Obsidian Noise

This is the oldest lion head in NYC, up on a wall in the secret association. It weighs about three times as much as the new heads, which are mostly paper and epoxy. The old ones were steel wire, lots of paper and glue, and wooden supports. Thinking about those who had to keep it hoisted over head for an entire day of dancing leaves me awestruck, and explains the incredible shoulders and necks of the people I know who practice this art.

This is the newer style Lion head. Awesomely decorated and functional.

The ears, brows and eyelids all move and are an important part of the dance. As the lion dances around the offering, its facial expression changes, very carefully, and that’s where all the moving parts come in. They’re controlled by these things:

Little pulleys and flaps and switches. Fun to pull on, but eerie how they bring the big head to life so realistically, and easy to see why the ritual has lasted for millennia.

I felt a little out of place up in the association that morning. Firstly, I was the only white guy. I’ve been in that situation many times, having spent years as a racial minority for most of my 20s, but it had been a while since I was completely immersed like that. Lots of conversations happened all around me that I couldn’t pick apart, the fast South Chinese dialects whizzing by my ears like bird songs. So I just knelt around, huddling my coffee, observing everything, loving every minute.

The youth of the place were all excited, practicing moves, showing off lion dance steps and aerials. Most lion dancers practice kung fu, and many of the moves are the same.

For many of these guys and girls, this is one of the most stable parts of their lives– the training and performing– they’ve been doing it, and doing it together, since childhood. They grow up in their own ways, moving away and around, going onto and down their different paths in life, but the Association and training bring them and keep them together for the rest of their lives.

Many of the younger performers are high school drop outs, some are working, but most are trying to make ends meet with a combination of street skills and family resources. But the one constant in their lives is training, and that’s a language and attitude and belief system I understand perfectly.

If you train enough, and get to your best possible state, everything else will just fall into place. I count on that being true, and I believe it is. If I lacked that belief, I probably wouldn’t even be alive any more.

A highlight of the morning for me was taking a rest in the association office. The walls were covered with pictures of the different lion dance troops over time. Decades and generations of groups all from the same association, having practiced and trained in the same building, the one I was standing in. The sweat-pounded carpeting of the training floor reminded me of my Sanda days at TiYu in Beijing and it filled me with melancholy. How recent, yet how long ago those days were. How near, yet how far they really are from the way things are now. It made me remember how my best friend from those days and I would stack into one of those small Beijing taxis, the ones that are illegal in post-Olympics Beijing, and with his small boombox playing My Dying Bride or Pantera or Cradle of Filth, we’d get psyched up on our way to Shi Cha Hai for a full day of obsessive, joyous, and occasionally wondrous training.

The office in the Association, there in Chinatown NYC, was dingy and crammed with multiple lifetimes of things and was fantastic. There were yellowing certificates and awards from the 50s and 60s and on and up through the last couple of years. There were giant vats of herbal medicine, saggy old couches an old TV with VCD players connected, old hot plates and tea pots on old shelves with the paint chipped mostly away, old books and charts of pressure points on the walls, and pictures everywhere. The scene was straight from the Mainland, and it was a nice scene indeed.

The son of the master of the association was in the office, wearing sunglasses that he never took off. We chatted quickly about training and I said I liked the place, and the association. He said something like “oh, is that so” and the conversation was over. I didn’t mind. I was just happy to have been able to get in that far and I don’t blame him. We made eye contact throughout the rest of the day and we’re cool.

From the office, we headed out.

The thing I’ll always like about this picture is that in the background it shows the tall building I’ve been spending increasing amounts of time in and around lately.

It was seemingly quiet out front. But one block away…

Intense amounts of people readying for the lions.

Different troops and schools and associations and clubs all come out for this, with their drums, with their lion heads, with their pride and loyalties, and they march around. It’s an amazing spectacle.

I was lucky enough to be able to march around practically within the troop I was invited to hang out with. There were a few times it got weird, such as when we all went right into giant dim sum restaurants and paraded around, thrilling the Chinese patrons who held out red envelopes filled with lucky money, and disturbing the white patrons who were probably just there to eat and had no idea that today was not a day for mere eating.

We paraded through all of Chinatown. Into the secret malls, down through the underground passage ways where people sell home grown soybeans, across Mulberry and Mott, down Canal and more. Around and up, down and around, pats on the back, red envelopes stuffed in my pockets. I was dressed all in black with sunglasses on, trying to blend in as just a walking, anonymous camera.

———————————————————–

Incidentally, the new Limmers performed well. Even with just a day or two of breaking in, the Light Weights were ready for a full day marching around, and at the end, as the first creases were starting to form, like the binding a of a new book which you’ve finally dived into, I saw their color had darkened, and that put a smile on my face.

__________________________

Busy week. Tonight I have Devin Townsend and Gojira playing in Williamsburg, which means getting a whole lot done between now and about 6p.

No training today as I swam for 60 minutes last night after The Routine. Physically, I feel really good, really strong. I’m 195lbs, which is the almost the heaviest I’ve ever been, and I’m also lean. I used to think a 195lbs lean daily weight was my ideal, but lately I’m tempted to add another 5lbs. It’ll be nice and whole.

Many of you guys ask for my training details and other things. There’s no secret here.

Current stats:

• 6′, 195lbs
• 10k (6.2 mile) run: 0:37:07
• 1 mile swim: 0:24:16
• Consecutive pull ups: 27
• Consecutive pushups: 94
• Consecutive situps: 203

The Routine:

Daily: 30 minutes of either running or swimming at 80% max heart rate.

• 20 (sets) x 25 (reps) pushups
• 10 x 10 pull-ups
• 10 x 15 slow leg raises
• 2 x 100 flutter kicks (on a four count)
• heavy bag routine

The walk in to work was damn near paradisal. It’s sunny and about 45. Hoody weather. Bounce-in-your-step brightness, the mind filled with the hope and excitement of somehow still being alive.

By the way, The Perfect Hoody is so named because of its universal soundness. Paired with gloves and a hat, you can be comfortable down to about 35 or so. Warmer than that, you can unzip the top or all the way open and wear it loosely. Tie it around your waist. Good to go. Perfect hoody. Little rain?  Perfect hoody can handle that. Sudden meeting? Perfect hoody is slightly sheeny and looks good over a collar shirt. Because it’s black, it’s always clean.

Similar to my boots, the Perfect Hoody has been with me everywhere since I sprung for it 2.5 years ago in San Francisco. Last winter, I wore it nearly every day, no jacket needed. Black hoody, gray pants, black Limmers, good to go. Universal.

I’m attracted to the simplicity of that arrangement. I now have three gray pants, two black hoodies (one Patagonia, one Arc Teryx) three white collar shirts, two suits, 24 band t-shirts, 8 hiking socks, 17 underwear. Plus a major new acquisition, because the timing was right: a new pair of Limmers.

The Limmer Standards that I’ve been wearing for about 6 years are holding up fine. I wear them just about every day and they feel like running shoes that I can wear into battle if need be. I grease them up probably every other week, or more if it’s wet or snowy out. I’ve had them resoled once and they’re about due for another. While chatting with Ken Smith over at Limmer Boot Company up there in Chatham, New Hampshire, I decided it might be worth checking out one of their other models, just to compare to the Standards. So right now on my feet I’m wearing the Limmer Light Weights, and I love them already.

It’s the same design, same construction– one piece of leather. By all other comparisons, these are not “Light Weight” at all, but compared to the Standards, they’re noticeably lighter. Instead of 3.2mm full grain leather and weighing about 5lbs/pair, these are 2.8mm waxed nubuck leather, and weigh about 3.5lbs/pair.  But interesting and contrary to what I had imagined, they’re still stiff as hell, which I love. The leather is strong and stiff, like a shell, and it will slowly break in around my feet the more I wear them. Also, the color will continually darken as they age and as boot grease is applied over time. I like the way they look– though of course I prefer black. It’s nice to have one of each now, dark brown and black– Light Weight for super long hikes and treks, and also my beloved heavyweight Standards for everything else. The Light Weights are also slightly less expensive than the Standards, but the prices at Limmer have gone up since my last purchase about 6 years ago, so these were about the same as what I paid for the Standards. They still had all my foot measurements on record so all I had to do was call them up and place the order.

—————————————————————

It’ll be a strictly working weekend. I’ll be home or in the library working on my dissertation, pretty much until Monday 9a. I don’t mind. I like being alone right now. I’m actually glad I have the circumstance that allows for it, otherwise I’m not sure I’d get done all that I have to. Also, after spending time in meetings during most of the day, I look forward to my time alone at night. I get lonely sometimes, but it’s a particular kind. I miss particular people. The feeling is that if I went out somewhere, with people I know or around strangers, I’d still be lonely for the people I miss.

Swimming was great last night. I did 30 minutes of laps and then the rest of the conditioning routine. Curious? OK then. Check this out:

• 30 minutes of either running or swimming at 80% max heart rate
• 20 (sets) x 25 (reps) pushups
• 10 x 10 pull-ups
• 10 x 15 slow leg raises
• 2 x 100 flutter kicks (on a four count)

Ater the cardio, sometimes I do the routine one exercise at a time, but if I have the pull-up bar to myself, I like to do it as a circuit. So that’d be 25 pushups right into 10 pull-ups, then still holding the bar, grind out 15 leg raises, then drop to the floor for 50 flutter kicks on a four count, then flip over and back to 25  pushups, and around the whole circuit again until all sets of everything are done. I prefer the circuit because by the time you get up to the 7-8th set, your entire body is awesomely wrecked. Your arms are deadening, your chest and tri’s are nearly paralyzed, your hips are practically useless. That’s when it’s most satisfying for me, to keep grinding it out, every rep a new little battle between mind and body, the sweat dripping onto the floor right in front of you, your handprints visible, leaving a record of the work you’re doing, and your victories over gravity.

You keep going. Even if it takes you 3 minutes to grind out one of the later sets of 25 pushups, hell even if it takes 5 minutes, with 10 seconds between each repetition, you keep going. The pull-ups near the end are motherfuckers. You might have to kip your way up above the bar by swinging your legs, and you might have to drop down before finishing because your hands are incapable of holding the bar any longer. But after shaking your fingers out for a few seconds, you get back up there and do the next rep, because you can and will.

Eventually you get every last rep in, because you always finish what you start.

Hobbling home from this kind of workout is great and satisfying and important for me. I like the feeling of total depletion. I think it’s my happiest state, when there’s nothing left inside. Getting home empty is the only way for me to be home safely. Otherwise I think too much, and go too deep inside myself and it’s hard to be there. When you feel like you left it all out there, and now your only job is to recover and enjoy the state, then things will be OK, another evening will end well.  Drop your stuff inside the door. Go to the kitchen and eat a fish, or a chicken, or a cow, a  bunch of grains and nuts, some leafs of stuff. Drink a liter of water and then take a shower. Jerk off to temporarily dull your ever present desire for sex, give your longings a break, and then stretch out while listening to the next album on your list, made by other people who understand certain things that others don’t, and then pass out into the universe for 8-9 hours with a smile on your face for the first time that day.

Have a great weekend.

Unconscious in a timely manner last night, and up with plenty of time to be fairly alert for a staff meeting. This time I was just an attendee, but I actually paid attention to everything that was presented. What a bunch of shit it all was. Seriously.

I had great training last night and my hips are tight and sore today, especially the flexors the run down the front. I used to have to do thousands of flutter kicks back in the pleasantness of non-civilian life, mostly to condition and occasionally to pre-exhaust the legs before going on long ocean swims.  In phase III we had a timed a two-mile open ocean swim that we had to complete in 70 minutes or less. That was with fins on, but it was extremely difficult to keep the legs moving through all that ocean for so long, and it was mostly hip flexor strength. If you were strong there, you’d be fine. I can remember as we prepared ourselves for those kinds of challenges, watching my hip muscles develop, growing out from my body, becoming little fists that would clench when holding my legs out straight. I think it was at that point, maybe about age 19, I first started to see  my body as an extension of myself, and using it and developing it in that way.

Kicking bags and people doesn’t work those kinds of useful muscles in the same way as a long bay swim, or especially not an open ocean swim. Because of that, I’ve starting doing the PT from my old days and it feels great. Flutter kicks and pushups, pull-ups, dips, leg raises and long runs and swims for basic conditioning now, when not wrestling or training at the MMA gym downtown. Since I’m off alcohol completely for another 6 weeks, I expect to see fast progress, and especially for long distance swims. My lower back is 100%.

When you switch over to endurance training, you lose most of the fat on your body and become hungry constantly. I believe that is my most natural state, and having started all this again it was a fast reminder of how important it is to me to stay hungry and anxious for action. Training hard and going extreme creates that state, and for me I need it. Hungry. Anxious for action. It applies to fighting, it applies to conditioning, it applies to sex, it applies to travel. I’m hungry. I’m anxious for action.

I have an MMA tourney in April that I’ll be over-conditioned for, so that will be a fun target.

Back to work for now.

One tricky thing is when you’re given a project to manage that you don’t particularly believe in. All of the minutia of project management– the record keeping, the ticket items, the milestones and assignments, the check-ins and the monitoring– it all becomes agonizing because ultimately you don’t agree with what it’s all for. When that’s the case, it’s difficult to do a good job. When you’re not behind the goal, all of the little tasks become absofreakinglutely annoying, disproportionately so. Writing a work ticket on this project cascades into hatred for innocent things. This morning, for instance, it took me ten minutes to write a work ticket because of how much hatred I felt for my keyboard. Then it was the act of typing itself. What a dainty little fucking activity, clickity clack, tap, clickity-clickity clack, tap tap. At what point in my life did I decide it was OK for me to use my fingers for touching little buttons instead of smashing stuff, or gripping stuff, or digging stuff, or lifting stuff, or punching stuff, or holding stuff up, or lugging stuff around.

Clickity clack, tap, clickity-clickity clack, tap, clickity-clack, tap tap.

That’s probably the hardest thing about my circumstance right now, that one project that I wish would go and die before it strangles my already blue testicles.

02/12/13

In my dream last night, I was leaving a giant supermarket, alone, and I watched a woman in front of me dig into her purse and drop something on the ground as she walked ahead. I went to where it dropped and saw it was a vile of prescription medication. I grabbed the vile off the ground started to chase after her, calling out. “Hey! You dropped these!” But she kept walking. Someone intercepted me and saw the vile in my hand. It was an authority figure, maybe a cop, maybe other security.

“Are those yours?”
“No, they belong to that woman.”
“Why do you have them?”
“I found them after she dropped them.”

And he started fighting me. We fought for a long time, wrestling and punching, the vile in my pocket, the woman getting away. I tried calling out a few times but my voice wasn’t loud enough. I remember thinking it was too bad there were no onlookers as I continually flipped the security guy over my back. Over and over, he’d stand up, I’d move in and flip him down, he’d stand up, and it just went on like that, like a video game in which you only know one move that works.

I woke up I felt bad for the woman who lost her medicine.

We had a snowstorm on Friday, 2/8/13, and it was great. I stayed in, listening to the plows run up and down my hill, clanking and scraping, their chained wheels grinding and chunking. Few things relax me as much. The hypnotic ballet of snow trucks. Or ballad. They worked all night long, and they worked on me.

What I like most about all night snow storms is the first look outside the next morning. What happened out there? Will there be 5 feet of snow? 15 fucking feet!!!? The quantity is rarely enough, but the quality can make up for it. When the morning after is bright blue and sunny and the snow is perfectly white and all the cars are buried completely, it’s a spectacular thing.

Here’s a pic from my phone on my walk up to the gym on Saturday morning:

As predicted, the rain is here today, Monday. Fuck this Monday.  It’s in the process of removing all evidence that the spectacular thing had occurred, and after only a mere two days.

Saturday night I was in Chinatown at a friend’s place for Chinese New Year. I helped cook for about three hours, learning many things that I doubt I’ll remember as it was all so complicated. I’m not sure how anyone would be able to reproduce any of it without following directions in books, but my friend’s mom was able to do it all from memory. Maybe 12 dishes? Here’s the near final spread, with my friend’s younger brother and dog in the background:

He’s a highly renown drummer and breakdancer in Manhattan.

It was all extremely good, and at around 11:30p we left for the Neighborhood Association, mostly a club house for elderly Chinese gangsters, to watch lions and old men drumming and banging things, like sticks and blocks and cymbals and cheering loudly, beginning indoors and then spilling out into the streets of Chinatown, parading around. Most of the group was wasted out of their minds on rice liquor. I was probably the only sober one there, having started my two months of no drinking nine days earlier.

The thing about setting a rule like that for yourself is that there can be no exceptions or the whole thing is meaningless. “No drinking” is crystal clear. And that’s how I feel right now.

That night was great but super cold and I headed back up and home on the D train by 1a, feeling like I had taken a trip away from things, at least for a bit, and all of that was nice.

Busy day today but training is at the end and it’s all I’m thinking about. I was also thinking about my ex earlier and missing her, and then about when I was growing up and my best friend and I would go out into the deep woods behind his house and make luge tracks for our sleds and stay out there until dark. Sometimes I miss people. Sometimes I miss the woods. It can be hard to know which one pulls harder, or if it’s in unison, or in the same direction.

The fire marshal called a couple hours later and explained that he couldn’t make it that night but was hoping to come “have a look” on Sunday morning, if that was possible. I said it was and he said until then not to touch anything. He asked me a couple questions, like who else had access to my balcony, who else has keys to my place. Do I smoke, when was the last time I smoked. Have I ever seen anyone climbing up the balconies of my building, and stuff like that. I answered everything as clearly and honestly as possible. Yes sir. No sir. Not that I’m aware of, sir.

From the pictures he was looking at, his early suggestion was that it was possible a cigarette or other burning thing could have blown over from one of the adjacent buildings, and touched the dead plants out there, and that’s all it would take. The plants were the accelerant, the yoga mat was the main hot fuel that enabled the harder to burn stuff, like the plastic chair, to fully ignite.

He said he still needed to come over to have a look around, and Sunday morning he called saying he was on his way in from Queens.

Fire Marshals are like police detectives. Their job is to investigate conditions and causes, and they have the power to make arrests, close buildings, seal evidence and essentially perform every other task a police detective does. When the one assigned to my precinct arrived, I hoped to learn more about what his life is like. That’s the level of ridiculousness I’m at: the Fire Marshal is coming to investigate me and a fire that nearly burned my place down, and I’m mostly thinking about the questions I’ll ask him, like what’s the coolest fire he’s ever seen, how long can he hold his breath for, what would happen if a subway was vest-bombed by a terrorist, etc.

He and his fat partner came in. The fat guy just stood around looking at stuff, not speaking, and made me uneasy. The fire marshal, however, was exactly as I had imagined. He had gray and black hair, deep lines in his face and he had very rugged look, like maybe his skin had been partially dried out and preserved by all the smoke he’s been exposed to through his career. To be a Fire Marshal you have to have been a fire fighter first, usually for 20 or 30 years, and work your way up. It’s unlikely to become a fire marshal because of all the qualified candidates and limited positions.

He was shorter than me, and somehow that made sense. His accent was as Queens as there is; more or less a younger, tougher Archie Bunker.

He looked around and tried to confirm his early hypotheses. He saw some cigarette butts out there in the soot and I had to explain they were from a get-together months ago, and that no one had smoked on that balcony in months. He seemed unconcerned with finding out if that was really true (it was), possibly because it wouldn’t matter either way. The truth is that it was and had been windy on my street, and my street is filled with smokers and kids who light fire crackers, and it could have come from dozens of different windows, fire escapes, and potentially hundreds if not thousands of different people who were there that day, and who smoke, and who smoke from their windows. If every cigarette in my neighborhood was a tiny smoke stack, my block would be the deepest, densest industrial sector in all of Manhattan, I bet.

He advised me that the balcony needed to be cleaned of all stuff from now on, that the smell should go away in a few days, and that the candle on my table didn’t make him happy. He asked if I was prior military and I said I was and he said he could tell and that so was he. We shook hands, his fat partner looking on, and he left, and that’s that. Case closed. I think maybe his partner was there for backup, or perhaps even at his level, all investigations require more than one witness.

Wednesday night of this week, the night before last, I moved everything that was burned– which was everything on the entire balcony– down the street for Thursday morning pickup with the regular garbage. I wrapped the big, half-charred stuff in plastic and borrowed a dolly truck and slowly moved everything down onto the curb. There’s now hardly any evidence there was a fire at all. My balcony looks big and comfortable again. So, thanks fire!

I have to pay for my door and a new AC which will be a couple grand. I signed up for renters insurance earlier this week, having thoroughly learned my lesson as it all would have been covered had I been enrolled. That’s only $15/month.

There’s a blizzard outside today and all I want to do is head into the woods with a dog, a thermos, and stay in there, in those woods, for a long, long time.

But instead I’ll probably be in some coffee shop later, working on a dissertation that is now my only anchor to NYC.

So I stood at the sliding glass window that used to open to a balcony that, while nice, was in fact filled with stuff that shouldn’t have been out there. Prior to Friday, there were pots of dead plants there, a couple scavenged office chairs, a weird wheely flat panel display thing that I thought I might use but didn’t and that I was told many times by many people to throw away. There was an old, cheap, plastic table with more dead plants on it, too.

After Friday, all of that was gone.

The chairs were now twisted, melted, heaps of stink. The plants were completely non-existent, almost no trace of them save for the puddles of now cool molten plastic that used to be pots. The clay pots were all smashed up, no doubt caused by the NYFD as they stamped out every last cinder.

The giant flat panel display apparatus was all contorted, its thick metal bars scarred with soot and boiled off coating, and the two glass shelves were melted off the frame, now all bent and drooping like something out of the Hiroshima museum.

The entire floor of the balcony was covered in black soot and gunk. The walls were now black, indicating clearly where every flame had licked and whipped the building with each gust of wind. The flames were said to be more than 6 feet high by people on the street.

The giant $1,400 air conditioner that fit into the wall was now out there in the pile of burned trash, all charred and messed up, its cord looking sad and unnatural out there where electrical things should never go, out in the world and exposed.

My neighbor came back over.

 “Don’t go out there, they told me to tell you not to touch anything until they can investigate.”

I said fine. She asked if I smoked and I said no. She observed some cigarette butts out on the tile floor of the balcony.

“They think the fire came from those, do you know where those came from? It’s OK, you can tell me.”

I said that I have had friends over who smoke and a few times people have smoked on my balcony. Those butts must have been in one of the plant pots or something like that, left over maybe from one of my summer gatherings. That’s the last time I can remember someone smoking out there.

She didn’t really look convinced, but it was the truth.

She left me alone after that. The conference at work was still going on, rumors no doubt swirling amongst the staff that my house was gone or something like that. I texted some pictures to coworkers and got many shocked responses. Sometimes when there’s a fire, it’s a small thing– you know,  something burns away. In this case, it was an actual fire, the kind that’s put out with a fire hose and NYFD’s finest. The kind that leaves your door smashed in, the corners of your walls all nicked and scraped and dented from large pieces of equipment strapped to the bodies of professional fire fighters. There’s a black handprint on the elevator button panel where one of them must have touched a large, gloved hand.

I never thought firefighters ever took elevators.

The locksmith was the first to come help me restore normalcy. He came quickly, having just been there earlier in the month to put a new lock on my door. He did his best, but the door was a bashed-in mess. He spent an hour trying to bend it back into basic shape, something that’s only possible with metal doors. After his hour of work and $220 later, my door was closing properly and lockable. It looked like shit, but it worked. I put a fan aiming out from the sliding glass door and kept my kitchen exhaust fan on, and both bathrooms’ fans to help clear the air of burning rubber fumes.

Once things were more or less in place and there was nothing else to be done, I sat in my room and tried to relax. It had been an unbelievably long 22 days of high stress work, both coasts, and I hadn’t any time to myself in weeks. I had rushed back to my east coast gig to try to get everything in shape for the conference, which was extremely important for me to perform well at. I was burned out already and that final, big, culminating day was the day of the fire at my place. It was almost poetic how bad everything was– the timing, the events, the consequences. I had been needing a break from everything– *everything*– and some peace and nothingness, relaxation and contentment. I was feeling like my health was suffering because of the lack of down time. And as I sat there in my room realizing I wasn’t going to have that time, not until after the smoke cleared– literally– and I was able to pay the damages and get everything back to normal, I would continue to be restless, weary, short-tempered and unhealthy. I needed that weekend, for this is going to be another long week, my calendar full daily until about Feb. 16th.

I sat there wanting to forget the fire, forget the conference, forget work. Forget everything. I wanted a pretty girl to talk to and fall asleep with. I wanted everything to be wrapped up so I could leave on vacation, guilt-free and feeling like I deserved it, that the timing was good, that I could leave my computer at home, that all I needed was a backpack and hammock and hatchet, and that maybe out there in the jungle I’d find the girl I needed, and out there I could hang out with her and we could cook together and wake up together. That New York and San Diego and two jobs and everything else wasn’t even a blip on my radar, and it was only me, in the jungle, the mountain, the island.

Minor major stress fest this morning, taking care of business for you guys now.

A long stretch there, so thanks for bearing with. I’m back on the usual routine now. I hope I didn’t lose too many of you.

I’ll catch you up slowly, but first something of priority.

I had a talk I was supposed to give at a big conference on Friday, 2/1/13. My talk was scheduled for 11:30a. While chatting with some attendees, at around 11:15a, I got a call from the NYFD.

“Mr. Duck?”

“Yes?”

“Hi Mistah Duck, this is Eddie Fredick over at New Yoak City Faiya Department. I’m calling’ because we had to enter ya apaatment trew da front doah because ya balcony was on faiya.”

“My balcony was on fire?”

“Yeah, da balcony was on faiya, can you tell me what it was you had out thea?”

“Sure, uh, plants, mostly dead, a couple chairs, a table thing…”

“Yeah so all that is gone, did you have anything combustible out theya, maybe some kerosene or something like that?”

“No…. wait, my balcony was on fire?”

“Yeah, ya balcony. Ya balcony was on faiya. Now what did you have out thea? It was no small faiya Mistah Duck, everything on that balcony is burned to a crisp. Also ya air conditiona had to be pulled out because it was on faiya too, so dat’s toast.”

“Wow. Are the other units OK? Any damage to the inside?”

“I think you bettah get down hea and we can talk about the rest of all that. Because we had to smash ya doah down, you might wanna get someone hea to protect the place until you can replace it.”

“OK.”

So then it was 11:18a. My phone rings again. It’s my neighbor calling to tell me my place was on fire and that she’s headed over there now. I asked her if she could hang out there until I could get home so no one goes into my place and she said she would.

11:25a. Should I race home or go on with my talk?

11:28a. How bad would it be to skip my talk?

11:29a. I wonder if the Xiphos, my beloved first metal guitar, is OK.

11:30a. “Good morning everyone, thanks for coming to my session. Today I’m going to tell you about…”

And that was that. Somehow I was able to push away the fact that my place was on fire and deliver an hour-long talk about assumptions in education. In hindsight, I am unsure if that was the right decision, but it sure made for an exciting talk.

As soon as it was over I tore for home to check out what had happened.

And sure enough.

My balcony was a crispy, putrid, charred, gunky, nasty mess. My place smelled like a tire factory and my furniture was all pulled away from the wall facing the balcony. The balcony itself was littered with burned and melted chairs, a burned up table, a pile of melted plant pots and the remains of 4-5 tall plants and inches of soot.

While coming to terms with what had happened and trying to guess at all the possible causes, I called a locksmith to come and replace the one the fire department smashed apart.  I was told not to go out to the balcony until after the fire marshal came to investigate, under penalty of law. So while I waited for the locksmith I stood in the doorway of the balcony and took in all the damage.

To be continued…