What’s a person to do when your spouse is out of town for the weekend and the daytime high temperatures are hovering around 102° with a heat index over 110°?
I had a plan and a backup plan. Fortunately, everything came together for the main plan because in hindsight i don’t think the backup plan would have worked out so well. I had this idea that I’d go down to the coast, where it would be 10-15° cooler, set up a canopy on the beach, bring along a cooler of beverages and a chair and write to the sound of the Gulf of Mexico’s constant waves. It was a romantic idea, but I don’t think it was that much cooler down there, and a few minutes out in the blanket of heat late on Saturday afternoon told me that it probably wouldn’t have been terribly productive time.
Instead, I went out to Trivia Night on Friday evening. The first time I’ve ever done that, and it was a lot of fun. Sponsored by a local organization that liaises between local businesses and schools. They organize the district science fair and mentoring programs, stuff like that. This was a fund raiser for their organization, the third year they’ve done it. There were some corporate teams, but I ended up sitting with five strangers. We sat at table 12 so when we were tasked with coming up with a team name, I suggested “The Dirty Dozen,” but since there were six of us, we modified it to “The Dirty Half Dozen.” There were eight rounds of ten questions and we did surprisingly well. We were the leaders at the midway point and ended up coming in second overall, losing out to the returning champions from last year. One of the rounds consisted of a baggie containing ten pieces of breakfast cereal that we had to identify. That was pretty clever, I thought.
Then on Saturday, the HPD ridealong I’d requested a couple of weeks ago came together. I had to be at the South Central station at 6:45 for roll call, so that meant getting up early. I was assigned, as requested, to a female officer, as I wanted to hear her perspective on the job. How her colleagues treated her, and how the public did. It was a fairly uneventful tour of duty—the officer kept looking for something interesting to show me, but the closest we came was a wellness check at a house where the resident hadn’t been heard from for four days. The front door was barred, so HFD was called in to pop the gate and then break down the door. Everyone expected to find a body inside, but the house was empty, so the resident will return home to a surprise. I learned all about the new street drug that is turning people into zombies and got the inside scoop on how cops handle certain kinds of routine situations. It’s been a decade since my last ridealong, so their tech has been upgraded a little in the interim. Cops have to be experts at distracted driving, as they’re always responding to messages on the computer, over the radio and on their phones, sometimes simultaneously. I think she was disappointed that it was a boring day, but I got a lot of material and we got to spend most of the time inside the air conditioned car!
Yesterday I watched a documentary called Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, which tells the story of how a director’s vision for an adaptation of the Jules Verne novel went off the rails. The movie ended up being made, but with a new director (after Stanley spent months on the script and preproduction), but went through various cast changes and suffered from the presence of two demanding and cantankerous actors: Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. It was filmed in a remote section of a remote section of Australia—an hour through the rain forest from Cairns, which is way up on the northeast corner of the continent, near the barrier reef. I spent a week there on vacation, a little before this film was made, I believe, and it’s beautiful but a long way from everything, and prone to bad weather. The movie makes one wonder how on earth films ever get made. This was a case of giving a guy a ton of money and plopping him down in the rain forest and letting him hang himself. Fascinating stuff, even if you’ve never heard of Richard Stanley.
I also saw the last part of True Detectives. The show had big boots to fill, and for the most part it didn’t live up to the standards of the first season. The plot was as convoluted as hell, but that’s almost a noir tradition and in the final analysis did it really matter? There were the good guys (a bunch of broken, wounded men and women) and the bad guys (corrupt politicians, etc.) and the very bad guys (Russian and Mexican gangs) all bumping up against each other. It was Chandler-esque and Ross Macdonald-esque and Ellroy-esque all at the same time, which isn’t a boon to the intelligibility quotient, but all in all I thought it was worth while.
I stuck my toe into the Sense8 waters. I’m not sold on it yet, but I’ll watch the next episode to see where it’s going.
