Bathroom Monologue: The Optimist in Hell

It was the hottest day of the Age of Sauropods. Through the high levels walked The Risen Man, and even his brow shone with effort.

The Risen Man came across a man aflame, burning from his hairline to his toenails. The man sat beneath the broadest tree in the levels, as close as he could muster without spreading his fire to the bark. To The Risen Man’s surprise, the man’s crackling lips were smiling.

He inquired, “What do you enjoy about your condition, Siree?”

The flaming man responded, “At least I’ve found shade.”

Bathroom Monologue: She'll Come Around, Redux

She fell in the puddle in front of his house, and he fell in love. He got his Pa and they helped her dry off. While her folks came, they played with his anthill.

The next day, she said ‘Hello’ passing by him in the hall. She’d never done it before. He beamed all the way through Algebra.

A week later, she’d forgotten he existed. His brothers elbowed him to do something about it. Go ask her out. Go ask if she’s started that ant collection. Go pretend to bump into her.

He did none of it. “She’ll come around,” he said.

She did great in Math, so he tried hard and made it into Advanced Placement with her. He’d watch her from the other side of the room and struggle to figure out the number of degrees in a pentagon. She never offered to collaborate when they assigned group work.

“She’ll come around,” he said.

She liked puppies, it seemed. She got a summer job at the Hearth Animal Shelter, the one with the uncomfortable location across from a cemetery. He lit right up and got a job as the assistant groundskeeper. She never came over to chat.

“She’ll come around,” he said.

She left town for college. He went to the bar when he knew her sisters were there, to overhear things about her. She switched from Mathematics to Education. She was a teacher. She got her own house. She got tenure. She got cancer. She beat cancer. She still got letters from that first year of kids she’d taught. She was thinking of writing a book.

In time, she passed. Her remains were shipped back to the town where she’d grown up. There was a big service with her sisters and cousins. A lot of crying and nice stories. He stayed out of the way, listening and offering the occasional box of tissues.

After the service, he came up and filled in the grave. When he finished, he patted the dirt with his shovel and said, “I knew you’d come around.”

Bathroom Monologue: Imperfect Couple

She was Unitarian, and he didn’t know what that meant, and she didn’t mind. He was a Mystery buff, and she didn’t see why that meant watching made-up stuff instead of solving crimes, and that lead to fun disputes and a lot of necking. Working retail made her ankles sore and the soles of her feet growing unbearably hot for hours afterward. Working in the graveyard and unheated funeral parlor left his back and shoulders almost frozen to snapping. After work they lie in the funniest positions on their twin mattress, her feet resting on his spine, soothing each other, a detective movie streaming on the laptop, and something Literary on her Kindle.

They were perfect for each other for thirty-eight years. They were grateful for every minute. Some minutes? Merely in retrospect.

Bathroom Monologue: Immigration

Don’t we have some responsibility to the heathens?

It is not our fault that we succeed. It is our boon and glory, and I would not detract from it, nor admit any heathens within our walls who would do those traits disservice. We made this harsh landscape work when all they could do was beg. Their peoples had the same destroyed lands as we. These arguments I will not profane.

Yet no man or woman standing in this hall built it. We enrich and till fields that were constructed by forebears, and forebears familiar with the values of life. Today our walls stand against the mean beasts, and preserve agriculture and culture in general. We benefit for the protection. Is it not in our moral interest to admit and naturalize heathens into the proper ways of living?

Today we’ve heard argued too often that we do enough by admitting anyone worthy and there are simply none worthy in the camps. Yet the camps themselves are a moral peril. Thousands without enough food, without knowledge of medicine, who built their own tents and cluster among so many desperate strangers – is there any wonder that there is violence? There are men who arrived at those camps children and still wait for expiation. Moral decay is all but inevitable in such circumstances.

I dare any man or woman standing in this hall to dispatch his or her child to those camps and reclaim them in a year.

Do you fear the child will not be alive at the end of the year? Then what fortune is a heathen, who has come from nothing but cultural failure, to anticipate? Who can be without sin in half a shelter, itself shared by likely death?

These people arrived of their free will. They elect to remain in the camps and await our assessments, yet the camps only exist because of our walls and laws. Do we not have investment in the business of their suffering? I feel my share of it in my pocket.

For remedies, I have few. We could abolish the camps and drive off the heathens, and thereby damn all, even the innocent minority, to life without illumination or certainty. We could have free immigration and rob the camps of their necessity, and accept the consequences of mingling with so many heathens. Of these two reforms, I anticipate little support. But know that every man and woman standing in the camps tonight who fails our assessments does so because we make them wait there.

They already number a dozen to any of our one. To sit by with legs crossed until the walls and laws are likewise outnumbered will damn our entire enterprise. If you will not expel or admit them, then you must behave with ethical fervor.

Is there any among you with the fortitude to migrate into the camps and share some of our secrets so that they no longer need us? And perhaps thereby learn anything they have determined and which we have missed in our safe piety? To give gifts unto people of no less blood than yourselves, for chance to return with sundry others, and regardless, return with security for the commonwealth of our enterprise?

I am only one such person, and alone will be consumed as a drop of dye into a lake. However, a mass of dye great enough will not disperse so swiftly. You’ll have until the morning to let me know.

Bathroom Monologue: The Diet Scam

Lita made all the meals. This was in part because she was an amazing baker, and part because he was terrible at cooking, and a large part was utter complacency. He loved her cooking; he never questioned the source of such buttery scones, untouchable pizza dough and jams. She didn’t seem to question it either until that doctor visit where his cholesterol came back at 285.

Now, the man exercised. She goaded him into it, sometimes dragged him out to jog with her, and even brought him tea as he soaked in the tub afterward. She had, in his words, the unfair advantage of being a titan against his hobbit. True to his inner hobbit, even if he did jog or play with dumbbells, he ate half his own weight in snacks almost immediately afterward, and grew a most spiteful temper at the mere suggestion of removing them.

He never questioned her dominion over cooking, and so she could have made him cook for himself, if she hadn’t tasted his cooking. It was too mean a thing to do to him. And yet no conversation argument would get him off the stuff that was killing him; he became so sour if she forbade any snacks from the kitchen. It was all a sullen demeanor she couldn’t get at with emotional prods.

He never questioned her dominion, and was certainly too loving to complain when his scones began tasting drier, heavier of flour. When garlics and peppers grew fainter. He didn’t know anything about how to make what she’d made, only that as she cajoled him to come on hikes with her, the stuffed cabbages and vegetable soups somehow took on more flavor than his old snacks, and as sore as he got, he’d settle for almost any flavor. Any flavor that wasn’t as bad as what he cooked. He tried baking his own tarts once, and it was the only time she ever willfully sabotaged him. It didn’t take much help for him to give up and go back to reading.

By the time his cholesterol resumed safe levels, he was actually asking after her vegan chili. It almost worried her that he’d want to learn how to make it.

Bathroom Monologue: What Is Your Reason For Going Back In Time?

“I’m a teacher, and a strict one, because I know what they say about kids is largely bullshit. I grew up very ambitious, very smart, top of my class because I worked hard. I didn’t lead the debate team, but I remember being the linchpin that took us to the State finals. I always stood up for the right thing, whether it was the vegan option in the cafeteria or making sure my sister wasn’t alone the time she broke her arm and spent all Christmas break in the hospital. But a month ago I was talking to my sister, really, arguing with her, and she said I was never there for her, and barely remembers me visiting her. And on an impulse, I started looking up some of my old journals, and they’re kind of shallow. I think of myself as having once been smarter, more virtuous, the best of youth that I claim I don’t see in any of the kids in my classrooms. So I need to go back to see if I really was any of those things, or if I’ve been holding people to an imaginary self my whole adult life. If I’ve been beating myself up, too, for being only a good person when I should have lived up to great potential. I could be better, but I need to know if I’m working to return to being a better person, or to become one for the first time. I’m guessing time travel is the quickest possible journey of self discovery.”

Middlemarch Character Guide, #NaNoReMo Update #2

For my second #NaNoReMo update on Middlemarch, I'm sharing my character list. This has been vastly helpful going through the residents of Middlemarch, who have sprawled out for 400 pages so far, and have 500 more to go. While the journeys are distinct, there are at least a dozen key players amid a booming cast, and I have the worst memory for names.

Beats Downton Abbey.

Dorothea Brooke (sister): Christian, conservative; loves Pascal, perceives herself as logical. Doesn’t understand art. A focused lens through which Evans is clearly going to fire satire.

Celia: Dorothea’s sister. First awakened lady, starts questioning things and thinks she likes it.

Rev Edward Casaubon: stuffy misogynist, a fixer-upper of a man. No passion about him. Kind of a tool. So naturally, he marries Dorothea.

Rosamond Vincy: Is so used to being pursued that she thinks everybody is in love with her. Well-read but not particularly bright. Sometimes the strawman. At one point falls in love with the idea of a man falling in love with her, even though she doesn’t like him very much. He is not in love with her. Favorite description: “She found time also to read the best novels, and even the second best, and she knew much poetry by heart.” Something about "even the second best" slays me.

Mary: Rosamond’s buddy; shrewd, judgmental. Best quote: “It is the blameless who are most exasperating.”

Fred Vincy: Rosamond's brother. Romantic, might love Mary; down on his luck, a debtor; probably screwed.

Mr. Lydgate: swears he’s going to be rational about women. Didn’t see a black widow coming. Is probably screwed. Low social standing since he’s only a surgeon, not a proper doctor. Very progressive, seems like he might have the closest to Evans/Eliot’s point of view on social issues like skepticism and compassion.

Mr. Bulstrode: Middlemarch powerbroker. Can be meanspirited, very political. Doesn’t eat much or indulge in many vices, yet I can’t stop imagining him as huge, usually as Hardy from Laurel & Hardy.

Mr. Farebrother: Mr. Lamppost Name. Gambles only to support his sick mother, a preacher people from other neighborhoods visit to watch, almost religiously pluralistic or deistic, and so nice he won’t be mad if you vote against him for a job he needs. This guy is screwed.

Mrs. Garth: Mary's mom. Smart lady, probably leader of her household; harder on women than men. Strong female characters who hates women?

Mr. Garth: He’ll have to ask his wife for a personality.

Bathroom Monologue: Thief Stranded in Virginia

“Yes, this is about a credit card you’ve flagged as stolen because of purchases out of state. When your company moved to flag my card, did anyone look at the expenses and purchases, or was it a computer? I ask because if you would be so kind as to look right now, you’ll find about two weeks ago, when I was still buying dinner and subway cards in New Jersey, I also bought a train ticket to Virginia. Virginia being where all the ‘flagged’ purchases happened: dinners, hotel and a rental car. Yes, so was it a computer, or did a person think I’d been robbed by a tourist? Because whichever it is, I’d like you to explain it to this nice police officer who’s held me in custody for the last day for stealing my own credit card in order to go to my family reunion.”

Bathroom Monologue: Riverbrook Station, Redux

Riverbrook never had a station before so they had to improvise as it went along. They used confident bidders, domestic steel and concrete to erect a long platform. They screened all their conductors thoroughly, even though the railway provided them. They made the right deals with Amtrak and some stations to the north to assure reliable service.

And then on opening day a little boy leaned over the platform to watch the train come. His mother was preoccupied with The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The boy did not pull back soon enough – which is to say, he didn’t pull back at all. It was a miracle he wasn’t killed. He was thrown thirty yards and was distinctly unaware of any miracles when he landed in poison sumac.

It was a horrible thing for Riverbrook. They apologized, made settlements and cleaned. They mourned, even though the boy was alive and from out of town.

Riverbrook put down bumpy yellow plastic to guide people away from the edge of the platform thereafter.

Plenty of people came to take the next train. They had lives. They rushed aboard, and teenage vacationer fell in the gap between the platform and the door. It took half an hour to get her leg free.

They wrote along the yellow bumpy plastic for people to “MIND THE GAP.” The station manager announced the same for the PA before every train.

Apparently this one girl from Florida missed the message and didn’t hear him. She was busy on her cell. She explained such as the station crew pried her knee from the gap.

So for the next day the station manager wandered the platform, explaining that some people had troubles boarding and to be very careful. Elderly patrons appreciated the attention, but some of the younger ones thought he was crazy and disregarded the message. One of them was threatening to sue twenty minutes later when he fell in all the way to the waist.

So the station manager and every free person on staff wandered the platform afterwards, making certain every single person had a thorough lecture on how to board a train. No one was allowed to board before they had all been lectured. It held up the rail schedule terribly. It also took so long that people who had been lectured grew impatient, missed some crucial step in the instructions, and three people stumbled into the gap that afternoon.

Conductors were ordered to carry everyone onto the train, as passengers clearly couldn’t be trusted with this kind of responsibility. But as Wesley Morgan carried his third passenger on board his back went out and he staggered backwards through the door. You can guess where his left foot went. He was the most pleasant of the gap-victims, though; he was looking forward to suing someone, and possibly retiring early.

The Riverbrook Station saw so many accidents that they were still unsafe by the time particle teleporters were introduced. The station manager happily handed over the keys to a physicist. He babbled warnings about queuing order how a size ten shoe can pass through a three inch space. The physicist shrugged him off and invited his first passenger. That was the first time any teleporter commuter ever lost a foot.

Bathroom Monologue: Edgiest Hero

No scarred personality. He’ll be fighting for truth and justice simply because it’s the right thing to do. It’ll be about civic responsibility at titanic scales. I’m thinking we bring him from the Midwest, the Heartland, and give him a lot of that boyscout virtue we’re afraid NRA-types are losing. Guns will be both useless against him and deplored by him.

In fact, he’ll deplore all violence. When he has to hit you, you’ll go through a wall, and he’ll be somber, even saddened that he’s had to strike. He thinks you should have been better, and he’s an example of your failure to be better.

That’s the thing: rather than being broken, his presence will show how everyone else is broken. The corruption of businessmen, the cynicism of reporters, the implicit cruelty of military – he’ll force you to change. He’s the one who doesn’t change just because the world’s hard.

We’ll run counter to the leather aesthetic. He loves capes, and spandex, and underwear on the outside of his pants. A brightly colored costume, a garish logo, something that looks gaudy in daylight. If professional wrestlers actually fought crime. Put him in a line-up of body armor and black trench coats, and he’ll be the one everyone remembers. He’ll be different from every other hero.

He’ll be super, man.

Consumed #16: Borderlands 2, Tig Notaro, Homestuck & More

Consumed #16 is live and up for free download this week, sporting our flashy new theme song by The Clark Powell Lounge Band.

This podcast is a crunchy sandwich of content, with a loaf of Borderlands 2 and Homestuck, discussing absurdist SciFi comedy and why even the juvenile still entertains. But the meat in the center are weirder topics, like the exquisite violence of Mark of the Ninja, and Tig Notaro's brave and staggering stand-up comedy about her battle with cancer.

It also includes at least sixty seconds of book talk as I try to explain Tom Holt's Blonde Bombshell.

You can download Consumed Episode # 16 right here.

Bathroom Monologue: Jared Diamond in the Rough

The primitive societies, such as bands and tribes, are in states of constant war because they have no official governments to establish peace. As societies grow, more organized classes emerge, such as religious leaders, who incite sacrifices and holy wars, and political leaders, who incite raids and proper armies. Eventually such lower societies connect into proper nations, after they have warred enough with each other that they’d rather all war together against somebody else’s nation, or several other nations, on behalf of whatever is available.

A society is really only proper once it develops sea and air travel, and can thus fight primarily one-sided wars against lesser societies, until they are subjugated to the point of noble objectification and abuse. Then, you see, then society flourishes, and you get intellectual endeavors like “world wars,” or “world wide webs,” on which whole new societies develop and war by taking each other’s sites down. They invent realms in which to war.

That’s the real difference between primitive societies and developed ones: the primitives are always at only one war. A developed society can lose many wars, all at the same time.

#NaNoReMo Update #1

So February has started and we all had our first weekend reading our classics. There's still time to hop on if you have a classic you've been putting off too long.

My pick last year was Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, which didn't go as well as I'd hoped. This year it's Middlemarch by Mary Anne Evans (as "George Eliot"). It was was originally a serial, a novel in eight released Books. I finished Book One this weekend and am a healthy way into Book Two, wherein we're still meeting the cast. It's so enormous that I'm keeping a list to keep them straight. Recent health problems have demanded I spend more time than usual sitting still, which has afforded me extra time to attack my classic.

Upon the first chapters, I feared this would be another Austen adventure. The scenes are primarily domestic or at someone else's house, and the dialogue is overwhelmingly gossip about someone's life or direction. Early chapters especially have the clash of men and women as prospects for each other, though there are always sparks of more going on. Further, Evans was every bit the whit that Austen was, with cutting lines and turn-arounds in conversation, though many more applied to the wry and detached narrator. I struggle to pick a favorite line or passage, but this is the most recent nest of thoughts to tickle my brain:

 "Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, 

but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions,

bring their provisions to a common table and mess together,

feeding out of the common store according to their appetite."

It's perhaps double the cast of Pride & Prejudice, but tenfold the content of personality, including women who are interested not just in marriage, but education, politics, religion, literature, foreign language and a deal more. A few characters are driven into romance, and to my eye, at least as keenly as Austen, but only a minority are defined by it. There is also at least one made a fool by the preoccupation, which lends necessary variety to the execution. The best effect is that I'm actually rooting for a few of these people to find happy endings, though that's dangerous in a satire.

It's also splendid to read a little reference-comedy about John Milton. It felt like someone was letting a little air of class into my room.

The most striking element thus far is the range of themes Evans/Eliot tackles. Scenes and chapters seem to almost deliberately disagree in their approaches, or someone’s opinions will fly against the narrator. Dorothea is introduced to us with almost too much “telling,” about her life, opinions, looks and behaviors, heaped upon in narration and then dialogue. A Book later, an artist deems her too complex to capture in art. It’s partially my bias to seeing the novel as an artform, but this artist is condemning the ability of the arts to capture life, which the narrator seems to think he/she is doing constantly.

How is everyone else doing with their books?

Liebster Award, Take Two (Thanks Katherine!)

You can tell the Liebster Award has made its circuit of our community as it's come back to me. I first handed it out on December 23rd after Mark Beyer bestowed it upon me. Katherine Hajer was kind enough to give me a second dipping.

Now I've already handed it out and given the random facts, but Katherine has given me eleven new questions to field. I had a lot of fun with these, and I hope you will too.

1. Chocolate or vanilla?
   Chocolate to excess. At any given time at least ten pounds of me is chocolate, even if I haven’t eaten it recently. It owns real estate on my ass.
   
   
2. Tea or coffee?
   Tea, especially black tea or raspberry tea with raw honey. It’s become a key instrument in freeing me for soda. I’ve never liked coffee.
   
   
3. What colour is Thursday (and why)?
   Caucasian. G.K. Chesterton didn’t write much fiction about people of color.
   
   
4. What's the first thing you remember?
   The Big Bang. It’s a false memory, but you can’t pre-date it.
   
   
5. If a stranger were to open your fridge door and look in right now, what would be the first thing they noticed?
   Me shrieking in terror at an intruder. Then the bat swinging down.
   
   
6. What made you decide to start writing a blog? 
   I was already writing Bathroom Monologues for years beforehand. An agent recommended every author have a blog, and I figured, I wasn’t really doing anything else with all these bits of prose. What was their purpose if not to share them?
   
   
7. If your home got featured in a house & home sort of magazine, how would you describe your decorating style?
   Lysol.
   
   
8. What was the last book you read that you recommended to other people, and why?
   I’ve tweeted about Tom Holt’s Blonde Bombshell multiple times, posted a review to Goodreads and on Facebook. Before I’d even finished it, I bought it for someone’s birthday present. If it actually got remaindered, I’ll be depressed. It is madcap absurd, about a bomb destined to blow up earth that gets a conscience and a libido, a genius tech engineer who’s paranoid unicorns are following her, and all because we’re the scum of the universe who had the audacity to invent the addictive nuisance of music. Every page is sharply written. You can read my full review of it here.
   
   
9. What's your idea of the perfect Sunday?
   Wake up early but rested, probably around 8:30, when not much is going on and there’s ample light. It’s one of my rare off days from exercise and physical therapy, and the one day per week I get to eat red meat. Tacos and pasta simmer while I exercise a bit, and read some incredible author. If football doesn’t come on soon, then curling had better. One or two friends stop by, but not for too long, because I’m usually a cognitive hermit. Either from then or from my relations on the internet, brave new things are discovered, like GIFs of rampaging Godzilla toys, some obscure Japanese wrestling match, or an author that someone threatens my life if I don’t try. I do try it and my whole week will be better for reading them. And all the while, I accidentally write an incredible amount without having noticed I was working.
   
   
10. Socks or barefoot?
    
11. What's next?
    The perfect Sunday.

Bathroom Monologue: My Kirk/Picard Slash Fiction (Dedicated to Shelly)

Picard: Earl Grey.

Kirk: Don't you... like it hot?

Picard: You make it so.

The Only Thing Worse is the Cure, Part 2

This is the much-requested second installment of The Only Thing Worse is the Cure. For the first chapter, click here.

For the entirety of my adult life, and for whatsoever of my immaturity I can recall, I have been observant to a perpetual war the angels and demons in every wall and fiber of our world. They are here now, in the bricks of this cell, in my mattress and pillow. They are in my hair. They are my hair. They compose the very door that protects you from me. Their battles are legion; they are infinite and infinitesimal. The demons circle around the angels in band of increasing number, as though waiting to strike, while the angels circle around something more central, the nature of which I have never determined. Perhaps it is The Lord Himself, or the Gates of Paradise. Yet they never battle over Him; in any case I have observed, demons leave their flocks for other shores, emitting sparks, static heathens.

I still perceive these miniscule wars, yet for the first time in memory, they do not terrify me. Strange how they ever did; I do not know the nature of the trick. As soon as you pushed that pram down this hall, the emotional reaction has simply severed. I see plainly now that they will not attack us, or undo our world; they merely are. Circles around circles around a neutral enigma.

As my neighbor now realizes he is the splendid Saint Augustine, and his neighbor professes to no longer crave human flesh, I am to puzzle on the meaning of delusions.

Perhaps it is the will of The Lord Himself that insists I see into the matters angelic and demonic, and thereby render unto you this: I see nothing unlike in the boy as to any other boy. He has no excess of angels or demons. Anyone in this house who sees magic in his constitution is still possessed of madness. He is a plain child who would, under other circumstances, require no more than baptism and proper diet.

Yet I appreciate that we are not under other circumstances. Should the manic paralysis of my wardens pass, they will be most cross with your young master, as will any authorities pursuing him. The mind lurches with your devotion to him.

Get him to Jerusalem, or unto any island in the south where the infectiously sick are banished. Upon the latter there will be no healthy jailers for his presence to harm, and I know of one colony that has a printing press with obtuse reputation. Perhaps that is where you can inquire as to your former mistress’s book. I would not have advised its immolation, yet can hardly criticize a man’s hysteria at matters uncanny. How I would have liked to study its demons.

How can such a boy operate? He breathes, his flesh is pink as dawn, his angels and demons no quicker or crueler than those in your hands. What about him could render this clarity unto me, or that copious vomiting unto the wardens? It is perplexing in a fashion I have never felt – that which must be normal confusion in the rest of human history. You have granted me the privilege of feeling what any Christian would consider confusion, and thus made me one with every other thinker on the earth. It is a sore unity. Thank you for the privilege, even if it should be counterfeit.

If you would do one more kindness: take me with you. Take as many from this house as you deem trustworthy, for your pilgrimage in any direction will require fidelity of numbers. This boy, innocent as I claim him, will be pursued. Any sane mind here is in gratitude to whatever gift you carry in that basinet, and even if I were still in mean fate, I would wish the best for a child. Will you let me guide you to that southerly island printing press?

Click here for Part 3.

Bathroom Monologue: Investing in Tomorrows

"Benjamin Franklin is quoted saying that a single today is worth two tomorrows. Now the board of directors defrauded me of thirty-one years of pension time. That amounts to 11,242 todays that I put into a retirement. Where did it go? They say the stock tanked, yet they have golden parachutes.

"I lost over eleven thousand todays. How many did you lose? How fair would it seem if the board spent twenty-two thousand tomorrows in a dungeon somewhere? Fair trade by the reckoning of a founding father.

"I have a very nice basement. By that I mean that it has a black mold infestation and some kind of mammal keeps breaking in through unknown holes. I think they’re raccoons, but they bite more than raccoons are known to.

"Now, I’m a little old to go around kidnapping. I'm only proposing this to our... board? Our Board of Owed Parties. Yes, I like that, don't you?

"So, I’d lease my basement to the Board, if there was interest. How many tomorrows do you think these people owe you?"

Bathroom Monologue: Flag Life

It was stitched, scrutinized, approved, kissed, blessed, and finally erected. Another flag had owned this pole once, but the North had taken the fort, and so the pole was its now. It never intended to yield the perch, with its illustrious breeze permitting in unparalleled sights of both sunrise and sunset, of young men marching needless hours, and thirty years of pine trees growing in the valley beyond. How tall they grew under its watch.

Once there was a forest fire. It couldn’t do anything about it, not even call for help, since it was a flag. It was merely stained by the smoke of many a young pine. The ghosts of sap haunted its pores for decades afterward. No matter how it fluttered, it could not shake this sticky sense, and it never fluttered of its own accord. Flags do not move themselves.

It watched colonels retire. Two of them – one a man with so many wrinkles he must have been born with half of them, and one an optimist who was so forced he’d clearly been learning the trade. The latter colonel stored the flag in his office when it was the shift of the other flag – the replacement. The stand-in. The impostor that stole its breeze.

This, the one true flag, was on duty the morning the madman bombed their fort. Apparently people made bombs out of nails. Two passed through stars its folds. No humans were injured. The madman was kicked in the head many times while the flag flapped overhead, two holes far too few to stop its work.

It was hailed upon. Thrice it froze in caustic hails, sticking the flag pole itself at a permanent full-mast, unable to be moved even by the greatest gales. It was a relief that no one died those days and required it to lower. On the third hail, its nail-tears finally expanded and reached its lower side.

The third colonel, the youngest, the newest, the most apt to quote Moliere, fretted over the fort’s prized relic. The uniform code said to burn it. The younger soldiers said it was a dishonor to something that had flown so long. The older soldiers knew better.

It was an older soldier of a flag. It had no complaints as it was folded, and kissed, and blessed, and set ablaze. It became smoke, like bygone pines. It became breeze, and finally experienced what it was like to stir other things. It joined what had always moved it.

Bathroom Monologue: Powers of Detection

He is The Detective and there is only one other on earth like him. When he walks into a crime scene, it doesn’t matter how long the FBI has canvassed or logged it, for only The Detective will see what matters. If he is the fifteenth to look upon a photograph, only he will recognize the setting in the background as the next place they need to go. If a thousand papers are strewn across the desk and window, only he will find the three that matter and give away the motive. If blood is spattered around the carpet, only he will see the pattern that leads him to a hidden crawl space. The facts wait for his observation.

Your years on the force are meaningless. Forensics, procedures, the scientific method itself is fruitless compared to his casual glance because the world was set up for his pursuit. This merely appears like our story, gentlemen. In truth, it is between The Detective and his greatest enemy. We are the casualties.

There’s only one other like him, and that is The Criminal. Author protect us, and please endow our Detective with greater skill.

My Foot Stopped Working: Grossly Normal

The 22^nd was one of the most reassuring hospital visits I’ve ever had. My primary care physician was up to date on my records, listened carefully, brought in equipment to examine my feet and was attentive every concern I had. At one point I told him that if I kept motor control, I’d be happy to deal with the numbness. He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “We’re going to find a cause, so you won’t have to."

If they don’t, then that’s false hope, but damn if that didn’t lift my spirits. At the very worst, he’s great at pretending he cares. I don’t believe he’s pretending. You don’t do that many exercises to somebody’s foot for show.

The MRI found arthritis in my spine. Up until then I’d been ignoring my back pain as much as possible, chastising myself for weakness. It’s funny how a word like “arthritis” can scare you into realizing how bad your back hurts. I went from calling myself a baby to absolutely babying myself.

The MRI results said most of my vertebrae are “grossly normal.” The least reassuring phrasing I could think of, but it’s a positive. I wish they’d given me a copy of the images themselves – they would have made killer author photos.

The arthritis isn’t the cause of the numbness. The doctor said it wasn’t in the proper areas and not severe enough to be messing with these nerves. I’ve got a follow-up with his associate neurologist in February. It’s a month off, too far for my comfort, but it’s as early as possible.

Today nine of my ten toes are numb, like they’ve been wrapped in ice, and most of the ball of my right foot is tingling. The worst was a few nights ago when, mid-exercise, my big toe fell asleep. Days later, it’s never woken back up. It’s weird, but I can move it. I stand by that I’d deal with this if it was all.

#NaNoReMo Megapost

National Novel Reading Month begins February 1st. The rules are simple:

1. Find a classic novel you've never read, preferably one you've been meaning to read for a long time.

2. "Classic" is up to your definition. If you feel Beloved is a Modern Classic, you read it.

3. Between February 1st and 28th, read the book.

4. Join in on Twitter, blogs and Facebook to discuss your journey through the classic. You're even welcome to come back discuss the books in comments threads on this post.

I've chosen Middlemarch, a social commentary on 1800's England by Mary Anne Evans, under the pen name George Eliot. I've wanted to read it ever since missing registration for a class on it in college. Les Miserables came close, but my copy is 1,400 pages, and that's simply too long for me to be sure I'll finish in a month with beta reading, more medical tests, and at least two big road trips. Middlemarch's 1,000 pages as far as I'm willing to push it. It's technically eight books in one - a collected serial. Fortunately, Catherine Russel is picking up my slack, having chosen Les Mis for her own #NaNoReMo!

If you've picked your book, please mention it in the comments here and I'll add you to the post. I'm going to link any blog or Twitter accounts so people can check out reading progress. Feel free to blog across the month as you get insights into your book, or tear through it and move on to still more classics.

#NaNoReMo Readers List
1. Catherine Russell: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
2. Danielle la Paglia: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
3. Tony Noland: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow
4. John Wiswell: George Eliot's Middlemarch
5. Andy Hollandbeck: T.H. White's Once and Future King
6. John Gray: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
7. T.S. Bazelli: Toni Morrison's Beloved8. Eric Krause: Edgar Rice Burroughs's Princess of Mars
9. Beverly Fox: Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby 
10. Paul Philips: BOTH Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives and H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man
11. Janet Lingel Aldrich: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
12. Katherine Nabity: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
13.  Ross Dillon: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
14. Maria Kelly: Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles 
15. Katherine Hajer: Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
16. Helen Howell: Bram Stroker's Dracula
17. Icy Sedgwick: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
18. Susan Cross: Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice
19. Cindy Vaskova: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

20.Rachel Frink: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

21. April L. Hamilton: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Bathroom Monologue: Editing Better

“I'll tell you how to make it better. I can't do crap to make it sell, or tell what this agent prefers, or what resonates more with Heartland audiences. I can only tell you how to improve every single paragraph, and the plot strung along them. Somebody else can tell you what they'd like better. I won't argue with them. They'll be wrong. All of them will be wrong if they disagree with me, but I won't argue. Everybody has an opinion. Mine just so happens to be correct and will guide you to producing the best art. Whether anyone else agrees? I don't see why you’d care.”

Bathroom Monologue: Heat of This Sun

Clark always insisted he was an alien. As young as three years of age he would lead friends on play dates into his barn where he alleged his parents had buried the ship on which he’d reached earth. They never found it, and he never manifested the alien powers he claimed he was supposed to get from sunlight. All it did was earn him the nickname “Unvampire.”

At five years of age, Clark began convincing girls on the playground to let him save them. It was his duty as a more evolved alien god-man. They would pretend to be trapped on top of the jungle gym, or that the slide was on fire, and he would run across the yard to pretend his incredible hearing was picking up their distress. How the fires were slain by him blowing on them was chalked up to imagination.

How the house fire began is still a matter of contention in the county. Clark was nearly burned alive trying to pull his mother from beneath a collapsed beam. The local paper has a heart-wrenching photo of the child kicking a firefighter for pulling him outside and, to quote, “stopping me from saving them.”

The tragedy begat several years of transitive living, with foster parents who all had praise for the boy’s intelligence and drive, but all reported he was simply too outgoing to fit in. He wanted to captain sports teams, be head chef at dinner, and yelled over every argument. His second foster father was an engineer, and tells the story of how the boy redirected sunlight through his glasses into a heat ray unlike anything he’d ever seen. The experiment conveniently destroyed the glasses and half their garage, and was largely thought of as apocryphal until his teens.

At age thirteen he lived at a shared home in a particularly nasty part of Chicago. It was almost as soon as Clark moved in that a series of grisly murders began along the waterfront, each a helpless young man or woman. The sites and times were spaced so that no one was able to create a narrow field of subjects. Not until Clark. With amateur blogging and diligent photo evidence of what was available to the public, he was able to lead the police to the murderer within only two weeks. It was a disturbed homeless man, whom psychiatrists later testified didn’t even know he’d done any of it. He’d squatted only a few blocks from Clark’s shared home.

Solving the gruesome killing spree launched him into a sort of regional celebrity. He was consulted on further cases, though solved none, and charities soon raised the funds to send him to the college he deserved. He had a plethora of glowing references and was admitted at the age of 16 to MIT.

Clark had the knack for engineering and immediately bonded with other top students and professors in key programs. He claimed he’d always loved rockets, and dedicated his post-graduate work in alternative fuels to a roommate, who died tragically from taking the wrong prescriptions. Clark revealed staggering breakthroughs in fuels only a month later, and patented enough that he was able to fund vast improvements in Chicago’s slums. To both orphans and astronauts, he was heralded as a hero. In retrospect, it seems bizarre they let him go up in that shuttle. It was all about stardom and reigniting the American passion for space.

There are doubts. While the alternative fuels initially tested producing no carbon emissions, the temperature of the planet has raised dramatically in the last three years during their adoption. Scientists still struggle to explain the cause. It would be too ironic if he had to wait for Clark to return and fix it for us. He’s already done so much, and we don’t even know what he’s up there looking for.

Bathroom Monologue: An Ode to the Towel

Hark and grace unto this invention: the towel. Yes, you can dip it in barbecue sauce, or nutrients for later sucking, or hail a spaceship with it, but there are other uses.

Here, humanity has said, “I have this wetness all over me and no biological recourse against it. I would dry it with my hair, only my hair is wet.”

And what was humanity’s answer? To create a rectangle of something else’s hair to get wet for you, with as little effort as a brief application and a tap. Or a scrub, or a rub, or a flossing motion that you really ought not to try when other people are around. It absorbs wetness even better than human hair, and is thus an improvement on evolution, a superior portable toupee that you can wear over your head, or around your genitals, or as a cape, unless your friends are judgmental pricks.

They are cheap, efficient, and do a job evolution utterly failed at despite having shat us out of the ocean by several million years of effort. Some will say the towel is an extended phenotype, a necessary invention of our evolved brains. These people are trying to help evolution reach the towel rack. Even fundamental forces of history and biology want in on the towel.

Here’s to it.

Last House in the Sky is Done & Next Big Thing Award

I said there’d be good news today.

Well, Last House in the Sky is done. It’s not a Rough Draft. It’s not a First Draft. It’s in the hands of a test-reader, and off to betas soon after that. My mad love project, sending heists into the post-apocalypse and crossing cars with dinosaurs, is growing on up. With good health and luck, I’ll be querying it by summer.

Recently T.S. Bazelli tagged me for the Next Big Thing question series. I sat down with these last night to celebrate. Let me know what you think of my answers, and how the book sounds to you.

---What is the working title of your book?

“The Last House in the Sky.” People seem to like it.

---Where did the idea come from for the book?

Intense friendship is one of my favorite themes in life and fiction. I love those small units of incredibly diverse characters, who you’d never imagine tolerating each other, yet whose bond is unquestioned. It’s often testy and tested. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are one. Lupin the 3rd and Samurai Champloo are prototypes of this. You get this intense samurai, this horny lock-pick, this Noir marksman – they should hate each other, and yet they never turn on each other. I could read or watch those bizarre dynamics for hours.

There was a week, I think it was the summer after college graduation, that I stuck three fictions in a car, with a far off destination, and made them talk until they revealed who they were to me. Soon I had my voices, of the aristocratic sociopath hopelessly in love with a lesbian, and that master-thief lesbian who willfully abuses his affection, and the failed sidekick who hates them both but can’t do better. Then they arrived and stole the sun out of the sky. These three have been with me ever since, and I kept going back to them, knowing eventually they were going to get their own book or series. I just needed to find the right heist.

---What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A trio of misfit thieves seek to steal the last shreds of civilization from an apocalyptic cult, who'd otherwise waste them blowing up what remains of the world.

---What genre does your book fall under?

Secondary World Fantasy, but also Heist and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, since the world has suffered a series of civilization-ending catastrophes every 200-300 years. It’s really a Post-Post-Post-Post-Post-Apocalyptic novel. Survivors have almost gotten the hang of surviving by now.

---Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I’d love a Studio Ghibli adaptation, even though their adaptations are notoriously loose. Anyone who worked on Castle of Cagliostro and Princess Mononoke could make this work in animated form.

Casting people is always hard for me since I don’t write thinking of my characters that way. They’re distinct, they have their own physicality, and so the impulse is to get a lookalike or someone who played a role that’s anything like this before. Let me try to ghost-cast The Trio…

Ninx Anzhel: The boss of a group that pretends it’s democratic. Rosario Dawson keeps coming to mind. I have a soft spot for Clerks 2, and she was a doorbuster in 25th Hour. She can balance flippancy and confidence in the crucial way, and turn it up later.

Randigo “Randy” Chambers: Son of hero-parents. Sidekick of the greatest hero of previous generation. Utter failure, now a nudist and wheelman. Aren’t I insulting someone by casting them? I don’t know. Maybe Kunaal Roy Kapur? Or anyone from Attack the Gas Station.

Egal Vineguard: He’s a triclops, so either I’m asking some great actor to wear a prosthetic over his head or we’re in CGI territory. Perhaps the best shot would be WETA-style cinema magic with Mark Hamill as a voice. He’s an incredible voice actor, and was a bit of the original voice-inspiration for Vineguard. Vineguard is the perpetually upbeat, shrewd and educated man who simply will not stop pursuing Ninx. So, Kevin Kline would be great. Matt Keeslar would make me happy. The triclopes in the part of the world I’ve written are Caucasian, but I’d also love to see (or hear) Souleymane Sy Savane try this. I’m willing to bet in five minutes he’d be the definitive Vineguard-voice.

---Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’ll seek representation and send out a package to houses like Tor and Angry Robot – places I’d love to work. It’d be funny if this beat my previous novel to press.

---How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It was May to September to write the rough draft, interrupted miserably over the summer for all number of events and travel. That was about 90,000 words. I’ve only just finished the perfectly clean draft this month. It’s off to an alpha now, and betas soon.

---What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Thieves are archetypal in Fantasy, and humorous Heist Fantasy is precedented in the mainstream in both Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl and Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard Sequence. The Last House in the Sky has a harder edge than Artemis Fowl, with more emotional development and maturity along with all the woeful immaturity that makes life worth living. Gentleman Bastard Sequence, which thus far is master-class Fantasy, is still more cynical and political. There isn’t enough of a world left in my Frontier for that much politicking, and is always defined by the personal experiences of these characters. Even the world-building is restricted to what they think and experience; I give plenty of references to the bigger world, and you can connect dots, but there won’t be chapters of exposition on something they barely see.

---Who or What inspired you to write this book?

At the beginning of May, 2012, I was more or less done with edits on my previous novel and waited on theta readers. I knew I’d be in a holding pattern for final edits and submissions to agents and editors, and I didn’t want to spend all that time producing nothing. I had about five novel ideas and couldn’t pick which was best, and so asked friends. One asked what ever happened to The Trio. That incepted me. I’d convinced myself it was their time by that evening.

---What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Besides heists and road trips through the Post-Post-Post-Post-Post-Apocalypse, driving in an ancient gremlin car among seas of glass, the bones of giant demons, and herds of dinosaurs feuding with carnivorous robots? A triclopic swordsman facing down a bulldozer? Mutually assured sexual harassment? Inter-dimensional lock-picking?

Then there’s this little promise. If you’ve ever read my blog, you know I strive to write from my heart. Weird as it is, this sort of madness is what is closest to my heart. This is as pure John Wiswell as it gets. That means heart, and that means heartbreak, and heartbreak is always funny.

Too Many Humans in Fantasy Novels?

As I began wrapping up the latest draft of Last House in the Sky, a new fear struck me. Good God, I’d made everyone humanoid. It’s terrible when Fantasies squander their secondary worlds with people and people-shaped beings, so many Star Trek guys of the week.

Four main of the characters were human. A fifth was a triclops, who was psychologically different, but physically about a “Star Trek” away from human. Skin tone, size, aerobic make-up and head-shape only go so far. Now he introduces us to imps, with their suicide-fetish and heads full of horns, sphincters and surgical implants that no one will accuse of being human, but still, the overall body is vaguely human-shaped. Not good enough.

Well, but that sixth main character was a decapitated gremlin head. She walks around on prehensile ears or combustion-powered prosthetic bodies. That was less humanoid.

Of course, she invented one of the key antagonists of the book: automatons. Giant spherical drones that suck you through vents. Enormous and hungry construction equipment. A little better.

And sauropods are everywhere. An ankylosaurus gets a big scene. Compsognathus. Brachiosaurs. Hadrosaurs, even Premium Hadrosaurs. Many references to the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the filet mignon of lizards.

Dorads, the sentient balls of snakes that form gestalt consciousness, in this novel to administer drunken church services. Nine-legs, granting a little radial symmetry to the background. Likewise, land-squid. Oh, the land-squid.

I’m still feeling self-conscious about all those human characters, though. I’m woefully failing the arthropod equivalent of the Bechdel Test.

Next time. Next time.

Some good news coming tomorrow.

My Foot Stopped Working: MRI Day

Some time since my original post I began experiencing a similar numbness and loss of control in my right foot. It began with the outer toes, just like the left. As though fearing it's being out-shined, now four toes are perpetually numb on the left and I have to consciously exercise them to make sure when they operate. Today I felt the loss of control in some calf muscles. It's back now, which is a relief. I wasn't able to identify which muscles went out on me.

Breezy.

On Friday I had a spinal MRI. Blood tests came back almost entirely negative, which was great in that I didn’t have any of those diseases, but disappointing in that I didn’t have an explanation. It’s worthwhile trade; it’s simply a disappointment-balance I want to note. In brainstorming other horrible bodily malfunctions we crossed my history of back problems; after I learned to walk again in Middle School, it would go out as often as four times a week on me. So the hypothesis is that some lingering vertebrate problem or pinched nerve is hampering my legs. Seems plausible enough to warrant manipulating magnetism for my benefit. They rarely let you manipulate magnetism when you want, like in traffic or in a queue.

MRIs fascinate and soothe me. A lot of people complain about claustrophobia and the noises – both of which are sensible complaints. If some jerk behind the glass hit a button, the platform could easily crush you to death. It’s the most immediate representation of how medical science puts our lives in other people’s hands.

The MRI operator offered me headphones with four varieties of music: 60’s, 70’s, Hip Hop, or Classical. I chose Classical, and as I was elevated into the ceramic doughnut of magnetism, I was treated to the most foreboding piano solo imaginable. If you imagine a montage in any movie where the main character goes to the hospital, gets tests and gets bad news, this would be playing in the background. I almost hit the emergency button because I was laughing so hard. It got better when the piano was overridden by the MRI noises itself.

The noise-canceling headphones did not work against the brute force of the MRI machine. Those noises bother nearly as many people as the claustrophobia, but I like them. It sounds like someone is hammering in the next room, and several times it’ll sound like a circular saw, only not as constant, instead broken up into deliberate patterns. The noises are loud and startle a primal part of the psyche; but they’re habitual, highly intentional things as well. The cacophony is too deliberate to be ruckus. That’s good science there.

I see my primary care physician about it tomorrow. We’ll find out if the problem lies in my spinal column soon.

Fine, here's a goatee picture.