Entries from December 2003 ↓

I was recently talking to my brother in law and his wife (both of whom are doctors) about the extreme unauthenticity of doctor shows like ER. Real doctor lives are much blander, more irritating, and less replete with beautiful people gazing wistfully/angrily/lovingly into one another’s eyes as they remove spleens and pry ribcages apart. I’ve heard that cops and lawyers have the same beef with cop and lawyer shows.

This isn’t surprising, of course, but it does make me feel a little jealous. As a computer programmer person, I have absolutely no television shows I can make fun of. The network execs in their imitation ivory towers are apparently convinced that there isn’t much interest in the dynamic, fast-paced world of software engineering. I think they’re wrong. I think there’s a market out there that is just begging to be tapped.

So, in the interest of getting the ball rolling, I’ve written the pilot of a teleplay about a cocky but brilliant but attractive group of computer programmers who battle the forces of evil with nothing more than a keyboard, a monitor, and their wits. They call themselves … The Code Squad.

THE CODE SQUAD

CAST OF CHARACTERS

ROCK CODEWRIGHT - Java programmer, two-time olympic pole-vaulting champion. A chiseled, well-muscled man whose somber, sensitive eyes stare out at the world through tortoiseshell glasses and see only despair.

HILLARY VAS DEFERENS - Buxom, irreverent, brilliant former cheerleader with a sharp tongue and sharper heels. She can code rings around her fellow programmers, and isn’t afraid to say so.

SQUAT BARSTOOL - Short, balding old-timer with a bad attitude and worse breath, he roams the cubespace of FastPaced Industries, cracking politically incorrect jokes and looking for trouble.

CLIPPY SUPERCOMPUTER - Cute little paperclip avatar connected to the Vast Mind computer system at Code Squad Central. Funny, cocky, and all-knowing, Clippy doesn’t take crap from anyone.

SCENE 1: Rock and the Clock

[Camera fades into a huge room filled with cubicles, dark except for a single fluorescent light that illuminates one of the cubes. Camera swoops slowly in over the cubespace as a lone flute trills an ancient Native American dirge, and stops over the desk of ROCK CODEWRIGHT, who is staring intently at a computer screen. A series of ones and zeroes, green on a black background, move across the display as ROCK CODEWRIGHT types furiously on his keyboard, staring handsomely at the image on the display.]

ROCK: Damn! [Checks watch, a handsome BULOVA chronometer with diamonds inset in the face] Only four minutes left!

[ROCK CODEWRIGHT begins to type even more quickly, and the symbols on the screen start to float away from their moorings, and slowly coalesce into the image of a check mark. It's not complete, though: one group of ones and zeroes is still floating around at the margin of the display.]

ROCK: Damn! [Checks watch, a handsome OMEGA chronometer with titanium hilights and a white gold band] Only three minutes left!

[ROCK CODEWRIGHT's fingers become a blur over the keyboard. The music swells then settles into a martial beat. A bead of sweat makes its way down ROCK's forehead. And slowly, slowly, the block of mutinous code begins to drift toward the checkmark.]

[Camera focuses on the clock on the side of ROCK CODEWRIGHT's cube. The minute hand is on the verge of reaching the 12, and the second hand is sweeping toward it. The tick tick tick of the clock becomes audible.]

[Cut back to ROCK. His handsome, sensitive eyes are wide with anxiety now, and he is breathing very hard.]

[A series of crosscuts between ROCK and the screen and the clock, the ticking getting louder and louder. At the last second, the reluctant piece of code reaches the checkmark and completes it. The entire screen turns white, and then a message appears in a digital-alarm-clock font:

[Rock leans back in his chair, a slow smile spreading across his handsome features.]

HILLARY VAS DEFERENS: So you made your deadline?

[Camera swings around to HILLARY VAS DEFERENS, who is standing in the opening to ROCK's cube. She is wearing a tight, low cut t-shirt with the words DÉCOLLETAGE, BABY written in pink cursive script across her bust. She has an irreverent expression on her face.]

ROCK: Hillary! What you doing here so late? I thought you had a … [pauses, a brief flicker of jealousy and sadness appearing on his handsome features] … date?

HILLARY: He was a stiff. And not the kind that I like, if you know what I mean. [She smiles irreverently] I decided to go for a late night jog, to work him out of my system, and wound up here. [She sighs, and her breast swells jiggly-ly]. I guess I like my job too much, huh?

ROCK: Join the club, sister.

HILLARY: You wish. [She wrinkles her nose, irreverently]. So what are you working on these days?

ROCK: Well, you know about that Y2K + 4 problem, right?

HILLARY: Sure. That’s the one where some lazy programmers back in the seventies screwed up the internal clocks of their Unix microchips, so that they’d stop working on 2004, right?

ROCK: Right. Except I’ve been looking at their code, and something isn’t quite right. Let me show you.

[ROCK leans forward, and his fingers flurry over the keyboard. A long stream of text (black on white) begins to scroll quickly by. ROCK stares handsomely into the display, waiting, squinting, until he sees something and slams his hand down on the spacebar. The scrolling stops.]

ROCK: [Turning toward HILLARY and pointing] Look!

[HILLARY leans in, her auburn hair brushing tantalizingly across ROCK's muscular shoulder. The camera zooms in with her, toward the screen, and settles on a line of code separated from all the other code by lots of whitespace. The code is a bunch of gobbledygook, but the comment above it is legible. It says:

HILLARY: [Starting back, as if struck. Her bust shudders like firm jello.] Oh my god! They did it on purpose! Those bastards! What systems are affected?

ROCK: The government systems.

HILLARY: The government systems? Which ones?

ROCK: All of them.

HILLARY: Oh my god! Rock, we’ve got to do something!

ROCK: Way ahead of you, Hill. [More typing. The screen changes again, this time to a pastoral scene. A paperclip cow is grazing on the verdant fields. ROCK lifts the VOICE RECOGNITION MOUSE to this lips and speaks.] Clippy! We need you!

CLIPPY: [Cow looks up, still chewing] Moo called?

HILLARY: [Laughing prettily] Oh Clippy! What are we going to do with you?

CLIPPY: Well, you could start by finding me a Mrs. Clippy. Clippy be horny! [The cow uncurls into a long, thin metal line, then curls into a paperclip that zooms toward the screen and knocks on the glass] Hi! You look like you’re having a national security crisis!

ROCK: You said it, buddy. I need you to hack into the government computer grid and download all the C subroutines you can find that have anything to do with the Y2K + 4 problem.

CLIPPY: No problemo, Rock-man. I’ll just patch into the federal GPS system and then route myself through the IEEE EJB CORBA lines until I find the right RJ-45 port.

HEATHER: Well, whatever you do, do it fast, Clippy. We haven’t got much time!

CLIPPY: [Changes into a jet dragster] You don’t have to tell me twice, sister. [He zooms off the screen]

SQAUT BARSTOOL: [Peeking head into ROCK's cube] Much time for what?

ROCK: Oh. Hello Squat. [Brow furled handsomely, he swivels his chair to look guardedly at SQUAT]. What are you doing here so late? I thought you were strictly a 9 to 4 kind of a guy.

SQUAT: Very funny, muscle boy. And, for the last time, the name’s Scott.

HILLARY: What the hell do you want, Squat? We’re kind of busy.

SQUAT: Don’t mess with me, little lady. I was wrangling subroutines while you were still in your swaddling clothes. [SQUAT BARSTOOL steps into the cube and positions himself beneath the shelf of HILARY VAS DEFERNS' bust, ostentatiously violating her personal space. He is wearing a short-sleeved white ketchup-stained button-down shirt with a single pocket that's dominated by a gargantuan pocket protector filled with pens of every color. He peers myopically at the screen.] Ah. The Y2K + 4 problem. Just finding out about it now, are you, Codeblight?

ROCK: [Sitting up straight. Steel creeps into his gaze.] You know about this?

SQUAT: [Giggling] Know about it! I was there, Hercules. I saw it all happen.

HILLARY: [Steps to the side, blocking the cube's exit.] You know what I don’t like about you, Squat?

[SQUAT BARSTOOL looks from ROCK CODEWRIGHT to HILLARY VAS DEFERENS then back again, squinting his beady little eyes with fright. Beads of sweat appear on his forehead.]

SQUAT: [Squeaking like a trapped mouse.] What?

HILLARY: Everything.

ROCK: Sit down, Squat. You got some ’splaining to do.

[FADE TO COMMERCIAL]

IMDB has a list of the 100 worst movies of all time, as rated by visitors to the site. Some observations:

• There are four “Police Academy” films in the list. There should be a lot more.
• “Plan 9 From Outer Space” only ranks as the 77th worst movie. This may be good news for fans of the film, but, personally, I’d rather be the worst movie of all time that the 77th. There’s a certain distinction in being #1, no matter what end of the spectrum the top spot happens to be on.
• There exists a movie called “Santa With Muscles”. I don’t know about the film itself, but the title is so inspired that people should give it a break.
• “From Justin To Kelly” is the all-time worst movie ever, and “Spice World” is number 44, proving that movies can be bad enough to overcome the megawatt cuteness of their actors.
• “Flash Gordon” did not make the list, thereby invalidating it entirely.

I think someone should compile a list of the most disappointing movies of all time: movies that, while not bad in and of themselves, so fail to live up to their potential that watching them is actually more painful than sitting through a flat-out stinker. I know which movies I’d vote for.

I have recently been reacquainting myself with Karim’s art pages over at karimspot. Some really excellent, eclectic stuff there, very much worth a look.

One of my favorites is this one: a spare drawing of an unravelling man, what remains of his features splayed out and disassociated and connected only by a thin, tortuous line. It’s kind of cool the way Karim put it together: the background was created by a program he wrote that generates randomly-sized rectangles and places them willy-nilly on the page. We’re seeing this kind of machine/man artistic collaboration more and more these days, most notably in the various computer-animated movies that are appearing in the theaters. But where the Shreks and the Finding Nemos are using software as a tool to express an essentially human vision, Karim has, in a way, made the computer part of the creative process.

It’s odd to think of a computer, a creature of ones and zeroes and flat planes and mathematical calculations and binary logic, assisting in something as aggressively analog as art, but it’s happening. And it makes you think: how analog is art, really? If you discount the role of a nebulous, undefined “soul” in human creativity, then it all has to come down to the biochemical equivalent of ones and zeroes, eventually, doesn’t it? I mean, the logical, physical substratum that underlies “consciousness” might be so fiendishly complex that we’ll never understand it — or, rather, that we’ll need to create an external uber-mind to understand it for us — but it’s got to be there.

But I digress, boringly. Check out these drawings. You’ll be glad you did.

The silver-tongued and multi-talented Clay Sails has just released his first album, and it’s really, really good. Go to The Music of Clay Sails for mp3 versions of all the songs, along with liner notes, lyrics, general musings, biographical information, and more.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I would like to say that I think it’s massively unfair when the gods choose to grant individuals superlative talent in more than one discipline. There just isn’t enough mojo to go around, and singletons shouldn’t get more than their share. We already know that Clay is an excellent writer, capable of tossing off inspired riffs both hilarious and profound, and then switching gears mid-paragraph to produce some of the most muscular, lovely imagery this side of Cormac McCarthy. That’s fine, I’ll give him that. But now we discover that he’s also a talented musician and songwriter. Where’d that come from? And then there’s Cory Doctorow, blogger extraordinaire, EFF evangelizer, up-and-coming sci fi writer. Or Viggo Mortensen, actor, poet, photographer, descendant of Isildur and lost king of Gondor. Or Vernor Vinge, computer scientist and Hugo-winning scifi author. Or Leonardo DaVinci, painter, sculptor, inventor, dead guy.

I don’t mean to sound bitter here, but this polymath shit rankles. Come on, gods. Share the love.

The only dispiriting thing about the undeniably uplifting capture of Saddam Hussein is how it’s managed to get the Democrats sniping at one another, once again, and most particularly at Howard Dean. Many of the primary candidates began to use the news as a Dean-bashing cudgel almost as soon as it arrived. Lieberman, predictably, was the worst offender, demagoguing frantically, “pointing out” that Saddam would still be sitting pretty in one of his palaces today if Dean were president, and then weighing in with his expert opinion that Hussein should be executed after the trial. The other candidates who supported the resolution that led eventually to the war weren’t much better. Given the moribund state of his campaign, I don’t know what Lieberman hopes to gain by taking these kinds of potshots at Dean, but I know what his party stands to lose: any hope of winning back the whitehouse.

I’m trying to sort out my reaction, tease it into its individual strands, but it’s been hard, largely because the emotional dimension of the capture is so difficult to separate it from the facts. It’s been enthralling, riveting to watch pictures of a hobo version of Saddam Hussein on the news, dissheveled and a little bewildered, being poked and prodded and shaved by military doctors, and then questioned by representatives of the millions he’s abused, tortured, oppressed and killed over the years. It was amazing, wonderful to see the reaction of the small Iraqi crowd at the news conference where Bremmer announced the capture and showed the first pictures of Saddam, the prisoner.

But the question is, does this really change anything, in the long term? It doesn’t change the fact that the Bush administration lied repeatedly to justify the war, nor that they did such a poor job planning for the aftermath that over 250 soldiers and many Iraqis have died violently after the mission was “accomplished”. It doesn’t change the fact that we’re overstretched and understaffed in Iraq. It doesn’t change the fact that we have alienated our allies and flushed the whole notion of diplomacy down the toilet in our pursuit of this war, and it doesn’t change the fact that we haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction, our primary justification for entering into it.

Then again, this capture may pay dividends. If Saddam has been directing the increasingly well-coordinated attacks on Americans soldiers and their friends, then we’ve just cut the head off the snake, so to speak. But, judging from the circumstances in which we found him, I very much doubt he was directing anything besides his pathetic efforts to avoid capture.

Or: his removal from the scene may eradicate any fears that the Iraqis have of a return of the old regime, and could spur any fence sitters into our camp. This is the more likely scenario, I think, but I’m not sure it’ll actually pan out this way. It really depends on whether the people behind the current violence in Iraq see Saddam as a figurehead, and, if so, whether his capture will demoralize or energize them.

But, regardless, the Liebermans out there are making a very serious mistake by over-simplifying this issue in an attempt to gain some traction in their campaigns. Yes, Howard Dean’s stolid opposition to the war has put him in a very tenuous position, but not because the capture changes any of the facts on the ground; rather, because the euphoria that’s followed it has served to mask the very real (and still valid) complaints about the execution of the war, and the rationale for entering into it. One hopes that cooler heads will prevail in the Democratic party, eventually, and that it will avoid its traditional fate of eating itself alive.

If there was a filing cabinet, somewhere in the white house basement, stocked with documents describing all of the ridiculousness perpetrated by the Bush administration in its three-year blitzkrieg against good policy and good sense, would you file its decision to forbid France, Germany, and Russia’s participation in bids for Iraqi reconstruction under “B”, for bewildering, or “S” for spiteful?

It’s a tough call. Because it turns out that Bush personally contacted the leaders of each of those countries soon after the contract restrictions were announced, asking them to forgive their share of Iraq’s voluminous debt. “B”, for brazen, then. But all of the slighted countries have indicated, in one way or another, that they’re suddenly a lot less willing to help out than they were two days ago. So maybe “S”, for stupid.

The filing cabinet, if it exists, is probably actually lots of filing cabinets, because there’s no way that just one is going to be large enough to hold all of the records of this administration’s foreign policy outrages; even if each incident is written out as a ten word summary on a micron-thin piece of tissue paper and compressed into superdense stacks with a miniaturized car compactor. From the Kyoto treaty to steel tariffs to old Europe, Bush & Co. have made a nasty little art of pissing off our friends and allies. So maybe it’s “B” for bullying. They’ve worked very hard to burn through all of the diplomatic capital their forebears have built up since since World War II, and now the well is almost dry.

Some governments are still playing along, but that’s more a reaction to our power than it is to our good works, so to speak. We’ve put an awful lot of faith in our military and economic might, because “S” is for superpower, god damn it, as in the only superpower left in the world, as in all of you little bastards had better fall in line before we really get mad.

During the 2000 campaign, candidate Bush promised that he would present America’s “humble” face to the world, because “we’re a freedom-loving nation. And if we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way, but if we’re [a] humble nation, they’ll respect us.” Looking back on that charming little speech three years later, from the perspective of a nation that’s declared its right to preemptively attack anyone it suspects of ill-deeds, under the government of a president who proclaims that any country that is not with us is against us, I can’t help but think what most of the rest of the world is probably thinking too: that “B” is for bull, and “S” is for shit.

I dropped my car at the dealer today for some standard maintenance. They called me a couple of hours later and told me that, in addition to my normal service, they thought that I needed to clean off all the carbon that’s building up on my engine, because bad things might happen if I don’t. And I needed to pay them a large sum of money to do this. A very large sum of money.

So I blanched, and told them thank you very much, but I like having carbon on my engine. I put it there myself, in fact, it keeps the engine nice and toasty in the winter months. And then I hung up, and started to worry. What if my car blows up when all that carbon ignites? What if the engine gets really heavy, because of all the carbon, and falls out of the car while I’m doing ninety down the highway? What if the carbon coalesces and becomes sentient and attacks me when I’m least expecting it?

I don’t know much about cars, so I instant message’d my brother. We had a conversation about it.

Lapsed Cannibal: Hey dude. What do you know about carbon buildup on engines?

Dirk DeBomb: tons. for example it occurs when carbon builds up on engines.

Dirk DeBomb: also, engines can have carbon build up on them.

Dirk DeBomb: and, finally, build carbon up engines have can them on.

Lapsed Cannibal: Ah. So it’s building up on engines? Not, say, down?

Dirk DeBomb: exactly.

Dirk DeBomb: it’s easily confused, but yes it’s up.

Lapsed Cannibal: Ok. Just wanted to be sure. So carbon buildup on engines is carbon buildup on engines, which is on engines, where carbon is building up.

Dirk DeBomb: exactly. why do you ask?

Lapsed Cannibal: Well, carbon’s building up on my engine.

Lapsed Cannibal: And the guy at the shop has offered to take it off for me. He’s offering to do so for a lot of money.

Dirk DeBomb: that’s what happens to engines. and carbon.

Lapsed Cannibal: I told him, thanks for offering to charge me a lot of money to do that thing with the carbon, but maybe later.

Lapsed Cannibal: And now I’m worried.

Dirk DeBomb: i wouldn’t be worried. although your car’s a little older, i’ve never had anyone offer to remove carbon from my civic’s engine.

Lapsed Cannibal: Not even for a lot of money?

Dirk DeBomb: no, not even. believe me, if someone had offered to take a lot of my money, i would have jumped at the opportunity.

Lapsed Cannibal: I would like to remove the carbon from your engine, and I would like to do it for an unreasonable sum of money.

Dirk DeBomb: you’re in! man, the carbon on my engine is really troubling me. i was hoping someone with carbon removal experience would remove it. the problem is that carbon removers do it so cheaply these days. it’s hard to find an expensive carbon remover

Lapsed Cannibal: And I’m not even planning to remove the carbon! Or look at your engine at all, for that matter. And yet, I’m still willing to charge you a great deal of money for it. Because that’s what brothers do.

Dirk DeBomb: that’s even better. there’s nothing i hate more than a carbon remover who removes carbon. thank you, brother.

Lapsed Cannibal: You’re welcome, brother. So, do you have any moss growing in your carburetor?

Dirk DeBomb: hmmm…. i’m not going to fall for the old moss in the carburetor trick. but the sooner your don’t remove the carbon from my engine, the better.

Lapsed Cannibal: Ok. Let’s make an appointment for me not to do that … mmmm … tomorrow? I’m thinking of not coming over to your house and taking care of it around, say … two?

Dirk DeBomb: two’s good. i’ll not see you then.

Lapsed Cannibal: Ok. Not talk to you later.

Kristof has written an op-ed rehashing the old argument that nominating Howard Dean will essentially guarantee a Bush victory in the general election — despite the fact that Dean is smart, articulate, principled, and has a solid record of centrist, practical governance during his time in Vermont.

But these qualities, laudable as they may be, will do nothing — the argument goes — to help his cause. The American people don’t like smart, they like folksy; they don’t like practicality, they like that vision thing; and, while the ability to speak well is nice to have, it’s certainly not a prerequisite for the presidency.

Kristof tells an anecdote about a speech Adelai Stevenson gave during his own doomed campaign. After he’d finished, someone in the crowd shouted out that he was the choice of every thinking American, to which Stevenson replied that this wasn’t enough; he needed a majority.

But I just don’t buy it. Even though Bush is still inexplicably popular, despite all the harm he’s done to us over the last three years, I really do think that the vast majority of the people out there are smart and insightful enough to know when the wool’s being pulled over their eyes. The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence: it’s a lack of interest. It’s a lot easier to accept a nicely packaged series of soundbite lies than it is to delve into the messy thickets of facts and truth. Bush and his minions are masters of the misleading factoid, the staged appearance, the deftly spun phrase. They’ve got the bully pulpit, and know how to abuse it.

And that’s why the democratic candidate has to be loud, vociferous, articulate, and too damn stubborn to back down no matter what vile misrepresentations the opposition hurls his way. He has to be blustery and combative and smart, and, you know, sort of Howard-Dean-ish.

Ok, fine. But the truth is that I’m feeling the vaguest tremor of doubt in the pit of my belly. If Dean gets nominated (and, should Al Gore endorse him tomorrow, I think he will be) can he really expand his appeal beyond the hardcore lefty contingent when it comes time for the general election? Does he have a prayer of getting enough votes from the all-important south? As George Will said on Sunday, the message they’ll be hearing from him is: same-sex unions are good, you’re undertaxed, and the war is wrong. He’ll be painted, with as broad a brush as the right can fashion, as a smarty-pants Northeastern liberal, a governor of a little tiny snowbound state with no foreign policy experience and a platform more oppositional than it is constructive.

Which brings me back to the Kristof column: what makes it more persuasive than others like it is the fact that Kristof himself was once a true believer: at thirteen, he was passing out pamphlets for George McGovern, another smart upstart Democrat who was soundly trounced by his Republican rival, Richard Nixon. I don’t know much about McGovern, but I gather he was the darling of the left, an antiwar figure who proposed legislating a guaranteed level of income for all American families. Moderates fled screaming to Nixon. Liberal heartbreak ensued.

Still, I don’t think Dean is cut from the same cloth. He’s anti-this-war, certainly, but not anti-war; he’s proven himself to be a fiscally responsible governor, which lends his calls for a repeal of the tax cut a certain level of credibility. Really, if you brush past all the firebreathing and teeth-gnashing, he’s a surprisingly moderate figure. He’s just got to convince the rest of the country of this. I hope he can.

Driving down the GW Parkway today, we passed the CIA headquarters, and my Mom pointed out the sign at the entrance: “The George Bush Center for Intelligence”.

So that’s where he keeps it.

I find that, sometimes, when I sit down to write, certain nuggets of prose just plop out of my mind, fully-formed and nearly perfect in their composition. These gifts are extremely few and far between, of course, tiny islands in a sea of churn, and the challenge in writing anything is building the necessary bridges between them to make an actual story out of this disjoint archipelago of inspiration. But the sad fact is that I can make the stuff that I have to labor over (this bridgework) presentable, and very occasionally good; but it’s never as good as the stuff that I don’t have to do any work on at all.

So where do these prodigies come from? Stephen King posits boys in the basement, little workers in the writer’s subconscious working diligently to fashion the best stuff your mind can muster, but doing so in such secrecy that when the fruits of their labor finally appear in the conscious layers of your brain, they seem to be just sui generis chunks of goodness.

Then there are theories that inspiration doesn’t come from you at all, that it’s a muse or a god placing this material in your mind, that’s it’s a Gift From Beyond. That writing well is largely a matter of being patient enough to wait for the good stuff to show up and spill out of your pen and onto the page.

Posh and tishtosh, I say. Stuff and bollocks. Good writing comes from your ass, and I can prove it.

Let’s break this down into individual points. Point number one: how do most writer’s write? Standing up? On their heads? Suspended from the ceiling, lying prone on a bed of nails, supine on a pile of dead eels, hanging from their teeth on a circus wire suspended high above a giant aquarium full of flesh eating beetles? No. They do it sitting down.

Two: when people sit, then are resting the entire weight of their bodies on their asses.

Three: The ass consists of two buttocks.

Four: Buttocks are fleshy, capacious vessels, capable of storing massive amounts of fat, small surgical tools, tiny microfiche editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica and — listen carefully now — stories. Lots and lots of stories.

Five: Stories are notoriously extroverted creatures, and cannot bear to be confined. Which is to say, they don’t like being locked up in your ass. But they really don’t like being locked up in your ass when your ass is being squeezed between the hard surface of a chair and the bulk of your upper body. This makes them extremely unhappy.

Six: Extremely unhappy stories will always try to escape. And, being nonmaterial objects and so lighter than any physical element, they tend to escape upwards.

Seven: A writer’s brain is upwards of his ass.

Eight: It’s widely acknowledged that, the longer a writer sits in his chair, the better and more prolific he becomes. This is because it takes a while for the stories to find their way to his brain through all that icky stuff, blood and puss and organs, inside his body. But once they’ve found their path, they flow upwards in a more or less continuous stream.

Nine: When stories reach a writer’s brain, they find there a means of escape not just from his ass, but from his body as well: through his creative cortex, down his neck, through his arm, out his fingers, onto the page, and into the great wide world. And they take it.

Ten: The writer, surprised to find all of these ideas clogging up his mind, clamoring for escape, is more than happy to let them do so.

And so. Quid pro quo. E pluribus unum. Veni vidi vici. Good writing comes from your ass. But not just writing. Art, programming, pottery. All creativity flows from the ass. So when your writing instructor tells you to put your butt in a chair and just write, he doesn’t mean it as a metaphorical exhortation. He means it literally. Sit down and crush that potential out of your ass. It wants to be free.