The Burgess Shale

I believe I just saw a corpse delivered to the local CBS station.

I was biking home along the Charles when I saw a helicopter pass overhead. It was dark enough that all I could make out were a few lights and the machine-gun sound of its rotors, but it looked huge — like one of those giant military helicopters, or a flying aircraft carrier from a superhero comic. Then I realized it wasn't big, just close.

I remembered there was a helipad very close by, at WBZ-TV. I tracked the helicopter through the treetops and arrived just in time to see it touch down across Soldiers Field Road from me. An ambulance was waiting in the parking lot, about a hundred feet away, with no lights or sirens. The EMTs waited for the rotors to stop turning, then slowly wheeled a gurney to the helicopter. Five minutes passed. I couldn't see much, due to distance and darkness, but I saw something placed on the gurney, and sheets being arranged. When they returned to the ambulance, the gurney was surrounded by a cordon of three or four people from the helicopter. I continued on my way.

The lack of urgency and sirens makes me think this was a dead body, but I don't know enough about coroners' procedures to understand why the handoff was made in the parking lot of a TV station. Perhaps it was a CBS helicopter, and someone died while it was in flight. Or perhaps the helicopter was transporting someone in critical condition to the hospital, and when they died en route it was diverted to a less busy helipad. Or perhaps the nearest hospital (Mount Auburn, presumably) doesn't have their own helipad.

Does anyone have a better notion?

Last night, prior to running off to Everything Is Terrible! I was just putting in a DVD of the 1958 B movie Fiend Without a Face when I decided I wanted popcorn. The popcorn package had this extremely simple recipe for kettle corn on the back, which I tried, became addicted to, and now pass on to you:

• Use half as much oil and sugar as popcorn. If you want to pop half a cup of popcorn kernels, use 1/4 cup of both oil and sugar.
• In a lidded pot large enough to hold the popped popcorn, heat the oil over medium-high heat until shimmering. Heavier pot is betterer.
• Dump in the popcorn. Immediately sprinkle the sugar over the popcorn and put the lid on, clamping it tight with your hand.
• Start shaking the pan on the burner. Do not stop until the popping stops, which will be in about two minutes.
• Remove from heat, remove lid, and sprinkle with kosher salt to taste. The salt will trickle down through, sticking where it needs to.

The end result is fluffy popcorn coated in a crisp, glassy layer of sugar that causes the kernels to adhere lightly to one another in fantastic shapes, not nearly so densely as in a popcorn ball. 1/4 cup of popcorn was a good amount for me alone — it produced perhaps a quart of popped popcorn. I intend to experiment with other oils and sugars.

Yesterday, I was crossing the street to Diesel, and walked between a dog tied to a parking meter and a soup bone about four feet away from it. Like a moron, I reached down to pat the dog on the head, saying something like, "Aww, look, you have a bone!"


After he let go of my knee, there was a hole in my jeans and a two-inch laceration on my leg.

Like an even bigger moron, I continued into Diesel rather than waiting for the owner to come by so I could ask whether the dog had been vaccinated for rabies. By the time I emerged from checking my knee in the bathroom it was gone. If I'd remained, this story would have ended last night; as it was, I spent the evening (after an excellent dinner at carpenter's house) doing research on rabies.

Turns out that rabies has been all but eliminated in housepets. There were zero cases of rabies in Massachusetts dogs in 2010, and exactly one case of rabies in a Massachusetts human since 1935 (he got it from a bat). This dog was owned, the attack was provoked; the chances of me developing rabies from the bite were infinitesimal.

But if symptoms developed, it would be too late to do anything. No do-overs. I would die.

In other words, I would be betting my life on the hope that this dog had not somehow missed getting its shots, and not gotten into a fight with a raccoon last week. Rather than Gambling With Death, I biked to the Mount Auburn clinic this afternoon, where, over the course of two hours, I received eleven injections: one in each arm, five into the wound itself, and four in my butt. (The five in the wound were all from one needle, but five punctures, half a cc at a time.) Only one or two of the shots were actively painful; they use fine-gauge needles, which for the most part I barely felt. The doctor and the nurses were all pleasant and sympathetic, and to a one seemed pained that I'd had the misfortune of getting bitten by a dog a) who almost certainly was not rabid and b) whose rabies status could not be verified. (One of them asked, "Was it, uh, with his mouth that he...bit you?" That confused me.)

I go back again on Tuesday, next Saturday, and the following Saturday, for one shot in the arm each time. After that, I will be IMMUNE TO RABIES, as well as tetanus and (randomly) whooping cough. (The new tetanus booster is a) permanent and b) also effective against pertussis.) The bite is not infected; dog bite infections present within 24 hours, the doc said, and only 20% of dog bites (as opposed to 80% of cat bites) become infected. I am a bit sore in one arm, and in a couple of spots on my butt. My co-pay was $20.

All in all, much better than I feared. And now I can play with bats all I want, because I am IMMUNE TO RABIES!

The first line of the first post of each month of 2011:

I'm beginning to worry about the new year.

On Saturday, I was confronted with a mystical word square from the third century, a palindrome intended to confuse demons. Something in my soul has loosened, as though it's been given a half-turn counterclockwise with an allen wrench. Piles of snow still lurk about, dirty and shrunken, like the aliens at the end of an alien invasion movie, when they're dying in sad heaps.

There were eleven people in my house on Friday. Together we climbed a mountain, called Kebo, whipped by wind and menaced by thunderstorms.

And then it was over. My hands were shaking, I couldn't catch my breath, but I did it. There was suddenly something in the corner, something like a skinned seal. Once again, I feasted on flesh.

I'm still free. Look out your window.

Cliché of the day: I feel like a new man.

I've been habitually tired for a long time — I'd guess six months, but it could be longer. I didn't feel rested when I woke up, I felt more or less foggy and thick during the day, and about three hours before bed my brain turned itself off. That last is the worst — those are my most consistent writing hours, and I spent a lot of nights staring at the screen with oatmeal in my head before giving up and going to watch an episode of CSI. If anyone's been thinking to themselves, "Hey, jere7my's been a little off lately. He's not as sharp as he used to be," you're right. (I don't know if anyone has, but it's seemed obvious to me.)

I had a lot of theories. I messed with my breakfast choices; I fretted about my caffeine intake pattern; I speculated on lingering illnesses I might have; I tried to link it to biking (or not-biking). Most upsettingly, I worried that I was just getting old — that fogginess and dullness were part of the progression of my brain toward senility, and it would keep getting worse.

Then I noticed three things: One, I woke up refreshed in other beds, at Arisia and at my mom's and in Bar Harbor this summer. Two, I was feeling pressure points when trying to fall asleep in my bed, and felt generally dense and heavy. Three, our mattress was about seven years old, which Consumer Reports says is close to the end of a mattress's useful life.

Bing.

Last Saturday, we went to Watertown Mattress, where Mike the helpful and gregarious made us lie on a half-dozen mattresses, steered us toward the ones he sensed we'd like, ratcheted down the prices until we relaxed, and told us mattress lore. (Q: Why are most modern mattresses one-sided, when the advice has always been to flip them every few months? A: Because the fire code changed in 2006, making it more expensive to bring mattresses up to code. Manufacturers cut costs by fireproofing only one side of their mattresses.) I nearly fell asleep on one of his mattresses, and we bought it.

Yesterday, three fellows wrestled a new Simmons Graball Plush Firm up the stairs and a sagging old Sealy Posturepedic down the stairs. Last night I had my first sound, restful, uninterrupted night's sleep in...I don't know how long. I bounced out of bed, was pleasant to my wife during breakfast, and had a clear head all day.

It's only been one night, of course, but I am optimistic that this is going to make a major difference in my quality of life. If you're sleeping poorly and your mattress is older than a first-grader, you might want to follow suit.

Thanks to irilyth, those of you who want to follow my writing blog in the context of LJ or DreamWidth can do so:

http://slowpalace-feed.livejournal.com/
http://theslowpalace-feed.dreamwidth.org/

You can leave comments on the feeds, but I may forget to check them, and they'll disappear after some number of weeks; permanent comments should go to the blog itself.

I'm still free. The icicle bars of winter haven't yet slammed shut, though recently another cyclist called out at an intersection: "It's the last good day!" That didn't quite turn out to be true, but I can see a long icy gray stretch of bus-riding and slush on the horizon.

That encounter was two Tuesdays ago, when I used the unseasonable warmth to bike to Lynn Woods (here's my GPS trace), enticed by names that could have come from a D&D map: Dungeon Rock, the Stone Tower, Pirate Boulder, the Wolf Pits! I spent a couple of hours hiking a loop of the southern half of the park, hitting Dungeon Rock, the Stone and Steel Towers, Walden Pond (not that one), Penny Bridge. It's an easy hike, with stone or wooden stairs taking you up and down slopes, and in mid-autumn an exceptionally pretty one, with red-orange-yellow-green foliage reflecting from mirror-still ponds. Off the main carriage roads, I only saw three other people the whole time. (Friendly dog-walkers abounded on the roads.)

Dungeon Rock and the Stone Tower are sometimes open, but not while I was there, alas. I'm told that Dungeon Rock descends 135 feet into the bowels of a stony hill; shining my flashlight around the cracks in the door, I saw a staircase plunging steeply into blackness. Gotta go back when I can convince the ranger to let me in!

I highly recommend Lynn Woods for low-impact hiking and nature appreciation. I found it more varied and welcoming than the Fells, for all that the Fells are a bit bigger (2600 acres vs. 2200). I took quite a few photos, and I'm very happy with the way this set turned out — do check it out. ( Highlights below the cut! )

The full set is here. I've also put together a collection of all my Boston-area park explorations, to encourage people to explore the green we've got.

I had such a nice time that I forgot that night drops like a guillotine at this time of year — half of my 18-mile return trip was in the dark, which was a bit of a knuckle-biter. What's more, Google Maps sent me into a nest of short streets and big box stores with fenced-off lots, which got me a little turned around. By the time I was approaching Harvard Square, I was anxious and distracted enough that I caught my tire on the lip of a concrete apron that wasn't quite flush with the asphalt, and took a tumble. I escaped injury, but my rear wheel was bent out of true; happily, Ace was able to fix it in half an hour for $20.

Last Saturday was one of those wonderful days you only get once a season, if you're lucky. I spent the afternoon riding out to Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge in Stow (about 21 miles each way, plus 4 miles of hiking — map). Assabet is covered over with a dense canopy of tall pines, so there's very little undergrowth, and everything is hushed. Every so often a huge, abandoned concrete bunker rises from the forest floor — Assabet used to be a military compound, and the army stored munitions and troops there during WWII. It lends a Lost Civilizations vibe to the whole place. Also on tap: very pretty wetlands (with plenty of frogs), a crystal lake, and twenty-some miles of hiking trails linking it all together.

The ride was perfect — ideal weather, farmland and forest to ride through (once I cleared Waltham), largely downhill on the way back. While planning my ride, I happened to notice that my route would take me within a mile of the homestead of Lorenzo Maynard, whose tomb I photographed at Mount Auburn last week, so I look a little loop through downtown Maynard to see it. On the way home, I passed by a herdlet of red calves just on the other side of a fence, so I stopped for a while to watch them romping and lowing and chewing. I sure do like the flexibility biking gives me.

When I got home, I had just enough time to shower and change and throw some pasta inside me before I had to set out for Davis Square to catch Beaver with kdsorceress. It was a variety burlesque from the folks who bring us the Slutcracker, starring J. Cannibal and satirizing the Tea Party. It was vicious. I was helplessly laughing for much of it — it put me in mind of the National Lampoon in their heyday. The Virgin Mary (Lolli Hoops) did a hooping striptease to Lady Gaga's Judas, then gave herself a Caesarean on-stage and danced with the baby Jesus. Rick Perry was Rickrolled, then encountered an abortion-on-demand vending machine (complete with vacuum noises) in "one o' them godless east coast shoppin' malls." A preacher testified about Christ as Penis. Sarah Palin did an involuntary pole dance, then helped to raise a Pride flag, Iwo Jima-style. It was relentless, crude, uncompromising satire...with boobs. Not something you'll find in the mainstream, and even if I didn't agree with every nuance of their message I was pleased to see artists taking a loud, unapologetic stand.

As an aside, I'm also pleased that I can hike-n-bike 56 miles in a day now and not really feel it. I was a little stiff the next day, but quite functional.

On Sunday, I biked to the MFA to check out their "new" contemporary art wing. (It's really just rebuilt and repurposed.) The space is airy and light, creating a sort of neutral-uplifting backdrop for the art, but they took a wrong turn by silkscreening explanatory blocks of text in each gallery ("Look around you! In this gallery, you'll see common objects used in uncommon ways!"). It creates a distancing Contemporary Art for Dummies feeling, and doesn't permit visitors to approach the art on their own terms. They also wrote out the guidelines for visitors in white neon, making a winceish "Is it art?" sort of installation that diminishes the rest of the collection. Getting past that, though, the collection itself is quite nice, charming and witty and powerful and inspiring by turns. I like the joke inherent in spelling out "INTENT" in incandescent bulbs, then letting them burn out until the message is illegible. A fellow struck up a conversation with me about the gorgeous, glossy, almost mechanical black mirrors of Fred Wilson's Iago's Mirror, and a young journalism student asked to photograph me contemplating a plaster cast of a morning shave. I most enjoyed the soft black closeness of their video installation gallery, where I sat watching a meditative underwater shot of a woman standing on a melon in the Dead Sea for about fifteen minutes.

It's good to immerse myself in contemporary art from time to time. I'm highly dependent on artistic self-confidence to carry me through this period of my writing career; seeing the many many ways people have managed to create art in the last half-century helps me tattoo THERE'S NO RIGHT WAY TO DO IT on the inside of my forehead. It's a message I needed to hear. Then I rode to Harvard Square to catch the tail end of the Honk! festival, and had it colored in with glitter and feathers and fried plantains.

Also: Neal Stephenson read from Reamde at the Coolidge, and while he has a typical geek's public speaking skills I was well entertained. A couple of weeks prior, I saw Betsi Feathers Burlesque at the Coolidge, and was impressed by their level of professionalism. Lots of choreography, very nice costumery. The dancers themselves were less alt-chick than I am accustomed to seeing; they looked like they'd stepped out of a glossy magazine, for the most part, which is not really my thing. But I had a good time.

Coming up: there's a Dali exhibit at DTR Gallery on Newbury Street (through 10/21), which I need to get to. I also want to get to the ICA after 10/7 to see the Dance/Draw and Swoon installations. The MoS is apparently hosting a huge travelling Pompeii exhibit, which adfamiliares and I are interested in; I'm also keen to see the fractals show in the planetarium. This weekend, J. Cannibal and the folks who bring us the Slutcracker are mocking the Tea Party at the Somerville with Beaver. The HMNH has a new "Life in the Extreme Deep" exhibit, with a talk-n-reception on the evening of 10/12.

Finally, my tires have been behaving themselves for weeks now, ever since the Ace guy found the tiny sliver and I put on a new Bontrager LT-3 tire. I think I'm going to bike out to Assabet Wildlife Refuge in Stow this weekend...and I'm laying track in my mind for a bike ride to Montréal and back next spring. Eep.

Last September, I posted my aspirations for the upcoming TV season. Let's see how I did, won't you?

• Hawaii Five-0: Renewed! This is a stupid, terrible show, which I totally dig. I look forward to season 2, and still bounce around like a fool when the theme music comes on.
• Chase: Cancelled, and rightly so. It was cliches on top of cliches.
• Outlaw: Cancelled, and again: hooray! Supreme-Court-justice-turned-trial-lawyer lasted about six episodes.
• Undercovers: Cancelled, and while I know some of my friends liked this show, again I can't blame the network. It was Alias without dramatic tension — two well-adjusted happily married trendies effortlessly completing CIA missions and running a catering business. Props for giving us black leads, but they could've been white and you wouldn't've noticed — they had no black friends, had nothing to distinguish them from the cultural mainstream. Heck, they went undercover in Germany without race ever coming up. I did like Gerald McRaney a lot, probably because he also disliked the leads, and because I used to watch Simon & Simon.
• The Event: Cancelled! They gave up on the most interesting part of the pilot (the nonlinearity) and replaced it with limp plot threads navigated by idiots. Wanted more characters to die.
• No Ordinary Family: Cancelled! Imagine Heroes. Now give the superpowers to the people on the front of a Hallmark card. Throw in a "hot" "geek" girl to make transparent superhero references, to appease the mom's-basement crowd. Bleah.
• The Defenders: Cancelled! I actually sort of liked this show. It floundered between heartfelt and edgy, but it was solidly affable. Oh well.
• Blue Bloods: Renewed! I will probably watch season 2, at least when my TiVo's well runs dry, because I like Tom Selleck and Donnie Wahlberg. It's probably the most politically conservative drama on TV, though, and it raises my hackles at least once per episode. The liberal foil in the family is weak and easily steamrolled.
• Detroit 1-8-7: Cancelled! Another cliched cop show, with terrible acting; they gave up on the interesting docu-drama angle immediately. I only watched two episodes.
• Outsourced: Cancelled! I actually had to look on Wikipedia to determine this, which tells you how funny the show ended up being.
• The Walking Dead: Renewed! Loved this; excited for season 2; worried about replacing the showrunner.
• Terra Nova: Postponed! Now it's going to premiere this fall, so we can wait once more to see if CGI dinosaurs make compelling TV.

At least most of my established shows continued into this year; only Medium, The Good Guys, and Caprica were cancelled, and the three new shows I'm still watching fill those holes. So, mathematically, I am in the same situation as I was last year: hoping for five or six decent new shows. I am optimistic! Ha ha!

• Terra Nova I've already talked about. Premieres 9/26 on Fox.
• Ringer is Sarah Michelle Gellar's triumphant return to TV, in which she plays a twin on the run who takes over the life of her missing, wealthier twin. I can't see it being good, but loyalty demands I watch the episode I taped tonight. It's on the CW (noooo!), and just premiered.
• American Horror Story looks like it might be a creepily intriguing take on the "Oops, I bought a haunted house!" genre. It's billed as a "psychosexual horror mystery," and the ads have been bizarre — like, someone playing a naked woman's back as a cello bizarre. Seriously, YouTube it. Premieres 10/5 on F/X.
• Person of Interest is the new drama from J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan (brother of Christopher), starring Lost's Ben as a fellow who's developed software to predict crimes and the fellow he hires to stop them early. Premieres 9/22 on CBS.
• Charlie's Angels is another reboot of a classic series, and while I suspect it will suck I'll give it an episode or two. 9/22, ABC.
• Grimm is about a monster-hunting cop who is also the last surviving descendant of the Brothers Grimm, who were also monster-hunters and writing stories about real monsters. 10/21, NBC.
• Once Upon a Time is, funnily enough, another "What if fairy tales were real?" show, with what looks like much less edge and conviction than Grimm. But it's written by two Lost alums, so I will give it a chance. 10/23, ABC.
• Hell on Wheels looks amazing. It's a historical drama about construction of the Transcontinental Railroad! And there's revenge or something! I am very excited. AMC, 11/6.
• Homeland is on Showtime, which I suddenly get for free for no reason I can discern. It's about a POW who may or may not have been turned during his captivity. Cast includes Mandy Patinkin, who suspects that I killed his father, and Damian Lewis, who starred in the vastly underappreciated Life. Showtime, 10/2.
• Pan Am, the period piece about stews, which is hovering on the edge of me giving it a chance. My dad's worked for an airline all his life, so it may hit the nostalgia spot for me. ABC, 9/25.

Coming in 2012 is Alcatraz, starring Jorge Garcia (Hurley!) and produced by Bad Robot, about a whole lotta prisoners who vanished from the island decades ago. Also The Finder, a Bones spinoff we already sorta saw an episode of on Bones; Awake, in which Jason Isaacs shuttles back and forth between two realities: one in which his wife is dead, and one in which his son is; The River, a gritty horror show about a wildlife TV host who goes missing in the Amazon, and the quest of his family, friends, and crew to find him; and The Firm, a "several years later..." sequel to the Grisham novel/movie, which I find such a weird concept I may have to watch it. The River and Alcatraz both have great potential; I'm actively looking forward to their spring premieres.

Fingers crossed for five or six of these to pan out! I have been scraping the dregs from my TiVo lately — I've been forced to watch Leverage, for God's sake.

(One show I will not be watching is H8r, the description of which gave me hives: "Host Mario Lopez will bring together stars [like Kim Kardashian and Snooki] and their civilian haters so they can convince these detractors to see the error of their ways." Gaaah! Why, TV? Why?)