The Trick of Flying

As I am a busy person, or at least person who tries very hard to appear like a busy person when anyone is looking, I rarely have time to actually sit down and read a book these days. Furthermore, I am a picky book reader and I consider a poorly plotted or overly bombastically worded book to be a personal affront from the author to myself. Since most authors are bombastic hacks who couldn't plot their way out of an open paper sack with a map, two different and wholly trustworthy guidebooks, a cooperative mule to carry their supplies, and a backlit nuclear-powered auto-compass that infalliably points to the exit, I find most books somewhat lacking.

This is not to say I do not like to read. It's just to say I do not like to read poorly.

The same thing could be said for movies, my taste in which veers widely and wildly across the landscape of cinema, though finding a reasonably plotted movie is even harder than finding a good book. Thus, you can imagine, I've become amazingly bitter and frustrated with regards to my entertainment choices, if one presumes that I want books and movies to form a large part of those choices.

Well, I don't. Nonetheless, I am bitter and frustrated because it seems amazingly hard to find a cuddly book or intelligent movie these days anyway, and I am feeling particularly prickly about this subject right now. I am certain these things exist, in so much as I am certain people live in China though I have never been there. That is to say, I am certain that people have told me that other people live in China, something most of them, no doubt, learned second-hand themselves. Life, one concludes, is mostly hearsay. The lives of other people, therefore, are essentially nothing but meaningless gossip and would never hold up in court.

Then, an interesting synchronicity of events occured at the same time, which, when you think about it, is precisely the meaning synchronicity. To wit:

1. Super Daddyman advises me to look at Audible.com.


2. I see a live performance by Ira Glass, who mentions Audible.


3. I purchase a Palm T3, a device supported by Audible for audio playback.


4. The Ambiguous Heterosexual tells me the next George R. R. Martin book is just about to come out.

Let's take those events separately.

One: Super Daddyman has dyslexia and reads very slowly. For years, he's been listening to books by downloading them from Audible. For almost as long, he has been telling me how much he enjoys downloading books from Audible and listening to them. For almost as long as that, I have been ignoring him.

Two: Ira Glass is the host/producer of This American Life, a radio program I enjoy but have difficulty making time to listen to. It so happened that he was speaking in Dallas, that I learned he was speaking in Dallas, and that I managed to get two tickets to go see him speak in Dallas. During the engagement, he mentioned Audible as well, which reminded me of all those years of I'd been ignoring Super Daddyman.

Three: I once had a Palm V, which I took to Europe with me. It saved me from many headaches in London and Paris when dealing with the metro systems in those cities. It recorded all the fiddly bits of information that got me from point A to point B safely. After returning from Europe, I lost it. I found it a year later in the garage, at the bottom of a box of unused bicycling gear that had become home to a lovely chameleon. How the Palm had smuggled itself out of the house, into the garage, and to the bottom of this box I have left unplumbed and unquestioned as one of the great mysteries of the universe. Beneath the rotting brilliant yellow jerseys and filthy lycra socks, it had died, with only a lizard for company. Now, as another trip to Europe approached, I resolved to get a new Palm.

Four: The Ambiguous Heterosexual, after not communicating with me or anyone I know for almost a year, sends me a messenge that simply says "NEW MARTIN BOOK JUNE 16" before logging off and vanishing again into the internet ether. He is, of course, referring to A Feast of Crows, the fourth book in Martin's Song of Fire and Ice cycle.

Armed with a new Palm, two recommendations for Audible, and the impending release of the one book I knew I was looking forward to, I downloaded the first three books of the cycle from Audible and listened to them, boning up for the new book. The Song of Fire and Ice Cycle is writing of high-calibre, fantasy novels drenched in ambience and historical attention to detail and lovingly bereft of all the trite, Tolkien-ripped conventions that plague the genre today. I wore the earphones constantly, and counted down the days until the new book was released. I finished the books just in time, on June 14th, and bit my lip.

It is at this time that the narrator will reveal to the reader that the Ambiguous Heterosexual can not be trusted with the facts, though the narrator himself forgot this in the excitement of the moment. June 16th came and went, and no new book appeared. Visits to Martin's website confirmed that the book was not released, was not expected to be released soon, and that Mr. Martin, though he would not say so, was having one hell of a case of writer's cramp.

In sad desperation, I made a dire miscalculation. I selected another book to listen to from Audible's collection, a bulky tome that had high recommendations on Audible's site, and one that I had seen weighing heavily on the bookshelves at every bookstore in the country. I downloaded it thinking, "Well, it'll give me something to do while I wait for Mr. Martin to find a good chiropractor."

I downloaded Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time.

At first, I thought, "Well, it's just the first few chapters, it'll get better." It didn't. I persisted. It got worse. I gritted my teeth. Something couldn't be this bad, could it? It was.

Finally, I sought help. I asked Miss Em if she'd read any Jordan.

"Oh, sure." she said. "I think I've read all of them. They filled me with so much hope."

"Really? Hope?" I asked, stunned.

"Yeah. Hope that they would get better."

I asked the Brain if he'd read any Jordan. He only sputtered contemptuously and demanded, with all due care, that I delete the recordings from my archive.

"How far did you listen?" he asked.

"Till about chapter 25. Nothing had happened."

Miss Em, who was sitting at the table as well, said, "Nothing ever happens. They just go on and on..."

"Delete it." demanded the Brain again. "Save yourself the pain and just delete it."

"Well..." I said cautiously, "I was kind of hoping that a stray photon might strike one of the bits in the file, causing a cascading nuclear chain-reaction that would rearrange the audio data into something more interesting."

The Brain looked at me increduously, "And you expect this to happen?"

"No, not really, but you have to admit it is a possibility." I replied.

"But not a probability." he said, self-assured.

"No, but it would be really keen if it happened. So, I thought I would give it a chance."

In fact, I give the universe a lot of chances like this. The Brain knows this about me and accepts it. What other people define as procrastination or laziness, I define as faith in butterfly effects. A danaus plexippus takes off for a holiday in Mexico and my dishes get done, for example.

The Brain, however, stood firm. "But, you've stopped listening to it, right?"

"Oh yes, I've moved on to something else. Douglas Adams."

Which brings the narrator and the reader to the Trick of Flying. I learned it today while sitting at a table, gazing at a laptop-screen-full of numbers and digits that represent "work" to me, sipping a freshly brewed cup of slightly sweetened Earl Grey iced tea, my earphones on, my Palm T3 in my pocket, and a dead English author nattering on and on in my head about this improbability or that one.

"The trick of flying," Mr. Adams says, "is to throw yourself at the ground and miss."