I Hate Memorial Day

I hate the concept, first of all. As if one Monday a year even begins to honor the life sacrifices of all those who’ve died “for this country.” We’re supposed to take this day and “remember them,” whatever that means. Statement certainly can’t be taken literally. I mean, let’s do some math here:

There are only eighty six thousand four hundred seconds in a day. Even if one were to take the time to memorize the names of eight six thousand four hundred fallen soldiers and then spend the entire twenty-four hour period actively remembering them (being careful to think of nothing else—not even one’s need to pee—and thus sacrifice an irreplaceable instant or, worse, lose one’s place) that would still leave millions of people unremembered. Unsung, as it were…which is a fancy way of saying, “Just as dead, except nobody really cares about it.”

The problem is, there are plenty of U.S. military casualties who are just that: unsung, unmourned, unremembered. Their bodies lie strewn throughout history. We don’t even remember their wars. Have you ever heard of the First Seminole War? How about the Second? Or the Third? Do you have any idea what they was really about? Do you remember the name of a fallen soldier who died for our freedom to take Florida from some brown people? And don’t you just love how Wikipedia’s U.S. Casualties of War table is littered with question marks. Its as if the table itself is shrugging, throwing up its hands in defeat. Hey it seems to say, don’t look at me. I’m just a table. Hell if I know how many people died back then. It was 1818, for goddsakes. Two thirds of ‘em couldn’t read and the rest were getting shot. Call that an estimate.

So we don’t really remember the fallen on Memorial Day. The task is impossible. What to do then? We barbeque meat. We drink beer. We bullshit with the neighbors and pretend to care about their lives. We watch sports, read the news, and do all the narcissistic things we do anyway. On a Monday. The worst fucking day of the week. Go figure.

Some of us (a shrinking, but nonetheless existent percentage) get the day off from work. Many do not. And, sure, the guy who pumps my gas or sells me my cancer sticks is getting time and a half...but this time last year I was that guy. I know exactly how he feels and, brother…twelve bucks and hour just doesn’t make up. Only twelve because we live out here, in what the President’s father described as “Little Beirut.” In my birthstate, time and a half equals eight dollars and hour…unless you’re a waitress, in which case it’s four, plus the tips you’ll get from those too lazy to apply meat to hot charcoal.

Meanwhile, 2465 new American soldier souls have shuffled their way free of this mortal coil. At this rate we’ll hit 3000 before the year is out and by this time next year we’ll still be wondering just what to do about extracting our fighting men and women from what used to be called “The Fertile Crescent.” Should we wait until the Iraqi army is trained and in the field? Or until Iran invades through the already-far-too porous border, triggering the next Only One Vowel Removed? Because didn’t the last one just go so well?

Vote for Democrats in November. At this point, it is your only hope and mine. It doesn’t matter what they stand for. You don’t know anyway, and won’t remember by this time next year even if you do. Besides, deep in your heart you know they’re lying. But at least their lies don’t lead young people into body bags.

Except for that one time, back in the 1960s…but that’s just boring old history anyway. Like the True Meaning of Memorial Day. Much better to indulge in the Pie-and-Spareribs Memorial Day than worry about the piles of dead that old son of a bitch, Ares, has claimed for his own.

Make Jesus Turn Around and Say, "Yo, Pac, this nigga flipped it."

In my research I've uncovered a vast array of data on the true religious character of America. I'm aided in this by Valparaiso University of Indiana, which has quite the collection of nicely colored county maps within its database. The maps provide a breakdown of religious affiliation as a percentage of population. The contrast between my birth state (Missouri) and my adopted home (Oregon) is quite a sight to behold.

Tonight...

Tonight I feel as if all roads are closing. Friends are departing, and those that remain remain distracted with each other. And I’m here.

Lucky me.

(James Burke) Download babysitting

…tonight. I found a new James Burke series I didn’t even know existed. James Burke, if you don’t know, is the only good sociologist. I don’t mean that he’s dead (not yet, thank god), only that he is the only vaguely “academic” British person I’ve seen who knows exactly how to use the medium of television to educate.

Burke is most famous for his BBC series Connections, which aired on PBS stations across America. Mostly educated, relatively “free thinking”, middle-class folk, some of whom were probably teachers, watched it, and then picked up their telephones. They dialed the little number PBS used to flash on the bottom of the screen before Al Gore invented the Internet. A human being thousands of miles away pushed a button and asked them what they wanted. Then they asked for a credit card number. Six to eight weeks (or however long it took) later, Connections found its way onto the dusty shelves of collage libraries all across the nation. Including mine.

I tell you this story to illustrate the kind of casual chains Burke seems to have devoted his life to examining. Burke’s work is all about the interconnectivity, not just of the modern world, but of the past that built it.

We in American have a problem with remembering the past. It bores us. It isn’t now. We live in a perpetual now because, as the man himself says, “We’ve got a problem.”

We live I the crosshairs of perpetual change. Everyday we wake up, go outside, or even stay in and turn on one of the technological gizmos we surround ourselves with. Whatever it is we do, we find ourselves forced to deal with more change than anyone at any point in the past. And because of this, we’re left with less time to process the changes that surround us. “We’re pulled between yesterday and tomorrow,” James Burke says.

I prefer o think of it as stretched, the way the Inquisition used to do. But my world has already diverged wildly from James Burke’s…or, at least, the twenty years young version of James Burke that speaks to me from my television screen. He filmed Connections in 1979; The Day the Universe Changed in 1986. It’s a little hard to take the Soviet Union seriously anymore, given the fact that it no longer exists for me. It’s changed.

And that’s the point. In our world, the pace of change will continue to increase, while the time we (as individuals and a society) give ourselves to process that change continues to shrink. What exactly will that lead to? And why will it lead there and not, say, in the parallel universe a few inches to the right of there?

That’s what James Burke is all about. I immediately urge all and sundry to seek out his work and bring it into your lives. It will open your eyes to a totally new way of viewing history, technology, and the whole of human civilization.

I could quote from the man at length, but I’d rather just point you to the man’s website and let you poke around. I will quote only the line that I find most relevant, as it is a truth we should all remind ourselves of, constantly:

We are making the future.

--D

Restless

...today. For some reason. Don't know what it is.

Random Fact of the Day

The name "Andalusia," the autonomous community of southern Spain, comes from the original Arabic name given to the territory after its conquest in 720 A.D. Al-Andalus, they called it, "The land of the Vandals," refering to the Visigoths North African Arabs found living there, worshiping false idols, when they crossed the Straits of Gibralter in 711.

Thought you'd like to know.

--D

An Unwelcome Dose of Real

At times, I’m motivated to turn this into a political blog. Not for any grandiose sense of purpose, no. I’m far too myopically busy with my own concerns to become an internet ideologue. But I must confess something, and since no one reads this thing, I feel secure in the same amount of anonymity I’d get from a priest.

I don’t even bother with the major news outlets anymore (notice I’ve removed them from the link role to your right). I get my news from blogs. Creative sample leads to a pungent multi-media experience without the sore eyes and gibbering lunacy encoured from actually reading a primary source…say, the New York Times.

Why bother? I think to myself. I’ve been reading corporate hometown newspapers all my life and it never made me a wit more informed. There’s the occasional diamond in the rough, like when USA Today lets us know the government has our phone records—but how often does the blatant lie, the obvious sin of omission, sneak by under the radar of our journalistic “watch dogs.” Things like,

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."— President George W. Bush 17 March 2003

Or the ever popular,

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."—Vice President Dick Cheney, August 2002

I’m reminded of Maurice Chavez, a great man who once said, “If you don’t vote you get morons in charge. Is that moral? I don’t think so.” Not to press the issue, but it seems that, year after year, cycle after cycle, we’re presented with a never ending crop of morons, whether we vote or not.

Worse, my home state of Oregon is far from clean. It, too, is subject to the despicable evolutionary laws of American politics. The headline of a study by the Money In Politics Research Action Project, dated November 7th, 2004, says it all:

The “Money” Party Wins 91 Percent of Oregon Legislative Races News reports often focus on the top fundraisers in the most competitive races, which sometimes leaves voters and potential candidates thinking that candidates must raise large pots of money to win elective office. However, while the typical candidate still needed to raise substantial amounts of money to win—nearly $59,000 for a House race and more than $100,000 for a Senate race—the top fundraisers for 2004 House and Senate seats raised nearly six times more. Overall there was a decided lack of competition among candidates for House and Senate races. More than one in 10 legislative races were one by candidates who were unopposed in their general election bids. Another 56 percent of races had a fundraising spread that was so large that the money underdog was effectively drowned out by the top fundraiser in the race.

So, really, what’s the point if the person who raises the most money wins 91 percent of the time? I could hop skip and jump my way to Open Secrets Government and track their graphs all the way up to November 7th. So what’s the point?

(And here I was hoping it would be the 5th. That would be just too much to bear.)

The point is, if you don’t participate at all you get what you disserve. I get what I disserve. No where else on earth have so many people cared so little about politics. What if we all decided not to care about the state of our car’s break systems? Or airplane maintenance schedules? Or nineteen, seedy looking Arab gentlemen who are all fired up to learn how to fly planes, just not so concerned about proper landing protocols.

Oh, I’m sorry. We already chose not to worry about that in the summer of 2001. And look where it's gotten us.

I say "us" and “we” only because “we,” the people are nominally responsible for the structure of our government. It is us, even as it listens to us. We listen to ourselves. We’ve tapped our own phone calls and we are building an enormous telephone call database beneath our NSA. With our money. That we, all of us, earned and just sent off to the federal government not a month hence with our tax checks.

The man who thought up this grand scheme is a Clarence Bodiger-looking motherfucker name General Mike Hayden. He’s currently in line for a promotion: form NSA to CIA after Porter Goss (an unqualified partisan hack, by all accounts) quit the job of Director amid rumors that he spent his nights partying with Republican lawmakers at roving booze, poker and hooker parties run out of the Watergate by lobbyists.

This is our current state of affairs, and despite the temporary upswing of attention garnered by Stephen Colbert, I have no problem predicting that the jaded public will continue doing nothing, or very little, to get up off their fucking asses and educate themselves to the state of their own supposed "leaders." They’ll be surprised as hell when the jackboots come kicking.

Me, I plan to be waiting in my crawlspace with my finger on the Big Red Button. Why should the President be the only one who gets to play around with Big Red Buttons?

In that spirit I go to Open Secrets and begin doing some research. I suggest you do the same, whoever and where ever you are. There are six months remaining.

Required Reading—Wired News: Whistle-Blower’s Evidence, Uncut

Excesses of Destroy All Monsters

Not to be all Fight Club on you, but the first rule of writing is, "Read." A lot.

It’s a good rule, though its not one I necessarily had to learn. My parents instilled in me an early, longstanding love of the written word. They assured me that I would go to college someday, regardless of how I happened to feel on the matter. And I’m sure that by the time I reached age five they were more than a little tired of me calling them into my room whenever I needed someone to read subtitles.

As a writer, I gravitate toward the very things I read: speculative fiction, old and new. Highbrow or pulp classic, I don’t care. All reading is good reading because even the worst book in the world can teach you something. Like what not to do in your own writing, possibly the most important lesson of all.

But while my writing falls within wide bounds, my subject matter (at this point, at least) is limited. By necessity, to be sure, but by interest as well. Some things just push the button for me. Some push the button and proceed to lean against it. Those concepts are my oldest and dearest loves.

One of them, as anyone who reads my movie reviews can surely guess, is the giant monster movie.

I say “movie” there only because the more general term, “giant monster story,” would probably seem foreign to my general audience (both of you). Hell, the damn thing even looks strange to me, of all people. Many would see the phrase as a contradiction in terms.

With the cost of making movies rising every year, and the cost of buying them rising just as fast, it’s a wonder more writers haven’t taken up the torch. Our special effects budget is as infinite as Santa Claus’s net worth. Yet few rise to the challenge giant monsters represent, and those that do rarely achieve the kind of credit their hard work disserves.

At the very worst, they miss a wonderful opportunity to throw open the genre and expose it for the vaunt of universal truth that it could so easily become when guided by the hands of an expert.

Ken Hollings, author of Destroy All Monsters is quite the expert. His book's title alone should establish that he is a fan from way back with an abiding love for his subject matter. And quite the misguided soldier, as well. In the time I should be taking to read my homework I am instead re-reading his work, having finished it sometime in the summer of 2004. Back then, my mind was absorbed in work and that rabid clusterfuck of a joke so blithely labeled a Presidential Campaign. The constant barrage of current events reduced me to a drunken stupor come election night. I hated every moment of it and I didn’t give Mr. Hollings book the attention it disserved.

I remember not liking the book as I finished it. I reached the bottom of the last page and felt strangely…empty. You can do stuff in prose that the average Hollywood jerk-off can’t even comprehend. Why do you think they’re always screwing up and making crappy movies out of good books? The writer in today’s movie making scheme might as well be an indentured servant…unless he is also the executive producer. The power to cut checks is a mighty arrow in some quivers. I want pretty pictures I’ll call in a flock of visual artists. But, damnit, when I want a story I’ll call a storyteller in and put his ever-expanding ass to work.

Though even that is no assurance of quality. Holling’s Destroy All Monsters is quite the case in that point. While I appreciate anyone brave enough to take the monster genre on, to get “lit’rary” with it, if you will…I’m not going to let that stop me from offering constructive criticism. Because it seems to me that giant monster authors are suffering from a common malady. I don’t mean the bird flu (though that’s coming, don’t worry). It’s more of a tendency toward overkill. An exuberance. Grab every toy on the shelf and play with them, by God. All at once. Because God only knows when a writer will get the opportunity to have this much fun again.

Destroy All Monsters is exactly what the title implies, an old story. Body-snatching aliens (one of which has found a comfortable home inside the Vice-President of the United States) seek to conquer a wacky, parallel Earth. It’s the kind of mish-mashed past/future Earth we see in comic books, superhero cartoons and giant monster movies of the late 1960’s. Like Japan of yore, this Earth has confined its giant monster population to a single, fortified island in the South Pacific: Earthquake Island. No longer do giants wade through cities. The creatures are studied, observed and contained…until, as the back cover of Jurassic Park so succinctly put it, something goes wrong.

But even before that Something throws all the world into chaos, Hollings spends a great deal of time informing us that Things Aren’t Going Well. Operation Desert Storm, in this crazy piece of the multiverse, has dragged on for almost half a decade. The President of the United States spends all his time moping about Burger King, haunted by the memory of his dead grandchildren. Months ago, at the Smithsonian, he watched helpless as a giant praying mantis/robot tore them apart like loaves of bread. It’s the kind of image that sticks with you (certainly still with me). The Vice-President, and the alien within him, are growing quite annoyed with their nominal superior’s mourning. It’s only a matter of time before the alien takes matters into the Vice-President’s hands.

Meanwhile, within sight of Area 51, a compound armed cultists is a’waiting for the End Times. In Memphis, Elvis Presley is reborn as a bastard child of cybernetic science and Artificial Intelligence technology. On Earthquake Island, DARPA is conspiring to uncover the Next Big Thing in weaponry from within the world’s monsters. And a female android named Muri is murdering her way through Tokyo for reasons she later states bold-faced:

“The monsters tear cities apart…I tear people apart. None of us can help it.”

Which is all well and good…but unasked is a burning, crucial question, one no book has ever asked, and no movie has the heart to.

Why?

Why tear a city, or a person, apart at all? Anger? Revenge? Cold-blooded pleasure? All of the above? I’d be fine as paint of that were the case, but none of Hollings’ characters think to ask. He allows them to hide behind that, “None of us can help it,” thinking this statement will wrap everything up. He’s obviously not banking on obsessive philosophical junkies, like yours truly, dissecting his work for some form of Deeper Meaning. For me, that “None of us can help it,” is a missed opportunity to examine the heart and soul of the giant monster story. At best it’s a hollow answer, not to mention a total cop-out. But Hollings’ is out to explore anything. He’s got far too many toys to play with and a sandbox the size of the universe.

With at least seven monsters (including Muri), an alien invasion, and an ensemble (hell, near-Dickensian) cast of humans and demi-humans under his command there’s far too much going on inside Destroy All Monsters for any consideration of issues. No time to pause and ask questions amid the rapid, hallucinogenic perspective shifts. The book is a rollercoaster of stark, sparse prose that can convey entire scenes in a sentence. However, this cuts the other way whenever Hollings brings about a concept (or an entire secondary character) that absolutely requires some necessary exposition. The debt he owes to post-modernism allows him to play the plot fast and loose, while simultaneously freeing him from the need to explain or justify anything. Rare is the chapter that lasts more than two pages. Rare is the dialogue exchange uninterrupted by action of one sort or another. DAM is the kind of book that jumps scene just as things have started to get interesting. This allows the book move at Flash-pace but keeps character identification down to a minimum. Voices begin to bleed together, especially once the more colorful characters begin to die in the climactic mayhem. At 316 pages it’s a fast, empty read. The kind of book you can finish in a weekend and forget all about within a week.

Is this what we want? Is this the best literature our favored genre can inspire? Post-modern, deconstructivist bullshit filled with empty, smarmy characters tossing one-liners at one another across shattered cityscapes? Can we not do…better?

I think so. For one thing, some of us already have.

I refer to Marc Cerasini, a YA fiction author and Tom Clancy protégé of some repute and mid-list talent. Back in the late 90s Cerasini turned out four Godzilla novels for Random House, ostensibly to celebrate the release of the American Godzilla movie. I remember this period as the golden age of giant monster literature…shortest golden age in history, perhaps, but nevertheless, at least it was there.

Cerasini quickly fell pray to the same temptations that sink Hollings, but his first attempt Godzilla Returns (1998) is a stark, realist examination of a giant monster rampage in the post-Cold War, pre-nine-eleven world. Godzilla, the only monster present, explodes from the page as a raging force of nature we all know and love. Cerasini’s knowledge of military hardware, and his attendant command of techno-speak, adds some tasty real-world flavor to the action without becoming the story in-themselves.

However, Cerasini’s pulls the real hat trick with his treatment of the human insects scurrying about Godzilla’s feet. Every character in that slim bugger of a book (234 pages, soaking wet) is realized with a depth and focus Ken Hollings can’t match. Ken’s canvas is too crowded for the kind of detail Cerasini spends on his characters. Most of it is spent in awkward, expository prose, but this is YA fiction, after all. We can’t expect continuous miracles.

Both books are prototypical “Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo” stories. Both build reflections of the real world and reign holy monster hell upon them. One fascinates, the other confuses, then bores.

The difference is one of moderation. No, Destroy All Monsters cries, there’s no time for moderation. How could I, a pitiful reader, question the author’s right to turn his plot into stew? After all, its not as if we should expect to enjoy our reading experience. Where, Destroy All Monsters asks, did I ever get that crazy idea?

My parents. But whatever. That's neither here nor there.

Destroy All Monsters is, finally, not a book about characters, or conventions, or themes, or even ideas…save one, and it’s so bloody obvious it probably escaped Hollings over the course of his writing. The book’s Idea rings particularly true for me since I’ve been aware of it for as long as I can remember—about age six.

Simply put, any universe the features giant monsters is a universe where anything can happen. Where the rules do not apply. Rules of physics, gravity, society and science are thrown hell bent into all four winds by the mere presence of a Altasaurus (Godzilla) a Manda, the Reptile Wing (Rodan) or an Eiga, the Dream Monster (one of Hollings’ better, if more nebulous creations). Once the reader accepts their presence (and if s/he is to get past page one, s/he must) than the green light is on for all sorts of craziness.

Robot zombie Elvis? Telepathic dogs? Size-changing androids with a taste for leather and human flesh? All these and more, equally ludicrous concepts, can easily share the spotlight with three hundred foot tall, fire breathing lizards. Only one other field of speculative fiction—superhero stories—comes close to possessing this sheer degree of stretchiness. Such is the elasticity of giant monster stories, as a genre. And it is here we find Destroy All Monsters’ downfall, and its unrealized potential. For once you know for a fact that you can at last do anything the temptation to do just that is as strong as gravity. Just harder to overcome.

It’s a temptation I’ll have to war against myself. Because I know we, as speculative fiction writers, can do this genre better. I also know that I can do it better and that I have already begun to do so.

Not Smoking (Writers vs. Musicians)

It’s another manic Monday and I’m doing whatever I can to avoid smoking. Cigarettes. MySpace is, thankfully, down for the moment, preventing me from wasting any more time in its digital cul-de-sacs. All things begin equal, I prefer blogging, both in general and as a fad, to this current wave the Talking Heads have labeled “social networking websites.”

Harlan Ellison must love MySpace…if he even knows of its existence. The impersonal, unfeeling, machine-as-spectator-to-and-cause-of-human-suffering is one of his best reoccurring villains. Dr. Charles Forbin’s Colossus and Arthur C. Clark’s HAL have nothing on the monstrous, sociopathic world-computer of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Were Philip Dick alive today he would no-doubt stare into the vacuous abyss of the internet and scream with equal-parts revulsion, fascination, and bitter disappointment. The World Computer, long dreamt of in story and nightmare, has seized us all. It had no need to control our nuclear missiles or our orbiting death rays. It’s captured us with flashing lights and the ability to upload our vacation photos.

MySpace is crack for the internet. It is Pure Democracy with no cause and no idea of its inherent powers. Only the bands, who popularized MySpace to begin with, have glimpsed even a fraction of the site’s potential. Even they only utilize it as a free promotional tool…more power to them, I say. Getting people to pay attention to you’re art is one hell of a thing. Believe me, I know. I am, after all, a writer.

To make matters even better, I live with a musician. And while we’ve formed several bands over the years of our acquaintance, none of them have progressed beyond the “Hey, wanna play music for a couple of hours while we drink?” stage.

I could blame this on my laziness or my roommate’s new girlfriend…either way I’d be making an excuse. I’m not that lazy, all things considered (three hundred-something movie reviews in four years ain’t no chump change), and the new girlfriend is a firecracker of athletic, honey-blonde hot. I cannot fault my roommate for selecting her, or disappearing into her apartment for days on end. Hell, were our positions reversed I’d do the same damn thing and not spare my roommate a second thought.

(In fact I did just that in the summer/fall of 2002. Now, when I go three, four or even five days without seeing my best friend I think back to that summer/fall and shrug. Serves me right, I think. Bros before hoes…not to cast disparagement.)

The more I think about it, the more I believe that musicians have it easy. Theirs is a performance medium with its own social expectations. Taste may vary with audience but, roughly speaking, the closer a musician comes to rocking his/her audience’s proverbial fucking socks off, the supposedly “better” they are. Personal (if not financial) success is measured in the amount of applause you receive from your (hopefully not too drunken) audience members. And, to top it all off, you get the instant gratification of knowing, right there, right then, that someone else has gotten a buzz off of your personal artistic habit.

We writers cannot perform in public…apart from the occasional maverick among us. Again I think of Harlan Ellison, who takes request from the audiences at his book signings, banging out the resulting short story on a manual typewriter with his index fingers. And even then how fascinating is the writer at work anyway? You can do a lot of things with prose, but I have always held (and will continue to hold) that you cannot make it fun to watch. If you could, the Japanese would’ve already ran with the idea straight into Game Show land. Its title would literally translate into Super Writer Challenge of the Gods…or something like that. Makes about as much sense as that damn game, Katamari.

To write is to make a conscious choice. I will spend a substantial chunk of my waking hours in forced immobility. I will consciously force my ass to press an outline of itself in this chair. I will ignore the pleas of friends and relatives and shun the attentions of hot girls. I will ignore the raucous floating through my window from the bar across the street. And I most definitely will not rise out of this chair to cross the street to join it. No matter how tempting a pint might sound.

Two days ago I submitted a short story to The New Yorker. This was, for all intents and purposes, my first submission. (The two or three from high school don’t really count…back then I thought “SASE” was some uppity New York way of saying “sassy.”) I suppose I could’ve taken a week (or, knowing my work habits, three) to pound out some pointless, neo-Hemingway-ish tale wherein a protagonist without a past goes to a war, beds a nurse, and gets drunk while wistfully remembering her…but I didn’t.

Instead I submitted a story about a politically disenchanted youth from the Midwest who, in a fit of passion, convinces his drug dealer to run for Congress. Do I need to tell my non-existent readership that it is a work of pure, undiluted fiction? And that any resemblance to any person, place, or Congressional district, living or dead, is purely coincidental?

I didn’t think so.

In any case, I don’t expect much to come of it. At most I figure I’ll make some bored assistant editor in some drab, windowless New York office chuckle. For a second. Maybe. Hopefully. In all seriousness, I did it just to get That First One out of the way. It was threatening me, building up inside my mind like the freakish quantum singularities you always see on Star Trek. Better to just get it over with, I figured, and move on to the next one.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction to read over…in lieu of doing my homework. Hell with mid-terms. That’s why god gave us caffeine and exotic, Canadian pep pills.