John Walters's Blog, page 6

Book Review: Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits Edited by J. Michael Straczynski; Part Two

I have been a traveler for much of my life, but my situation and finances don’t make it possible to do so at present. They do, however, make it possible for me to qualify for the national program known as Museums for All, through which I can gain admission to most of the museums in the city for free. I decided, therefore, for the time being at least, to travel through time and space by exploring the variegated and multifaceted museum exhibits throughout Seattle. Besides the Museum of Pop Culture, or MoPOP, which explores the history of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and popular music (and at which Harlan Ellison has a place in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame), I have visited museums that celebrate Asian, Nordic, and Native American cultures. I’ve also perused many works of art, from classic to modern. Sometimes I have come across beautiful paintings that at first seem to be abstract splashes of color but exude great emotional power or pieces that blend seemingly disparate materials into strikingly cohesive statements. And as I pondered these works I wondered how the same assemblies of mystery and wonder could be accomplished in prose. When I brought up the subject, one museum employee suggested that some poetry does this, and that’s true, but I was more concerned about how abstractions in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts might be rendered in story form.

It’s not easy to put a story, or parts of a story, together as a collage of language with a unifying theme, but Ellison is a master at it. He accomplishes this with great skill in stories such as “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” and especially “The Deathbird.” In these tales, each part is a shining prose gem, and together the disparate parts unite in theme to create a devastating message.

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” was written back in the 1960s, but it is as relevant now as ever as the tale of a world-encompassing AI that has run amuck and destroyed most of humankind, keeping only a few survivors alive so that it can endlessly torment them. As I mentioned before, this story changed my life with its brilliance and originality. It is a dark, dark tale, but oh so well told. One objection I have with the Greatest Hits version of it, though: in the original story, in the scene breaks Ellison had inserted streams of punchcode tapes; these were meant to represent AM, the AI’s, continuous presence. Ellison had even taken the further step of having the tapes coded in international telegraph alphabet with the phrases “I think, therefore I am,” and “Cogito ergo sum,” which has the same meaning but in Latin. Even if you don’t know what the tapes mean, these interludes are eerie and powerful. However, for some reason Straczynski eliminated them and simply titled the sections alternately “I Think Therefore I Am” and “Cogito Ergo Sum” over and over, which comes across as much blander, especially if, like me, you’ve been able to compare the two versions. It doesn’t detract from Ellison’s powerful prose, but it puts it in a slightly less effective frame.

The novelette “The Deathbird” is, in a sense, Ellison’s atheist manifesto. In it, the roles of god and devil are reversed. God is a mad maniac that destroys the Earth and humankind, while the alien Snake, the devil character, is a compassionate guide to the last human on his final quest. Whether or not you agree with the religious implications of the tale (the two creatures representing god and the devil are, in the story, alien entities), it is a heartbreaking tale of the irredeemable loss of the planet we call home, which is sentient and is likened to a grieving mother. But that’s not all. The story is told in twenty-six sections that roam from past to present to far future. Some take the form of an quiz with questions pertaining to the theme. One of the sections even has an interlude that tells the true tale of Ellison’s dog Ahbhu (incidentally the inspiration for the award-winning novella “A Boy and His Dog,” which is not included in this collection): how Ellison rescued him from a shelter, learned to love and trust him, and finally had to put him down when he became deathly ill. But all the disparate parts come together flawlessly as an intricate literary mosaic.

“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” which has always been one of my favorite Ellison works, has a brilliant storyline, but it goes far beyond mere story in the telling. It is a novelette-length piece of prose poetry, its descriptions intricate and ornate and deeply emotional. When a character dies, this turn of plot is not simply stated; instead, Ellison takes readers on a wild cyclonic rollercoaster ride through the process of dying, even using stylistic touches such as changes in margins and font size to provide graphic illustrations beyond words. In his introduction to the story in his collection I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream: Stories, Ellison writes that the story came to him when he was in Las Vegas for a film event, and he dashed up to his room and his typewriter and began to write it out while naked in a cold, air-conditioned room. With the story half-finished, he developed pleurisy, went into a coma, and had to be flown back to a hospital in Los Angeles. One wonders if he was writing the surrealistic death sequence when he was slipping over the edge himself.

(To be continued)

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories. To send a one-time or recurring donation, click here. You can also donate via my Patreon account. Thanks!

Book Review: Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits Edited by J. Michael Straczynski; Part One

And now we turn to a complex subject: the writer Harlan Ellison. He was a volatile, controversial figure during his lifetime, and continues to be after his death. His literary executor, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, is intent upon seeing to it that Ellison’s works do not disappear from the view of the reading public, and Greatest Hits is one of his first attempts to reintroduce the late author’s short stories to a new audience that may not have ever heard of him.

I’ve certainly heard of him. I first discovered Ellison while taking a class in science fiction as literature at the University of Santa Clara in the early 1970s, in the waning years of the Bay Area hippie revolution, where I was, in fact, spending more time smoking pot and taking psychedelics than studying. When I got to Ellison’s story, though, in the anthology that was the course textbook, my life changed. I had never read anything like the short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” (More on this story later.) Before I had finished it, I decided that I had to become a writer; no other occupation in the world would suit me.

And so I began to write and also to read a lot more science fiction stories. However, I didn’t make much progress, even after I moved back to Seattle, until another encounter with Ellison led me to Clarion West. I read in the newspaper one summer that Ellison was going to give a reading on the University of Washington campus. I’ve never encountered any writer that can read their works like Ellison. At that time he read his new story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs.” (More on this story later too.) I also found out that he was teaching at a six-week live-in writer’s workshop, and the next summer I enrolled. Thus Harlan Ellison, along with five other well-known science fiction and fantasy writers and editors, became my mentor. At the time he had already published the groundbreaking anthologies Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, and he was searching for material for The Last Dangerous Visions. All of us students, of course, dreamed of writing a story good enough for him to purchase for it.

In short, for years Ellison, or Harlan, as he insisted his students should call him, was one of my favorite writers, and I read a lot of his work – everything I could get my hands on. Since then I’ve reread some of his stories. I remember, for instance, finding his collection Deathbird Stories in an English-language library when I was living in Thessaloniki, Greece. Shortly after I moved back to the States, I found a reasonably-priced used copy of his door-stopper of a book The Essential Ellison on Amazon, which gave me another chance to reread some of my favorites.

Now, with this volume, I have a further opportunity to reacquaint myself with Ellison’s masterful short stories. And herein are some of his very best. In his introduction, Straczynski primarily addresses readers that might not have ever heard of Ellison, and that’s okay. But I am aware that many other readers like myself who grew up reading Ellison, even though they are familiar with the stories, are eager to obtain copies of this book.

There are three introductions. The first, by Straczynski, as I said, seeks to offer a glimpse of the complex man behind the words. The introduction that impressed me most, though, is the one by Cassandra Khaw, who writes of using pain as fuel for the creative process. There is certainly a lot of violence and pain in Ellison’s stories. However, there is much beauty too. For sheer power, visceral intensity, and precision and poetry of language, his best stories are hard to beat. And this selection certainly contains some of his best.

*     *     *

The collection kicks off in high gear with one of Ellison’s most popular stories, “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman.” The harlequin of the title is a rebellious man out of step with time in a hyper-organized future. The story is told in a hip, seemingly lighthearted, unorthodox style that was wildly unconventional at the time; the middle comes first, then the beginning, and then the story concludes. Ellison prefaces it with a long quote from Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.” Incidentally, this story introduced me to the works of Thoreau, whose writings subsequently had a profound effect on my life.

(To be continued)

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories. To send a one-time or recurring donation, click here. You can also donate via my Patreon account. Thanks!

Concerning Empathy

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, empathy is “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” This contrasts with sympathy, which is a feeling of concern for another but not of actively sharing the experience, and also with compassion, which involves a desire to alleviate the other’s distress. When I speak of empathy in this essay, I refer to this vicarious sharing of another person’s feelings and experiences.

I think that empathy is a natural outgrowth of love; it takes love several steps further into a sense of bonding and the sharing of minds. The example that prompted these musings occurred just a few nights ago. One of my sons has recently achieved some major goals in his life and is in the midst of shifting from one situation to another. As with many such changes, there is a period of uncertainty in between. He has been traveling across the United States, and he called me one evening while paused at a truck stop in the Midwest. It was late, and he planned to spend the night there, sleeping in his car. It was especially cold in that part of the country, and arctic storm fronts were soon expected to move in from the north. In my years on the road, not only in the States but also in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia, I have been in similar, if not worse, situations. I know the feeling of having to bed down in an unknown, possibly risky place, and to try to sleep as best as I can in uncomfortable and unknown surroundings. I know that my son is an experienced traveler and has excellent survival training. And yet…

That night I couldn’t sleep. I felt for him out there in the darkness, in the cold, on the road. I wished that I could alleviate his distress, or at least somehow make my way there to share it with him. Instead of drifting off to sleep in my comfortable bed, I journeyed in spirit to that truck stop and I vicariously shared my son’s experience. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, nor did I want to. What I wanted to do is somehow telepathically consol him. Maybe I did; I don’t know. One thing was for sure, though: that night I didn’t get any more sleep than he did, and maybe less. In the morning, in my exhaustion, I came to realize that my son was well able to take care of himself and I needn’t have worried. However, what I went through that night went beyond worry. If I couldn’t be there for him physically, at least I could keep vigil for him and be there spiritually.

I’ve had experiences like this with my other sons, too, when they have gone through crises and were far from home. There is something in a parent-child relationship that does not dim with age. There is a link, a bond that remains strong regardless of where the vagaries of life lead us.

After the crisis was over, I continued to ponder the intensity and ramifications of empathy. And my thoughts shifted to my relationship with my mother when I was in the midst of my initial travels, hitchhiking across continents, taking the Hippie Trail, the overland journey from Europe across the Middle East to India, deliberately exposing myself to strange circumstances and possible dangers so that I could learn about life and write my impressions. When my son was in his isolated, vulnerable situation, I was able to video chat with him. But when I was traveling back in the 1970s, there were no cell phones and there was no internet. The only way to communicate with loved ones back home was by post in the form of aerograms, bits of paper that I could fold up and affix a stamp to. My mother only heard from me by means of these brief notes every few weeks, and to answer me, she had to send letters to the poste restante, or general delivery, of the main post office in the city and country where I estimated I might be next. I know that she deeply loved me. How she must have worried! Thinking, as a parent, how she must have felt, caused me to feel great empathy for her. If I would have known this back then, I might have written more often, but it took becoming a parent to really understand how deeply rooted love could become.

Empathy is a great gift, but it is a gift capable of causing great pain. In fact, in my life, at least, it seems to more often bring pain than pleasure. When my sons are doing well, I rejoice but I also become less concerned. However, when they are going through difficult times, that’s when the empathy pops out. I wouldn’t have it any other way, for it is a manifestation of imperishable love.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories, or to send a one-time or recurring donation, click here. Thanks!

Book Review: The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival among America’s Great White Sharks by Susan Casey

In the days when there were only four channels on TV, no cable, and no streaming services, my friend and housemate Rolf and I used to go to a lot of movies. On one occasion we went to a downtown theater to see Spielberg’s box office sensation Jaws. My friend usually manifested an image of bravado, but when we came out of the cinema he was visibly shaken, trembling even. When we ducked into a bar to have a pitcher of beer and play some pool, he could hardly hold his pool cue, let alone keep it steady. He confessed that he wasn’t afraid of much, but he had a strong, irrational fear of sharks. I think that there are many people with similar paranoia. After all, sharks are immense, savage carnivores of the deep, lying in wait in the depths to attack unwary prey.

The mystique and primal fear of sharks plays a large part of the allure of The Devil’s Teeth. The previous book I read by Susan Casey, The Underworld, Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, is an account of historical and contemporary efforts to study the deep ocean and its denizens. In contrast, The Devil’s Teeth reads more like a memoir chronicling several visits that Casey made to the Farallones, an archipelago about twenty-seven miles west of San Francisco. The title of the book refers to the clump of islands, which are collectively known as the Devil’s Teeth. But surrounding the islands are the devils of the sea, great white sharks, which especially during the fall months of September through November, congregate in the waters off the islands in two groups. The scientists refer to a team of males as the Rat Pack, and a team of truly immense females as the Sisterhood.

The Farallon Islands are a protected area, and there is only one inhabitable house on the island of Southeast Farallon. For decades a team of scientists has lived on the island and studied its populations of birds and mammals such as seals, but during shark season specialists also study the great white sharks and their attack patterns. They scan for attacks from a lighthouse on a hill. When they spot them, they launch a boat that is smaller than some of the sharks, and head out to document the activities with underwater cameras held on poles.

For Casey’s first visit, she was allowed a permit for just a couple of days during shark season. She came back for a short time during the summer, when the island was covered in breeding birds, but this was not enough to satisfy her journalist’s curiosity. She was not allowed to stay longer on the island, so to be able to remain for an extended period during shark season, she rented a yacht and anchored it offshore, which was technically permitted. We normally associate the word “yacht” with luxury, but this boat was old and untrustworthy, with plumbing that spewed waste, a fridge that stopped working, and unreliable electricity. During storms the boat would pitch and toss, making sleep impossible. Nevertheless, Casey endured the discomfort for the opportunity to go on shark watches with the scientists and observe how they work.

This is a thrilling book about a unique, primitive part of the world that is in fact only a short hop off the coast from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It seems strange to have such opposites in such close proximity. As I mentioned above, this book does not delve as deeply into background and history as Casey’s The Underworld. For instance, I would have appreciated, and in fact was hoping for, a historical overview of the study of white sharks. Instead, it focuses solely on the Farallones. In this context, though, it is fascinating and fully absorbing.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories, or to send a one-time or recurring donation click here. Thanks!

Book Review: Playground by Richard Powers

My God this is a beautiful book. This is why I read: to discover gems like this. I don’t think it’s perfect; it gets a little confusing at the end and some of the threads remain unresolved. But it is absorbing through and though, and it has deep sympathetic characters, and it deals with important, cutting edge topics.

Ostensibly it concerns the proposal by a group of Americans to begin building, on the tiny Polynesian island of Makatea, floating cities whose inhabitants can live on the open sea. The concept of floating cities intrigues me, and that’s why I picked up the book. However, the floating cities idea never even comes close to initiation. It is a frame on which to construct a complex plot that involves the lives of four characters of starkly different backgrounds, the importance of protecting the ocean and its ecosystems, and the inevitability of advanced artificial intelligence.

Rafi Young, a young Black man deeply absorbed in literature and reading, forms an unlikely friendship with a young white man named Todd Keane, partially due to their mutual fascination with games such as Chess and Go. Todd goes on to become a tech billionaire (by inventing a complex game/social network called Playground) and one of the main financers of the floating cities project, while Rafi marries a part-Tahitian woman named Ina Aroita and goes with her to live on Makatea. The other main character is a French Canadian woman named Evie Beaulieu; her father helped invent the aqualung, and Evie’s early exposure to it helps to inspire a lifetime of exploring the ocean as a marine scientist. It is mainly through her eyes that readers experience the wonder and awe and vastness and importance of the ocean.

Powers tells the background stories of each of these main characters, alternating between these flashbacks and the situation concerning the floating city concept in the present day. At no time, though, do the cuts from scene to scene become confusing. Powers deftly and artistically weaves the disparate pieces into a coherent whole, so that we are carried along on what becomes a fast-paced ride from the past into an uncertain future. What is intriguing is that Powers does not make the solution simple. There are compelling arguments for both sides. If the floating cities are constructed on Makatea, it will mean well-paid jobs for the islanders, and among other amenities a new hospital and a new school. However, the construction will also cause irreparable damage to the marine ecosystems around the island and to the casual, comfortable way of life to which the island’s residents have grown accustomed.

I don’t want to give too much away, because part of this book’s appeal is in the excitement of discovering these things for yourself. What shines brighter and brighter as the story proceeds, though, is Powers’ genuine concern for the environment, a concern he passes on mainly through Evie’s life and observations as an undersea explorer and oceanographer. What also becomes clear early on is that Powers is a very powerful and poetic writer. He doesn’t merely tell the story; through his precise, complex descriptions he helps readers dive in and experience what is happening along with the characters.

All in all, this is a first-rate, absorbing novel that I highly recommend. And having now glimpsed his talent, I’ll be looking forward to reading more of Powers’ work.

Resolute for the New Year

That title above is not a typo. I intended to write “resolute” instead of “resolutions.” At this time of year, a lot of people announce various ambitions or goals that they promulgate as resolutions, but many of these resolutions turn out to be holiday whims or wishful thinking; they might be initiated with great zeal, only to be abandoned, in the light of reality, a few weeks down the road.

To be resolute, on the other hand, means to be bold and determined in pursuing a course of action, to be confident, decisive, adamant, implacable, unrelenting, steadfast, and single-minded. Resolutions fall by the wayside because they are only individual pieces of a larger goal; when they prove to be impractical and are abandoned, this can lead to discouragement and a diminution of self-worth. If you are resolute, however, you relentlessly proceed toward your objective even if you have to experiment with diverse means of getting there. Attempting and discarding specific methods denotes progress, not failure.

Do your best at what you are already doing. If you need to reset your goals, fine: do that. So much of life involves trial and error. But it’s not a game we are playing. We are doing it for real.

In my case, I have met many of my life’s goals. I wanted to travel, and I lived overseas for thirty-five years and visited numerous countries in North America, Central America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. I married. We had children. We raised them to be strong, intelligent, thoughtful, considerate adults. Now they are grown and gone, as they should be, and they are prospering.

The one area in which I have not succeeded as much as I had hoped concerns my writing. This has been a primary life focus for me since I was a teenager. I have written and published almost forty books, and over forty of my stories and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies. However, I sometimes become discouraged because to most readers I am still unknown. That discouragement, if allowed to fester, could result in my giving up and throwing in the bloodied towel. But here is where remaining resolute comes in. I can’t force editors to buy my stories or readers to read them; those things are beyond my control. What I can do, though, is keep writing and attempt to make each piece the best it can be. Not long ago I wrote and published an essay called “Write Better Stories.” Someone on Facebook had put forth the question, “What is the best writing advice you have ever received?” My response was to quote my former teacher, Harlan Ellison, who said, possibly tongue-in-cheek, “If they are not buying your stories, write better stories.” Of course whenever I am working on a story, I try to make it the best thing I have ever written. But the underlying message of this advice is to remain resolute. Whatever you are doing, don’t give up. If you know you are on the right path, continue to move forward and make progress regardless of the obstacles that might be in your way. In the course of your journey, you may need to discard some methods (resolutions) and embrace others. No matter. The important thing is to persist. As for me, I have said it before and I’ll say it again concerning the writing: they’ll have to pry the keyboard out of my cold dead hands.

Book Review: The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides

I love a well-written true life historical adventure, and this is a great one. It tells the story of Captain Cook’s third and final voyage, a voyage on which he was killed in the Hawaiian Islands. The depth of research and amounts of fascinating facts are amazing, but even more amazing is that despite the abundance of details, the author Sides manages to keep the story fast-paced and thrilling every step of the way.

This voyage is one that I am content to take from an armchair, thank you. It’s not that I don’t like traveling: I’ve roamed around the world, hitchhiking and taking public transportation across the United States, around Europe, across the Middle East, and around the Indian Subcontinent. The way was often rough, and I was often broke or near broke, but I almost always managed to find congenial companionship, good food, and a safe place to lay my head. The conditions on this third voyage of Cook’s, though, and presumably on the first two as well, were appalling to say the least, especially for the common sailors: dampness, heat, cold, filth, rats, cockroaches, close quarters, and often disgusting cuisine. Why did they do it? Well, for one thing, conditions weren’t much better at home and this was probably the only job for which they were suited. But besides that, they reveled in the adventure of exploring new lands; they looked forward to liaisons with willing Polynesian women; and most of all, they craved a share of a generous reward offered by the Crown if they located and navigated the fabled Northwest Passage over the North American continent from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.

I had studied a bit about Cook’s journeys back in high school, but this is something I never knew, or at least I’d long since forgotten: that one of the primary goals of this third voyage of Cook’s was to search for a water route back to England through the Bering Sea and beyond. The trip took years, and along the way Cook charted the islands in the Pacific as well as the Northwest American coastline. He left just as the American colonists were signing the Declaration of Independence, and was unaware of the escalating Revolutionary War until many months later. He traveled from England to Cape Town, South Africa, and from thence to Tasmania, New Zealand, Tahiti, and other tropical islands. On his way to Alaska, he discovered Hawaii and its inhabitants, which no one in England knew existed. Then he made his way north, along the coastline of the Oregon Territory and Alaska, journeyed as far as he could before being stopped by solid ice fields, and then returned to Hawaii, where he was killed.

I’m not giving any spoilers here; you can find this all out in Wikipedia. What makes this book difficult to put down is the way that Sides tells the story. It is full of details, as I mentioned, but these details help to immerse you in the adventure, so that you can feel the sea spray, experience the frequent storms at sea, shudder from the bone-chilling cold, dread the unknown while sailing through thick fog, and revel in the calm interludes of abundance and romantic entanglements during stopovers in islands such as Tahiti. The author’s skill as a writer makes it all come alive, as if you are a participant in the action.

As I said, I am content to sit this adventure out in an armchair, but nonetheless I am thankful to Sides for making it possible for me to partake of it, at least vicariously. It’s a thrilling tale of a high-stakes voyage on the high seas that holds the attention from start to finish. Highly recommended.

Life Is a Gift

As I mention at the beginning of this essay, I wrote it a few weeks before Christmas. My first thought was to post it a week or so after Christmas, possibly even after New Year’s Day, because I thought it might not be upbeat enough for the Christmas season. But in fact, you’ll discover as you read that it has a happy ending. And after pondering the situation, I realize that gift-giving, for a lot of people, is a big part of Christmas. It is an opportunity, albeit flawed and rife with possibilities of error, to express love for those who are particularly special in our lives. Since December began, during meals I have been re-watching Christmas movies and Christmas episodes of series such as the Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, and Futurama, and it is amazing that so many of these focus on the topic of selecting and giving gifts. This essay concerns the greatest gift, one we have all received regardless of merit or lack thereof. It is freely received year-round by a lot of people, regardless of the calendar date. And so here are my words for you, on Christmas day, celebrating the gift of life.

I’m writing this a couple of weeks before Christmas, but I probably won’t publish it until after the holidays. It deals with some intense emotions, and I don’t want to bum anyone out. At the same time, I think that by the end it will ultimately be uplifting.

To dive right in: I had a down day. A very down day. Most of the time I am able to maintain a state of serenity and contentment, but once in awhile, every week or so, my mood takes a dive and I struggle, as if I am fighting to stay afloat in a sea of depression. The two main causes of this are part of my ongoing situation. One is that I live alone and I often deal with intense loneliness. You see, I’m an empty-nester. My ex and I raised our family in Greece, but as my sons matured into teenhood and adulthood, a massive economic crisis hit the country, and opportunities for higher education or employment became nonexistent. I decided I had to get them out of there and off to the States, where they had a better chance to thrive. My wife stayed behind with the youngest and I left with the rest of the boys, those, at least, who were not already in the States. Eventually, when she saw how well the boys were doing, she brought the youngest over too. So for about a decade I was a single parent, and my main focus in life was the welfare of my progeny. But then, one by one they left and went off on their own. A few years ago the youngest moved out, and I was left alone. That is as it should be; my sons should be off pursuing their destinies, and to a degree knowing that they are doing well mitigates the pain of loss. But I am used to being surrounded by a large family, and now there is just me. You would think that I would eventually get used to it. But I haven’t. As I said, I can usually keep my equilibrium and remain serene and content, but once in a while something tips the scales and I founder.

The other cause of my discontent is my financial situation. In Greece I taught English as a second language and I got quite good at it. I was well paid by the language schools I worked for and had as many private students as I could handle. My intention, when I returned to the States, was to continue teaching. When we landed in San Diego, I went around to every language school in the city and presented my resume and letters of recommendation, and some of the schools were impressed enough to want to hire me. However, a technicality prevented them. They said that I had to have a college degree, and I didn’t. So I looked for another job. I searched for months. I applied at a multitude of companies for all sorts of positions, including warehouse work, driver’s assistant for UPS, and salesman at a hardware store. A tech company almost hired me but then backed off because of my age; I would have been at least a couple of decades older than anyone else in the office. In desperation, I looked for writing work online, and eventually I found some, ghostwriting articles and blog posts. For awhile I worked exclusively for a private Medicare firm, writing articles for their blog, but most of the time it was piecework. Every day I had to search for assignments. But I usually found them. I wrote articles on travel, health, sports, business, finance, literature, and a variety of other topics. For a long time it was enough to keep my sons and I with enough to eat and a roof over us. A few years ago, though, those markets started to shut down. More and more businesses began to settle for inferior but cheaper AI-authored material, and one by one the websites where I had found employment closed. Now I am living off the scrapings of what was once a thriving occupation, and I keenly feel the loss of income. I barely get by month to month.

The thing that knocked me off my stability this morning was an email from the management of my apartment complex that they were sending around new contracts for the tenants to sign. Just a few months ago the manager had told me that they were doing away with contracts and all tenants would pay month to month. This sounded good to me, as I also had received notice of a substantial rent increase, and I was unsure if I would be able to come up with it. Month by month rental meant that I was not tied to an agreement for a specific amount of time.

Anyway, the email shouldn’t have thrown me for such an extreme loop, but it did. I wondered what the hell? What is it all for? It is so hard to survive, and all I had to look forward to was continuing loneliness. That’s when the thought struck me.

Life is a gift. Every moment of it. And most people seem to realize it and struggle to survive even under horrific conditions. Let’s face it: I might be lonely, but I have a good, clean, safe place to live, enough to eat, and loved ones who care for me, even if they are not in close proximity. People cling to the precious gift of life even under horrific conditions: as soldiers at war, as prisoners, as inmates in concentration camps, as castaways in remote locations, as patients in hospitals, despite agonizing injuries, illnesses, traumas, loss of limbs, loss of loved ones, loss of possessions. Through all of these things and more people strive to hold onto the gift of life. Yes, life is beset with sorrow; it is part of the human condition. However, it is also suffused with joy: the joy of accomplishment, of the attainment of goals, of the appreciation of natural beauty, and most of all of the love we share with those close to us and with all of our fellow humans. The fact is that life is precious but it is also finite. Sometimes we lose sight of our mortality, but sometimes it is good to be reminded of it, so that we cherish each moment and spend it wisely.

I promised you a happy ending. Well, the realization that life is a gift should be cause enough for joy, but here’s more. The problem with the lease I mentioned, the one that had set off my depression, was satisfactorily solved. When I went to the office and asked about it, the manager assured me that nothing had changed. I was still renting on a month by month basis; the leases were formalities insisted upon by the central office that did not apply to me. He said that all I needed to do if I had to move was to give notice twenty days early, and there would be no fines or other penalties. This reminded me of a lesson that I have had to learn many times in my life. Sometimes when we receive what we perceive to be bad news or circumstances appear adverse, we anticipate worst-case scenarios instead of patiently persevering until we find out for sure. At least that’s frequently been true of me. Often, as events transpire, I am reminded that things are seldom as bad as I imagine them.

Strange Christmases – Part Two: Penang, Malaysia

On one of the strangest Christmases I have ever spent, when I was all alone on the island of Penang in Malaysia, I received an unusual but intensely valuable gift: a clue that led me toward my destiny.

This was during the period of my life when I lived and traveled overseas for thirty-five years. I had been living in Nepal, had met a woman from New Zealand, and had gone with her to her home country. When we broke up, I flew back to my home town of Seattle via Los Angeles (where I briefly visited another ex-girlfriend). After an interlude with my family in Seattle and a brief flurry of work to raise landing funds, I was ready to be off again. My mother worked for Pan Am Airways and was able to obtain tickets for me at ten percent of cost, so I flew from Seattle to San Francisco to Hong Kong to Jakarta. In Indonesia I joined an Australian friend on a road trip across the island of Java to Bali. When I returned to Jakarta, I flew to Singapore, and after spending a few days in that idiosyncratic city-state I took a train to Bangkok. There I moved into a communal home with other young travelers and taught private English lessons.

All went well until I’d been there almost a month and my visa was about to expire. To renew it I had to take a train ride to the Malaysian border and back. I was making enough money for self-support but I couldn’t afford the visa trip. What to do?

The answer came out of the blue. A Thai film production was looking for foreign extras to appear in a Thai-language movie. Since one of my roommates knew someone on the crew, she managed to get several of us hired. All we had to do was dress up like hippies and walk in a bedraggled bunch through a section of the Bangkok Airport concourse, where we would appear as background color behind the main Thai actors. For that brief appearance, the other foreign extras and I were not only taken to a fine restaurant and treated to normally-unaffordable cuisine, but also paid enough to cover my round-trip train ticket to Penang and back with enough left over for food and a few nights at a hotel.

And here’s the holiday tie-in: my visa trip happened to take place over Christmas. There was nothing I could do about it. If I waited to celebrate the holiday with my friends, I wouldn’t make it out of the country in time and would risk getting penalized for overstaying my visa.

So it was that on Christmas day I sat at an outdoor cafe in George Town, Penang, perusing an English-language newspaper travel supplement that someone had left at the table. And in it, there were two human-interest articles about India. I had already spent a few years altogether on the Indian Subcontinent, in India and Nepal and Sri Lanka, and I loved it. It was one of my most favorite places on Earth, and if it had not been for the ubiquitous visa vicissitudes, I might have been there yet. One of the articles, I recall, was about an isolated island in the Andaman cluster where primitive tribes were protected by law from civilization. I forget the details of the other article. The point is that they got me thinking about India and how much I missed it. I decided then and there that when I got back to Bangkok I would somehow raise the money to return. As I made the decision, I burst into tears.

Destiny indeed. For on that next visit to the Subcontinent, I would eventually meet the Greek woman who would become my wife and the mother of my five children. All in all, at that cafe in Penang on Christmas Day, I made one of the best decisions of my life.

Strange Christmases – Part One: Goa, India

As we enter into the winter holiday season, I find myself looking back to some of the unusual places where I have spent past Christmases. The first that comes to mind is Goa, India, in the mid-1970s. I had spent the summer hitchhiking around Europe; as I was enjoying Greece late in August, wondering what I should do next, knowing that the hot weather would soon wane, I began to hear of other young budget travelers heading across the Middle East to the Indian Subcontinent. This was in the days when the Overland Trail, also known as the Hippie Trail, was still open, and you could travel by hitchhiking or on cheap public transportation across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all the way to India and beyond.

The idea deeply appealed to me. I had come this far partially due to the example of literary progenitors such as Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller. They had got as far as Europe, but if I struck out farther east, I’d be accomplishing something that even they had never attempted. The problem was that I’d almost run out of money. So I first hitchhiked back up to a friend’s place in Holland, where I worked in factories for a couple of weeks and saved up two hundred dollars. I then set out on my journey through Holland, Germany, Austria, and communist Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to the Turkish border. I managed to hitchhike with European truckers all the way to Kandahar in Afghanistan before I switched to buses and trains. By the time I made it to Bombay (what Mumbai in India was then known as) I had heard from numerous travelers that they were headed for Goa to celebrate Christmas. Goa was on the coast south of Bombay, and because it had been a Portuguese colony, there was still a strong Catholic influence.

And so, as Christmas approached, I found myself in a warm tropical paradise with incomparable sand beaches, coconut palms lining the shores, unimaginably beautiful sunsets, and friendly welcoming people. Oh, and quite a few of the foreign women would sunbathe in the nude, oblivious to the crowds of Goans who would observe them from polite distances. It wasn’t exactly the white Christmas that Bing Crosby sings about, unless you count the color of the sand on the beaches, but it bustled with activity and its own version of holiday cheer. The accommodations and food were dirt cheap, and many Goans were eager to extend hospitality to the foreigners who had come for the season.

All went well for several days. However, it was on Christmas morning, as I recall, that I was strolling from the room in a thatched hut I shared with several other foreigners to the seashore when I passed a shack with a makeshift kitchen where a Goan was preparing and selling masala dosa. These are folded-over pancakes with potato curry inside, and when they are prepared properly, as these were, they are delicious. I had three, and then continued on my way to the beach. I did not, however, account for the cook’s lack of sanitary precautions. Later in the day, I began to feel uneasy, and not long afterwards, my stomach erupted in pain. For the next three days I lay on my bed too weak to move, except to make frequent trips to the outhouse, where the resident pig waited underneath to noisily consume whatever I discharged. Finally one of my roommates called an Indian doctor, who stabbed me in the ass with a needle-full of what I presumed was penicillin. I was soon able to travel again, although my stomach was tender for several days.

All in all, despite the malady, my Christmas in Goa was a wonderful interlude. After all, as a budget traveler on the Subcontinent I expected to catch some sort of illness now and again. It was one of the prices I paid for a glorious adventure, and it was well worth it.