So Whitmanesque

Today it was so Whitmanesque to walk the familiar route to the Red Apple. The Mexican food trailer sitting on the corner by The Station coffee shop which was just opening at 7 o’clock. I came across two men who walked their dogs and a pile of beer cans with discarded food cartons. The Community Center El Centro de la Raza, formerly a neighborhood elementary school that looms Gothically, making one think that in this quiet neighborhood, a sleepy underdeveloped enclave a  stone’s throw to downtown Seattle and to Chinatown, that there may be hidden dragons and crouching tigers or dungeons where they chain vixens for forcible sex. Whitman never have imagined this when he was writing in New York that depravity could spread this far. This is Seattle man. Even here the cops shoot to kill the mentally ill. 

THE OLD HOUSE ON BAY AVENUE

THE OLD HOUSE ON BAY AVENUE

I slept in the anteroom because the bed was there and early in the morning while still in bed the freight train would rattle by just across the dirt fields, cycloned by blackberry brambles. When the roar of the engines died, I would gradually hear robins or sparrows chirping and singing. Those days I was 21 and 22 and I didn’t need coffee or strong tea to wake up yet and I would linger in bed relishing the morning deliciously because my strength was still in my brain and my eyes and limbs were good and young though my loins were still virgin and it was to be another 3 years before I have my first sexual experience with an older married woman from Aberdeen.

For now group and ring theory filled my head and no one has licked the Pacific Rim of my cock yet. I had many women and girl friends and I mean just Platonic friends because I made friends easily and I was not a threat to them; I did not demand sex, though a few would really want to initiate me. I was that shy. I remember Reed who taught me how to kiss in my car before I went down to Eugene to attend the University of Oregon and maybe the trouble was that it had started with Eileen. I will talk about that in a little bit. That was my first frost in the telephone booth, but in retrospect, I still love her, because she came back to me twenty years later and made it up to me.

Well, let me continue with the story on Bay Avenue then.

More than anything it was a time of reading. In the summer I worked for Kerns Desoto furniture factory, a mill just a few blocks down in Hoquiam. There was not much to say about that. It was just a summer job and all they demanded was that I didn’t eat in the lunch room because there were a couple of girls worked there in the wood lathes and they liked me or I mean they probably just looked at me and found me a Chinese curio, and so the red necks gave me these mean stares. The tension was so thick that I went outside and leaned about the building with its weeds and wild flowers and all to eat my sandwich and apple by myself. Nobody spoke to me and I didn’t give a shit. I paid my union dues and they needed some robot to sort the wood as it came out of the saw. I discarded the pieces with the worm holes and stacked the good pieces on a pallet eight hours a day. And when I went home I took a short nap with the sawdust still in my lungs and then my brain was so clear that I read Herstein’s Introduction to Abstract Algebra like it was nobody’s business. How I loved that mathematical realm then.

On Saturday mornings I would drive to the Highway Grocery early in the morning and get a bottle of Mogen David blackberry wine and a yellow pad of legal paper and tried to write something. That summer when I was twenty-two I bought a Writer’s Market and daydreamed that someday I will be a writer. But all I need essentially was to drink enough blackberry wine so that I felt mellow enough so that went the emerald light flooded through the bedroom window (I had moved into the back bedroom by then; it was a two-bedroom house), the unnamed tree in the backyard with its foliage and closure silhouetted itself upon the window I was transported to leagues under the sea. The world was dense and its mysteries began to beckon to me. I had also studied philosophy with John Wisdom by this time. But I didn’t know how to write worth beans. But at least in a small town, I was not anomic. I was the son of Bill and Kim Woon, restaurant owners of the Hong Kong Café on Simpson Avenue. Everyone called them Mamason andPapason. But they were neither. They are as Chinese as Chinese can be, for those who know the difference between Chinese and Japanese. I was the Hong Kong Kid, as known to Dixie Wilcox’ parents. Dixie and I were secretly in love, but neither one of us made any attempt to make it happen in the real world. Later when I worked for the Aberdeen Post Office, I could have asked Dixie out for a date, but I was like a sojourner in a temporary land. I never felt I belonged. The freight train was always going by and it never stops and I sometimes fancy that hoboes were on it wishing they could get off and I wished that I was on it – with destination Bangor Maine.

So You Think You Can Win?

TAIPEI — China’s increasing military musculature continues to crush the margins of how far the US military can conduct operations near the mainland, experts say. Through the purchase of Russian-made equipment, China is attempting to break beyond the current air defense range of 250 kilometers in what US experts refer to as China’s anti-access/area-denial strategy.
China plans to procure two new Russian weapon systems that will extend the range of its air defense strike capability to 400 kilometers. This would place all of Taiwan within the scope of China’s air defense network and endanger the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, which China also claims.
The first is the much-reported negotiation for the 400-kilometer range S-400 surface-to-air missile (SAM) system with a possible deal after 2017, when the Russian manufacturer, Almaz-Antey, fulfills Russian military orders.
The second is the Sukhoi Su-35S multirole fighter jet. These fighters will not be outfitted with the older Zhuk radar, but with the IRBIS-E radar, said Vasiliy Kashin, a researcher at the Moscow-based Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
Built by Tikhomirov NIIP, the 400-kilometer range IRBIS-E multimode X-Band passive electronically scanned array radar can detect and track up to 30 airborne targets and attack up to eight at the same time, according to the company’s website. In addition, in the air-to-ground mode, it can track up to four ground targets, and can track one ground target while preserving air sector surveillance.
The S-400 and Su-35S with the IRBIS-E radar might become “a psychological deterrent to politicians in Washington when they contemplate a Taiwan contingency,” said Alexander Huang, a military specialist at Tamkang University, here.
Kashin said the tactical situation is “bad news for Taiwan,” as the Su-35S will be able to spot Taiwan’s F-16 fighters at 400 kilometers with its new radar. “That means Chinese Su-35s patrolling on the mainland side of the border will be able to see the targets all over Taiwan.”
If anything, these systems will “inspire determination to expedite production, procurement and deployment of the [Lockheed Martin] F-35 fighter by the US and its Asian allies,” Huang said.
The latest information on the Su-35S deal was revealed on June 10, when the director general of Russian Technologies Co., Sergey Chemezov, said the final commercial contract on the fighter sale could be expected by the end of this year.
Kashin said the “contract likely will be signed at the next meeting of the Sino-Russian intergovernmental commission on military technical cooperation, which can be expected to take place in November in Moscow.”
The first procurement contract is expected to include 24 Su-35S fighters, with an option for an additional 24 as things progress. Though 24 to 48 fighters are not a significant threat to US forces, they pose a problem for Taiwan as it retires 56 Mirage 2000 fighters and roughly 50 F-5s. Taiwan is upgrading 126 indigenous defense fighters and 145 F-16A/B fighters, but there has been a significant push by Taiwan to procure 66 F-16C/D fighters to counter reductions. Effective lobbying by China within the US government has blocked new F-16 sales to Taiwan.
With projected reductions in fighters, Taiwan’s military has begun fielding its first land-attack cruise missile, the Hsiung Feng 2E, and is working on a variety of new anti-ship cruise missiles.
However, Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, said Taiwan’s growing interest in land-attack cruise missiles could be countered by the Su-35’s “potential ability to detect small low-flying targets at ranges suitable to support an engagement.”
The IRBIS system’s 400-kilometer range “could provide a useful gap filler” to support the Chinese air force’s limited number of airborne warning and control system aircraft (AWACS), Barrie said. “It remains to become clear what, if any, long-range air-to-air missile might be supplied with the Su-35.”
Both the S-400 and Su-35S with IRBIS-E radar are “impressive steps in increasing capability,” said Lance Gatling of Nexial Research, a defense consulting firm in Tokyo. However, there are technical challenges to integrating China’s AWACS capability with the S-400 and IRBIS-E. “SAM radars, ground-based, have the radar horizon issue, so they can’t see planes at very low altitude over Taipei.”
Taiwan could use the jamming capabilities of its new early warning radar at Leshan Mountain, near Hsinchu, to play havoc with China’s various radar systems, said a Taiwan defense industry source. The Leshan facility is considered one of the most powerful radars in the world, and unconfirmed sources here indicate it relays data directly to the US military to allow for the monitoring of aircraft and missile activity within China.
Gatling said the ultimate question on China’s procurement of the IRBIS and S-400 systems is: “How advanced is the integrated air defense system, data management and data links” in China? At present, this is difficult to define, as much of China’s military capabilities remain opaque to outsiders.