One Man International Rescue Mission: After-Action Report, Part 2

(link to Part 1 for those readers just joining us)

I turned on my phone, which didn’t have service, and wandered the length and breadth of the arrivals terminal at Mariscal Sucre, looking for anyone who might be looking for me. No one was.

I went outside to smoke a cigarette, tried my phone again, went back inside and made another circuit. I checked out the cabbies, thought about renting a car. I’d google-mapped the directions before I left in case I needed them (and/or to double-check against where my theoretical driver actually drove me; you never know, after all) and it looked pretty straightforward on paper. Of course it wouldn’t be, and I didn’t relish the idea of driving off into the jungle at night, but if my contact didn’t show I’d have to decide between that and negotiating with whoever I could find at the airport. That theoretical person might or might not know the way, might or might not be on the up and up, and would have to be negotiated with in Spanish. After twelve hours in transit, neither option had much appeal. At least I didn’t have to worry about changing money.

I decided I’d give whoever might be coming half an hour, then either find a hotel near the airport or start negotiating (whatever uncertainty that entailed, I decided renting a car would be my last fallback, and not something I’d chance til morning if it became necessary). I went outside and smoked another cigarette. It was good smoking weather: the air was cool, but it felt nice after the recycled atmosphere of the plane, and the new airport is far enough outside the city for the air to be comparatively fresh (the old airport was in the middle of town, a much more overwhelming transition).

I wasn’t quite worried, but I was relieved when I went back inside and saw a young Ecuadorian man holding a sign with my name on it. He led me outside and called the driver, who was waiting outside the airport so he wouldn’t have to pay parking. We talked a little, but my Spanish wasn’t back online and I was too tired to say much, anyway. He told me Michael was feeling better and then the driver showed up in a brand new mid-size, quad-cab Chevrolet pickup. We loaded in and were off into the night, along shiny, well-lit, brand-new highways that were nicer than most of the interstates I’ve driven on lately. Up in the front seat, the driver and my contact, whose name I later learned was Eduardo, chatted amongst themselves while I looked out the window and tried to follow what they were saying. Their relationship wasn’t clear, and though there was little overt cause for concern I was now in an unmarked vehicle with two other men and a bunch of cash in my pocket. I was ninety percent sure it was all good, but the non-negligible remainder bothered me enough I started gaming out scenarios for how it would go down if I was wrong, and how I might handle it. I knew I was probably just being paranoid, but if something did happen I would need to be mentally prepared to react quickly and decisively, the odds being what they were.

Hey, I told you I’m obsessive/compulsive. Used properly, it can come in really handy in life, though as with all super-powers there are downsides.

We went through a few roundabouts, and I watched the signs. We seemed to be going the right way. I couldn’t follow Eduardo and the driver’s conversation in terms of what they were actually talking about, but the nonverbal cues were pretty clear. They were just two guys, minimally acquainted, making conversation to pass the time. Eduardo, being young, spent a lot of time on his phone, and the driver seemed maniacally focused on taking every turn and stretch of highway as fast as possible, while being as delicate with his brand new vehicle as he could, which meant a lot of quick acceleration and sudden braking. The radio filled the cabin with the major-chord melodies and sprightly rhythms of Ecuadorian country music.

I got a little sketched out when we pulled off the highway onto what looked like a dirt road. I’d turned on my Kindle, gone back to reading Hild — if for no other reason than to spare myself the mental strain of a conversation in Spanish — and was just checking in with reality every now and again to appease my paranoia. The driver, as solicitous of his brand-new vehicle as he was determined to exploit its accelerative capabilities, announced the turn with a sudden and definitive application of the brakes and next thing I knew we were on dirt and rocks, heading toward darkness. I ramped up just in case, started paying attention, but the vibe in the cab hadn’t changed, and we went around a bend and there was a tractor-trailer, which we passed, and then we were past the place where they were expanding the highway and back onto pavement, a perfectly serviceable two-lane road that twisted and climbed and generally just snaked its way through the mountains, which the driver took with his by-now familiar blend of attentive aggression and gusto. I would later discover just how beautiful the country I was passing through was, but all I could see was darkness out the window except when we passed what few vehicles were out on the highway.

They were driving me into the middle of nowhere, sure. But that’s what I was paying them to do. I put my paranoia to bed and settled back into Hild for the drive. Continue reading “One Man International Rescue Mission: After-Action Report, Part 2” →

One Man International Rescue Mission: After-Action Report, Part 1

I got the call last Monday. I missed it, actually, because I was taking a nap. I’d just finished Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and as is not unusual after reading a work of that power, compellingness, and degree of writerly badassitude, I needed to shut down my conscious brain and let my psyche digest what I’d spent the last day and a half gorging on (to the detriment, obviously, of my list of action items). Not unusual, like I said, but there was a weird edge to the feeling: anxious, almost nauseous even. I don’t remember what I dreamed about, but I remember waking up unsettled and still groggy. I wonder if I didn’t have some premonition of what was coming (it wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened to me).

I woke up, went to the bathroom, washed my hands. My brain still refused to gear up. Usually when I cat-nap, it takes me a couple of minutes to remember who/what/where I am, and at this point I was past the usual threshold, but not necessarily worryingly so. I saw the phone blinking, touched the screen, saw my dad had called and left a voicemail. I remember thinking, “I wasn’t expecting a call from Dad,” and again there was that tiny backbrain premonition.

I unlocked the phone, hit the voicemail icon, put the phone to my ear.

“Dallas, it’s your dad. Call me immediately-” I didn’t bother listening to the rest of the message. Continue reading “One Man International Rescue Mission: After-Action Report, Part 1” →

Resolution and Resolve

So it’s New Year’s, that arbitrary yet persistently meaningful occasion when, after a few months of holiday excess, we take it upon ourselves to reflect on the year gone by, and to commit ourselves to improvement or at very least change in the year to come.

My list of particular resolutions is much the same as everyone else’s. Suffice to say it involves being healthier and more focused on what gives my life meaning, and setting aside habits that keep me from doing that as well as I could. I am resolved, in short, to be a better, more useful, more productive person than I have been.

In thinking on my New Year’s resolutions I got to thinking of the dual meaning of the word ‘resolution’ itself. This time of year, it means mostly a formalizing of resolve, a determination that things will change, become a certain way. But it also means fidelity in the rendering of a signal (think a high-resolution video screen), in which the higher the resolution, the clearer the picture that’s rendered. I think it’s useful to keep both definitions in mind when contemplating a mindful personal evolution.

Mindful personal evolution means changing who you are as a person in some meaningful way, which can be really, really hard to do. There’s great comfort in familiarity, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to fall into old habits rather than risk the uncertainty of doing something different. Without a clear vision of not only who you want to become but also why you aren’t already that person, the will to change alone will only get you so far. I’ll give you a personal example: Continue reading “Resolution and Resolve” →

Things I Learned on the Internet This Week 8/8/14

Another week gone, and the internet (and the world it reflects, or possibly refracts) continues to fascinate. So, in my continuing efforts to excuse to myself the embarrassing amount of time I spend surfing the internet, here is a selection of highlights from my procrastinations this week:

Warren Layre, 61, told The Inquirer in an interview last year that the officers beat him with a steel bar and kicked in his teeth during a warrantless raid on his machine shop on West Sedgwick Street in June 2011. Speaking to a reporter two years later, he pulled back his lip to show the gaps in his teeth that remained.

According to Wednesday’s indictment, Liciardello reported less than $7,000 of the $41,158 they seized from Layre’s shop.

Truth really is stranger than fiction, as this story of six corrupt cops up on racketeering charges in Philadelphia attests. For ten years, these guys ran rampant through the city, shaking people down and sending people to jail on trumped-up charges and basically running a standover operation, and the only thing that stopped them was that one of them finally got caught and turned stool pigeon. If this was on TV, it’d be a huge hit, and I expect some day it will be. In fact, I think these guys are a natural extension of the portrayal of law enforcement in our entertainment culture, which I think has a lot of similarities to what happened (and continues to happen) between Hollywood and the Mafia.

Moving on to American law enforcement at the institutional level, we learn from the Washington Post that

Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI lab has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency, government officials said.

For years, even decades, a team in the FBI crime lab misrepresented its results in order to secure convictions. Not unlike the situation in Philadelphia, the problem was known but institutional inertia prevented it from being attended to until outed by investigative reporter Spencer Hsu.

The review comes after The Washington Post reported in April that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people but had not performed a thorough review of the cases. In addition, prosecutors did not notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Worst of all, innocent people may have been executed. The first article in the series sums it all up pretty well, I think.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

And, just in case you weren’t yet fully convinced of the dysfunction in US law enforcement culture, here’s one more slug to the guts.

“I felt so vulnerable being laid out on a table, with all my clothes off and in a bag and all the swabs and brushes and combs,” she recalled. But at least, she figured, the police would use the swabs and hair samples to help catch the rapist.

They did not. Like hundreds of thousands of other rape kits across the country containing evidence gathered from victims, that of Ms. Ybos lay untested for years on a storeroom shelf.

(hat tip to Charles P. Pierce, one of my favorite writers, period, for this post, where I found most of the above)

Having gotten through all that, I think we could all use a break. Here’s a picture of the sunset at Second Beach, where I went camping with my girl and just the loveliest bunch of people you could ever want to hang out with last weekend. Continue reading “Things I Learned on the Internet This Week 8/8/14” →

A Glimpse Into This Writer’s Life

It’s been a pretty exciting week for this semi-pro writer. Yesterday came an email from the submissions editor of a well-respected speculative fiction market (one I’ve been trying to break into for years) saying she was passing my current submission up to the editor-in-chief. It’s further than I’ve ever gotten with this market, so even if the EIC passes, I’ve still got that going for me, which is nice.

Today I finally queried another market, who’s had a story of mine for just over a year and a half (not unusual for them, for what it’s worth), to see if my story was still under consideration. I’ve been putting this off for a long time, afraid I might trigger a rejection or, worse, that the silence would continue. But they got right back to me and said yes, the story is still under consideration. Which is cool, and totally freaks me out, because I definitely feel like I’m punching above my weight class with this one.

Currently only have one other sub out, which I don’t expect to hear back from for at least another month. Given the timeframe, it’s one of those situations where the longer it takes to hear back from them, the better.

I’ve got two more stories that are almost ready for submission, one a novelette I wrote a couple of months ago that I’m nearly done tinkering with, the other a story I wrote two years ago in South America, revised, sent to most of the usual suspects, market-wise, and then thought of a way better ending for. If I can get one or both of those ready and out the door, I’ll feel pretty good about my number of active submissions. Continue reading “A Glimpse Into This Writer’s Life” →