Nah, Bentley's too skinny for lunch

I’ve been reading a guide to the Bahamas, and in it is more than one reference to the “gin-clear” waters. Somehow it pleases me to think of the ocean as one giant cocktail, and since I favor both the martini and the gin-and-tonic, I like to drink that concept up.

I spent a year living on a speck of a Micronesian island, whose waters were gin-clear as well, sometimes up to 200-foot visibility. Considering that there are scads of engulfingly beautiful corals, impossibly bright, darting fish and impressively large aquatic beasts there, it was perhaps less a cocktail than a massive, boundless aquarium tended by benign, giving gods who thought “more is always better.”

One of the first times I went snorkeling there, a large ray winged its slow, flapping way about four feet underneath me, just above a raised coral ledge. My girlfriend Alice, who was watching nearby, thought I handled that exceedingly well, since the ray’s wingspan was probably seven feet, and I’d only seen such things on television. I did appear to handle it calmly, but that was because my brain froze when I realized that a large creature from the big blue had decided to synchronize its swim with me—I was incapable of movement.

Shark Sightings Are Good for Thinning the Blood
Frozen movement wasn’t the case on another snorkeling occasion, when a six-foot reef shark appeared about 15 feet away from us and then actually veered in our direction for a moment. Seeing a top-of-the-food-chain predator suddenly appear and actually nose my way shot me backward in the water about ten feet, as though I was wearing a jet pack. Alice was behind me, and thus I pushed her vigorously back as well. It was only later that I explained, when she expressed gratitude for protecting her from the shark, that I had no clue she was behind me. The hero exposed. (By the way, reef sharks are generally pretty well-behaved, but tell that to my exploding heart.)

Anyway, the reason I’m again contemplating gin-clear waters is that Alice and I are heading to the Bahamas to house-sit for a couple of months on the island of Eleuthera. It’s not exactly a pleasure trip, because we’re going to try and keep our regular contract work schedules, but I’m sure pleasures will be had. Some gin too. And I’m going to try to find my inner Bill Bryson too—he’s in there somewhere.

Bonus Halloween Treat (Well, More of a Trick)
Squidoo is publishing a series of magazines, and one of them is about Halloween. I wrote a little piece about some of my own Halloween doings—kids, don’t try this at home.

I was at a vintage auto concours yesterday, where there was an eyeball-scorching field of gleaming chariots, where the “oohs and ahhs” were many and involuntary. But then I saw this rig pictured above, a BMW Isetta with a teardrop trailer behind. The Isetta took more than 30 seconds to reach 31 mph, topping out at around 50. That the owner of this one had the peculiar cant of mind to hook up a tiny—but usable—trailer behind struck me with its whimsicality.

I don’t know where the quote “Normality is what cuts off your sixth finger and your tail” comes from (I’m sure it’s not Michele Bachmann), but the Isetta is an exemplar of the quote’s creed. So this post is rather a coda to the Katherine Hepburn one that preceded it—sometimes that sixth finger is the only one that can get a grip on an unusual idea, so it’s a shame to cut it off.

I recently read an article in an April 2011 New Yorker about David Eagleman, a professor of neuroscience and his work on how the brain conceives, interprets, and filters its sense of time. The article is wholly fascinating, but one of the tangents discussed in the piece was the “oddball effect,” which at its essence posits that the brain reacts with great focus and avidity to things that are outside the standard pattern, pushing the norm or subverting it, so much so that time itself seems to be dilated as a result of the brain’s attention.

Here’s to the Oddballs
Though I don’t even play a scientist on TV, I can’t address the measures or implications of that phenomenon, so I’ll just turn it to my purpose: The oddball effect is often a sensation of incredulity, mixed with delight. It’s when you pull up next to a car at a stoplight and the driver is wearing a gorilla mask. Good God!

So, like the Apple ad that saluted the crazy ones and the misfits, I want to salute the eccentric writers, who stroke and poke our brains. People like Tom Robbins, who never met a metaphor he couldn’t bend around a shooting comet, or Oscar Wilde, who while studying at Oxford University, would walk through the streets with a lobster on a leash. Or Lord Byron, who when told at Cambridge he couldn’t keep a dog in his room, discovered that there were no rules against bears. So he got one. (Note: Can we draw any conclusions about prestigious English academies and lunacy?)

Bertrand Russell said, “Orthodoxy is the death of intelligence.” Here’s to the guy that owned a truly oddball car, an Isetta, and thought, “A little trailer to go with it, that’s the thing!” He probably would have put a bear in there too, if he’d thought about it long enough.

I love this photo of Kate Hepburn. Even though her both-feet-athwart stance seems to presage a butt-tumble to come, the fact that she’s cranking the angle shows she’s not just rolling a flat-foot-dead-ahead-I’m-terrified skate, but she’s going for it. Maybe it’s the only time Kate skated, maybe it’s just a publicity photo, but implicit in it is the kind of attitude confirmed by Hepburn’s bio: a brash kind of what-the-hell brio that was disarming and refreshing.

That’s what I think writers should do: push the angle a little, crank off some language that’s bolder or brighter, be willing to take a bone bruise to your writer’s elbows. I like to imagine Kate grinding on a curb in the Safeway parking lot, the security guard saying, “Hey lady, give it a rest!” From reading of her history, she rarely gave it a rest: she was opinionated, strong-willed and emotional, and it came out in her acting and her personal life. Whether you write for business, pleasure or both, writing doesn’t have any flavor unless you add some cayenne now and then.

The Long Hangover from a Word-Bender
When I was ten or eleven, I became slap-happy with words. I’d read the dictionary in chunks of pages, getting into the brief etymologies, mouthing the pronunciations. I remember running down to my best friend’s house, having memorized a line about a nice, old Volkswagen bus his highly educated parents had bought, so that I could spring on them something like “Congratulations on purchasing a well-restored vintage mode of transportation,” or some such gobbledygook. My friend’s dad just looked at me and laughed, though in a kindly way.

Despite regularly getting those kind of skeptical responses, I continued being a word-dweeb for years. The editor of my college paper was a guy who liked me and my writing, but one who accurately judged that my polysyllables-per-sentence count was choking many readers. He once titled an article of mine about an unconventional housing design near the college, “A Lot of Big Words About Housing.”

I’ve calmed down some from those days. I’m no longer so insecure about my writing that I have to forcibly lard it with fifty-cent words to make it seem worth something. But I’m still thrilled by language, still rifling through the dictionary, still wanting to goose a sentence with word-grease that makes it jump. So, take some chances with your writing: think of Kate Hepburn shredding in a half-pipe, no knee pads.

Bonus Celebrity “No Way!” Sighting
Agatha Christie was a surfer. I knew that Mark Twain did it in Hawaii (look for his tales of “surf bathing” in the Sandwich Islands), but Dame Agatha? Yes! I am hoping that one of you can find out whether Yogi Berra was a knitter.

Give your writing some stripes

Though I’m only a few minutes from a freeway, I live in a semi-rural area, where there are some stretches of tangled brush and stands of tall trees. There’s a nice walk on a paved road through my neighborhood, and though there are many houses around, the road winds up and down some small hills, flanked by these areas of bushy scrub, scruffy oaks and fairly big pines.

There’s also a bobcat. The first time my girlfriend and I saw her on our walk, she was a distance away in a clearing, and I thought it was just a big house cat. But I could see the rumpy way she walked through some high weeds, and then could see the wispy flares on her ears. A bobcat! A wild thing, in context. Seeing an unexpected bobcat focuses the attention, stokes the heart, makes you tilt your head and consider things from a different perspective.

I advocate putting a bobcat in your writing. There’s not a recipe for what I’m pushing, no “use two action verbs, vary sentence length and strangle the adjectives.” No, instead I’m saying look for the places in your writing, whether it’s business writing or the novel that has been drinking too much decaf—and put in a bobcat. Don’t settle for the common phrase, don’t settle for rote description, don’t have your characters or your concepts always be tight and linear.

Whether it’s with poetic language, an artful dodge, a right turn when a left was called for, a bright balloon in a sea of grey, a bobcat in your writing is a joyful thing. Look for the fields—or the corporate boardroom—where you can place one, and see what happens.

Naturally, you can’t put a bobcat in every paragraph. That would de-claw it. No, find the places where it can pounce, and proceed.

Mors Pulchra
Mors Pulchra is Latin for “beautiful death.” I bring that up because there was (and I hope still is) more than one bobcat in our neighborhood. I know that because once on one of our walks, we found one dead, very close to the road. Perhaps he’d been hit by a car, though there were no obvious signs of what had killed him. He was a strikingly beautiful animal, muscular, with a thick, tawny striped coat and surprisingly large paws. I felt a sense of loss and regret that was oddly touching.

Some writers are able to capture an essence of longing and “what might have been” in a way that isn’t cloying or sentimental, and they can put it to use in their work. I had that emotional feeling when I looked at that bobcat, thinking that those big paws probably scrambled up these hills in a swift flash of electric life.

It’s a tricky thing to pull off, but there are also times when you want to put a dead bobcat in your writing. Done well, it can grab readers in a place where their brains don’t call the shots.

So, bobcats as writing aids—who woulda thunk it?