Entries from April 2003 ↓

So my dog pissed on the floor again, tonight, and I am surprised to find myself nearly incandesent with rage, flailing and screaming and spluttering like I’ve just grabbed the bare end of a live powerline. Like someone threw a switch in the darkest part of my mind and suddenly the whole mechanism lights up like LA at night and where there was nothing but dim and placid, there’s suddenly mayhem, carnage and chaos and mayhem. Strange feeling, a little unsettling. Looking back at it now, an hour and two graham crackers later, it’s all very weird. Who was that masked man?

Speakling of inandescent … I just finished Idoru, by William Gibson. He writes like Raymond Chandler on hallucinogens, prose spare and jarringly beatiful. Here’s a sample:

Between stations there was a gray shudder beyond the windows of the silent train. Not as of surfaces rushing past, but as if particulate matter were being vibrated there at some crucial rate, just prior to the emergence of a new order of being.

Lines like that make my teeth sweat. Just amazing Of course, the first sentence Gibson gave the world was “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” so I suppose it’s time to stop being impressed and start taking his skill in stride. But: some things you just don’t get used to. Thankfully.

I got my first rejection letter today. From Asimov’s. I sent in a story about four months ago, and forgot about it, until recently. For some reason, I’ve had this mania about its fate for the last couple of weeks: running out to the mailbox every single day, rifling through Shoppers Food circulars and utility bills and Feng Shui Home Improvement catalogs, looking for one particular envelope.

Which arrived yesterday. It was thin. I felt around the edges of the single sheet of paper inside. This is, I reflected, the shortest acceptance letter ever. They must have used really tiny type to fit all those accolades and prostrations to my supreme authorial skill on one piece of paper. They must be strapped for cash. Perhaps the presence of my brilliance in their magazine will lift their sales, improve their prospects. Actually, there’s no perhaps about it. Those losers at Asimov’s sure are lucky I chose them.

It was a form letter, perfunctory and a little bit smug, I thought. It said they didn’t want my story. They didn’t want it because: (a) it recyled old ideas; or (b) it was badly written; or (c) it didn’t stand out in the crowd of the other 850 manuscripts they received that month. There was no (d). I scrawled one in: “(d) Because we are punk ass losers who wouldn’t know real talent if it stripped naked and set itself on fire and danced the Macarena on our desks while ululating the lyrics to the national anthem.” And then I wept like a little girl.

I read once that the young Stephen King impaled all his rejections on a nail sticking out of the wall over his desk. I had made a mental pact with myself to do that too, to work under the gaze of my own failure. Now that I have an actual manifiestation of that failure in my hands, however, I’m not sure I’m up to it. I think I’ll just set it on fire and forget it ever happened.

Forget what ever happened?

Last night I had a dream. I was watching Tony Blair give a speech in the alley across from my house, when he broke off and looked behind him at an emaciated cow that had appeared in the street. The cow was looking at me, and all at once I felt the full force of its bovine malevolence. It began to run toward the house, and in an instant it had passed the prime minister and was thundering onto my lawn.

I turned and tried to open my front door, but the door would not open. I tried again, and again it would not open. There was no reason for the door not to open. It was unlocked. The plots of nightmares don’t have to be especially plausible, they just have to scare the crap out of you. And, in this, it was successful: I felt the first wash of panic, and tried the door for a third time. It clicked open just as I felt the cow’s head plow into my back.

I woke up screaming. My wife was in bed, reading her email. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her about Tony Blair and the cow. I think I failed to communicate the full horror of the experience, though, as she quickly lost interest. I tried to explain the terror of being attacked by a mad cow in front of one’s own house, but it wasn’t working, and I gave up. Still. It was nice to talk about it.

And then it struck me, the purpose of marriage: it’s not procreation, or lifelong companionship, or soul completion, or any of that bunk; it’s someone to wake up to when an enraged cow chases you out of your dreams. That’s what marriage is for. So the next time my sleep is marred by a horde of armored tinsel baboons, or evil enema nurses, or pirhana armadilos, or giant people-crushing eardrums, I know she’ll be there when I escape, reading her email. And that’s a comforting thing to know.