Doug Bruns

Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

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Too much pizza. Too much beer.

In Books, Memoir, Writers, Writing on May 24, 2012 at 6:00 am

I wrote this a month ago, saved it as a draft, thinking it best not to post it, for reasons which will be soon apparent. But I’m nursing a brainwave flatline and like its shallow mellowness. So, rather than get the synaptic camshaft cranking, I’m going to swallow my pride and roll with the post. What the hell.

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Carole is out of town and so tonight I eat out. BBQ chicken pizza at Portland Pie Co. Carole does not care for their pizza so this is my place when she’s gone. And beer. I drink beer here too. Copious amounts.

I divide the pizza: eat this half tonight, this half tomorrow lunch. I eat. And drink beer and eat more. The first half is gone and I peel off a piece from the second. I hate myself for doing this. I order another beer. The hate increases.

I eat and drink and read. I read when I eat alone. Often, I read with company for that matter. Once I left a party we were hosting and went upstairs to read, the party being so very something other than what I thought it’d be. I was rude, of course. Just writing that makes me feel like a jerk. But that is a different story. I eat the whole thing. Drink more beer even. I leave loathing myself. My discipline has abondanded me. I am lost.

Tonight I read Joyce Maynard‘s At Home in the World. It is one of the finest, if the finest, memoir I’ve ever read. Maynard was a child literary prodigy–she writes like an angel– and came to the attention of old man J.D. Salinger living as a recluse in Cornish, New Hampshire. She moved in with him. She was nineteen. He was thirty-five years her senior. I was reading the part where he teaches her how to induce vomiting after eating food he deems toxic. There is a reason Salinger was as he was.

Things begin to turn ugly.

I leave, paying the tab, in a state of gastro distress. As I walk home I think about Salinger, two years younger than me, puking. I think about life imitating art. I rush home, miserable more so now that it all has settled and capped off my GI tract. Into the bathroom I go, kneeling in front of the toilet. I look at my middle finger. Is the nail clipped? I think of Brando in Last Tango.

I plunge the finger down my throat, curious at what’s down there. Interesting. I wretch. But no pizza, no beer. Just a little phlegm. Lucy is sitting to my left, looking at me. I reach out and scratch her ear, tell her it’s alright, then plunge the finger down my throat again. Again, nothing. My eyes watering I give in. This is obviously not a solution. I’m not made this way. I must pay my dues, suffer for my sins. I must digest. I ask Lucy if she wants to go for a walk and she tells me that yes, indeed, let’s go for a walk. I get the impression she thinks that to be a better solution to my current trouble than whatever it is I’m doing.

After our walk I come home and recline, the only position that offers up any comfort, and continue reading how a nineteen year old woman came to live with J.D. Salinger.

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Gentlemen of Baltimore: Flynn

In Creativity, Photography, Writing on May 22, 2012 at 6:00 am

If all goes as scheduled, today I return home. I look forward to catching up with my friends at …the house…. In the mean time, one last prepared post, another story from The Gentlemen of Baltimore.

Flynn

Flynn sat on a bench in the shade. There was a book next to him, The city Boy. “It was the first book Herman Wouk wrote,” he said. “I have an eidetic mind. The second definition of it is total recall, a photographic mind. That’s what most people are familiar with.” I asked him what is the first definition. “Science of the world,” he quoted, “intuitively apprehended.” He said he wanted to open a bank and cited regulations required to start a financial institution. He said his bank would also provide inexpensive used cars. “I will address the needs of moderate and low-income people.” I remarked on his creativity. “I have a lot of ideas. And they are all elegant.”

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Curiosity has ceased. Contemplation has set in.

In Death, Life, Memoir, The Examined Life on May 21, 2012 at 7:00 am

I’m traveling…er no…got in last night. Late. Jet lagged to nth degree…coffee…

This is a repost.

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My cousin said to me a few weeks before she died, “When I come back I’m going to do it differently.” We chuckled over this. Sadly though, it was her confession of remorse, an admission of disappointment over the life she had lived–at least I think that was what she was saying. (The Latin from which the word remorse is derived means literally “to bite back.”) Later, at her death-bed, the pallid riddle was laid out for full inspection. I have to admit, as bad as it sounds, watching the death of my cousin was a curious, even interesting, thing. That was my reaction at the time, at the bedside. I thought it odd then–my reaction–and still do.

I recall that Diane Arbus sneaked into her dead father’s room to photograph his body–odd, yet understandable. My cousin’s death was over a year ago and I find myself thinking about it often, though the spectrum of reflection has shifted. Curiosity has ceased and contemplation has set in. Her death was a study; now it is a meditation. So much has been written on the subject, indeed, everything has been written in the shadow of death. I cannot add an iota of originality to the subject.

I am drawn to the idea of living life in preparation for its end. In some traditions this complex notion is reduced to something so mundane as a rote ideal, a doctrine, in the most extreme instances, denial. I guess there is nothing wrong with that, though mass consumption of rote ideals never seems to turn out as hoped, an observation I believe history supports. I am self-taught at everything so am stubborn as a result. I can’t accept a doctrine so much as rush down a blind alley, take a U-Turn or be lectured to. The big questions generate itches I must contort to reach.

I am reading both Montaigne and Nietzsche so one should not be surprised at such musings.

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Nepal, end notes.

In Adventure, Travel, Writing on May 20, 2012 at 6:10 am

Two days after Thorong Pass we hike into Jomsom. Scott and I will leave from here, flying out to Pokhara, then Kathmandu. As we enter the village I see, not a hundred meters above us, pressed into the mountain side, the crumpled remains of an airplane. Four days previously a plane landing in Jomsom aborted on approach and attempted to return to the single airstrip. There was not enough space in this narrow wedge of a canyon and the plane crashed where I now observe it. It was the morning flight to Pokhara, the same flight Scott and I will be taking in twenty-four hours. Fifteen died. Five survived. I try to put it out of my mind. Unsuccessfully.

Tim is staying to press on to Annapurna Base Camp. He will return home in ten days. Seven years ago, my daughter and I traveled to Tibet where she was to work and live in an orphanage. I got her settled, showed her Lhasa, as best I could having been there a year before. Ultimately she had to leave, realizing after the fact that an American living in a school-orphanage in Chinese-occupied Tibet was asking for trouble. This was understood with immediate clarity when the school director shunted her into a closet after a surprise visit by the local Chinese authority.

I think of this as I prepare to leave now Tim behind, far from home. The weight of being a parent has never been heavier, except for maybe leaving Allie.

As Scott and I walk to our plane I hear a whoop. I turn and see, in town, on the tallest rooftop, Tim. He is waving. I raise my arms, whoop, and wave back. Scott and I board and begin the first leg of our return home.

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Thorong High Camp

In Adventure, Travel, Writing on May 20, 2012 at 6:00 am

We arrive at the base camp to the Thorong La, the world’s highest mountain pass. All vegetation is left behind. Occasional piles of snow spot the trail. It is not a hard climb this morning until the last hour. We gain all our elevation, around thousand feet, in the last hour. It is tough going and Tim is failing. He did not recover this morning as I was sure he would. Scott is moving well. I am moving well. But Tim has to pause and catch his breath. I know he is miserable. It is a terrible feeling.

At base camp he finds a bunk and crawls into his bag. He goes to sleep immediately. Our guide, Ram, has given him something for his stomach, which is giving him fits.

Base camp is a timber and rock outpost of maybe twenty bunks. There is a common room where the trekkers eat and frequently relax playing cards. There is no heat, no electricity. We wear all our clothes. Surprisingly they have tuna sandwiches for sale. Tuna and eggs are safe. Both are sealed and full of nutrition. I guess that I’ve shed ten pounds or more since beginning the trip. Yesterday I ate a bowl of porridge for breakfast with toast and black coffee. Lunch was a fried potato cake. Dinner was a bowl of soup and a hard-boiled egg. Appetite falls off at altitude. If an entrepreneur could figure out how to simulate altitude at a strip-mall diet center, a fortune could be made.

Altitude sickness has little rhyme or reason. It does not necessarily seek out the weak or old. Nor does it grant the experienced a pass. I feel badly for Tim. This is his trip and he is off his game. He should have run up the mountain that last hour. Instead he was bent over and retching.

Mid afternoon the blue sky disappears and a cloud descends on camp. Snow begins to fall, heavily. Someone is playing christmas music from an iPod. Though spirits are high I sense in all of us a weight of dread. We climb to the pass tomorrow, to almost eighteen thousand feet. If the snow continues in this fashion our work will be that much more difficult.

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Thorong La Pass

In Adventure, Travel, Writing on May 18, 2012 at 5:15 pm

May 14, 2012
Thorang High Camp (el. 15, 700)
4:00 am

Trekkers begin to converge in the high camp great room. It is still dark and we wear headlamps. There is a young man from Israel, a couple from the UK, a couple from Italy, via Seattle, a couple from France, a gentleman from Germany, and the three of us. There are also two guides and four porters.

Tim is still in his room. I checked on him first thing. He is up and about, getting ready for the morning climb, but still not in top form. Someone in the room asks after him. I say he’s better, but not one hundred percent. A guide looks at me, smiles, and says, “No one is one hundred percent at altitude.”

The snow storm left a half foot of fresh powder. We assume it will be deeper as we climb. The sun is not yet up, but I can see stars and know the sky is going to be clear above us. Excitement fills the room.

At 5:30 we gather outside and Nat from London breaks trail. We are all grateful for this. It is hard enough to climb, harder in fresh snow, most difficult to break the trail. We stretch out behind him and begin.

It is bitter cold. Within minutes my fingers are numb. I see people adjusting their gear and clothing for warmth. I think the pace brisk but welcome it, as it helps us warm. The sky to the east is growing pink above the mountain and I know that once the sun comes up we will be fine. I look back and check Tim. His head is down and he is moving in lockstep with the group. I know he is working harder than normal. Scott is immediately behind me and says he is terrifically cold but fine.

In an hour or so I reach back for my water bottle. The water is laced with ice and I have to hit the side to break it up.

The sun is up and we are now comfortable, except for the work we’re doing. I feel my eyes grow misty. I become emotional. I am climbing a mountain in Nepal with my son and my nephew. It is a beautiful morning. We move through a white crystal expanse. My lungs burn and my legs churn like powerful pistons. I am overwhelmed by a love of life. A deep and powerful sense of existence fills me.

An hour later and we embrace on top of the pass, 17,700 feet above my home in Portland, Maine. We celebrate and take pictures. After fifteen minutes we begin the downclimb. The next six hours will be for me the most painful of the entire trip. My old joints resist downclimbs with a singular determination. But for now we are full of ourselves and of each other and of the stuff of life.