Zombies. Ninjas. Hot Lava.

Mt. Cardigan

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:49:25 GMT

I went hiking back in September and it was awesome. Here are some pictures, taken by silentq:
http://silentq.org/photos/Cardigan09/

Remember Hemingway?

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:21:05 GMT

Well, this is the story as emailed to me by the man it belonged to. His words follow, with permission:

The summer of 1959 was a celebration of graduation from St. Paul’s, acceptance into Princeton, a return to travel abroad. Ultimately, just too damned good. Hemingway was the author of choice for many of us, as much for his imagined life style as for his writing, and I took to John Eaton’s suggestion that we go to Pamplona. My father had been appointed Consul General in Birmingham, England, a posting that earned me a first class ticket on the SS United States. Marty McClintock was on the same ship and introduced me to Chivas on the rocks, which I thought was about as cool as it got. “Chivas on the rocks.” Walk up to the bar and say, “Chivas on the rocks.” What a man I was.

John picked me up in a rented car at Calais and we set off for Spain, with a stop in Biarritz. Pamplona was a week of much Moscatel, little sleep, and of course, the bull fights. This was the “dangerous summer” of the mano a mano between Luís Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordoñez that Hemingway followed and wrote about for Life Magazine. It was what his friend José Luís Castillo-Puche was to call “another of Ernest’s great years in Spain, a vintage year like 1925 or 1931.” Hemingway was quoted as saying, “Everything’s better now than in the days of The Sun Also Rises.” But it was also within two years of his committing suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.

Along with dozens of others, I stood in line one morning to take my turn to speak with Hemingway at his table in the Plaza del Castillo. I had fifteen or twenty minutes to think about what I would say, and remembered an article I had read earlier that year in The Atlantic by, of all people, Peter Ustinov, claiming that bullfighting had become something of a farce, that the bulls’ horns were filed so as not be so sharp, that the matadors padded their trajes de luces to protect themselves. My turn eventually came to sit down before the man. His was the same stony presence that Karsch had captured so brilliantly in a photograph taken about the same time.

I asked him about the article. His face hardened even more. “That fucking queer, what the hell does he know about bullfighting?”

Mary Hemingway and several other women were sitting at the table. I somehow felt uncomfortable for them. But I took a deep breath, drew closer to him and asked, “Yes, but is it true?”

And for a brief moment the mask seemed to fall away, his face softened, his voice dropped. “Yes.”

“Thanks,” I said, and left the table.

items from work

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:17:48 GMT

Apparently, I’ve been looking at this one symbol long enough that I can visually detect a variance of .2 millimeters. For six and a half years, I’ve seen it on almost every package, and it is always the same size. Always.

I have bloody knuckles on my left hand from resolving a paper jam. I was, perhaps, a little overenthusiastic.

Yesterday, I went to New York City to read the Thor screenplay. My NDA says that’s all I’m going to say about that. But across the street from the Marvel offices was a corner window enclosing a small set including a couch, two end tables, and a rack of clothes. A pair of young ladies sat around in bathrobes checking Twitter feeds on MacBooks and occasionally changing clothes. A crowd of people – mostly men – waited outside in the crisp but pleasant fall air, waiting to see the girls in their underwear. Many of them had actually brought video cameras with them, which struck me as odd. It’s not exactly difficult to see a girl in her underwear in midtown Manhattan, and the internet renders it entirely free and easy.

There’s something about strippers and similar performances that I find singularly uninteresting. When a girl I know takes her clothes off, that’s sexy, but strangers doing it has never held any particular fascination to me. This isn’t to say I don’t appreciate naked ladies – I very much do. It just strikes me as odd to wait around for some girl you don’t know to take her clothes off.

I think it’s because I’ve never considered erotica something to be enjoyed in a communal environment. I suspect that if I invited a stripper into my home, I would enjoy her in much the same way most guys do out at a club. There is a false intimacy there that, for me, is probably key to the enjoyment of the show. Whereas sitting around with a group of other people, waiting to see someone do something sexy – that’s weird.

God knows I’m not a prude, and I’m certainly not embarrassed by sex or nudity or whatever. I think that what it is, is I’ve been around nudity my entire life. Neither of my parents was particularly fixated on being always clothed, and I was pretty much perpetually naked until I was five or so. So I don’t necessarily equate nudity with sex, like most other people seem to.

Anyway, I always feel like some kind of alien when everyone else gets all excited about naked ladies hanging out in a window in Manhattan. I was more curious about what they were advertising than in trying catch a glimpse of camel toe.

running

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:35:48 GMT

Earlier this year, I started running once a week, with the intention of ramping up to three days a week. Then ~~July~~June happened.

For those who don’t live in New England, there were three days in July this year when it didn’t rain. That’s not an exaggeration. It rained almost every single day for the nicest month of the year. It was wet, and mildewy and crappy, and I stopped running.

I’m determined to get back into it, so I’m trying to get up forty minutes early a few days a week to go for a run. You’d be surprised at the number of excuses I managed to go through just this morning to avoid it. I actually soothed myself back to sleep counting excuses like sheep. And my nice running shoes stayed in my closet, gathering balls of cat hair in the toe boxes.

Oddly, one of the things that makes me disinclined to run – other than the fact that running kind of sucks – is that I don’t have the proper clothes for it. The other runners I see all look very sleek and professional in their specialized shorts and tight-waisted windbreakers. I feel like a tool in my cargo shorts and hoodie. At least when I’m on my bike and dressed like a dirtbag, I fit in with the other dirtbag cyclists.

I don’t know why this is. I’m not exactly a fashion-forward person, and when I’m running I’m usually concentrating so hard on not puking or passing out that I’m effectively blind. I assume other runners are similarly occupied, or that they are at least focused enough not to have time to sneer at my shorts.

Anyway, I’ll give it another shot on Wednesday. If I can at least get out of bed before deciding to skip the morning run, I’ll consider it a victory.

virginia

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:29:29 GMT

On Saturday night, I stood outside under a wide-open Virginia sky, smoking a Cuban cigar and drinking a 16-year-old Lagavulin while the father of the bride told me about the time he met Ernest Hemingway at a bullfight in Pamplona, when he was 17. It was 1959, and Hemingway would have been deep in the grip of both depression and severe alcoholism. By that time, the writer had suffered any number of broken bones and other wounds, been in two plane crashes, been burnt in a bush fire, and probably suffered brain damage (after beating his way out of one of the aforementioned burning planes with his own head; both of his arms had been broken). But even towards the end, when thoughts of death must have run through his head every day, and pain must have been a constant companion, he was a fierce, clear-eyed, intelligent man. He was beaten by life, eventually, but even in the few words related to me by my friend’s father, it was clear that he went down swinging.

It would have been a hot, dusty day in Pamplona, in August of 1959. The air in the bull-ring would have reeked of wine, sweat and blood, and echoed with frenzied Spanish and Basque voices. Pretty girls would have crowded the rails, hoping that the bullfighter would grace one of them with the freshly cut ear of a defeated bull. Hemingway’s white hair would have been glistening with sweat, and his breath would have smelled of the scotch and Cubans that had rendered his powerful voice gravelly and yellowed the fingernails on his right hand.

I don’t know how tall Hemingway was, but I imagine him being an enormous man, a giant with fists like bowling balls and a glare that could freeze a man’s blood in his veins. It’s a mercy that he died before the modern age of tabloids and sex tapes (he certainly would have had a sex tape). He was a man with probably more flaws than most, haunted by the sort of bizarre demons that only writers, artists, and the screaming homeless suffer. He would have been destroyed long before is death if he’d lived through the latter half of the twentieth century, and that would have been sad to see.

It’s a goddamn shame we don’t have giants like Hemingway anymore. Like him or hate him, he was a towering figure – a myth more than a man. We don’t allow people to become giants anymore. Any kind of celebrity requires that you surrender your dignity entirely. It’s unfortunate.

In Virginia on Saturday night, it was cold, but you could see the pale sweep of the Milky Way running across the sky, and hear laughter and music all around you.

going for a walk

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Turns out, the Appalachian Trail runs through Leesburg, Virginia, which is where I am. I have nothing to do until 2:00 this afternoon, so I'm going to go get breakfast, and then go for a walk in the woods.

The weather is supposed to be mild and pleasant today, which is good, because I'm not wearing boots or any sort of appropriate clothing. I'm going to walk a few miles, up and down the trail, listening to the birds and hoping to see a big lizard or something.

Veteran's Day

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:30:54 GMT

As I said, yesterday was great. I spent it in exactly the manner a day off is intended to be spent – drinking with good friends.

I slept in until about nine, then headed to Miracle of Science for breakfast, arriving around 9:45. I did not leave Miracle of Science until 9:15 last night. I was pleasantly surprised at how many people showed up to join me.

Spending an entire day in one place is an interesting experience, akin, I suppose, to being a rock on a beach at the high tide line. You are an immovable fact of the landscape, observing the ebb and flow of humanity around you, but somehow apart from it. The breakfast crowd comes and goes. The lunch crowd floods in, noisy and rushed, then flows out, leaving the place empty and silent and a little bit sad. In the early afternoon, a small, devoted crowd of daytime drinkers arrives, has a few beers, and then disappears to do whatever people who drink four beers at two in the afternoon do with their evenings.

I’ve been meaning, for a while, to establish one of the local bars as my bar, so that, in the future, I can say “I’m going to the bar,” rather than, for example, “I’m going to Miracle of Science.” Yesterday, I was recognized by the bartender, and greeted one of the regulars by name. So I feel I’ve earned the right to just call the bar, “the bar.”

I am not difficult to please. When they start automatically entering my breakfast order without asking me what I want on Saturday mornings, I will feel I’ve truly arrived.

I can’t say that much actually happened yesterday. But the company was pleasant, the food was good, and the beer was plentiful. I spent a good three hours writing, and writing well. I talked about everything with close friends and total strangers. I went home feeling loved, and slept with the windows open and a cat on my chest.

MW2

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:08:45 GMT

Yesterday was the best day off I’ve had in ages. I want to tell you about, but first, let’s talk about Modern Warfare 2.

It’s awesome. It’s also possibly the most disturbing video game I’ve ever played. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. There’s a mission in which you play a deep cover operative working your way into a terrorist organization. As part of your cover you take part in an attack on an airport full of unarmed civilians – machine gunning them as they wait in line at the security checkpoint. It’s upsetting to say the least. The whole mission plays out in slow motion, like the nightmare that it is. If you play it, and it doesn't mess you up, you need to seek therapy.

I played that mission twice, because I wasn’t happy with my original firing position when I first opened up on the crowd of people, and I didn’t get to kill enough cops. There’s something seriously wrong with me.

Rock and Roll

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:42:42 GMT

I was sick all last week. Hell, I’m still sick, but last week I deserved it. I went to a birthday party the Thursday prior, then a Halloween party down in Providence the next day. I got back to Boston just in time to eat dinner, then get ready for another Halloween party. That Sunday, I went back down to Providence to see the Misfits.

I never get to drive any more, so when my last-minute traveling companions turned out not to have a car, I got the rare treat of getting a Zipcar and being designated driver. It’s probably not a good sign that being forced by circumstances to regulate my alcohol intake was noteworthy.

The last time I saw the Misfits was seven or eight years ago. I don’t remember who was fronting them then (Michael Graves, maybe?), but the show was great. It took a lot of convincing by the bouncers, cops, cute door girl, and some drunk townie in the bathroom to make me leave and go get the stitches I clearly needed. That show was good enough that the clear sight of a double-digit percentage of my own blood soaking into my pants and shirt was not enough to make me want to leave.

This show was. . . depressing. Jerry Only is fronting them now, and he is not aging well. He looks tired, and when he lifts his arms you can see his muffin top peeking out from behind his bass. Dez Cadena, from Black Flag, looks like a fucking corpse, and not in a cool way. He just looks like he died a little while ago – kind of green and waxy and stupid. I realize these guys are only a few years younger than my mom, but my mom never quite realized her goal of becoming a punk icon like the Misfits and Black Flag did. Also, I feel like my mom would bring more energy to a show.

It’s not entirely their fault. The crowd was surprisingly tiny. It was mostly 18-year-olds, which usually energizes things, but a pit with only ten people in it is pretty sad no matter what you do.

The high point of their set, for me, was breaking up a fight. I love breaking up fights for some reason. In this particular instance, one of the combatants had his arms up in such a way that I was able to put him in a sleeper hold without even thinking about it. It was the first time I’ve ever actually applied a submission hold of any kind in a real-life situation, and the immediate placating effect of it was deeply satisfying. This kid went from trying to knee someone in the face to gentle as a kitten in a matter of seconds. I just picked him up and carried him away from the guy he was fighting, then set him free on the other side of the pit, like he was an injured bird I’d been nursing in my garage.

One of the opening acts, Sasquatch and the Sick-A-Billys, was worth the price of admission. Good fucking rock and roll, right there. If you want to watch a couple fat guys spit on each other and sing songs about fucking, they’re a good bet.

The next night, I was back in Boston to see Girl Talk. He’s great, but I guess I sort of expected something more than just some nerd triggering samples on a laptop. He might as well have put on one of his own albums and gone to get drunk at Tequila Rain. Also, his fans are assholes. And, oddly, they smell worse than Misfits fans. Go figure.

I was very sleepy on Tuesday, and then I got sick. FML.

Mike Birbiglia ticket available.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:54:58 GMT

My friend Amy and I are going to see local comic Mike Birbiglia at that place next door to the WANG center that always has comics. Her roommate flaked, so she's trying to sell a single ticket for this Friday evening.

Go watch Birbiglia on youtube, and think about whether a night drinking margaritas with me and a foul-mouthed blond girl from Connecticut, then going to see a comedian sounds like fun.

hiking

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:32:10 GMT

I think that, before I am 40, I would like to attempt thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. For those who don’t know, the Appalachian Trail stretches around 2200 miles from Georgia to Maine. Hiking it takes five or six months, though some people have done it in as little as three. It’s pretty rare you’re cut off from ready supplies for more than seven days at a stretch, but still. Seven days without a burger is a pretty long time.

I’ve always sort of wished I’d been born like six hundred years ago as the son of a noble or merchant. Had I been, I could have indulged my urge to be an adventurer. I could have hired a ship and crew, and gone off to explore the other side of the world; a vast mystery cloaked in impassable jungle and clinging mists, populated by monsters and savages. I’m sometimes sad that so few places like that exist any more, and upset that the ones that do are usually filled with land mines and child soldiers.

I realize this is not a realistic picture of the world then or now. The world kind of sucked six hundred years ago. People were filthy, diseased, and often driven stupid by royal inbreeding or malnutrition. There were no movie theaters, air conditioners, or refrigerators to keep food from rotting. But there were undiscovered places then, and there aren’t really now – outside of space, but it takes something more than gumption and a modest fortune to mount a space expedition.

The hardship of sailing for weeks across a sea that may or may not end in an infinite precipice, and then finding that the only source of fresh water for thousands of miles is deep in a fever-infested jungle is part of the attraction. You don’t become an adventurer because it’s easy.

This is the ad Ernest Shackleton placed looking for men to accompany him on an expedition to the Antarctic:
MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.

Sure, men do stupid things like go to the South Pole for honor and recognition, but we also do it because of the pointless danger and discomfort. Overcoming adversity and deprivation are satisfaction enough for most people.

In the century it has existed, only a few hundred people have successfully thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. Most people drop out inside the first 25 percent, which ironically is the easiest, most forgiving section of the trail. For half a year, you must trudge over broken, uneven ground, through pouring rain and blazing sun, carrying a pack weighing anything up to 50 pounds on your back. There are diseases like Lyme disease or hantavirus, which can cripple or kill you. Some stretches of the trail are long enough that an infected blister under the strap of your backpack can turn gangrenous and send you raving into the woods to die a screaming, agonized death. There are bears and mountain lions and crazy mountain people. There are cliffs, and mercurial mountain weather patterns that can drive you into hypothermic dementia in minutes. There are not always toilets nearby – you must carry a tool with which to bury your poop.

It is a thing that few other people have ever done – you might never meet someone who’s even done something similar It’s a thing that I stand a very good chance of being incapable of doing. My knees could give out. I could hurt myself. Or I could simply become miserable and give up.

Still, I should like to give it a shot. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Misfits

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:12:28 GMT

Once again, my penchant for buying tickets in advance backfires on me, and I'm going to see the Misfits by myself tonight. Who wants to come with me?

Tickets are $22, and the show starts at 8, at Lupos in Providence. Opening acts include:
Sasquatch & the Sick-a-Billys
Acerose
Lemon Lime Tennis Shoes
Stigma

The current lineup of the Misfits includes Jerry Only (original bassist), Dez Cadena (Black Flag), and Robo (Black Flag). So it's basically like getting to see the Misfits (without Glen Danzig) and Black Flag (without Henry Rollins) at the same time! Lucky you!

the final frontier

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:04:30 GMT

This is crazy. There was an early design for a space station – created originally by a scientist named Hermann Oberth (who escaped from the Soviets after WWII and came to the U.S. With Wernher von Braun to help us build missiles and spacecraft), and developed further by an Austrian named Herman Potocnik that would have been steam powered. It was a 30-meter wide torus, with a central docking column like the space station in 2001, that used a giant parabolic mirror to heat boilers, generating warmth and electricity for the crew.

This is insane. Someone actually designed a steampunk space station back in the 1920's.

Part of what's amazing about this is, it's not a completely batshit idea, even by today's technological standards. Let's say you built a rail gun running under the plain near Mt. Kilimanjaro, and then up the side of the mountain. You could accelerate a capsule along this rail gun to give it an initial launch velocity. After launch, maintaining velocity is relatively cheap, from an energy-expenditure perspective; so what you do is you strap a giant block of ice to the ass-end of the capsule and point high-powered lasers at it. The vaporizing ice should provide enough thrust to maintain escape velocity. Not the best way to get people into space, but it's certainly a very economical means of launching cargo into orbit.

I love the fact that I'm living in this crazy, hyperconnected future, where the threads of the internet are woven constantly around me, and terabytes of information are more or less instantly at my fingertips, but I'm ready for another era of big ideas. We've gone too long without a breakthrough of disruptive technology.

flaming balls

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:38:32 GMT

Somewhere in Pennsylvania is a shop, just off the freeway, that specializes in the sale of fireworks and “karate supplies.” I didn’t know quite what to expect when we stopped there; to imply that one requires supplies for karate hints that karate itself might be a finite resource. Perhaps even now, the karate-rich nations of the world gird themselves for chaos as their karate reserves dwindle. Within the next fifty years, Japan, China and the west coast of the United States will be plagued by spent karate fighters, their supplies exhausted.

In Hollywood, breakout Asian stars and directors, desperate to get their start in the western world, will be forced to wait in hours-long karate rationing lines. Thousands will be tragically confused and uninjured as a surge of poor-quality black market smoke bombs and throwing stars fail to work as promised. The last known breeding pair of ninjas will live out their twilight years in captivity at the San Diego Zoo. The decision to finally put them down will be made after they completely spurn their guitars, and have not flipped out and cut anything’s head off for weeks.

Without karate, what will become of the world? The future is already scary enough. Now imagine facing it without nunchucks.

Anyway, it turns out that karate supplies are mostly things like knives and stun guns, and loose pants with wide legs that make snappy fabric noises when you kick. It also turns out that if you’re in a car with out-of-state plates, they can sell you pretty much any kind of firework you can imagine, as long as you promise to take them out of the state before lighting them off. So I bought a couple mortars.

One of them was a simple box, like you’ve seen a zillion times before, with twelve pre-loaded tubes and a single fuse. The other was a single larger tube with eight shells. The shells each have a long fuse. You drop the shell into the mortar, making sure the fuse sticks out the top of the tube. Then you light the fuse and, if you’re smart, run like hell.

I finally got to light these things off this weekend. Fireworks are almost always mildly anti-climactic, unless you put a lot of thought into the display, but that doesn’t mitigate the satisfaction launching illicit explosives of uncertain quality into a rainy sky.

Any child or childish adult can explain to you why fireworks bans don’t make any sense – chiefly, we all know they’re dangerous. That’s why they’re fun. The job of the government is to regulate things that would surprise us if they started blowing off limbs. With fireworks, as much as the newly limbless or blind might pretend it is, this is never a surprise. Little Jimmy Three-Fingers is just being a spoilsport because he took to long to throw that M-80.

People like me don’t set off fireworks because we hope they’ll work perfectly and impress everyone. We set them off hoping that something will go just wrong enough to be amusing – that a mortar will tip over and send a shell rocketing into the garage near the paint cans, or a roman candle will set grandma slightly on fire. This is why the smart pyromaniac runs away from anything with a sputtering fuse; we want to watch the chaos from what we hope is a safe distance.

So when my single-shot mortar exploded on the ground, sending an asterisk of flaming red balls and shredded paper in every direction, I was deeply pleased.

why right of way is important

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:36:44 GMT

For those of you who don't know, I ride my bike everywhere. Because I am not an asshole, I stop and wait at stoplights. This gives me the opportunity to practice my track stands, which make me look awesome, to look at girls who jog by me, and to see things like I saw today.

Imagine, if you will, a T intersection on an extremely busy street. I am approaching the light along the top of the T. Inexplicably, a car going the same direction as me has stopped in the middle of the intersection - one presumes to let the single pedestrian waiting patiently on the sidewalk to cross against the light. I hasten to add again, this is a very busy, two-lane street that you cross illegally at your peril.

As I approach the light, it turns red, so I begin coming to a stop. A green minivan races past me, runs the red light, and smashes into the rear end of the stopped car, the driver of which I can only assume is completely consumed with trying to wave the pedestrian, who has just taken a first, tentative step, out into the intersection.

I recognize I'm not a sympathetic guy. I don't have a lot of patience for the sick or stupid. I dislike listening to other people's problems. My most commonly given piece of advice is "get over it." Still, I'm forced to recognize that maybe something is wrong with me when my first reaction to seeing an accident like this, which totally crushed the rear- and front-ends of the respective vehicles involved, is laughter. I don't feel bad about it, and even if I had rode over to see if anyone needed help (which I did) and seen blood and brains splashed across the windows of one of the cars (which I didn't), I still wouldn't feel bad about laughing.

Because come on. Right-of-way is one of the very few human inventions that, if used correctly, just works. Me and the pedestrian - both uninvolved witnesses - remain unhurt. But, had the pedestrian gone ahead and cross against the light, he probably would have been killed. Had I ridden through, I might have hit the pedestrian, or been struck by a car trying to avoid the accident. Had the stopped car simply driven on like he was supposed to, he would have been fine and the pedestrian could have crossed in a timely manner, rather than been stuck there as a witness. Had the van stopped at the red light, no matter how big a hurry he was in, he certainly would have gotten to his destination faster than he will now that his vehicle is totalled.

I don't feel bad about laughing at this because A) car accidents are pretty rad; and B) this is one of the very few instances in which stupidity is actually painful, and thank god for that.

Maybe I am kind of an asshole.

the king

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:45:11 GMT

Stephen King has a new book coming out called Under the Dome, which sounds awesome. It’s about a small Maine town that suddenly finds itself completely cut off from the world by an airtight, impenetrable force field. King has always been at his best when dealing with supernatural horror – The Shining, The Thing, Pet Semetary – but he’s got a soft spot for torturing small towns, and sometimes that can lead to a really great read. The Tommyknockers is awesome, and I enjoyed the hell out of Desperation, even though the ending totally sucked. Other times, when he decides to destroy a place and all its people, it doesn’t work out so well. Needful Things, for instance, is kind of a waste of time.

But let’s face it. Stephen King hasn’t really been scary for a while. His powers as a compelling writer have declined steadily since he quite drinking, and even the Gunslinger series, which was supposed to be his masterpiece, falls flat after the fourth book. It’s a goddamn shame, because with the occasional exception of Peter Straub, and The House of Leaves, Stephen King is the only writer to ever really scare me. After I read The Thing, I didn’t even like going to the bathroom by myself in case something started whispering threats from the drain.

Still, Under the Dome is exactly the sort of story I’m a sucker for. The world watches through an impassable, transparent wall as a small town – “real America” if you will – tears itself apart. Rod Serling would narrate this story, his voice made husky by cigarette smoke and genuine pleasure at the monsters men become.

So I’ll read it, and I’ll probably be disappointed. But at least I know at least one person gets a hole drilled in his skull, and sometimes that’s enough.

Teeth

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:47:46 GMT

Teeth:
I saw the movie Teeth this weekend, and while it’s a good movie, I was still sort of disappointed.

I don’t really know what I wanted. I knew what the movie was about, and I even had a pretty solid understanding of the details going into it. It’s an excellent profile of a young woman discovering she is, in fact, a monster, but that everyone else is too. It’s brutal and sad and beautiful.

But for a movie with such a gonzo concept – namely that our virginal heroine has a vag full of lamprey teeth – it’s sadly lacking in truly gonzo moments. True, I haven’t seen so many severed penises in a movie since I saw John Wayne Bobbit: Uncut, (not a worksafe link, but you knew that) but I sort of wanted something more.

If this had been a Japanese movie, the titular teeth wouldn’t be content to reside behind a young woman’s meat curtains, waiting for unsuspecting phalluses to wander blindly into their cave. They would lunge at people. I want Teeth 2 to be full of rampaging attack vaginas.

The low down:
zombies: 0
ninjas: 0
hot lava (in liters): 0
nazis: 0
breasts: 2
decapitations: 3 (Freudian)
monkeys: 0

What I know

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:53:23 GMT

Here's what I know about the guy who used to live in my apartment.

His name is Scott. I'm making the assumption, based on that, that he's a guy.

He's a Scientologist. I know that the same way I know his name is Scott: because I get some of his mail sometimes, which I mark return to sender and drop back in the mailbox. He got what appeared to be an invoice from the Church of Scientology.

I don't have a lot of respect for religion generally, but I try to leave people the hell alone about their beliefs. I have my own strong opinions, which I'm perfectly happy to discuss, but I'm not going to get all up in someone's face with my atheism. That said, Scientology is a stupid religion. You have to be seriously deranged or deeply stupid to believe in that crap. I mean, this is a church that sends you letters reminding you that you owe them money. And what do you get for that money you pay? Fuck all, that's what. At least when you tithe in most other churches some homeless guy somewhere gets a cup of soup or something. Scientology just gives you the deep, all-American satisfaction of contributing to the bottom line. Hooray.

Normally, if I was picking on Christianity or something, I'd mitigate my opinions here with an apology to any of my readers who are believers, but not this time. Hey Scientologists! Your cult is retarded.

Scott is also a smoker, and kind of a sloppy one. There are weird little scorch marks all over the linoleum in the kitchen and bathroom, as if he just casually flicked his ashes onto the floor. The windowsill above the kitchen sink is also covered in scorch marks where he must have put his butts down to smolder while he did the dishes. Part of the plastic light cover above the medicine cabinet is melted through too, though I doubt that was done with a cigarette.

When I looked at the apartment, he had no television, and his bed was one of those crappy folding futon chairs on the floor. I assume he spends all his money on cigarettes and Scientology. He also had a small, folding table in the kitchen, and a single easy chair, where he sat and ate his Lean Cuisines in silence.

The only thing he left behind in the fridge were two 2-liter bottles of seltzer. I expect his breath smelled quite strange.

tech support

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:49:04 GMT

Okay, so I bought myself a netbook today. It's tiny and cute, and I think I kind of love it.

However, there's a weird thing, as there always is with a new computer. At home, when I connect to the wireless network, internet-based applications like Skype and MSN Messenger have no apparent problem connecting to the net, but neither Explorer or Firefox can load web pages. The network connection strength is excellent.

When I run the connection diagnostic through Explorer, it tells me that it connects fine through HTTP and HTTPS, but fails to connect through FTP. I've tried it with the Windows firewall on and off.

Here's the weird part: I just walked down the street to Petsi Pies to try their wireless network. Connected there, Firefox and Explorer behave perfectly normally. Also, when I type Google's IP address into the address window of Firefox, the page loads fine, but if I just type google.com, it fails to load.

What am I missing?

new start

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:10:15 GMT

As a copywriter, I work exclusively in very short form fiction. Not including the (admittedly fairly crappy*) comics I’ve written over the last few years, I’ve not written anything of note longer than three short paragraphs.

I used to be interesting. I used to journal regularly, and everyone would tell me how hilarious I was. I have no idea what happened. Work got extremely busy about five years ago, and really hasn’t let up since. I won’t say it’s killed my creativity, as I think I’m still pretty good at my job, but I’m not as good as I used to be.

There are a lot of metaphors writers use to try to describe what being a writer is like to other people. Painters and filmmakers and sculptors have their metaphors too, but ours are generally more concise. The one commonality among all artists is that we often equate the experience of our craft with some kind of bodily function. Painters are always shitting something out, or vomiting onto the canvas. The metaphors grow in complexity and surrealism as the artist struggles more to make you understand, but one thing is certainly true; the act of creation is never made to sound pleasant.

The metaphor I used to use is this: Take a long piece of string – ten or twelve inches. Hold one end very firmly between the index finger and thumb of your left hand, and swallow the other end. Now, slowly pull the string out of your throat.

It’s not a bad feeling, per se. It’s unpleasant, but also pleasurable, in a way. A little like being tickled gently from the inside. You want it to end even as you sort of enjoy it. Imagine that this string is even longer. You know it has an end, but that you don’t know how long the string actually is, or how long it’s going to take to get it out. That’s what writing is like, when I’m doing it well – for me at least.

There’s another metaphor that I’m sure is common but I read it in a Stephen King story. When you’re writing, and you’re really into it, the page in front of you disappears. Your eyes go out of focus and you sort of strike blindly at the keyboard. Words somehow happen, falling out of you in a jumble, and organizing themselves according to a will that is no longer entirely your own. You’ve entered this sort of Power Zen state in which reality bends around you and allows you to pass through it invisible and unaffected. You know how God feels, sitting at the center of his universe, all of time and space at his fingertips. It sounds pretentious, but it’s true. It’s a total trip.

Writing a novel or a short story is a lot like dating. You fall down the same rabbit hole every day, becoming intimately familiar with its crooks and contours. You fall in love with the story, even though sometimes it betrays you or lies to you, but if it’s a good story, you forgive it. Then, when it’s finished, you don’t look at it for a little while. When you return to read it over again, you hate it, because you realize it’s just an ugly, horrible bitch that knows all of your secrets.

Package copy, these little bits and blurbs I write dozens of every day, is like a one-night stand. You work so quickly, and on such a great many projects, that you’ve only got time for the most superficial of intimacy with each one. If you fuck a dozen different girls a day for five years, eventually you’ll forget how to fall in love.

When I sit down to write now, all I can think of is getting onto the next thing. I used to be able to hold an entire outline for a story in my head, organized, structured and safe, but long neglect has left that framework rusted to shit. The story-telling area of my brain is like my room when I was a kid – everything’s organized, but it’s organized in piles. Thoughts about robots are all here in a jumbled tangle of Technicolor armor plates, power cables the size of your thigh, and Rutger Hauer’s head. The zombie concepts are all here, but the fast ones keep tripping over the shamblers or slipping in a pile of brains. Even all the sex stuff, which used to be very clearly organized, filed by category and separated by divider tabs shaped like tits, is all stuck together in a ball of old lube. It’s awful.

So I need to try journaling more often. I need to set aside time every week to do this, just like I do with push-ups and masturbation. Though I’ll probably do the journaling at work, because that’s where my brain needs to be trained to go slower.

Chances are, you’ll get mostly weekend updates at first, which no one likes reading, but I’ll try to lie to you about what I’ve done over the weekend to make it interesting.

* The art in the comics has, by and large, been well above-par. I’m just not happy with my writing in most of them.

Con Air

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:43:26 GMT

You know how sometimes you'll be walking down the street, and you'll walk right through a giant invisible spiderweb that envelopes your head? And you completely freak out trying to get it off, even though no one can see it?

I just saw a girl at Whole Foods have that reaction, but it was in response to the stench being let off by this dude in the Tex-Mex section (shopping for beans, natch). I saw her freak out right before I hit the wall of odor myself, and I'm honestly amazed the air wasn't all wavy like blacktop on a hot day. I went blind for a second as control panels inside my brain exploded, killing the red shirts that pilot me around when I'm not doing something awesome (when awesome happens, the Captain takes the con). It was a bad enough smell that I wouldn't be at all surprised to wake up in the morning to find I'd grown an extra arm or gained super powers or something.

I can't even tell you what it smelled like. Maybe the inside of Dick Cheney's soul? If Hitler was a smell, he would have been at Whole Foods this evening.

FU Square Enix

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:32:17 GMT

I just finished Star Ocean, which was the game I was playing to get my JRPG fix until Final Fantasy comes out. I tell you what, the good people at Square Enix are on my list. Most of the game was good enough, or at least good enough to keep me from microwaving the discs and using them as coasters. But the end of the game was a little much, even for a determined masochist like myself.

JRPGs typically have epically long boss battles at their conclusion, and that's fine, but last night I started playing the final dungeon around 8pm, only to find that it was uninterrupted by a save point and navigated largely via hidden doors that only appear if you aim the camera at them just so. So I left my xbox on overnight, like I used to do with my Atari when I had to go to bed but didn't want to lose my game.

This morning, I returned to the game determined to finish it, and discovered that the conclusion of the game includes not one but two epically long boss fights, separated by an invisible maze populated by every other boss in the game. Oh, also, the first final boss is vulnerable to a magic sword the main character found earlier in the game, but the next boss is immune to that sword, and you can't change weapon load-outs in the middle of a fight.

Fuck you, Star Ocean.

The Children

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:13:08 GMT

The Children:
They used to make pretty good movies about kids suddenly deciding to kill everyone. The original Village of the Damned was great. And how many Twilight Zone episodes feature some brat with wish powers and a mad on? Also, let’s not forget Macaulay Culkin, who made us all want to die.

In the last 20 years or so, there haven’t been any really good movies (in the west anyway – the Japanese have long known that the scariest thing in the world is a little dead girl who keeps staring at you) about killer kids.

Imagine, if you will, that you are surrounded by a fierce tribe of adorable little scamps waving shards of broken glass at your genitals, and your only defense is a young Christina Ricci. You can see how intense the experience would be. This is The Children in a nutshell.

If you are at all a fan of seeing people get impaled on shit, you should see this movie.

The low down:
zombies: 0
ninjas: 0
hot lava (in liters): 0
nazis: 0
breasts: 0
decapitations: 0
monkeys: 0

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:01:28 GMT

I'm trying to bring these back. We'll see.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra:
Look, if you go into this movie expecting anything more than a really kick-ass episode of the cartoon from the 80’s, you’re a goddamn fool. Sergeant Slaughter should come out of retirement to put the Cobra Clutch on your mom.

For those of you unfamiliar with modern wrestling terminology, the Cobra Clutch is like the Shocker, but way more violent. If you don’t know what the Shocker is, wait until you get home to Google it.

There’s nothing in this movie that will really wow you, except for how quiet the Baroness’s skin-tight vinyl bodysuits are. In fact, the fact that someone who wears skin-tight vinyl hangs out with a ninja should be your first clue that this is a CARTOON. Even the most elegant woman sounds like an angry mouse convention when she walks around clad in vinyl.

But still, if you yearn for the days when villains did things like drape half the world in a Pyramid of Darkness, or shoot mutagenic snake bombs into the sky, then you’ll probably enjoy this movie.

If you’re a hardcore Joe comic fan, you might take issue with this movie. But then again, if you’re the sort of person who complains that a mediocre movie doesn’t adhere slavishly to a mediocre comic book, then you’re a little bit of a douche anyway.

The low down:

zombies: 0

ninjas: 2

hot lava (in liters): 0

nazis: 0

breasts: 0 (sadly)

decapitations: 3

monkeys: 0

Moving Day

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 14:10:56 GMT

Well, thanks to the help of my good friends, I am moved. The new apartment is shaping up nicely, and my things all fit, which was a genuine worry, as this is definitely the smallest place I've ever lived.

The cats are freaked out. My last apartment is the only place they've ever really lived, that they'd remember; they were three months old when I got them. They're already starting to get over it. More and more, they're coming out from under the bed, looking out the window, smelling things, climbing up on the highest object they can find, and then running back under the bed to hide some more.

I'm a little freaked out too. I was only in that last apartment for three years, but it looms so large. The most significant relationship of my life peaked and failed in that apartment. My closest family member died there. My job made the transition to full-blown career while I lived there. It was kind of a crappy apartment, but a lot happened there, and this move is filled with more apprehension than it normally would be.

Hopefully soon I will find my shoes, razor, and work clothes.