In which I take the words of an old friend woefully out of context.
Actually, I probably shouldn’t refer to Rob as an “old” friend. I’ve known him longer than almost anyone I know now outside of family, true; Phil’s the only one who beats him, and that’s only due to a chance encounter when I went up to Oberlin my senior year of high school as a prospective. (“Is that ‘Memories of Green’? I said, and he looked up from the piano and said, “Why, yes. Yes, it is.”) —Rob was (briefly) in my froshling Russian class, first semester, and I actually officially met him when I responded to an Infosys post about a neat-sounding PBM game. He sold me his position, which I never did anything with, and later on when he was shedding all his Heinlein books I bought his copy of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Not because I had an especial thing for Heinlein—as all liberal SF aficionados must, I’d shed him like an old coat, leaving only “The Menace from Earth” and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress behind, and Spacesuit, because the protagonist’s name is, um, Kip.
But that was all a long time ago, and while I dropped out and wandered off this way for a bit, he headed off yonder, and our paths have crossed only a couple of times since, in the occasional Seattle living room. And we can argue all night about whether you ever really change or just become more of who you always already were—I’m pomo enough to know that things look different from different points of view, and so while I might shrug and shake my head and say (with some little wistfulness) that he’s gone through the looking glass and over the edge off the deep end, he’d smile (I’d like to think he’d smile) and tell you I’d always had too much heart and not enough head, and what there was was woolly, at that. (Of course, by that standard, Giordano Bruno was postmodern. But I digress.) —The facts on the ground are this: he’s pretty much as right-wing and reactionary as you can get from my linchinography, he is by a long shot, and he’s only there because I knew him when, and he knows jokes that most of you don’t, and it was through him I met Elkins and Barry and Phil (again), and through them everybody else; without him, I wouldn’t be who I am today. A link on a blogroll is chickenfeed, next to that.
(Charles? Charles had the room under me, froshling year, and borrowed my copy of The Darkest Road, and he still swears Carl Muckenhoupt was the one who broke my slinky. So I would still have met Charles, and could have through him everyone else etc. But that’s not how it happened. So Rob gets the glory, and the blame.)
This is what Rob had to say, in another context, just recently:
You are certainly entitled to treat other people as you see fit.
The broad political grouping that I find myself a part of has adopted a different approach. We don’t all agree on everything, but we have agreed to support one another on the issues that we do agree on. And, as part of our compact, we each try our best to refrain from casting aspersions at one another—so I don’t call my bozo fundamentalist friends bozos, for example. It makes coalition building much more effective, as we’re able to reach out to groups with whom we have any common ground at all.
Other political groupings adopt a different strategy—one where ideological purity on a wide range of issues is required before there can be any cooperation, mutual respect, or basic courtesy. This prevents idiosyncrasy and heresy from infecting the loyal troops; you can’t be infected by the evil meme if you drive off the memebearers with vitriol.
So far, my side has taken control of the government, is setting the national and regional agenda on many-to-most of the items that are important to us, and is daily making huge inroads on the popular culture.
How’s your side doing?
Well, we aren’t trying to get Alberto Gonzalez in as Attorney General. That’s how we’re doing.
Leaving aside the stark fact any fule kno—that utilitarian arguments for torture crumble before its staggering uselessness as a means of generating trustworthy, actionable intelligence—there’s the craven, callow figure of a man Gonzalez presents, willing to bend any rule, write any memo, fill out any form that does what his boss wants done. Forget, for a moment, torture: Alberto Gonzalez, attorney, judge, Republican, insouciantly opined that the President could “set aside” whatever quaint laws got in his way—thereby setting aside almost 800 years of common law pretty much because a few bad apples might otherwise rough up the ride a little.
A woolly-headed socialist with anarcho-syndicalist leanings shouldn’t have to remind a libertarian what happens when you grant a government powers like that.
And maybe my “side” does demand a certain ideological purity, comparatively speaking; maybe doing so means we’ve pretty much lost on this one, and we’ll have Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and the sick-making transposition of an “n” for a “q” in today’s Times will prove a harbinger, not a typo, and we’ll be talking about the horrible photos coming out of Evin in a couple of years. Maybe that’s not how it will happen. I don’t know. But whatever happens, however it happens, I’ll know I never valued liberty so lightly that I’d toss it out the window at the first sign of trouble. I’d know I still thought some ideals were worth a suicide pact. Torture is wrong; we should never, ever do it; anyone who ever tried to write it off as no big deal for whatever reason has no business as our Attorney General—and if my “side” fails to prevent that from coming to pass, well, that’s something we’ll have to live with, yes, but at least we’ll know where we stood, and for what.
And it says something cold and horrible that I even have to say these words, and take this stand. But anyway, that’s how we’re doing. Or what it looks like, from where I’m at.
X had been the editor of Upton Sinclair’s EPIC News, a political newsletter with a peak circulation of two million, and one of six men chosen by Sinclair to write a constitution for EPIC in 1935 as it set out to become a nationwide movement. Clearly this young man was no mere fellow traveler and certainly not “the moderate Democrat” he would claim to have been when he once referred to this otherwise deleted section of his curriculum vitæ. No, he was the genuine article, a ’30s radical leftist, and his name was Robert Heinlein.
—Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of
Leather.
Apparently, that’s the traditional type of gift one gets and gives on the third anniversary. (The modern? Crystal, or glass. There’s a moral to be drawn, if you’re so inclined.)
I’ve been at this for three years now, which is roughly a twelfth of my existence, which doesn’t sound too bad, I guess, you put it that way.
Trying to move it all over to another server and use WordPress instead and prevent another round of galloping linkrot and maybe redesign the whole shooting match while I’m at it which means I’m trapped in an another round of why am I doing this again and what is it I’m doing, anyway, and wouldn’t I have more fun if I just committed to the shallow end of the cult stud game instead of trying to come off like a second-rate Rude Poor Man, except then I feel like I haven’t done the reading, which is usually why I fall back on coming off like a second-rate etc., and anyway shouldn’t I be doing more local politics? And culture? I could have sworn there was a resolution around here somewhere to that effect. Oh, and since the day job went back to what passes for normal, I’ve been trying to do more non-whateverthisis writing. Like City of Roses. Good God, has it really been that long?
Which would explain the relative silence hereabouts of late in part, I guess.
(No, it’s not pretty. It never is. Nor does it help to realize Barbellion said pretty much what I’m trying to say 102 years ago, or thereabouts.)
So.
Um.
Oh, head over here for some photos of our cats, and me in my new silly hat; “Hänger Långsamt I Luften,” “Raining Twilight Coast,” “Red Rain,” “Polchasa,” “Ask DNA,” “Caught Making Love,” “Dead,” “Letter to a John,” “Filipino Box Spring Hog,” “Pigeon Toes,” and let’s throw in the Nappy Roots / Mountain Goats mashup, since it’s fun; vote in the Koufax Awards, where I think I’m up for best writing, but also, I got nominated for a Perranoski for design, so vote there, too, I guess, and, um, I’ll be back. Browse the archives, or hit the blogroll, or, hell, you know how this works.
Out of curiosity.
Why am I suddenly overwhelmed (to the tune of over 300 hits before 9 AM Pacific) by requests for the meaning of IOKIYAR?
The year in review:
This, too, shall pass.
Whipsaw.
There’s a woman copping a smoke in the doorway of a building one stop up from where I get off. It’s right next to a Men’s Wearhouse. The windows are done up for Christmas already: one of those foxily silver male models looms in a window-filling poster, dapper in a dark suit, holding up a puppy with a big red bow around its neck. The next window over, he’s casual in a den somewhere, a nice bright sweater, a mug of something hot and spiced in one hand. He’s wearing the same airbrushed grin in both shots, and not a silver strand is out of place: a metrosexual CEO, his hands never dirty, his lucre never dreaming of filth. Someone just like him was hanging in those windows last year, and the year before that: the river is never the same, but it takes a while to wear a loop into an oxbow. As it were. I mean, it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet, but here’s the Christmas swag; the Payless down the street got its holly-swaddled signs up the Friday before Hallowe’en. I ought to be livid. It’s one of the harmless little things I let myself blow up over. (Not until Black Friday, people! Please.) But I’m not. I’m not. —And her? She’s standing there in her business drag, blowing smoke: taking a break from answering the phones, stepping and fetching, an early morning deathly dull sales conference with successorized PowerPoints, trying to sort 500 boxes of document production for the upcoming class-action suit. She might have been copping a smoke there yesterday, too, or last week, or the year before; maybe I just never registered her. Maybe I never looked up in time. Maybe her schedule changed; maybe she just started here. Maybe she was working in Tualatin last week. The river is never the same, but how different is it, really? A little ripple here, that’s gone before you know it? A different twig rolling down the current than the one that was there a minute ago? The scree shifted a little when you weren’t looking? What does any of that matter? Don’t these people realize Everything Changed last week? Don’t they see what happened? Doesn’t anyone?
The second of November, 2004: and nothing was ever the same again.
And sometimes what I’m listening to is Paul’s band, Arms; a lot of the time what I’m listening to specifically is “Build on the 9s.” And yes, I know, the song is built out of nine sections, and no take was ever more than nine bars long, and they chopped it all up and edited it back together, and they’re singing “Build on the 9s, build on the 9s,” because, you know, that’s what they were doing. But they recorded it in 1999, when the tail wind that carried us through that decade hadn’t yet begun to sputter, and even if a decade is a wholly artificial demarcation, a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas (important events, and important ideas), and just when did the ’90s begin, anyway? The World Wide Web? Clinton’s inauguration? “Right Here, Right Now”? That night the Wall came down? —Remember when all our wars were going to be for the right reasons? (They weren’t, but remember?) Remember when we were going to abolish stupid work and outsource ourselves in our pyjamas? (We never really could, but remember?) Remember when somebody would show up at your cubicle with an orange messenger bag full of DVDs and ice cream you’d just ordered online? When the hit TV show was “Northern Exposure”? When we were all going to move to Prague and become uncitizens of the Middle World? Remember when the clouds finally looked like they were lifting and the sunlight lit up the sky and the drums kicked in and then they blew that amazing horn break that sounded like it was going to last forever? Remember when we were going to save the world?
Those are the nines, right there: nine one, nine oh, nine three, nine five, all the way up to ninety-fuckin’-nine. (Eight nine, even, and the Wall, coming down. There’s a photo of me somewhere, with a ponytail, in the long dark coat I still wear to work when it’s cold, chipping away at that Wall with a hammer and chisel. When I was six or maybe five we went through Checkpoint Charlie and Mom was told she couldn’t photograph an old bombed-out church in East Berlin, so she turned around and caught its ruined reflection in the oranged glass cladding of the people’s office box across the street. —My God. Was it all really that long ago?) —Build on those nines, dammit: and the song lurches in its engagingly undrunken way from nine-bar to nine-bar, and all those names come thundering through the speakers, universal in their particularity. The increasing us and the decreasing them. The past didn’t go anywhere! The nines are still here, all about us. Build on them!
And I’m listening to that because it’s something I need to know, here and now. It’s easy to forget.
Remember Y2K? Remember why we were gonna party like it was 1999?
The twelfth of December, 2000: and nothing was ever the same again.
Later than eleven
Trying to make the earth into a heaven
So, yeah: saving is what misers do, and there’s something else I’m listening to, when I’m not listening to that. What I’m listening to is the Mountain Goats, and specifically what I’m listening to is “The Plague.”
There will be cotton clouds
Above the fields, as white as cream
There will be loud singing in the churches
As we all come out to take one for the team
And all our great schemes and plans
Will slip like fishes from our hands
And the rivers will all turn to blood
Frogs will fall from the sky
And the plague will cover
The country with its anger
La la la la
La la la
La la la
Premature, perhaps, but.
HYDRIOTAPHIA.
ENTIERRO DE LA URNA;
O, Un DISCURSO De las URNAS De SEPULCHRAL ENCONTRADO ÚLTIMAMENTE EN NORFOLK.
A mi amigo digno y honorado,
Thos. Le Gros, de Crostwick, Esq.
La gallina el pyre general estaba hacia fuera, y el valediction pasado encima, los hombres tomó durar adieu de su interred a amigos, esperando poco que la curiosidad de las edades futuras debe comentar sobre sus cenizas; y, no teniendo ninguna vieja experiencia de la duración de sus relicks, llevada a cabo ninguna opinión de tales despue’s-consideraciones.
¿Pero quién sabe el sino de sus huesos, o cómo él debe a menudo ser enterrada? ¿Quién hath el oráculo de sus cenizas, o whither él debe ser dispersada? Los relicks de muchos mentira como las ruinas de Pompey, en todas las partes de la tierra; y cuando llegan sus manos éstos pueden parecerse ahan vagado lejos, que, en un recorrido directo y meridiano, tenga solamente pocas millas de tierra sabida entre se y el poste.
Not quite right. I shall try again, in the morning.
Winning friends; influencing people.
Y’know, Ted—can I call you Ted? Ted, I could, if I wanted, thank you, for finally giving me a glimpse of what it is y’all think you see when you take a look at Kerry; I could sneer at you, and tell you that your partisan ideal of God is a pathetically transparent crutch, devoid of mystery and grace, part and parcel of the exclusionary rhetoric that has so bitterly divided a country so sorely in need of uniting these past four years. I could point out that the soldiers whose vote you so assiduously champion are many of them paid so little they must feed their families with food stamps—which puts them squarely in the freeloaders’ camp, whose vote you so thoughtlessly disparage. I could slyly allude to the charming hubris in whingeing on about the unworkable inefficiencies of public works over the internet—one of many great public works that make this modern world of ours at all possible—but it’s an old and tired point, worn smooth with overuse. (Besides, you doubtless go out of your way to use private toll roads, and think the free market would do an even better job of keeping cholera at bay; also, I’d have to hear you rationalize an administration that’s presided over one of the largest public-sector growth spurts in history. I’d really rather not.) —I could be rude, and unload a mercilessly colorful stream of invective that attempts to plumb the willful depths of your ignorance; I could be shrill, and hold you up as an example of all that is wrong, as one of the tuneless tootling flutes that bedevil our sleep and hold us back from all that we could be; I could be deferential, since the ground I need to cover has already been well and truly mapped. I could be a mensch, and let you know, privately, that anyone who goes on about how dumb Democrats are had probably better know how to spell Republicans. (Hint: there’s only one “i.”)
But what I’m gonna do, Ted, is this: I’m gonna tell you to stop sending me unsolicited commercial email. This may be one of the most polarized elections ever, or at least in a while, but if there’s one thing that will bring us all together, Democrat and Republican, Green and Libertarian, and unite us in a common cause, it’s an undying hatred of spam.
Verb. sap. and all that, old boy.
Oh, right, I have this blog.
It would appear I am on something of a hiatus. (An hiatus? Oh, shush.)
There is work: the balloon went up at the day job, and now I have three times as many people to oversee as before. I really need to finish the ceiling in my office (those of you who’ve assisted, my thanks: it is now just under two-thirds complete. In May—or was it June?—it was one third less than it is now); winter, after all, is coming, and unceiled eaves are drafty. Having in a rash moment submitted a manuscript to a magazine for their consideration, I now feel a nagging itch to do so again; the story that presented itself as next in the queue, however, though clearly outlined on paper, refuses to budge past the opening of the second scene, such as it is. And the Spouse, in a bid to finish her current chapter by the end of October, hell or high water, has drafted me as a jackleg flat colorist, which is pleasantly tedious work, but hard on the carpal tunnel. (Basically, I’m doing stage 3 and a little of stage 4 on a couple of pages.)
So, um. Yeah. The blog-thing. You heard Derrida died, I bet? Yeah. And Superman, right?
Hey, how ’bout that election?
(Oh, don’t feel too badly. There’s emails going back weeks I need to answer, and let’s not even look at the phone calls to be returned, shall we?)
Where were they then?
16 September 1968: American League President Joe Cronin fired umpires Al Salerno and Bill Valentine for trying to start an umpires’ union. Also, the Detroit Tigers whupped the Yankees 9 to 1 at Tiger Stadium. The Beatles, or at least Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, were over at Abbey Road recording “I Will.” The Amtrac Platoon in Vietnam completed Operation “Lancaster II” and began Operation “Scotland Trousdale North.” Orlando Bosch fired a bazooka on a Polish ship in Miami, and is also connected with a bomb blast on the Satrustegui in Puerto Rico; Miami later proclaimed an Orlando Bosch Day. Richard Nixon said “Sock it to me!” on Laugh-In, thereby securing his victory over Hubert Humphrey. Over on CBS, the last episode of The Andy Griffith Show was airing. And the British Royal Mail eliminated the separate rate category for inland postcards, creating a two-tiered system of first- and second-class mail. Confusion reigned, briefly.
Also, I was born. (Thanks, Mom! —I’d link to you, too, Dad, but you don’t have a web presence, and let’s face it: Mom did most of the heavy lifting.)
—16 September is also the birthdate of General Motors, Ed Begley, Jr., and England’s Henry V.
Hearts & minds,
or, The Man in Black.
I spent the bitter month of February, 1992, dressed entirely in black and canvassing door-to-door for MassPIRG. I was dressing entirely in black because I was finally starting to get over having been crushingly dumped the summer before: the sort of break-up where you find yourself on your figurative knees saying something like I love you so much that if you need me to leave I will. —Later, I found a cheery Mexican restaurant and drank too much cheap beer and staggered home singing Waterboys songs at the top of my lungs. I swore off love earnestly and loudly to whomever would listen. Now I was dressing entirely in black. How else was I to reclaim my dignity?
And I was canvassing door-to-door for MassPIRG because I hadn’t had a job in half a year. I was living in a two-bedroom apartment under a cliff in the middle of western Massachusetts nowhere with three close friends (we got up to six total for a bit there), spending entirely too much time hanging out at the UMass Science Fiction Society’s library cum offices—this despite the fact that I was in no wise a student. For a while there, I was trying to perfect my Florentine fencing with a couple lengths of PVC pipe wrapped in foam insulation and duct tape; when I went home for the holidays, I took my brother to the plumbing supply shop so we could make a pair of fresh swords and hack away at each other in the backyard. I have no idea what my parents thought of the whole situation. I spent the rest of that dour vacation hacking away on an old typewriter at a story that still hasn’t gone anywhere, patiently ignoring the doubtlessly good advice they were trying to drill through my skull.
One day after I got back I was musing aloud in the USFS library about jobs and money and the getting thereof. Someone (and I can’t recall who, but I don’t think it was the skinny guy who said he was ex-Special Forces and that we shouldn’t wake him unexpectedly if he dozed off, since he couldn’t be held responsible for what his trained reflexes would do) told me about this guy that this guy he knew knew, who could hook me up with a Situation: I’d get a car key and a piece of paper with two addresses on it in the mail. I’d then go to the first address, somewhere in Greenfield, or Northampton, say, and I’d use the key to open the door of the car I’d find parked there. I’d drive it (scrupulously under the speed limit) to the second address, in an outer borough of New York City, say, where I’d park it, take a manila envelope out of the glove compartment, put the key in its place, lock the doors, and walk away, not looking back. There’d be a sheaf of grubby bills in that envelope: enough for dinner in a restaurant and a night in a crappy hotel before training back up to Massachusetts for another work-free month or so. Until the next car key arrived in the mail. Und so weiter.
Somebody else (and I’m pretty sure it was the cute girl who was into filmmaking and pot, which is how I later came to realize that pot does absolutely nothing for me—nor her, neither, but that’s another story) told me about MassPIRG. You know: the bottle bill? Putting the people back into politics? Ralph Nader’s baby?
I ended up at MassPIRG. They were renting a room up on the second floor of an old open-court motel that had been refitted as a strip-mall, there above the pawn shop where I’d already sold my bass guitar to make rent (no great loss; I’d never made it past Peter Gunn), and they were looking for door-to-door canvassers (they’re always looking for door-to-door canvassers), so I signed up. I had a pulse, so I had a provisional job: canvassers had a couple days out on the sidewalks to make the cut. The PIRG wanted a return on their investment, you know? And I made the cut, so I had a job, my first in six months.
Which I promptly muffed.
I’d like to think when you tot it all up that I raised more money than I cost in wages, though I was goose-egging at an alarming rate toward the end, there. (So maybe if you added in overhead..?) And much as it’s easy to laugh nowadays at the follies of lovelorn drop-out me kicking my way through ice-crusted snowdrifts from one suburban Springfield door to the next in my black boots and black jeans and black turtleneck and my long black coat, it doesn’t change the fact that at the time it all hurt in some deep and ineluctable way that made knocking on strangers’ doors and telling them about such eminently worthy causes as the Reduce Reuse Recycle and Polluter Pays initiatives, asking if such public service weren’t worth twenty, forty, seventy-five bucks, all much harder than it had to be.
And there were those annoying get-to-know-you team-building goal-congruencing exercises! Oy. We had to play them every day before hitting the streets for some godawful reason (then, turnover was high): “If you could be any color, which would it be, and why?” “What’s the best thing that happened to you this week?” “What do you see yourself doing five years from now?” —Gah. I turned in my clipboard after four or five weeks and went back to sulking, thankyouverymuch.
But not before the New Hampshire primaries.
In 1992, Ralph Nader put himself up as a write-in candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in the New Hampshire primaries—to make some noise, test the waters, provide an alternative, scare up a soapbox, shake things up. Nobody was thrilled with front-runner Tsongas, but none of the other Democrats seemed ready to call for the all-out revolution needed to undo the 12-year Reagan-Bush interregnum. We wanted fire; we wanted bellies; we wanted motherfuckers up against the wall. We got genteel bupkes. —Hell, Barry put himself up as a write-in from over the border in his UMass Daily Collegian comic strip and got, like, a dozen votes. Discontent was in the air. (Then again, maybe not: Mickey Mouse never actively campaigns and he regularly gets written in, so what do I know?)
So, on that fateful day, when it came time for the get-to-know-you stuff before we got in the car and drove to Springfield to hit the sidewalks (which time, it should be noted, we didn’t get paid for), whoever-it-was who was in charge of congruencing our goals eschewed the usual Barbara Walters group interview for a rousing Nader sales pitch: he’s the guy who invented PIRGs! He saved us from Detroit! He’s running a campaign against corporate interests, for the people of this country, and he needs volunteers! We were asked to sign up for a slot on the bus to go up to New Hampshire and knock on more doors to help get the word out.
Well. I didn’t sign up for a slot on the bus. And I was miffed when he dropped out of the race after posting disappointing returns in New Hampshire. But when the Massachusetts primary rolled around, I wrote him in. And by early November, it was clear Clinton was going to hammer Bush for Massachusetts’ electoral votes, and Clinton was a slick-talking centrist who damn skippy wasn’t going to be putting anybody up against any walls. So I had no qualms about writing in Nader for president again.
(Of course I voted for Nader! I was a whiny pampered guiltily liberal ivory-towered at-loose-ends young white man! Weren’t you paying attention?)
Words—
I only ever really knew him through his words, but they were good ones: they were funny, they went on both wisely and too well about things like comics and Buffy, they stood up for small things; they suffered no fools gladly, but he’d occasionally let ’em take a fool around the block and back, and if sometimes they got outraged, it’s only because he was paying attention. He paid a lot of attention; you were going to learn something whenever you let him have his say, and there’s a lot of things in this world both little and big that are the better for it.
A moment of silence, please, for Aaron Hawkins.
—And then start making more noise than ever. He was the Uppity Negro, after all.
The mood I’m in—
He shrugged gracefully, rolling his beard between two fingers. “I’ve had a local reputation for a long time as a sort of knowledgeable nut. People invite me to their history classes, and I give them demonstrations and talk about extinct attitudes. I talk about chivalry, honor, prouesse, and playing by the rules, and I watch their skins crawl.”
Farrell was startled to feel his own skin stir with the words. Hamid said easily, “Well, you make them real edgy, John. This is Avicenna, they just like theoretical violence, rebels in Paraguay blowing up bad folks they don’t know. They like the Middle Ages the same way, with the uncool stuff left out. But you scare them, you’re like a pterodactyl flapping around the classroom, screaming and shitting. Too real.” The round eyes seemed to flick without closing, as parrot’s eyes do.
“A dinosaur. You think so?” John Erne laughed—a rattle of the nostrils, no more. “This is my time.” He leaned forward and patted Farrell’s knee hard. “This is the time of weapons. It isn’t so much the fact that everyone has a gun—everyone wants to be one. People want to turn themselves into guns, knives, plastic bombs, big dogs. This is the time when ten new karate studios open every day, when they teach you Kung Fu in the third grade, and Whistler’s mother has a black belt in aikido. I know one fellow on a little side street who’s making a fortune with savate, that French kick-boxing.” Farrell watched the combat master’s face, still trying to determine how old he was. He appeared most youthful when he moved or spoke, oldest when he smiled.
“The myriad arts of self-defense,” John Erne said. “They’re all just in it because of the muggers, you understand, or the police, or the Zen of it all. But no new weapon ever goes unused for long. Pretty soon the streets will be charged with people, millions of them, all loaded and cocked and frantically waiting for somebody to pull their trigger. And one man will do it—bump into another man or look at him sideways and set it all off.” He opened one hand and blew across his palm as if he were scattering dandelion fluff. “The air will be so full of killer reflexes and ancient disabling techniques there’ll be a blue haze over everything. You won’t hear a single sound, except the entire population of the United States chopping at one another with the edges of their hands.”
Farrell asked quietly, “Where does that leave chivalry?”
—Folk of the Air, Peter S. Beagle
I don’t know; I don’t know. It’s September, and last week the weather slowly began to turn with a great creak into aumumn. It’ll yet flutter into summery heat now and again, but we’re sleeping under heavy blankets now, and we dress in layers, and I really should be losing this urge to grab half the country by the collar and scream myself hoarse about how mind-bogglingly stupid they are, how blind, how irresponsible.
A blue haze over everything, of invective and two-minute hate.
(Don’t mistake this as a plea for reason and moderation. Can’t we all just get along? Be decent, to one another? —Some of us sure as fuck can’t, but there’s not much we can do about that without persuasion, and it’s hard to persuade somebody when you’re screaming in their face.)
It’s been a week. Alex Lencicki can tell you. He was there, and I wasn’t, and while maybe now that the freak show has packed up its narrow tents there’s maybe something of a catharsis, still, like the summer breaking, it isn’t enough.
And I don’t know now that there ever will be.
I’m working on it.
I’ve been sick. (Stupid canned con air.) It’s at about 4600 words. Maybe another 1000 to dig my way out of it, and then the links, and the photos. (Christ, that’s a lot of theoretical bloviating. Maybe I’d better pull out the red pen—) It was going to go up last night. It might go up tomorrow. But I have to work tomorrow. And Sunday. We’ll see.
So Selina Kyle actually ran for mayor of New York City? What the fuck was up with that?
Sorry. Anyway: Bill and Vera and Erika and Clio and Anne and Patrick and Lori were all on the scene in one way or another, so you can go spoil yourself there. I might yet beat the titans of con reporting, though, so there’s that. —But they’ll have better pics.
One last thing: I just re-read Whedon’s original script for Alien: Resurrection, and was startled and amused this time to notice how much Firefly is in there. It’s a stretch to say that Firefly redeems his famously scuttled Alien script, the way Buffy redeemed Buffy, but it’s not that much of a stretch. Certainly, it’s a more intriguing lateral comparison than City of Lost Children.
We done? For now.
And so we return and begin again.
Oh, there’s a lot to go through, like the creepy coolth of dessicated, plastinated corpses when arranged with surgical precision by a gentle German huckster, and what it’s like to crack an egg into a bubbling hot pot of soon tofu, and then there was the Con, but I want to just take a moment here and now to register my disbelief at something we saw on the drive back from San Diego to LA, and it wasn’t the $2.25 a gallon we were paying for regular unleaded. I get out of the car to stretch my legs and what I hear is somebody telling me to call now, because operators are standing by. It was the gas pump. There was a little screen on the gas pump over the screen you use when you’re paying for gas with a credit card. It was a television screen. It was playing commercials to a steady stream of momentarily captive audiences.
And then came the Fox News update.
We have no shame. None whatsoever.
Now that we’re all enthused.
Yeah, so, the Spouse and I are off to Comic-Con, where we’ll be crammed into an exhibit hall a third of a mile long with tens of thousands of speculators and cosplayers and the occasional cartoonist. And you shouldn’t take my grousing too seriously: fun will be had, of a serious and determined sort, and I don’t doubt that photographic evidence will surface after the fact that makes or breaks more than one reputation.
We will also talk comics, I imagine. At least once.
If you’re in the neighborhood, drop by: I’ll be spending at least some of my time at Tranquility Base, where Jenn’s hooked up with Scott McCloud, Patrick Farley, Daniel Merlin Godbrey, and Tracy White. That’s Booth #1230, across from the Image Comics pavilion, which will include a booth for Flight. Plus I’m sure at least a third of the Pants Press will be in the vicinity at any one time. Should be a blast.
I’ll leave you with a pointer to the latest review of Jenn’s Dicebox, and contrary to Kevin’s snark, I’ve got no nits to pick. (Where on earth did I get this reputation for persnicketiness?) —Anyone who realizes an opinion formed in the middle of a work-in-progress will doubtless be changed by later readings of later material is A-OK in my book. (And anyway, us critics ought to stick together.)
Avast.
Just a quick note, in case y’all don’t pay much attention to the “Commentations” box in yon left sidebar: The Poet, one of the deejays for The Crystal Ship pirate radio station (1982 – 1984), has posted a neat little oral history of their piracy as a comment to an old post on Portland’s own Subterradio, and pirate (harrumph: “micropower”) radio in general. Check it out.
So here’s another one up for the Crystal Ship, and the PRA, and Free Radio Berkeley and Subterradio, and Liberation Radio, Radio Free Radio, the Voice of Laryngitis, the Crooked Man, WGHP (With God’s Help, Peace) and the Voice of the Purple Pumpkin, Secret Mountain Laboratory, the Voice of Voyager, Radio Ganymede, the Voice of FUBAR (Federation of Unlicensed Broadcasters on AM Radio), and WUMS (We’re Unknown Mysterious Station, perhaps the longest-lived pirate ever, who broadcast from 1925 – 1948, and whose equipment, upon retiring, was requested by both the Ohio Historical Society and the Smithsonian).
Some context.
Oh, hey: if you’re swinging by from the Willamette Week story, and you’re wondering about the tersely cryptic excerpt, well, here; and here’s the reason why my desk is groaning today:
He was very afraid, very alone. He had the thinnest arms I had ever seen. His whole body trembled. His wrists were so thin we couldn’t put handcuffs on him. As I saw him for the first time and led him to the interrogation, I felt sorry. The interrogation specialists threw water over him and put him into a car, drove him around through the extremely cold night. Afterwards, they covered him with mud and showed him to his imprisoned father, on whom they’d tried other interrogation methods.
They hadn’t been able to get him to speak, though. The interrogation specialists told me that after the father saw his son in this condition, his heart was broken, he started crying, and he promised to tell them anything they wanted.
—Sgt. Samuel Provance, 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion
Of course, I don’t know why I’m so angry today. We’ve known we were capable of this particular damnation for over a year now.
(This is, indeed, more of a literary blog than anything else, I suppose. But what passes for politics these days has a nasty habit of getting in the way.)
