Entries from November 2003 ↓

My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable is some of the weirdest, funniest shit I’ve ever seen on the web. It’s a comic strip composed entirely of bad powerpoint clipart, depicting karate people talking about kicking each other’s asses. Greatest Karate Master of All Time With a Brick Wall On His Head and Karate Snoopy are my favorite ones, so far.

Oh, wait, and here’s another strip called Get Your War On, and it might be even better. Some sample dialog:

Man: Since the smoking gun didn’t come in the form of a mushroom cloud, what form will the smoking gun come in? Woman: The smoking gun will come in the form of a completely disassembled gun that is not smoking, because it exists only in the form of a future potential possibility of creating the conditions that may eventually lead to the assembly of the gun which may one day smoke. At which point you may die. Man: You mean die of boredom waiting for a goddamn real smoking gun?

In other news, I’m got something stuck in my teeth and no matter how much I floss and pick and delve and pry and worry at it with my tongue, I can’t get it out, and it’s driving me crazy. Can somebody help me? Anybody?

I sit gazing forlornly at the objects of my suffering: a tube of caulk, a big blue cylindrical caulk gun, and a flat, stiff, grout-assailing putty knife. They look back at me, wordlessly. In my bathroom, a shower stall waits. I sigh and reach for the caulk, but my hand comes up against some sort of invisible, electrified barrier, and I draw it back, yelping. I try again, going in from a different angle, and actually manage to grasp the tube before a thousand tiny land piranha swell out of nowhere and start eating the skin off my hand. I pull back again, shaking them off. Sit and look warily at the caulking paraphernalia. Sigh.

To my infinite chagrin, I’ve begun to notice signs of disrepair in my house. Which isn’t to say that those signs haven’t been there for some time: they have. I’ve just failed to notice them. This is a defensive mechanism. I have trained my brain to shield me from all forms of unpleasantness, especially unpleasantness of the domestic variety: the disintegrating caulk in our bathroom, for example, or the rust appearing on the metal railing outside the front door, or the hairline crack that stretches from floor to ceiling in the dining room. My eyes process these things, and my ears digest the sound of my wife telling me about them; but, somewhere in the crucial membrane between the sensory and the cognitive, my mind knows to activate a horde of synaptic censors that chew, termite-like, through this distressing input before it has a chance to penetrate to my more delicate cortexes, leaving me blissfully ignorant of my house’s problems.

At least it has until recently. No longer. Either my mind is getting lax about these things, or it’s decided that it would be foolish to allow the vessel of wood and drywall that houses its vessel of skin and bone to disintegrate totally. So I notice the failing grout whenever I take a shower, and it nags at me. It’s been nagging at me for two months, a great mental burden that my powers of laziness and benign domestic neglect have been unable to overcome.

And so, yesterday, I walked to the Home Depot and wandered its massive labyrinthine aisles until I found the caulk section, bought the necessary equipment, and came home, prepared for an afternoon of serious grouting. I put the bag down on my dresser. I looked at it uncertainly. I left the house.

It’s sitting there still, a beige plastic bag bristling with various protuberances whose malign shapes strike fear into my heart. I am resentful. I don’t ask the house to brush my teeth for me, or cut my hair, or bandage my gashes. Why should I have to deal with its personal upkeep? I’ve posed the question many times, and have not received an answer. The house is mute, as well as helpless before the vagaries of time and decay.

I reach down and grasp the putty knife. I open the bathroom door. I switch on the light.

I’m going in.

Some really good columns out there today. Michael Kinsley takes on the notion that governers of smaller states (like, say, Vermont) are less qualified to be president than governers of larger states (like, say, inebriation). Krugman dissects the AARP’s decision to back the Rebublicans’ Medicare plan, and Cringely speculates on how Microsoft hopes to transcend its software roots to become the ubiquitous digital overmind that it always wanted to be.

So I was lying on my back, agape, with various dental instruments crammed into my mouth, when my dentist paused, bent in closer and made that a scary little “huh” sound, the one that never means good things. Then he repositioned his mirror and took out a long hooked silvery tool that looked like the severed arm of a giant metallic praying mantis and pressed its point into a soft spot in one of my molars (#30, I think), withdrew it, nodded, and said the dreaded word.

“Cavity.”

So, fuck, I’ve got another cavity. Third one in a row. I’m a little worried by this sudden rash of dental decay, because my teeth have always been pretty good. My dentist would have me believe that it’s all the sugar I eat (a small sugar plantation’s-worth every day, pretty much); that I’m getting older, my teeth are getting softer, and unless I lay off the sweet stuff I can look forward to a mouth riddled with enough cavities to house a tiny terrorist organization.

Really, though, I’m not convinced. 9 out of 10 dentists might claim that sugar causes tooth decay, but my Uncle Sassafras thought otherwise.

Uncle Sassafras was a strange old man with a tree-trunk torso and a tiny, yam-shaped head. He had little black pinprick eyes and arms that were all lumpy with muscles and massively oversized hands that he used to crush squirrels and break nuts and strangle alligators. He wore white t-shirts three sizes too small, and smoked a bifurcated pipe, one bowl of which was always filled with tobacco, the other with weed. Every so often, he’d hold the monocle that he wore on a string around his neck up to his forehead and tell us that he was peering into our souls with his third eye, so we’d better not be fucking lying to him.

More often than not, the subject about which we’d better fucking not be lying to him was the location of our parents’ liquor. Uncle Sassafras was an alcoholic, and he was passionate about it: he’d spend his afternoons dispersing AA meetings, threatening sober people, and sending death threats to temperance organizations around the country. He liked to slip gin into children’s milk when their folks weren’t looking, and he’d spend long afternoons telling us stories about the glories of inebriation.

He was drunk when he told me where cavities came from, I think, but still, his words had the force of truth behind them.

“Larry,” he said (he called everyone Larry, because it was easier), “there’s only three ways to get cavities. One: sobriety. Two: celibacy. And three: sin. Now, when was the last time you got drunk?” I shrugged. I’d never been drunk, I didn’t think. “Aha!” he said. “And when’s the last time you scored?” I was eight at the time, and held females in the same regard that I held broccoli and school. So I didn’t have a good answer for this either. “Aha!” he said. “And have you sinned recently?” I looked down at my feet. I’d used the lord’s name in vain at school that day, three or four times, and stolen some candy from Hektor Davdison’s lunchbag last week. “Aha!” said Uncle Sassafras, nodding vigorously. “Sins live in the teeth, boy, don’t ever forget that. Every time you do something bad you’re giving those bastards a place to live. So let’s review.” He ticked them off on his fingers: “One, you’re sober all the time. Two, you’ve never so much as copped a feel. And, three, you sin more than Judas Iscariot. And you’re surprised you get cavities? Shit, boy. I’m surprised you still have teeth.”

Ever since then, I’ve aspired to drink more, sin less, and have a varied and prolific sexual career. Sadly, I’ve failed on all three counts. Hence my current dental predicament.

The theme of this entry? Ignore Uncle Sassafras at your peril. You’ll be glad you didn’t.

Several adorable little animals adorn our small cubicle-space here at the Doodleplex Command auxiliary office. There’s a cute little Frankenstein with a crutch made out of masking tape; a floppy monkey with long arms and velcro palms; a small, life-like hippo with gaping jaws, and a soft moose wearing a football jersey. It’s all very cute, very innocent, very wholesome. It’s a family-friendly cube.

Or it was, until the Violator arrived.

I walked into the office one day to find the moose and the hippo engaged in certain salacious activities that I hesitate to describe here, for fear of offending my younger readers. Let’s just say they were having … relations … of a certain … um … carnal nature; not at all the behavior one would expect of cuddly desk creatures. I was confused, and a little taken aback, but I assumed that it was just an accident; perhaps I’d knocked the moose over in my haste to leave the night before, and it had landed on … er … where it had landed.

But the next day found Hippo and Moose in an even viler position, the sort of tableau one would expect to find in the hippo edition of Penthouse magazine, or perhaps on the glittering ramparts in the moose room of Studio 54, but certainly not on top of a filing cabinet in a professional office environment.

Day by day, week by week, I arrived to progressively more shocking animal arrangements, testaments to both the lasciviousness and the creativity of the Violator. Last week, a Buck Rogers starfighter got in on the action, thrusting its die-cast prong into … well … participating in what was surely the first moose/hippo/spaceship orgy in the history of sexual perversion. I wept as I extricated these poor innocents from their unholy embrace, and cursed the Violator’s name.

Last week, he struck again, as the picture below attests. He’d added small plinths to the mix, and ratcheted the level of prurience up to heretofore unexplored levels.

But I suspect that this might be the last I see of the Violator. He left a calling card this time, finally revealing his identity. I rushed to confront him, but I was too late: he had already escaped. His office was empty of everything but an origami menagerie of tiny mooses, hundreds of them lined up in an orgy of paper perversion, spelling the word “Goodbye” along the floor.

So my desk animals can breathe a sigh of relief. But somewhere out there, a clutch of teddy bears, or a circle of fuzzy bunnies, or a harem of adorable little puppies are about to find themselves in positions they have never, ever dreamed of before.

I haven’t been watching much of the current Republican-engineered senatorial gabfest, but I’ve seen excerpts here and there, hilights of white men in suits standing in front of placards bearing misleading numbers in large fonts, arguing over whether the Democrats’ blockage of four judicial nominees constitutes an assault on the constitution, and whether the similar Republican blockages of 68 Clinton judicial nominees was the same thing. Blah blah blah.

So far, it appears to be a depressing litany of formalized partisan bickering, with one exception. Before it all started, the ancient Robert Byrd stood up and asked Senate majority leader Bill Frist if they could delay the proceedings for a couple of hours to get some work done on a long-overdue appropriation bill. Frist refused, of course, and eventually Byrd sat down. But it was nice seeing the old man try. He strikes me, these days, as the embodiment of … not so much the way things used to be, but the way they ought to be, in our nation’s Congress: he seems principled, forthright, well-spoken, and passionately opposed to all the crazy, up-is-down, farcical illogic that passes for policy in these trying times.

Byrd has a grievously checkered past, however, so it’s difficult to hold him up as paragon of senatorial virtue; but standing there stooped and palsied, tilting at the windmills of majority supremacy, he struck me as a valiant and doomed figure, the perfect representative of a valiant and doomed system of governance. The system that the founders set up for us is designed to move slowly, to inch unperturbed across the landscape of history while events whirl around it, a stately turtle armored against the vicissitudes of the current political climate, the partisan whim of the moment. But I can’t imagine that they intended things to be this vituperative, this ugly and petty. The word “politics” has achieved the status of epithet in our society, and watching this farce play out, it’s easy to see why.

I just finished the second draft of the Click story, and have posted a couple more fragments from it: a revision of the one I posted a couple of weeks ago (because the first version was horrible; first drafts should never see the light of day, they shrivel up like vampires and crumble into dust); and a new one, a little vignette about the love interest.

I’m having a lot of trouble with this story. It’s about grief and love, and I’m not sure I understand either emotion well enough to write about them, so I’m having to constantly guard against maudlin sentimentality and cliche. Not sure how successful I’ve been, every time I come back to it I see something that makes me cringe.

Anyway.

I got two alarming letters in the mail the other day. The first was from the Lebanese Embassy, inviting me to attend a reception in DC. The other was from a Muslim charitable group. Normally, neither of these letters would have bothered me. They probably wouldn’t have interested me very much, either: I was born in Lebanon, but grew up during the civil war there, so never really got much of a sense of the country, beyond a general feeling of malaise, decay and violence. And I don’t subscribe to any religions, and tend to ignore the junk mail I get from their adherents.

But ever since the Bush Administration enacted Operation Incarcerate Arab People in the wake of September 11th, I’ve been expecting the secret service to show up on my doorstep, inform me that I’m a “material witness”, then haul me off to some maximum security prison in New Jersey, where I’ll spend the better part of my six-month pre-deportation period in a dim six-by-six cell with a hole in the ground for a privy and a single drop of water plink-plinking down on my head 24 hours a day.

It hasn’t happened yet, but getting mail like this isn’t going to help matters. You may find this attitude somewhat paranoiac, but, given that my house is bugged and the FBI is reading my mail, I really think my fears are more than justified. Let me explain.

A plumber arrived at my door a couple of months ago. I could tell he was a plumber because he wore a spotless grey jumpsuit with the word PLUMBER stenciled on its breast. But it was partially unzipped, and I could see that he was wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie ensemble underneath. That got me feeling a little suspicious. Also, the guy didn’t really look like a plumber, with his black shades, his close-cropped hair, and his square-jawed, military, no-bullshit demeanor. And, most worrisome at all, I hadn’t called a plumber.

“I am your plumber,” he said. “I have come to fix your plumbing.”

“Ok,” I said. “I don’t need a plumber, though. Thanks”

He paused. “I was told that this residence had requested the services of a plumber.”

“Nope,” I said, smiling, my eyes lingering on the suspiciously firearm-shaped bulge under his jumpsuit. “Not by me.”

He paused, then lifted a finger to his ear, which, I saw, had a little earpiece in it, with a cord corkscrewing out of it and disappearing into his collar. He nodded, and said: “Perhaps the lady of the house.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.” I glanced over his shoulder, and saw two other men in plumber outfits across the street, nonchalantly leaning against streetlamps and reading newspapers.

He lifted a finger to his ear again, then said. “I must fix your plumbing. It’s a matter of national security.”

“Oh. Well, in that case.” I opened the door all the way and stepped aside.

He walked into the foyer and came to an abrupt halt, clicking his heels together and putting down his briefcase in the same crisp motion. He surveyed the house. “I must first establish the source of your plumbing issues. Where do you and your wife conduct your private conversations?”

“Excuse me?”

“Where do you discuss matters that you would not want your government to know about?”

“How will knowing that help you figure out my plumbing problem?”

“My agency is very thorough.”

“Agency?”

“My plumbing agency.”

“Who do your work for?”

He paused. “The Federal Bureau of Plumbing.”

“Oh. So you’re a government plumber. I didn’t know they had those.”

“They do. Please direct me to your inner sanctum.”

“Ok.” I led him up the stairs to the kitchen. “This is our kitchen cum cabal chamber. My wife and I like to hatch conspiracies here over breakfast.”

I said this with a big grin on my face, but the plumber guy didn’t even crack a smile. He put down his suitcase and walked right up to me, then leaned in very close and said: “Please repeat your last statement, as loudly and clearly as you can.”

“Um.” I hesitated. “No?”

“I see.” He waited for a moment, then said: “Perhaps you could paraphrase, then.”

“Ok.” I hesitated again. “I like breakfast.”

He waited, gave me a curt nod, then went back to his briefcase and opened it. “I will require some privacy.”

“Why?”

“It’s a matter of national security.”

“Right.” I’d forgotten. “And why are my pipes a matter of national security?”

“That’s classified. Rest assured, the Federal Bureau of Plumbing takes your safety and security very seriously. Please leave the building, immediately. I will alert you when it is safe to return.”

So I went outside and sat on my stoop and watched the other plumbers trying to pretend they weren’t watching me. I heard drilling noises from inside the house, and banging, and loud electronic beepings, and occasional static-washed conversations with people on the other end of a walky-talky.

Finally, the door opened behind me. “Your plumbing has been repaired,” said the plumber guy.

I got up. “Thanks.”

“That will be one million dollars.”

I waited for the punchline. It didn’t come.

“One million? The number with the six zeroes?”

“Yes.”

“The six zeroes before the decimal point?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Those are standard Federal Bureau of Plumbing procurement rates.”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t have one million dollars.”

“I see. How much do you have?”

I reached into my pocket, found some loose change, counted it. “Forty-seven cents. No, wait.” I reached into the other pocket. “Forty-eight cents.”

“That will be sufficient.” He took the change and dropped it into an inner pocket. I heard it clink against his gun. “Have a pleasant day. God bless the President.”

“Ok,” I said. I watched him stalk across the street to a white unmarked van and get in. Presently, the two other plumbers followed him. They drove off.

I went back upstairs. My fire alarm had been replaced by a large video camera with a blinking red light beneath the lens. It was rotating in its bracket, tracking back and forth across the kitchen with a small mechanical whir. It was painted white, presumably to help it blend in better with the ceiling. A large boom microphone emerged from the lamp over our kitchen table, hanging just inches above its surface. It was painted yellow, and had the word “lightbulb” stenciled on its side.

So this is the environment in which I found myself opening my two letters. In the pre-Bush world, I would probably have just thrown them away, along with all the Safeway circulars and the mobile phone offers. But I find that I’m loathe to get rid of them, now: not because I’ve discovered a newfound interest in my past, or a sudden attraction to Islam, but because I don’t like being wary of my mail. And the impulse to dispose of this stuff feels, suddenly, like capitulation; like a repudiation of my heritage; and, most of all, like fear.

I’ve discovered where nightmares come from. For the longest time, I thought they were created by some neglected god from an out-of-fashion pantheon, a Morpheus or a Hypnos or one of their lower-level factotums, dredging my memory and subconscious for fresh material to splice together in garish, monstrous dream pastiches. But I was wrong. The origin of nightmares is actually about half a bag Tostitos and a jar of salsa, consumed less than an hour before bed. This combination pretty much guarantees me a very unpleasant night.

Last night, for example. I went to bed right after downing a bunch of chips and found myself in the middle of what appeared to be a pretty innocuous dream. I just remember its barest outlines, but I think the gist of it was that I was bringing cups of coffee upstairs to my wife, one after the other, which she would repeatedly examine and turn upsidedown. The coffee, no longer liquid, would squeeze out of the mug as a spongy brown cylinder and fall onto the bed and break up into several icky, spongy brown pieces. Grody, though not particularly frightening. But my dread mounted every time I returned with another cup, until finally I was just absolutely scared out of my mind.

Finally, on my last trip, as I was reaching for the cup, my wife grabbed my arm and looked at me in a certain way, and said Where do you think you’re going, and suddenly my frightmeters shot up to eleven and my adrenaline klaxons started blaring terror. I woke up screaming.

Sitting here now, writing this, I can’t imagine why this scene scared the piss out of me (the figurative piss, thank goodness). Fear is all about context, I guess, and one man’s commonplace is another man’s nightmare. I think anyone would run screaming from an angry werewolf, or a shambling zombie creature, or a Bush environmental plan; but things like bad grades, interviews, unemployment, financial ruin, brushes with the law scare some people less than others, or not at all.

I once dreamed that my skin was cracking into hard fissures and sprouting thousands of tiny heads of broccoli, and the image torments me to this day. I can imagine that some people would find this amusing, or. at worst, kind of icky. But I hate broccoli, and the thought of going through life as a walking broccoli chia pet is almost more than I can bear. But that’s just me.

In the past couple of days, I’ve stumbled across of veritable cornucopia of Neil Gaiman goodness. For those of you who don’t know the name, Gaiman is a fantasy writer most famous for his Sandman series of comic books. He dabbles in lots of things, however, including novels (American Gods won the Hugo award a couple of years ago), short stories (it’s a safe bet that any high-profile fantasy compilation will include his name, somewhere), television, and movies. He writes for both children and adults. Oh, and he’s a living god, and I worship the ground he walks on.

My recent journey down Gaiman lane started with an excellent Q&A on slashdot, which led me to his (very active) blog, which led me to his FAQ, which led me to this little gem. which answers the standard question on how to get published if you’re an aspiring unknown:

How do you do it? You do it. You write. You finish what you write. You look for publishers who publish “that kind of thing”, whatever it is. You send them what you’ve done (a letter asking if they’d like to see a whole manuscript or a few chapters and an outline will always be welcome. And stamped self-addressed envelopes help keep the wheels turning.) Sooner or later, if you don’t give up and you have some measurable amount of ability or talent or luck, you get published. But for people who don’t know where to begin, let me offer a few suggestions: Meet editors. If you’re into SF, Horror or Fantasy, go to the kinds of SF, Horror or Fantasy conventions that editors go to (mainly the big ones - look for words like WORLD or NATIONAL in the title). Same goes for Romance or Crime. Join associations - SFWA or HWA or the Romance Writers of America or The Society of Authors. Most organisations like that have an associate membership for people who wouldn’t qualify for a full membership. Even if you haven’t met any editors, send your stuff out. The “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts is not always a bad thing - publishers take enormous pleasure in finding authors from the slush pile (Iain Banks and Storm Constantine are both writers who simply sent out manuscripts to publishers), although it occurs rarely enough that it has to be a special thing when it happens. If you write short stories, don’t worry about agents, just find places that might print the stories and get them out there. If you write novels, I think it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other. I’d written and published 3 books before I decided it was time to get an agent. Writers groups can be good and they can be bad. Depends on the people in them, and what they’re in them for. On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing. If you find your writers group stopping you from writing, then drop it. The other thing I’d suggest is Use The Web. Use it for anything you can - writers groups, feedback, networking, finding out how things work, getting published. It exists: take advantage of it. Believe in yourself. Keep writing.

Simple advice, but not simplistic. It seems to me that many of the writing books I’ve read/perused/skimmed all start way too far into the process, with technique and style and theme, and don’t address the most basic prerequisites. Turn on computer. Sit down. Write. Do stuff that makes it more likely that you’ll write. Don’t do stuff that makes it less likely.

Simple as this advice may seem, I have a terrible time following it. So I think that stressing the basics makes a lot of sense; because the best and most useful lessons about writing happen for me while I’m doing it. Writing groups, classes, abstract treatises on the craft all have their place, but only as adjuncts to the act itself. Writing is a road you take, not one you make, so the only way to get anything done is to put your head down and just go.