I had the great pleasure of sitting down for a few beers with people who are in politics as a profession or a significant hobby. If you have never met such people, you might be surprised by how they do things.
I know a lot of people like this in part because politics has been something of a hobby for me as well. Most of the people involved are hobbyists, which is my way of saying they have real skills that they never attempt to make a buck off of; it’s the fun of it that keeps them going.
The most common perspective for novels and other stories is one of authorial omnipotence. It also happens to be a point of view that I strongly dislike.
The basic idea is that in the world the author has created, they know everything. The storyteller is privy to what happens between characters and inside of them, at the scene of the action and away from it. Any way that the story can be advanced is at their fingertips, and the characters have to contend with the author as some kind of a deity.
In a steel and glass cage moving at 80 miles an hour, time passes slowly. But time is the only tangible sensation you can count on.
I have spent too much time in a car lately going from one point to another. What I find most remarkable about the way I relate to these places is that I go precisely from one point to another. In between I am in the car. I am never particularly in one place at any time, but simply in between. Travel is always this way. I am either here or there, or in transit. The conveyance of travel connects time and space through a simple ratio of average speed.
There’s a little secret shared by many Anglos who grew up in Spanish speaking parts of the United States. When we were kids, a lot of us turned the teevee to Univision, the Spanish network, even though we didn’t understand a thing.
Why did we do this? Nothing more than idle curiosity. We wanted to know what the deal was. Perhaps we could learn a little of the language and a bit of the culture. Once we tuned in, it was easy to get hooked on the erupting theatrics and the dewy-eyed women in low-cut dresses. If nothing else, everyone looked so damned good.
A few days ago, the temperature reached 98F/37C in Saint Paul, with high humidity. Any trip outside was a swim through the air, desperately making as few waves as possible. But during all of this, I was always heartened to know that very cold air was only about 10 miles away.
Not across town, that is, but up. The temperature is as low as -50C directly over our heads in a mysterious place called the “tropopause” before you hit the stratosphere. It gets that was because of some unique features of living on a wet planet.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 