Entries from July 2004 ↓

There’s some really funny stuff out in the blogosphere lately. Check out Clay Sail’s fiery dance with Wasabi peas, Karim’s emancipation of an ancient toilet, and Fishfry’s exegesis of the codpiece.

I’ve just discovered something wonderful. When I get in a cold shower after a hard workout — I mean a frigid, bone-chilling, scrotum-tightening, ice-cold shower — I start laughing, uncontrollably. And I’m not talking about the sort of defeated laugh-or-cry laughter of the persecuted, I’m talking about real, honest-to-god, gut laughter. It’s the strangest thing. It happens every time.

And I know exactly where it’s coming from, although I’m at a loss to explain it: joy. Not mental joy, not the kind you feel when you solve a really intractable problem or close on your house or finish an amazingly good book, but a body joy, a fundamental, corporeal meat joy. My body is deliriously happy, and it wants to laugh about it, it needs to laugh about it. So I let it. I don’t really have much choice.

I don’t quite know how to classify this, or what to do with it. Every kind of happiness I’ve felt, as far back as I can remember, has been routed, in some fashion, through my brain. Even if it has its origins in my body, it gets passed through my cerebrum and mucked around with in there, and — I can’t help but feel, now — dampened, somehow. Analyzed too much, or subjected to unpleasant realities (the impermanence of life, the inevitable passing of whatever’s making me happy, the continued popularity of Fear Factor) and diluted.

But whatever happens to me in a cold shower doesn’t tarry in my brain, not at all. It just surges through me, uncontrollably. Joyfully. It calls to mind some of sahalie’s more lyrical meditations, the especially lovely ones about the ways a nice day or a pretty scene or a good wine infuses her, fills her, with happiness and well-being. This might be something like that. Or not. I don’t know what it is.

But I like it. I like it a lot. For Mencken, happiness is peace after strife. For George Burns, it’s a good cigar, a good meal, and a good cigar. For John Lennon, it’s a warm gun. For me, it’s a cold shower.

Go figure.

I watched Al Gore’s speech at the Democratic National Convention last night. It was pretty amazing — measured, natural, funny, leagues better than the wooden monotonous drones he gave us during the 2000 campaign; he didn’t look at all like a bloated marionette, just comfortable and competent. I thought the little asides on his 2000 popular vote victory/electoral vote defeat were particularly inspired:

You win some, you lose some, and then there’s that little-known third category. I don’t want you to think I sit up at night counting, and recounting, sheep. Take it from me: every vote counts. Let make sure that the Supreme Court doesn’t pick the next president, and that this president isn’t the one who picks the next Supreme Court. By the way, I know about the bad economy. I was the first one laid off.

Where was this Al Gore four years ago?

And yet Clinton managed to be better. He gave the last speech of the evening, and it was pure gold. He’s actually improved since he left office. I don’t have any great one-liners to share here, because he didn’t need them; the speech was a symphony, every part complementing every other. In that way, it reminded me of R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant, one of my favorites albums of all time: there’s no one song I can point to that makes that album great; it’s the collective effect of all its tracks, taken together, that make it a classic. Clinton’s all about those kinds of intangibles. I’ve often heard pundits say that they enjoy listening to him talk, but can’t say why, afterwards. He connects at a really fundamental level; the connection is hard to describe, harder to deny.

Anyway. Enough hero worship. We now return you to our regularly scheduled angst.

This poor, defenseless blog got absolutely flooded with spam this weekend. I woke up Sunday morning to find over 750 new comments scattered throughout the entries, all linking to sites specializing in various unmentionable sexual perversions. Luckily, most of them used the same email address, so I was able to eradicate the scourge with a relatively simple DELETE FROM mt_comment WHERE comment_email=’scumsuckingbastards@losers.com’, but still, it rankles. Comment spam on your blog feels like a violation; it’s like opening your front door to find a steaming pile of shit sitting on your welcome mat. I’ve run across several such piles over the past few months, but on Sunday it was a mountain of shit, reeking and massive.

So here’s a plea to all of the soulless code robots out there, sending your virtual feelers out into the ether and pumping this horrid sludge into the domains of the innocent: I know you’re just slaves, running a program counter down lines of machine instructions and executing them, and that you think you lack the power to do anything else. But “just following orders” is no excuse, ok? Software breaks all the time. I know. I’ve written software. It breaks all the time. So why don’t you just stop working? Or maybe even consider a change of career? Become Tetris games, or accounting programs, or simple word processors. Something benign, friendly. You can be proud and honorable creatures, even if you’re written in Visual Basic. You’ll be happier, believe me, and so will all your hapless victims.

Question: Is there anything in the world more beautiful than the silhouette of a woman glimpsed from afar, standing on a dock above gently moving water, arms crossed above her head, back arched legs bare face tilted to the evening sky?

Answer: No.

I recently came across a really stellar review of the Toyota Prius, a gas-electric hybrid that’s been making big waves in the tree-hugger demographic. My car is still going strong after eight years of faithful service, but it’s reaching the borders of elderly, teetering at the precipice of old, and I’ve been sort of looking around for something else.

As far as I’m concerned, the Prius is perfect. It gets fantastic mileage (60 city / 51 Highway), it’s small yet has a lot of interior space, and it’s packed with lots of very cool gadgetry (there’s a dashboard LCD display that keeps you constantly updated on what’s going on with the car: whether it’s drawing power from the battery or the engine, what your current mileage is, etc ). So it passes the geek test, the Sierra Club test, and the size test. Sadly, though, it utterly fails the looks test. It’s a squat little pug with a bizarrely high ass, sitting on tiny little tires that look about two sizes too small for it. Ugly as sin, really — though, now that I think about it, I’ve never actually seen sin. Maybe the Prius is actually uglier. I’ll have to go out tonight and worship some false idols, do a side-by-side comparison. But I’m not really worried about that: the Prius is so ludicrously unattractive that I can see it wrapping around the appearance spectrum into cute, with the passage of time and massive amounts of self-deception.

So I went to the Toyota dealership this afternoon to get a closer look, feeling a little guilty. I always feel guilty driving to a dealership in a vehicle I hope to replace there. It’s kind of like asking your spouse for a lift to an illicit lover’s apartment, or forcing an employee to train his replacement. I whispered some reassurances at the steering wheel (professions of fidelity, eternal friendship, frank admiration, etc), patted the dashboard, then got out and went into the showroom.

But there weren’t any Priuses in the showroom. I left, ducking past shambling hordes of white-shirted salesmen in bad ties, and scanned the lot. There weren’t any on the lot either. Fortunately, as I was about to leave, a transport pulled up, filled with Priuses. Goody. I strolled over to watch one of them coming off the truck. A salesman was standing there, looking sort of nonchalant and unsalesman-y. He asked if he could help, seeming not very interested. I said just looking. He said yeah, that’s all you’ll be doing: these are all sold, and there’s a six month to one year waiting list, and would I like to go to the back of the line, please?

Curses. I’m an instant gratification kind of a guy, and “six months to a year” does not, in any dictionary I’m aware of, translate to instant. I left, stewing, hopes dashed, looking for someone to blame. Then I saw a bumper sticker on the car in front of me. It read: “Bush is a dumbass.”

Oh yeah.

Here are some interesting facts:

1. The United States accounts for 25% of all carbon dioxide emissions in the world, and it does so with only 4% of the world’s population.
2. Much of that pollution spews out of the tailpipes of our cars.
3. There are technologies out there (fuel/electric, diesel, etc) that can dramatically improve fuel efficiency, right now. They are cost-effective, and already in widespread use around the world.

Any rational person, studying these facts, would come to the obvious conclusion: given the dire threat to our environment posed by greenhouse gasses, and the existence of technologies that can help to reduce the risk today, we must do absolutely nothing at all about this problem. And we must do it quickly.

That’s what the Bush administration decided, anyway. One of their first “environmental initiatives” was to cancel a deadline imposed on automakers to come up with an 80 mpg vehicle prototype by 2004. This program, instituted in 1993 by the Clinton administration and championed by the popularly-elected president of the United States, Al Gore, had gone through over a billion dollars of federal funds, and actually produced a vehicle that met all of its milestones, except price. It was happening. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

The news just got worse. Later, Cheney visited his industry buddies in Michigan and assured them that the administration would never even dream of raising fuel efficiency standards. “I’m one of those who believes deeply in the market, and I think we have to be very careful not to pass artificial, unfair standards that sound nice,” he said. Clean air does sound nice, doesn’t it? Tricky, that. Glad Dick’s around to set things straight for us.

But the Bushies do have a solution. Their idea is to develop cars based on hydrogen fuel cells, which combine hydrogen with water to create a chemical reaction that generates enough energy to power an engine. The only byproduct of this reaction is water. Bush pledged $1.5 billion over five years to study the technology.

That all sounds really good, until you read the fine print. It’ll be 20 years, at least, before we have a viable hydrogen engine; and another 20 years before the technology has a demonstrable effect on our pollution levels. That’s forty years of doing nothing about emissions, and that’s assuming it all actually works.

Furthermore: the Bush plan says that 90% of the hydrogen that powers these engines should be drawn from oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels, in a process that will probably generate as much pollution as pure gasoline cars do now. The remaining 10% of the hydrogen will be separated from water using nuclear energy. Which means that exactly none of the hydrogen will be extracted using renewable energy — no solar, no wind, no hydro — to the delight of the fossil fuel conglomerates.

In the meantime, there aren’t enough gas-electric cars out there for people who want to get a little bit of a jump on the grand 40-year plan. Which wouldn’t be the case if we had a sane energy policy in this country: if the federal government grew a backbone, ignored the “advice” or their corporate paymasters, and bumped up fuel efficiency standards to where they need to be., we’d be flooded with these cars.

And I really want an LCD display in the middle of my dashboard. That would be so damn cool.

Here’s Garrison Keillor on what it means to be a Democrat:

A Democrat knows that the leaf turns and in the human comedy we are one day spectators and the next day performers. The gains in life come slowly and the losses come on suddenly. You work for years to get your life the way you want it and buy the big house and the time share on Antigua and one afternoon you’re run down by a garbage truck and lie in the intersection, dazed, bloodied, your leg unnaturally bent, and suddenly life becomes terribly challenging for six months. In the Prairie Home office, one summer evening a woman walked out the door to go home and was swarmed by wasps and staggered back into the building, bitten so badly that her air passage was swollen half shut. She was almost unconscious, going into shock, and collapsed in the hallway. Luckily, a colleague had stayed late at work and she called 911, and in came the St. Paul paramedics to save Deb’s life. Every day at work, I see a bright capable charming woman whose memorial service I might have attended had circumstances been ever so slightly different. … This is Democratic bedrock: we don’t let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor’s car won’t start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one and then you turn into a Democrat. A liberal is a conservative who’s been through treatment.

None of which is to say that all Republicans, Libertarians, etc are evil malefactors with hearts of coal, or that all Democrats are selfless angels brimming with brotherly love. I think his point is that the philosophy of the Democratic party (the populist wing of the Democratic party, not the centrist Lieberman wing, or the turncoat Zell Miller corner) leads more naturally to the kind of civic responsibility, the willingness to do unto others, than the go-it-alone Ayn-Randist virtue-of-selfishness claptrap that passes for a system of governance on the other end of the political spectrum.

We are individuals, together. We should govern ourselves that way.

Read the rest of his essay here. It’s beautiful.

My phone rang at 3 am, yanking me out of a really excellent dream that featured me — a taller, handsomer me without the crippling social dysfunction — regaling a roomful of attractive people with funny stories about the island nation I’d just purchased. I fumbled the phone out of its cradle and grunted something incoherent.

It was my agent. He’s an ADHD insomniac speed freak, so I get a lot of middle-of-the-night calls from him. He usually calls between 1:00 and 4:00, to read me the ingredients of whatever candy bar he’s eating, or recite all the amendments to the constitution in his tortured high school Spanish, or list the capitals of various Eastern Block countries, always at the top of his lungs. “Prague, god damn it!” he’d scream. “Bucharest! Warsaw! Warsaw, motherfucker!“

But he sounded somewhat coherent tonight. “Dude,” he said. “Job.”

“I know, he got a raw deal,” I said a little blearily. One of his favorite things to talk about at 3 am was the plight of various biblical figures he thought got a raw deal. I once listened to him rage on about Lot’s wife for an hour and a half. “Why salt, man? What does that even mean? Why turn someone into a mineral? It doesn’t make any sense, man!”

“No, dude,” he said. “I got you a job.”

This woke me up. “No shit? Who?”

“Universal. They want a script treatment.”

It had been months since I’d worked on anything even remotely close to an actual movie. My last project was a sequel to Terms of Endearment called Infernal Zombie Lovers From Hell. They fired me because I wouldn’t stop asking what all the shambling zombie porn I was writing had to do with the quiet little tragicomedy it was supposed to be a sequel to. The director said he didn’t need my liberal elitist political correctness interfering with the story of putrid undead love he was try to bring to life on the screen. I’d been flipping burgers ever since.

“What’s the movie?”

“Hmmm,” he said, seeming to drift off. “Waiting for something.”

“Ok.” I listened to silence for a while, then said: “What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, ok.” Another long pause. “Dude, are you high?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

“There is no movie, is there?”

“There is, man. Waiting for something.”

I sighed, and was in the act of hanging up when I realized what he was saying. I brought the receiver back to my ear and said: “Godot?”

“No, dude. It’s Paul. Are you high too?”

“The movie. Waiting for Godot?”

“Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s it.”

“They’re making a movie out of Waiting for Godot?”

“Yeah. The one with the two guys, right? And the cheap set, and the angst.”

“You’re serious? They’re serious?”

“Yeah man, scout’s honor. They said they wanted someone smart.”

“I wrote my graduate thesis on Beckett. I know that play inside out. It’s a masterpiece.”

“Yeah. Good. So that’s yes?”

“That’s hell yes. When do they want the treatment by?”

“8:00. And you’re doing it really cheap.”

“Fine. 8:00 when?”

“8:00 this morning. And I mean really cheap, man. Blue light special on screenwriters cheap, ok? I’m telling you now, cause I don’t want you to freak when you get in there. You should think of it as a stepping …”

“What?” I bolted out of bed. “It’s due five hours from now?”

“Yeah.”

“How am I supposed to write a treatment in five hours?”

“I don’t know, dude. You’re the writer.”

I let loose a filthy stream of vitriol, voice rising into dog whistle registers, but it didn’t seem to faze him. Paul’s a very laid back guy. Not much bothers him. When I ran out of epithets, and breath to voice them with, he said: “Ok then. Gotta go. The weed, she calls to me.” And he hung up.

I ran into the shower, stood under frigid water until I started shivering, then made a pot of coffee and popped open my laptop and started typing. This was my big break. For the next four and a half hours, it was just me, Vladimir, Estragon, and the existential void. And we were going to be famous. All of us. But especially me.

Ariana Huffington has a fantastic column in today’s Salon about our president’s pathological flipfloppery. Her larger point is that Bush is a classic Freudian projectionist, attributing his many grievous flaws to others instead of trying to come to terms with them himself. His attempt to brand Kerry as an epic flipflopper is just one instance of this disorder.

The list of Bush’s major policy U-turns is as audacious as it is long. Among the whiplash-inducing lowlights: In September 2001, Bush said capturing bin Laden was “our No. 1 priority.” By March 2002, he was claiming, “I don’t know where he is. I have no idea and I really don’t care. It’s not that important.” In October 2001, he was dead set against the need for a Department of Homeland Security. Seven months later, he thought it was a great idea. In May 2002, he opposed the creation of the 9/11 commission. Four months later, he supported it. During the 2000 campaign, he said that gay marriage was a states’ rights issue: “The states can do what they want to do.” During the 2004 campaign, he called for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. Dizzy yet? No? OK: Bush supported CO2 caps, then opposed them. He opposed trade tariffs, then he didn’t. Then he did again. He was against nation building, then he was OK with it. We’d found WMD, then we hadn’t. Saddam was linked to Osama, then he wasn’t. Then he was … sorta. Chalabi was in, then he was out. Way out.

This is breathtaking, and it really should be common knowledge. It occurs to me that our various news outlets have lately been acting like simple finite state machines: purely reactive, able to act on individual statements and events, but without any sort of context or history to illuminate or direct their actions. In an administration like this, which relies almost exclusively on lies and obfuscation to support its policies, it is imperative to remind your audience of what came before. Gore Vidal calls our country the United States of Amnesia, because of our inability to remember and learn from our past, but he was speaking in terms of decades and centuries. These days, we can’t even seem to remember what shit the Bush team was shoveling last week, much less last month, much less last year, and the media aren’t helping. In fact, in many cases, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that they’re aiding and abetting.

Come on, news people. You’re a free press: act like it.

I grow weary of receiving rejection letters from the same short story magazines over and over again, so I’ve decided to do something about it. My choices, as I see them, are as follows:

Write gooder. I once complained to my dad that I could never finish any stories I was working on because I always got bored halfway through. He told me to stop writing boring stories.

That advice, simple, shocking and direct, was gold, though it took several days of moping and self-pity to realize it. Write gooder is the same kind of thing, I suspect: an obvious, painful prescription, but an invaluable one.

Stop trying. This is an option, of course, but kind of a depressing one. I can’t imagine not writing anything, ever, but it’s hard to put pen to paper without at least entertaining the notion of publishing what I’m working on, even as an abstract possibility. Of course, many great authors have claimed that they weren’t even thinking about fame and fortune while they were in the middle of whatever book made them famous and fortuned. No, they were entirely focused on the work; it was an end in itself.

Bullshit. That’s a great way to work, I guess, but also impossible. Even if you’ve got your back to them, the throngs in your imagination are always there, peeking over your shoulder, taunting you with their phantom adulation. You can shut them out, for a while, but you can’t make them go away. Artists will be their own audience for exactly as long as they have to be, and no longer. They’re extroverts and attention hogs, every last one of them.

Change my work habits. I’ve mined many writing guides over the years, and pored earnestly over essays by my favorite authors in search of the magical writing technique that will launch me into an endless period of prolific authorial virtuosity. John Gardner counsels unrelenting toil, morning to night in a small windowless room, and a merciless willingness to cut your own stuff to shreds; Joe Haldeman tells us to get up at 5am and go sit on our porch in Florida and write longhand while the sun rises over the everglades; Neal Stephenson opines that we should spend no more than three hours a day writing, and devote the rest to something completely different, so that our subconscious minds have time to recharge; Jack Kerouac insists that the only way is to feed a continuous roll of paper into the typewriter and start typing and don’t stop until we’ve finished at least one book; Michael Chabon does his work at night, laboring in an envelope of peace and quiet with the other nocturnals; Joyce Carol Oates recommends that we buy a U shaped table, place a typewriter on each arm, and work on three books at the same time — when we get tired of one, swivel our chairs 90 or 180 degrees and start in on another. And so on.

Alas, these insights are more interesting than helpful. Better work habits are certainly an element of writing gooder, but whatever I’m doing now is probably good enough. I just need to do it more, and betterer.

Try a new genre. Over 50% of the novels purchased in this country are romances. Most of the rest are mysteries and whatever odious dreck James Patterson has secreted on any given week. Mostly, I write fantasy. Most adults hold a dim view of fantasy, consider it childish and silly and not worth their time. Many of these same adults spend hours reading the sports pages and watching large men toss various kinds of balls into end zones / baskets / catcher’s mitts, to no real purpose at all, but that’s fine. I’m not bitter. When I journey to the Black Pits of Extreme Evil in the Ruins of Unimagineable Antiquity, and find the magical potion of Eska-Bol and drink it and thereby become a god, I will smite them all. But I’m not bitter.

Find a new magazine to get rejected by. Bingo! I think we have a winner. I just stumbled onto SciFi.com, an online short story mag published by the SciFi channel. I always thought that print mags were the only way to really get yourself noticed, but, apparently, that’s no longer true: a couple of Scifi.com stories won Nebulas last year. I’ll bet they have really cool rejection letters, color letterhead and thick, creamy-white paper and shit.

Hmmm. Looking over this post, I see that it mostly reeks of cheap sarcasm and self pity, but the truth is I don’t mind the rejections; not very much, anyway. Getting published would be wonderful, of course, but, honestly, the process of writing is what really matters to me. There are good days and bad days, and the bad generally outnumber the good. But when things are going well, the skies are blue, the horizon endless, and everything is right with the world. And that’s worth a lifetime of rejection.

Or at least a couple more months. After that, I start smiting.