I handle the dilemma of privacy slightly differently than Sudeep does. I keep very few secrets of my own from public view. (Secrets of friends, employers, co-bloggers, loved ones, are an entirely different matter.) One reason for this is as ethical prophylaxis. Knowing that I will have to own up to whatever I do is one extra push to resist temptation in the heat of the moment.

Anyway, I mention this because I am tempted to acquire a Blackberry because in my new and busier life I now spend non-trivial stretches of time dashing from place to place without a chance to really use my computer to check my email. And given the events of last night, I suspect I will only be busier in the next few months.

But while having email wherever you go can be liberating, it can also be constricting as those whose queries you wish to avoid (or even simply to mull over more carefully) know that you've already gotten their messages. So I was pondering buying one and jokingly suggested keeping it secret from all but a select group of elect, thereby giving me versatility without obligation.

But whatever I decide-- and truth be told my indecision about the various kind of hand-held-email-gizmos will probably result in paralysis-- my anti-secrecy ethic turns out to be too strong to keep it a secret.

Firefighters recently allowed a man's mobile home to burn down (after putting forward some initial efforts to keep the fire from spreading and to make sure everybody was safe) because he hadn't paid his $25 fire-service fee.

I am surprised, since normally we are beset by an unwillingness to let people suffer in emergencies even when they have failed to take the necessary precautions (unless we attach a certain moral blameworthiness to the incaution). That said, the claim that the man "couldn't afford" the $25 fee seems a little bit imprecise. He obviously had assets, to wit the home and whatever stuff he had inside of it. So he probably could have sold something to make the fee if he wanted to, but he didn't, probably because what little assets he had were very dear to him and the possibility of a fire seems remote. Fair enough, even if a bad choice ex post.

Anyway, presumably some readers think that those with money should be compelled to provide free fire trucks to those without, and others think that one ought to have to pay at least a nominal fee for what one gets. Either way, I suspect results like this are rare even in jurisdictions that compel them by law.

With an occasional exception for a dash of Mozart here and there, I have been listening to nothing but Horace Silver and Johnny Cash for the past month. On the advice of a Friend of Crescat, two new Horace Silver CDs are winging their way toward me now, so until then I am slowly growing more and more addicted to Johnny Cash and June Carter's duet "Jackson" on his album at Folsom Prison.

I confess that even after reading the lyrics I am a little unsure exactly what the song is about, but it only matters a little.

UPDATE: I didn't even think to wonder "Which Jackson?" (since I assumed it was Jackson, Mississippi) but Angus writes to point me to this "evidence".

(Sudeep points out that these hiatuses diminish the serial fiction concept. I am inconstant in this, as in all things. To see previous posts in the story, a category search of the title will suffice.)

The night after he died, led by the informal vine of whispers that curled down the cracks of the boardwalk, the tacky confraternity who lurked on the beach all came by to offer their respects and have a beer for Billy O’Brien, who had been here before the DINKs and wealthy eccentrics who now made up most of the people dropping by, the yuppies forging their authenticity with wall-sitting Corona and fat papered collegiate spliffs, toasts to the old man of Inwood Avenue. Too many of them came up beside me and uttered laced condolences: I’m sorry, in choruses of Humboldt and Tecate and over-the-shoulder glances. Slaps on the back which slithered to ill resting comfort. Our motherfucker, they said. Our motherfucker, indeed. My father. And the bonfire of old Vons pallets grew high in front of our house. And Dave the Butcher blared on the old receiver, crackling through the window. And I got drunk. And I did not weep.

My mother sat inside. Quietly, biding this sickness. She had buried him already, buried him before he wore his face like a mask and distracted her from the order of her life. She had suffered. And we were not inside for her. We were outside, destroying her manicured lawn, prefiguring a wake, surrounding our sorrows with noise and drink and the buckshot eyes of the one we loved for a single night reflected in the glint of fire and salt air next to us. She would have refused us. And not forgiven us. So we burned up, outside the house, melting like candles.

My sister sat inside with her, our open photo albums besides her. I knew what she was doing. She was trying to find in the silvered memories before her the day of my father’s actual death. She searched through those pages, rapidly, as had I, as our mother had, for hours, seeking within his crookedly adjusted cap and ruled block printed captions some telling deviation writ large upon his square face, some stain, some slump in his body that would announce when we had lost him, could wash our hands clean and point, and say, after this, you know, it was all really downhill. The sort of memento to save for casual conversations about your father’s death. Over salad. For future summers.

When I was fourteen my family went one mid-May Sunday after church to the newly opened Wild Animal Park, the more natural extension of the zoo. Piled in our wide Buick, Bill and Don were laughing at some internal twin joke, and Don, playing his hands across the radio to scratchy KHJ from LA had fifteen seconds of the Stones’ Tumbling Dice before my father’s glare necessitated its being turned off. The road toward San Pasqual shimmered in the late-morning, black coffee poured across the desert. My sister sat next to me, head absently leaning against the window. My mother began to sing. My father glared again, and this too was turned off. And we drove.

At the turnoff, the newly christened Wild Animal Park Road just off of the I-15, my father noted, in his architect’s way, that the new ramp seemed poorly graded, just ready for some damn fool to crack up and spill his car across the highway. Still, we passed it without incident, sliding on down the curve, the hot air from the asphalt leering at us through the slightly cracked window. We parked, and walked up the long hill to the gates, teeming with flamingo legged tourists and red jacketed usherettes. The Park itself was underwhelming—acres of cultivated desert which one entered through a giant birdcage. My mother told us that it was the largest free-flight aviary in the world. Boys, this is the largest free-flight aviary in the world, she said. My father examined the materials of the cage. Solid steel, the bars, and between them (this sotto voce) titanium mesh! Inside the park, my brothers pulled ahead, perhaps eagerly expecting a lion to devour the African antelope which were contained in the same free-flowing habitats. To their disappointment, there was little devouring. It was midday, and near every animal in that godforsaken patch of terraformed desert was doing its best to sleep in the shade.

We boarded, for lack of other interest, the Wgasa Bush Line monorail. Boys, isn’t this amazing. This was my mother’s no question mark voice. And so my father sat with Bill, explaining to his disinterested and sluggish nods the workings of the magnetic track upon which we were borne. And my mother sat with Don and asked him all about the animals, that she could not keep straight in her poor little head, not like her brilliant twins. And my sister and I sat together in the rear car, unspeaking and placid in the way of beasts and younger siblings.

After about thirty minutes of rolling hills and what seemed like thirty different species of small game, I had gradually allowed myself to fall asleep against the railing and my sister when we were suddenly jerked to a stop. Turning to ask her what had happened I realized that she had disappeared. But my brothers’ pointing and my father’s grim leonine scowl led me to scan the artificial savanna. Nothing but grass and two lone eucalyptus. And then to our right, on the gentle and artificial veldt, curled by a broken quadruped, I saw my sister kneeling in the grass. On seeing the dying beast, she must have hopped out of the car at the last maintenance platform we had crossed and climbed down, hands moving rung over rung, and padded through the grass like an angel of mercy. And as we watched her move her hands over the striped animal and hold her mouth as if in prayer, a slow realization dawned on me and I began to laugh, a deep rumbling that spilled from my belly without containment. My idiot sister was giving a zebra the sacrament of extreme unction, anointing its trembling long nose with Pepsi, soothing its jerking limbs.

Her voice floated up to me. Come on R.G. Can’t you see she’s hurt? And looking right and left at the oxen of my unmoving brothers, I moved to join her on the grass. And I can see myself climbing down the maintenance ladder to the right of the track, walking out to my sister and folding her in my arms, and we laugh at the slowly drying nose of the dying zebra, snuffling its last breaths, until its life shuffles out, and it kicks, and stops.

Should we go R.G? she says after a long spell.
I don’t know, soot.
They’ll be mad, you know.
I know.
But I’m not scared.
Oh.
If you are, that’s okay.
I don’t know.
I guess I am.
I’ll be here.

She brushes the hair back from her eyes, and begins to hum. I grab her hand, the one without the Pepsi. We stand in the tall grass by the dead zebra, staring out into the fake Serengeti, and everything is right with the world.