Mopac’s Seamy Underbelly

I was trying to think up a kick-ass ending for a novel, and decided that I needed an exploratory bike trek to clear my mind. After ten years of living in my neighborhood, I just discovered there was a system of hike/bike trails that weaved through a nearby tangle of freeways and arterial streets. In my defense, I thought I had once ridden my bike through this no-man’s land, but I must have had it confused with another unsavory urban transit corridor.

I am amazed at the short distance between Austin’s beloved Lady Bird Lake and the start of my newly-discovered, nasty trail heading north along the Mopac freeway. Look one way and see joggers, kayakers, and stand-up paddle-boarders. Look the other way and see slabs of concrete laid unevenly, curving into weedy obscurity. I felt compelled to enter.

I started the short climb on my bike and then swept downward into the weeds along a mostly dry, rocky creek bed spotted with pools of stagnant water. Empty plastic bottles and shredded grocery bags on the rocks attested to how fast this creek could flash flood in a heavy rain. Tires whined and clacked as unseen cars, their drivers oblivious to the lone figure on the bike beneath them, flew over me on layers of stacked, curving bridges. The trail hugged the side of the creek embankment, and I moved to the inside. If I went over the edge I might not be found anytime soon. Broken bottles and filthy, crumpled blankets were evidence that the less fortunate sometimes slept here.

This place repulsed, yet I was fascinated. That a world so foreign to my everyday experience existed not more than a mile from my quiet home propelled my imagination. God only knew what happened down here in the wee hours!

Side trails split off from the creek and worked their way outward like veins in a decomposing body. I booked on ahead, through a couple of dark, urine-smelling, concrete culverts and then popped out of the trees into a grassy median between an access road and the freeway. Even though the sun was low, it still had to be close to a hundred degrees, and I wilted from the temperature change.

Abruptly, the trail dumped me into a quaint little park across the street from some high-dollar homes. How fast things change! I rested under a tree in the park and watched some pretty good b-ball players go four-on-four on a court that actually had straight rims. When the arriving Amtrak rumbled by, I waved at a kid in a window.

Mopac Freeway Complex

On the way back through the netherworld, I took every side trail out of the creek bed. I crossed footbridges with peeling paint and splintered deck planks as each trail ended at a different cross street, above. I guess that’s what exploration is all about. But I still haven’t thought of an ending for the novel.

 

 

Book Review–Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

This book is the last (6th?) of a very good series with private eyes, Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. All the books in the series are page-turners. I’m glad Lehane wrapped this up so I can move on to other books by him. (I did already manage to slip in the great Shutter Island, though.)

I can’t think of any other author who draws characters as vividly as Lehane does with such efficiency. Depending of the character’s importance, the author can sear an impression into the reader’s mind in a few paragraphs or draw out a description for several pages or even a full chapter if necessary. Of course, the main characters of Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are continually developed throughout the series. To my delight, my favorite character, Bubba Rogowski, makes an appearance. Bubba is a criminal, but he’s good-guy muscle without a conscience when the heroes need it.

My biggest complaint with Moonlight Mile is that Kenzie, Gennaro, and their 4 year old daughter continually fall into mooshy, familial affection fests. Enough is enough. There is also a lot of class resentment by the main characters, who struggle with bills that can’t ever seem to be paid from their meager P.I. incomes. But that’s who they are, and Lehane does a good job of consistently working that monkey-on-their-backs into the plot. Actually, it propels the plot at times.

Some of the similes and metaphors are over the top, but the book is written in first person, and hard boiled noir prose seems to bubble up that writing style. All in all, it’s another entertaining read by Lehane.

Earth Needs Bruce Willis

I bought a helmet and plan to watch the Perseid meteor showers the next few nights. The Earth is passing through space debris left by the comet, Swift-Tuttle, named after the two astronomers who identified it in 1862. The comet crosses Earth’s orbit every 133 years, and in the year 3044 it will be perilously close. The comet is about the same size as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

In the 1998 movie, Armageddon, Bruce Willis and a handful of other movie stars rocketed to an asteroid that was headed for Earth. Mr. Willis detonated a nuclear device that split the asteroid in half, saving us all. Even though his character sacrificed himself for the greater good (can’t get much greater good than saving Earth) Mr. Willis’s roles in a long career of action movies convince me that he has the moxy to actually pull off this feat in 3044.

Therefore, I am formally requesting that Bruce Willis cryogenically freeze himself sometime before his mental and physical faculties deteriorate so that he may be reanimated before a possible devastating impact in the future. Mr. Willis, the people of Earth need you!

On a less dramatic note, hopefully the full moon this weekend won’t overpower the streaking trails of the Perseid showers. The brighter the trail, the bigger the piece of “falling” debris burning up in our atmosphere.

Here’s my description of a similar meteorite from Church of the God Particle, except this meteorite didn’t fall naturally:

The night sky flared with the incendiary brightness of a dozen full moons. Streetlights shut off as pinkish purple light flooded the cityscape. Out of the sky glow emerged a fireball, its lavender tail sizzling from the stratosphere. Descending in the west, it punctured a few sparse clouds and blazed out of sight below the horizon.

Mr. Willis—Let me know if you’d like to be frozen for the good of mankind. I have some space in my garage where you wouldn’t be disturbed.

 

 

 

 

Religion, Bliss, and the God Particle

A 2005 Rice University survey of 1646 faculty researchers around the U.S. showed that about two thirds of them believe in God.  Some of those who said they don’t believe still consider themselves “spiritual.”  I’ve always been puzzled by the scientific supposition that the brain creates consciousness, yet plenty of brain scientists believe in an afterlife–even after the brain has been eaten holey from casket invaders living in the moist earth of cemeteries.

The villain of my novel, Church of the God Particle, carries no such dichotomy baggage.  The Reverend Lucas Ruthlier is a particle physicist and an unabashed believer in a higher power.  And, by God, if anyone impedes his physics experiments, the reverend’s homicidal son will accelerate the arrival of the intruder’s afterlife.

The Large Hadron Supercollider at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland is smashing subatomic particles together, trying to find something called the Higgs Boson, aka God Particle.  It is the singular component of the theorized Higgs Field. Assuming a field of Higgs particles exists, it bestows mass.  Mass is experienced as weight when an object is in a gravitational field.  Such objects include casket worms, you, me, and even planet Earth. Like the resistance of swimming through water, the ubiquitous Higgs Field imparts mass to the subatomic particles of matter as they pass through it.  At least that’s the theory.

Whether or not supercolliders will reveal the existence of God is a concern for Reverend Ruthlier.  He wants the world to believe like he does, as is the case with many believers of many religions.  They want to share their bliss, at least about their faith.  But a mother with a hungry child, no matter how steeped in the faith of her religion she may be, could not be characterized as blissful.  However, the materially-satisfied Reverend Ruthlier, as he leads his congregation toward a rendezvous of physics and religion, is indeed blissful– except for that relentless Texas Ranger following the trail of bodies that leads perilously close to the Church of the God Particle.