The Freed Mind

"Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. . . ."

It is not only when I sleep that my mind unravels the knitted sleeve of care or solves the problems that plague me during my waking hours, but when my mind is set free from the constant struggle of understanding the why and wherefore of everyday life. When I do mechanical or repetitious tasks and my fingers/hands are busy, my mind is set free to knit up the raveled sleeve of care or just simply go and solve puzzles and problems, answer questions that have baffled the world -- and me -- for centuries.

Or years.

Or decades.

Or just because. Things that make you go, Hmmmm.

It is at these freed mind times that answers come unbidden, like that 3 a.m. moment in the midst of deep sleep when you sit up in bed and cry out, "Excelsior!" or "Tom Hanks" or whatever the mind has been cranking away on when the answer was on the tip of the tongue and couldn't be grasped. Sherlock Holmes is still a virgin! Jon Snow is released from his vows. The skid mark is a result of men's favorite past time - farts! All the answers are clear at last.

I like to watch series that I've watched before and enjoyed. The second or third time through I pick up little details that have been lost in the overwhelming amount of input that happens on the first watching. Like Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch.

In series 3 when he has at last taken a girlfriend in order to get close to the world class international blackmailer it wasn't until Sherlock was in the hospital after being shot by Mary Watson that Janine mentions that they should have had it off at least once, which is Brit speak for, "We should have had sex at least once." Sherlock, or Sherl, is still a virgin and he has been a gentleman, although I'd rather say that Sherlock has avoided the messy romance stuff that goes on between the sheets. After all, he has been off cultivating a drug habit to convince the blackmailer that his pressure point is drugs when all the time it is and has always been John Hamish Watson, his best and onliest friend. I missed that still a virgin bit the first time through, but caught it on the second. The words and the Eureka! moment floated up to the forefront of my mind while cross stitching, or maybe it was when I was mindlessly playing solitaire online. Either way, the brakes were not engaged and my mind churched up that little titbit.

Then there were the skid marks, those unsightly fecal stains on men's underwear, the brown stain that freaked out Miranda on Sex and the City and have baffled women forever. It's a simple formula. Men fart. Men create games around farts. Men are unbridled and unleashed when they fart. It is during the fart that the skid mark begins. The sphincter loosens, the gas is released, and any fecal material locked within the sphincter's folds is also released to stain the pristine white of the Fruit of the Looms. Skid mark!

The only other possible reasons for skid marks have origins in less than fastidious wiping after BMs and rumps that have been ranged too vigorously and too often. Take your pick.

And that, fellow readers, brings us to Jon Snow's death at the end of the last season of Game of Thrones when his brothers in the Night's Watch unceremoniously, and I would say viciously, cut him down in the prime of his life.

When a ranger dies, his brothers eulogize him with "And now his watch is ended." I seriously doubt that Jon Snow will ever be eulogized since he had so blatantly and openly rescued the free folk from the King of Winter and let them through the gate to settle in the Gift on Night's Watch lands. That was a very unpopular move and his brothers expressed their opinions by stabbing Jon Snow almost as many times as the senators stabbed the tyrant Julius Caesar in the last days of Rome's greatness. Romans could not abide a tyrant, although dictator was an accepted position. Jon Snow was the Watch Commander and deserved to be Commander. He had been tapped by Mormont as Commander to be when he was alive, before the black brothers killed him. Mutiny they would have called it on the high seas, but it was unthinkable on land or sea, and even in the air if the Westerosi had the power of flight. Allowing the Wildlings through the gate when the Watch has been keeping them out for centuries was more than the black brothers could take, hence turning on the one man who can protect them from the White Walkers.

Jon's watch has ended. He is dead. Melisandre, the Red Witch, will bring him back to life because that is in her Lord's power.  R'hllor the Red God will grant Jon Snow a return to life to finish his job, but it won't be the job of the Commander of the Night's Watch -- or maybe it will - but Jon Snow is no longer bound by his oath. His watch is ended. He died. He was murdered by his black brothers and is now free to take a wife, bear children (maybe?), and sow his wild oats.

He is also free to return next season with short hair and wow audiences while he joins with Danaerys Targaryen and the dragons to fulfill his destiny of defeating the King of Winter. This may or may not be what George R. R. Martin has in mind for the final chapter, but this does make sense, even though Martin tends to kill off his stars in the bloodiest manner.

Jon Snow may or may not be Azor Ahai, the prince of prophecy, come to defeat the White Walkers forever, but at least he will be in a position to fulfill his part of the legacy he was given since he is the son of Leanna Stark and Rheagar Targaryen. He is the union of Ice and Fire. Azor Ahai may be Danaerys, but she will need to unite with the Prince of Ice, Jon Snow, in order to beat back the Winds of Winter.

There are two times when my mind is most fertile and active. One is when performing tasks that leave my mind free of constraints to shuffle the data and latch onto answers such as those above. The other is that time between true sleep and waking when I doze and slip easily into REM sleep and my dreams are at their most vivid. I don't get much in the way of refreshing rest, but at least I finally have a path to the answers.

That is all. Disperse.

Review: The English Monster by Lloyd Shepherd

I go into every book I read with a sense of hope that it will transport me to another place and time with characters that make me look twice, make me uncomfortable, or even make me want to smile and laugh with joy. There are few of the joyful characters in The English Monster by Lloyd Shepherd, but there is much that made me uncomfortable and made me look twice, even starting at unusual sounds and shadows at the corner of my vision.

In 1494, Billy Ablass, a week since married, went to Wapping to talk his way onto a ship where he could make his fortune, at least enough to buy some pigs and prime land in his home of Oxfordshire.

In 1811, a servant, Margaret, goes on two separate errands for her employers, Mr. and Mrs. Marr, and comes back to find the house locked and all the lights out. She hears someone inside and the baby's cries suddenly cut off. She pounds on the door, drawing a crowd, and a neighbor gets into the house from the back and discovers murder most foul. Both Marrs, their new baby, and the shop boy have been murdered and the weapon left clotted with blood and hair, brains splattering the walls and floors. In the basement, the baby's throat was slashed.

From these two events there can be no connection, not with 300 years between them, and yet there is a connection, one that grows with time and Shepherd's dark and razor sharp prose that drew me into these disparate tales and into the lives of the newly formed River Police.

Waterman Constable Charles Horton, with his own past to keep secret, is a different kind of police officer. He investigates, a word unknown until he began his inquiries into the nature of the crimes in and around the port, and even into the murder of the Marrs and their shop boy in spite of his lack of jurisdiction. The river police do not solve crimes on land. Magistrate Harriot believes that his duty lies wherever he finds crime and sets Horton to looking into the matter, though it cost him everything he has worked for and prizes.

What Shepherd does with clarity and the magic of prose that transports these horrific events into something wonderful is weave threads of various colors and kinds into a new cloth that presages the modern era and lays the foundation for the Britain and Scotland Yard to come. The English Monster is no simple police procedural, nor is it history overlaid with fantasy. This is a new kind of history more fantastical and palpably real that rises above the common historical novel into a realm all its own.

I foresee more novels featuring Harriot and Horton where mystery and marvel combine to create a crime solving duo as memorable and Holmes and Watson.

Connections

I was browsing through The 10% Solution.

I mean the $9.99 book by Ken Rand, not the movie about Sherlock Holmes going to see Sigmund Freud, which is really The 7% Solution since Holmes was in all things careful about his health. That centered on a time when opium dens flourished and cocaine and other drugs were sold over the counter and readily available, when the police only went to opium dens to do the job of detecting, question suspects, and pick up dead bodies and the government was more involved in intrigue and governing the country and not filling the prisons with drug addicts who, they believed, could go to the devil in their own way as long as murder, theft, or fraud were not part of the deal.

They (the British government) also had a strange idea that if the prisons were full to capacity with the downtrodden, debtors, and real criminals who had stolen, defrauded, murdered, beaten, robbed graves, burked people to provide bodies for medical students who needed a cadaver to study, or were mad and shut in Bedlam, among other ills due to the financial disparity between the upper, middle, working, and lower classes (the lower classes driven to crime to feed themselves, their families, and buy gin to get drunk and numb the pain of reality and poverty), the malcontents and miscreants were packed off like chained sardines to Australia where they were out of harm's way, decreased the surplus population, and could drink, whore, steal, drug, and whatever into oblivion away from the increasingly cramped confines of London and the countryside. Australia was also a good place for political prisoners who objected to the poverty, government, and way of life that denied a man all pleasure and sustenance, as were India, the colonies, the Bahamas, Africa, and the other outposts of British control. What's the use of having all that real estate without real Englishmen to populate the lanscape?

Aah, the golden days when the rich got richer and the poor could still get drunk, do drugs, and whore without risking jail. The rich drank, did drugs, and whored, but the likelihood of them seeing the inside of a jail cell was remote. Rank and funds doth impart immunity and privileges. Oh, for the days of opium, a 7% solution of cocaine to relieve boredom and ennui, and plenty of gin, even without the tonic.

I was browsing through The 10% Solution, which is a slim paperback volume priced far too high for the content, about writing tighter, moving the story along faster, by eliminating extraneous words. Those words are mostly connective words, writers' tics, that impede the flow of speedy progress, which is fine in a newspaper report or radio report, but not so fine with regard to the cost and content of books. It's all connected. Everything is connected.

What Rand writes about, in the tone of a sales letter that is long on words and short on getting to the point, is removing words and syllables like And, ly, that, of, ing, but, etc. Those words can provide color and a hint of the writer or character using said words as narrator or in dialogue and are not necessarily obstructive, but Rand believes them to be so, hence the book, which is more an article and less a book without the large type and small size of a less than trade paperback. The cover is nice and so is the introduction by a big fan, and well known author, whose name escapes me at this point.

(Oops, one of those phrases that should be edited out . . . at this point . . . and I do see the point, especially when typing up operative reports in which doctors repeatedly use that and other phrases that basically boil down to and then this happened and then that happened and then and then and then instead of getting directly to the point without all the fluff. "I used a scalpel to cut down through the layers of tissue and entered the abdominal (peritoneal) cavity. The hernia sac contained incarcerated bowel (omentum, muscle, fat, etc.) and was reduced back into the abdominal (peritoneal) cavity, ligated, and closed. Etc., etc., etc. Instead, (another verboten word in tight writing) the doctor goes on and on at length adding as well as instead of and, at this point, instead of moving on or at least using at that point since the text is in past tense, as is the rest of the sentence, and so on. I'd rather have a concise and tightly written/dictated report and lose the pages than have to go on for five minutes -- or up to 20 minutes -- with fluff and garbage. Get to the point.)

To get back to the point (pointless words that do not move the narrative forward), the book is a bloated explanation of a very simple process, something that George R. R. Martin calls sweating the text, which is a screenwriter's term for getting out the fluff and condensing fifty pages to ten, which can be done. I've done it in editing my own work, removing my own writer's tics. Writing tight isn't really my problem since I err on the size of tightness in the first place (self-editing as I write) and usually need to pad the text, only I pad with description and characters and action instead of erm, but, or, at this point, as well as, etc.

Whenever I am forced to listen to, watch, or read reams of text just to tell me a product works with a couple of examples, maybe a testimonial or two, and the price it will cost me to get this miracle, I skip down to the text. When faced with a video scrolling words or a talking head reading said sales text, I shut it down, run a search on the topic, and cut right to the chase.

What I'm am getting around to writing is that, while I do agree with the subject of the over priced book, I don't appreciate paying more than it's worth. Some would say, a little prevention is worth the price of a pound of cure, but they knew the prevention cost less than the full treatment. I'd give Rand's writing tip top marks for the central theme and a big thumbs down for the price. I've bought, read, and written books that didn't cost as much.

I suppose the real point in this meandering post is that everything is connected some way. I started with Sherlock Holmes, moved through scriptwriting, operative reports, and sales letters and came out at the same point where I started. Sort of. I didn't mention the price in the first sentence; that came everything is connected and makes ours a much more interesting life and -- in this case -- a review of a good pamphlet that should not have been a book.

I highly recommend the content. Consider getting the book second hand or checking it out of the library and copying the important material. It's cheaper.