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

Bathroom Monologue: Why People Get Sick In Winter

"Now scientists from the Empire said that it wasn't cold climates that made you catch disease. Even winters didn't actually care sickness with them, but rather since everyone headed indoors to escape the chill, they all shared their air, and diseases danced out of their mouths and mingled in the closed space. This was not Randy's opinion. He believed winter, with its mean-spirited cold and ice falling from the sky, convinced your unconscious to finally give up and send out distress messages to any neighboring diseases to help mercy kill itself. He founded this suspicion from honest introspection; not once had he trudged through ankle-deep snow and not found some part of him desire to blow his own brains out. The sniffles were part of that desire."

Bathroom Monologue: What Now Was Inland

They were half a generation beyond the end of oceans. Half a generation since the elders had seen one, and half a generation since the young could only imagine them. It was half a generation, down to the very day of conception, when the tides of fermented blood rolled across ancient shores, turning parched deserts to dripping beaches.

Upon this gory tide rode a ship. It flashed no bearing and collided with a sandbar that, for half a generation, had been a popular hill. It rose, and it shuddered, and they fled, and they sang warnings inland. Its hull heaved for breath, and every groan of its sundry structures contributed to the songs of the natives, until warnings turned to invitations.

There was not a soul aboard, nor a husk through which a soul might have conducted seaworthy business. Yet there were many fine armors, which the middling and young shared and donned, not for war, so much as for fashion as only new varieties can afford. Beneath decks lay exquisite weapons, spears that made the air bleed, and swords with epic poems etched along their edges, verse honed to unparalleled sharpness. These, the natives beat into ploughshares, and rapidly set about tilling and sowing before the gory tide could dry up. Already it was fleeing into the horizon, as though happy to be rid of the vessel.

They stripped, too, the skin of the ship, and fashioned it into new bodies for their elders, so that Grandpars and Grandmars could join them in the fields. They stripped the bones of the ship’s mighty underhauls, which they fashioned into the outlines of new houses. When, at last, the ship was naught but an empty indentation in a sandbar, every individual, young and middling and elder, scooped up a handful to keep in memory. They pocketed their handful of the ship as they set to work.

For this culture didn’t trust the ship had been a miracle. If it were a miracle, then there would be two more, for miracles always come in threes. One miracle is happenstance; two miracles a coincidence; three, a confirmation. More, none alive had ever witnessed, and none dead had spun songs about.

The uncertainty of miracles meant labor, raking the scabs over the desert, tilling and churning, and planting the warts and rust from the former hull, along with the thumb bones of their ancestors, which had been set aside for just such an occasion. All this planting meant making music.

So they spun songs of who built the ship, who raised its marvelous hide, who operated its great oars and gills, and every song of every sailor was at the behest of a hero. They spun many songs about this hero’s journey, about the madness that had driven him to jump overboard, or feed himself to the ship so it might still live, or his pursuit of a love that had launched a thousand such ships. None was particularly good, and none was repeated, thus disqualifying them from truly being songs. If it’s only sung once, a song might as well be an errant miracle.

They sang to work, which is the duty of song, to render long labors brief, and render brevity pleasant. They erected fine homes of the ship’s vast bones, and they patched every elder’s new body, and they marched the rows of their uncanny crops in numbers only songs had ever referenced. It could well have been the music that caused their crops to sprout.

They smelled the wrong rain coming. First a few seedling squelched, and then rows belched brine. By noon their fields showered blood upward, so many geysers as to terrify the elders. Their entire culture was sprayed, and their entire world flooded by bounty. Sandbars disappeared beneath viscous waves. The middling sang the young and elders into their new homes, with solid ceilings, and the pores of their windows fastened shut, and their rich floors rose. The riding tide lifted every home from its roots, settling them to bob like corks in global liquor. Some elders fell into the maelstrom, nerves feeble beneath their shells, yet their shells were as buoyant as the hero’s ship had once been. It was the first opportunity in half a generation that anyone had to drown, and not a soul took it.

That begat their song of the hero’s journey, not of his lust or violence, but of what they had done with the flesh and bones of his ship. They thanked him for moisture, and for the clothes, and for the homes, in choruses that echoed across the ocean that climbed until their heads stuck in the clouds. Then they sang about the clouds, and in them.

Bathroom Monologue: “Those who can’t do, teach.” -Anonymous

“I’ve never understood that phrase. William Shakespeare. Niels Bohr. Bruce Lee. James D. Watson. Michael Faraday. Stephen King. Bill Clinton. All of them teachers who were famous for work in their respective fields.

“But beyond that: isn’t the music teacher who picks up a cello and shows her pupil who to tune the strings doing? Doesn’t the very act of her playing the music as example, and being able to bring others into competence with the technical proficiency, demonstrate her ability to ‘do?’

“But beyond them: Jesus Christ was a teacher. He was, so I’ve read, also God. If teachers can’t ‘do,’ and God is omnipotent, and ‘omnipotence’ is the ability to do anything to the utmost– isn’t there a grievous flaw in someone’s claim?

“Since adolescence, ‘Those who can’t do, teach’ has struck me as the refrain of the student who can’t do. Usually, it’s of the student who can’t ‘do’ up to a teacher’s standards. You hate this authority figure, and so they must fail at what they’re passionate about, not based on evidence, but based on your disdain. Invention of someone else’s flaws to make ourselves feel better is something we can all do.”

My Foot Stopped Working: What Chronic Pain Is Like

It strikes me that in some of my earlier neuropathy posts that I’ve neglected to inform people about my basic health. You know that I’m losing feel in my feet and legs, and sporadically lose the ability to move parts of them. Perhaps you don’t know why the numbness was so immediately apparent.

Since age 13, after some catastrophic medical malpractice, I’ve been in constant pain in every part of my body. It’s been so long that I don’t know how not hurting feels, except for this new alternative: not feeling anything at all. The first time that my toes irrevocably went off the grid, I was terribly frustrated. I’m used to navigating with them, and feeling the twinges of pain in their second-from-last joints as the curl, the bellwethers of how putting my foot down in each step will feel, and how sharp the pain will be in my arch and ankle.

Perhaps the best analogy is to remember the last time you had a really bad flu. That deep ache that settled on your flesh and in all your tissues, that made every movement a deliberate labor and reminded you of all those organs you take for granted. Sometimes one part, like my spinal column, hamstrings or kidneys will ache worse, and the chief pain can even be a means of focusing through the disorienting general pain. The worst is when the fog of pain is so great that I can no longer speak or compose full sentences. That general pain is so distracting, because the reports come from so many parts of the body, that my biggest daily problem can be thinking straight. This has been the last two decades of my life.

It's a little tragic that I miss the pain in my feet. I'm too used to it. The human mind is a remarkably adaptive thing, and at present I'm wondering if I could eventually adapt to not feeling anything at all, perhaps over a course of decades.

I learned to deal with chronic pain, since the alternatives were dying or getting hooked on morphine. I know I’m good at dealing with it because most people are surprised to learn there’s much wrong with me. Argue ableism and disableism all you want, but from my teens on, the ability to blend in with relatively healthy has been a source of pride. Often, also a source of protection. The kid who limps and props himself up against walls is a great target for beatings.

Finally seeing the neurologist on Friday. It's been a long month of no leads or answers. Feeling a bit hopeful today.

Bathroom Monologue: 5 Failed Dating Tips from a Super-Rich Friend

1. Approach him with your eyes affixed to someone or something else nearby, then fake tripping and spill your Merlot on him. Offer to buy him a new wardrobe. That will work as a starter date.
   
   
2. Ask his position on prostitution and how it’s really just a contract between consenting adults. Ask if he realizes marriage is a contract between consenting adults. Finally, ask how much it should cost to marry him for a while.
   
   
3. Buy every seat on the train, plane, theatre, or whatever else it is that you’re at, I didn’t catch it at first. Anyway, when the two of you are alone in the building, sidle up to him and act like this solitude must be kismet.
   
   
4. Jesus, I don’t know. Talk to him and see if you have chemistry.
   
   
5. Hire some ex-military officers, preferably something professional, to attack him, and to take a dive when you run in to fend off their fascists. Keep their card for a second attack whenever your date loses steam.

Bathroom Monologue: Toothpick Man

Guy comes into town chewing a toothpick. It’s Sunday, so everyone is at services, and he goes in, sits on the last pew. He doesn’t join in the songs or prayers. He just stares forward and rolls the toothpick across his molars.

The priest comes by to welcome him. The new guy ignores him and chews his pick.

A couple of the socialites stop by to ask whose family he is with. The new guy ignores them and chews his pick.

The town belligerent comes up and asks why he’s so quiet. The new guy chews on that pick, and the town belligerent pokes him in the chest, and the new guy chews some more. So the town belligerent grabs him by the collar and thrusts him out of the church, out into the yard. He slaps the pick out of his mouth and asks what he’s got to say about that.

Well the new guy reaches into his coat, produces a new toothpick. He stares at the town belligerent, puts the pick in his mouth and bites down with his canines.

The town belligerent jumps on his chest and starts beating at the new guy’s nose, trying to pulp it. Some mildly superior Christians eventually seize him by the elbows and haul him out of the yard.

Only a kid from the choir approaches the new guy. He brings him a cup of water to dab the remains of his nose in if he wants. The new guy doesn’t use the water, though. Instead he reaches inside his coat and fetches two toothpicks. He chews upon one himself, and gives the other to the kid.

The kid holds the toothpick in front of his eyes, rolls it between his fingers, studies it. It’s grainy wood, nothing special to his eyes.

So he asks, “What is this?”

So the new guy answers, “It’s an example of how to give your characters distinction.”

“Oh,” the kid says. He doesn’t get it, because he has no distinction. Not until he puts it in his mouth. The next day his wisdom teeth start growing in.

#NaNoReMo Update #3 – Almost Done

I’m nearly finished with Middlemarch, and it feels like I’ve been cheating in my 900-page climb. You see, my grandmother had a serious health issue and I had to travel to Maryland to help her. That meant taking four trains, two light rails, a cab, and spending an additional six hours in lobbies. That also meant ample time to digest chatty 1800s satire.

She's doing much better, thank you.

It’s funny reading satire when you’re being altruistic. 20^th century satire, and thus far, most of 21^st century satire hinges on a cynicism that all but denies the feelings that made me travel last week. Even Evans/Eliot’s American contemporary, Mark Twain, would never have written a fictional protagonist thinking or acting as I did, unless it was to mock whatever petty foibles I exhibited along the way to good intentions. It reminds that the scalpel is not the only instrument.

Middlemarch is highly unusual satire, especially set against the modern strains. It’s not invented to condemn an ideology, religion or social institution, but rather to rigorously examine why its many characters screw up and hurt each other. Mr. Bulstrode’s Protestantism is a moral barrier he’s constantly trying to rationalize around in order to be selfish; Rosamond’s naivety corrodes her life; Mr. Lydgate’s inability to politic constantly puts his public works in jeopardy; both the couples of Mary and Fred, and of Dorothea and Will, almost invent ways to not live happily ever after together because they overthink and misread too often. She's beaten me to much of wanted to do in Literature by over a hundred years.

Because it’s gentler and not so obsessed with a singular evil, it’s easier for me to take seriously than 1984 or The Daily Show. And I enjoy The Daily Show, but Christ, everything Republicans do is the worst thing in human history. I’m still coming to terms with the phenomenon of comedy performed for applause instead of laughter. It feels like intellectual cancer.

Me and the world's largest copy of Middlemarch.

Too much of modern satire is essential fictional polemic, identifier an “other guy,” and painting them as dumb and/or evil, with only the most minimal examinations of why. It shuts down your empathy towards this “other” in favor of the pleasant outrages of having an enemy. As much as I admired Catch-22 in my teens, this ought to be the ground floor of satire, not the heavens.

Middlemarch brazenly scorns hypocrisy, misogyny, ignorance and dogma, but frequently does so with colossal inner working. It makes me wonder if I wouldn’t have preferred 1984 as a book from the perspective of an actual Big Brother on the rise and why he made his awful decisions.

It certainly makes me think about where satire could have developed if Middlemarch had won. It’s not as gratifying without the obvious audience pandering of modern satire, with victim-heroes and strawman-villains. I can see why it lost. But I wonder if this wouldn’t better serve the psyche, to constantly be reminded that every potential for exterior failure exists within, as a means of progress towards remedy.

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.”