Dresden and its lifelong impact on an American POW who survived because he was held in an underground slaughterhouse. Parable of the Sower is about the total breakdown of civilization and depicts a dystopian future United States in the years 2024 and beyond. As the story begins, the first-person narrator, Lauren Olamina, is a teenager living with her family in a relatively secure walled community surrounded by chaos and extreme poverty and even more extreme violence. You know within a few pages that the chaos and violence are going to penetrate the walls and that the Olaminas and their neighbors' situation, already precarious, is going to deteriorate. And - spoiler alert! -  it does. People do everything that people can do to other people when there are no social structures and no consequences; and Lauren’s fear is compounded by a hyperempathy disorder that causes her to feel others’ pain when she sees it. And she sees a lot of pain. 

You might wonder why I am even doing this to myself, and you would not be alone in asking this question. Why am I doing this to myself? And why are Kurt Vonnegut and Octavia Butler doing this to me? That last question is easy to answer, actually. Both of them just wrote about the truth as they understood it. Kurt Vonnegut actually did survive the bombing of Dresden; Slaughterhouse Five's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is a fictionalized version of Vonnegut himself. And although Octavia Butler didn’t experience a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles hellscape, it’s not hard to imagine that in such a scenario, the rich would remorselessly exploit the poor and that the strong would relentlessly abuse the weak and that people would rape and torture and kill for any reason or for no reason at all. Octavia Butler might not have seen or experienced the things she writes about in Parable (God I hope she didn’t) but she didn’t make this stuff up, either. It happens all the time. 

Books aren’t always supposed to be easy, for either writers or readers. Fiction can’t always be a pleasant escape, even when it’s page-turningly compelling, which Parable of the Sower certainly is. Reading about suffering and atrocity feels like facing it a little bit, like not turning my back on all of the actual real people who have endured such things. That’s why I do this to myself. 

*****

All the same, though, I do hope that Lauren Olamina and her band of refugees will wind up safe and prosperous on Bankole’s farm. I’m near the end of the book, and I’m almost afraid to find out. 

Seasons

It’s Monday, September 2, 2024, 9:45 AM or so. I’m normally at work at 9:45 on a Monday morning but today is Labor Day, my very least favorite holiday. 

The pool will open for the day in about two hours. For the first few hours, it will be a normal pool day, with the adult swim whistle blowing at 45 minutes past the hour every hour. It will be more crowded than usual, of course, because holidays are free guest days, and everyone will want to get their last swim in. But by 5:30 or so, the occasional swimmers and the families with very young children will have cleared out, leaving the last few hours to the serious pool denizens. The lane ropes and the rope that marks off the diving well will be gone. The lifeguards won’t bother with the last two adult swim whistles. There will be simultaneous games of knock-out, sharks and minnows, and water polo with lounge chairs as goals. It’ll be fun, but a little frantic. And then as it’s getting dark, the final whistle will blow and pool summer will be over. And I’ll feel a little bereft and sad for a few days, but by next week at this time, it’ll be fine. It’s nice to have seasons, even when your very favorite one has to end.