We take off on our trip in less than a week. This Sunday we will head south to Auburn and spend some time there. The following Tuesday we will drive to Los Angeles and on Thursday we will be on the train headed for points east. The ultimate destination is NoirCon 2014 in Philadelphia. Right now I’m typing this post on my laptop, a serviceable Toshiba Satellite running Windows 7. I have a hard time with the cramped keypad and have always found laptops difficult for this reason. I’m not much of a typist—years of practice have improved my skills somewhat—and I need space for my “search and destroy” technique. I’ll have to get used to it as I’m bringing the damn thing along for the journey. I hope to post regularly to this site and hope you’ll follow along. I’ve always kept a journal when journeying but they’ve always been the pencil-and-paper kind. This is the first time I will be using the computer and all the modern things like WordPress and Facebook that come along with it. Should be fun. Except for the numerous typing mistakes.

I’m also bringing a camera. Since I still have a “dumb” phone (and the cheesy 2 megapixel camera that comes with it) I decided to buy one for the trip. Off to Wal-Mart I went, it’s the only place in Yreka that you can get decent electronics. I found  a compact little Nikon (the Coolpix S3600) for a hundred bucks. It fits easily in a pocket and has a 20 megapixel resolution. My 8GB SD card fits it perfectly and the Satellite has a card slot as well so it’s all good. My big Canon PowerShot SLR is much too bulky, and being a few years old it “only” has a 10 megapixel capability. The Canon is a real camera for serious photography, something I don’t really do. I’m about as good with cameras as I am with keyboards. My main criteria for this purchase was size. This Nikon fits in the palm of my hand. It seems pretty easy to operate and should be just fine. I’ll post up lots of my amateurish snaps for y’all and try to make the bog posts reasonably interesting, OK?

The next item on the checklist is packing. I don’t like to carry a lot but with the fall weather coming I’m not sure exactly what to prep for. Raincoat, hat, and compact umbrella for sure as I expect we’ll get some rain. I understand that places other than California have rain. I’ve no idea how chilly these places (like Chicago, our first stop) will be this time of year. Sure, I can check the forecasts, but temperature doesn’t tell you much. A 50ºF day here in Yreka is not as cold as one in the Bay Area as the climate here is mostly sunny and dry and there is much more relative humidity down there. At least we’ll be in civilization so if we need something we can pick it up without much trouble.

Be seeing you!

Today was a good day to brew. The smoky skies and swirling ash fall were at a minimum and the weather, while warm, was pleasant enough in the shade. I had a kit from MoreBeer! courtesy of my pal Janet and I decided it was time to make the eponymous Janet’s Brown Ale. It’s a “big” beer in my book, that is, a high original gravity (1.065-1.070 or 16-17 ºP). I lean toward the “session beer” style as I like quaffing pints and neither my waistline nor my personality improves with more caloric or higher alcohol brews. Nonetheless I expect this one will be pretty tasty—lots of crystal malt and multiple hop additions!

That’s me below, obviously. My phone cam is kind of cheesy and I couldn’t quite get the angle right, hence the cockeyed frame. You can see the psychedelic thingamabob that my pal Stephani gave us hanging from the beam over the kettle. That’s my custom made maple brew paddle on my left shoulder. (Another gift from an old pal.) You can see the dark wort a-bubblin’ nicely. I love the aroma of fresh wort. I love the aroma of hops. Hell, I love beer and everything that goes into making it.

The breeze came up around 2:00 p.m. and dumped a lot of crap into my work area but I was able to keep the kettle covered during the cooling phase and kept the brew from being spoiled. I suppose I could just let all the seeds, dead leaves, wildfire debris and whatnot add its own unique flavors. After all the Belgians open the roofs of their brewhouses and allow their beers to ferment with wild yeasts and bacteria. Of course, some of their beers taste like old socks. I suppose I’ll just have to enlarge my palate and start thinking about some new flavor profiles.

Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

My uncle sent me Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye as a retirement present. I’ve read a fair bit of Chandler but not that one and I devoured it over the last three days. It’s a terrific book, maybe not as tightly plotted as The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely but it’s not the story or the mystery that makes a Chandler novel rock. Seeing the world through the eyes of Philip Marlowe is what makes Chandler worth your time and you get his remarkable prose as well. Chandler must have thought in metaphors as his books are loaded with original and savagely funny analogies describing people and places. Speaking of places, he captured both the beauty and ugliness of post-WWII Los Angeles with his crisp and detailed descriptions of everything from architecture to weather. More than anything, though, Chandler wrote about money and power. Corruption, whether civic or moral, flows through his stories like an ocean breeze. Marlowe’s struggle to keep his hands clean and do what he thinks is the honorable thing for his clients is Chandler’s way of exposing all the venal and tawdry things he detested about Hollywood and big business. Marlowe is a celebration of American individualism and his unyielding nature—a virtue, to Chandler—serves only to get him into deeper and deeper shit.

The Long Goodbye takes a looks at the nature of friendship as well. Marlowe is a loner and too prickly for most people but has an old-fashioned sense of loyalty. The book is littered with dysfunctional and ephemeral relationships and Marlowe’s attempt to befriend the pathetic Terry Lennox causes him both physical and emotional pain. In the end he has to say goodbye to him and to all the other people Terry brought into his life including the beautiful Linda Loring, the only woman the virile but normally celibate Marlowe finally beds. She proposes to him after their one-night stand and he rejects her offer, believing that she is too shallow to make a marriage last. In the coda of that scene is the line that sums up the theme: “To say goodbye is to die a little.”

While The Long Goodbye, like all the private eye novels of that time, is formulaic and clichéd, Chandler writes so well and invests Marlowe with enough empathy and humanity to keep you interested in what happens to him. The genre boundaries don’t confine Chandler, rather they seem to liberate him to say whatever he wants. It’s like Miles Davis playing a pop tune—he finds all the places to go in and around the melody no matter how insipid it might be and thus creates something unique and original. Much of Chandler’s work (and Dashiell Hammett’s as well) is full of casual racism that is sometimes shocking to the modern ear. These men—the writers and their character mouthpieces—were surely products of their time and their language reflects that. Marlowe is too cynical and at the same time too honorable to be genuinely racist. That is, he judges everyone by the same standards regardless of their skin color. Nonetheless he refers to Candy—the butler, who is from Chile—as a “Mex” throughout the book even after he is corrected. He and Candy actually part amicably however, having earned each other’s respect, while all the rich whites turn out to be horrible people! It’s a funny world Marlowe inhabits. And speaking of funny, Chandler manages to infuse his sordid story with quite a bit of humor, especially in the dialogue:

“Who’s your buddy? ” I asked him.

“Big Willie Magoon,” he said thickly. “A vice squad bimbo. He thinks he’s tough.”

“You mean he isn’t sure?” I asked him politely.

I’ve been experiencing my own long goodbye this summer. I retired from a thirty-year career in teaching in June and have spent the last few months doing mostly nothing. School is back in session and I must say I miss the fun parts. At least I knew what I had to do Monday through Friday! I’m looking forward to building a new life, one that doesn’t revolve around a job, but it has been surprisingly difficult to shed Mr. O’Connor. It’s like trying to take the “corned” out of “corned beef.” You have to keep changing the water in the pot before all the brine is leached out. I’m getting there, and doing my best to enjoy the journey. Reading my new book was like a batch of fresh water—the salt is almost gone. And I think I’ve stretched the simile to its breaking point.

Thanks for the present, Uncle John. You knew just what I needed. It figures—you’re a retired teacher, too!

Slowly but surely I am learning this new software. I’ve managed to add my own header images and customize the background. I’ve created some pages and put some widgets on the sidebar. All that’s left is to have something to blog about!

Despite seven years of blogging (using Google’s Blogger), I am new to WordPress. I can’t believe how difficult it seems. Perhaps it was this difficult with Blogger and I’ve just forgotten, but I don’t like being a helpless newbie all over again!

This is my first post as Mark C. O’Connor on markcoconnor.com!