The Third Day

by theenglish

“Well, what do you think it is?” I ask taking another toke of the thick, but poorly rolled joint.

“I can’t remember.”

“I’m telling you; it’s his dick.”

“No, it’s not. It is like an arrow or something. I read about it when I was a kid, but I’m fucked if I can remember now what the hell it’s supposed to be.”

“Look.” I move over to the left side of my recliner so Al can follow my finger more easily and point out the pattern of stars. “There is his bow, and his arms; down there are his legs, and that’s his belt. So, what’s that hanging down there? That, my friend, is a penis.”

“Maybe you’re right, or maybe you just need some serious help for your Freudian obsessions.” He grabs the joint from me, takes a long puff, and then examines it carefully. “Especially considering the way you rolled this thing.”

“Like you can do any better.”

I lay back on the recliner to enjoy the effects of the pot as it slows down time and amplifies the constant drumming of the waves. We had spent most of the evening drinking at a bar down the road. When we got back, we brought the plastic recliners from house, along with a cooler of beers, a pack of cigarettes, and the marijuana, down here to a small concrete patio on the beach to enjoy the sound of the surf.

A friend is letting us use his beach house for the weekend, to relive the years we had spent here in El Salvador together. Now that I’m married and living in Canada again, and Al has moved down to South America with a serious US State Department job our lives are much calmer than the raving, drunken, days of our twenties. Most of our expatriate friends have moved on and are living in other countries now, but we decided that this was still the place for an extended weekend.

Al had been in the region for most of the week travelling up through Guatemala City and Antigua by bus before returning to El Salvador. Last night, Wednesday, we spent in the capital, drinking at our old Ex-Pat club. The same bartender was still there, but he seemed much older and more fragile than before; it was a strain for him to read the receipts from the till. But he had been there forever and the bar was his life, so the current management felt that it was a decent thing to do to let him keep working there on slow nights.

Being Semana Santa, the week when most people go away on vacation, the place was pretty dead except for the new regulars who didn’t seem to think too much of us when we said we had been part of the old crowd. But we satisfied ourselves by reminiscing about old times and playing a few games of darts and snooker, neither of which we were very good at anymore. We stumbled out of the place around one in the morning staggering down the street as there was not a cab to be found.

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Fletcher's Ford by Eric Marks

At the time, Mr. Dobbin blamed the fog for what happened. Afterwards, he wasn’t so sure.

He’d been staying at Quaco two and a half weeks. It was mid August, and with homecoming week a month past and the Labour Day rush yet to arrive, the seaside village was deserted most days. He was the only guest at the local inn.

Mr. Dobbin rather enjoyed the quiet. His doctor had ordered him to take a vacation that would provide a modicum of exercise and a retreat from the stress of his law practice. So, Mr. Dobbin had booked himself three weeks at an inn on the shores of a bay he had never heard of, as far from Boston as he cared to drive in a day.

He passed the time walking and sketching, a hobby he had enjoyed in college and rediscovered during his convalescence from a double bypass surgery several years before. Mr. Dobbin had tried to wring as much as he could out of life early, and while this had made him comfortably wealthy, it had also very nearly killed him. He had experienced two heart attacks since the bypass, the most recent severe enough that his doctor had warned him if he suffered a third, neither his money nor the remaining veins in his leg would be likely to save him.

Even on vacation, Mr. Dobbin followed a daily routine. He rose as early as he would have in Boston, watching the sun rise over the bay and reading newspapers with coffee in his room. He breakfasted late, donned a waxed canvas satchel containing lunch and a few sketching supplies and set off wherever the impulse took him. With its covered bridges, long, crescent shaped beach and scores of Victorian sea captain’s homes, the little village offered a variety of interesting and challenging views. When he returned to the inn in the afternoon, Mr. Dobbin liked to paint his best sketches in watercolour.

What he hadn’t counted on was the fog.

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Surfing for Good Science Fiction on Television? Good Luck

by theenglish

From the Science Fiction lovers perspective there seems to be very little out there in terms of new television entertainment this year. Compared to a year ago, when Farscape was in full swing, Firefly was just starting, and there was still a Buffy around to watch, I guess I can consider myself lucky that I have so much time for myself now. There is nothing in the way now to keep me from sitting down and writing my Pulitzer Prize winning novel before May sweeps come around.

I have no desire to watch UPN’s updated version of the Six Million Dollar Man, Jake 2.0, and I have never really gotten interested in Stargate SG-1. Please don’t get me started on Andromeda, as I’ll leave that for a future column. I’m really starting to realize that the Sci-Fi saturated airwaves of the nineties were something I took for granted.

Luckily there a still a couple of good Sci-Fi programs out there.

Each week this season, Star Trek: Enterprise has delivered a solid episode. Granted, there hasn’t been any ground-breaking Science-Fiction that has made me want to re-evaluate my place in the universe, but the plots have been crisp and well paced, and the actors have delivered competent performances. Compare this to a year ago, when the episode being broadcast was a rip off of The A-Team and what’s worse is that the A-Team episode was more entertaining. No, this year’s Enterprise stories have been fun. It is too bad though, that the show has fallen so far in the ratings it may never recover.

Angel, the Buffy spin-off with a do-gooder Vampire as the main character, has also started off the season on a high note. After last year’s fourteen episodes of cliffhangers, the Angel writers seem to be taking a more laid back, relaxed attitude and the series has really gotten back some of the charm of the early Buffy The Vampire Slayer seasons. The Angel cast has great chemistry, something that even the arrival of James Marsters (Spike) doesn’t seem to affect. When the show’s production company, Mutant Enemy, announced that Marsters was coming over from Buffy to join the show this year, I was a little worried that he would dominate the program. Thankfully, this doesn’t seem to be happening. He was hardly even in the first episode, and the second episode was a nice slow introduction of his character into the current Angel milieu.

On the lower end of the spectrum, I find that I derive this guilty pleasure watching the WB’s Dawson’s Creek/Roswell hybrid, Smallville. Although I find about half its episodes to be quite good and interesting interpretations of the Superman mythos, the rest are such complete drivel that I change the channel when my wife comes into the room out of sheer embarrassment. I am beginning to suspect that she thinks I am a porn addict or something.

I can’t understand why the show is so popular. John Glover and Michael Rosenbaum do a wonderful job at playing the Luthors, and there have been some great interpretations of Superman’s history, including a nifty appearance by Christopher Reeve last season, but the show falls prey to so many failings, each episode has the potential to be a hit or miss.

In the first two seasons, they had so many kryptonite villains and so many on again, off again moments between Clark and Lana that I keep hoping Rick Berman wasn’t watching the show and thinking that maybe there was another holodeck story left in Star Trek after all. To top it off, by the beginning of the third season Clark has been seen in so many suspicious situations it makes the whole giving Clark glasses as a disguise thing seem like an act of creative brilliance.

To be honest, I really believe that I watch this program out of desperation because other than these three shows, there is really nothing of Science Fiction left on television that even remotely interests me. Thank God, for DVDs as I can entertain myself by watching old Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Buffy episodes until the 2004 fall television season rolls around.