In the Nature of Scorpions and Tortoises - #fridayflash

The tortoise was just coming to shore when the scorpion scuttled by. It stopped in the pebbles and waited for the tortoise to approach.

“Pardon me,” said the scorpion, “but could I have a ride to the other side of the river?”

“I don’t know,” said the tortoise. “I am going back there this evening, but I heard there are some very shapely turtles sunning up by the road on this side. I wanted to ogle them.”

“That is a noble cause, but I hear there are some very shapely scorpions over on the other side of the river. I’ve never seen the shape of a scorpion over there, you know. Lived here all my life.”

“That is a shame,” said the tortoise, trying not to look the scorpion in the face. Unfortunately at their level, there was very little else to look at.

“As someone with the gift of aquatic travel, I hoped you would see fit to help a brother out.”

“How long is a scorpion lifespan again?”

“Not impressively long. I’d very much like to ogle a decent scorpion before I die.”

“Well…”

“You’re not afraid, are you?”

The tortoise stirred. “No. What?”

“Good. There’s a terrible stereotype about scorpions stabbing people with the least temptation. Only rednecks believe in it.”

Scorpions can be very pushy, and any tortoise hates being called a bigot. He wound up rationalizing out loud. “Well, it’ll only be a minute. I’ve been swimming a lot faster lately. Cardio training from a race with a rabbit.”

“Is that so?” the scorpion inquired as he scurried up the tortoise’s shell. He paused at the top, his tail quivering.

The tortoise eyed him. Since scorpions have much more complicated eyes, he couldn’t tell if the scorpion was staring back at him.

They dipped into the water. The scorpion’s legs coiled inward as though he were dying.

“Are you alright?” asked the tortoise.

“I’ve never been over water before. I guess I’m nervous.”

The tortoise could not tell, but it seemed the scorpion was staring at his shell. He swam a little faster.

“Are you licking your lips?”

“I don’t have lips. I’m an arachnid.”

His tail bobbed, as though nodding in agreement. With every bob the thorny tip drew closer.

“Almost there,” said the tortoise.

The tail drew as far up as possible. It quivered for an instant.

“I’m sorry,” gasped the scorpion.

“Sorry for what?”

“It’s my nature!”

The scorpion struck down with all his might. His barb snapped against the tortoise’s shell.

“Oh, is that your nature?” asked the tortoise. “Mine’s a carapace.”

They didn’t talk for the rest of the trip. The scorpion got off with his head down, and the tortoise barely looked at him. He slipped back into the water with a mutter that sounded like, “Dumb ass.”

The (Unexpected) Brilliant Writing in The Raid 2

I loved The Raid: Redemption, with its perfect action movie plot of cops climbing a gang building, each floor occupied by angry criminals. It's the perfect excuse for the unparalleled fight choreography that got the little Indonesian film international acclaim.

That's also why I didn't expect such great writing in the sequel, The Raid 2. No book or movie has sunk a hook that well on me in years. I envied their skill at making me question what was going on in the hero's mind as he sunk into the criminal world. There's a lot emerging writers can learn from its first act.

Rama is our hero – our moral and incredibly capable police guy. The Raid 2 opens with the murder of Rama's brother. He swiftly vows to bring down the crime organization responsible, but to do so he must ally with fringe police he doesn't trust, and from there get tossed into the same prison as the son of the mob's boss. If he can ingratiate himself, then he and the fringe police will have a path to the heart of the organization.

I didn't say you only watch it for the writing.

So Rama gets himself convicted of a crime, but once inside, always acts bitterly towards the son. He only has a sincere interaction with him during a massive riot in the recreation yard, where he saves the son's life. The two have a moment of bonding before riot guards drive everyone into the ground.

The movie jumps forward a few years. The son is already out, and today Rama is getting out too. The mob has pulled strings to help him. On his way to the car, Rama fusses with the cuff of his shirt, tears out a listening bug and drops it in the road before he and the son drive away.

In the cinema, I leaned forward in my chair wondering if, during those five years, he'd switched sides.

Then Rama meets the mob boss himself, who makes him strip. A specialist checks his every crevice, and even feels up his discarded clothing to make sure he's trustworthy. Once they're sure, they incinerate his old clothes and get him a good suit. Something fit for his new life.

The new family.

Did he know they'd do that? Did the police he's working for not know and bug his clothing? Or has he changed in prison? It's too plausible that he could bond with the son while missing the companionship of his brother. But he also could have gleaned that this pat-down was coming and found the police's bug to be foolish.

The opening act of the movie does a brilliant job of making the audience ask those questions, and then tweak them as the unspoken thrust of what characters do. There's the visceral side, of seeing him manhandled and talking humbly to a man who could have him shot at any time, but those are the trappings.

You Aren't - #fridayflash

Take none of this personally because you aren’t. Whatever you’re hearing, whatever I say you’re thinking, it should all be taken with due skepticism as all evidence suggests you do not exist. You can't exist as I describe you, though you as a listener, or reader, or telepathic audience, ought to. Otherwise, how are these sentences operating?

You don’t care about that semantic babble. You care about the slime molds that have swallowed the first floor of our house.

You’re the second person to occupy this house, you know because the first person has dissolved into no more than a gangly skeleton inside the gelatinous mass presently overflowing the first floor. The bones of the first person’s right hand stretch out to the stairs as though begging for company.

You don’t feel like company; you’re almost alone here, except for the third person, myself, and I am just a voice. You never thought about it before, but you find disembodied voices annoying. Less annoying than carnivorous slime, but annoying nonetheless.

Even if you aren’t, you still would be a few things. Spry and resourceful, if I may flatter, are traits that describe you. You sprint up the staircase, pulling picture frames and shelves from the walls, and lobbing them down the steps at the slime. The slime absorbs all of these as easily as it did the first person, dissolving bits of organic matter like the butterfly collection you threw at it. It only stops at a broken salt shaker on the top stop, deliberately oozing around the white grains.

Thinking of slugs, you rush into the second floor pantry for a bag of salt. You don't wonder about why you have a pantry on the second floor, where almost no one keeps a pantry. You do wonder as the slime undulates and sloshes onto the second floor, growing upon receipt of the salt, and growing so rapidly that it catches your left leg.

You think two things then: that the slime burns like ice packing around your flesh, and that the slime was probably saving the broken salt shaker for dessert since it clearly loves the stuff. You curse Morton's and all salt distributors as you are sucked inside the slime mold, the first person's undigested cranium bumping against your chest. Your chest, like your legs and arms and eyes and pancreas, dissolves.

You find that none of this hurts. You find that you aren't scared. How is this possible?

Because you aren’t. The second person is a handy thing to be, and to not be.

An Open Letter to Wolverine and Archie (RIP)

Dear Wolverine and Archie,

I was in elementary school when they killed Superman. It was big and dramatic; my mother ordered my brother and I separate copies of the black-bagged issue without even asking us because it seemed so culturally important. Being a villain-kid, I was just happy to see such an annoying icon scrubbed, but I was interested. The cafeteria buzzed with speculation about how it happened. It was a pop culture event.

It's been a stupid twenty-two years since then. The decreasing relevance of superhero comics has led the industry to many stunts, including killing characters whenever they get desperate for attention. I'm afraid you two are the most recent victims, and I sincerely apologize to you both that you had to share an announcement month. Archie, you're not even a superhero. You both worked hard enough to deserve better P.R. You're both iconic in such different ways that you getting stunt-murdered at the same time makes it all feel like… well, stunts.

And your announcements came only weeks after Marvel announced the who-dunnit murder of The Watcher. Oh, for a meta-comic about The Watcher observing this desperate trend.

Even as a villain kid, you were my hero, Wolverine. I was a runt like you. This is a perplexing week, as I should be upset that you're going to die, and yet, I'm not. If anything, I'm upset that I'm not upset. The problem is that you'll be back, probably in the next two years. Why, just last week Marvel resurrected Spider-Man after a year of being dead. He's alive again in time to make his own movie premiere.

Not only did Superman come back, but his killer, Doomsday? He's been killed and resurrected at least three times. In the last few years they've killed and resurrected Batman, the female Robin, Captain America, Nightcrawler, Superboy, Wasp, and Thor. Every dead Flash has come back. Marvel and D.C. brought back the perennial tragic sidekicks Bucky and Jason Todd almost in parallel, to identical drama with their mentors and antihero lives.

D.C. pulled "Blackest Night," a Green Lantern story that brought back every dead character in their universe, and boldly ended it with the characters surmising the dead could never return again and death was now permanent. A year later, D.C. rebooted its universe and brought back a bunch of those same dead characters.

Remember when Marvel killed Ultimate Spider-Man, a Spider-Man from another universe, and tried to convince the public they'd killed the one they actually knew about? Just to get on CNN? Later they killed the real one, but as you both know, he's back.
 

This has devalued death, which ought to be the greatest stakes in all the combat-based stories superhero comics keep telling. Archie, you've never been about fighting, so it's not fair that you're been sucked into this, but you have. I honestly wonder if you'll return, too, the next time your publisher needs attention.

And Wolverine? Death may be the rest you deserve, but it won't be permanent. In the last ten years Marvel has already killed and resurrected your nemeses, Sabretooth, Gorgon and Cyber. When Psylocke died, you yourself visited a friend in NYC for a method of bringing her back. That guy can probably hook you up if you want it.

You both have no control over your mortality, just like me. But if you could write for your own comics, don't you think the interesting story at this point would be about a universe where death isn't permanent and what it does to people's psyches? If C-list heroes routinely rise from the grave, does the public no longer fear death? How does religion change? What happens to the blood feuds between heroes and villains when bloodshed doesn't end anything?

There are stories there. There's an upheaval of the way I live, and the way you both will probably be living again in a few years.

I'm sorry that I'm not sorry you died. You deserved better.

Best,

John Wiswell

What Victims Watch - #fridayflash

Every week, everyone who’s ever died in a Horror movie gathers at The Killer’s house. The Killer is never home, though they do often see his shadow in the hall by the bathroom, or his silhouette against the refrigerator, and if any of them take a shower, they’ll feel his presence on the other side of the curtain. Everyone who’s ever died in a Horror movie has grown used to this. Nowadays, they giggle at it.

They come for the relief from their work weeks. Drunken jocks sit in open windows, for all the sofas are piled with nubile teen girls who are showing neck wounds and too much cleavage. Nerds pass bongs and bags of Fritos, though they try to keep the coughing and crinkling down so everyone can hear the show.

They watch you pre-ordering a television instead of buying health insurance. They watch couples spend everything on houses in flood zones they haven’t researched enough to know even get rain. They watch countries vote on politicians who support women’s rights and healthcare, and ignore those same politicians will eradicate forests and drone-bomb foreign innocents.

They watch you forget to thank your mother for that trivial thing she did, that thing you’ll always remember after her car accident tomorrow. They watch, and they laugh their heads off. Even the characters who didn’t die from decapitation laugh their heads off at you.

The show is so funny that everyone who’s ever died in a Horror movie always packs the house. They don’t care that they don’t get cell service, and no one tells their parents where they’re going for the weekend. They come with little gas, in used clunkers that rattle and practically fall apart before they groan into their parking places. If their clunkers are overheating, the victims prop open the hoods while joking about how stupid real people are to spend so much time arguing on the internet.

They need the release. They work hard, they play hard, and they die unfairly; you’d need ridiculous context to avoid how most of them were hacked to oblivion. Much more context, they figure, than all the real people they watch getting hooked on drugs or forgetting to pay the rent.

Everyone who’s ever died in a Horror movie needs the real world to take their minds off of fiction.

Bathroom Monologue: Twenty-One Fantasy Countries Made From Scratch

Randall Nichols is a dear friend of mine who's wrapping up work on a card game. He asked me to check the twenty-one one-sentence pitches for Fantasy nations he had to invent – a pretty mean feat for anyone on a deadline. I was happy to help, but because my imagination was obnoxious, I couldn't stop myself from generating my own countries, based on ridiculous Fantasies he couldn't possibly use. Blame it on Calvino and sugar.

I wound up running until I had my own deck of twenty-one uncomfortable neighboring cultures. Like Randall's, mine get one sentence a-piece to sum them up. It is the most fun I've had in a while, writing or otherwise, some pure play that I have to recommend trying at home. Maybe you already do.

If you don't, I figured I'd share my twenty-one Fantasies here.

1 The most technologically advanced culture is dominated by sentient robots that are mostly threatened by advanced models time-traveling from the future to supplant them with infinite hindsight.

2 The country of eight-armed people with no legs, who are renowned for their litigation, and arguments that take days as lawyers constantly argue, "And on the other hand…"

3 The nation where everyone believes their shadows are their true forms, and their bodies of meat are but biologically afterthoughts.

4 A bog in which every human civilization has sunk and failed, but the bacteria is quite evolved and has a bustling culture.

5 A strict theocracy worshiping the gargantuan on whose back they all live, harvesting giant lice for food.

6 A loosely collectivist culture with no central government, and yet everyone is obsessed with constantly building great labyrinthine walls, such that invading armies starve before hitting any homes.

7. A culture like any other, except it lives upside down, gravity reversed, and so mostly excavates tunnels or conquers the undersides of floating slabs of rock.

8. Capitalists who live on the top sides of most floating islands and slabs of rock, whom sell anti-gravity powder and whatever else gets stuck in the treads of their shoes.

9. This culture is unknowable.

10. A democracy where everyone ages backwards, only the middle-aged may vote, and newborn ancients are protected by world-weary infants.

11. A nomadic tribe of beings with no immune systems, but who are carried in individual wads of slime that are toxic to everything they touch.

12. A storied monarchy of underwater creatures, claiming their territories include all the world's seas, and who raise giant squid to defend their borders against sea trade.

13. The only country to ever forge a peace treaty with 12, this is a sentient gestalt reef of coral bordering several countries.

14. Barbarian horde living with domesticated dinosaurs, living the dream of every good Metal album cover.

15. A religious conclave of worm- and human- symbiosis dedicated to finding and digging to the center of the planet.

16. A nation of religious crusader pacifists who have rationalized their dogma such that they only invade the opposite end of their own kingdom, switching sides every year, crusading safely without bloodshed for a record 150 years come this Fall.

17. A nation of werehumans who are quite content for most of the month, until the full moon, when their curse fills them with existential dread and body issues.

18. A vine-covered nation of sages so trapped in nostalgia that they are trying to reverse time and return to the glory days.

19. A culture of mountain-dwelling misotheists who view the lands and seas as the gods' creation and seek to build something better on scaffolds between the peaks of the world.

20. When they say they're a nation of sunlight, they mean that all time stops for anyone and anything in their vicinity if shade or night passes overhead.

21. A nation where every third person takes turns not existing for a year so that everyone can reminisce about how wonderful he/she was, their annual return providing a constant stream of reality checks and disappointment that keep the culture grounded.

Everyone's Angry About the Hugos

John Scalzi has argued that the Hugo nominations shouldn't be announced so close to Easter since too many people are busy to get caught up in them. Cleverly, the voters circumvented that this year by nominating people that would piss everyone off.

The most outrage is about Vox Day's novelette, Opera Vita Aeterna, published in The Last Witchking. Everyone was furious without having read the story. Why? Because Vox Day is also a cartoonishly bigoted blogger, most famous for writing unforgivable things about N.K. Jemisin. Here his fiction has been nominated, not the person, but liberal voters have a difficult time extricating the two, or even seeing why they should bother. It's the most brazen example yet of Hugo voters copping to the awards not being exclusively about the works nominated.

The nomination presents a fascinating problem for WorldCon. We knew about 10% of SFWA members voted for him to be their president before he was kicked out of the group. Now we know enough WorldCon members are willing to vote in his work, and it feels like there's a reactionary element here, hoisting him up in retribution for his booting.

But what do we do about this? Kick out anyone who votes for him? Go make a new club that doesn't let "the wrong kind" of people in? For all the negativity flowing right now, I don't see any reasonable solutions proposed.

Five Phases of Tragedy - #fridayflash

Phase 1

Helen finally tries out for the school play. Danny and Asia hate theatre, but go to her audition anyway, and cheer like it's a conference football game when she's cast as ___. ___ is the role that shall never be spoke of again starting Friday. No one else wants to play ___ because of the costume, with the straps that nobody can figure out are supposed to stay up.

Phase 2

Helen is electric as ___ for two minutes and ten seconds, before the straps come apart like overcooked pasta. Hundreds of people, including, Helen's mother, her brother and the Honors Bio teacher she has a crush on, see her topless. Her life is over.

Asia has an idea to resurrect her. She's watching with Danny on the catwalk.

Phase 3

Running through the hallway, Helen sees a cell phone streaming video of her impromptu topless scene. Her shame is already a Vine.

Danny snags Helen's elbow, hauls her into the empty English classroom, and gives her his jacket. Helen sobs and begs Danny and Asia to never speak of the stupid role again. Danny promises to, and is halfway through promising to replace the name with a blank line if he ever sees it again, when Asia strips off her jeans, and then down to a neon orange bra and thong that her friends never expected she was capable of wearing. With equal fervor, she begs Helen to go streaking with her.

"We have to own this before it owns you," she explains, casing the hallway for adults who might impede seizing the day.

Phase 4

Helen is mocked ceaselessly, on Facebook, the street, and in every glance she gets in school. Asia's plan failed and now the two of them are a school meme - Thesbians.

She keeps taking bathroom breaks from class to cry, and Danny refuses to let her go alone, and so is eventually sent to Detention for going into the Girls' bathroom. He becomes part of the meme before his sentence is served, and Asia and Helen wait up for him afterward to break the news. Asia mocks him for being the biggest Thesbian of all until Helen smiles and agrees to pizza.

Phase 5

Asia is asleep, half on top of the pizza boxes and half beneath the futon, even though she's the one who asked to watch Pacific Rim for a second time in one night. Helen is on her way to sleep, dozing off against Danny's bony right arm as giant robots defend the world. She means to ask what he thought of Asia's dumb streaking plan, and then sees down the back of his khakis and realizes he isn't wearing underwear.

Drowsy, she makes a joke about it.

Then it's part of them.

Faking Disability - #fridayflash

“He's not disabled. He doesn't look in pain, I saw him smiling yesterday. Sometimes he jogs; he must, since I've seen him in sweat pants. Cripples can't exercise.”

“I've heard him laugh. His back can’t be that bad, that's just something he tells the government. He's lazy. He's a liar. Sure, sometimes he goes to his room for two hours, sometimes for a day, but he comes back acting normal. Bet he’s jacking off, and if he can jack off, he's not that sick.”

“When he staggers around like that it gets a lot of sympathy, but he’s not a hunchback. He could stand up straight if he wanted. I’ve seen him do it for photos. It’s an act.”

“No, he’s probably drunk when he’s staggering like that. I had an uncle who liked to get fucked up, but the government didn’t pay him for it. Being fake disabled is a sweet gig.”

“How much do they pay him?”

“Too much, that’s how much, to just pretend like that. It’s depressing to look at, with that stupid tremor. How's he make his leg go like that?”

“Depressing because it’s an act?”

“…Yeah. Yeah.”

John Adapts to Having a Cat

So, yesterday was not my day. While I don't want to go into everything that happened yesterday, it began by burying the family cat, Marshal. Spring had softened the ground enough to confer him to earth, and he'd been waiting long enough for it.

Marshal and I were not friends. He was my sister's cat, though she left him with us years ago to move closer to work, in an apartment that forbade pets. I am extremely allergic to animal dander, and above all danders, cat dander is the worst. Lock me in a room with a cat for long enough and I'm dead. That meant that Marshal spent his life in our basement, with a door leading to the outside where he could prowl and menace the squirrel population.

We had to adapt to each other, because often I'd be the only human contact Marshal could even have in a given day. And further, being the eldest male around, I quickly became Marshal's alpha. He would claw and bite the ladies of my family. I still chuckle remembering the one time he bit my foot as I was too slow to bring his food; I knocked two knuckles on the top of his head, soft but swift, and he looked so surprised that there could be comeuppance for his actions. He never bit me again, and starting that night became much more affectionate.

That was a problem for me since I'd get bleeding hives from a cat rubbing on me. I bought plastic gloves to pet him, and in warmer weather would occasionally wear an old blanket so he could sit on my lap for a while. Even that caused severe asthma attacks.

Marshal never understood why he couldn't rub against my leg or sit in my lap like he could on other humans. However, to illustrate the point of Dr. Pavlov, he learned that he wasn't allowed to. Last spring he finally adapted to following me to the deck and sitting underneath my chair, resting in the shade I created. By the end of summer, he was routinely beating me to the chair for his spot.

It was as close as we could be. Sometimes I'd bring fresh copy out to edit, and talk out plotting problems with him. He was a terrible editor, and if he managed to drool on a page I'd have to throw it out. There was something to having another pair of eyes, sapient or no, to look into as I chatted. There was even the benefit of having those eyes attached to a mind that couldn't understand and thus couldn't object to whatever I was saying, permitting me to have company without distraction. He was a good listener.

A person can adapt to a lot.
 

The Nigh-Infinite Serpent - #fridayflash

It’s hard to believe we ever wanted to kill the Nigh-Infinite Serpent. I mean, I don’t know how you do that, and neither did the Ancients, since every bomb they invented never even sloughed its old skins. But I’ve got fat books full of stories of great knights and cyclopes who braved the mountains of the world trying to kill the Nigh-Infinite Serpent. Their bravery made for great tragedies, even if these days they only get adapted as comedies.

You have to be very brave to fight something that can and frequently does encircle the continent. Every Winter the nights get longer, not because we’re tilting from the sun, but because it’s shifting in the sky trying to warm up. You might as well try to arm wrestle an earthquake. Also, fighting it caused a lot of earthquakes, which is why the Moderns outlawed fighting it.

There was this one whole crusade that climbed up to the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s mouth, using a combination of apatosauruses and gryphons for travel, just to die bravely and go to Ten Heavens. This was in the second dynasty of the Moderns, who dispatched one thousand runners to chase them and hand of the writs of cease-and-desist. It was bound to be an epic, and an epic against the serpent would probably wreck the entire continent for us.

So the crusade had to turn around, because if they broke the law then their dead souls would never get into Ten Heavens. Except they were so high up that they had to march down the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s spine – there was no easier way. And marching around up there, the crusaders found there really was no more convenient way to get anywhere on the continent than by walking on the serpent. It was lying about so much of the world that some of them even visited islands cartographers had deemed lost and mythical by hopping off its tail.

You can tell which regions were the first to bribe the Nigh-Infinite Serpent into playing highway because they’re still rich as cake today. Ornithologists were conscribed to trick flocks of rocs and gryphons into straying past the Nigh-Infinite Serpent’s mouth, giving it ample sustenance, and for every load it would contort its amazing body, a length becoming a new bridge or tunnel, sometimes running two or three highways on top of each other if the bribe was plentiful enough. When the Moderns factored in the reduction in wars with nature and no longer needing to construct or pave highways, they considered bribing the beast to be an exceptional savings.

Nowadays it actually gets angry if people aren’t traveling on its hide, which is why it attacks so many aircrafts. The best we can tell is it’s used to all the traffic as a sort of back massage. I work in automobile manufacturing, so I don’t mind the anti-aircraft strikes, but the delays on the highway are miserable whenever the beast sheds.

Waiting for Godot Review

I had the great pleasure of attending my first Broadway play last week. It was Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Waiting for Godot, which commanded the sort of cast I’m told you don’t usually get even in New York City. Thanks so much to Ross Dillon and Max Cantor for having me along with them, I, some Philistine who wasn’t sure Broadway was even a real place. It turns out is a place, like a lot of New York City, that exchanged the sky for glowing billboards, making it a fine place to watch two great actors ask each other if life is really happening.

Vladimir and Estragon.

It was a wonderful production. Shuler Hensley played Pozzo as a hooting Texan, which I’d never imagined and immediately adored. Billy Crudup rounded out the cast and completely nailed the role of Lucky, from his weary swaying to that impossible monologue on everything and nothing. There came a point when, as an exhausted Pozzo prepares to leave, Lucky took on a knowing expression and caressed his chin in a way I can scarcely believe they got to work on stage, with Crudup blocking so much of our view and facing away, and yet sharing his expression with a crowd behind him. That’s the level of craft the foursome brought to the play.

Shame on me for my highlight coming out of the non-superstars, but McKellen and Stewart were as sterling as you’d expect. McKellen is the more versatile performer, and here played Estragon with so many senile and demented notes, all with the weight of immense age, that reminded me keenly of my grandfather’s final years. Even gestural suggestions of senility were perfect for Waiting for Godot, and particularly for Estragon, who has to forget so much of what’s allegedly happened in front of us. It detracts from my reading of the play as raw nonsense, deliberately eschewing its own continuity to make points about post-modernism, and yet it fits to humanize the material. I love when good actors read material differently than I do. Art isn’t worth it if we all agree. Then it becomes Heinz ketchup.

Also, I love Heinz ketchup.

Vladimir and Estragon.

McKellen got me thinking about other interpretations of the work, and inspired a vision that can never be: Waiting for Adventure Time. The cartoon is often absurd, but that’s a credential for this kind of mash-up, and is so often about exactly the kind of baffling logic that, here, Vladimir is infuriated with for not working. On the subway ride out, I pitched it to Ross and Max, with Finn as Vladimir and Jake as Estragon, and likely animated by the same crew. They won’t even have to switch backgrounds. Any number of Adventure Time voice actors would fit Pozzo, while if we’re going to get anyone to do Lucky’s monologue, it’s got to be Lady Rainicorn running it in Korean.

The play has that elemental nonsense about it, that honestly does remind me of Adventure Time. Adventure Time follows a contrived internal logic, something unreasonable and that children don’t know isn’t acceptable yet. Waiting for Godot is about a grown man’s inability to deal with that lack illogic. An easy highlight of the show was arguing with my friends over its potential meanings as we were stuck in the stairwell trying to exit the theatre.

Vladimir and Estragon.

And no comparison I make can render me guilty. No, sir and madame, every inane thing I think about Waiting for Godot was made to lofty after the lights in the theatre came up and a woman sitting two rows behind us asked, “Why were they waiting for him?”

That’s another highlight right there. You can get angry, or despair, or relish in gifts like those.

#NaNoReMo Wrap-Up

March is on its way out and maybe, just maybe, spring is coming. My boiler is busted and winds are rattling my walls, so it’s cold enough inside that it still feels like winter. Winter is a good physical state to read some angry Russian novels.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is probably going to be on my #bestreads list at the end of the year. It’s a unique novel and excellent in too many ways, the greatest being that it somehow balances all those ways without losing them. It’s political and religious satire, it’s sincere literary soul searching, it’s mad-cap adventures. Its tone changes on the scene to feel like it’s bridging worlds usually separated by genre.

Since I have this whole wrap-up post to write about the book, I’d like to target the dumbest criticism I’ve read of it. I’ve jumped around Google to collect context for Bulgakov’s life and the culture he was tickling, and there are many sites that have a nub about the novel’s aim on Soviet Russia’s secularism. The Wikipedia entry mentioned:

“However, the attempt is ad absurdum – the novel shows the reality of evil and demonic powers in this world. And the resulting question is, "If those powers exist, and the world is run by Woland and his entourage, why does this world still exist?"”

It’s one of many little atheistic editorializations that never seem to get flagged or cleaned up on Wikipedia. This is a particularly stupid one, as having read fifty pages of the novel you know Woland’s agents wouldn’t destroy the world because they don’t spend all their time here and they enjoy its excesses. Woland visits us so seldom that he’s baffled (and then elated) that the Soviets disbelieve in him. And near the end, the devil speaks with a possible superior (guess who) who seems able to get him to change his actions for the kinder.

It’s unbecoming when a line on Wikipedia bothers me for weeks like that, but at least I can get that out of my system, just like Woland got earth out of his.

If I have a regret about the novel, it’s that I read it while writing so much of my own. Composition takes up so much of my mind that often I couldn’t pay The Master and Margarita proper attention and would hold it off to a weekend or a travel day. I read half of the novel on trains headed towards Waiting for Godot, and it was a delightful experience, but it felt like it deserved better. It’s definitely one I’ll revisit in multiple translations.

Other National Novel Reading Month Wrap-Ups: 
Elephant's Child Vs. Salman Rushie
Cindy Vaskova Vs. Jekyll & Hyde 
Helen Howell Vs. Tom Brown's School Days

Talk to Villains - #fridayflash

I never expected to solve more crime as a reporter than as a bulletproof icon. Yet Simon Magus is responsible for more crime in this city and on the planet than any drug runner. He’s a CEO, the kind that builds skyscrapers named after himself, paid for by what his companies export into war zones. He hates me – one of me, for what I’ve been doing in those same parts of the world when I’m not pushing for a Pulitzer.

He invited me to a lunch on the top floor of one of his skyscrapers, witless that it'd been me who stopped a homicidal robot on its roof three days prior. Even with all the shattered glass, he had a breakfast table set up with Kopi Luwak and imported baguettes. Simon honestly wanted to talk to me about my criticisms of his company, at first to see if he could wow and bully me into retreating, but later about the veracity of my sources and how to keep shareholders happy while enacting reform.

All the while he peppered in attacks against my alter ego. He wanted to convince me what a danger he posed, taking responsibility away from normal people. As though he sells VX nerve gas to normal people. The surprising thing was that when I kept disagreeing, Simon grew more eager, like being stolid earned his respect.

I'll never forget. He said, "Cal, the world doesn't need him. It needs you."

That haunted me, and not just as I put on the tights and stopped his robots. Maybe that means he won.

The next day he bought my paper. We’d gone too deep into the red over the backfiring paywall, and without his money we’d have sunk. He said he’d bought it with the money he'd typically donate to PBS. He had me on the dais as he announced the takeover, and asked me to be the new editor in chief.

If this is a scheme, it’s Simon’s best. Not a single crate of weapons has ‘mysteriously gone missing’ off his cargo liners since our first breakfast together, which if you do the math, has saved more lives than I can at the speed of sound. I can’t help doing the math.

But if he expects me to run a puff piece Sunday, he’s got another thing coming.

Bathroom Monologue: Revenge

Step 1: make two small cups of tea since your OCD friend stole your big mug.

Step 2: sip randomly from both cups.

Step 3: watch your OCD friend pay.

Closing in on The Master and Margarita - #NaNoReMo

I cannot call this book by its real title. At least twenty times in this month I've called it "The Master and The Margarita". Perhaps this is because I spent three years expecting it to be about a beverage. Perhaps I have an unhealthy fixation with parallel structure (regardless, we know I have one of those).

I'm closing in on finishing The Master and T... and Margarita, and it's a fascinating piece of work. It's rare that I find any novel with such disparate elements, but it has zany comedy, romance/redemption or high religious pathos. At different points it's reminded me of those cheesy 80's satires that shed their criticism for personal stories of discovery *and* the most profound Historical Fiction. It maintains both its Soviet-era anti-secularism and its Christ-era critical thought, though they come closer to converging, and the ending gets surreal in provocative ways.

Most provocative to me is how the novel challenges what is absurd and what is surreal (damn it, more parallel structure). Both words describe parts of the book, but neither is wholly applicable. Because the scene with the giant talking cat trying to steal candy bars is absurd - it's goofy, impossible, something that doesn't pretend to fit into how the author thinks the world works. But the scene with The Master, an author who went mad trying write a book about Pontius Pilate, having a vision of Pilate struggling to find rest after the execution of Christ, is surreal. The latter scene feels so intense, not fitting with our world and yet unaware of it. Here the absurd and the surreal split: the absurd being what can never be and doesn't care, and the surreal being what can't be and feels like it thinks it could be. Bulgakov's surrealism is disturbing for how convinced it feels it could barge in and upturn us if it wanted to, and brings me back to Borges and the better Kafka.

Which is to say: it's really quite something. I'm too happy to have kept this copy around all these years, and a little guilty for not getting to it sooner, just like Middlemarch last year. Like Middlemarch, there's nothing else quite like this. Other than being unique, there's nothing in common with Middlemarch. Woland would set all that town's nuances on fire.

When I've asked around if any other Russian novelists screw around to the degree Bulgakov did, I've only gotten the answer of Nikolai Gogol. Any recommendations from that canon are welcome. It keeps rewarding me for diving.

A full review of the book should be up on Goodreads (and maybe here) soon. How is your #NaNoReMo coming?

The Perfect Song - #fridayflash

The author finds the perfect song. The search is laborious, infinite, and instantly forgotten in a melody inspirational and nonintrusive. Whatever muse sprang these rhythms into our world gave them merit without demanding attention, and thus the author can work to it.

The author puts the perfect song on loop and begins to type what will surely be the greatest opening paragraph in the history of the novel.

The author’s web browser blinks with an IM. GChat is never truly closed in publishing. Or perhaps it’s a tweet, or a new Like on a half-clever Facebook post from a few hours ago, the last dying gasp of approval for memes past. The author checks the trivial interruption, which ought to take only a few seconds, and the end of the key sentence is still in his mind. Somehow, by no fault of his own, he has soon opened Tumblr, Reddit, and least defensibly, Youtube, chasing links that ask for so little of his time. All with that perfect song on loop in the background, reminding him to work. Eventually he may pause the perfect song to better hear the funny cat video his second college roommate posted, though he’ll unpause it out of guilt shortly later.

The author screws around for so long that, once he realizes his errors, his mind now associates the perfect song with screwing around. Perhaps it was never perfect. Perhaps he was never perfect, but that matters not, for the song is no longer the anthem of victorious words. It causes him only to dwell in how he let lunch time get here without meeting his morning word count.

And so the author opens his music folder and searches for another perfect song.

Rough Draft Done Two Days Early, Let's Go Read Books

At 1:10 last night, I wrote the final chapter of We Don't Always Drown. It's 60 chapters long, about 97,000 words, and as in dire need of editing as I am of a bath.

Like always, I'll post a breakdown of the entire process. Right now I have to make a run to the library - finishing writing means it's time to read.

But I wanted to share a sheet of paper I've kept floating around my desk since the end of February. It assisted my temporal reasoning with the dates when people might visit, or when I'd be traveling, which is a handy way to not rationalize against productivity. At the end of every writing day, I'd mark down the roundest version of my word count.

The 22nd is marked "Godot" because I'm headed off to NYC to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot. A pair of wonderful friends got me a ticket to go with them, and I'm equally excited about spending Saturday night with them. I've got something to celebrate now.

7 Chapters in 5 Days

Those pixel-stained technopeasant wretches. Wait, what?

After Thursday, the plan was to write eleven chapters in seven days.

After Friday, the plan was to write nine chapters in six days.

After Saturday, the plan was to write seven chapters in five days.

Thursday was a very difficult day physically, but I managed to make pace that took me through the weekend, and at the urging of friends, took Sunday off as a breather. That’s reasonable because I’m at pace and over the tricky denouement. The remaining seven chapters are mostly shorter and all the composition has gotten me into the groove where I’m terrifically excited to write them. Some of the best bits of the book are about to spill out of my fingertips.

On Saturday night I went out to celebrate by watching The Wind Rises. It’s a wonderful film and a very interesting piece of art if it’s truly Hayao Miyazaki’s last. It’s about the life of a boy who dreams of building airplanes, living myopically towards his goal which lands him a job in pre-World War II Japan. I couldn’t help wondering if I was projecting things onto it, knowing it might be the end of his career, with its ominous treatment of earthquakes, the frequent shots of exhausted engineers smoking to relieve stress, and the finality of so many elements, even the love story that is stricken by tuberculosis we seldom pretend we can beat. It’s certainly the only anime I’ve seen that’s referenced Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.

Then, midway through the film, the engineer’s hero mentions that he’s retiring because an artist only ever has ten years in which he’s creative. That sort of line doesn’t make it into this sort of film by accident. Too funny after a career that touched five decades.

I was the only one in the cinema with a scrap of paper. As immersed as I was in The Wind Rises’s humanoid sound designs of planes and curious depiction of a country at war, I kept drifting back to my novel. Am I passed that ten year period already? I don’t know, but I kept having ideas for what I’d just written and what I’ll be writing next. I tainted my own mind by writing so close to seeing the movie, though it’s a testament to how much The Wind Rises gives that it still caught my attention every time I pocketed my scrap of paper.

Now it’s back to work for me. How’s everyone doing?

They All Fall - #fridayflash

Gravity was a good god, and that was his downfall. He always did his job, pulling things down or together, and did so with such reliability that humans could measure him. How Loki laughed at the idea of a god with such low self-esteem that he let himself be measured. But Gravity broke none of the rules: humans still couldn’t see him or talk to him directly, and he never tampered with someone else’s domain. Loki never had to fear Gravity playing tricks.

The problem came, then, that humans didn’t fear him like they did Loki or Zeus, and they certainly didn’t revere him as they had the sun or that Jesus kid. They made planes, helicopters and went to the moon without so much a prayer – except the typical calculations for landing and such. Even when he did something nasty it was always the suicidal prick that jumped off the bridge that got the credit, not Gravity for providing the very force that enabled the tragedy.

The rise of scientific thought only insulted him further as people believed less in his friends, but never even bothered to question his existence. He wasn’t even part of the cultural debate. One year Carl Sagan, of whom Gravity had always been very supportive, actually mocked theology by saying no one prayed to gravity. Then one morning Gravity picked up Scientific American (well, not “picked up” – he never picked anything up that he didn’t have to) and saw some theorist asking why gravity was so weak in this universe.

“So weak.”

Gravity snapped and finally took old Loki’s advice. They’d regret not appreciating him. They’d regret it when gravity ignored them, and they learned the terror of floating.

Mum At the Final Act

Apologies for recent and short-term blogging silence, friends and fellow readers. The biggest thing slowing The Bathroom Monologues has been on my novel-in-progress, We Don't Always Drown. I've just finished re-plotting the final act and think it's devious enough to go forward. Right now it weighs 76,000 words and feels ready for a big trick of a conclusion. I'm hoping to finish the rough draft before next weekend, when I hit NYC to see Waiting for Godot with friends.

This composition string has taken its toll on reading time; I'm even days behind on blogs, let alone my NaNoReMo pick.

I'm a third of the way through The Master and Margarita. At this stage in my career, I still feel awkward critically assessing the novels of others. So far the novel is delightfully cheesy in a way that none of the Russian heavy hitters I've ever read has gone for, including the deliberate, knowing setup conversation between those darned secular elites and the man we know will turn out to be Satan, as they deny his existence only to be blown away.

This is a good cheese, and an unusual cheese, especially for the contrast of flashback narratives to Pontius Pilate's encounters with a Yeshua of some renown. This Yeshua behaves skittishly, mortal to a fault, even denying his own teachings to get out of being convicted. Where the Satan-against-Soviets satire seemed gleefully pro-Christian, this depiction reads highly anti-Christian. Am I wrong? I almost hope not, because the collision of those two themes could make an incredible novel, and one third of the way in, The Master and Margarita hasn't uncloaked its true shape yet. It could wind up as a number of kinds of novels.

What this really calls for is research on cultural context, but I'm so deep into writing my own novel that reading time is slim. This has slowed down my consumption of Bulgakov's novel, but I'm no less enthused to read it.

Phallus for the Sky - #fridayflash

A gorgeous shot from Icy Sedgwick's photo prompts.

"Hey honey."

"Oh for God's sake, Earth."

"I know you see it. It sure sees you."

"Put that away. It's not even morning. I'm tired."

"I can see the sun behind those clouds! Come on, it's the weekend."

"Where'd the romance go? You're all architecture these days."

"I sent you that shuttle!"

"I know it's the last one, Earth. All your TV satellites are floating in me."

"Have I told you that you look spacious lately?"

"I'm going back to bed."

"I bet a full moon will be out!"

"You're the worst planet I've ever dated. Pluto never needed artistic viagra."

"And look what happened to him! No, baby. I got you figured. You go take a nap. Dream on all this. "

"The single worst planet I've ever..."

White Knighting

Discussed feminism with my girlfriend. She didn't understand why I kept walking in L-shapes around her. I explained that I was White Knighting her.

We broke up.

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards 2013

It's March 2014, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2013. If all the griping 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 Robbed Award
Going to the movie that got no play last year
and is still on my mind more than whatever won Best Picture

Beasts of the Southern Wild

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

Lawrence of Arabia

#NaNoReMo Round-Up

It's March, and that means we're kicking of #NaNoReMo!

If you're just checking in, National Novel Reading Month is a support system to finally read the classics you've been putting off. It's not a book club and we don't all read the same book, though you're welcome to read along with me. Instead, every participant chooses their own classic based on their own definition, and blogs or tweets about their progress. It's been a great experiment every year, and everyone is welcome.

And if you've got a book picked out, sound off in the comments so I can add you to the master list!


The NaNoReMo Master List

John Wiswell: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Ross Dillon: Old Goirot by Honore de Balzac
Helen A. Howell: Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes
Cindy Vaskova: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Beverly Fox: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Sonia Lal: Murder on the Orient Express by Agathe Christie

Thanks to everyone who commented and e-mailed about which book I should pick. My friend Ross rightly chided me that I'd been talking about reading Bulgakov for too many years, and so I've chosen the Russian classic The Master and Margarita. It's got the wonderful elevator pitch of "Satan vacations in Soviet Russia," which is a wonderful sort of alien satire and immediately reminds me why I bought it. Even if it I bought it an embarrassing number of years ago.

I prefer satire from other time periods and countries because I have a tricky mind. I can't watch The Daily Show or Colbert Report regularly because, great as their hosts are, the social commentary is inevitably obvious and I can always find ways in which it's somehow inaccurate. No, that's not the problem. The problem is my mind always finds the ways they are inaccurate, even when they're arguing my position. But when I read the meaty social criticism of other countries, the requisite invention of context occupies my mind long enough that the criticism can sink in and has a fighting chance. As much as I respect Garrison Keillor, Avarind Adiga is just bound to give my mind more to work with.

Rest and Repel Those Aliens - #fridayflash

It’s so cold out that he has to build a robot. After he’s shoveled the snow, and cut the wood, and the stoked the fires, his bones are still heavy with persistent chill. He’s weary and climbs into bed, beneath layers of sheets and blankets, from which he constructs the robot.

Technically the robot is a military exoskeleton, but there is no time for technicalities because the planet is under siege. There’s a jersey knit sheet over him, full of microfiber transmitters. A heavier quilt lays over that, but he puts his arms over it, because they always get too hot under all the blankets, and because when he makes fists in the quilt, it feels like two flight controllers molded to his hands. There’s another blanket over that so his arms don’t get too cold, and to seal him into the cockpit. The only thing it doesn’t cover is his head, though he can pull the blanket over it if he gets a nightmare.

The beauty of his robot is that it convects his body heat, storing and building it up much better than a snow suit or a single blanket unit. Also, it has hard light lasers that can smash alien ships with armor that’s heat resistant, and that’s wicked. His weary eyelids slide closed and he enjoys a heads up display that targets all the enemy craft hidden in the sunspots.

His robot is so smartly built that he doesn’t feel it take off. It moves through the stratosphere without a whisper, powered by Generation Two Improbability Drive Tech. The invading aliens don’t even have Generation One.

The wind rattles his windows like a hundred tractors driving by. He imagines a hundred enemy space crafts, out-numbering him, but they are out-teched and out-gunned. Just one squeeze of his imaginary triggers fills up the sky with his hard light lasers.

Sometimes he shoots them down. Sometimes he goes up and talks it out, and becomes instrumental in the peace process. Sometimes he falls asleep right away. Saving the world is oddly relaxing.

What Recharges Writing?

Probably unrelated?

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about how to recharge writing. There are some people who never seem to stop – Stephen King infamously told the public he took three days off a year, only to reveal he’d lied and that he wrote on those days too. At Viable Paradise I was awed at how Elizabeth Bear could hit her laptop in-between lectures, critique manuscripts while jogging, and always seem to maintain writing progress even in crowded rooms of people who wanted her attention. She reported something like 200,000 paid words last year. From afar, King and Bear seem like model authors.

Update: Bear responded on Twitter that she takes breaks all the time.

I’m not like them. Based on an informal survey of professional authors I’ve been conducting, most aren’t like them. Most who would disclose their beliefs believe in significant periods of recharge, whether it’s a day or weekend off, or a few weeks or months after finishing a novel. More authors wouldn’t disclose or couldn’t come close to pinning down their processes.

Vacations don’t help me very much. In recent years I’ve kept data on myself around when I take breaks from composition and editing, and there’s very little correlation between a break and output at resumption or upon starting something new. While my recent novel-writing campaign started amazingly, it was one of seven projects I took significant breaks between in a three-month period, and was one of only two that seemed to jump out of the gate. The others ran on will power and routine until I could build up the steam.

Perhaps more importantly, I notice I don’t feel mentally refreshed upon returning to work. Most recently I was derailed from my novel by bronchitis, and then had to leave home for travel. As awful as bronchitis was, I was relieved to stop work because of anxiety about whether I was executing the novel correctly. After weeks off, I resumed yesterday and felt absolutely as incapable of getting it right as I did before. This morning I awoke feeling like I had nothing left inside of me, which is disturbing for a living being to believe.

It wasn’t until I helped a mother in a check-out line that the feeling changed. A joke fell out of me, and she laughed, and seemed a little relieved despite the child kicking her hip. It was as though giving someone that little relief temporarily validated me, and I felt like if I had a keyboard right then, the clouds would part.

This isn’t a whining session. It’s an invitation to you, friends, fellow readers and writers.

What do you do to recharge?

We know that it’s something taxing, partially on the body and partially on the mind. It’s something that everyone needs to pause from, and walk away from for the day. It may be that everyone has a different recharge cycle, or a different set of recharge cycles – surely some full-timers take the occasional afternoon off while also taking periodic vacations, while others are more idiosyncratic. That leads us to question what we do in those periods that restores us.

I’ve tried both avoiding reading anything and reading a great deal, and within the latter, reading narrowly and broadly. None of the above seems to change things. Do you read to recharge? If so, what? Is it research? Is your reading compartmentalized?

Many of my breaks have been around my home. If you know my health, then you can figure that I don’t travel often. Yet when I do travel, returning home doesn’t seem to have changed anything, whether I departed for family emergencies or to hang out with friends. Do breaks work on you? What is it about them?

There are authors who juggle 8- and 12-hour jobs and write in excavated free time. There are authors who are full time parents and still hit the keyboard every day of the week. Is there a shorter recharge cycle there? Do the Kings and Bears of the world recharge primarily in shorter runs, in breaks to jog or have dinner with family? If so, how do those refresh cycles operate?

A few questions for you. Perhaps too many. Feel free to drop any answers you have, even the partial ones. Most of the writers I’ve talked to about it seem to live on partial answers.

The Last Cat on Earth

Toby slipped on the thick leather jacket. He flipped up the collar to shield his neck and cheeks. Next came a second pair of jeans, buckling them over the tails of the jacket. Gloves and construction boots were necessary. He looked out the window as he donned the ski mask. He watched the undead shuffling on the street corners before flipping goggles to protect his eyes.

He couldn’t risk getting a speck on him. He was the last man who could do the job.

He followed the undead through the windows of his house. Two windows on the west wall, then the one next to the porch. Four of his former neighbors shambled along the driveways. Their eyes were blind, noses turned up to sniff. Maybe they could smell him. Or maybe they smelled Mr. Tibbs.

Scuffling rose behind him. Toby whirled and saw the basement door shake. He rushed over to it, but the button was depressed. It was locked. He heard his sister – his former sister – groaning down there.

He frowned at her through the door. She couldn’t do this job anymore.

“I’ll take care of it,” he told her. “Even though you know I never wanted it here. Do you know how dangerous it is?”

The deck door slid open quietly. There was a little whoosh of air, and then the saddest sound left on earth. A keening, churning whine. As much as he hated these things, it made even him feel a little sorry.

It padded around the plastic deck furniture. It arched its spine, so that when it walked between their legs it would rub its sides. Mr. Tibbs was a self-petter, but that wasn’t enough affection. Even self-rubbing, it looked so damned pathetic.

Toby drew a plastic sheet from the living room and closed the door. No sense in letting dander get inside. This was going to be an allergic nightmare as it was.

“I don’t like you any more than you like me,” he said down to it. It didn’t seem to dislike him, but cats lied with their faces. “This just doesn’t feel right. And you're not eating the food I throw out here. What's wrong?”

When Toby didn’t immediately pet the little bastard, it keened again. It sounded almost human. Kickably human. The kind of humanoid sorrow that’d haunted him up in his safely boarded study the last three days. His wonderful, hypoallergenic study with the view of the wonderfully silent, dander-free undead.

The plastic chair creaked as he squatted into it. He laid the plastic sheet over his chest and lap, hands flattening it into place over his jacket. When it was ready, he patted his thigh. Mr Tibbs quirked its wretched head, then began to climb into the last lap on earth. Even now, there was a little affection left in the world. But only a little. He’d kill the bastard if it got any hair on him.

Dedicated to Marshall, the cat that inspired this piece. Rest in peace, little guy.