Lynn takes Pics

A few years ago, I bought a kit camera at Costco, basically the cheapest DSLR you  can buy.  I use a cheap android phone and the camera cost less than an iPhone.  It came with two lenses and the elephants you see here were taken with the long lens.

The beach had four or five elephant seals on it and this one was the most active and appeared the most dominant.  He flopped into the water and began swimming down towards a couple of other males who were sunbathing. 

He made a sound like a low drumming honk.  The other males ran in opposite directions.  One was flopping towards us so we also moved away!  

Off to a different stretch of coast, I looked around at the tidal life.  Snails munching some rotting seaweed. 

A hermit crab hides inside a snail shell.

A snake, possible a Western Yellow-bellied racer was stuck at the bottom of the cliff and on the wrong side of a coastal creek.  I moved him into some vegetation.

A kitesurfer, there were around ten of them that came and went.  It was very windy.  The kitesurfers seemed to be all middle aged palefaces with different manners compared to surfers.  Their rigs use inflatable tubes to remain open, rather than rigid structures.  Below are a couple of tidal scenes.  The cliffs here are hard sandstones.  The wind knocked chunks of rock out of the face which made clinking noises as they fell. 

THE END

 

The Attendant

 

July 4, 2041, 8:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, Pittsburgh, PA, Children’s Hospital

 

T

he man appearing on the Clarity View at the visitor’s gate, on the unwatched screen in the security round, had a kind, elderly and yet incongruently muscular face, framed above by a shaven skull of a pale hue, ancient freckles and fresh age spots mixing into a complexion that might seem motley.  Below his close-cropped silver beard, attached by a corded neck, his kind, somewhat worried visage was offset by the hardened body of a 20-year-old athlete under sleek, form-fitting yoga leotard of blue—the same color as his wistful eyes.

The man was holding a pink teddy bear, a stuffed companion bedecked in a white fedora decorated with an emerald green feather, a hand-stitched dreamcatcher suspended from its fluffy neck, above plaid overalls and black leather, silver-buckled shoes.

The automated attendant announced, “Welcome to Children’s Hospital, your name please?”

The man shuffled nervously, “Rick, ah, Richard Wayne Pensky.”

The attendant droned, in a gender neutral voice: “Greetings, Richard.  Please state the nature of your visit.”

The man shuffled again, “I’m here to see Dandelion Machi.”

The attendant suggested, “Richard, please extend your hand for safe check.”

The large, thin-skinned but unwrinkled left hand extended as the other held the teddy bear.  An electric eye moved near on its rubber stalk through the galvanized steel bars of the gate and illuminated the Universal Person Code on the back of the man’s pale, spotted hand.  The eye retracted and the man’s face was oddly cast in a state of wanting wonder, a face curiously un-indented by a mask, a face that, should the man be viewed by any sociologist, would suggest a lifetime of non-compliant criminality.

The attendant droned, in a now feminine voice, “Please Richard, await the safety officer for a manual reading of your safe code.”

The man looked around nervously, and asked, “Can I just drop the bear off for Dandelion Machi?”

The tinny female voice of the attendant droned for compliance, “Shah Ali Khan, await the safety officer.  You have been cited for use of an assumed name.  Failure to accept citation may result in the issuance of a medical warrant by the attending physician.”

“I just want to see my little niece!  She’s sick.  She should not be all alone.  I’m not sick—look at me.  I’m healthy!”

The attendant soothed, “Visitor, please understand that safe code certification is a condition of visitation and that Children’s Hospital is dedicated to the safety and wellness of staff, patients and visitors.  The safety officer will be with you momentarily.”

The man claiming to be an unregistered person named Richard Wayne Pensky, as indicated by the red flashing words “NOT FOUND IN DATABASE” on the unobserved monitor in the vast security room, occupied by one obese officer asleep in one of the 24 swivel chairs, before the 240 screens, became red in the face and blurted, “Just let me leave the bear, please.  A little girl should have a teddy bear at least!”

The attendant, unseen, as the attending screen and speakers were below the monitor lens, switched to a mid-octave feminine tone, a voice with a motherly quality patterned after long-dead but immortal singer, “Visitor, in these trying times the need for counseling and treatment of anxiety and depression remains profound.  We, at Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital, are dedicated to the wellness and safety of all and offer treatment.  Our Cradle-to-Rainbow Bridge Initiative links MedFar Health facilities suitable for all ages and genders.  If you would be kind enough to await safety certification by one of our sensitivity-trained officers, then the attending physician may redact your medical warrant and issue a prescription for psychiatric treatment in one of the following assisted living facilities: Monroeville Geriatric Center, McKeesport Senior Hospital…”

The anonymous man, now known to possess the Universal Person Code—as indicated by the red flashing notice on the Clarity View monitor—of Shah Ali Khan and claiming to be a missing and unrecovered person by the name of Rick Wayne Pensky, last contact traced in Orlando, Florida in January 2032—as indicated in the still, blue notification of investigation lettering at the top left of the monitor—became agitated.  The irrational man then stuffed the bear under his arm and jogged nimbly down the walkway and out of view of the Visitor’s Induction Clarity View.

As the single safety officer in the 24-seat security room, before the 240-screen Clarity View round, snored softly in her blue uniform, her many service decorations slinking softly against her sagging breast, various views of the muscular old man in the blue yoga suit alternately shuffling, jogging, walking and looking about suspiciously under the grey overcast sky, played across the cluster of monitors dedicated to the exterior of the east wing of the hospital. 

‘Ogres of that Coast’

Black-Walled Khemi: Chapter 16 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 202-206 of the DelRey edition

Impressions by James LaFond

Conan leads his savage corsairs to the evil coast of Stygia, which would have been like Tolkien having Aragorn recruiting Haradrim troops to infiltrate Mordor and was entirely at odds with Jim Crow convention, for those half-witted critics who type Howard as part of the slave master elite, when he repeatedly has his white hero allying with black henchmen to slaughter enemies, and, just to make certain that he insulted blacks as well as whites, Howard treats the reader to this:

“The blacks sensed his eagerness, and toiled as they never toiled under the lash, though ignorant of his goal. They anticipated a red career of pillage and plunder and were content. …and the Kushites of the crew joined whole-heartedly in the prospect of looting their own people, with the callousness of their race. Blood-ties meant little; a victorious chieftain and personal gain everything.”

It sounds like Howard had taken a trip forward in time to one Baltimore, Philly, Saint Louis, Chicago or New Orleans to glimpse the sad spectacle of blacks butchering one another in service to The Man. 

Howard then continues with modern American commentary, indicating that the Stygians, his lifelong enemies and those of his tribal black allies, were a slave race whose common men were not permitted to wear swords, which is of course the fantasy replacement for the gun of Howard’s day. The reader certainly reads a hint of Howard’s Uncle’s tales of riding with Nathan Bedford Forest in Tennessee who employed black soldiers against Jefferson Davis’s orders.

Gianni closes out the chapter with an illustration of Conan returned to his lone element rowing a boat into the heart of his enemy’s city, with the Stygians essentially representing Howard’s version of the pre-Hellenistic Egyptian race.

Diction of Note

Zikkurats, for ziggurats

‘A Hell Unfathomable’

The Return of the Corsair: Chapter 15 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 197-201 of the DelRey edition

Impressions by James LaFond

To begin this reader’s favorite chapter in any Conan story, the illustrator sketches six dark figures, enchained and rowing as slaves in what Howard would call in the text “a hell unfathomable.”

Conan awakens on the deck of an Agrossian ship and roars in his kingly manner, “What lousy tub is this?”

To this, one of Howard’s more short-lived incidental characters answers:

“The Venturer, out of Messentia [Howard’s Naples, Italy], with a cargo of mirrors, scarlet silk cloaks, shields, gilded helmets and swords to trade to the Shemites [Howard’s Hebrews] for copper and gold ore. I am Demetrio, captain of this vessel and your master henceforward.”

It doesn’t take a plot genius to realize how short and bloody this chapter is going to be as Conan, the White Lion of the Black pirates finds himself between caught between a galley full of black slaves that used to be his warriors and a crew of stocky Italians that don’t know they just brought their worst nightmare onboard…

The deserved carnage of slave masters butchered alive by rising slaves is so palpably enjoyable to the author that the reader must wonder if he admired Nat Turner, who surely would have blushed at Howard’s vision of what a slave revolt should be like.

Just to make certain that modern African-Americans would be as disgusted with the outcome of this chapter today, as “white” Americans must have been when this story was published, Gianni, the illustrator, with rare balls accurately portrays the freed black savages as hailing Conan “in an ecstasy of hero worship” as he stands above them like a naked, prehistoric Abe Lincoln. Never has something been written or illustrated to insult both racial fraternities of the retarded American Body impolitic.

Flood: Interlude

 The Conclusion of Flood

 

I

 am too much of a literary whore to let an entire book go up as free content.

So, for those interested, there are only two chapters I am not serializing of Flood’s story:

Large and In Charge, Our conversation after the Y2K water and battery buying panic, sparked by a shared vision of our lovely overnight cashier, in which we ended up talking about our mutual rivals Big Boy and Ralph, our sleazy employers and our mutual enemies, the thugs of Baltimore.

The final chapter is an event that occurred a few years earlier, which resulted in his massive loss of teeth, as he did not have bad oral hygiene and I was moved to ask how he lost so many teeth.  This account, the final chapter, titled The Rent comprises one of the most heroic stands against the odds that I have documented in my weird hobby of interviewing violence survivors over these last 25 years.

Other than that, and whatever became of my coworker after 2002, you have all of Flood’s story I can recall and reshape.

-James LaFond, 1:03 A.M., Sunday, November 15, 2020, Portland, Oregon 

‘A Dingy, Ill-Famed Den’

The Black Hand of Set: Chapter 14 of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon

Reading from pages 190-196 of the DelRey edition

Impressions by James LaFond

The opening illustration presents a horror started man with a black hand imprinted on his bare chest as he lays still in death on a shadow-cast floor.

“Conan woke from a sound sleep as quickly and instantly as a cat. And like a cat he was on his feet with his sword out before the man who touched him could so much as draw back.”

That’s Robert E. Howard on PTSD before it had a diagnosis.

Finding that his quarry is hiding in a place called the House of Servio, Conan is off on a brief, brutal and unsuccessful venture which finds him stretched senseless among the bodies of a reasonably competent band of murders as a pressgang happens by to force him into the slavery of the sailor.

But Conan is not so much the story of this chapter, but rather the tale of his grim pursuers who bring sedate death in his angry wake.

Death is illustrated by the artist as four predatory black birds on wing, searching the world below for their quarry, relentlessly seeking the hero via at once arcane and beastly methods.

Flood No. 14: Big Boy

July 1999, Fort Avenue

 

F

our figures sat in the tiny lunch room:

Smart Stuff was a skinny little long-haired white man who didn’t even drive and had somehow written a book that was getting published by a “How to Make Bombs in Your Basement” publishing house.  This fellow and Israel had been on the same crew since 1995 and had never said a word to one another, him being the frozen foods man until recently and lowdown white besides.

Then there was Flood, who no one in this company had ever called Israel.  They just all liked that Flood—liked the biblical significance he supposed, of his family name.  Other than Curtis Green, the Little League baseball umpire who cleaned their floors at night, Flood had been the only black man at this store, ever and he had been the night captain until very recently, when he had opted to go to part time due to his advancing age.

Then there was Ralph, a small, skinny, red-headed bitch-made redneck who had been promoted to night captain when Flood stepped down.  Unlike Flood, Ralph’s idea of being in charge was all about having everybody else do all the work and him do nothing.  Ralph, knowing that he was in charge and yet not the smartest white man on the crew, had a deep hatred for Smart Stuff, for the very sensible reason, that a scrawny little white man in charge only has one thing going for him—smarts—and Smart Stuff owned that.  Where Big Negro concerns applied, Ralph made himself scarce, afraid, apparently, of being trampled in the throes of the dominance display.

But on this occasion, Ralph had no choice but to stay pinned in the ringside seat of peril, for he sat in the back corner, with Flood next and Smart Stuff, his cold paranoid self always sitting close to the door and carrying a screwdriver he didn’t need for opening boxes in his back right pocket…

The fourth man entered, Big Boy, who called himself “The Mac Daddy,” like he was a clown wrestler on TV.  He was a former minor league linebacker who only stood 5’ 11” but scaled 350 to Flood’s 6’ 1” and 280 pounds.  More importantly, this reprobate, who forever thirsted for white women in an unseemly and open way, and threatened all the white men except for the diabolically evil Smart Stuff [1], who he seemed to consult like some Spartan Ephor approaching the Delphic Oracle of old, was only 36 years of age to Flood’s 60.

Time has its way of elevating the low and levelling the high.

Big Boy was likable after his fashion.  Heck, he got kicked out of the football league for excessive contact against teams composed of police—who couldn’t get behind that?

But his arrogance, talking about his fists calling them “chump hammers” and throwing his weight around wore thin when a man was old and had long ago been told not to let some fool bring you down.

Big Boy came into the breakroom, only six feet wide and 12 feet deep and leaned right into Flood’s face and menaced, “Flood, who’s the HNC!  You know what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!  There can only be one!  Who’s the Head Nigger in Charge on this crew!?”

Flood tried not to get angry and parried, “Keep on jawin’ Chomp [2].  Keep pluckin’ a nerve ‘till a real man give you dat woopin’ dat yo Daddy should ‘ave!”

Ralph looked frightened, like he might get squished.

Smart Stuff leaned back in his chair and grinned his wicked grin.

Big Boy pressed his five-gallon bucket of a head against Israel’s head—it were Israel now, old time Israel being bullied for the first time in his heart—and he stood up and faced that hulk of a chump.

Ralph cringed in the corner like a rat in the dog pound cage.

Flood stood and looked down into the needle-green eyes of that light-skinned chump and snarled, “You about ta cross da line, Slick!”

The “ghetto-bragging man,” always talking about how tough Washington D.C. was, disparaging Baltimore folks as soft—it made Israel’s blood boil that this fool didn’t know he was messing with a Country Boy from Downhome!

Big Boy pressed his forehead against Flood’s chin and growled, “What is it Flood, Baltimore or D.C.? Who’s the Head Nigger in Charge at Store Forty-Five! [3]”

That was about all of this crowding he could take and Flood slapped that pumpkin headed clown so that it echoed through the store and out the front door and Smart Stuff darted like the serpent he was out onto the sales floor, back to work 15-minutes early, unpaid and off of the clock.

Now, there is an old saying in Baltimore town, that when the smartest man in the room up and in a hurry leaves, that some stupid shit is about to go down.

That lazy faggot Ralph was trapped.

Big Boy then body-locked Flood, hauled his big ass off of his size-14 feet, slammed him into the soda machine, which rocked and cracked the dry-wall behind it, then snarled and turned again and slammed Flood’s back into the time clock, and was about to slam Flood into the water fountain which had a real ceramic encasement…

This was not the only fight between night crew employees witnessed in this tiny lunchroom…

…

A minute later Big Boy stalked out onto the sales floor, one would think victorious, his massive arms flexing out of his green wife-beater as he stalked down the aisle to Smart Stuff, who was facing up the pickles on his own time as he stood on a milk crate.  He then fumed, his massive chest heaving below the skinny man unnaturally elevated upon his milk crate prop and said, “Jimmy, you see what dat nigga Flood done ta me!?!”

The forensic anthropologist of the night crew at Store 45 then peered down at Big Boy’s massive trapezius muscle, between his corded neck and the strap on his wife beater and reported, “I see three blood-filled holes, two low, one high.  The upper wound I would suggest is Flood’s final front top tooth and the two lower wounds their dental companions.”

“Bleeding?”

“Yep.”

“That dirty mutherfucker—and he was pulling out his case cutter goin’ ta cut my throat!”

“Can we call it a draw?”

“You call it.  I ain’t goin’ nowhere near his old ass.  Imagine if you had a hundred a them rising up on a plantation in the middle of the night—fuck that!”

…

Big Boy and Israel never got into it again, although Israel forever called Big Boy, to his face “Boy,” “Chump,” “Chomp,” “Slick” and even “Slack,” if it could passably be made to rhyme with “you ain’t comin’ back!”

But when Big Boy was out of ear shot, Flood later confided in the author, “I ‘bout shit maself when he picked me up—it was on then!  Dats a big boy!”

Somehow, this event ended up bringing Flood and Smart Stuff (the author) into our few conversations in our last two years working together.  I would also later referee a fight between Big Boy and a huge security guard [6’ 5” 450-lbs] of his same ethnicity over the HNC title for Store #45, a bare knuckle affair conducted in the dairy box, so the timeclock didn’t get ripped off the break room wall…

 

Notes

-1. Smart Stuff was Flood’s pet nickname for me.

-2. When Flood was having fun baiting a younger crew member, he would often pronounce Chump “Chomp.”

-3. I found out a few years later when I coached his son and friends and neighbor men [the fathers of two of his son’s friends] that Big Boy was a huge pro wrestling fan and was just playing the heel script not realizing he was triggering some Park Heights PTSD.