The Savage Coast

Sunday morning I was in the cafe where the workers have come to hate me with that contempt that familiarity breeds. Every morning I go to the Garden Ice Cafe, which offers free wifi, to check my email, facebook, this blog, etc. I do this because my Livebox, which will allow me to connect from home, has not been delivered to my house, and because actually stocking Liveboxes at the store would just be silly. I would love to write, and probably will write, a post soon about the way that French companies seem chronically taken-aback when they realize that you wouldn't mind using their services, you know, some time this week, maybe...

...anyway, back to Sunday, and I would not have started out by complaining except that it somewhat informs this story. My mood Sunday was... bland, maybe? I don't like having to come here, and I was thinking about this blog, trying to think of something to write, and I realized that I had not had any adventures worth the name in a few days. Almost exactly on cue, my facebook message screen pops up with a message from local legend Chanchan, who advises me to call my friend Franck if I want to go surfing. I was intrigued, but I'd left my phone at home to charge, so I told him I'd call him soon, and resigned myself to probably missing the session, because I still had a few things to take care of on the internet. A few minutes later, Franck posted a message on my wall from his phone:

"wtf u doin then we wait in f of garden ice ten min"

I hastily paid my bill, and went outside and met Franck.

 Approximately 30 minutes later, we were walking down a forested path toward one of the many stretches of beach that make up the Côte Sauvage, or Wild Coast. There were horseflies, and don't ask me how, but they always manage to land on the hand that is holding your surfboard so that swatting them is an awkward and ungainly adventure that seems barely worth the effort. That's why it's good to have friends...

 "You enjoyed that!" Franck seethed, when Chanchan swatted a fly perched on his arm with more force than was strictly required. Chanchan was hurt, indignant, see if I help you again... 

 The first look (the first look is like the first time, the confrontation with the reality of what you've been privately hyping up in your mind) was... well, could be good... Not firing, per se, but... whatever, let's go!

I took off on my first line (the first line is like...) just as the first trickles of water like searching, icy fingers found their way into my wetsuit. There was the usual feeling; the clawing at the water, the acceleration as the wave takes you in, the small flurry of spray at your back as the crest begins to fall forward, the hurling yourself to your feet and now you're up! and you're taking weight off, throwing it back on, your board is slicing through the water like a hand held out of a car window, up and down, using the energy of the wave and then throw all of that energy at the end section, lay back, (you'd like to think your mind is clear, but you know Chanchan is taking pictures so...) BRING IT!! slicing through the oncoming crest and then it's done, and you collapse theatrically into the shin-deep, icy brine.

It was a good start, and the next hour or so was spent chasing incoming left-handers and threading our way diagonally toward shore around portly and nude older gentleman. It's a nude beach, I forgot to mention, and I forgot to mention it because don't get too excited the only people who ever take advantage of nude beaches, in my experience, are older men.

On Sunday, the sky was blue and the waves were fun, and I was in a random spot on this Earth perfectly placed to enjoy them. This is what we want, and these are the moments that call us back. It is a beautiful kind of isolation, when you know the most significant thing in the world has just happened right here, when a moment danced lightly across the stage, twirled, and disappeared completely forever, exiting stage-right. A small, fleeting moment that somehow means absolutely everything precisely because it amounts to nothing.

 Nothing apart from memories, maybe a good photograph or two, and my satisfaction at having something to write about in my adventure blog. 

(New French vocabulary: Les vagues extraterrestres are the waves that come out of nowhere when you're not paying attention.)

  

 

 

 

Pregaming at the Cognac House

Saturday was "Patrimoine" day in France, all over France. I'm still not sure how to translate "Patrimoine", but I guess a good translation is "Heritage" day. A practical translation is "Everything's Free."Museums, aquariums, zoos; everything that is owned publicly is free. Many of the private attractions are free as well, which brings us to Cognac on Saturday morning.

Our friend Lauren works in one of the Cognac houses (Remy Martin) and we would head there after lunch, but first we were stopping off the Martell house, founded in 1715 by Jean Martell. We did not tour the actual production facility, but rather a special tourist edition, complete with animatronic boat, giving the whole place a strong Pirates of the Caribbean (CaRIBbean... CaribBEan...?) vibe. The tour was in French, and I learned quite a bit of Cognac-specific vocabulary. At the end of the tour, we were treated to a Cognac tasting (for FREE!), and then we left, with me somewhat disheartened that I never thought of anything smooth to say to our tour guide, whom I thought looked a little bit like Natalie Portman.

After lunch at a kebab in town, we clowned-carred our way to the one of the Remy Martin houses in the back of Lauren's company car. It was one of two houses in Cognac, and one that they had purchased in the 60's in order to accommodate their own vineyards, and though it was only about a half-century old, the buildings already looked ancient due to the layer, on every wall, of a kind of mushroom that thrives on the "angel's share" (evaporated Cognac) from the production houses.

No one else had booked a free English speaking tour (their loss), so Lee, Laura, and I had a private tour with Lauren who - rather sportingly - put on her best tour-guide voice while I did my best to derail her by indignantly demanding a new guide when she said she was American. Like a pro, she ignored me when I did this, and we learned quite a bit about cognac, and about Cognac. (By the way, following up a French tour with an English tour is not a bad way to nail down your vocabulary.)

At the end, we had another tasting - cocktails(!) in celebration of Patrimoine day - and then they called us a taxi. The cab driver was friendly, and we chatted a bit about Cognac ("nice to visit, but a terrible city in which to live"). Oh well. I fell asleep on my cushion bed on the floor almost as soon as we got back to Lauren's house, and awoke a few hours later ready to go again. That evening, we had pizza at a local shop, and the owner sat with us and chatted for a while about his difficulties drumming up business in Cognac. Finally, we wound up back at Lauren's, where we played "Circle of Death." (Jack Rule number 3: You must replace the word "Turn" with "Merkin"... don't ask.)

Finally, to bed, again.

Guerilla Recycling

"We're not really certain that what we did was wrong, but we're certain that we what did was right."
                                                                                                                              - Lee Davis

We: two furtive shadows in the mid-day sun. We: Conscientious, concerned, determined. We: Fearless, seizing opportunities, daring anything. The town was dissolving into the two-hour long torpor of the French lunch hour. My kitchen table: buried; table space lost, languishing beneath a mountain of that which was reducible, reusable, recyclable. Yellow: The color of the bin lids dedicated to recyclables. Green: That's for everything else.

It finally had to be done. We had held off for us long as we could. A bag of trash here, a plastic bottle there, abandoned nervously - one at a time - into bins for as-yet-undetermined types of detritus. Never enough. Our mountain of recycling was too high - and our love of BN cookies too fond - to entertain the hope that we could continue to stem the tide in a piecemeal fashion. We had to take out the recycling.

Recycling, in addition to being a noble and beautiful thing - good for the world - is compulsory in France. Failure to recycle could, as far as we know, incur penalties ranging - we didn't really know - from a stiff fine to - why not? - deportation! We're immigrants, after all, and we seldom know but always worry, just a little bit.

Stealing down the street toward the center of town with eyes flicking from one side of the street to the other, Lee and I strolled along clutching a cargo of recyclables and looking for an empty recycling bin. Okay, there's a yellow lid. Full. Fuck! I don't even know if we're allowed to use these! What's the penalty for using someone else's recycling? Deportation, probably. Another one; full; fuck.

Finally, I spotted a likely candidate by the back-alley door of a main street shop. The owners were probably at lunch. Silently, I opened the lid and emptied my bag as carefully as I could. The cacophony of clattering coke cans... fuck again, and again! This is stupid, I'm trying to save the world for god's sake... Why does France make me wonder if I'm doing the right thing? Is it all the paperwork? They love their paperwork; I should've filled out some paperwork for this... Lee hoisted a box, an ersatz recycling bin full of other boxes, cans, and miscellaneous plastic... The bottom of the box is kind of shitty, should we still try to save it? My mind is humming, lucid; the tension clears away every thought not corresponding to the disposal of reclaimable refuse.

- Leave it! Leave the box! I hiss under my breath, and we close the lid.We will leave a man behind.

Okay, done... walking away. Not too fast... casual, but let's keep moving. Should I whistle?  No, rookie mistake. Okay, home. Inside. Up the stairs. Sigh of relief. So... okay. Yellow for recycling, green for everything else.

Now for the glass... we've been stacking up some glass bottles, and will have to deal with them pretty soon. Glass goes in a completely different container.

Vive la France.

The Assistant's Creole

When you live in France, but you still spend a fair amount of time among English speakers, strange things can happen to your language. I was Skype-calling my dad yesterday, and I told him that I pay a fixed rate of 100 euros for electricity, but that the figure would be regularised at the end of the year. Dad knew what I was talking about, but was still undoubtedly wondering why I didn't throw in a nice phrasal like "balanced out" or "evened out" or something. The reason I didn't is because it didn't occur to me. It had been explained to me in French, and so I explained it to dad in the Assistant's Creole.

Language Assistants will know what I'm talking about, because we all notice it/talk about it/revel in it. There are a variety of reasons that language assistants find themselves substituting French words for English ones, and one of them is simple economy of syllables. When you have two languages (more or less) at your disposal, and you are lazy, you can code-switch freely to save yourself the strain of using, say, six syllables when you could use four, or even three. For example:

English: Do you like that idea?
French: Est-ce que ca te dit?
Assistant's Creole: Does that te dit? Or, "That tell you?"
(Mitch)

Sometimes you might just like the sound of a word. You might, for example, find "bouger" to be more pleasant than "to move" or "to head out", thus:

"You guys wanna bouge?"
(Mara)

Sometimes the use of the Assistant's Creole reflects cultural differences between one's country d'origine and one's adopted country. It was not uncommon, among American assistants, to have never traveled by train before arriving in France. Thus, the word "train station" is not part of our functional vocabulary. So, while a British assistant might suggest we head on down to the "train station", an American Assistant would - I think without exception - suggest we go to the "gare". Another example is the creole for "bakery". I, for one, did not frequent bakeries before my time in France. Thus, I do not refer to them as bakeries, but rather "boulangeries" or "the 'ol boulanger".

The Assistant's Creole is often wielded to humorous ends as well. Much comedic hay is made of the fact that the French word for bread is "pain". Thus, when you see a boulanger called "Maison du Pain", you can selectively translate the title of the establishment, yielding "House of Pain." Another favorite is the literal translation for the French expression "Tiens-moi au courant," which means something like "Keep me posted" or "Keep me up-to-date." To stay up-to-date in the Assistant's Creole, one would use the more literal "Hold me to the current", which sounds more appropriate for a situation with a car battery and an agreed-upon safe-word than for making plans.

As a final example of the Assistant's Creole in action, I offer this real-life example that came up even as I typed this essay:

Laura - ...okay, we'll probably take one of the direct trains.
Jon - Sounds good.
Laura - Alright, well see you soon. And if you pass by a boulanger... bring the pain.
Jon - Done.

Fin

Mea culpa, September 11

September 11, 2001 was the first time I left school during the day and just drove off. I went home, followed the news, called people, and looked at old pictures of myself on top of one of the WTC towers. If I remember correctly, I bought a special edition of the Florida Times Union or the New York Times, which featured a photo of a man in an apparently graceful headfirst dive toward the ground. It's a famous picture, now. That night, I showed that picture to my dad and told him "No one should ever have to do this." He said he was proud of me for thinking that way.

Earlier that day, I had told my friend Joanna, echoing the sentiments of one of my teachers, that "someone [was] going to get their ass kicked over this". By this I suppose I meant that some number of anonymous people - let's call them all "x" - were going to die violent and early deaths in payment for this...this... Perhaps they would do this with their families, perhaps alone, maybe stoically, maybe terrified as darkness crept from the edges of their vision inward, and they had their last thought, said their last prayer, whatever. I guess that's what I meant when I said people were going to get their asses kicked, and that's what I wanted more than anything. Blood for blood in uneven ratios. I wanted "them" to pay, etc. I wanted blood. That's what I meant when I said that thing about ass-kicking, and when I said that thing about "no one should ever have to do this," I guess what I meant is that "no American should ever have to do this."

I quickly came to the conclusion that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the attack. My evidence was this: I had seen his name at the top of an FBI "Most Wanted" list. His blood, then! Just the blood that the situation demanded! So, I didn't protest at the beginning of the Afghan war; and when my leaders produced a litany of reasons to suggest that Saddam Hussein's blood might be good to have as well, I went along with it. It doesn't matter that I never voted for George W. Bush (couldn't, at the time - before 18 you can't vote, you can only be exploited); I joined the chorus with a full-voice, and as small as my voice was, every breath and overtone of it demanded violence as a repayment in kind for Sept 11.


Since 9/11, we have entered into two wars, ended countless lives, and made the world a more dangerous and suspicious place. We were sucker-punched, and while we were dazed and our vision was blurry, we threw a blind, giant backhand punch, and we felt better! We congratulated ourselves that we had prevented any further terrorist attacks. Never mind that Spain, whose government had supported us,  made herself a target, on 11 March, 2004 and 191 people died and 1800 were wounded. Never mind the London bombings of 7/7/2005. "No American should ever have to do this." And no American has, since. Never mind the troops (but we are only to support them, not ask ourselves whether they are dying for a good reason).

Eight years ago to the day, I told Joanna that someone was going to pay for this, that someone was going to get his or her ass kicked. She said she hoped not. I was taken aback, and a little frustrated, because all I really wanted was to indulge my need for action, revenge, something... I thought she was being naive. She was, in fact, the only person that I encountered on that day that was big enough, level-headed enough to realize that violence only ever begets violence, and that an early and violent end is always tragic, in some way or another, whether it happens to "us" or "them".

I don't intend this to be a space for me to air my political views, but this is something that is important to me. To the degree that I worked toward, or failed to work against, the propagation of violence in this world, I feel I must now work against it. To the degree that I was indignant and outraged that someone could do such a thing as destroy thousands and thousands of lives on 9/11, I must be willing to honestly examine the actions of my country - as thoroughly as I must examine my own actions and impulses.

I am ashamed at my own blood lust and blind need for vengeance on 9/11. I am sorrowful that other people seek to further stoke the fire that feeds the fight that we all felt we needed on 9/12. I am enraged at the politicians who try to control me with my fear, who play upon my fear in campaign adverts (roll twin-towers footage! Cue the crying widows! Flash the photo-negatives of terror suspects! Havoc! Let slip the dogs of war, and all that). On September 11, 2009, I rededicate myself to the search for a peaceful solution to all problems, and to making justice universal, regardless of religion, color, creed, etc. I hate the way I felt, but I intend to make it right.

This is a long post, and I haven't bothered to edit it, but...well, there you go. I feel the early inklings of a freedom that is absolute; a freedom from the darkness inside myself that demands your blood in repayment for mine. The kind of freedom you win WITH - not from, or in spite of - the other people we run into in our lives. This is a hard-won freedom (and I'm still not there yet), but on this September 11, my heart is light. I will not be manipulated, and I will not be ruled by fear. I will make myself whole and good, and if I'm fortunate I will continue to live that way no matter what happens to me, no matter my fears.

So, that's that.

The Last Week, Abridged

The language on some of the websites I frequent has switched, automatically, to French. It has been about a week since I last wrote anything, and it has been a... an unusual week. There have been parties, last-minute preparations, and things that stressed me out beyond measure.

There were long goodbyes to people I love, and in particular, a long goodbye that I had no idea how to impart to someone who may or may not know what it means that I will be gone for as much as one year. And there was the sharp pinch behind my nose and eyes when I dropped him off at his house.

There were the last minute efforts to finish the music I'd been working on all summer, both my EP and my stepmother's Christmas CD.

There were departures; arrivals; connections; planes, trains, and automobiles; and clouds that looked like glaciers butting up against mountains that were young by both atmospheric and geological standards. There were clouds thousands of feet below, set ablaze by the light of the morning sun and looking like cotton balls that someone had partially pulled apart.

There was a panic, lasting all day on Wednesday, as I arrived in Paris and found that I couldn't access my money. A train journey with a surfboard in tow and in the company of a French surfer who was similarly encumbered, and hours spent fighting fatigue in the compartment between train cars, shuffling the boards from one side of the train to the other at every stop (somehow, we always managed to place the boards on the side with the platform of the upcoming station). There was the arrival in Royan, the trip to a local restaurant to use the internet and Skype-call Wachovia, and the relief when I realized I'd have access to my funds. Then there was the surrender - after 36 hours of consciousness - to a sleep that could no longer be refused.

Yesterday, I went to my place of employment and was oriented. Then I walked around for a couple of hours and found a tree branch that was lodged in some rocks, rocked continuously by the incoming swell. Grateful, I took at least 50 pictures of it as the waves crashed and swirled around it. Then I went and moved into my apartment - a nice and reasonably spacious place downtown. Finally, there were drinks at a coworker's house, and then back home for a few episodes of The Office before bed.