Fine, I'll start a goddamn blog

Feminism could have definitely worked out less nightmarishly for the worker bees

2012-02-15T07:16:00.000-08:00

Damn, my boyfriend's apartment is a mess. I'm not saying he's a slob; he's actually a perfectionist and usually looks wonderfully slick despite a low-ass budget. But it's Wednesday, my midweek day off, and I just washed out the same containers we ate leftover Chinese from on Sunday. I also washed the rest of his dishes that were in the sink, absent-mindedly and quite contentedly, as I waited for my coffee to get strong in the press pot. He had at that point been at work for two hours already while I gently snoozed.

It certainly didn't feel like I was being dehumanized as I cleaned those dishes. Or oppressed. I think of those words when I see him or myself going off tired again to our jobs, leaving depressingly messy apartments behind us. Let me repeat: on a day when I don't have to accept near-starvation wages to make someone else money so I can stay alive to go on making money for other people, I find it quite satisfying to do a bit of kind tidying for someone who is perpetually kind to me in return. It's called a human, as opposed to a financial/survival, reee-laaa-tionnn-shiiiiip. You know, where it's reciprocal and not based on screwing a less lucky player in this forced-march game blue.

I'm not saying we should go back to the 1950s, although I definitely get the feeling that the division of labor that old-fashioned sexism enforced left everybody with more free time. It also halved the number of people in the work force, give or take the spinsters and widows. I'm not saying I think that the mass (dare I say very nearly forced, in the case of everyone below the upper middle classes?) entry of women into the permanent workforce was the only force involved in the falling-over-a-cliff routine that wages have been doing since roughly the year I was born (I always seem to get lucky like that). Certainly we have globalization to hate as well. But most high school graduates have some grasp on supply and demand; it's hard to argue against the fact that if demand for labor stays roughly the same (there are still two adult consumers per average household, and now nobody has time to do the shopping!) but its supply doubles, its price is going to drop. And when it becomes expected for a household to have two incomes so the lady of the house doesn't feel like a throwback to corseted times, well, who needs to pay any one employee enough to support an entire family? It's practically an insult to a guy's wife to give him a living wage!

I remember a rant that one of my beloved, well-meaning, feminist male cousins went on once about somebody saying something about his wife going back to work so soon after they had their first kid, or something of the like; I was so shocked by the final point of his rant that I'm fuzzy on the details, but the point boiled down to: "Gee, so sorry she wants to go out and have a job like a real human being!" Which is a nice sentiment insofar as "job" and "real human being" go together as concepts--as far as I can see, however, they go together about as well as roofing tar on toast. This cousin has always fared better than I have in the workplace, so it probably made sense to him, but I must have looked as if he'd just suggested his wife might find personal fulfillment in being gang-raped by hyenas.

I certainly couldn't think of anything to say. Even taking the SAT was less dehumanizing than the jobs I've had. What exactly would be "not a real human being" about making a nice cozy home for yourself and your favorite person in the world... not to mention spending your down time reading or writing or whatever floats your boat, with no supervisor tapping his foot and making sure you don't overstep the bounds of your unpaid half-hour lunch break? I'd take a life of going back for a nap after sending my best friend out as well-armed as possible into the cold cruel world. Hell yeah! I can't wait till he gets back here tonight and finds me here with the dishes washed--and hell, maybe I'll sweep the floor too. Tomorrow I have to go back to the unkind world myself, and believe me, I prefer today by a long shot.

Then again, if you've got somebody at home cleaning up for you and making a nice nest, maybe working isn't so bad. Imagine: if you made enough money that your partner could do all that fucking housework and shopping while you were gone, you would both have the rest of the day for yourselves and/or each other instead of having to go to work and then come home and schlep the laundry you needed done so you could look 'respectable' back in the mines the next day. So maybe after a while the person who was staying home and cleaning up might want to switch roles. Well... go for it! What's un-feminine about coming home from the office to a warm penis and a bubble bath? What's un-masculine about pampering your own personal Jeanne d'Arc when she's done fighting her half of y'all's battle for the day? If 1970s feminists had been less mindlessly pro-work and pro-career and less about measuring people's worth by silly social/"career"-bullcrap-related measures of "success" (why they rejected society's beauty standard but not the ditch-digging standard is beyond me) and more about actual equality, fairness, practicality, and (god forbid, America!) quality of motherfucking life, who knows? It might have been perfectly respectable by this point in time for couples to share a job and each work it for six months out of the year.

Sounds fair enough to me. But no, women in the 1970s had to be all envious of the shit sandwich male employees-for-life were eating (why? WHY?!?! It never fails to absolutely stun me how pointlessly masochistic the American work ethic is, even my own at times), and now we all get half the bread for eating twice the shit. CONGRATULATIONS.

Ah well. (That stock phrase is my way of taking a deep breath so I don't set things on fire.) At least I'll have time today to give him a shoulder rub. Oh, the degradation!

Human beings are wired to fight each other

2012-01-12T18:25:00.001-08:00

And that seems to be pretty much all of what most people are. Do you ever wonder why the closest surviving primates are so... far from us? Quit having babies.

The slaves will always be with us.

2012-01-12T17:57:00.000-08:00

Quit having babies.

Sometimes I think I should be less grumpy

2011-11-04T06:41:00.000-07:00

(Sigh) Yes, I know, the world isn't out to get me personally. It just doesn't give a fuck. About anyone. It's not capable of giving a fuck. But sometimes despite that you manage to get some people together and have a really good time.

I had a reading last night here in Chicago, at Bucket O' Blood Books and Records in Logan Square, the only place in town that wasn't too scccccchicken to let me read, and a cool-stuff emporium that makes me wish I had more disposable income and free time (never a likely combination). We had poetry from Marc Ruvolo, my reading from NVSQVAM, a bit from my as-yet-unpublished sci-fi book LYFE, and two good friends, Joanne Von Alroth and Benjamin Capps, who both turned out to have some absolutely amazing stories to read.

I don't just mean that in the disgusting 'my fwends are awwwwww geniuses!' way that some of my former overlings at the Chicago Reader would say it, I mean it in the, 'seriously, I had a fun fucking time listening to these guys, and I got all sorts of compliments on how I really know how to put together an evening's entertainment' way.

Attendance was low, as it is at these things; but it was high for these things. Ruvolo, the owner of Bucket O' Blood Books and Records and an excellent Gorey-esque poet--at my request he read his twisted, hilarious poem "The Lidded Box" to kick off the evening; check it out in THE GOTHIC BLUE BOOK, a local anthology of creepy-ass lit--says for a reading in a bookshop it was a smash hit.

So here I am, enjoying my day off from the angry shtick. I deeply appreciate everyone who did trek out to Logan Square, and also those who live in Logan Square and forewent or postponed the many other entertainment options available in that neighborhood, and also thank you to the friends who expressed their regret that they were unable to make it. Thank you for coming, TGGP, and thanks to my sister Liz and my old friend Brendan O'Mara for both bringing chums out to discover my sick little world! Ben needs to compile a collection of his off-the-wall Max stories. Joanne, already a noted journalist, needs to write more fiction. That's all. Good times. Good night.

No one wants my fucking book, OK, here's my political stance.

2011-09-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

Yeah, thanks for buying my book, world. This really makes me want to be a more cooperative citizen. Go on, ignore the best I have to give at the current moment. I will surely participate more enthusiastically in your neoslave culture after this.

In other news... my friends are often confused as to whether I am a conservative or a liberal or, even worse, OTHER. Well. That has never been easy to explain, but let me try to clarify where I am now. Which, ironically, I was unable to do until the conservative mainstream fucking mutated into such a giant monster that Ronald Reagan's daughter felt the need to piss on them.

I am an Observer. I capitalize that because when I was an adolescent I realized this thing lived in my mind, slightly outside of myself, just watching and judging (but not being judgmental about, not savoring it--judging was just part of its job) everything I did and everything that went on around me. And at this point in history, ya know what my Observer says? (It's really only as smart as I am, remember, despite its fucking attimatude.) It says that true liberals and true conservatives really need each other, and society needs both of them. And unfortunately true conservatives are no longer involved in mainstream discourse. The difference between Taki webmag and Sarah Palin's fucking mangled idea of Paul Revere is a gap that I fear is almost too overwhelming to fill. What fucking CONSERVATIVE doesn't know her own country's history, good and bad? Michelle Bachman is an embarrassment too. Slavery was good for black families???? Jesus, even a fraught divorce is better than Dad getting sold up the river at economic random!

In an ideal world, liberals are in charge of coming up with wacky new ideas, some of which may be great and some of which may be godawful,and conservatives are in charge of keeping them from throwing out the baby with the bathwater. None of which has occurred during my lifetime. Equal rights: good idea. The cons let that through. Affirmative action: really bad idea, which in practice only helps minority kids who already have rich/connected parents, as far as my experience goes; congratulations, you helped one rich kid beat another. Where were the professional cons on that one? Oh yeah: being rich kids. Just like the professional liberals who came up with that horseshit (who are now occupied with eating Obama alive, with ketchup). But that's a 1990s complaint; what we're facing now is far worse than "already-set person makes 20 dollars an hour, I make nine."

The GOP now scares the living hell out of me. The Onion made a funny joke of it, but they are so preocccupied with destroying Obama (who CLEARLY hasn't done the wise thing and gone in a bathroom stall with these homosexual homophobes) that they don't care what they do to the rest of the population of the earth. I'm sorry, but when you start doing things like the recent debt-ceiling standoff (which unnescessarily destroyed the most powerful currency on earth; congratulations, you managed to fuck people everywhere just because your dick hurt) I not only don't want to listen to a word you have to say, I want you dead.

Then again, if Tipper Gore fell on my sword I would not be sad, so I still don't know what I am.

LATER: Oh, wait, no. I do know what I am, but not on your axis. I'm a person who just wants all the horseshit to end. Quit having babies, and we won't have any more stupid debates.

My friends write fun shit part 2: Nick Mamatas and SENSATION

2011-06-14T18:20:00.000-07:00

Boy, I'm a slow piece of shit. My own book (NVSQUAM, aka NOWHERE, Nine Banded Books) is coming out tomorrow and I still have yet to get a review posted of Nick Mamatas' latest novel, SENSATION. I've been meaning to do this for weeks, but it's been one thing and then another... I think the problem with this here blobg is that I insist on writing these entries like they're articles that I'm getting paid for--insisting on forethought, coherency, etc--when maybe ten people read them. And why do ten people read them? Prrroollly because I don't post often enough to make this something one would check on a regular basis. Because I take too long to post. Because I keep having to wait till the time is ripe... OK, let's just shit this bugger out, shall we? It's not like I'm a sufficiently tight essayist at my best for anyone to tell the difference between me half-assing it and me completely ass-hatting it, so-oh... Everybody, meet Nick Mamatas and SENSATION

Full disclosure: I've never lived in the same city as Nick, but I've corresponded with him on and off for christ--ten years or so now? He wrote the blurb that appears on the cover of NVSQUAM. We've met a couple of times and he has kindly (probably too kindly) included my stories in a couple of horror anthology projects he's been involved with. And what project remotely related to modern sci-fi or horror hasn't he been involved with? I swear the guy must have a time machine, he does and writes that much stuff. I'd like to think that if I were less of a misanthropic introvert I could be a bit like him, but fttt. How someone extroverted enough to get all the stuff-he-does-that-involves-others done actually manages to write as much as he does is a total mystery to me.

Aaaaanyway. When my copy of Sensation arrived, it was just after I'd written the post below, regarding Andy Nowicki's The Columbine Pilgrim, and it got me thinking: wow. Whatever else there is in the world that pisses me off, at least I've survived till that period in my life (a period relatively few people ever get at all, so I count myself lucky in this regard) when people I actually know are putting out books I actually, genuinely want to read and take great pleasure in reading and would most likely read even if I didn't know these people, assuming I found out about their books somehow (which isn't that likely, since my chronically shitty income usually mandates that I find my reading material in the paperback section of the used book shop, if not the library). When you're younger, of course, if you're at all "creative" or if you associate with such animals, you will have all kinds of crap thrown at you by friends who, in their callow self-expression, are desperate for but so rarely deserving of praise. Always uncomfortable. So it's very nice when the field begins to thin, and reading your friends' shit stops being a chore and turns into a pleasure.

SENSATION is along the lines of YOU MIGHT SLEEP... , Mamatas' 2009 collection of wacky sci-fi short stories, which was honestly about the best short-story collection (certainly takes the prize for sci-fi collections... sorry, Vonnegut) I've ever read. The conceits that Mamatas comes up with are incredibly clever, and he nearly always carries them out with a perfect version of the sort of wry humor that seems to be the most consistent method these days for lifting sci-fi stories safely clear of the overly-serious kitsch pit.

In SENSATION, all of human history is revealed as a byproduct of a war between a species of arachnid and the parasitic wasps who rewire the spiders' brains to build them nests even as the wasps' eggs hatch inside the spiders' bodies. A human woman gets stung by a slightly radioactive wasp, and her ensuing hijinks set off a hipster revolution, an economic catastrophe, and some serious reality warps.

Since I'm just shitting this piece out, however, and because I'm tired as hell from my new job, instead of trying to boil down all the thoughts I had while reading SENSATION, I'm going to pick on what is at the forefront of my mind: the day my copy of the book arrived in the mail, Nick posted on Facebook about an ONION review of the novel. Big deal, hey!--most major publications only condescend to review one book a year anymore, so those slots are publicity most precious--but they kinda panned it. I refused to read the review before I read the book--not because I'm that horribly sensitive to peepwle picking on my fwends, but because I hate spoilers almost as much as I hate mosquitoes.

It was nagging me, however, as I read the book with great pleasure: oh damn, the mighty ONION AV Club (everyone knows that's the paper's weakest link, but power is power I suppose) knows why I shouldn't be enjoying this, but I don't. Oh no, I'm having fun in a pissed-in sandbox. I'm a philistine, boo hoo. I wonder why, exactly, though?

After finishing the book, however, when I let myself read the ONION article at last, I had to laugh with relief. One of their complaints was that a revelation halfway through the book sucked out the dramatic possibilities. Jesus shit, man, the first ten pages sucked out the dramatic possibilities! Mamatas isn't much of a "dramatic" writer, at least not when he's in sci-fi mode; he's more of a funny-thinky writer. When you read one of his stories you don't really care where he's going, even though he isn't predictable; you care how he gets there. It's like reading a Jane Austen novel, except you don't know the heroine is going to get married at the end--for all you know she could end up living inside a giant squid. But the squid isn't the bloody point, it's the squid jokes.

OK, so I didn't feel too stupid about that. A simple difference in expectations; it was a complaint I could at least make sense of; the reviewer apparently expects drama in every story regardless of the type or intent of the tale (which puts him right up there with people who demand sympathetic characters, but at least it's a coherent system of expectations).

The last sentence of the review is, however, kind of mind-blowing when you think about it, and I quote:

"Weirdly, SENSATION throws its most caustic satiric barbs at hipster poseurs, not the near-totalitarian aims of the spiders, which comes across as though Mamatas has switched allegiances this time, from Kerouac to Cthulhu." [Mamatas' previous novel heavily referenced Jack Kerouac.]

"Weirdly"? Really? Weirdly?! Weirdly, he satirized characters who were based on a type of people who actually exist instead of skewering those insidious, Nazi, hyper-intelligent spiders who control the world. Because, man, those fictional spider are totes the ones whose behavior needs critique and correction! Ho-lee-shitburgers. If you needed any evidence that the ONION's AV Club might be a bit divorced from the mission of their editorial department, you might want to glance over that review for a minute. I never thought I'd see the day when I would feel the urge to gently explain the point of satire to the fucking ONION. Then again, Sarah Palin thinks her hair can run the federal government, and people are still watching AMERICAN IDOL, so... I give up. Reality is just going to do whatever the hell it wants, I guess.

My Friends Write Fun Shit Part One: Andy Nowicki's novella "The Columbine Pilgrim

2011-05-04T16:19:00.000-07:00

You know what I think powerful people love the most about life? It's the fact that karma is no more than another comforting fiction, and in all likelihood the shit they pull, unless it's flagrantly stupid, is never going to come back and bite them in the ass.

But perhaps the reason they're not quite happy -- why they need massages and facelifts, why they feel a little insecure, why they have to pile up yachts -- is that once in a while, it does. Once in a while, one of the serfs will take it upon himself to manufacture some karma. "The rabbit," as the Relaxed Muscle song goes, "is gonna teach the eagle a lesson. With his Smith and Wesson."

Tony Meander, the "hero" of Andy Nowicki's latest novella (full disclosure: I've reviewed a work of Andy's before, Considering Suicide, and that work was printed by the same outfit that's set to release my new novel NVSQVAM this June 15, Chip Smith's Nine-Banded Books), is one hell of an angry rabbit.

Thirty-three now, he's never gotten over the trauma of his high school existence as a weird, smart, hyper-bullied nerd. On the surface, his life seems OK now; he's on track for a PhD, even if he is alone, and the reader suspects he always has been alone; in fact, he's quite religiously anti-sex as an adult, claiming the loss of sperm will reduce his powers. His colleagues have no idea what "powers" he's talking about, though he occasionally makes jokes about himself becoming an ubermensch or god of some sort. When he's not talking weird crap, though, he seems like an uber-decent fellow.

But under the surface, the basic loathing he developed for human nature while his classmates tormented him continues to boil and bubble till it finally breaks his brilliant mind. He goes on a murder-suicide shooting rampage at his class reunion, blasting through the crowds till he gets to the pretty, bitchy cheerleader who made him hate sex so much, whose fake come-ons--she once deliberately crowded up to him to give him an erection, then berated and humiliated him for his body's involuntary response--ruined one of life's main comforts for him. He has a special surprise for her. And the way she reacts is even more surprising.

The plot is a simple revenge fantasy; but the book is interesting in other ways. Tony is, as the title suggests, a huge fan of the kids who carried out the infamous Columbine mass murder, wherein two bullied students took out their violent revenge while they were in high school. In fact, for most of the book, while he sits in his car near the site of the reunion, he is under the schizoid hallucinatory impression that he is actually on a pilgrimage to Columbine, and since the text is delivered in the first person, the reader is taken on his imaginary journey with him. I don't think this is a spoiler, since most of the events he describes are so dreamlike and unlikely; in fact, even Tony wonders whether anything he's experiencing is real.

But within the hallucination, Nowicki explores not just the themes of powerless, human group behavior, and revenge, but the utterly weird thing that is religion itself.

A lot of Nowicki's writing (he labels himself a "Catholic Reactionary," a self-labeling which may or may not be part satirical) deals with religion in a strange fashion; for example, Contemplating Suicide is a meditation in two halves, the first being a fictional (but suspiciously autobiography-tinged) narrative of a miserable nerd who, facing his fall from childhood's purity and the bleakness of the godless, boring, senseless grown-up world, can't decide whether to kill himself. The second half is a somewhat scholarly essay (but too angry to be properly scholarly) asserting that we must believe in god, because otherwise things are meaningless, and to say that things are meaningless is a meaningless statement.

The two pieces sound like they were written by two different people, and the net effect is the queasy feeling that even if God exists, there's something wrong with the way we envision Him; and if God doesn't exist, that's an even worse fact than it seems on the face of it. So perhaps to live decently we must force ourselves to believe in... in... um...

"The Columbine Pilgrim" presents religion in an entirely different light; Tony's self-aggodizement comes off as a grotesque parody of the Catholic canon, complete with whorish Virgin Mary. His new auto-worshipful religion, a splicing of Marx, Nietzche, and a dab of Hitler for good measure, could be read as a scathing satire of the anarchic tendencies of secular society; if man really is the closest thing to a god, what's to stop the rabbit from glorifying his gunplay--or the eagle from gloating over his talons, for that matter?

However, it could also be read as a satire of the religious impulse itself; the way Tony slowly begins to believe his mad ideas is a maddeningly near-logical fulfillment of his wishful thinking. It's as though he's sitting in a theater watching a 3-D movie, and the part of his brain that's dedicated to suspension of disbelief slowly creeps over the rest of his cerebral cortex, finally convincing him that the movie is the world. His wishful thinking becomes his reality, and in the new reality his religion tells him that it's his duty to shed blood in his own name.

All in all, a stimulating read, and a short one; good for the ADHD, but personally I'd like to see Andy write something longer once in a while. Not that this needed to be longer; it's the right length for Tony's swift descent into the abyss, even if that makes the character's name a touch ironic.

Oh, boy, more shitty fucking weather

2011-04-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. The Earth is not a sentient being, and it is CRAYYYZEEEEE for me to think it in any way has it in for me. I'm trying not to take it personally that it's thirty FUCKING degrees out in what is now the second half of April, but the closest I can come is the slightly less paranoid delusion that the planet hates not me specifically, but all of us. You, me, squirrels, cows, cats, dogs... the planet fucking hates us all. Who knows? Maybe when we walk around, we tickle. Why else would EVERY FUCKING CLIMATE BE SHITTY?

I know, I know, mine is a temperament that is extremely averse to cold. I'm generally not warm enough until everyone else is sweating their ass off. Move to Florida, Ann, and you'll suddenly be a sunshiney sweetheart with a perfect personality. Oh yeah? How cheery do you suppose I'll be after my house gets mowed down by a hurricane and an alligator eats my ass off?

Well, if I don't like cold and I don't like hurricanes, I can always move to Africa... and die in a drought! Or catch some horrible disease from a mosquito, hurrah! The only good thing about cold climates is that the bugs' reproductive cycles are at least given some pause by the yearly freeze. Move to someplace that's comfortable year-round for me, and chances are it's equally comfy for disease-ridden bloodsuckers who will kill me just to get a snack.

Unless, of course, you're talking about a desert. Yeah, that's fun. I want to spend half my life worrying about water, yeah! There are parts of the Middle East where you can get hit with a sandstorm and a snowstorm on the same fucking day. How that region wound up with so many theocracies is a mystery I'm not even sure I want to solve.

Once again, the only way I can believe in a deity in a world like this is to believe in one with a shitty, nasty sense of humor. Oh, look, the little Chicago monkey is trapped in a cold dark apartment suffering SAD and cabin fever because every time she goes outside she can feel her bones freezing. Comedy gold! Oh, how funny, look at that African baby, his lips parched with thirst, while elsewhere people lose their homes in a flood. HILARIOUS! THE IRONY! OMFUG THIS SHIT IS SO HYSTERICAL IT'S WORTH ALL THE SUFFERING! BRING IT!

Fuck you, god, and fuck you, mother earth. What kind of mother gives you fucking frostbite and malaria? If Gaia were in a court of law she'd be up for billions upon billions of charges of child abuse, from a mild chill to beating Japan silly with a tsunami. I know, I'm lucky to have access to clean drinking water... but what I wouldn't give right now to be able to stroll down the street without feeling like the very planet is sticking knives into my skin. When the very air around you is attacking you without mercy, how can you seriously believe in any kind of benevolent deity?

Do Christians just not feel the cold, the way some people aren't ticklish? Or maybe they love the abuse. "Thank you God, thank you Gaia, for teaching me this valuable lesson in..." HORSESHIT! HORSESHIT HORSESHIT HORSESHIT! I'm going to huddle under the covers and cry some more now. God damn it, the wind is just screaming outside, but my heat isn't even on, because why would it still be on when this kind of weather in April is just a shitty unfunny joke?

Things I fucking hate

2011-03-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

In light of personal miseries, I have been feeling rather irritable lately. Off the top of my head, here is a fun list of shit I absolutely hate.

1. Death. OK, universe, real funny joke. Even if we finally find someone we love who won't break our hearts, they're going to die anyway. And we die. And our pets die. And our grandmothers die. And everything dies and you aren't reincarnated and there's no afterlife and that's all horseshit because it's so obviously wishful thinking. And why wouldn't you wish that death would go away? Death, fuck you in the eye.

2. The expression "give 110 percent." There's only one situation in which this isn't absurd nonsense, considering the fact that "100 percent" means "all that it is possible for a particular person to give"? This is only non-nonsensical if you redefine "100 percent" as "all that it is possible for a particular person to give WITHOUT DYING." Since nearly 110 percent of the time this stupid fucking phrase is put into play, it's at work, the usual meaning of "give 110 percent" is "work yourself to death for me while I underpay you, serf." I hate people.

3. People.

4. Arrogant people, particularly intellectually vain people, who can't spell or use grammar properly... especially when they're posting all over the internet and clogging up its possible utility. Yeah, genius, you may be a software-writin' badass who makes ten times what I do an hour, but unless you can express yourself without giving me a headache, shut up and get off the internet. You got paid to set it up, now take your money and let literate people take over the debate.

5. The GOP today. I understand the classically conservative impulse; for fuck's sake, I went to school to study ancient Greece. But you people aren't conservatives. Your only real philosophy, insofar as it can be articulated, is "Life in a political party should be a competition to see who can be the most hateful, arrogant, and blatantly insane member of this frighteningly powerful freakshow." Fuck off, you're all mad as hatters and far less cuddly. You'd be hilariously funny if only you weren't running half a continent into the ground.

6. The Democratic Party today. Oh, the things you say sound so nice. TOO BAD YOU'RE FUCKING LIARS! (I guess I can make an exception for the senators in Wisconsin. Obama and Feingold only seem to lie when they really need to, and there's a handful of current senators whom I trust, but most of 'em... nah, I wouldn't hire them to cat-sit.)

7. Me, when I try to make sense out of politics. I might as well try to film my cat's hallucinations and use them as a doctoral dissertation in 19th-century French painting.

8. Noisy optimists. Just because you're either unusually fortunate or especially stupid or both doesn't make it OK to power-hose your fucking sunshine up the rest of the world's fundament. SHUT UP. Life is not good, and it never has been, for the vast majority of your fellows.

9. Pro-natalist tax and social spending policies. I can't seem to bitch about this enough to get it off my chest, it just keeps burning. When I have money, I get taxed so breeders with no jobs can live on welfare. But when I don't have money, there is NO SOCIAL SECURITY NET FOR ME, apparently because nobody feels bad for people who haven't bought into the life-lie and brought more sufferers into the world. "You aren't playing our little game, so we don't give a shit if you suffer. But we'll gladly steal your money when WE need it." And tax breaks for parents to boot?! That's just adding insult to injury, especially when the rest of us are already paying all kinds of child-related tax expenses. You cause more expenses, but you pay less. On which planet is this fair? If it wouldn't get me into so much trouble I'd almost be tempted to steal a child and tell the government it was mine; people who are irresponsible enough to make children probably shouldn't be trusted with them anyway. Fairness aside, these stupid policies actually give people an economic incentive to bring more suffering onto this accursed world.

10. Heartbreak. Why is the human psyche set up so that the uncontrollable fickleness of another being makes us feel like we're being repeatedly kicked in the stomach? So literally so that it's almost impossible to climb out of bed? Well, for some of us. The heartbreakers probably don't feel very much stuff. What a miserable world.

11. And finally... winter. The little death. Why are all the good big cities the ones with the brutal winters? Fucking hell. If I don't get some warm air and sunshine on my skin soon soon I am going to peel it all off so I can't feel anything anymore. It's not like it's making me any vitamin D. I guess I could move to Los Angeles, but I hate cars even more than I hate winter. (Yeah, having a monkey, possibly drunk, maneuver an unrailed two-ton hunk of metal at 60 miles per hour is a GRAND idea. I sort of want to set this aside as a separate item of hate, but I want to stop short of a neat dozen so that I might cause a fraction of the irritation I feel at the moment.)

Pippi the Unnatural Woman

2011-02-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

A Disjointed Tale Which Probably Breaks Some Copyright Laws

It was the night the cops found where the gangbangers had tied up a bunch of people and used duct tape to shut their mouths and attach them to a chair and slit them open somewhere or something and they died, and there was a chase and the gangbangers shot at the cops and hurt one of them and the cops fired back and killed the lead gang guy and nobody was probably all that upset except maybe the five girls who thought they were his true love.

When it happened Pippi Longstocking, who had grown up to be better known as the Unnatural Woman, was walking down Devon with her friend Vomit Tony. Vomit Tony was some kind of real estate slime by day, but at night he walked on the wild side. He thought both sides were pretty wild, but the Unnatural Woman rolled her eyes at him. Always. Come to think of it, calling Tony her friend was a pretty loose use of the word. He was more like somebody she had known since that unfortunate week when she aged twenty years and began to see the world through eyes that weren't all full of whatever hallucinogen children naturally secrete.

Anyway. Pippi and Tony saw it all, and Tony guessed correctly that the gang guy was going to die and the cop was going to live. "That's the way it always goes. The cops train for years how to shoot, and these stupid fuckers on crack think they can win a shoot-out? When they hold their guns sideways and laugh instead of aiming them? No wonder they're always shooting random fucking grandmothers and kids on the sidewalk. They should be forced to go to a shooting range so they only kill each other.

"Then again, they'd also kill the cops. I dunno. It's a no-win world. You want to go get a beer? You're a bitch today. I'll show you how an Italian mobster aims when I take you home afterward," he said, pointing at his crotch.

"Get that away from me, you savage," she growled. "Don't fuck with me. I'm not drinking. I haven't been drinking. I need to think. But when I'm not drinking the emotions come back."

"What emotions? You're the most emotionally repressed person I've ever known."

"You just think that, you piece of shit, because you live in bars, and that's the only place you see people. I only get a break from my emotions when I'm in a bar. When I'm not in a bar, you bet I wish I could repress them, but it's hard to repress something that's punching you in the face with -- I'd say brass knuckles, but it would have to be something heavier than brass. Antimatter knuckles. Punching you in the face with antimatter knuckles, Tony. Shit, you should see me during my period. I spend half of it chewing through the plumbing in my apartment and the other half shooting my illegal rifle through the window at everything that moves and some shit that doesn't. Why should a snail live when this shit is killing me? I've never been in a relationship, because it would mean I'd have to commit murder twelve times a year."

"Come on, let's go to the bar."

She punched him in the nuts.

"Huh," she said as he rolled on the ground. The police cars were still swarming around, but they had paid no attention to the nut-punch. "Huh. You know, I still don't feel any better. Sure, let's go to the bar before I kill someone."

"I hate you, Unnatural Woman."

"Oh, you don't feel anything like that. You don't feel anything at all, why else would you be such a puke? But if you insist, I'll buy you the first beer and we'll call it quits."

They got a pitcher each and sat at the bar. A hipster with braided facial hair was riding his unicycle up and down the bartop and he spilled Pippi's first glass of beer. She smiled politely and poured herself another. When he made his next lap, without taking her lips off the glass of beer, the Unnatural Woman pulled a stuffed fish from the barroom wall and deftly slipped it into his spokes. He pitched over the bar and cracked his skull open on a fishtank. The fishtank broke, the floodwaters slipped up stiletto heels, there was a tumult, and during it the Unnatural Woman slipped with her pitcher into the bathroom to steal someone's package of cocaine and change into her slut disguise.

Some more dull bar things happened, and when she woke up near sundown the next evening there was someone beside her in the bed. Which was not her own, but she had the sense she was still in the neighborhood. She checked to make sure it wasn't Vomit Tony, then let the body sleep till it woke on its own. She sure didn't want to hear noises start coming out of its head any sooner than necessary.

But they started coming out inevitably, like death and taxes, a saying which doesn't make sense because squirrels never pay taxes but you see them dead all over the place. She sighed. The person started comparing her to girls he'd gone to bed with in high school.

"Haaaaang on, buddy. You still talk about high school? Oh, Jesus, how fucking old are you?"

"I'm 20."

"Shit. I hate Courtney Cox so much. Or Demi something. That old woman who's fucking the little boy. Bad as a dirty old man. Bad as the pedophiles who buy my goddamn books. I'm in my thirties, OK, I'm not telling you which one, but I'm telling you this much, my address is not in cougartown, OK? Get away from me. Fuck, I told Vomit Tony not to make me drink anymore." She urinated on the bed and he looked up at her, hurt.

"What, did you think I was going to be honored or something? I know you guys, you'll fuck a pumpkin." She threw on her normal clothes, not the slut ones, and ran outside. Sure enough, she was only four blocks from her stinking hovel and her teeming cage of pet rats. But it was long enough for her to see two different flocks of police cars chasing two flocks of whatever-they-were, one going up the north side of the street, the other up the south. They respected each other's chases, almost like normal traffic.

"Shit," said the Unnatural Woman. "Am even I going to have to start to stay in after dark?"

Two drunk guys were laughing. "I love the blue lights! It looks like a Christmas tree!"

The Unnatural Woman walked faster. She could almost feel the bullets on her brain. "I should be the one doing the shooting, not some random flock of boots and cocks."

Suddenly, coming the opposite way, she saw the hipster again, his whole head in a bandage except for his insipid grin, his stupid legs whirling on the unicycle pedals, going right for the scene of the action, as though he didn't notice anything.

"That does it, I do got to stay in now," said the Unnatural Woman. "Definitely staying in."

Insomnia again; playwright Ben Jonson

2011-02-27T01:24:00.000-08:00

Terrible terrible terrible. Insomnia is yet more proof of an absent or malicious divine being (as though teeth weren't enough). If the cosmos is going to hand this fucking disease out to people they should at least be perpetually 26-year-old trust-fund babies whose relatives are all dead and whose friends are all extremely deferential so they never have to do anything at a particular hour and can at least get some blessed sleep when they finally drop over. People who can buy heroin when they really just want to nod off. Space monsters who need not sleep but blood. But no, it just gets handed out at random, so you just don't sleep for a week.

Then again, I could just blame Ben Jonson. I didn't get home from seeing his comedy play till 11 PM, it's almost 4 in the morning now, and I'm still all riled up. I think that's my real problem, not my constant and overwhelming anxiety. Even if he's been dead for almost 400 years, sure, why not, blame him.

I just discovered Jonson this week; yeah, I know, I claim that I speak English so I should know more about Elizabethan drama, but I should know more about a lot of things. He was the first poet laureate of England (before the term was properly invented) and wrote Volpone, one of the most famous satires of his time. And I didn't know who he was till I ran into the fine Chicago actor Don Bender, who told me there was a rarely-produced Elizabethan drama starring his person playing at a theater in my neighborhood, and this was closing weekend. He gave me a 2-for-1 ticket voucher (I just decided in my head that deal seats for great plays at off-Loop theaters should at least be considered a minor economic indicator) so I agreed to come.

The person who was going to split the ticket with me canceled, and I was going to stay in my house and watch King Lear on Netflix streaming, but then I decided I needed a mission for the night, and boy, I'm glad I did. I got in at a very discounted price anyway, and I had the time of my life. Bender warned me the intermission was an hour and a half in, and I swear it was the shortest ninety minutes of my life. When I got to the theater I ran into D'wayne Taylor, another greatly enjoyable Chicago theater actor with whom I've briefly shared a day job, and I told him the Italian names on the character list looked like lampoons of character names from Plautus.

By the end of the play I thought: Wow. If only I could be half that on the money twice a year, I'd be a millionaire. How you top Plautus is the question on every silly person's lips, and clearly it was up Ben Jonson's pen.

Plautus was the ancient Roman comic playwright who worked the hell out of the 'clever slave' character and the 'greedy potential heirs circling the dying rich guy' theme in his day. (Or in the latter am I conflating him with Horatio? I don't remember anything, I don't sleep anymore.) I think Plautus is funny as heck, but Ben Jonson seems to have read him and said to himself, "Hm, so I think I'm pretty much a genius, so I'll just take this Plautus stuff and make it even more awesome by messing with people's heads and not ending this anything like someone who's read Plautus would guess."

I should have seen he was going to throw a big curveball when he switched the clever slave formula up from the start. The clever slave is usually servant to a young master, who's trying to get around a mean father or potential father-in-law to marry the girl of his dreams. He faithfully (even if he gets some digs in at the usually quite stupid young hero along the way; think Jeeves and Wooster) helps his master out without substantially questioning the social order, though he's often the most sympathetic character in the play.

In Volpone, however, the title character is a wealthy, old but vigorous man, who gets his clever servant Mosca to help him in his schemes -- the first of which is definitely not love. Volpone has no children, so each of his clients believes he has a shot at the estate. (This was a not-uncommon theme in Roman comedy and other writing.) He wants to leverage extra valuable gifts out of his greedy potential heirs by pretending to be near death and in the process of writing his final will. When the vultures come around, the old fox puts on his cap and lies in his bed in a phony half-cadavarous state while Mosca assures each macabre suitor in turn that he will, indeed, soon enjoy Volpone's entire estate as long as the pearls and plate keep flowing in as a show of their "affection." When each leaves, Volpone gets up and scampers around laughing, remarking how greed engenders its own punishment. He doesn't plan to die anytime soon.

There is a love plot, but it looks like a Plautus love plot that's been smacked upside the head with a cricket bat. Volpone is momentarily turned away from his satirical schemes of revenge on those who would have his fortune when he catches a glimpse of one heir's beautiful wife, whom the heir keeps locked in her room because he's madly jealous. Volpone falls in love, and Mosca cooks up a scheme in which he uses the heir's own greed to get him to force his own wife -- suddenly forgetting his jealousy and ignoring her attempts to protect her honor -- to lie in Volpone's bed with him as part of a quack cure cooked up by a physician. Of course, the minute he's left alone with her Volpone springs from the bed and begins first to seduce, then to violate her. Mid-rape, however, another potential heir's good-looking but stupid son -- whom Mosca has brought to the estate as part of another sneaky subplot -- hears her cries, wounds Mosca, ruins Volpone's voluptuousness, and saves the girl.

There's a court scene, and it looks like Volpone's going down for bodysnatching, but another of Volpone's would-be suitors is a lawyer, and Mosca gets him to turn it around on the young wife and the young bachelor. By this time in a traditional Plautus-type play, the two attractive but insipid young people would be safely married. Instead, they await sentencing, she as a trollop and he as a would be parricide.

OK, that's enough spoilers; I know, you watch these things for the way they get to their endings, not what the endings actually are, but the surprises in this Elizabethan take on the clever butler and the greedy heirs are part of what made it special for me. Let's just say there's a really clever twist on the master-servant tradition and an unexpected but satisfying ending, and I'm really psyched to have found out about this playwright, and call it a night, because I haven't slept in two days. (Wow, that was a lot more pleasant than my drowning-in-a-port-a-potty insomnia post.)

I can't stop "They're Winning" by the Walkmen running through my head

2011-02-21T13:07:00.000-08:00

For christ's sake, I first heard this song, what, a decade ago? When I had hope. When I was young. When I had illusions. Oh, what can I say about illusions? They're the only thing that makes life worth living -- and yet they're the thing that makes people commit the most atrocious actions. War. Birth. Murder. None of these horrors would be worth committing were it not for the delusion that they are somehow important, good, or at least instructive. And then you live the rest of your life, which is indeed mostly composed of "I've stood in line/so many times/how can I/do it all again?"...

Political Activism

2011-01-19T13:40:00.001-08:00

Q: What's an even more useful substance to slip into the civic water supply than LSD?
A: The Pill!

Sorry, on the eve of the publication of my new novel I'm trying to figure out what the stats on how many books are released a year by what now must be 7 billion possible authors, and trying not to cry. Positive thinkin', man, positive thinkin'.

Insomnia death fantasy horrors

2011-01-19T02:25:00.000-08:00

Sooooo I'd say I haven't been blogging because I've been proofreading the final draft of my second novel, NVSQVAM (Nowhere), soon to be released on Chip Smith's Nine-Banded Books, but the real truth is I'm a crappy essayist, and prefer to be writing FICTION, where I BELONG. But there is still some shit that you just can't say on Facebook unless you want to be a 50-year-old table busser, to wit: when I have insomnia this bad (it's 4:28 AM and not even one wink to be had) I just can't seem to stop thinking about all the horrible ways I might die someday (like tomorrow, if it's a really shitty day).

And tonight's is probably the worst I've ever had. I mean, there may be worse ways to die, but seriously, right now I can't think of a way to beat this one: what if someone decided to drown you forcibly in a well-used port-a-potty? Just imagine being held upside-down in shit and tampons and babies and whatever that blue crap down there is, all of it going up your nose and into your mouth as you prayed to lose consciousness... I just can't stop thinking about it. Along with all the real shit in my life that's going on. Now I'm actually just thinking about it instead of the problems I already have. Brain, would you really rather be thinking of drowning in blue piss and discharge than about my current problems? I mean, really, why did I fucking bother wasting an hour today doing yoga?!??* I'm not going to have mental peace until I cut off my head.

*Oh, probably because I anticipated having a full 24 hours of goddamned consciousness, so what the heck, let's waste one pretending we can fix something.

Is this just my excuse for apathy?

2010-10-05T15:50:00.000-07:00

I've just noticed that I've gradually stopped taking people's political opinions seriously -- well, those of people who tell me they're liberal or conservative anyway. The terms have become such team flags that I can't help thinking that most people who wave them are either A. Saying exactly what their parents taught them, because they're sponges, or B. Saying the exact opposite of what their parents taught them, because they're rebels without a clue.

Just show me the facts. And if there aren't enough facts available for me to make up my mind, and you want to call me a pussy or a waffler or whatever, then change your team shirt, it's smelly with dribble.

What's not to love? Poem for a small mammal.

2010-10-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

I'm strolling up Wilson toward the dollar store when I see him.
A very small brown body. What are you, fellow?
I walk closer and he doesn't run away. Tail like a rat, face like a hamster.
Are you a lost gerbil? Are you just pretty vermin?
Anyway he seems like a treat thrown down from the universe
till I get too close...
someone so small
should have run from the great ape by now.

Crap, are you dead? Oh, no, worse; you're dying.
I can see your ribs move in and out, still getting some air,
but there is a persistent fly attached to the side of your nose,
pumping its eggs into your little body before you've even finished using it.
Your eyes are shut, you don't fight, you barely twitch as the proboscis makes its lewd attack,
you're just buckled down to bear the final pain;
a laissez-faire unit
of nature's sick economy.

I should smash you
curtail your agony but
I'm too busy suspecting my own motives, my bloodlust, my own indulgence
to figure out whether that's what you'd really want.

And anyway I just can't: the fur still so appealing, the breath still too alive,
the little eyes so tenderly squeezing, holding the last of yourself to yourself...

... the little mortal hands... I haven't got the guts.

So I get a soft straw of grass -- I love you but you may be dying of a disease; I haven't even got the guts to touch you --

and I sit in the nice patch of sun next to where you are losing your life,

and I pet your tiny back with the straw. I hope I'm not just frightening you, I hope your sudden total stillness is a moment of peace and not more terror, I hope to have given you something in your scanty life, but I am also brushing off the fucking flies, stupidly yelling,

GET OFF OF HIM! GET AWAY FROM HIM!

as the bastards smell your defeat and come in a cloud.

On our (sometime) greater humanity toward the non-human

2010-08-29T14:07:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking back to a post I read a few months back on Sister Y's blog The View From Hell (see my blogroll) concerning our greater willingness to put a sick and suffering animal out of its misery than we are to show a similar mercy toward, say, Grandma.

These thoughts came bubbling back up due to a cross-reference with the recent article on Antinatalism, the Greatest Taboo (see blogroll again) regarding the controversial activist who's offending people by offering overly fecund and irresponsible drug addicts $300 for permitting her to provide them with free surgical sterilization. I was watching my cat roll around on the floor today, and I wondered why it was OK for me to spay her without her consent (hell no), much less paying her $300, while some consider it 'Nazi-like' to suggest to addicts who have abandoned multiple babies.

Why is it that we tear up and reach for the knife when we think about kittens being born into a world where they'll be unloved, uncared-for, and homeless... but the thought of preventing babies of our own species, who are arguably far less able to care for themselves than young kittens, to be born into a world where they'll be unloved, uncared-for, and foster homed actually pisses people off? Since when is preventing human suffering the province of Orwellian, knee-jerk-response-invoking villains?

What's the deal here?

It seems we either value human life itself more than we value animal life, or we pity animal suffering more than we pity human suffering (unless, of course, that animal is not a pet species but a food animal, in which case it can be stuffed in a tiny box and roll in its own feces amid a cloud of flies until it's big enough for us to eat it, as long as we don't have to witness this or, even worse, butcher it ourselves).

Or is it both? That doesn't seem to be a logical answer; if we feel our species-mates' lives are intrinsically worth more than the lives of an unborn kitten, then why wouldn't we feel greater empathy for their pain? So even if our empathy for other humans' pain outstrips that which we feel for even the cutest of fuzzy creatures, we're willing to let them suffer as long as it means they have lives. WHY?! Is it because other humans' existence, as miserable as it may be, somehow fulfills our need to feel that somebody somehow will continue our existence or consciousness in some way after we die? This answer, if true, is horrifying: we want our fellows to suffer because it gives our lives meaning.

Oh well, at least we've spayed a few cats. Have lots of kids, maybe they'll buy my books!

Prayer to Nothing for the Only Prize

2010-08-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

The loved one's face
Will change with age.
Let it stay beloved;
Let my heart have been in the right place.

Feeling bleak, messin' with Google

2010-08-19T21:25:00.000-07:00

If there is a meaning I've made up for my life, if only to keep myself from resenting loved ones for whose sake I refrain from jumping off a bridge, it's the pleasure of consuming and (when I can) making written and recorded distractions -- confections or truth-scouring, they all give pleasure, even if it is the pleasure of grinding your face in God's fecal accident. So sometimes when I feel really shitty, I Google phrases that I hope someone's written something about. "Monsters of Consciousness" yielded this guy, whose intense loopiness is delightful for about 30 seconds or so:

http://moneyistheway.blogspot.com/2008/05/monster-of-consciousness.html

But the real comedy gold didn't enter the building till I stole his "[enter entity] is the way" formula (his chosen entity was money; still not sure if he was kidding or not) and typed in Juvenal, the Roman satirist.

Juvenal is my favorite poet ever, probably. He's the root of most of what I hold dear in literature; I'm sure every fan of his through the ages has probably thought the same thing, but he makes me feel that, though humanity is corrupt and suffering in every century, it was in his time and then again in mine that men were most extremely punished for their virtues and rewarded for their vices. Snivel.

So, with high hopes, I typed in "Juvenal is the way," hoping to find a kindred soul who hasn't already passed through the bowels of a million generations of worms. (Although it would be kind of hilarious if a molecule or so of what used to be Juvenal turned up in Carla Bruni's bottle of lube, eh?)

Well, I didn't get any hagiographies... I got something funnier. I got this:

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080924143736AA5L2DD

Juvenal Hall: it's where they put the leering, white marble busts of wayward teens. Something tells me this might not seem so funny if I weren't so tired, but ah well.

Yes, Virginia, we are freaked the fuck out by our mortality.

2010-07-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

Fainting; seizures
Incision through abdominal muscles
Loss of heartbeat
Elevated blood pressure, risk of stroke
Life-threatening hemorrhage
Torn urinary bladder
Broken tailbone
Cut or torn flesh (your choice) between genitals and rectum
Compressed intestines
Fibroids
Severe pain
Rearrangement of abdominal organs
Creation of sufferers of diseases, mental illness, and pain
Shitting the bed

What is all this shit? The list of tortures shown in a horror film about Nazis? The aftermath of a hurricane? The do-do list of a mad scientist who's broken into a girls' school? The last one is pretty close...

These are the horror stories I got to hear from my perfectly healthy -- or so they told me -- female cousins all last weekend about something they did to themselves on purpose. Some of them TWO OR THREE TIMES.

I am talking, of course, about the beautiful, natural process of childbirth. (Let's keep in mind the fact that heart attacks, cancer, earthquakes, and the fundamentally frail and destructible nature of the human form are all natural.)

I went to teh olde summer famblee reunion against my better judgment, you sam, and my cousins and I seem to be around the age when every female's biological clock except mine is said to be yelling at them. Although I'm not so sure it's a biological clock that's yelling at people... maybe it's more like a potential gramma.

Or first sure glimpses of personal mortality.

I know some people will let physicians do gross and painful non-birth stuff like liposuction to them out of (I guess?) vanity or a feeling of professional obligation... but I suspect a lot of cosmetic procedures come about because the sag of your once-glorious ass is a painful visual reminder that you're going to decay entirely one day. But, gross as it is, plastic surgery isn't the least rational way to deal with the fear of death: at least a nose job won't tear your bladder or make you shit the bed in front of a room full of people. Sure, people die from liposuction, but at least the survivors don't get post-partum depression.

There are all kinds of reasons, I suppose, for having a baby -- tax breaks, boredom, the nagging insistence of people who believe the childfree to be selfish (click on Jim Crawford's antinatalist blog on my blogroll over there at the side, where he and other contributors repeatedly spare me the trouble of refudiating* that bass-ackwards notion), masochism, etc... but I think the really big one is that old fear of mortality.

"You mean I'm going to end someday? No more me? I just... go away? And the universe goes on without me? I never get to see what happens? I'm not part of the future? Oh god... wait, you're dead... oh, DNA, make a mini-me, please, I don't want to die! Don't let me go away, I'll miss me!"

I don't know about you, but I've had those panic attacks myself, and they're really the only reason I would ever let a kicking, grabbing, growing animal hang out right under my goddamned liver and feed off my bloodstream for nine months. Did I mention the fact that even once those nine months are over, it takes another year for your digestive organs to move back to where they're supposed to live? And yet women who have already gone through this once will come back for another round, just in case mini-me #1 dies early or goes sterile!

It kind of makes your mind spin -- the madness of risking an early death, while assuring yourself of pain, discomfort, and invasive changes to your very flesh... just to half-assure yourself of a kiiiiiiiiiiinda immortality, of which you will have no personal direct consciousness.

That, kids, is how powerfully we fear our own extinction. But what are you doing, ladies, when you go through this pain to assuage your fear? You run a 51% risk of creating a daughter -- a creature who's just as badly fucked by Mother Nature as you are. Sure, men are mortal as well, but at least they don't have to risk large chunks of their lives in order to earn a false sense of connection to the living future. It's just one more evil joke on the part of Mother Nature, that these infinitesimally luckier creatures are slightly less likely to be the fruit of your misery. The lesser of two evils is to bear the full brunt of your fear of death yourself. Have a heart. Don't make another woman who has to choose between the chance of an emergency c-section and a more direct look at the abyss.

*The ever-frightening Sarah Palin, channeling Shakespeare, as she claimed, recently invented this word; if there were cosmic justice, it would insist that if you ever cast a vote for her you will happen to be standing under one of the nuclear warheads she would accidentally launch whilst trying to ring for coffee her first day in the Oval Office.

The Chicago public transport system used to be content to just make me late.

2010-06-20T20:15:00.000-07:00

That really used to piss me off. But now that it's tried to kill me, I think I'll be able to put non-near-lethal delays in perspective.

Tell me, what's worse than walking six or seven miles to the library because you only want to splurge on the inflated el fee one way and you figure you'll be more tired coming home, then getting on the train when you're ready to come back, plunging into the best-looking of the books you've checked out, and almost instantly being interrupted by the loudspeaker announcement that you're being delayed due to a small fire on the subway track, and looking up and realizing that the air is beginning to fill with greenish-black smoke, and putting your shirt over your nose as it starts to smell like a cross between a tire fire and Satan's hangover breath, and getting dizzy anyway, and then not being able to see more than two seats in front of you, and realizing that you're stuck 100 meters underground and have no idea how many side tunnels lead out of the main tunnel -- not that you can safely bail out of the car anyway, since god knows what's going on out there, and now the train has begun to crawl along, and the conductor promises you're going to be released at the next station, but then the car stops again, and then it starts again, and then as orange flames sweep down the sides of the car you realize that the conductor is driving the train through the goddamned fire, or else you have died already and the train is taking you to Hell, and you should have listened to your grandmother -- but since your lungs feel so terrible you kind of suspect you are alive, for the moment, and now you wonder exactly how you're going to die, since asphyxiation, poisoning, being burned alive, or simply dying of the panic attack you feel coming on (for once it makes sense!) all seem to be more or less equally viable candidates, and you're wishing you could store oxygen in your body tissues somewhere for use when you can't breathe, in the same way you can store calories for use when you can't eat, and you suppose evolution will have to throw humanity a few more million tunnel fires before we'll make that adaptation, and hopefully we'll have died out by that point anyway -- if the idiots who are clamoring for the conductor to open the doors (so the smoke can get in faster, derrrrrr) are any indication, it won't be long before we shoot ourselves in our last remaining foot -- and shit, isn't it going to suck to die this way, and since you're in the tunnel and can't get reception you can't even send anyone a goodbye e-mail, and jesus christ I never noticed how claustrophobic the subway is before, if anyone survives they'll have a great idea for a horror movie I'll bet, and then as far as you can tell in the smoke the train seems to have finally pulled into the station, but before the doors open the power goes off? Huh? What's worse than that, you ask?

Well, at least up to this point, we have all been in it together. But when people start figuring out that even with the power off we can open the doors by pulling the safety knob, it's every lung for itself. And the lungs nearest the only reachable (broken) escalator are up near the ground and the breathable air (relatively breathable; this is Chicago, after all, but right now a face full of diesel exhaust would taste like a mountain breeze) before the rest of us can even get within seeing distance of its heavenly light. The escalator is only two people wide, so everybody lined up in back is going to have a few more minutes' wait before our oxygen feast.

So what do the first people to get to the escalator do? WHAT DO THESE ASSHATS DO, I ASK YOU?! Do they panic and cause a riot? Do those of us in the rear start a scrambling row? Oh no, nothing happens that's as understandable as that. This is the glorious 21st century, and we are all angels of ADD. Forgetting their so recent terror, not to mention the continuing terror of those behind them, the first waves of people to reach the upper world START SLOWING DOWN THE MINUTE THEY CAN BREATHE, HALFWAY UP THE FUCKIN ESCALATOR, SO THEY CAN DIG OUT THEIR PHONES AND START SENDING PEOPLE TEXT MESSAGES!!!!

Uh... human race? Hello? Hello? What are you thinking when you do things like this? Mom doesn't need to be assured that you're safe yet -- this only started thirty minutes ago, and even if anything's hit the TV she probably doesn't know exactly which red line run you were on, unless you're such a mama's boy you actually text her shit like that. Your boss doesn't need to know you're going to be late until you actually start being late, and your friends don't need to know (ASNAP!)what an amazing cool unique thing you just survived... because it ISN'T THAT FUCKING SPECIAL. It's just another near-death experience; people have them all the time; quite often they swing so near they actually fall in.

But the rest of us down here do in fact need something: AIR! WE NEED AIR, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!

When we finally made it out, there were people from the train that was nearest the ignition point stumbling around with their faces covered in greasy black crap; about ten ambulances were already on the scene, and a few really messed-up people were being strapped to stretchers. I hung around for a while hoping we'd be offered some sort of free shuttle bus to get where we were going, but that was just the smoke inhalation thinking for me -- why would the CTA fail to charge you double when now they're going to have to find a way to pay to clean up and fix the antiquated disaster they call a train?

Then again, I seriously doubt they're going to really fix it; according to the report that's now up on the Trib's site, fires like this happen all the time. The wooden ties (I can hear Western European cities laughing at us now; yes, people, we do still use 19th-century technology, we just hoist it up in places on these rickety crumbling concrete pillars to give it that Disney city-of-the-future look, but actually we lost the Olympic bid to Rio because of SKULLDUGGERY) get soaked with fuel, and then when it's warm out and the train throws sparks, BOOM. It's just that usually it doesn't happen in the tunnels. I guess flaming, compromised wooden ties on an elevated track aren't quite as bothersome as people breathing burning creosote in an enclosed space, so they've never really given the problem much thought before.

At any rate, although I had only managed to wring about a mile's progress out of my el fare, I was feeling too stubborn to give them any more of my money (and too loopy to dig it out of my pockets and count to $2.25 anyway), so I walked all the way back home. Now my feet hurt enough that I really don't notice my lungs, so I guess I'm cured! Well, except for that black crap coming out of my nose... oh, well. At least now I know what boogers are for.

"A cynic is just a disappointed idealist." -- Carlos Yu

2010-06-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

"You think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fuckin' peasants, as far as I can see"

--Marianne Faithfull

I ought to look up old Carlos Yu on Facebook. I worked with him at my first newspaper job some 17 years ago (ouch), and I can't remember why I lost contact with him; he would have been worth staying in touch with, but I suppose I was a pretty flaky beer-drinking kid back then. Anyway, the above headline was Carlos's favorite saying, and it's floated up to the top of my mind lately, tied largely I'm sure to the complex of ideas that's been stirred up by the fact that the whole BP oil disaster has occupied about 80 percent of my coherent and topical thoughts (as opposed to thoughts like 'my leg itches' and 'the cat needs water' and 'oh, life is pointless anyway, let's pop in a Tim Burton movie') for the past few weeks.

You can hardly blame me for obsessing; if you aren't worried about the mysterious future consequences of unprecedented amounts of oil being spilled into the earth's least-well-known and largest ecosystem -- not to mention the ominous and equally unprecedented underwater oil plumes which are going to lurk god knows where killing god knows what for god knows how long -- then I think you're the one, to understate the case severely, who has a problem.

But as a mere ant in the global whatever-the-fuck-you-want-to-call-the-economic-system-we-have-now, it seems all I can do about it is sign the odd petition and 'inform myself,' just in order to... what? Impress the more intellectual among my fellow ants? Scrabble for a shred of hope? Ignore my own mortality for a few moments thanks to a burst of righteous outrage? Hey, it seems to work for most ever'body else...

However, since I have, like most of the populace, long forgotten how to operate a physical newspaper, it's google google google "oil spill." So I find some pretty random stuff. There are the obligatory rants blaming Obama the socialist (if he's a socialist, kids, I'm a tree frog) and Geedub the oil tycoon (I hate to break this to you, but even if his entire life was indeed buoyed by crude, the oil cabal would have no doubt been just as strong without Junior as an ally), as expected. But what's really shocking is the relatively mainstream British-jingoist ranting I found in, of all places, the Daily Mail.

Yeah, I shouldn't have been surprised. Fancy that, a tabloid devoted to cellulite seek and snark missions publishes a bunch of columnists who still feel a vituperative resentment against the United States for... what, exactly? Not belonging to them anymore? Being fat and ugly? That's kind of the vibe I picked up, although, like most people who are tormented by tribal hatreds which are no longer nice to express in polite company, the Mail's columnists had to twist things around to make themselves look like victims, who are merely striking back in self-defense.

So their launching pad for their American-hating British diatribes is American hatred of the British, as exemplified by President Obama's OUTRAGEOUS reference to BP as 'British Petroleum,' a name the company ditched 12 years ago in favor of, um, the acronym of that very name.

See, that slip of the tongue, the Mail argues, shows just how much Obama hates, and always has hated, Great Britain. Remember when his wife HUGGED THE QUEEN? (The Mail actually used the verb form 'mauled,' as though Mrs. Obama were a bear, and her side-hug had in fact been a violent tongue kiss followed by erotic strangulation.) American outrage at BP's actions is, they claim, a direct expression of the fact that AMERICANS STUPIDLY HATE AND DISDAIN EVERYBODY, especially the INCREDIBLY CIVILISED AND SUPERIOR BRITISH RACE, because we are DUMB EUROTRASH HALFBREED YANKEE GITS. Ain't prejudice hideous? The amount of hatred simmering in these columns, as well as that openly expressed, on both sides, in the comments section, is surprising: we have been allies for quite some time, fella/ows.

Of course, one of the more rational Mail articles on the subject brought up the very valid question of why mainly-American companies such as Halliburton, who were BP's contractors on the blown-out well, are not getting the same fire as BP. Valid though it is, it's an easy question to answer: while Dick Cheney is still at large, anyone who questions Halliburton -- including the sitting president -- runs the risk of being waterboarded. (Or beheaded; I just got around to watching Alice in Wonderland, and while I've always admired Helena Bonham Carter, I think ole Dickwad would have been a much better casting choice for the Red Queen.)

I'll grant the Mail another point: as much of a ditheringly detached scumbag as he seems in his own right, you almost had to feel sorry for Tony Hayward when the U.S. Congress laid into him this week. The format of the interrogation was proportional to the disaster, but in no way appropriate to the amount of personal guilt that can be laid at the feet of a single man when an entire multinational corporation's habits of recklessness and greed are at fault.

HOWEVER: Come on, what different outcome did the Mail honestly expect? The US congressmen needed to show blustering outrage in order to appease their constituents so they could justify their useless overpaid role in a government that's so much weaker than the nondemocratic international corporate system of overlord-ism that their only possible means of remaining relevant is to, indeed, be noisy and hypocritical corporate lapdogs. How does this differ from the prostrate bloviation of British -- or any -- politicians? Serving up an individual head like Hayward (and, to a lesser extent, Obama) as a sacrificial circus scapegoat is the only way to quiet the populace without attacking the big, thick body of the multinational hydra -- which no politician, no matter how comfortably the hydra may line his pockets, has the power to do in any meaningful sense. (With the possible exception of Obama, who tried to make up for his adminstration's failure to clamp down on the oil industry in time to avert the disaster by wrangling a reparations trust fund for the small businesses and individuals that were ruined by the multinational's fuck-up -- but who in consequence is once again being blasted by the corporate welfare queens. That'll teach 'im! If he were more malin he'd just put Hayward in the stocks for a bit and then slither away with a payoff.)

In other words, if the Mail columnists know anything about the way the world works, which I hope they must, their attack on Congress (and by illogical extension, the entire American populace) is just as insincere and opportunistic as the Congressmen's attack on Hayward.

And, I suppose, in my turn I should not be surprised that the Mail is trying to drum up British jingoism against the stupid, dumb, arrogant, dumb, stupid Yanks; it's a great opportunity to use obsolete prejudices to get more clicks on your site from angry people on both sides of the pond. Never mind the fact that the daily lives of the Yanks and Brits whose ancient antagonisms they're riling up are, in the end, far more heavily affected by the same non-elected international corporate bureaucracy than they are by their own home governments. Hell, even our own home cultures are losing ground by the day.

That said, the Mail columnists do have another valid point: we Americans are throwing a fit and demanding reparations because a company we perceive as foreign (it's actually multinational, with plenty of U.S. stockholders and employees) has polluted our shores, when American corporations as well as the government are creating massive messes in others' backyards on a constant basis. True; even as we cry over BP's oiling of our shores, American companies are trashing our own neighbors' land to extract oil to fuel our monstrous SUVs. (Just google 'Canada tar sands' if you want to be absolutely sick.)

But then again, as repulsive and immoral as 'our' actions in Iraq, for example, have been, it's American taxpayers (not, you'll note, corporations such as Halliburton who have made money hand over fist off the war) whom the Bush administration set up to foot the bill for cleaning up the mess we've made there. The public sector in this country has enough trouble cleaning up its own disasters; once in a while we'd like the profiteers to pick up the bill, thank you, regardless of where they're based.

MORE ESSENTIALLY, HOWEVER: Is the average British citizen to blame for BP's spill? Absolutely not; they're powerless against the company, and any American who decides to hate the entire UK population for this soft attack is -- despite my devilish compulsion to make jokes like 'one if by crude, two if by methane' -- off his rocker. Aaaaaaaaand, by extension: just who the fuck are you, Daily Mail, to blame the average American citizen for the actions of powerful 'Americans'* beyond his control who pollute sites in other countries? I personally have no more control over the nefarious deeds of Halliburton than John Smith of Picadilly has over Tony Hayward, or than Ali Iraqui had over Saddamn not-actually-the-Taliban Hussein. In fact, I don't even drive. The Mail may rant and rave about what a gas-guzzling monster culture the U.S. has, but the fact of the matter is that most individuals must either live according to social norms or live like me -- rather small and outcast. Most people can't handle that. Do you own a vehicle, Mail columnists? Do you eat food and drink beverages? Yeah... I eat too. Maybe we should all shut up. If you're going to tilt at windmills, tilt at the multinational money government, not random tv-addicted 40-hour-a-week-working no-health-insurance-having American citizens. Most of us are just pigs being fattened for the slaughter, just like your own compatriots.

But back to Carlos Yu. You know, maybe I wouldn't care so much about any of this if it weren't for the Enlightenment. That was a period of time in which much idealism was bandied about, and those ideals have been passed down to us, even as a new, rather nastier -- dare I say it? -- international aristocracy has grown up around the corporate system. Free markets had their day, so they say, a hundred or two years ago, but what have we got now? The only people I know who weren't born with more money than God who are really rich now never sleep; they may have power within the circle influenced by their work, but they're hardly in a position or mental condition to make a real difference in the world. Those of us who want to have lives outside of work have no power at all, except the power of free blogspeech, which is reaaaaaaal useful when there are as many blogs as there are PC owners. Once in a while we can circulate a petition to save an historical building or two, but I'd like to see, say, restaurant-worker bloggers take down Sysco.

As twistedly as we may behave, modern denizens of nominally democratic nations are hopeless idealists, on the grand scale of things. More than any other peoples in history, we really seem to believe in freedom for everybody. Ironic then that almost nobody really has any. Which is business as usual for humanity, but we're unique in being so bothered by it that we're in near-psychotic denial. You're free, huh? How about that student loan? How about your rent payment? Mortgage payment? Oh, you've paid for your house? How about those property taxes, then? You think you can quit your job and keep that house you 'own'? What percentage of your income do you spend paying property taxes for the right to live on 'your' land in comparison to, say, the percentage of his fortune that an anonymous scion of the Walton family pays in total? Yeah, you're free. I'm free. Free to be you and me: indentured servants, whoo fucking pee.

I remember being patriotic when I was a little kid. It's natural to want to be proud of your country, even if it can lead to nasty things. It's especially natural when your country tells you stuff like, hey, you're free! No tyrant can rule over you! But then why is Dad so cranky and miserable? You find out when you get a job and are shoved into the mini-realpolitik of the office that, even if we were living in a pure and perfect libertarian or socialist paradise, where everybody truly got an equal shot from the start, people will take petty tyranny where they can achieve it, and enlarge the scope of their ass-rapership whenever possible. Actually, didn't you already learn that lesson in grade school? Even as you were assimilating the optimists' propaganda of freedom and equality, the kids who thought they were better than you for one reason or another (sometimes just because they didn't like your face) were stuffing you into the Dumpster behind the gym.

Feudalism and aristocracy seem to be the natural tendencies of large-scale and complex human societies. Any measure of democracy or freedom is a sweet fruit to be savored, indeed, but not to be depended upon. It seems almost cruel to inculcate children with the idea that these things are their inalienable rights, when most waking hours of most people's lives in even the most affluent nations are marred by bondage to activities contrary to the individual will. And the sweeter freedom sounds to you, the bitterer you're going to be when you grow up and realize how pitifully rare such a thing is in all of human history.

Sometimes I just want to put my blinkers on, get high on yoga, put my head down, and think about nonexistent gods while I muck through the most mindless job I can find, then shuffle home and turn on the circus tube. When I was younger I thought such behavior was degenerate, but now I think it's realistic; nonetheless, something keeps me studying things like Sanskrit and history and literature whenever I can work up the energy. I think that something may be a yet-unlabeled form of insanity. 'Cause we're still fucking peasants as far as I can see, and even after the death of Divine Right, repositories of divide-and-conquer strategems such as the Daily Mail and the non-fiscal right seem to hold an eternal advantage over love and logic.

*Who, for all their own opportunistic pseudo-jingoist rhetoric, care more about their equally wealthy Saudi oil buddies than they care about Joe Yank -- I mean, seriously, geedub would have looked much more appropriate wearing a giant pound symbol hat on his head than a frigging cowboy hat.

More signs of the apocalypse

2010-06-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

Oh joy, now it turns out that an oil slick on top of the Gulf of Mexico would have been a minor cosmetic blemish compared to the new development: we're starting to get oil 'plumes,' they say, columns of oil droplets that are dispersing through the water below the surface, like colossal goopy octopi poised to strangle the oxygen out of the web of life.

Woops! Our bad! Sorry, other animals! Before we can figure out the real extent of the damage this spill will ultimately do to the world's largest and most mysterious ecosystem, we'll probably be extinct. Maybe we can make up one last advertising slogan for ourselves before we go. HUMANS: WE'RE LIKE AIDS FOR THE EARTH!

You'd better eat all the oysters you can while there's still time, kids. Eat 'em like popcorn while Obama (I tried to figure out what the hell logic leads the peanut gallery to surmise that this is his fault, but then I thought, oh well, a scapegoat's a scapegoat) and Tony Heyward are forced into a cage match. The last of the circenses!

But seriously, folks, I was talking to a millionaire at a bar the other day. The guy's an engineer, doesn't have a care in the world financially, he's about to pay off the mortgage on his condo... which he has stocked with three weeks' worth of rice, beans, bottled water, and canned food, because, while he hopes he never has to use them, he thinks it's fairly likely that the shit will hit the fan sooner than later, and he wants to be the guy who survives the critical period. Everybody laughs at me, he says... all my coworkers laugh at my Aldi's-shoppin' lifestyle and giggle at my pantry... but who knows whether a day will come when a million dollars in the bank won't get you a dried split pea?

Tell it to Louisiana, buddy. Tell it to Louisiana. Maybe it's just me (well, probably), but even up here in Chicago there's a sort of panic in the air.

PS UPDATE RE: OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND BIG OIL

If you can believe the Rolling Stone's political reporting (and pardon my ig, which is vast, but I don't see much more reason to distrust them than, say, Fox News), the Obama administration hasn't done all that much to clean up the corrupt relationship between oil companies and their would-be gummint regulators. Ah ha. Well then, cage match it is. But since Obama has at least publicaly admitted his guilt, he gets to keep his underwear on, and Heyward has to fight with tackle flapping. Then again, maybe nobody wants to see that...

2010-05-22T19:04:00.000-07:00

I'm completely perplexed by the debate over whether animals have emotions. I thought I'd be the last person to have serious issues with the scientific method, but come ON. If you see that look of fear on an animal's face and don't recognize it for what it is, yeah, you might be a smidgen of a sociopath. Just saying. They do. That's it. I mean, the look on a human's face and the things it says are the only things you need to indicate that another human has feelings like you do, non? So why do you need any further evidence when that same sort of eye-pinch is coming from a cow?

Shit, I think I just argued myself into vegetarianism again. That never lasts for long... my body just starts blathering about the shit it needs to survive... arrrrrrgh, to have been born an innocent rabbit...

Signs that you might want to rethink your dress sense

2010-05-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

Holy shit, I'm still laughing my head off... OK, so I just walked out of the corner store with a can of pop after having yet another delightful conversation with the delightfully harmless and distracting religiously insane cult guy who owns it (since he doesn't belong to one of the majors, what large-scale harm can he possibly be?) and walked out, still chuckling over the delightfully mad nuggets of self-help advice he had been trying to wedge down my throat between quips, admittedly not paying nearly enough attention to where I was going, and some woman who seemed in the end to be at least as unhinged as I am, poor thing, nearly backed her car over me while trying to park. I leapt out of the way, and one of a bunch of kids who were on their way into the store screamed at the woman: "LADY, YOU JUST ABOUT RAN OVER THE PROSTITUTE!"

Imagine how flummoxed this woman must have felt as she was trying, in horror, to apologize to me for almost killing me, as I was laughing uncontrollably and trying to communicate to the kid (while the other kids were yelling at said kid for being rude) what a budding comedian I thought she was. Fuck, I really thought this coat looked neat... but maybe I should stop wearing it with miniskirts. Prior to this incident, I was mentally composing a goofy post about how aristocratic I think I am, but that would just make me look ridiculous now... fuck, exactly what is it about a pair of a-few-years-old Dansko sandals set against a coat with a vaguely Marilyn-Monroe-y fake-fur collar that screams 'hooker' to somebody who doesn't even look like she needs tampons yet?!??! I'm afraid to dress myself now. I need to call my more-sartorially-clever sister every time I plan to leave the house, I guess... hee hee hee gotta admit I'm half tempted to go back out again without changing a stitch, but the reason I was headed home early from my random pointless walk in the first place is that I was cold and wanted to add a sweater or four, since the thought of having to put on foldy bendy entrappy jeans at this time of year makes me want to jump out the window... huh, maybe I should also stop aimlessly wandering around the streets when I can't think of anything better to do. 'Street walking' in the classic sense... this is what happens when you let a Wisconsin girl who is amused by dressing too loudly move to Uptown, I guess. Punk rock must have fallen out of fashion again. Oh well, all we have to do is wait for Lisa Falour to go viral and then I'll look perfectly normal.

PS why is it that seriously hating a lot of fabric hanging around your legs must necessarily translate as 'whore'? If it weren't for the sex thing and we kept it to antiquities, I would have made a great Victorian. But you people must think against sex all the time, mustn't you?

(bitter reflection upon the past deleted)

2010-05-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

In any case, ME ME ME ME ME have proofreading credits for a book I love, to wit, the latest release from Chip Smith's always thoughtful (well, except when he snorts Drano and agrees to publish me later this year, of course) Nine-Banded Books label, is...

CONFESSIONS OF AN ANTINATALIST!!!!!!
by Jim Crawford.
I couldn't be prouder.
http://antinatalism.blogspot.com/

PS proof-monkey fuh fackts: -er vs more as a comparative:

The general rool of thmz is that two syllables or less is -er, three or more is 'more,' which generally works. (Cooler vs. more atrocious.) BUT the real, secret base rool iz: if it's a middle English or olde Ynglishe root (ie not Greek or Latin) then it's -er. If Greek or Latin, or Latin via French (huzzah for 1066 and all that! variety, spice, yer know), then use the alienating 'more.' Bitte!

Far be it from me to tell anyone else how to do their job...

2010-05-19T18:24:00.000-07:00

...especially since my own employment status lately ranges from under- to 'what-the-hell-is-going- on?' to 'oh, I should just go throw myself under a bus, the world has no use for me.' But jiminy Christmas -- Chicago must have the most incompetent panhandlers on the face of the fucking earth.

I mean, panhandlers do provide a kind of service. They serve as a way for overpaid people to assuage some of the guilt they feel over the fact that they receive far more money than they need to sit in a corner office and do nothing that is of any use to anyone. I have never required this service, personally, so I do not give money to panhandlers unless they particularly appeal to me for some reason. The girl with the cat a couple months ago, for instance. Not only did she have a sign saying she wanted to work -- and a stack of resumes she was handing out to anyone who would take one -- she had an adorable, if frightened-looking, fuzzy cat on her lap. I gave her a dollar I really couldn't afford to give away basically because I hoped some of it would be used to purchase cat food.

Also -- this is the important part -- SHE DIDN'T FUCKING RUIN HER CHANCES AND PISS ME OFF BY YELLING AT ME.

Like a civilized beggar, this skilled member of her craft wrote a description of her situation on her sign, and then sat there quietly next to her sign, thereby giving people the choice of whether or not to give her money or take her resume without shrieking, bellowing, moaning, groaning, whining, or belching at them to get their attention.

Most panhandlers, who can't figure out the psychology behind the very acts of human kindness on which they've decided to depend for a living, suck. Look, buddy. You who have been yelling at me since the moment you saw me. People are not blind, unless they have a cane or a dog with them to indicate that, yes, they might not notice you standing there with your hand out. Most of us can fucking see you there. If we are not giving you money, it's because we're unemployed and broke and almost homeless ourselves. Or maybe we're selfish, OK, you got us -- but is barking like a dog at a person suddenly going to make them see the light about human fellowship?! If they want to give you money, people will. But if you make noises out of your fucking head at them -- and most of you make really loud and irritating noises with your heads; maybe this situation could be improved if you were forced to listen to recordings of yourselves -- the likelihood that they will give you cash drops considerably.

The cat girl was raking it in. These dipshits who think they're going to provoke compassion by howling at people -- do you ever see anybody giving them change? Ever? The only ones I ever see giving them anything start talking as they do it, and it quickly becomes clear that they're just as fucking douchey and irritating as the incompetent panhandler, only luckier. They enjoy giving money to other loud, obnoxious hosers? -- well, good for them. But that's really a specialty market. People who don't like being yelled at in public make up, I think, the vast majority.

And they only seem to be getting worse. I guess everyone else is increasingly broke, so they're increasingly desperate. Instead of working smarter though, they're just working harder. The other day I was trucking down Halsted, trying to save el fare by walking a ridiculously long way to a job interview; I had some quarters in my pocket that I was going to spend on the train back if I was too tired. I was trying to cross before the light turned red when this fucker with a Dunkin Donuts cup popped out from behind a mailbox and started not only shouting in my face about how he could hear the change in my pocket, but doing a shuffle-dance back and forth in order to keep himself in my way so I would be trapped on the street corner with him for the duration of the red light. I was not in the mood for a goddamned waltz lesson; needless to say, he did not get any money out of me that day. I didn't even deign to point out the irony of the situation.

Then again, maybe in these tough economic times, it's good for the rest of us that the vets stink at this trade so awfully. Things get any worse, I should start panhandling myself. Show these morons a thing or two. Just by keeping my fool mouth shut I'd be the ace rookie on the block.

Fuck the artists of old

2010-05-13T18:03:00.000-07:00

They had no idea what it was like to toil in obscurity with SIX BILLION TOILERS ON THE GLOBE.

They never toiled this long, this hard, or this hopelessly.

To hell with them.

But further to hell with you, breeders.

You cheapen human life further with each cheap, cheap soul.

You have put the price of hard labor at zero, and the price of art at negative twenty.

I only wish there were gods to punish you for your sociopathic carelessness.

Yet more benefits for breeders

2010-05-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

Ho ho ho, I love the State of Illinois. "The economy is terrible, everyone's out of a job, people are miserable through no fault of their own, college graduates are in debt and screwed, blah blah blah, jeez, we have to help people... but not without making them earn their keep. Hmm... I know, let's subsidize some jobs and call it Put Illinois to Work!

"But hang on, let's not get too crazy. Let's make sure to exclude everybody who hasn't deliberately dragged another soul into their pit of economic woe:"

http://www.dhs.state.il.us/page.aspx?item=49105

Great idea, State of Illinois. There are too many people on the globe, and yet you keep rewarding those who are adding to the problem, at everyone else's expense. Will there come a day when I'll have to decide between starving and preggers? I'll have to make a sign and carry it around: "Will be babymomma for food." I mean, come on, people, are you trying to keep up with the Chinese? Do you REALLY want to try to stuff a billion hoomins onto our portion of this continent just to keep up in the race to be the globe's most prominent cock-slapper (jesus, I just referenced lolcats and the Onion in the same sentence, please put some tape over my mouth)? Do you think that having more people around than our resources can support is going to HELP somehow? I'm trying to come up with some sort of rationale for why our society keeps encouraging mindless gene-replication, but nary a one seems, er, rational.

The Hurt Locker

2010-04-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

OK, so it took me way too long to see this great film, and of course my first reaction is smart-assed. I was watching the scene where Lieutenant Sanborn and the crazy new commander are shit-faced drunk and punching each other in the stomach for fun, and I thought, "Wow, I take it back -- men actually do play games with each other that are even more profoundly stupid than golf."

But then I'm watching all the scenes with 'the suit,' and I'm thinking, hm. They only have one seriously armored suit per unit, and it weighs a shitload -- the guy inside it dies because he can't even run far enough to get to where the suit is actually good enough to protect him. The rest of the guys are running around with arms and legs apparently just covered in cloth; clearly they've got some body armor on, but their eyes are protected by sunglasses. Awesome.

I know, I don't know dick about military technology -- no more than I know about medical technology. But I've always had this little conspiracy theory about happy pills: if we weren't such friggin' puritans about not wanting anyone to feel pleasure, do you think we might be concentrating on actually having HAPPY pills instead of just pills that alleviate symptoms of abnormal mental states? Because, come on, even if you aren't seeing Jesus or suffering double depression, most of life is not exactly elation. We have all these pills to alleviate psychotic delusions, depression, anxiety, whatever. So what's stopping us having a pill that will make us feel seriously happy and free? Like being drunk or stoned, but without the cirrhosis and lung cancer. I have no proof, of course, but I still have the sneaking suspicion we could do it.

So now I'm starting to wonder about military armor. I mean, yeah, you want guys to be mobile, and the government, obviously, has a limited amount of money. But Jesus, I spent 300 dollars and got a computer with a webcam and everything else you could want, and it weighs two fucking pounds. We make spacesuits, for christ's sake. A vacuum isn't an explosion, sure, but it's still a pretty extreme condition for an Earth creature. We have smart bombs too, right? Although we don't hear about them that often anymore. Maybe they don't actually work so well. Maybe the U.S. military is just throwing darts at a board, they way they usually have to do with psychiatric meds. I dunno, I just think... all this stuff we build. Why not better armor? Why not a healthy drunk pill? Is that too much money to spend on grunts? Is that too much happiness for good Christians to want without expecting harsh payback? I hope it's simply that we can't figure this stuff out, because those are some stupid fucking objections, if that's indeed what's holding us back.

Wrongful Birthday Suit, part II

2010-04-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

I wrote a short poem this morning before going to work... I thought it was finished, but while I was sitting there in court watching all these bitter child-support disputes while I waited for the case I was translating for to come up, my brain started spewing what seemed like an endless supply of verses. One couple started fighting in front of the judge and had to be sent to sit down; another guy had to be asked to stop calling the judge "you guys," as though she individually represented the entire justice system... and all because none of them could remember to put on a condom. So here it is, in all its crescendoing, hysterical rejection of this mortal coil...

WRONGFUL BIRTHDAY SUIT

I hate being sober
I hate being drunked
I hate being captain
I hate being punked

I hate the cold
and I hate the bright sun
I hate getting started,
I hate being done;

I hate being alive
but I'm sure death is worse
All human existence
is simply a curse.

I hate being certain,
I hate being confused
It's too frickin' seldom
I'm very amused

I hate being naked
I hate wearing clothes
I hate all this stuffed-up shit inside my nose
I hate having jobs
but I hate being broke;
It kills you to do nice things like drink and smoke.

Women are mental
And men are disgusting
And rare's the example of either
Worth trusting

And if you should find one
They'll likely soon croak
Or someone will tell you they're dead
For a joke

Life starts with an ass-smack
then hustle and tussle;
My knee hurts, my tooth broke,
I have a sore muscle.

'Twas vile being young,
Now I'm scared to grow old
I might be attacked
And both my kidneys sold.

My job terrifies me,
My BA is worthless;
I hate a buffoon
Just as I hate the mirthless.

Employment is slavery --
Go ask the Greeks.
I just lay in bed with swine flu
for two weeks.

Wherever I go
I can smell a big rat;
My friends will all die some day
As will my cat.

Most people are hypocrites,
When they aren't rude;
Hunger's unpleasant,
And so is most food.

There's rape, plague, and boredom,
There's losing your mom,
And seven new nations this week
Got the bomb.

Misery en masse
is from time to time faddish;
Here are ten starving Slovaks
Dividing a radish.

There's loneliness, child abuse,
Tenement halls,
Plus the time that you e-mailed
And hit 'send to all.'

There's biting a sandwich
And tasting the mold,
There's watching Brett Favre get insane
And grow old.

You might lose your mind
And you could lose your pension;
There's helplessness, hopelessness,
Water retention,

There's nothing on TV
'cept medical dramas
Recalling unpleasantly
All of your traumas.

Bad writers, bad painters,
Bad singers, bad mimes,
Get rich and well-known
While you haven't a dime;

The masses might coat you
With feathers and tar,
But we'll all see a squirrel
Smashed under a car.

There's your growing stack
Of form rejection letters,
There's crying for weeks
And still not feeling better;

You've struggled for decades
And still aren't the best;
There's that scary sensation again
in your chest.

A friend stole the love
Whom you blindly adored;
cut corners, mass layoffs,
And beer that's short-poured

There's trouble with teachers,
the law, and the mob,
There's glimpsing a mirror
And seeing a slob.

Too few public toilets,
And all of them stink,
The person before you
Heaved up in the sink.

There are beatings and balding
And herpes and farts;
The camera killed most
Of the visual arts.

There's paperwork, busywork,
Shitwork, and gout,
There's lying, castration,
A surfeit of louts;

There's finding out there's
No such thing as the Force;
There's child support after
Your grisly divorce.

There's delayed retirement,
The failure of plans,
The sudden appearance
Of IRS vans,

That person who follows
Too close on the stair,
Hearing a noise
When no one should be there,
Being the only one not in a pair,
And fathers whose answer is
"Life isn't fair"...

There's perjury, penury,
Pissants and dearth,
And the number one cause of our death
Is still birth.

So think before you take your ass
Off the pill;
Your offspring might not wish to wait
For your will.

Wrongful Birthday Suit

2010-04-28T06:02:00.000-07:00

I hate being sober
I hate being drunk
I hate being captain
I hate being a punk
I hate going to bed
and I hate getting up

I hate the cold
and I hate the bright sun
I hate getting started,
I hate being done;

I hate being alive
but I'm sure death is worse
All human existence is simply a curse.
I hate being certain,
I hate being confused
It's too frickin' seldom I'm very amused
I hate being naked
I hate wearing clothes
I hate all this stuffed-up shit inside my nose
I hate having jobs
but I hate being broke;
It kills you to do nice things like drink and smoke.
So think, think, before you stop taking that pill!
Your offspring may not want to wait for your will.

Koko the Natural Woman

2010-04-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a post about how much cuter my adult cat is than any human baby I've ever seen (and just think what she must have been like as a kitten). But I know what kind of ass-hat assumption that leads to: "This so-called 'childfree' bitch is secretly seething with envy because she hasn't had any babies and feels worthless and unloved*, so she's stereotypically hoarding cats and trying to convince herself that they're really just as good as the joys of being a mombie. One of these days her biological clock is gonna catch up with her, and she'll cry her eyes out over the realization that it's too late."

Yep. Well, that's pretty hard to argue against, since it's so goddamn dumb, and people love to believe in stupid shit, particularly when there are so many romantic comedies that prop up their delusions. Women all really want to have babies! Motherhood is our natural state! It's the fulfillment of our existence! If people are really just animals, we'll only make ourselves miserable if we fail to follow our natural inclinations, right? I'm going to set aside, for the moment, the consideration of whether it's ethical to bring someone into this world for the sole purpose of making one's selfish self happy and fulfilled. I'm just going to present ye with a test case: is baby-making actually going to do that for one's selfish self?

Well, if you want to define happiness as giving in to one's most basic human instincts, then I present you with the one woman in the world who most perfectly walks the fine line between being able to speak her mind and being in a natural, primitive state, free of the BS and delusion of civilamazation: Koko the Gorilla.

Koko became famous about a quarter-century ago for learning human sign language, and for showing the ability to express not just simple desires and aversions, but hopes, fears, emotions, and a surprisingly complex grasp of stuff and stuff. When Koko learned sign language, your average mombie would have probably been gratified to hear that her fondest requests would run along the lines of "Koko want male gorilla no condom please want small gorilla to chew up nipples and ask depressing questions of why human can leave cage but gorilla no can leave."

But oddly enough, Koko never asked for such a thing; she may have gotten knocked up later on when they brought in a signing male gorilla, but something tells me it was an unplanned pregnancy on her part, and probably on the male's as well; like humans, gorillas naturally like sex. But also like us, I don't think they're necessarily going at it with a productive end in mind. Nature may trick us into having babies by making sex so appealing, but She (the wretch) relies only on our sense of grim duty to get us to take care of them once they've appeared. You see, Koko never expressed any desire for a baby. What did this natural woman really want? What did she demand for her birthday? I think you may have already guessed...

Koko asked for a KITTEN. Case closed.

*For the record, I have had men not only beg, but PLOT to make me the mother of their children, so don't even let your lil brainz think about me sitting on the pity pot, yeah?

On a kinder, gentler note...

2010-03-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

... it's funny that, while I find Evelyn's Waugh's religious views to be borderline delusional, I find his novels much more pleasurable to read than those of writers with whom I come closer to agreeing intellectually.

Sort of akin to the way I'd much rather look at a nice Caravaggio biblical scene than, say, a conceptual piece echoing the emptiness of emptiness.

I guess I like fiction, even when the author thereof actually believes it.

Doing me taxes...

2010-03-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

... and wondering why it is that people without babies always have to pay more taxes, but people without them are the ones who get all the benefits.

I mean, you don't subsidize my novels. Why should we?, you huff. I'm clever enough, and could have gone into a more lucrative field, like, say, dull mindless money-grubbing. It was MY CHOICE to take a particular route in life -- to grasp at faux immortality through literary fame. So I must swallow the cost.

Yeah? And who forced you to have a baby at gunpoint, then? It was YOUR CHOICE to go for faux-immortality through reproduction. You should have to pay for the consequences of your choices, since they're just as silly as mine. In fact, since at least my decisions have involved actual thinking instead of doing whatever everyone else does, they're SILLIER.

But even if you're well-to-do, you still get tax breaks for your choice. If you're down on your luck, you have access to government handouts that I can't get, no matter how bad the economy or my personal situation become. Why do I have to swallow all your extra costs and never get any benefits myself?

Just askin'. My guess is: you're selfish, useless, and the majority.

And you still want me to step aside on the sidewalk for your double-wide stroller. Guess what?

Not gonna.

Non-babymommas: the strike starts now.

PS Hehnnnnnn... reading the above, I'm afraid I'm so angry today that I give antinatalists a bad name.

Just another stupor day at circus court

2010-02-11T15:05:00.000-08:00

The death of John Mortimer was right up there among the sad deaths of the past 12 months (Jeff Felshman, my mom's cousin Craig, Vic Chesnutt -- I almost started crying just typing that one -- J.D. Salinger, my friend Lee Kluever, Jay Reatard), although unlike many of the others, he at least got to live a long, full life full of creative fun. If you've never been graced with the joys of Mortimer's most famous creation, you need to get the Rumpole books or the DVDs as soon as you can. Though books are more portable, I'd actually recommend the audiovisual version in this case, as it was greatly enriched by the acting talent of Leo Kern, who also died just a couple of years ago, damn the universe to all hell.

Rumpole of the Bailey was that rare breed of barrister who cared far more about keeping his poor, huddled, and usually shifty clients out of a cage (it didn't matter to Rumpole whether they did it or not; in fact he didn't want to know) than about keeping his wife in fancy dresses, or himself in anything like a respectable-looking wig and hat. Bit like a hooker with a heart of gold.

Anyway, one of old Rumpole's delightful chomps at the legal system that fed him was to habitually refer to the prestigious circuit court, to which he never quite got promoted, as 'circus court.'

Boyyyyyyy, did he have that right.

So there I am at 9:30, an ocean away from the old Bailey, and not as close to the Skokie circus court as I need to be at this hour. I was out at a rock show last night, but that's not why I'm late; I left the house at the usual time, but I'm up over my knees in snow, and hoping I can somehow manage to slog through before the judge starts asking 'where the hell's that interpreter temp?!' and calling the agency. I'm only about a mile into the 2.3-mile slog from the el's yellow line to the courthouse; the snow is thick and wet, the day is getting warm, and I haven't been this deep in unplowed snow since the el broke down and I had to walk home in the middle of the night during the blizzard of 2000.

I should have left home earlier, because I should have guessed that nobody in fucking Skokie believes in shoveling the sidewalk. It's like another goddamned planet, where everyone is born with a car seat attached to his ass. I'm surprised I haven't been picked up for vagrancy, or a drug search. It's like being back in Carbondale.

Even when there aren't two feet of snow, some of the sections of street along my route don't even have sidewalks. Why do they send all the criminals from the north side of the city of Chicago to a circuit court in an unwalkable suburb that only has one el stop? As if I didn't know! The court employees probably lobbied like crazy to have it built there: the more small-time criminals who can't afford cars who can be convicted in absentia, the quicker they can get to lunch. I'm not joking; the lawyers and courtroom cops start making lame quips about how great food is going to be starting at around ten. (Speaking of the cops: I love the way courtroom cops glare imperiously at me until they figure out that I'm not a defendant's moll; dude, you're basically a security guard. All the criminals you see are already in cuffs.)

Well, at least I've got my practical boots on. They get me through to the courthouse only a bit late. The nasty lady cop who does entry security (she, too, has an unearned 'tude; I see her there every goddamn time I work, it's clearly her only duty) screams and rolls her eyes at how stupid I am when I leave a quarter in my pocket before entering their metal detector. She's my favorite coworker.

I get to the court, and I'm relieved to find that, as usual, there is a long, long list of males waiting to be tried before the females come up, and the defendant I'm translating for is a woman. (They refer to the defendants as 'males' and 'females,' and since they seem determined to do all the males first, I've developed an absurd theory that after the verdict is passed and they're taking them back to the prison, they spay or neuter them, and they don't want to have to switch tools for every case the way they would have to do if they went in alphabetical order. Yeah, I can get bored and wacky sitting there.)

Not only has nobody noticed that I'm late, I can sneak out to the cafeteria and get a caffeinated beverage; now that the judge has spotted me and noticed I'm here, the clerk will know that she can page me if the woman's case comes up.

But first, I want to watch the current trial. It's clear that it's a bigger deal than what they usually do -- there are witnesses and everything! Usually they just push the defendants through; it's hard for any lawyer, much less a public defender, to refute the usual failed breathalyzer tests and video-taped shop-liftings. The drug cases are my least favorite, because the cops always seem to have the shakiest evidence on those -- I've never seen a photo of a confiscated package or any such thing in court, and the judge never asks. I wonder how hard it would actually be to frame someone? And while more addictive drugs might cause people to commit robberies and murders and such, ingesting or carrying marijuana is kind of a classic example of a victimless crime, in my book.

This defendant is a bit different. He's wearing a bright yellow jump suit, which I've never seen, only a dingy blue for the women, dingy green for men. Maybe it means something in prison code. At any rate, I'm sucked in to his story. The public defender and the DA are cross-examing the cop who arrested the guy, and then the guy himself. It's clear that the guy was caught with bundles of small packages of marijuana (to which which the DA sneeringly refers as 'dope,' apparently having no idea what a dill-hole she sounds like); the question is whether the cop saw him stuffing the bag into his pants as he was pulled over, and whether there was a bit of the bag still sticking out of his pocket when the cop approached. I slowly figure out that they're trying to determine whether the search was warranted or illegal.

And then they call in the star witness. Now, this is the kind of drama you think of when you think of a 'court case,' and it's exactly what I have never yet seen in a court of law. Speaking of molls, this witness would make John Dillinger so envious he'd get hives. She has perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect butt in a modestly gray but very, very tight knee-length skirt. She's well-spoken, and the words are coming out of a beautiful face. It's making everyone in court's day. The DA says to her, "Now, of course you're going to try to protect your boyfriend, because you want him to stay out of jail so he can... keep being your boyfriend."

Moll (softly, with a charming modesty): He will be no matter what.

Whether he goes to jail or not, you have to admit, he's sort of a lucky guy.

Anyway, she was the driver in the car, and her story matches the boyfriend's, doesn't match that of the cop. The public defendant points out all the inconsistencies in the cop's story; the DA makes some very assertive-sounding ad hominem attacks on the lovely couple (and manages to say 'dope' again about five times). I thoroughly dislike her by this point.

I do like this judge, however; she's always kind to me, and she always tries to be fair; she did go off on a repeat-offense drunk driver once, but christ, it's scary for everyone to have people drinking on the road. And she always looks reluctant to sentence small-time drug offenders, even when the evidence (which, for all I know, she has in fact seen in legal briefs which would be too time-consuming to drag into the formal proceeding; pardon my conspiracy theory above; just had to get it off my chest) seems damning. She says she needs a few minutes before she can make up her mind, and goes on to the next rubber-stamp case while she mulls over it.

I basically trust her. But you never know. I decide to go get that beverage instead of wait for her decision, so I can pretend she did the right thing, so that I'll go on liking at least one of the people in this looney bin (there's also a court secretary -- I think that's what she is -- who's very sweet and showed me where the water cooler was, but she was out sick today). Drug prohibition always bothered me, but not as much as it has since I've had this job. Judges and lawyers and lawmakers might be public servants in their way, but in their own way, so are drug dealers. I'm allergic to pot myself, but I have friends who enjoy it -- and so do you, and so does everyone, even if they aren't aware of it. Even if pot were legal, would you want to go through all the rigamarole of growing it? It's supposed to be a pain in the butt. I mean, you don't even grow your own tomatoes, I'll bet, and those are easy. Without drug dealers, everyone would be a drunken lawyer.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I was on my way to the cafeteria, and I spotted one of the lawyers I'd seen slouching around the courtroom. The client I've been translating for -- we'll call the poor woman N -- gets a new public defendant every week, and I'm hoping he's it, because then I can check in with him and tell him where I'm going so I may have my caffeine in a relaxed mood.

"Hi, I'm the interpreter for the N case. Are you her lawyer?"

"Nope," he says. "But I'll tell him you're here."

"OK," I say, "thanks," and I turn to walk away.

Ha ha, nothing's ever that goddamned simple.

"Interpreter!" he calls after me. "What language?"

"French," I say, and instinctively cringe, because I know he's going to say...

"Oh? French! Really? Oui oui oui!"

Why do all douchebag court employees say this when I answer that question? I've never in my life heard any French person actually repeat 'oui' three fucking times. Is that from some dumb fucking movie or something? It makes my blood boil.

And he goes on: "Bonjour, Mademoiselle! Bonjour! Oui oui oui! I love French. It's the most romantic language.

"Ah, vraiment? Alors vous..."

"Ha ha ha, I don't know what you're saying. Those are the only words I know. But it's soooooo beautiful and romantic. I LOVE it."

Yeah? I HATE people who say shit like that, what a coincidence. If you're clever enough to be a lawyer, and you looooooooooove French, and it's suuuuuuuuuuuuch a romantic language, whhhhhhhhhyyyyyyyy do you only know three words of it? Oh yeah: because learning French wouldn't make you any money, and you're a lawyer fuck. If you used your big brains on beautiful things like French, you'd be a fucking temp. Also: how do you know you looooooove a language when you only know three words of it? I think Japanese is kinda sexy sounding, but for all I know it has a gimped-up grammatical system from hell. Therefore, I say that am a curious about the language, but I don't use that curiosity to ham-fistedly hit on its current students.

Yep, hit on. Real subtle, too. One conversational turn in and I'm already hearing him say: "You know, you really look kind of French... with those glasses... mmm... hey, are you nervous?"

"I, uh, no, I'm tired, I had to walk in the snow from the Skokie Swift..."

"You walked all the way from the Skokie Swift?!" He shrieks. Clearly he is one of those car people who consider any act of autolocomotion that carries one farther than the distance from the mall food court to the far-end Macy's to be a feat akin to the Boston Marathon.

"Gosh, no wonder you're in such good shape... you look very athletic." Yeah, I'm a power walker, dude. Maybe I look sporty with my winter zip-up fleece on, but I don't have enough hand-eye coordination to drive a car, much less excel at naked racquetball or whatever the hell he's seeing in his simian head.

He's still going: "Perfect complexion... " (has this moron ever heard of makeup?!) "...and what color are your eyes under those glasses?... mmm..." It occurs to me that he is actually analyzing my appearance for himself OUT LOUD, as though I were deaf. How many deaf oral interpreters do you get in here, bonehead?!?!

"Speaking of romantic, it's almost Valentine's Day? Are you doing anything?"

I guess he figures he's gotten past the flirting stage now, and it's time to drag me into his lawyer-cave. Jesus, how do these douches pass the bar? "I hate Valentine's Day."

"That's refreshing. Not going in for those bullshit holidays. I don't meet girls like you very often."

I want to comically slap myself in the face and then let my fingers slide down till they pull my lower eyelids inside-out at him. But instead I say: "Hey, I've really got to get some caffeine in me while I wait for my case. When you get back to court, could you let the public defender know I'm here?" I want to make sure that he and I are headed in opposite directions.

"Anything you like! That was actually my last case, but I'll do anything for you if you can tell me how to get hold of you."

My jaw is bouncing off the floor. He thinks I want to give him my phone number!?!? I give him my e-mail ("I hate the phone"; this is just as true as my remark about yet another holiday which revolves around extorting gift purchases out of people, but I'm trying to edit my conversation to include only things I hate), panic momentarily over that -- why am I always so reflexively polite?!? -- but remind myself that I can put him on my junk list the minute I hear from him.

Finally, coffee. I sit down with my book and start to sip. Ahhhhh.

Two minutes later, I hear a voice making noises at me: he's back. Gehhhhhhehehhrhhehrheherhhrehererrher. Circuit music starts playing in my head as he starts to talk to me. I lamely attempt to keep reading my book, but he's talking too loud, and I am too angry now. He spews a lot of idiotic drivel which makes me rabid over the fact that he's rich and I'm poor; I distract myself by making a solemn vow that the next person who tries to tell me we're living in anything resembling a meritocracy is going to be in a coma for at least eight weeks. He's gone past analyzing my appearance now, and has now begun to extrapolate, from my terse, barely polite replies to his inquiries, as to what kind of girlfriend material I am. "Cultured, studious, unconventional... and you're studying medieval history!" I stonily refuse to point out the fact that the book I'm reading is in fact a history of ancient Greece. "Wow."

The conversation is getting more uncomfortable by the minute -- not that he's bothered -- and he comes up with what I suppose he thinks is a save: "Hey, they probably won't be doing the females till after lunch. How about I take you out?"

"I just had a sandwich."

"We could go get a nice glass of wine then! French wine, ron ron ron!"

I stare at him. "Before court?" Then it suddenly dawns on me: he's not just serious about his offer -- he's already drunk. I finally look straight at him, which you're not supposed to do if some dude is pestering you -- it ruckuses up their hormones, I guess -- and he can barely focus his eyes. His face is all red. He's shitfaced.

"Is there anything you do need?"

"I need a nap. I've got to work my other job tonight still..."

"Oh, well, I've got 72 channels of cable at home, you can just zonk out there until..."

"I've got a boyfriend," I say, and stalk out, furious. I mean, I'm all for the civilized, old-world glass of beer or wine at lunch. But this is the 21st century, and we're working in a building where people who have the nerve to like marijuana instead of or in addition to booze are sentenced to lose years of their life in a fucking cage. And this guy is walking around blatantly shitfaced on his nice, legal, expensive wine? That's taunting, you fuck. If you were in the NFL you'd get fined for that! It isn't cricket. I mean, if you have one beer at lunch, OK. But so shitfaced you're asking the goddamn temps to go get shitfaced with you!? It's not like I don't drink enough outside of court as it is! Go to hell.

Anyway, I might be steaming from the ears, but at least I'm rid of Toad Lawyer. Yet the fun is nowhere near over. We've still got N to contend with. Her case doesn't come up till just before the lunch break, at 1 PM (whatever; I got paid to sit around for three hours and be pest meat).

Cripes, poor N. It's hard to think about her. I keep feeling like I should have done something, even if I am forbidden to get involved with the clients. I just repeat what everyone says, like some demented legal parrot. "I was just squawking my job!"

Well, at least they didn't kill her. Just took a couple years of her life. They did give her psychiatric care for free, I suppose, if by 'lots of meds, just enough to quit hallucinating and sort of tolerate being in a prison filled with violent criminals whose language you do not speak' you mean 'psychiatric care.'

N was picked up for shoplifting from an overpriced department store in 2008. Doesn't seem like the kind of crime you'd spend years of your life in jail for on a first offense, does it? Ha ha ha. Welcome to the great state of Illinois, kiddo. Sell a Senate seat -- become a celebrity! But if you steal over $300 worth of clothes -- and in the case of her little spree at Nordstrom's, that only came to one blouse, a pair of pants, and a bathing suit -- you can go to jail for two to five years. She should have gone to Filene's.

I only started working on her case about six months ago. I don't know who was doing her translation when she first got into the system, but they must have really had a hard time believing what they were hearing. Because they were hearing things like "I was born under the Vatican, the reason I seem to be speaking French is because They put a device in my throat; my native language is Latin. N isn't my real name; that's the name of the woman who killed me and my family."

N didn't come to the U.S. planning to shoplift, nor did she hope to have her first psychotic break. The back story didn't come clear till her last psychiatric evaluation, which took place in the Cook County legal system's psychiatric unit, which is on the tenth floor of the 26th and California branch of the circuit court building, which is connected to the jail. N has been bouncing between this unit, the jail below, and the Skokie for two years now. The psych unit has large windows which offer a sweeping view of idle factory chimneys and active storage facilities and dingy attic apartments. On the day of her last eval, the sky was grey and furry with snow; fortunately for me, the south side of Chicago does believe in snowplowed sidewalks.

The psychiatrist tried to make conversation with N, pointing at the window: "Boy, you've been in jail a while. I bet that looks just like the garden of Versailles to you now!"

Way to break the ice! She nods; it probably didn't take her long to learn that she needs to accept their stupid jokes.

But he won't stop, he's got to say what they can never seem to stop themselves saying to her: "Boy, France sure is a beautiful country. I've been there a couple of times, it's just beautiful." Yeah, buddy, she really needs to be reminded of that. Not only is it beautiful, it's her home and she's in prison half a world away. You could hop on a plane and go to the baths of Constantine at Arles any time you like; she can't even go out there and run around the dead factories. She understands enough English by now that I can get away with letting this remark go untranslated, but from the look on her face she understands exactly what he said and feels the whole awful well-meaning brunt. What a bedside manner! Once again, I find myself wondering who hands these 'professionals' their credentials.

Now he gets down to work. He really does mean well; as he explains to me later, she's still a little wacky -- at one point in the interview she claims to have known Mayor Daly for years -- but he wants to declare her fit to stand trial so she can finally get tried and go home, since she has already served the two-year minimum between jail and the psych ward, and the Skokie felony judge wouldn't be cruel enough to sentence her to anything more than the minimum.

That's the scary thing I'm learning about the legal system: most of the people in it aren't actually evil or cruel, except for some of the rinky-dink cops. They don't need to be to do their damage. They're just bumbling, or stupid, or drunk, or overworked -- you wouldn't believe how many repeat intoxicated-driver shitheads they have to process per diem; those guys sure seem to get out of jail and back to weaving in and out of lanes in good time -- or hopelessly tangled in a nonstop loop of paperwork. (Not to mention the injustice of many of the laws they're instructed to enforce: shoplifting from Nordstrom's is hardly more of a victimful crime than pot smoking; it costs every investor what, one penny? -- which they'll surely make back with their overpriced made-in-sweatshops crapola.)

Every step of the process revolving around N has been shoved back and back and back for such reasons as a form which one day's public defender forgot to pass along to the next, or the fact that the psych ward seems to have lost her psychiatric records a couple of times. N's mom sent bond money to the state of Illinois so she could at least not have to be in jail in her condition; the state took the money but for some reason never did the paperwork to let her out. When she says something about that, the lawyers tend to mumble something that I can't translate for her clearly, because I don't fucking understand it myself, and I'm pretty sure the lawyer doesn't either. Once I even got paid to sit in court for an extra hour because the cops had brought the wrong damn prisoner out to Skokie instead of N, and we had to wait for them to go back and get her. The woman they brought didn't even speak French, and was rather insulted that people were speaking to her loud and slow. Awesome job, legal system! You meant to release the shoplifter, but you let Jeffrey Dahmer go instead! Woop, our bad!

Anyway, I digress; at the last fitness eval, N's delusions were basically under control, and she was ready to tell us what set her off in the first place, as soon as the lawyer quit unintentionally taunting her. And surprise, surprise, it was quite ironic. One of the nice things I found about France when I was there was that the French aren't quite as... steal-y as Americans are. I went into a night club -- mind you, this was a crappy little college town, not Paris, so don't try this in la Capitale, kids -- and my friend told me I could throw my coat and wallet in a corner. I looked at her like she was out of her fuckin' mind (imagine me saying this in a thick Chicago accent), but everybody else was throwing their coats and cell phones and god knows what, their family jewels, in a big pile in the corner. To be polite, I threw my coat on, but I kept my wallet in my pocket.

Because habit dies hard. I don't care how many kilometers you've put in on a jet plane. The same held true for N. She came here as a tourist, and made the rounds of DC and NYC and Vegas (why Vegas is anyone's guess, but hey), and finally came to Chicago, where to her delight her cheap hotel happened to include a swimming pool. She happily took off her clothes, in which were her wallet and money and ATM card; fortunately her passport had been left in her room -- without that, who knows, she might have gotten waterboarded. She left them all unlocked in the vestibule; she's not from the city, she probably didn't even think twice. Nobody stole her stuff while she was swimming; they waited till she was in the shower afterward, so they could take her bathing suit too. The security guy at the hotel just shrugged when she told him what happened; he probably thought she was a moron, and deserved the mishap for being spoiled by an easy life where people don't always walk away with everything you don't nail down.

So there she is, alone in a foreign country, and all her money is gone, and her swimsuit is gone, and what, considering what stage of the trip this was, were probably her last clean clothes. I don't know what she wore to flip out and go revenge-stealing -- her pajamas? I'm aware that some parts of her story don't make sense, and that she may have been lying, but I never heard the psychiatrist, who had access to her file, contradict any of it. Well, except the part when she started in on her personal friendship with Daley...

At any rate, at least she wasn't talking about her imaginary friends any longer. At her last eval, she claimed that she stole the clothes because she had wealthy friends that no one else could see, and they were going to pay for her clothes, but they disappeared as she was approaching the cash register, so she got confused and headed for the door. At the end of the day, she got two years for wandering out of a department store in a delusional state, carrying a couple lousy yards of fabric.

So here we are: it's finally her day in court, her real day in court, where she has to give up her right to a jury trial and mumble 'guilty' and finally go home. Some people from the French Embassy have FINALLY taken an interest in her; they're sitting in court, a hideously ugly Belgian-looking woman in a powder-blue cardigan and a snickering fellow who can't quit twitching. Good job, French Embassy; you're about as efficient as the State of Illinois. Just before they call her case -- as the cops are complaining because they already ordered their lunch and we were supposed to wait for the females till after the break -- the lawyer calls me over to the temporary storage area where they keep the defendants in glass boxes while they wait for their moment before the judge. He wants to talk to N to make sure she knows what's going on.

He explains to her that he's made a deal with the state to reduce her charges to a misdemeanor, considering her state of mind at the time of the crime -- they really didn't mean to keep her so long, and they're very sorry. He tells her that she can go home after the trial, that the embassy is there for her (now that she's going to go free anyway), and makes sure she knows that she needs to see a shrink the minute she gets home to keep up her medication schedule. We all stand up to go into court. It's her big moment.

And then: "Boy, I've been to France a couple times," the lawyer says. "Lovely. Man, it's beautiful. You've really got a lovely beautiful country to go home to." She looks down. She's lost two years of her life, her home, her family. I grip my file folder and squeeze my eyes, because I've got no right to cry; I've never been in prison, and it would just be unseemly and unprofessional. But someone is yelling... the yelling is getting louder... I open my eyes.

The glass box full of South American drunk drivers across the hall from us is ringing with the cries of males who haven't seen females in however long. They're making 'phone me' gestures with their thumbs and pinkies, yelling at me and N: "Take my business card, baby, I'll give you a job!... Hey, hon, when you get out of the joint let's get together!" Even the lawyer looks somber now. Sometimes I don't like my species very much. And on this note, N goes into the stuffy, dingy courtroom to admit her guilt.

Told you so

2010-01-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

Hey, can I call 'em? The Boers and Bernstein show on Chicago talk radio just turned ten; it's the longest-running sports radio show in town. I wrote about them for the Reader, what -- nine years ago? Check the archive. But just so you know, I know what's goddamn funny, goddamn it, even if I'm a rejected shit-pile loser myself.

Andy Nowicki, me, and the huge joke called journalistic ethics

2010-01-14T12:33:00.000-08:00

You know, I actually spent a couple of days wondering whether it would be ethical for me to write a review of Andy Nowicki's book Considering Suicide. After all, it was printed by Chip Smith's Nine-Banded Books, which is set to release my exile novel, NVSQVAM (Nowhere) late this year.

And then I remembered that DELETED BY GHOST OF MY INTERNALIZATION OF SENSELESS, INCONSISTENT, FAVORITISM-CORRUPTED CODE OF JOURNALISTIC ETHICS DESPITE THE LAUGHABLE OXYMORON. I'm sure ethics have contracted geometrically since then. So I'm good to go. And unlike gentle SHITBAG'S NAME DELETED BECAUSE I AM CHICKENSHIT, OR MAYBE BECAUSE I JUST DON'T SEE THE POINT IN PICKING A FIGHT WITH TOTAL PISSBURGERS, I have sucked down a couple of beers in order to be as vicious as possible in my attack on my label-mate. And not just because I like beer. This is on purpose.

Well, I wouldn't really call it an attack. Because I'm going to tell you first off that it is beautifully written. Compelling. I just read a short story by Nowicki which could have convinced me, in absence of this latter-day prodigy of long-past-the-point theology, that Nowicki could do no wrong.

And don't get ME wrong. My label loyalties aside -- and mind you, I'm a person who's loyal to a great, big, self-destructive fault -- you should do your boredom syndrome (I just made that up, but I really wish I had a PhD in psychology so I could sell it) a favor and read this book. Regardless of what you think about God, if you are capable of thought, it will make you think, and think again.

You may still be scratching your head over the fact that, while the book is called Considering Suicide, I've said you will have your thoughts provoked regardless of what you think of God. That's probably because I read the second half of the book last, as I usually do. The first half of the book is a beautiful novel about a desperately suicidal guy. The second is a theological argument.

Yeah, I know. Takes ya back, yeah? To about 1500. Theological... argument. The two hardly go together anymore. Lately you either get Foucault-type philosophasters who argue about language (which is interesting as hell, of course, but from an honest linguist's point of view, s'il vous plonk!) or religious nuts who think reasoning is tantamount to shooting god in the face.

Nowicki argues from the point of an agnostic who's as deeply doubtful as he is desperately hopeful that meaning, in the form of either accepting life (Christ) or rejecting it (Buddha) must exist. Even after I asked him to re-explain it to me personally, I either don't buy or don't completely understand his assertion that the statement "Life is meaningless" is meaningless, because it's tantamount to saying 'I am not saying this.'

He says that a claim that 'there is no truth' is a claim of truth itself, thus self-negating. Fair enough, but pointing out the fact that we have a conception of meaning, because the word meaning means something, doesn't mean that that meaning has to be anything in particular, including 'living for Jesus.' He seems to be reopening the door to the Camusian assertion that we must make our own meaning, which he argued down to the mat earlier in the book. And yet this is part of his key, closing argument for 'faith in faith,' which to his great credit he gives us the choice whether or not to accept as he finishes the book. The uncertainty of his theological 'conclusion' ties back into the uncertainty of the act of suicide (or putting down the pen?) which polishes off the first half of the book. He's having his cake and eating it in a way that he's a good enough writer to get away with, and to my mind, the fact that the second half of the novel is blatantly philosophical is a daring admission of the mission of a lot of fiction: to create a 'smear of meaning' by setting points of view against each other in order to try to triangulate the author's vague, terrible, subverbal suspicion of what life really might be.

If that doesn't sound like a fun read to you, then I haven't done my job, OR you are -- whatever it is you think about God, suicide, the meaning of life (having read this book -- layered as it is on top of Monty Python consumption -- I can barely type 'meaning of life,' since I now realize how much trouble I have getting my mind around the very concept, since in a way you could bend Nowicki's argument to say that every act or aspect of one's own person has a semaphorical function on some level that humans are incapable of comprehending, to wit:

Oh, christ, what if I'm only a sentence in an argument between Jehovah and Baal? AEHHEWJAWGGRGEHJEGHJRGEHRIU help me) -- really too smug in your opinion, and I hereby kick you gleefully in the crotch.

TWO THINGS YOU SHOULD SHUT UP ABOUT:

2009-12-31T13:40:00.000-08:00

Tiger Woods's virile member, and manpurses.

TIGER: golf geek. The guy has geekface the way Jay Cutler is said to have jerkface. Iffen youse is SURPISED that he started making up for lost time when he got rich, then youse knows so little about human nature that I don't think it's safe for the rest of us to allow your ass to go out in public.

Tiger reminds me of a guy I worked with in high school. He wore a fucking PING cap to work every day. I would have never even have been cursed with the knowledge of what PING is if he hadn't gone on about it at nauseating length ("I betcha don't know what my hat means? It's the greatest golf gear company in the whole, wide, etcetera, etcetera, Ann has long stopped listening..."). He wanted to date me. I would have rather dated the damn cap -- at least it was succinct. I ran into him years later and he had lost about fifty pounds. (Maybe he took up speed golfing.) He gave me this smug look as though to say, ha ha, now that I am lithe, you shall be mine! He still had the fucking hat on. I heard my mom calling. I've never seen anybody look so confused.

Are YOU still confused? About Tiger, I mean. Female humans HATE golfers. We have almost no patience for listening to stupid stories about stupid shit that men like to do. I'm a sporty chick; I like games that are cool to watch or play, like football, or the other football, or even tennis. But 99 out of a hundred of us won't even listen to the two words immediately following 'golf'...

... unless those words are 'I'm buying,' and the girl in question happens to be a particularly shallow specimen. None of Tiger's coochies exactly have the air of chess champions, n'est-ce pas? But guess what: he didn't care. He's a golfer. Taste is clearly not his forte. As hostile as I feel toward golf nerds in general, however, I'm starting to feel sorry for the guy. He's only been doing what every other hopeless dork would have done.

MANPURSE: stop shaming them, please, before they change their minds. I have a hunch that I speak for every woman who has ever been stuck out in public with a male friend or relative who keeps buying/collecting/hunting/gathering shit and cramming it into her bag. "Sweetheart, can I put my sunglasses in there? Baby doll, surely you won't mind if I ask them to box up my garlic-rich leftovers and shove them in your new leather Chanel bag. My arms hurt, can I put my new weight set in your tulle knapsack? Uh, and sugar angel... is there still room for these golf clubs?"

Not only does this annoy me so much my teeth hurt, it doesn't make any goddamn sense. Statistical and anecdotal evidence alike point to the mang's tendency to have larger biceps than his shorter half; sure, women are supposed to have superior lower body strength, but when was the last time you saw a human carrying a purse in its feet? Boys, for the love of not getting your face smashed, ignore the haters. Manpurses are SO virile -- I think I'm going to burst when I see you valiantly hauling your own horseshit around in that droll Vuitton case. It almost makes up for your PING tattoo.

A translation from Cioran

2009-08-12T20:41:00.000-07:00

Ship smith clued me in to Cioran; I don't know whether this passgage has been translateed earlier and better than this, but what I'm reading right now particularly sez it:

" If an obscure universal force has decreed that you will belong to the order of victims, you'll go to the end of your days stumbling, squishing the scrap of paradise that you hide inside under your feet, and the bit of force that pierces out from your smoldering stares and from your dreams will soil itself in the face of the filth of time, matter, and men. You'll have a compost heap for a stage and your tribune will be an instrument of torture. You'll only be allotted a leprosy-infected glory and a crown of drool. Feh, you would try to walk alongside those to whom everything is due, for whom all paths are clear? Dust and cinder will rise to bar time's exits to you, will bar the escapes of your dreams. No matter where you turn, your feet will stumble, your voice will only call hymns of filth, and, past your heads which are bent toward your hearts, where only self-pity lives, the breath
of the happy will barely pass -- the happy, those blessed toys of a nameless irony, and just as guiltless as you are!"

Pardon my tortured translation, I've had a few. And cioran wasn't a native French speaker anyway, so pardon his tortured fucking Romanian.

now i think it has gotten worse

2009-07-31T10:35:00.000-07:00

If anyone at all was reading this blog, it has lain dormant due to Fate and teeth-kickings. I don't suppose I believe in Fate, but if I did I would seriously suspect that She plans on using me to generate very dark and hopeless writings. Perhaps she wants all of humanity to finally wake up to its dismal pointless condition and commit mass suicide.

By the way, how did all the wealth in the world just disappear? How the fuck did we go into a depression during a war? Who stole all the fucking money, kids? SOMEBODY IS LAUGHING.

I continue to be mesmerized by the horror that is homo sapiens. I highly suspect that if there is somebody behind this mess, they did it just for fun. To see what would happen to everyone else, look down, and laugh.

Well, I suppose we deserve it. Look at us. Just look at us.
Monsters.

FEEL THAT?

2009-07-08T07:28:00.000-07:00

Do ya FEEL it? I think, higher up, even they can hear it grind: it's the wheel of history, crushing the peasants again. You whined and whined when it crushed your dreams, but the fun's only beginning: wait till it crushes your bones! Ha ha! One likes to tell oneself that at least the wheel will feel sorry when it notices that now there are things it wants to get done, and there aren't any peasants to do it anymore, but SINCE YOU FUCKING MORONS KEEP POURING MORE BABIES INTO THE NIGHTMARE, it ain't ever going to learn its lesson. Not that, lacking a central nervous system, it could have done so anyway. HA HA HA HA HAH HAHAHAHHAHAAHH!

Still alive

2009-06-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

To the disappointment and/or indifference of nearly 100 percent of the human race, I haven't hung myself. I've merely been very busy reaping the reward of a youth pissed away in dedication to the literary arts: I've been studying night and day to pass the training exams at a corporate restaurant, where decisions regarding my progress toward the right to wear a baseball cap and be tip-stiffed by subnormals who can't properly read a menu are routinely made by people who are A. Ten years my junior, and B. Invariably more drunk from the night before than I am.

Yeah, last night I was held back a training stage (which means losing 4-5 days' work, and probably being stuck with lousy shifts till I 'prove myself,' ie forever) for hitting two incorrect buttons on a touch screen. I wanted to grab my youthful trainer's collar and scream, "YOU WRITE A COMIC NOVEL THEN! GO ON! WRITE A FUCKING COMIC NOVEL IF I'M SO GODDAMNED INFERIOR!" But I couldn't really grab his collar, since he was wearing a t-shirt, so I pretended to be a good sport. And to ignore the fact that the shift had kicked off with a lecture on how there was too much server error being committed by people who were already full servers. No punishment, mind you. No loss of income or status. But for NEWBIES (even when I'm not one, I detest and want to kill people who use that word), there's no quarter. Typical humans: once you're in, you're in. If you aren't inside the circle yet, show any weakness and WE will tear your throat out.

(Ah, well. At least, once I'm finished with training hell, I will be able to GO HOME ON MY OWN TIME AND DO WHAT I WANT. Fuck you, academia, fuck you still. I guess I'm not really mad at the young trainer; I'm still enraged by my former employer. I shouldn't be starting over at this point in my life. The years these kids are giving to perfecting their table-waiting skills, I pissed away at a 'liberal' newspaper where promotions and permanent careers as a journalist were only ever a real possibility for those to the manner born. So fuck you too, journalism; fuck you harder. I want to be the real thing anyway, not a professional cocktail-partier with a tape recorder.)

(Funny: up till this humiliation, I had been feeling the fine sensation of being back in the polis with all my heart. I hope the anger dies quickly. It was nice to feel well for a little while.)

Anyway. I'm working on a pair of articles on a 2005 Philip Larkin biography for FISTAGBLOG, but paying gigs take precedence at the moment: see the tale of my first day in retraining for the restaurant industry at www.intheweedsmag.com.

Philip won't disappoint you, the poor dead humiliated antinatalist bastard. If I ever catch up on my day humiliations. The trick is to pretend you're watching a movie. The more stupid shit that happens to you, the funnier the movie becomes, yes? Ha ha.

P.S.

2009-05-02T15:02:00.001-07:00

Shit like this is why I'm going blind... usually such false fanciness makes me want to stab the student in the eye, but at least it's funny:

One of the first women mentioned in the novel is Meroe, a witch who runs an inn whom Socrates stays in.

Imagine reading hundreds of essays that are written like this... I'm feeling sort of psychotic, I've been at it all afternoon... GODDAMNIT OBAMA, DO NOT SEND EVEN STUPIDER PEOPLE TO COLLEGE! WORRY ABOUT THE DAMNED HIGH SCHOOL KIDS! BY THIS POINT IT'S TOO... FUCKING... LATE!

Ethics, Shmethics -- this is why I'm not going to finish grad school, part two

2009-05-01T08:13:00.001-07:00

OK, time for a direct quote from a student. I'm sick of protecting the guilty. And anyway, I'm not going to tell you this little fuck-tard's name. Lucky him! Because here is a prime sample of the shit that lands in an average public-university TA's e-mail every godforsaken day of the semester:

| Hello i am emailing you because of my last exam grade. It says i got a 27 but i dont know how i could of scored that low. I thought i knew evewrything. Would i be able to stop by and see my exam by any chance. Thank you for your time.

Uh huh. Are you going to thank me for my time by giving me some money to make up for the freelancing work I am not going to be able to do because I have to come in and deal with your bullshit on what's supposed to be my day 'off' (i.e. moonlighting day, since the state doesn't see fit to pay me enough to live on -- too busy subsidizing the FUCKING BREEDERS who go on creating more wastes of air like you)? Nah, I didn't think so. You're just going to show up in my office ten minutes before our appointment and bitch at me for worrying you because I was only five minutes early and oh goodness, you would have wasted your time if you'd left before I got there!

I don't know how I could of agreed to take this job. I thought i knew evewrything.

(My god, that e-mail is a lapidary treasure of hubris!)

At least it's almost over. I can go back to waiting tables, so I can have money left after the bills, some unadulterated free time to write, and customers who don't demand that I come in on my days off to discuss why they're so goddamned stupid.

Not a noble calling? Hey, I've already written my academia novel. Now we shall spy on the human race at large as it unwittingly struts its stuff before the servants. (The first time I tried this, my own ego hadn't fully congealed, and I spent more time licking my wounds than analyzing the data.) Any academic research I would do would be read by ten people, and the rest of my time would be spent torturing and being tortured by mouthbreathing adolescents.

So goodbye, undergraduates of the world, and here's a word of advice: either shut up and do your schoolwork, or shut up and go be half-assed somewhere else. Not all of the time and money you're wasting belongs to other people; this is your nasty surprise and my consolation.

Ah... but really... is there any consolation for wastes of life? When I think of how isolated and peerless and glum I have been since I left Chicago I feel afraid at how much it must have changed me. No one will even recognize me. In a week I'll be wandering around the city like a ghost, unable to speak through the wall to anyone, and not really giving a damn -- it's only more soul death, after all. If they recognized me they'd only want to break the glass cage around my heart, and the fragments would rattle around and kill me. In Carbondale, my prison till next week, it has been raining every day for what seems like decades. And I still have hundreds of undergraduate essays to go. I thought i knew evewrything.

Pirates, part twaaaar.

2009-04-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

Seriously, though, I can't get over this pirate thing. I'm not so much taken aback by the fact that there are still pirates, but -- to paraphrase They Might Be Giants -- where the fuck's my jet pack? Are you reading this shit? The pirates are attacking conventional, earthbound, seafaring vessels with... a skiff.

A FUCKING SKIFF! THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY! EIGHT THOUSAND PLUS YEARS OF PIRACY AND THESE MOTHERFUCKERS ARE STILL ATTACKING EARTH BOATS WITH A LITTLE -- FUCKING!!!! -- SKIFF?!

I give up. I read Evan Dorkin's space-pirate comics when I was an adolescent. I was resigned to a universe peopled by glamourous brigands in ska outfits, just so long as they attacked me while I was flying between galaxies on some noble mission in a space cruiser with a nice warm swimming pool. Jesus fucking christ, I want my fantasies back. Seriously, if the Christians are allowed to walk around in their own little fictional world, why can't I? I'm going to go fall asleep in front of Doctor Who now, and dream of the day when he shows up to take me adventuring. Wake me when someone destroys the earth with a herd of elephants. On second thought... don't bother, my final nightmare will probably be more interesting.

(Anything would be more interesting than dying of swine flu... can you think of two less glamourous words for Armageddon? I mean, besides 'mad' and 'cow'... "Help, help, I'm being killed by Tipper Gore!"...)

Snapshot of current events, yaaaaar.

2009-04-18T05:12:00.000-07:00

PIRATES! (Slaps self in face, giggling hysterically.)

FUCKING PIRATES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pompey Magnus told us TWO THOUSAND FUCKING YEARS AGO that he had this shit under control.

Fucking politicians, man.

I talk about politics too much, but what the hell, it's intrinsically funny

2009-04-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

Goddamn it, I said I wanted this blog to have a topic besides my smashing novels, but I didn't mean for that topic to become politics. It's just that... well... so I'm reading Barack Obama's autobiography, and after a while you feel more like you're reading a good novel than a politician's autobiography, and start wanting to have a beer with the main character. (Steve Sailer found the to-be president's writing style obtuse and wandering, which confuses me since I found it to be the opposite; his analysis of the book's content is lucid enough that I worry whether this means I'm obtuse and wandering myself and don't even know it. Shit. This is, after all, a parenthetical.) It feels incredibly strange to have a likable, thinky fellow in such a high position. After the past few years, it feels positively unnatural. (Still, weird as it is, I hope he gets re-elected: the last thing I need is, within four years, to have a former president who can write getting into the novels market. When that kind of shit starts happening, any novelist who isn't well established already is going to drown.)

As a politician, the thing that excites me about Obama is actually kind of sad, when you think about it: what he's doing is his job. He's doing it with unprecedented energy and decency, of course, but when you come down to it all he's doing is HIS JOB. And we're EXCITED about it. After eight years of the President not doing his job, we're all dewy-eyed over the fact that, when high-paid officials at companies that are bailed out with public money get huge bonuses, the leader of our country actually has the balls to try to get the money back instead of winking, nudging and asking for his cut. Oh, blessed light, will the Catholic Church allow a communiss to be named a saint? He's like the nice boyfriend who comes after the one who beats you up. "Sweetie didn't hit me once this year, I think he must be an angel from Planet Love God!" "The president won't give the auto companies more money till they start making cars that won't choke us all to death? WOW! I BET HE CAN FLY!"

Still, it's really nice to see him do stuff like cozy back up to France. (And it can't be easy, after all -- President Sarkozy seems about as easy to snuggle as an angry sea cucumber. Carla Brunetti must spray herself with Teflon before bed.) Yes, it can be such fun to make fun of the French, I guess, if you don't know how to make real jokes, but don't let's forget: the rivalry we share with them is sibling rivalry.

Why is it so hard for Americans to remember that most of the Greek and Roman ideas -- not to mention the Age of Enlightenment spin-offs -- which form the foundations of our democracy were funneled directly from French thinkers through the likes of Benjamin Franklin? Why in God's name do we make French jokes instead of British jokes? And why can't our collective consciousness hang on to the fact that it was aid from France that let us win the Revolutionary War?

My guess is it's the same reason the French are grumbly about being beholden to us for WWII. Our ideals were formed around the same time; the modern form of both countries arguably came into being around the same time (with more fits and starts on their part, but we did have legal slavery till 1865, and Caesar Napoleon has been comedy gold for so long that in the end the detour was probably worth it); basically, we're brothers. And I'll be DAMNED if I'm going to admit that my younger/older brother beat up the bully for me!

Of course, not all of us feel this way. One of my favorite Inspirational Moments in History was when U.S. General Pershing arrived on the scene in WWI and shouted to the disspirited French troops: "Lafayette, nous voici!" (Lafayette, here we are!) I get teary whenever I think about it.

In case you're scratching your head: Have you ever noticed that goddamned EVERYTHING in the U.S. is named Lafeyette? Ever wonder why? Lafeyette was a French noble at the time of our revolutionary war who really, really believed in the ideals of the Enlightenment. In fact, he loved them so much -- and felt so sympathetic toward Americans, presumably -- that instead of sitting on his ass and fucking the maid, he got on a ship (in an era when just getting across the ocean was a likely way to die) and, before the French crown had even decided to send help (presumably to annoy the British in the main, since they were still the crown), went with his own men to fight for the rebels. So when it came time for Pershing to come and return the favor, he signaled it for what it was: Lafeyette, we've come to repay your generosity and courage! OK, you're dead now, but it's the thought that counts!

Of course, many Americans hate the French because they think the French hate us, which is merely a cultural misunderstanding. Yes, they do bitch about us an awful lot, which sounds rude to us; we kind of like to walk around with these shit-eating grins on our faces and pretend that everything everybody does is just ducky. I think this may have something to do with the fact that more of us carry guns. If you criticize somebody in America, you're implying that you generally don't like them and don't care if they resent you. You might also be suicidal.

The French, on the other hand, bitch as a means of displaying affection. Have you ever listened to a bunch of French people bitch about France? Oh, my god, if you didn't know better you would think they were talking about a horde of barbarians that had invaded and enslaved them. "The French can't learn foreign languages, the French are neurotic, the French are too hidebound, the French can't run a company, the French can't make the trains run on time [absolute lie, unless there's a strike], the French make annoying noises when they eat, the French are driving me mad..." Holy crap, France -- who are these French people and why don't you kick their asses back to wherever they came from?

They bitch about their country because they love her, and they want her to improve (how the interior walls of the bar are going to solve the social ill upon which the patrons and staff are expounding is beyond me, but once again it's the thought that counts). Connect the dots: they bitch about America for the same reason. After 9/11 I visited some friends in Paris; it was Christmas, and the French were still in a state of shock and horror. You'd think it had happened to them. (But not to those French bastards. Then they'd be partying in the streets.)

When they bitch about us, I don't think it occurs to most of them that we may be hurt by their loving abuse. They just want to help. They didn't tell us to stay out of Iraq out of surrender-monkey spite; they were probably hoping that we would risk our troops' lives in a place that was already a hotbed of terrorism. Sure, there are French people who hate everyone else based on general jingoism, but they've hardly got an exclusive patent on that vice. They need our massive democratic population to protect them, and we need our older brother to tell us when we're being adolescent loons. Repairing our relationship with our oldest allies is, once again, part of Obama's job.

But the British, however... he's too goddamn nice to them, them and their lousy aristocratic protocol. (I'm referring to the humorless ones, of course; surely Eric Idle and Matt Lucas find it as silly as I do.) Are you following this crap about how Obama should be made to walk the plank because he shook their queen's hand with two hands instead of one? Oh, god, they'll never recover from the emotional scarring. Can't they just be happy and smug that our last President sold us to their banks? (Or is it China that owns our war debt? Or Bill Gates? Myehhh...) The French fought a war so we wouldn't have to memorize all this bull-pucky. We need to use our brains for more useful shit, like NFL stats. And popping caps in the Nazis. If Their Serfnesses want to pitch a fit because our First Lady hugged their queen BACK (instant replay shows this to be the case, pbbbt) then they can stick it where the sun don't set. The Crown is not the boss of us anymore.

The banks, on the other hand... well, Mr. President, I suggest you think of a nicer gift than a bloody Ipod when you have tea with those guys, huh?

Is this going to be a running gag? That'll require at least two more reps.

2009-03-28T05:45:00.001-07:00

I was getting curious, so I googled:

1,270 hits for "Slick Bill" in quotes;

11,000 for "Slick Barry" in quotes.

1,530, 000 for a general search on Slick Clinton;

1,910,000 for Slick Obama.

Just as I suspected: recycled uses now top virgin taunts. Christ, even the epithet-manufacturing industry is in a recession! There are even Web pages where people giggle about how Obama is supposed to look like Curious George. Hang on... hadn't we already decided George Bush looked like Curious George? AND HIS NAME IS GEORGE, DON'T YOU GET IT? DUH!

Cuz it's all about names, right? Some of the articles on Slick Barry boil down to this: WHAT IS HIS NAME, MAN? WHAT'S HIS REEEEAL NAME? HE USED TO BE BARRY! NOW HE'S BARACK! OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL DOOMED!

Is that why Bill was slick, too? Because his real name is William BUT HE ASKED US TO CALL HIM BILL???? That HORSE-FUCKER! I guess this means my cousin Frank, who was known as Frankie when he was a kid, is in on the plot. He did just shave his head, I guess. Then again, he shaved it for some children's charity thing that I was too cheap to shell out for. But I could definitely see him conspiring to... oh, I dunno, to recycle stuff. But not jokes. FRANKIE WOULD NEVER RECYCLE A JOKE. THAT IS STRICTLY FOR COMMIES. Oh wait, "Slick Billarry" (OH MY GOD! BARRY AND HILARY HAVE THE SAME TWO LAST LETTERS! HELP! HELP!) is coming from the right, not the left... HANG ON! IF YOU HATE COMMUNISM, THEN WHY ARE YOU RECYCLING? WE KNEW YOU WERE ALL MIAMA CUBANS! DOUBLE AGENCY! DOUBLE AGENCY! CURSES!

I'm not sure whether this is I find this highly entertaining because it's so absurdly weak-assed, or highly dull because it's so repetitive. C'mon, right-wing nut jobs. You can do better than that. People depend on you for original laffs. I like wordplay myself, but just repeating crap isn't wordplay, it's an OCD. Bo-ring!

A ray of hope: I did recently read an anonymous blog post claiming that Obama is an alien and that he caused the tsunami. YES! Whoever that wingnut is, I salute heshit! Absurdity with substance! The rest of you need to get in line. You all sound like fuggin' Foucault! And if that ain't a commie name, I don't know what is.

But seriously, folks: Mayhap they are avoiding insane claims of would-be substance because they're afraid they'll go to jail. Check out this post on the Hoover Hog web site if you would be curious re: the mystery of the missing wingnuts.

http://hooverhog.typepad.com/hognotes/2009/03/sympathy-for-the-heretical-two-.html

Academia is rather more a living hell than an ivory tower, but some academics are cool.

2009-03-17T16:03:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm glad the new president has kept his campaign promise to pronounce nuclear 'nuclear' and fight for the little guy, or at least try, but I was sort of groaning during his state of the union speech when he announced that part of what 'fighting for the little guy' means is making sure all little U.S.-lings that anyone decides to poop out have the opportunity to go to college, because you can't get by in today's world without higher education.

That's nice. I sure as hell wish that when I decided to get a degree as an adult, somebody had already fixed the system so I won't be an indentured servant when I go back out into the cold, cold world. But did it occur to him that, even with tuition taken care of, allowing/forcing kids with less-than-brilliant minds to go into what used to be higher education is not the best thing for everyone concerned?

For starters, it isn't necessary. Think about how much brain power the average person's job takes. Washing dishes, for example. I used to do that. I could use ninety percent of my mind for thinking about elves and sex and listening to music and still get the job done just fine. It was great, actually, except for the low pay and no insurance. You wouldn't even need to read to be a dishwasher, much less write a college essay! Granted, not a lot of people want to be dishwashers. But the dishes need to get done, and if you're the guy who's going to wind up washing dishes anyway, isn't it a bit cruel to ask you to spend four years sitting in a desk feeling stupid first?

But that's an extreme example. Take a 'higher' function: newspaper work. I was hired by a newspaper with a sensible hiring policy when my only degree was from a high school in a hick town, and I did the job just fine (well, I didn't get fired, anyway). I had learned proper English from reading science-fiction novels; there was no reason for me to sit in a classroom and learn biology and math and all of the other crap classes they need to force students though in order to test their level of obedience and ability to swallow shit. Haven't kids learned enough shit-swallowing by the time they get out of high school? If they haven't, they'll be adept after about ten minutes on the job. Like my dad used to say, "That's why they call it work." Most desk jobs are just as mind-numbing and repetitive as the jobs they threaten you'll be stuck in if you don't piss away four years of your fleeting youth -- the only thing, as Wilde said, worth having -- paying to do something you don't want to do instead of getting paid.

The only reason I went to get my degree was because I sprouted a crazy-stoopid love for the ancient Greek and Roman world; when I realized Greek and Latin were difficult enough that I wouldn't be able to learn them myself, I took a deep breath and looked into student loans.

Well, that love has died. Thanks, grad school! See, when I got me bachelor's last spring and began peering back into the work world, my professors asked me if I wanted to stay on for a year and work for them as a teacher's assistant. My school is too shitty to have a graduate program in classics, but they said they would help me apply to real schools, and I wouldn't have to go back to waiting tables or monkeying copy. Ever.

I hate this college town with a passion, but stupidly I said yes. My professors here are funny, clever, kind people who are fun to be around. And despite having busted my ass to get the undergraduate degree (even with a teacher, Greek is really, really fucking hard, not to mention Sanskrit), I still had the idea, common in our anti-intellectual culture, that academics live a charmed life of sitting on their asses, occasionally lifting a finger to turn a page.

Ha.

Yeah, I've sat on my ass a lot, but the top half of me has been hunched over a desk, and my arms have been milling frantically as I try to get this last hundred tests graded before I can't stand it anymore and my brain forces me to drink myself to sleep.

This semester hasn't been so bad, because I've given up, so I don't do my own homework, which frees up enough time, as Bukowski said, to scratch my ass (and get it out of the chair often enough for the bedsores to recede). Also, my position is only half-time, which means I only get paid half of peanuts, but I only have one group of 300 students to pile on me instead of two, so I can go back to a bit of freelance writing, which gets much closer to paying me the legal minimum wage.

But last semester was pure 19th-century shit, except the air quality in the library was (slightly) better than what Upton Sinclair reported. Seven days a week, and I am not exaggerating (I know I exaggerate, but this is the horrible truth) I would get out of bed full of dread, knowing that I would have to start working the minute I got up, and would have to keep working till late in the evening, and I would still fall into bed way, way behind, negating the possibility that I could ever take, say, a Saturday to catch my breath.

Week after week after week after week after week after week after week after week.

Naturally I wound up having a nervous breakdown. I'm too old for this, for starters. And maybe there are some grad students who do have cushy positions. Film students, maybe. I should have gone into film. But if you have to spend any real time on your own homework, the 30 hours you're already spending on grading and shit-work on average (not to mention going to all your classes AND attending the ones you're teaching AND hanging out after those classes so the students can come up in a long line and ask you questions that are already clearly answered on the syllabus) are going to kill you dead.

One could perhaps tolerate this way of life if the shit-work taught one anything (besides the insight into how stupid most adolescents are), or at least if it didn't take so long. But you try picking up the pace when you're grading essays written by kids who can't conjugate English verbs. Or who think Zeus is real, and conflate him with Jesus. (Yes, one of the little darlings actually did this. I wonder which of the scary windowless churches in Carbondale he goes to.) Maybe one out of every 50 essays has a clear thesis supported by non-made-up evidence; one out of 200 has a scrap of entertainment value that's intentional. You try to find places where you can legitimately grant people points, if only so you have fewer complaints to deal with when the grades are released, but trying to be fair and consistent about this is satanically time-consuming.

Here's where I finally get to my point: even before Obama's well-meaning program takes effect, there are already far too many kids who are far too stupid to be going to college who have been pushed into it.

Maybe it's because the kids at the school where I teach aren't from particularly privileged backgrounds, but I dunno. If you are a child who has the I.Q. and the intellectual curiosity to belong in HIGHER EDUCATION, then you are going to find a way to develop a reasonable level of literacy just about anywhere in the industrialized world. I learned to read in central Wisconsin; George W. couldn't even learn to talk at Yale... in a system of compulsory basic education, you don't suppose it might have something to do with hardware? I somehow doubt the TAs at Harvard are having a blast reading three hundred freshman essays either.

And if you don't possess intelligence and curiosity, what the fuck are you doing in a Roman Civ class? I guess you're hoping to get to see Gladiator while you jump through the hoop.

I feel kind of sorry for the kids sometimes. They like to drink on top of being stupid; they're going to wake up with a terrible hangover, flunked-out and pursued by large loan payments. But most of the time I just want to scream at them to quit wasting everybody else's mental energy. The other week a girl decided to waste my time by demanding a conference with me outside my regular office hours to discuss why she wasn't doing better on the exams.

I asked her, "Do you take notes when you read the texts?"

"Read?"

"Uh... I'm sorry, are you too broke to buy the books?" (This is a legit problem sometimes, though the kids who really give a damn can use the campus computers to get Cicero or Caesar in translation on Gutenberg.)

"Oh, no, no, I have them." I'm thinking, Er, what are you using them for exactly? when she hits me with the punch line: "Reading just isn't my thing."

I'm not quite sure how I managed not to stomp on her foot.

And my job, shit-dealing-wise, is relatively easy compared to what the professors go through. I get most of the boring grading work, but Real Teacher is head of the complaints department. They seem OK with it most of the time, but once in a while you can smell the strain. Complaints, threats to take it to the department head, attempts to cut deals, four or five dead grandmothers... the stream of whining kids who just want to be left alone to drink beer instead of going to class that flows in and out of their offices while they're trying to parse the ancient mysteries is astounding. Last semester somebody claimed he was going to have to donate multiple internal organs to his cousin.

I want to work two jobs plus trying to write for six years so I can achieve that? Uh, I'll just wait tables and scribble, thanks. If all the subnormals who would rather be having unprotected sex are helped/forced to either go to school or shovel radioactive slime for a living, it's only going to get worse.

Even if you are smart and curious, you can only take so much of the extraneous bullshit that institutional learning fosters. Not to mention the fact that intellectual curiosity is usually a general compulsion, an urge that wants to poke its nose into everything, not just its favorite topic. Believe you me, if you spend too much time being forced to research your favorite topic exclusively (in grad school there's no time or energy for outside pursuits any more demanding than Monty Python and beer) you're going to start to hate it. This hurts. You feel hollowed out. And the day you arrive on the job for which you are now overtrained, it's already a familiar prison.

Instead of making sure everybody goes to college, and making lots of cranky would-be academics like me go insane and drop out -- and have the government pay us to do it, not to mention paying for all the extra classroom space, lost productivity from potential workers who are spending four years pretending they can read, and student sports facilities -- why doesn't somebody set up a government Office of Job-Requirement Non-Lunacy? It wouldn't cost nearly as much as putting all these kids whose thing isn't reading through four years of hell for them and hell for their instructors. You just send a couple of agents per city to go through the want ads and ticket the employers who are pushing the diploma inflation.

Agent Tom: Hm... OK, the hospital wants a surgeon with a PhD.

Agent Bill: Pass.

Tom: The high school wants a French teacher with a PhD.

Bill: Bzzzzt! Tell 'em to take anyone with at least a bachelor's into consideration, and then test them to see who can actually speak French. I suppose they can ask for a master's, but then they have to pay extra.

Tom: Next is Tony's Fine Dining. They want a server with experience.

Bill: How the hell is anyone supposed to get experience if everyone needs it? Tell 'em they need to change their ad if they don't want all their employees to be compulsive liars.

Tom: The newspaper wants a reporter with a degree in journalism.

Bill: Which one? That one? Hm... well, I hate those guys, so let 'em demand that and they'll get exactly the assholes they deserve. But the other paper... I like them, so tell 'em no. They should just ask the applicants to sit down and write something.

Tom: Here's Joe's Radioactive Slime-Shoveling Service. They want their applicants to have PhDs in Human Resources.

Bill: Heh heh heh. Good on 'em.

Overpaid and Not Doing Their Jobs, Part T-eeew: "IF I WERE A YOUNG ACTRESS AND MICKEY ROURKE WAS TRYING TO BALL ME,

2009-02-18T10:43:00.000-08:00

I WOULD AT LEAST DO MY PROFESSION THE BASIC HONOR OF TRYING TO SEEM FLATTERED."

I was really, really, REALLY looking forward to seeing The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's comeback film about a pro wrestler making a comeback. If you know me at all well then you know that I used to have rather an enticing gap between my top front teeth. (For another shortie on gap-tooth pride, see the Notes page on Liz Tamny's Facebook account.)

And then I became a mud wrestler. I know what you're thinking... but I was not an 'exotic' mud wrestler. NO! We were serious artists: this was WWF-style grapplin' that just happened to have an extra fun element of slippery mud, plus the traditional accoutrements: costumes, plots, threats, boasts, double back-flips, secret identities --I was the Incognito Mosquito, dressed like a giant bug -- heads beaten with folding chairs, and some serious, adrenaline-pumping PAIN.

Once in a while there was too much pain. The time, for example, when I fell too hard on my face and knocked out my beautiful misaligned fangs. I still don't know what made me sadder: the fact that the bemused dentist didn't even know how to restore gapped teeth on purpose, or the fact that I was asked to hang up my mask and wings. I didn't even have anyone to be angry with. We parted amicably, the Mud Wrestling Organization and I; it was simply decided that I suffered an incurable inability to respect my own physical limitations, and was therefore an insurance liability. I still root for the MWO -- they're still around, by the way, and have a web site; look 'em up, they may have some shows this spring -- but it was rather a stab to the heart.

So ten years later, they say there's gonna be a Mickey Rourke flick with a pro wrestler making a comeback? Oh, boy, I say, painting on some extra thick eyeliner. This is going to be worth walking to the mall! (The only movie theaters in this town are in the no-peds-land of the mall district, reachable only by walking along the highway or, if you're not blind, prone to panic attacks, or particularly concerned about the future, driving your SUV.) And it was worth it, just to see Rourke's performance, certes, as well as to reminisce over the joys of spandex, endorphins, and bleeding all over the place like AIDS never happened.

But two things marred my joy. One of them was my own goddamn problem, or at the limit, the problem of the U.S. Air Force. What Rourke's character, Randy the Ram (better than my moniker, I have to admit) is coming back from is a heart attack, and anything related to heart problems has got to be my number-one neurosis. If I see somebody else clutch at their chest I immediately get chest pains. Whenever I have a stomachache (which is almost always), part of my brain is constantly pulling on the panic cord labeled "BIZARRE SENSATION IN CHEST AREA! DYING DYING DYING!" I still can barely choke down eggs, even though they've figured out that there's something unsticky about their brand of cholesterol. Thanks for ruining a perfectly good foodstuff for me, Air Force.

The reason I blame this on the U.S. Air Force rather than on my parents, who should have NEVER told me that I had a heart murmur as a baby (I was premature, so it was par for the course, and it fixed itself, so there was no reason I had to know), is because the AF lied about my grandfather, whom they drafted when he was very young, and who went on to remain in their employ until he died of his fifth heart attack, at the age of 52. This did not occur because heart disease runs in my family. It was because of a strange heart defect particular to Grampa. (God, my palms are sweating just typing the word 'heart' so many times.) The Air Force doctors knew this; however, if they had told anyone about it they would have had to release him from their service, and he was a very good, uncomplaining, hardworking piece of cannon fodder. So they let everyone in my family walk around thinking our hearts were time bombs. Is it any wonder I didn't give a damn if you broke a window over my head? They didn't release this piece of information till well after my gap was gone, the fuckers. (I suppose we should have figured something was amiss when neither my dad nor any of his eight siblings suffered a heart attack for the next thirty years, but neurosis can eat up a lot of brain space.)

They also waited till my chest-fear was lodged far too firmly in place to ever get anything but temporary relief, from heavy applications of flesh-wounding and/or alcohol. So imagine my willies when I had to sit there watching a method actor do chest pains for two hours. I have never been so fruck out that I had to leave a good movie prior to this, but at some point during the SPOILER ALERT, SORT OF final scene of The Wrestler, closing my eyes didn't work anymore, and I had to stand outside the door and wait till it sounded like things had either turned out all right for the Ram Man, or not.

But all in all, the movie would have been top-notch fucking cool, if it hadn't been for the execrable performance of the lump who played the Ram's estranged daughter. Evan Rachel Wood, as young as she is, already wears the chronically bitchy, moron-being-sarcastic facial expression of a mad divorced suburbanite. So how is she supposed to amp it up to look situationally pissed off at an absentee, mane-bleaching father? I don't know how this rat-faced no-talent got this job, but she completely ruined the scene where she's supposed to be bitching the Ram out for the last time and telling him to go away forever. She doesn't look hurt in it -- she just looks mean. She probably puts sand in her boyfriends' underwear. She looks like her real-life father has been spit-polishing her ass for her with a soft cloth from the word go.

So the day after I see the movie, after a night of forcing everyone in shouting range to listen to me talk about it, I venture back to the Mall Zone to hit the grocery store. And on a tabloid cover in the check-out line I find a dangerous piece of evidence favoring the disfavored science-ish of physiognomy: Hey, Evan Rachel Wood really is kind of mean! Apparently she went to a movie-star party with Mickey Rourke, where he got drunk and pawed her (why he was doing that when he could have been drinking more for free is beyond me, but that's outside the scope of this essay), and people started to speculate that maybe she was seeing him. Her response: "I'm not attracted to him, he's too old for me." Does she have the faintest idea how unprofessional this makes her sound? She is, apparently, not at all turned on by a master of her own supposed craft. And she flaunts it!

OK, fine, so his fingernails in that film looked a little less than pretty. But for all I know he did something to them on purpose to make them look fucked-up because he figured that's the way the Ram's hands would look. That's the point! He's an actor! He's like the Ram -- he will do anything he has to to make the art exactly right! Bitch, you can't even fake-cry without making me laugh, and you think the world is going to give a damn whether you think the master is too old to be sexy? Christ! I'll concede that, if you aren't attracted to somebody, you can't do anything about it. But you're supposed to be an actor! You could have sucked on his ear, gone in the bathroom, gargled some Listerine, pretended you were still hung up on your ex Marilyn Manson (aim your own smart-ass comment at that barrel of fish), purred 'Tempting, but no!' and we would have been none the wiser. Dumbass.

(P.S. Marisa Tomei was pretty terrific in that film, too, but since she didn't say anything stupid nobody seems to be talking about her. Sorry, Marisa.)

Feel free to mock the Sanskrit periods that showed up in my NPR post now: An ex-proofreader vs. Rick Moody

2009-02-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

So I already knew Rick Moody was kind of a cunt; not only did he declare that he didn’t like any of the music-hall stuff on the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, but I was young and dumb enough once to take a college creative writing course, where I was force-fed part of his first novel. This made me feel a little bit less like a cunt myself when I joined the ULA and Karl Wenclas mandated Pavlovian training to make us vomit every time Moody’s name got mentioned; at least I knew what I was vomiting about. But I never had worked up the nerve to read The Ice Storm... until this weekend, when I force-fed it to myself.

See, in my second novel (out late this year on Nine-Banded Books), there also chances to be an ice storm; as a backdrop to my fictional action I was following, with reasonable faithfulness, local and global public events of the winter of 2006-2007, and the damn thing went and occurred. Two of them, actually. It would have been awkward to write around them, so I didn’t. And at some point I gave in to the nagging reality that Moody’s book is, unfortunately, known to enough people that I would have to at least try to turn my ice storm into a bit of a Moody joke, or at least get familiar enough with his text to stop the joke from being on me. So, grumbling, I trudged to the library, because I’ll be damned if I’m giving any money to a so-called Mag Fields fan who can actually suspend his depression long enough to sucker-punch showtunes, for Christ’s sake.

To my relief, not only did Moody not wring all metaphorical possibilities from the subject, he also didn't waste my time completely. Frankly, I expected The Ice Storm to be a lot more boring than it was. Sure, I could have spent that time better. Yes, I had to do some drinking to get all the way through it. But it was nowhere near the torment that followed when I was dumb enough to volunteer to review the second Dave Eggers novel for the Chicago Reader. ( I thought I was going to have to cave my frontal lobes in with a Sanskrit dictionary to get through that one.)

Moody’s second novel was actually entertaining in parts. I laughed out loud once. It even had a reasonably workmanlike structure, despite the occasional mechanical peek through the fourth wall on the part of the pompous narrator (was his pompousness supposed to be funny? Was the tacked-on feeling of these peeks meant as a spoof on the overuse of metafiction? I doubt it); despite the overwritten bits, despite the underwritten ones; despite the pointless concealment of the narrator’s identity as the family’s eldest son and this fact's tiresome revelation at the end (no shit, Holden!)...

OK, so it wasn’t what I would call good. But I had to admit it was better than reading nothing at all. I definitely would not have preferred staring at the wall. And the above are complaints that could be lodged against any number of overrated writers; the experience reminded me that ‘overrated’ is not a shorter way to say ‘devoid of merit.’

And yet, by the time I was finished, I was pissed off and actually kind of shocked. Sure, I laughed once – but that’s nowhere near as often as I choked on a typo. Has nobody else noticed all the errors in this novel? For fuck’s sake, did he publish it himself? My first novel has a couple of typos – but I’m the only one who read it before it went up as a POD, and by the time the sample copy came in the mail I was so goddamn sick of it I didn’t open it for a month. But people presumably got paid to keep Moody from looking stupid. Even my cost-free typos make me feel a bit ill. Did he gasp with horror when he saw the finished work? Did he show up at the publishing house a week after it came out, grab some underpaid copy monkey by the collar, and shake it till its ears rang? (Did the Carbondale university library, which always finds funds for physical refurbishments but not for books, get its copy from the ‘not-quite-perfect’ bin? Always a possibility...)

Actually, part of me hopes he did go in and raise hell. When I was a copy monkey, I would have never gotten away with letting a supposedly major author go to print saying things like “These last eight pages were enough to life Paul Hood from the murky bog of self-recrimination” (p. 193) and “The worse such storm in thirty years, according to Mike Powers, spokesman for Connecticut Light and Power.” Come ON, copy monkey! And come on, Rick! OK, so the first example was almost certainly somebody else’s typo; it’s the kind of thing that happens, however unfortunately. And I suppose ‘worse’ could be meant as a direct quotation from Mr. Powers. But it ain’t in quotes, buddy! Fuck! At least try to look like you know what you’re doing! I know how to use the superlative in eight different languages, you can’t do it in one, and I’m sitting down HERE while you’re sitting up THERE?! Don’t even bother to ponder the mystery of whether there’s a god, Rick. ‘NO’ has left its fingerprints everywhere.

Of course, these are petty errors. Whadya want, I'm an old monkey. I can't stop feeling nebulous Catholic guilt either. I suppose a fan might even consider infractions like 'worse' to be charmingly human (why is ‘human’ so often used as a compliment?). But these are but a representative fraction of the typo-age, and I’ve saved the real fuck-up for last.

Dorothy Halford, the hostess of a suburban key party (which is as tiresome as it sounds) is described, on page 107, in a fashionably incomplete sentence, as: “No makeup.” OK. So she’s a minor character, and you’re trying to say something about her personality with one efficient, tangible detail. And we all slip in the odd incomplete sentence once in a while, especially when we’re trying to remind reviewers of how streamlined and energetic and muscular we are as we move four-gram plastic keys up and down. Fair enough. But we shouldn’t employ techniques like this quite so mechanically, so easily, so... so... so ‘just-how-drunk-were-you, Rick?’-ily that we forget ourselves and, a mere eight pages later, toss off another admirably efficient snapshot of the same character by claiming that “For a moment she was frozen, with her carefully lipsticked mouth open wide...”

I guess we’re to take the fact that she carefully lipsticks her mouth as a slam on her character, since worthy people -- literary geniuses for instance -- are never so clench-pussied as to be careful about anything. I know, I know... my old job as a proofreader doesn’t exist anymore. The general public doesn’t need, want, or care about people who read every line to make sure it’s pretty. I see their point; if an emoticon is worth a thousand love poems, does a missing comma keep anybody who isn’t being deliberately obtuse from catching anyone else’s drift?

But think about it, Dicky. What non-nerd reads novels anymore anyway, now that Hollywood can put Beowulf in an ass-kicking (I say this without a hint of sarcasm) CGI epic? That’s right: a rising proportion of the book audience will now be made of nit-picking shits like me. People to whom typos are as painful as a Bic spattered on a Renoir (even if it’s not actually a Renoir, but Dogs Playing Poker). Think about it. You’ve made your pile, I suppose, and we can’t take that away from you, unless we become exotic dancers. But I’m going to go proofread my new book again now, before carefully attributing an example of ignorant-sounding use of the language to a radio announcer during my own ice storm. Most writers, darling, frozen or not, can’t afford to be floppy.

The polis, it's important, who knew?

2009-01-18T07:49:00.000-08:00

It wasn't until the day after Obama got elected that I figured out what Bush fans were so wet about.

Like everyone else in the country I had a hangover of one kind or another, and as I walked to work through the grey November pines -- though everything in my personal life was exactly the same as the day before -- I felt happy. I hadn't felt so -- what was I feeling? -- call it 'non-overwhelmed-by-dread' in, oh, exactly eight years. For all our shouting about democracy worldwide, we had finally elected somebody democratically. No suspicious voting machines, no brothers in Florida, no 'we're just a banana republic that takes four days to fly over at Christmas' routine; sure, as usual, the guy with the most money won, but this time it was in large part money taken from small donors.

And he was the first minority president, which not only sounds cool on paper, and does a bit to repair our world image as the last Western power to give up literal slavery, and probably makes a lot of people feel less hopeless -- though, unless we have O's brilliance and charm, we should all feel hopeless -- but, tactically speaking, I think it also blunted the elector-scaring sting of that very, threatening, brilliance.

I'd like to think people have learned something from the eight years of misery that resulted from casting enough votes for the fake-cool moron that he could fudge his way into power. But it can't have hurt that Obama, unlike poor old robotic Gore, had a bit of street talk to throw in -- just as populist and far less cringe-worthy than Bush's attempts to look like a '50s-fantasy ranch hand -- and an 'I'm down' card to play against his geekiness. Which is charming to me, but that's probably why I spent half of junior high in the school nurse's office.

In other words, even though I'm not black, I suddenly got the profoundly un-alienating feeling that the new guy -- the new guy in charge of the most important job in my country, theoretically -- is... well, he's one of us. Not that I'm claiming to be that bright. But I think of thinking as an important thing. Clearly, it's a fundamental part of his life, the internal weighing of these 'fancy words'.

So my brain, in its comfy and vulnerable state of civic happiness, found itself admitting: hyuk, it's really cool that I could maybe have a conversation with the new president without him falling asleep. I mean, the guy doesn't just know what a rising tricolon is -- he can form them on the fly in debate. He could likely tell me something I don't know about the history of rhetoric. He could tell me a lot of things I don't know, probably. He's the king of the geeks! All Bush could have told me was a bunch of stuff I don't want to know -- his frat's secret handshake, the pattern of freckles on his wife's thigh (well, maybe; something tells me he's not that observant) -- and things I only want to know out of morbid curiosity, like why the hell he did all that insane shit.

He's one of us. Of course, this is Obama's advertising ploy; people very unlike me fell for it the same way. It was Bush's basic line, too; it's every politician's advertising gimmick, at base. It's just that this is the first time the old line has rung true for me -- 'Is it a gimmick, or is he a real, decent person, the way we all consider ourselves to be, however far we may fall outside our perception of the majority norm?' -- and then the guy goes and wins.

And suddenly -- now that I'm safe in the bosom of one of us, and he hasn't had a chance to screw anything up yet -- I have the psychological space to form the thought: shit. Having a psycho in charge of everything made me a lot more nervous than I thought. No wonder I have fake heart attacks every other day.

For the past eight years I have paid as little attention to the larger polis as I possibly can and still call myself a homo sapiens sapiens. I didn't realize it, but I was trying to convince myself that with six billion people on the planet, unless you're actually living in a place the maniac queen bee of your hive is incorrectly bombing, the direct influence on each of us is so diluted that it really doesn't matter that much. It's awful in the abstract (poor dead Iraqi babies; poor victims of attacks by actual terrorists; poor neighbor I don't talk to who lost his kid), but me, hey, I got my friends, and they're decent people. I can just do my job, read Latin, hide in my mental hole, I'm fine...

HEY, ASSHOLE! If you're hiding in a mental hole, you aren't fine.

Just because you aren't literally being shot at doesn't mean you can let the polis go to hell and survive. You can survive as a body, sure. Hooray for your feet, I'm sure they're consciously glad to be alive. But what about you? Do you like waking up every day knowing that your hive is doing insane shit and taxing you to do it and not giving you anything back and the economy is tanking, but hey, you've never been a go-getter anyway and you somehow get the Internet bill paid so you and your long-distance buddies can talk about Red Dwarf, it's OK, it's OK, it's OK...

Well, I guess that delusion was what kept the geek army from revolting. Too bad for the dead Iraqi babies. But what are you going to do -- run out on the White House lawn ostentatiously protesting and then get ostentatiously shot?

It's no secret that self-delusion keeps people alive and meekly carrying on. But once in a while, when you're safe not to delude yourself... the deepness of the breath you suddenly suck in makes you mourn the time you spent shoving the scared thoughts down. Creepy Mao-style T-shirts aside, Obama is a man and therefore will fuck up, perhaps enormously, before he's done. But there's a difference between the possible fuck-ups of what now appears to be a pretty great man, for a man (please let my cynicism be merely the product of habit this time), and the inevitable, what-were-we-thinking, shoulda-seen-this-coming fuck-ups of a privileged subnormal who had no business running a hot dog stand.

God, I could kick myself for not setting things on fire eight years ago, when the Constitution began flaming anyway. Ye gods! I can say that now and not start to panic, and not shut my brain down, because it's the beginning of the end! -- You caught the double entendre? Congratulations. Yeah, we could still go down the drink, but at least we won't have Captain Civic Shame at the helm.

The polis is part of you, whether you asked for it or not. No matter how cynical you feel about particular politicians, or politicians in general -- and despite, when you look at it straight, the actual meaninglessness of biological life -- there is an abstract romance one has with one's world; the ability to feel straightforwardly is what keeps us more than merely breathing. When that romance is impossible, when you are a mere cog in a mad hive, not being bombed is not such an honor. You're still being strangled.

2009-01-10T19:11:00.001-08:00

I promised, and I deliver – which would be much more exciting if anyone cared, but at any rate here’s my short but sweet e-mail friendship with an NPR employee who I would bet money was named after Alan Alda।

Attn: book reviewers: John Kennedy Toole reincarnate... briefly

Now, we all might intuit that the parlor pinks of National Public Radio could give a rat’s ass about writers who aren’t already hip and safely encased in a charming Manhattan two-bed -- but now we have proof। Although, as my dear friend Brendan of the Royal Pines told me, “This is a good-e-mail, Ann, but I bet they get crackpot shit like this every day।” (I mention that he’s a dear friend because no other kind of entity that likes heshit’s face arranged the way it is currently should say that kind of thing to a Capricorn।) This is the sole attempt at publicizing my first novel for which I found time in fall 2008, while I was being worked (or working myself – it’s finally occurred to me that the one good thing about the amount of unpaid labor involved in a graduate degree is that, since it’s unpaid, you’re free to flunk or walk away) into a bilious pulp (not to mention butterfly net number three)।

-------------- Original Text -----------------Date : 9/14/2008 11:17:16 AM

Dear NPR,
After my habit of blathering about suicide while in my cups got me chucked in the looney bin twice during the four years it’s taken to get no response at all, from any editor at any level of the publishing industry, to my first novel -- a murder-mystery spoof about, ironically enough, the corruption of the newspaper industry -- (deep breath) I have given up and self-published the poor thing as a POD on Amazon।com। Now I would like to emotionally blackmail you into reviewing it। However, budget considerations such as the rising price of bread and peanut butter make it seem wise to send an e-mail asking whether there’s a chance in hell you’ll read the book before I pay Amazon.com too much money to send you a copy. So RSVP. If you’ve read this far, perhaps you would like to see the ad copy I wrote for Amazon:

“Join Edgar Rodger, a fledgling private eye and former murder-desk rewrite man for a Chicago daily, as he descends into the bizarre world of the city’s favorite artsy-cultural alternative weekly paper. Inspired equally by Wodehouse and Chandler, Girl Detectives lightens the murder-mystery brew with social satire and sick slapstick as it conjures up a fun-house milieu where nobody can seem to be themselves -- not even a corpse. Kimmie Wrigley, a functional illiterate whose family fortune helped her skate into a job as a Chiculture staff writer, was driving her editor to drink when she disappeared. She was also busy stealing a man from Maurinette Meede, the imperious, blue-blooded food critic. But the paper’s proofreaders -- all slightly unhinged by their intellectual dead-end jobs -- also hated the dopey heiress on principle. With so many potential killers, there’s only one thing for Rodger to do: blackmail them till they sign on as deputy detectives and rat each other out.”

If that doesn’t pique your interest, I guess I’ll go work on my second novel -- which is better than Girl Detectives and nearly finished despite my exhausting job, thank you very much -- or cry।

Yours,
Ann K।F. Sterzinger
Dear Ann,
Thank you for contacting NPR’s All Things Considered.
NPR welcomes the sharing of thoughtful diverse perspectives and occasionally provides on-air "reviews." To submit material for consideration, please send to:
All Things Considered
NPR 635 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
Please note that a submission does not guarantee an on-air review. Material submitted will not be returned. If we have further questions about your submission, we will contact you.
Thank you for listening to All Things Considered, and for your continued support of public broadcasting. For the latest news and information, visit NPR.org.
Sincerely,

Alan, NPR Services
NPR invites you to join its audience advisory panel, NPR Listens.Learn more at http://www.npr.org/listens/

Charming, but I never wrote him back. After all, he would never remember which of his crackpot pen friends I was. And anyway, the only thing I could think of to say – well, the only relatively civil thing – would be:

Hey, Alan:
What the fuck are the scare quotes around “reviews” about? Is “spoken” “language” not “really” “language” – or are you saying they’re not actually reviews at all, but mini puff pieces about NPR employees’ kids? Yeah, I thought so। Well, at least you didn’t call the cops...

xoxoxox,
RADAR

Hearing myself type

2008-12-20T10:01:00.000-08:00

Ok, so here I am! Selling myself! First post! Go! OK!

...

Shit, I should have picked a subject for this blog.

I mean, a subject besides my books. I've only written two. That's not a lot to talk about -- particularly if you consider the spoiler-avoidance factor.

When I was 31 or 32 and trying to sell my first novel I started thinking about suicide a lot. It gets expensive to mail sample chapters to publishers, and if you send them an e-mail you worry that it didn't get there, but actually you know that they're just ignoring you because you are one of the approximately 20 percent of the 6 billion humans on this planet who are trying to get someone to publish their books, and they haven't heard of you, and they don't have the time it takes to read the sentence or two that will let them know whether you're Schopenhauer-approved or a rambling shithead.

It's a hopeless waste of time, money, and energy. It's like trying to hit a pinata, only the pinata isn't actually there, and the blindfold is soaked in chloroform, and the last thing you hear before you pass out again is Joyce Carol Oates laughing at you.

In four years of trying, I had one indie publisher, once, ask to see a full manuscript. I sent it. I felt hope -- what a moron. I waited month after month with no response. Finally, after several more e-mail queries, they sent me a form rejection.

Thaaaaaaat episode of our show ended in Loony Bin Field Trip #1.

So I told myself, OK. Life is painful and failure is humiliating. I only expect you to take just so much of this, kiddo. If you still haven't published a novel by the time you're 35, and it still hurts you this much, I am going to squelch the curiosity that is keeping us in this mortal coil (will the Packers EVER win another Super Bowl? Oh, so close! Guess I'll drag the corpse around another year...) and give in to your urge to do whatever it takes to check out of Hotel Hell-Planet.

So this summer, as I nervously approached 34, I found out that Amazon.com will charge you very little to put your book up as a publish-on-demand sort of thing. You get to design your own cover, set your own price, ya-ta-ta-ta... and they just take the production costs as part of what they take out of your cover price. The rest is yours. Granted, they probably take out about 500 times what it costs to actually print the thing... and my paranoid Googling resulted in lots of hits on people saying that Amazon is evyl, that they force small publishers to do something or other, that they stomp on the small press...

To which I said, "Good." It was a small press that put me over the edge. It was a small press that ripped off Lisa Falour when she wrote her autobiography. Small presses, no less than large presses, generally release crap, and they generally release crap by their friends, and isn't the market clogged enough? It's a small press that put out the crappy book of a former acquaintence, who is smug. So fuck 'em.

And so I put my fabulous novel (Girl Detectives, a sort of murder mystery/old-school British farce hybrid) up as a POD, sticking out my little pink tongue. And then I got too swamped by my job to do anything to promote it. (Except write a suicide e-mail to NPR, with mildy ironic results -- see it in my next post!)

I was busy asking myself whether this POD thing meant I had to go on living after 35 even if I never really got anything published, when I got stuck in the looney bin again after having a Thanksgiving breakdown. After I got out of the hospital, for some reason I could not make myself leave the house before dark for a week, so I called in to work nuts. Maybe it was because I hated the people I was working for because they overloaded me till I lost my head, but I knew that my immediate supervisors were actually nice people who were underfunded -- they told me they really should have three people to do my job; they genuinely seemed to wish they could treat me more humanely (not that they did much about it), so I wanted to wait to put myself back in contact with them till I could be civil without short-circuiting. (Although that theory admittedly doesn't explain the overwhelming aversion to daylight.)

This was a really odd time for Chip Smith (Hoover Hog, Nine Banded Books) to pick to e-mail me and ask how I was doing.

I'm surprised I got out of bed to check my e-mail that week, actually.

Must have been bored on the way back from the toilet.

Anyway, he tells me about this publishing company he's started (see above). I've only met the guy face to face once, and we were both too drunk to talk, but we read each other's zines back in the 1990s, and... you can guess where this is headed...

It's the only way anybody not to the manor born ever gets published, it seems. Somebody you've known for a long time starts a company and asks if you've got a manuscript. I always figured that, if it ever happened, this is how it would go. I just thought I'd be a little more bashful about the irony, having spent my adult life seething over nepotism.

However, I honestly admired the prose in the books Chip sent me that he had already published; for example Bradley Smith, who wrote The Man Who Saw His Own Liver, is a novelist who's practically a poet, but he doesn't bash you over the head with it; there's a thick bed of thought under the pretty words, and he's entertaining. And I've always thought Chip was a good writer himself. Nine Banded Books is exactly the kind of project I want to be associated with. (Except for the fact that it's not large and powerful, of course, but even after four years of nut hatches and empty bottles, I still have some pride: I ain't swinging at the damn pinata no more.) And it's not like we were college roommates or drinking buddies or cousins. I'm thinking: maybe he's one of those mythical, leprechaun-type people who publish books because they actually LIKE THEM -- not because they seem marketable, or are about Bettie Paige, or because they owe somebody a favor; and without necessarily knowing the authors well enough to know whether they'll like them personally. He knew me just well enough that I didn't happen to have to sit and wait on his slush pile.

So... we're still sending the contract around in the mail, and I'm still finishing the damn thing, but it looks like... well, unless something goes wrong (always likely), I'm either going to have to go on stumbling around this jolly globe, or renegotiate my suicide deal. Sorry, gang! Maybe I'll help reduce the population some other time.