8. Infinite Jest, Gorbachev & Baby Hedgehogs

Imagine that you spent a long hot day on the road.
Stuck perhaps in a rickety old bus.
Cramped, breathing in the air of others and all that damn dirt and filth.
Finally you arrive at that rundown roadside hotel.
The kind that should really have been either knocked down or at the very least renovated …100 years ago.

Still, you’re grateful to be there.
You check in and you find your way to your room.
One of the first things you do is strip off your clothes,
pick up that over starched cardboard-like towel and head to the shower.
You turn it on and you are greeted with a drizzle.

That’s what it was like opening my door this morning. To the rain; that weak, useless, impotent drizzle.

The only advantage will come if it continues.
Too often at this time of year the first rains we get, after months and months of drought, is torrential. And it does the land no good. It hits us so hard and so fast that all it does is rip off and drag away the topsoil leaving the land poorer than when it arrived.

But if today’s drizzle might persevere it will prepare the land better for those heavy rains.

Yet even as I speak, the drizzle dies off.

Drat.

I have a question.

Today I am halfway through reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

I’ve found myself to be really enjoying it.

But I’m starting to wonder what next?

Should I read Gravity’s Rainbow or Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”?

Initially I had discounted Gravity’s Rainbow, when I thought of it last week.

I have no interest in World War Two or the V2 rockets.
But then I made myself smile.
I have no interest in tennis academies, or drug addiction, either and this of course, is what Infinite Jest seems to revolve around, at least on the surface level.

So what do you think the next mega or encyclopaedic novel should be to grace my bedside table?

I do have a copy of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.
However I shall look to indulge in this whilst I’m in Paris.

I rescued a baby hedgehog last night.

On my evening walk around the property I went up to one of the water storage tanks to see just how dire the water level was.

We received one water delivery yesterday, but we need more.

And as I looked down into the tank to my horror, I saw this tiny baby hedgehog, swimming frantically around and around from one side to the next.

I hurried off, got a net on a long handle and thankfully I was able to pull it out, alive if not particularly well.
I put it down, gave it some food.
At the time the temperature was good.
The simple fact that the baby hedgehog had still been swimming itself frantically around the water tank leads me to hope that it will have sufficient strength to survive this trauma.

I heard this morning that the former President Gorbachev of Russia had passed away, aged 91.

It’s funny how we think of people we have never met — I confess to thinking of him quite fondly.

The words, glasnost and perestroika remain firmly affixed in my memory.

I was surprised when I checked today to learn that his leadership of the former Soviet Union had spanned six years. I had no sense of it being that long.

I wondered why. Then I looked at the timeline of his leadership and I realised in the latter half of his leadership I had found myself with my own troubles, involved in a war elsewhere; in the world where my focus really didn’t go outside the borders of where I was at. Indeed, it was unwise if my focus ever lifted more than a few feet in front of my next step or wherever my vehicle tracked.

I am very grateful for all he did for the world.

Although I was surprised to find that he had resigned because the dissolving of the Soviet Union.

The world needs people like him.

The night gifted me to nightmares.

I shall make mention of only one.

Where I live I can see the coast.
I can see the sea.
I can’t access it easily from here.
I could do if there was some incomprehensible emergency.
I look down on the water from a height of about 300 metres and the coast itself, which is largely cliff edge is about a kilometre away — 1000 metres away — as the crow flies.

There are a series of multiple almost sheer drops down the mountainside before one reaches the coast.

I could perhaps make the journey if I travelled on all fours, scrabbling to reach the water, or the cliffs above it.

So it was last night, in my nightmare, that I watched two grand yachts — those that billionaires rent for the summer — pass by the coast below me.
They reached a certain point and both of them sank. Within seconds.
I felt my heart leapt into my throat, a sense of horror swamp me.
Soon afterwards, another two yachts came by and the same thing happened in exactly the same place. They just rolled over and sank.

Next in the dream and much much bigger superyacht backed up to that location.
Using its lights it illuminated the water. And there we could see the sunken yachts beneath the waterline stacked upon each other, side by side, one upon the other.

Suddenly I found myself down at the coast, no longer watching from afar.

The water was perfectly still.
I found myself in the water.
Amazed by the sheer clarity and crystal-clearness of it.
The level of which I swam in the water was actually clear without colour, like looking through a glass of water that one would pour oneself to drink.
Below me in an ever darkening gradient it turned gently blue.

I remember looking left to right, looking for the fish, looking for any sign of life in the water.
There was none.

That unnerved me more than anything else.

The rain has stopped and I can hear the roar of the sea as it smashes up against the coast in the distance. Up here there is not a breath of wind but down below the sea is angry, not yet with white horses but I shall watch today to see what happens next…