Bathroom Monologue: Eulogical

Ali was a great man, and everyone here will miss him. He was one of my closest friends. I met him in college, where he was screaming at the Dean of Studies. I was waiting next in line, to get her to sign something. I think he was fighting either about Affirmative Action or letting the Kung Fu Movie Club back into the campus theatre. As soon as Ali stormed out, I ran in and got her to sign the form, and then hustled after him. I bought him dinner at the crappy campus café, just to talk to him and learn how you could have balls of that size. By the end of our nachos, he was screaming at the bar tender for his taste in music. It’s not a big surprise that a heart attack killed him.

So next week, I imagine, Ali will cure heart attacks. It will likely be the first medical innovation based on offensive medicine. Attacking hearts, probably. That’ll be why no one thought of it before.

By the end of the year, he’ll have used his fame to found the world’s largest television network devoted to martial arts movies. It will spur a renaissance in the genre, and he will probably star in one where he fights social injustice with compassion and Capoeira.

Having both won the Nobel Prize for curing heart attacks and won the hearts of the world with his digitally enhanced fists, Ali will ride superstardom to political office. There, he will do what he told us all he’d do for the last twenty years: get those Washington assholes to listen to reason. I’ve had hundreds of political discussions with Ali and I’m still not entirely sure what that means, but I know that as soon as he gets into a room with those Senators that he hated, he will fix the entire system overnight.

His newfound axis of social policy will change the world we live in. He will revitalize our space program. He will, I think, make both Israel and Iran extremely unhappy, and pride himself on it. Surely in Year One of Ali’s reign, he will force Axl Rose to stop ruining Guns ‘N Roses. Given how many impossible problems Ali believed could be solved by people ceasing to be stupid, I imagine he’ll have fixed the world before the midterm elections. We’ll all be so grateful that he’s still with us.

That’s what I’m going to imagine Ali’s future is like tonight. I invite you to join me in a well-earned delusion for a dear friend. It’s not fair that he’s gone, and I think the least we can do is lie about what could have been for a while. Let Ali have his way tonight.

Bathroom Monologue: God of ____, Redux

Ares was the god of war, Aphrodite was the goddess of love, but Apollo was the asshole god who wanted to take seventeen majors in college. Apollo was a very presumptuous god. He was a sun god, even though Helios already did the sun and Zeus did the sky. He was a medicine god, but also a bringer of plagues. He was both a war and sports god, making him a professional and hobbyist ass-kicker. He was the patron deity of shepherds and colonists, making him both God of Protecting Your Stuff and God of Taking Your Stuff. His oracles at Delphi were the most reliable and salient, making him a knowledge god, and from there he became more powerful than the muses at inspiring music and poetry, making him an arts god. And we can't forget that he was randy, though that was more a "god" thing than an "god of" thing. The gods were fucking nuts. And by "fucking nuts" I don't mean "crazy;" I mean if they found a cashew arousing, they'd turn into an ox and find a way to penetrate it.

Happy Birthday Danni! John narrates Pride & Prejudice

Happy birthday to Danielle La Paglia! For her birthday, Danni asked me to record the classic opening chapter of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. It turns out that I am absolutely awful at this, but if you'd like to hear me be awful at it, you can listen below.

If you listen very carefully, you might hear me arguing with someone about how to pronounce one of the words.

Bathroom Monologue: Give Me Your Daughter

Everyone in the camp knows at this point. This thing, this monster is going keep attacking us every night, killing a new victim until we give it my daughter. I thought you’d get it last night, but this morning there’s a new widow, and I hear people murmuring that he died instead of my girl. That’s not an exchange a father ever wants to hear murmured under breaths while he’s taking a piss. Now I hear you might consider giving Cornelia over.

Understand that you’re not giving that thing my daughter. Give it me instead.

It goes for stragglers. People too near the perimeter, or who don’t think there’s safety in the group. It’s never killed a group, has it? So tonight you build fires, and you set traps, and you sharpen all the fucking pointy sticks you can make. And you get everyone into a single group. You scare them with stories about what’s been happening – what happened to that pardoner who thought he could do better alone last night. You tell them his bloody tale so they get theirs into camp.

And an hour after dusk, when no one’s left the campfire, and everyone’s armed, I’ll start an argument with you. I’ll shove you, and you’ll hit me, and I’ll storm off towards the conifers. I’ll piss on them, and complain to myself, and pray like I’ve been doing, none of it too far from you. I’ll be the only easy prey the monster sees. It’ll have to kill me eventually to make good on its threat.

You wait until it’s eating me. Until I’m screaming in pain. Then you bring everyone down on that thing and you kill it, cut off its head, tear out its lungs, so that it never bothers anyone again.

Then you don’t have to worry about it killing us in the night anymore. Then you just got to worry about raising my little girl.

Bathroom Poetry: Progress

Think this.

Feel this.

Do this.

Think this.

Feel this.

Do this.

Think this.

Feel this.

Do this. 

Progress.

The Only Thing Worse is the Cure, Part 5

This is Part 5 in a weekly serial. You can begin at Part 1 here.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

They know he’s here. The trunk that came this morning was full of ashes from his house – from the very estate you served in, Cecil. They burned the bed he was birthed on. The mariners know he’s here, they see it from their ships, and they think he’s causing the plague that consumes the continent. Thousands upon thousands dead that he could cure if he’d go out there, and then they’d know what we’ve turned into a way of life. It is worse than an affront to keep him on this wretched island. We’re squandering him.

We need only to tell him something, and his heart will bring him to his feet. So why not tell him we found the Arab? Ruth and Hansel found an Arab hanged for heresy. It could be him. And your Young Master’s been practicing so long in cemeteries. Let him go raise his personal Lazarus and ask his identity. After that, we’ll never have to deal with these ships or assassins again.

This isn’t my notion. None of these are words original to my mouth; this is everyone’s notion, but yours, and the crone with her printing press. Everyone thinks we ought to spur him into manhood, save you, and that little gardener, and your Young Master himself, who only believes such because he’s so obsessed with these arcane books, so possessed of his own origin that he ignores his destiny. This is his time. A plague is the perfect time for the man who is the cure.

I attest this of sound mind, for once I was mad and fretted over the sensations of an arm that had long left me to gangrene. Your Young Master took my ghostly limb and ghostly anxiety, but if you shut him up in this little safe isle any longer, he’ll never know all the limbs that are truly at his command. You’re raising a bull to be ignorant of his horns, a lion ignorant of his voice. There are eight ships in the bay, and they’ve brought cannons, Cecil. They brought the trunk of ashes. They haven’t thrown a dead mariner overboard in a week; they circle to find the safe distance from your Young Master’s reach. Do you want to wait to find out the reach of their arms?

So let us tell him we found his Arab, and get him into the world. You can go to him this morning, speak one sentence, and he’ll believe you, because you’re the one he grew up trusting. Or, so help me, I will lock you in a cellar and find another way to convince him.

We need lions, and they need the cure.

Continued with Voice of the Lion

Bathroom Monologue: Homeless Magician

Skepticism kills jobs. The encroachment of science, obliterating hunger and HIV, left people with no wonder for a man levitating on stage. They thought they saw wires he didn’t need. Infinite kerchiefs from his sleeve paled from Nova’s special on infinite bubble universes. He even caught his beautiful and talented assistant brushing up on Honors Chem; he could have prognosticated the fine career she’d have, but she quit before he could tell her. There was no money left in magic, and soon he had to saw himself in half just to fit inside a friend’s rent controlled closet. He’d be damned if he slept with the rabbits in his hat.

Bathroom Haiku: Lot Gulls

Pecking at your tires.
How long before we admit
they are “lot gulls” now?
 

My Foot Stopped Working: Needles in My Legs

I thought I’d experienced every nerve test. I’ve had sweat tests, blood tests, muscle biopsies, shock tests, tests where they strapped electrodes to me and tossed me onto a treadmill. I have what are likely exaggerated memories of an hour spent in a room with gradually elevating temperature and currents being run through my left arm.

But this “Nerve Shock Test” I got in Fishkill was a new one. The technician stuck needles into the muscle tissue of my legs, then electrified the needles to record nerve reactions. It may be the first time I’ve ever bit my lip to keep from yelling. Didn’t help that the technician was a jerk who talked down to me for the entire test.

What a nice place to be electrocuted.

Then I got off the table and heard exactly what anyone who’s been electrified for their own health wants: “This shows there’s nothing wrong. That’s a good thing.”

A good thing because, according to a glib explanation, it ruled some problems out. It’s probably not Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome. He didn’t even think it was neuropathy, though he didn’t have an alternative to suggest. Now all I had to do was get another neurology appointment to come up with more tests. Recall that last time, the Nurse Practitioner was drawing a blank on what it could be and what to do.

The only good thing I’ve experienced is that the numbness hasn’t spread far. For the last few days I’ve felt it in the ball of my left foot. Otherwise it is located in the toes and periphery, and every time I’ve checked, motor control has been available. Sweet, sweet ability to walk.

I waited two weeks before posting this, just in case. Bruises the size of my thumbs still mark where the needles “probed.”

Eight days after Nerve Shock Test. My leg doesn't look like Jupiter anymore!

Bathroom Monologue: “Nothing to write home about”

“Nothing to write home about” had been a joke in his father’s time, when all soldiers wanted was to write home or receive mail from loved ones. It had mutated since then, into a dismissal of events that the needy would have cherish. No one wrote home enough these days. No one called their mothers enough, or had heart-to-hearts with Dad, or took five minutes to simply make sure everyone was okay and lunch went well. It was a dismissed world.

The cell phone didn’t change things the way he wanted it to. Somehow the ease of dialing, or having a number auto-dialed, and having a brief conversation amounted to an effort that left people rationalizing to keep their minutes. The postal service was on the verge of demise, and e-mail was outmoded. Nothing was simple enough for the stupid mind to write home and keep those micro-contacts firing in the shape of a real life.

He’d change all that once he invented the text message.

Bathroom Monologue: Ninja in the Chapel

“Listen, we have to make this quick, because my brother’s eldest daughter is getting married in ten minutes. I know where your ninja are. There are twelve, counting the two out here – one behind the statue of St. Aloysius, and one in the rafters over my head. I’m guessing you intended to execute me along with my brother and his family. I haven’t told many people because I don’t want to spoil the weekend.

“So let’s make this quick. I poisoned your crepes this morning with an extract from a newly discovered species of jellyfish. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to darken the afternoon, and I figured if you were polite at the wedding, then I’d put the antidote in your cake at the reception. It blends seamlessly with syrups and icings.

“So. If you don’t make a stir, and all of your invisible assassins remain unseen, I’ll hand you a piece of cake in an hour and we’ll go home. I’ll even write the names of your three associates who I’ve similarly poisoned today on your napkin so you can go about saving them, or letting them die and taking their place. Don’t rush into the decision now. It’s a wedding day. This should be something special.

“And where are you sitting?”

Bathroom Monologue: No Such Thing as Sex-Positive

The gentler sex - charity for the drunken brother, contempt for the unfortunate sister
via Library of Congress

Are you sex-positive? No, because no one is, though many people think they are.

It sounds fun and liberating and progressive, as many mirages do. According to a preposterously trusted source, “The sex-positive movement is an ideology which promotes and embraces open sexuality with few limits beyond an emphasis on safe sex and the importance of informed consent.”

I learned of the movement this morning, and having skimmed a Wikipedia article, now know everything about it. That is why I regret to inform you that all sex-positive thought is a sham. You may ask, “Why? Surely boinking with informed consent is great and gooey.”

Gooey though it be, it makes everyone a rape victim. Everyone in the world started out a virgin, and virgins don’t actually know what sex is like until they’ve done it. Therefore every first time has been under uninformed consent, and every sex-positive sexer who kept doing it afterward was merely burying the trauma. It’s not informed consent. It’s Stockholm Syndrome with lube.

From this day forward I shall be sex-negative, which I now need to make up and adhere to with unwavering virility, and consent to no other ideology. Stand beside me, brothers and sisters. If you want to. If you know what standing beside me is like before you do it.

The Only Thing Worse is the Cure, Part 4

This is the fourth installment in a seven-episode serial. To read Part 1, click here.
To read Part 2, click here.
To read Part 3, click here.

I’m the reason the island grows. Until I was born, my shack barely had enough cabbage for two, and I was the seventh. Now every soul on the island eats from my garden. They say I’m magic. I’m the reason they’re all alive.

This used to be a colony for souls the mainland didn’t want. Saul says before I was born, Grandmamere couldn’t even stand up for more than ten minutes. Now she runs almost as fast as I do; I let her win sometimes. That’s what my garden does. Souls come from two islands over to beg for our leftovers, and even if it’s my suitor they say they’re visiting, it’s my food they eat, and they stay forever growing hardy, or they leave and never come back. I think that those who leave realize their mistakes and commit suicide. We might get a church next year, but I’ll only allow it if they make me a saint.

Saints have to commit miracles, and even if you don’t count my garden, I was dead for half a year before I was born. I don’t feel dead; sometimes I wonder how deadness feels. My mother was called names for conceiving me, because of how ill everybody was before my garden, and the weight got to her eventually, and she ran off, probably to Jerusalem. Saul says she was found floating in the sea, but I don’t believe it. No soul related to me could be dumb enough to run into the sea.

Grandmamere says I was born as still as a stone into her hands, and then I wriggled. I didn’t even cry. I’ve never cried. I don’t know how that feels, either.

Another saintly quality I have is that everyone loves me. I think more saints should be popular, so that we can remind the world that everything’s not about outcasts. You can’t build a church out of dying alone. It’s about community. Grandmamere loves me, and Grandgregor, and all the souls who used to be crazy, and the dock workers, and my suitor spends all day following me around. I don’t know if I’ll marry him. Maybe if we get a church, to commemorate it. He’s supposed to be rich. He gets gifts from the mainland all the time, heavy trunks and books that smell like I think a desert would. Arid tomes. People say they’re coming to see him, but they eat my food, the souls who aren’t afraid we’re contagious. Then again, maybe we are. Every mariner who comes selling things here dies. They should eat from my garden.

I don’t think I’ll marry my suitor because he’s too uncouth. He’s probably rich and always washes up, but he sleeps in the cemetery. He says it’s practice, and you have to be fairly uncouth for that to make sense. He doesn’t even bring a blanket, he just lies face down, fondling the earth. So I have to carry one for us, and a pillow. Grandmamere forces me to sleep out there with him. They like him better than me, which makes no sense, because it’s my garden that keeps the island alive. They say Grandgregor couldn’t even sit up straight for thirty years until I was born.

It’s like they’re afraid what will happen if we grow apart. Grandmamere and my suitor’s steward are always around making sure we’re together. It must be his money. They think he’ll love some other girl, which is silly, because he doesn’t think about girls. He doesn’t think about anything. Yesterday one of the souls who used to be crazy, who some nights wakes up screaming about angels in the walls, got into an argument with Saul and some mariners about predestiny and was stabbed four times in the flank. My suitor wouldn’t even look at him, even though I was trying to show him how eating from my garden had helped. Two days ago he’d eaten one leaf of a cabbage, and as soon as we walked in the crazy man got sane and didn’t bleed anywhere. My suitor went sullen, like he was unimpressed with my miracle, like he didn’t want to help.

The one saintly thing I need to do is endure a vision. I’ve never had one,  even though I faint too often, and I think fainting is a great opportunity for God to give you a vision, maybe to let me know what crying or dying feels like. No luck so far. I only faint when I’m alone. My suitor finds me and wakes me up. He’s so attentive then, which is why I bring him a blanket at night.

Grandmamere says he loves me, but old souls’ brains rot up. I don’t think my suitor loves anyone. He doesn’t enjoy my cabbage, or Gregor’s singing, or reading, even though he’s reading all the time. Sometimes, when ships anchor off-shore and souls stare at us through spyglasses, he looks at them like he can see them right in the eye. He doesn’t even enjoy that. He doesn’t enjoy us being watched even though he’s always waiting for visitors. They go everywhere for him, which must mean he’s rich. I wonder what they’d have to bring back to impress him. Sometimes, I think, he might get fed up and go searching in the mainland himself. I might go with him. I don’t know. It depends if we get a church.

Part 5, "The Lie," coming Friday the 15th.

Audio: Excerpt from "Dracula"

Though now several days late, I've finally made my birthday recording for Helen Howell available for free stream. It's an excerpt from Bram Stoker's Dracula,  wherein our narrator first meets the world's most famous vampire.

You can listen to me voicing the hero and the count below.

What Makes You Like a Protagonist?

I got this idea from The Roundtable Podcast’s Worldcon episode, where they interviewed various authors for their ideal protagonists. Any canny person recognizes that your ideal protagonist changes from time to time. Who you desperately wanted to write or read about ten years ago is almost certainly different from the one you craved last night. If you’re like me, it even changed a few times over the course of this morning.

So, fellow readers and writers, I have a question: what protagonist would you most like to read about right now?

If you’re lucky, somebody else might turn it into a #fridayflash or short story. If you’re brilliant, you might find yourself a new hero for your next WIP. But at worst, I’m willing to bet we’ll get an interesting spread of what people crave from fiction.

You can base it on any characteristics and ideology, any kind of story. Are they unusually analytical? Insane in a world that's too sane? Is it just about how often they get laid? Whatever it is, just tell us what in the comments. This is another experiment in how different people can be, not about superiority, but about individuality. Still unsure of how to put it? Here’s a possible answer:
 

Holier-than-thou type, but very approachable. Healer. Loves the poor even though his followers want to make him rich. Might not be wild about what Christmas becomes.

I guarantee you that is somebody’s ideal protagonist. What’s yours?

Bathroom Monologue: 992 + 992 = ?

We begin by acknowledging that “2” is not a real thing. It is an incomplete idea, a description, a modifier of real things. Two people are real; remove the people, and the number ceases to be. The people continue to be without the number, even when they are a divided pair of ones.

Then consider the number of things to which “2” can apply. Two people. Two battleships. Two bunches of grapes.

Consider also that “addition” is a floaty concept. If you move two bunches of grapes over next to two more bunches of grapes, you may well have four bunches of grapes. If two of the bunches grow tangled as you mush them together in a sloppier addition, they may well become three bunches of grapes. More common in my produce experience? You throw four bunches of grapes together, a few twigs snap, and one bunch breaks into two. This leaves you with five bunches of a grapes as the result of adding two and two.

Thereby, 2 + 2 = 5.

We’re not asking much.

Bathroom Monologue: What would she do without me?

Doris simply couldn’t reach the box on her own, not without the stool, and since her hip surgery, the stool was unreliable. She wound up grabbing the box with tongs, tugging it until it fell into her arms. She sifted through its photographs; vacations she didn’t care to look at anymore, but they would do.

She returned the tongs to the kitchen, then selected her second favorite cookbook, the one with the cookie recipe her grandson Martin loved. She stuffed the book into the second compartment of her pantry, underneath the warped Tupperware. She was tangling the cord to her blinds when the phone rang. It was Martin.

“Hello!” she shouted into the receiver.

“Hey Grandma,” came Martin’s brusque voice, going weary all of two syllables into conversing. “Excited to see me tomorrow?”

“Oh, you know it. I’ve got a box of photos I can’t get back up on the top shelf, and the blinds are all tangled again. You’ll have to fix them up for me.”

“Sure, Grandma. Do you want to go out to dinner when we get there, or can you make something?”

“Oh, I would, but you know, I just lost my cookbook.”

“Again?” The disdain in his voice gave Doris a swell of pride.

“You’ll help me find it, won’t you?”

“It’s always in your cupboard. I bet I even know where you put it this time.” She heard him sigh into the receiver. “What would you do without me?”

“I’ve got no idea. I’m just lucky to have you.”

Happy Endings and the Nonsense of Realism, Revisited

Prepare to have many endings spoiled for you.

Sometime in adolescence we learn disdain for the things we like. We still want to watch cartoons, play with action figures and hear stories at bedtime, but these are inappropriate desires for “grown ups.” Children grow to feign disgust for the things they actually desire, preparing them for adulthoods of denial. Often those adulthoods are spent desperately seeking childhood freedom, such as the necessary irrationality they can now only get through alcohol or pot. I blame that same anti-rational kickback for why so many people will watch a third awful Transformers movie.

Especially if you aim for an intellectual life, one of the things you learn to disdain is the happy ending. They’re unrealistic and trite. They don’t happen. When they do, it’s still more important to the cynical intellectual to write about when they don’t. Ours is a culture that disdains naïvety but cherishes cynicism, despite those being the same thing. They are bald-faced, oversimplisitic ideologies that prejudge people and the world, glomming onto any supporting evidence while blithely ignoring or making excuses for the exceptions. To be cynical is merely to be naïve in the negative direction. Like the sweetly naive, the cynics claim they know the real world and demand their realism.

Never mind that all fiction is inherently unrealistic – no matter how bleak, it’s just words on a page. Denis Johnson is one hundred percent as make-believe as J.K. Rowling. Not one word of it wasn’t made up at a keyboard. Many in my crowd are suckers for unhappy stories, leading them to universally rebuff me for thinking JT LeRoy was a fraud. That one had a happy ending, I guess.

True tragedy and moments of profound melancholy possess inarguable power. No distaste with darkness robs Of Mice and Men of its closure. Tor.com posted an editorial positing that 1984 is a classic because it’s depressing. I’ll freely admit that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, one of my favorite reads in recent years, ended about as bitterly as he could make it.

Despite my fondness for Of Mice and Men and Brave New World, the worst of the unhappy endings is killing your main character. It’s typically a cop-out. Death, even in sacrifice or redemption, bails the character out from having to face future consequences. You’re at least fifty years too late to play the “but those consequences were so bad” card. It’s not deep; it’s the sick-note for Gym Class of fiction tropes.

One of the greatest offenders is the post-Burton killing of villains in superhero movies. Villains in particular should have to stick around in franchises and see what they’ve wrought or develop as characters. How nice would it be to have Doc Ock mentor Peter in Spider-Man 3? Or have Harvey Dent come to his senses after his rampage in Dark Knight? I grasp the desire to kill Osama Bin Laden, but it’s a far better story to have that man meet every widow he’s made.

Danny Boyle is making a career partially on subverting the crumby ending. In India, in a secluded canyon, and in the zombie apocalypse, he puts his characters through utter Hell so he can deliver that one moment of climactic relief. He plays the conventions of bleak fiction against its own crowd. He keeps getting nominated for awards, so thank goodness the wrong people haven’t caught onto what he’s doing yet.

Depressive folk always tell me, “That’s the way the world is.” FX’s Louie having no soundtrack, dull lighting in an airport as he laughs at someone else’s distress – this is, according to The New Yorker, “giving reality its due.” This is real life.

Bullshit. That is something that can happen in reality. A man in a Ronald McDonald costume humming show tunes can also happen. It’s less likely to, though art affords the possibility for it. To mindlessly or pedantically mimic some myopic reality any reader can experience more clearly by putting the book down and living – that’s more intellectually bankrupt than a thousand Happily Ever Afters.

This storytelling environment has left the “happy ending” malnourished. We’ll continue to see trite happy endings, where the heroes either win outright or by Deus ex Machina. RomCom Guy gets RomCom Girl. Harry Potter sends his magic kids off to magic school. In many cases these still satisfy. I’ll almost always side with a treacle positive ending over a treacle negative one, because my soul isn’t a black vortex that demands to be fed disappointment. If we’re going to be superficial, I want to smile through it.

But we should do more with happy endings, though. What else could be done with them? Examining what people want.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day is remembered as an indictment of servitude and denying common desires. I’m still at odds with the novel, because its protagonist butler is an extreme stereotype of a human being who’s given up any personal ambition in favor of blindly supporting his employers, and the novel definitely tortures him for doing so. Yet the ending has him choose an affirmation: to continue in service, but to alter his personality to do it even better, by learning to have a sense of humor. In that way he actually has a spirited moment at the ending, even though he’s chosen against the independence society believes he should prize.

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle literally ends on the line, “we are so happy.” Their circumstances are tragic, psychotic, and yet are desired. The survivors are deranged and enthusiastic to live in something as ruined as any Greek Tragedy.

Happiness also plays a role in the better kind of ending: the complex one. Consider J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is held up as an example of too many things, but one it never gets recognition for is its insanely ambitious conclusion. It deserves that recognition because it gets lumped in with “happily ever after” – largely by drunks and people who’ve never read it. Evil is defeated, a monarchy restored, our king marries someone we never met, the dead rest, Gimli and Legolas for an interracial friendship, the Shire is destroyed by bloody war, Sam starts a family while Frodo is so emotionally exhausted he essentially gives up on living. What happens in the payoffs in Return of the King are progressive, regressive, conservative, triumphant, joyous, defeatist and agnostic. All these themes must share a complicated world.

But writing rich endings like that is hard, which is why most authors don’t do it. The “bad ending” or “happy ending” is about as complex as most human minds are capable of fabricating, as is evidenced by the inventory of modern fiction. We mere mortals must strive for an essential goal: the ending that is authentic to the story. Of Mice and Men and Brave New World succeed in the end because their deaths are wretched and appropriate closure to great stories. A lame story can’t seed and grow a good ending. No matter what you tack onto the end, it won’t be particularly meaningful. Likewise, you can’t beat how The Princess Bride goes out. I adored Reiner’s decision in the film version to actively have a narrator tease us for wanting the right ending.

And going against what’s built up can be harmful. The end of Batman Begins suffers for Batman letting R’as Al Ghul die, tarnishing the hard-worn altruism and aversion to the death of others displayed throughout the movie. “I don’t have to save you” sounds like hokum, or a screenwriter making up for Liam Neeson’s contract expiring.

Sorry. How cynical of me.

Bathroom Monologue: The Failure of Math

"A problem which reveals the failure of Math: there are 28 seats, all side-by-side in a row, along one wall of a bus depot. How many people do they seat?

"14, if no one is a dick, because generous people only take up three seats, one for the butt, and two as a barrier on either side so no one will sit near them. More likely, 12 or 13 people fit, though more if some arrive in couples without so much entitlement about baggage. You might squeeze 18 people onto 28 seats if you have some genuine humanitarians in the depot.

"Some may crunch the numbers and determine this is a failure of people. 28 human-sized seats ought to equal 28 sitting humans. It’s not math’s fault that it fails here. It is a doomed invention, doomed to the service of its inventors. Evolution has never been kind to inventions. It’s a grand tool for analyzing the universe, which is utterly broken by a simple bus depot."

The Only Thing Worse is the Cure, Part 3

This is the third installment in "The Only Thing Worse is the Cure."
To read Part 1, click here.
To read Part 2, click here.

I don’t care how many people followed him here. Let them alone. Gregor, are you listening? They both survived!

Here, here. The old man – yes, one of the followers, I don’t care – came from where you’re standing and sat right here, with the child in his arms like any proud father. The way he always kept an elbow up at us, you could tell how protective he was, how much he loved the boy. He wanted after some tome we printed when the press first opened. He practically threw money at me, like we have use for crowns out here. All I’ve got is a rusty press, a malformed heart, and rags I wash for Juniper.

I was trying to explain to him, trying to explain that we did that half on dictation and the Arab who ordered it only ever wanted five copies. At first, at first I thought Juniper was getting up from the rear to support me like she shouldn’t, but the sounds got so awful. A third labor on that same stone cold baby, and everyone in the shack knew from the sound this was the last one. I nearly bled for her in sympathy.

Now the old man had assisted with births back on the mainland, and most in the shack were so feeble from plague they couldn’t help, so I led him in with me. He… and you know, Saul got the same expression you’ve got now. Listen, I love my daughter more than anyone on the island, so why do you all question me so? But when Saul heard a stranger was in the rear, he came in with an axe handle and threatened to scatter the old man’s brains. With my heart, I couldn’t fight Saul, not then. So he picked up his boy and ran from the cabin, and no sooner was he through the threshold, then Juniper started bleeding in earnest. Like she was birthing to a razor. Everyone had to rise and hold her down, even the old man that you and Saul distrusted on principle.

The old man set his son on the floor, and didn’t even have hands on Juniper before it stopped. Like nothing you ever seen, turned to nothing, and I thought our girl was gone to Heaven. And Gregor, she didn’t give birth to a stone. We’ve got a daughter and granddaughter – but keep quiet, because they need rest. I never even thought I’d live to have a daughter, and now… come look at her. And keep quiet.

I know it’s funny, he’s so much bigger than her. Sleeps all the time, the old man says. Begged me to let his boy sleep in the same room as the mother and child. Some mainland paganism, I guess. But there’s no harm in them sharing the basket. He’s like her luck charm. Watching them fools me almost enough that my heart feels normal again. Haven’t wanted to sit all afternoon.

So you let those followers stay, no matter what they’re chanting. There’ll be more in time. For now you tell me – do you remember anything about that Arab who had us press five copies of a book?

No? Well we’ve got to fix that. The old man deserves to know whatever he wants, and he wants to find this Arab, or at least another copy of his book. If his mistress burned one, there ought to be four more out there, oughtn’t there?

Click here for Part 4.

#NaNoReMo Ends

Today ends February, and so goes 2013's National Novel Reading Month. I've seen several people knocking off their classics in the last few days, and I've got particular pride in Tony Noland for finally conquering Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I really ought to get to that, especially after how much I enjoyed The Crying of Lot 49.

Middlemarch's 1,000 pages too me twenty days, including the two I spent stuck in trains and depots. Having an enormous classic is a great way to pass long waits and, it turns out, to keep strangers from talking to you. It's easily one of the most ambitious novels I've read and has made me question many of the conventions of satire and social criticism. There's an essential empathy, a mandatory understanding behind any unkind action, that makes most conflict-writing feel... well, "lazy" is a nice way of putting it. You can read my full review right here.


I'll pitch that we run it in January next year, 2014, for a few reasons. January would let everyone start the year off with conquering a classic, and there's a little New Years power to such things. January also has three more days than most Februaries, and there would be no unintentional slight against Black History Month, one of the few "official months" I hold in serious reverence.

If you have a National Novel Reading Month wrap-up post, please link to it in the comments. I'll create a junction post here for fellow readers to blog hop across.


1. Cindy Vaskova's tremendous closing on Frankenstein.
2. Eric Krause finishes Princess of Mars.
3. Tony Noland finishes Gravity's Rainbow.

So, who's finished? And what are you reading next? I'm deciding between Brandon Sanderson's The Final Empire and Joe Abercrombie's Red Country.

23 Things I Won’t Miss After the Apocalypse

1. Driving in Manhattan.

2. Aggressive avoidance of eye contact by millions of neighbors in any given metropolis.

3. Tailgaters (traffic violation, not sports party).

4. Ties. I can't wait for the world to end so I won't have to wear a noose to job interviews anymore.

5. The overwhelming American film bias among Oscar nominations.

6. When you and two parties, or three parties, or four or maybe five parties, are involved in a vital deal, and every last one of them is benefitting while apologizing to you that there’s nothing they can do, and you wind up losing your shirt over it, and yet the only time you’ll ever see any of those parties again is if you’re on the sidewalk as they step out of a town car.

7. Jehovah’s Witnesses, and their internet cousins, New Atheists.

8. “Gave Up Anything for Lent” jokes.

9. The birthplaces of martyrs as destinations of tourists.

10. Any sense of need for martyrs.

11. An information economy that has led me to physiological stress any time I only have two bars .

12. Applause at the State of the Union.

13. When someone is headed to the same grocery aisle as I am, and they speed up so they enter first, and as soon as they do, they slow down to a damned crawl. I don’t care that they’re looking for something, because every time it happens, I know I’d find what I want in an instant and be out, but the old lady just had to go first. And so I’m stuck crawling along behind her, looking for the model of cereal I let myself eat, and glaring at her even though she’s not paying attention to me, and unable to get around her, and always she parks her stupid cart exactly in front of where I want to go, so I have to wait an eternity as she figures out which brand of wheat grass she wants. When she finally moves on, I pick up my cereal and find I don’t even want it, and the wait wasn’t really that long, and I’m in an impatient and horrible mood for no good reason. My inability to not suck as a person in a grocery store is something I will not miss.

14. Anonymous attacks on people’s character.

15. Soccer/football arguments.

16. Bombing foreign countries for ethical reasons.

17. Bombing foreign countries for unethical reasons.

18. Creationist dog breeders.

19. The DOW Industrial Average being even close to record highs in an economy with this level of unemployment and wealth disparity.

20. Gritty reboots.

21. Funsize candy (never fun).

22. The 18-month baseball season.

23. Inspirational movies. Actually, hipster commentary on them, like Freedom Writers, or Rudy, blow-by-blow dismissals, as though noticing the tropes of a kind of story that touches people somehow invalidates it.

My Foot Stopped Working: Neurology Wants to See You

I’m getting better at going to the hospital. I’d rather get better-period, but I’m taking pride in handling how these investigations work. On Friday I saw the Nurse Practitioner at my hospital’s Neurology department. You’d think waiting a month and a half would yield a doctor, but she was very friendly and thorough. She jabbed my feet with pointy sticks, banged on my knees with metal rods and tried to knock me over several times to figure out how much proprioception I still have.

Good news: I have some. Proprioception is the wonderful sense of balance and spatial reasoning. The notion that we only have five senses is a crock.

I need to be electrocuted again?

The sign of my improvement at managing healthcaregivers (perhaps the second-ever three-word portmanteau, after “plainclothesman”) came as she tried to dust me off to blood work. After we got the results, we could schedule a follow-up.

I opened a portfolio and produced the bloodwork from January, when the neuropathy was already going on, complete with disease tests and liver function. She found nothing suspicious in the data and said she’d have to sign me up for a Nerve Conduction Study, where they run electrical current through your nerves to see which are active. Shock tests. They usually took a while to get, but we really needed to know…

I opened my portfolio and handed over the results of the Nerve Conduction Study from January. Ba’am.

Bringing print-outs of records saved me at least two months of waiting between tests, but I still needed an EMG, because for all the data doctors have taken on me, the Nurse Practitioner couldn’t figure out a proper cause. In her experience neuropathy usually results from alcoholism, diabetes or age, none of which apply to me. The “age” one made us both laugh. I believe the only time I’m ever called young anymore is when someone is talking about the health problems I’ve already developed.

Because of two particular nerve groups that appear damaged, her best hypothesis was Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome. It’s like Carpal Tunnel, except focusing on the tibial nerve in your foot. Well, not your foot. Both of my feet.

That it’s in both feet is what baffled her, because such neuropathy and motor control loss is seldom symmetrical without a spinal issue. This sort of malfunction typically hits one foot and might hint at something. It’s something we’ll review after my EMG. She spent a proper half hour fielding my questions, getting down to some crazy theories about non-manifested diabetes and shoe sizes. At the worst, I couldn’t have asked for someone to be more indulgent of my curiosity.

This was also the first hospital visit on the case where someone said it might be all in my head. It was a joke, but it was said.

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards, 2012

It's almost March 2013, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2012. If all the complaining on Twitter is any indication, I'm once again happy to have skipped the Academy Awards. Naturally I disagree with some of the winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a sizable democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go.

The Too Little/Too Late Award

Going to the movie I missed by several years,

but have now seen and wish I'd been on the bandwagon for at the time

Big Trouble in Little China

The Raddest Scene Award

Going to the raddest scene in a motion picture

Raid: The Redemption, the brothers face Mad Dog

For the Shorties, OR, The Terminus/Validation Award

Going to the short film I wouldn’t shut up about all year

Paperman

The Best Soundtrack Award
John's already used the "going to the obvious thing-award" joke,
so this is embarrassing

Raid: The Redemption

The Dark Horse Award

Going to the movie that was way better than you all led me to believe it would be

Lockout

You're Actually All Great At This

Going to the best ensemble in a motion picture,

since a great cast is way more impressive than a single great performance

Silver Linings Playbook

The Frank/Nixon Memorial Award

Going to all actors who performed as well or better

than Frank Langella did in Frost/Nixon

For the fifth year in a row, No One

The "There's No Such Thing As The Best Movie of the Year" Award

Seeing as there is no such thing as a best movie amidst a field of
comedies, dramas, musicals, period pieces, speculative fiction, animation,
blockbusters and an international film market we're both not watching enough of as it is,
the award that simply goes to whatever movie brought me
the closest to both crying and laughing last year 

The Secret World or Arrietty

 
Other great movies I was too unambitious to invent awards for:
Robot & Frank, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Delhi Belly, Safety Not Guaranteed

Movies of 2011 Awards
Movies of 2010 Awards

[Graph] How I feel reading the end of a series