The Numbers Game
August 23, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
I keep telling myself that I’m finished with writing noir, but the truth is that noir isn’t finished with me. I don’t decide what to write, I just listen and transcribe as best I can. Here’s the latest, a short piece I’ve been working on between hot and cold bouts with the current novel in progress. It’s coming down in seven days, that’s midnight of 8/30.
-Craig
Jimmy Rehab’s showing a nine up against my dual eights. The high count is my green light to buck tourist strategy so I split for a hard eighteen-fifteen then stand. Jimmy’s ace in the hole gives him a soft twenty which costs me another 6,000 milligrams of tetracycline.
Fifteen blocks from here, young mothers push strollers through Golden Gate Park and the electro-poets sip six-dollar coffees at sidewalk tables along Irving. Keep walking West and the bright afternoon grows indecisive at 19th Ave. You hit 25th and take off your shades but can’t tell the difference, the light bright enough to see by without throwing any shadows. Come 43rd, you haven’t seen another soul for ten blocks and the stores are either empty or closed. The colors vanish along with the shadows as the current drains from the sunlight.
The Outer Sunset, another ghost town trailing another gold rush, the postwar housing boom following the first feeding frenzy a century prior and the dot com locusts forty years later, this is where Jimmy and I play blackjack by the light of a camping lantern, where I’ll play two and a half million hands before I see sunlight again.
I’m here because of the Numbers, because this is the one place some very bad people won’t know to find me. I’m here because I made a wager and I make good on my bets. I’m here because I keep my word.
Skinner Jones said that would be the death of me and he was half right.
(08.31.08 The piece is down, but I’ll keep you posted once it finds life elsewhere. Cheers, -C)
The Dreams of the Sparrows
@ 12:33 am
I’m going to make an exception to my normal blogging policy and recommend this film for anyone interested in learning what life in postwar Baghdad is like from the Iraqi point of view, for a change. Yes, actual residents of Baghdad from multiple political viewpoints- those who opposed Hussein and those who favored him. If you think you’re getting the best perspective on Iraq from Fox News, PBS, CNN, NPR, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Jon Stewart or Bill O’Reilly well, you’re not. The problem with all of those sources, aside from the fact that all of them are biased, is that none of them are from Baghdad.
-c