Stock Taking

Novel in progress, two years after initial conception: 33,854 words, less than one-third completed

Short story number one, nine months after initial conception: 11,553 words, over four-fifths completed.

Short story number two, two weeks after initial conception: 1,472 words, the red-headed stepchild of the bunch. Impossible to fractionally calculate how far this one is from completion.

Movie review, two days after initial conception: 2,267 words, not even close to completion.

Leave the house to gather provisions: chocolate milk and sweetened tea. Watch a crow dive down into the wet, shinny streets, chasing a walnut that’s fallen from his/her grasp into the middle of an intersection. The crow spears his/her prize on his/her beak and lifts off, alighting on top of a streetlamp from which the nut will surely fall again.

I wish him/her, “Good luck, yo. That looks like a tough nut to crack.”

The crow stares down at me with its oil colored eyes and does not acknowledge my pun.

Return home, type out the above, and get back to the Work.


Tag: Personal: Writing:

Something Appropriately Baroque on this Cold and Raining Tuesday

Tuesday again, and I’ve settled into my new job at my new cube farm. The end of training has bequeathed me a measure of autonomy that should last, at the very least, until my first cataclysmic fuck up. Which, with God’s help, will be far off, as this job is heinously easy. In the meantime, I read.

Though my college, Col. Giddens, has graciously loaned me Pullman’s His Dark Materials I am a horrible friend when it comes to reading recommendations. I hope this will keep me from coating the dust jackets of other people’s books with my asinine endorsement blurbs. Then this tendency to fly off and read any old goddamn thing I chose will most likely be used in the service of Justice. In the meantime all it’s good for is adding height to my Must Read pile.

The Pile shows no signs of shrinking, as I’m currently re-reading A.A. Attanasio’s Arthurian saga, staring from the beginning with 1996’s The Dragon and the Unicorn.

Previous to this I tried (honestly I tried) to wade through Malory’s Le Morte d’ Arthur, having no wish to even contemplate Tennyson’s Idylls of the King…but 1468 is a long way from 2006, and the English language has (to borrow Stephen King’s phrase) moved on . I don’t care how much of a philistine admitting this will make me: man can only take so many Chaucerisms at once. And with all the closeness of Sir Malory’s to our own, you’d think we’d be able to “modernize” his text in a way that preserves some modicum of style, in the manner of, say, some of the better Bibles I’ve read around the local college reading rooms. They may not have the authority of the good old King James my grandmother gave me, but they can beat it like the family mule for a good turn of phrase.

There’s plenty of style, and turns of phrase, crammed into Attanasio’s two thousand-plus page re-telling of the Once and Future King’s life…and considering he isn’t even born until four hundred pages into it one is tempted to criticize Attanasio for both stylish and substantive glut…if, that is, one is a heathen devil with no sense of beauty in his or her soul. I’d not have a word of these books cut. Better to see them released as a single, massive tomb, the way Lord of the Rings was intended to be. Sometimes I think all great epics should be monstrous giants…until I stop to consider the power this would give already too-indulgent writers the world over. Then I shutter.

Afterward, I read, not from any great love of epic fantasy or chivalrous romance. Attanasio, bless his Hawaiian heart, chose to go down neither of those well-traveled paths. Instead he hacked a third one through uncharted, genre bending lands, and I doubt it worked as well as either he, or his publisher hoped…though in all honesty I could care less. I have the books, and tell God thank ya for ‘em. They’ve done exactly what I need them to do for me.

I picked them out of a Hastings Bookstore shelf at the age of thirteen. I got them then, but feared that, a decade later, they would fall short of my memory. That’s yet to happen. If anything, I feel as woefully inadequate now as I did thin, faced with Attanasio’s prose stylings. The man writes beautifully, as if he’s swallowed a page of the Thesaurus every morning with his coffee and cornflakes. My mother and I both agree it has to be because he lives in Hawaii, where all is green and good, save the twin poles of sea and the mountain, and the artificial ones laid out by man.

Not only does Attanasio re-animate the overly-archetyped, near-entirely abstracted characters of this myth (Arthur; his father, Uther; his mother, Ygrane, Queen of the Celts, whom nobody ever remembers…and Merlin, ‘natch) he creates a universe of supporting cast members by adding equal doses of historical reality, electromagnetic physics, and new age metaphysics…which is really no more than old myth in new clothes, anyway.

Even the metaphysical is given a physical basis. Gods, demons, the titular unicorn, all are beings of sentient plasma, held together not by magic so much as will alone…and electromagnetic physics. They live above us puny mortals, eternal, everlasting, inside the magnetosphere thrown off by our planet’s poles. To them it appears as a multi-tiered Heaven. We on earth call it the World Tree, and it is as real as the force that pulls our feet down to the floor every morning, and brings our hand down on the Snooze button. It is spread across the Earth, just like Jesus said, and men do not see it.

But more than this melding of physical and spiritual, which struck me as both obvious and stupendously liberating at the age of thirteen (one of those ideas that’s so good you kick yourself for not independently arriving at it), it is the idea that opens the book, lifted whole from Asian mythology and dressed in modern, pseudo-scientific skin, which still rivets me:

There is only one Dragon. It lives inside the earth and is as large as the entire planet. Its mind thrives within the magnetic field thrown off by the core. Its blood circulates with the slow convections of magma beneath the rocky crust that serves as its perdurable hide. Slowly molting with the slidings of tectonic plates, the Dragon renews itself over eons: mountain ranges fin from its back like thorny scales replenished every hundred million years as maritime trenches subsume its old flesh.

My thanks to the author.


Tag: Personal: Reading: The Dragon and the Unicorn:

Snapshot of the Past

Over the weekend I relapsed and smoked a cigarette, putting me right back into the noxious, gray wastes of the addictive cycle, where anything and everything under the sun makes me long for a smoke. Just one. Good God, at times I’m sure I would birth children just to sacrifice them for a fucking cigarette. Just one.

It’s been five years since I told myself I could have just one. Since I assured my friend-who-happened-to-be-a-girl that, hell yes, I could have just one. That, unlike my parents, my uncles, my grandparents and friends, unlike all those other unlucky bastards throughout history, I had self-control, thank you very much. I could quit, I assured her, whenever I wanted to.

At the time she smiled her best, predator’s smile. “I’m gonna get you addicted,” she promised. It was one of the few promises she kept during the long, slow course of our co-dependent “friendship.”

Tag: personal: authorial bitching: reminiscence:

Untitled

You paid attention during 86% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
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This is a horrible overestimation.

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Sunday Un-funnies

I’m trying something new on this gray, rainy Sunday. Something I hope will lead to further writing and a greater increase in my general output…however I chose to measure it. “Output,” is such a bastardly nebulous term anyway. So nebulous I can hardly use it without falling into a philosophical cluster fuck of inane, unanswerable questions about what, in fact, constitutes “output.”

Should I measure the number of stories completed? Or the number of words on a page within each? The number of words in total for all the various projects I’ve completed, present or past? Or the number of words in each of the three stories-in-progress I currently have kicking against the placental walls of my brain?

And then there’s my damn novel, also in progress, which my colleague Col. Giddens so aptly labeled “your baby”. As a dog mother (who spent the majority of her teenage years raising her little brother, for all practical purposes) she knows a fretting parent when she sees one. And, oh, how I fret over my baby. Over all of them, really, for they are all my children…even the ones that arrive stillborn, malformed and hideous to behold. The ones I kiss before gladly dashing their heads against the nearest unyielding surface. Believe me when I say its better that way for all concerned. Especially the stories themselves.

Occasionally I get the hot idea to use this blog as a journal of my writing, a record of progress that I could look back upon with awe in those dark times when the melancholy rises like a five armed octopus and wraps its tendrils around the support beams of my frayed self-confidence. Unfortunately, by the time I wrap things up for the (day/night/hour/minute/whatever) I rarely if ever have the patience or energy to spend any more time writing…certainly not writing about my writing.

At various times in various magazine interviews, Hunter S. Thompson decried the whole business and practice of writing. “Nothing’s fun when you have to do it every day,” he said. It was a specific reference to journalism, particularly the type he practiced during his drug-fueled hay days of the late-60s/early-70s. And in this, as in so much else, Dr. Thompson had a point. There are times when this—this hum-drum magic making, this everyday necromancy, this thing that is the Art and craft of writing—is the last thing on earth I want to do.

There are times I’d rather walk down to the Southern Pacific rail lines and just lay in wait on the tracks. A train is bound to go by, sooner or later.

Now is not one of those times. Now the pensive weight of a week spent in idle fantasy (and a day [yesterday] spent in hedonistic splendor) is moving my hands with unearthly speed. The Col.’s Ritalin is certainly helping and if I hadn’t already, I’d thank her.

But now I must get back Into It, and say good afternoon to this damned, dusty blog.

Tag: Writing: personal: authorial bitching:

Linkage

Why are you even here? Go read something else. Something good.

The American Prospect: Battlestar Galacticons by Brad Reed, discusses the rise and fall of Battlestar Galactica in the eyes of many a Right Wing pundit.

Rolling Stone: The Worst Congress Ever by Matt Taibbi speaks for itself.


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Philosophizing, Issue One: Schopenhauer

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Critical Spear

From the bowls of UCLA comes a wonderful socio-philosophical reading of Brittany Spears, as seen through the Critical Theory of Theodore Adorno, among others. I’ve been getting heavily into western philosophy these past few months, so expect notes to follow. Pray it’ll all matriculate through the soapy mesh of my brain to birth some new and glorious idea (or Ideal) for these malignant modern times.

But for now, read you fools. Read and think.

Tag: Personal: philosophy: Critical Theory: T. A. Adorno:

Blinking in the Face of Poverty

Whenever I write and I find things go…less than admirably….I find myself walking. Most often I walk the twelve blocks to 39th Avenue, thinking, and muttering to myself. I work through snatches of dialog, plan out sequences of events, and once I’m at 39th it’s a simple matter to turn north, walk two more blocks, and pick up some groceries from the Safeway.

Three days ago I took the trip, picking up a rasher of bacon and some tortillas. I paid with plastic and caught the bus back home, being too lazy to walk, my head too full of ideas. I was thinking about giant monsters, scientists and the way the afternoon light fell flat as a flapjack on my neighborhood’s sidewalks.

I found a homeless man sitting outside my house. Right outside, on the treated wood planter the keeps the English ivy from swallowing the sidewalks and rampaging, in a very prim, proper, English way, down the road.

He word red and black plaid—a long sleeve shirt I’m sure feels much colder in the dead of night when one is sleeping on the ground—and faded pants, once black, now as gray as the hair sprouting from his head and beard. “Excuse me, man,” he asked. “You have a quarter?”

I’m not afraid to say I lied. Of course I lied. I lied to him as surely as I lie to his kith and kin downtown who regularly troll through the human sea of commuters, asking similar questions. At times I think the only upside to my not smoking (other than the decreased risk of catching every form of cancer not caused by the sun) is the ability to tell those homeless that, honestly, no, I don’t have an “extra” cigarette. Even when I, theoretically, did I bought them all for myself and was never in a mood to share. I don’t believe in assisted suicide when doing so is inconvenient.

It’s a simple thing, lying to the homeless. Practice awhile and it’s as easy as slipping on shoes. So easy it becomes an autonomic response, as it has for members of my class from time out of mind.

“No,” I said, adding, “I’m sorry,” though I was not. I was thinking, Shit, man, I’m not doing so well, myself.

Except that was a self-severing lie, and I can’t lie to myself. I caught myself before I even made it the twenty-plus steps to my doorway. As I put my food into the ‘fridge I peeled off the layers of my lie until it stood naked in my mind and shivered.

After all, I thought, you’re miles from that man out there. That man who’s out there, not fifty feet away, wearing all the clothing he owns. Who sleeps on wet grass when he can find it and hard concrete when he can’t. Who’s come to here, to this neighborhood, in search of peace, out of some vain and fleeting hope he’ll be unnoticed by the policemen. As if the police in my ‘hood were some mystical, benign sub-species that doesn’t get drunk on its own power, that doesn’t rouse you out of concrete sleep to present you with the immortal choice of, “Move it, or loose it.”

I looked at my ‘fridge. Dirty, sure. A little light on the protein, but stocked, running. Humming blithely along, putting paid to my lie and shaming me into action.

I peaked into my wallet, thinking, Is this how Bruce Wayne feels? Five, six, seven, eight dollars total. No, I thought, Bruce Wayne is moved by grief and honest-to-God compassion. If there’s any guilt moving his hands it’s the gnawing, niggling guilt of plane crash and earthquake survivors. Not at all what I felt as I stood in my kitchen and counted my money again.

—Eight dollars, my mind said. —Great. Why not just escort Mr. Red-and-Black to the nearest ATM, pass him your card and say, “Have at it”? It’ll do more good. Or just as much, considering the old bird’s probably drunk. Or insane. You see that brown paper bag next to his feet?

I had. But at that moment I didn’t care. I put my money in my pocket and stepped back outside. These are the moments, I thought. When the wolf is at your door that you have to stand and see what you’re really made of. And you have to be honest with yourself. Talk is cheep if you’re not prepared to walk the walk of the honest, the just and the damned.

—Which one are you? My head asked. I didn’t know, and that vaguely frightened me as I walked down the parking lot and turned left.

Mr. Red-and-Black was gone. Phlegm and the brown paper bag were all that marked his passage.

—Too late, too late, my head told me. At times I think of this as my Joker voice. We’re connected, that voice and I, like comedy and tragedy. It derives comedic pleasure from my occasional tragedies.

I turned right and there he was, shuffling up the block, past the Japanese restaurant and its neighboring bar. Past the once-thriving Korean market that’s now a hollow, boarded up shell, to the grass and sidewalks of the next block. There he half-sank, half-fell to the grass in an apparent dead faint.

—Or stupor? I nodded. Or stupor. Big deal. Because you can mouth pretensions of charity until the vaults of heaven fall down. As the dead rock star once asked, who needs action when you’ve got words?

I do. And so I shook the homeless man’s shoulder. “Man. Hey, man.”

It took three shakes before his gray, watery eyes fluttered open. “This is all I had on hand,” I told him, slipping the money into a dirty, yellow-nailed hand. “But you better move on, yo. Some of my neighbors aren’t as…gracious as the rest of us.”

Mr. Red-and-Black blinked twice and his eyes were the color of cataracts. “Sorry,” he half-muttered, speaking through nubs of teeth and a tongue as red as the checker board on his shirt.

I shook this off and turned away. No, no sorry necessary. Hell, I’m sorry I keep blinking whenever I come face of face with poverty. Real, honest to god poverty of the kind you can rarely find in the woody creeks that birthed me. I’m sorry I cannot do more. Or will not do more, as the case may or may not be. I’m sorry I couldn’t express any of this to Mr. Red-and-Black at the time. I’m sorry for the fact that he probably wouldn’t have understood me, anyway.

I went back into my house, my clean, pristine, paid for apartment with its dirty but-stocked ’fridge. I mixed myself a drink, sat down and fired up this humming box of a machine, all the while wondering if I’d done something noble…and if I had then what was this ambivalence in my guts? More middle class guilt? Or some other, more malignant species?

I began to wonder as I began to write. I’m still wondering now, as dawn breaks over My Fair City and the homeless shuffle toward downtown with its kitchens and its haunts.

Tag it and bag it: Personal: the homeless: poverty: class warfare:

My Brain Has a Vagina

In lue of actual content, I present this not-quite-all-that-surprising quiz result.

Your Brain is 73% Female, 27% Male

Your brain leans female You think with your heart, not your head Sweet and considerate, you are a giver But you're tough enough not to let anyone take advantage of you! (Test taker's note: Ha!. Well, that's a goddamn lie, right there. Shows what you know, random blogthings brain gender quiz.)

What Gender Is Your Brain?

Via Poppy Z. Brite’s most-excellent blog, Dispatches from Tanganyika. Buy her shit on eBay for she is a native of New Orleans and a writer in search of a house amid the wreck of her Fair City.

Tag it and bag it: Personal: Writers: Poppy Z. Brite: quiz results:

Four A.M. Voices and the Week to Myself

My college, Col. Giddens, has suggested that is the duty, nay, responsibility, of all writers to “communicate the in-communicatable,” a calling as daunting as it is practically impossible. Is that, I wonder, the purpose of these notes from the dulling edge of the American Empire? To communicate some incommunicable Truth about It All? Oh, the horror…the horror if this is so for I feel it is a project as far beyond me as the stars of Andromeda; as intangible as the halo the forms around the moon when the night is filled with clouds and your head with LSD; as devoid of meaning as the bleating of Our Glorious Leader, George Dubya Bush.

So much for all that, yar. And so much for my writings here. Dispatches from Within the Empire have been short and sweet in coming due to that oldest of all devils, Circumstance. I am currently embroiled in a transitional phase of my life and times, both as a writer and a man…or perhaps I mischaracterize the situation, investing it with far more Drama than it is due.

In any case, Things have occurred since last we spoke. I have swapped one cube farm for another, changing my job with what, to the casual, must seem a callus disregard for my employment record. As if my resume were some unbroken chain of blameless upright-itude, rather than the erratic patchwork of piecemeal employment that it is today. By the time I am a famous author of notorious public excess I expect my resume to look much worse. I am banking, after my own fashion, to hold more jobs than Mark Twain by the time I am done (while at the same time making much more intelligent investments). I’ve already beaten out another famous Missouri native on this score: that great sage and Beat groupie/godfather, William S. Burroughs, one of the few junkies lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon already at his disposal.

So, yes, I quit my job, and burned the bridge behind myself. I have told everyone I did it out of malignant hatred of the work, but that is not the truth. I’ve told everyone I quit because of foresight and convenience. After all, that cube farm was a 90 minute train ride away, both ways. That’s twelve hours a week lost to commuting alone, another unpaid workday in itself. One hundred and thirty-two hours in all, lost, never to be regained. A lot of time that could’ve been spent writing. And besides, my Fair, adopted City is scheduled to begin a grand maul re-design of its downtown transit hub this coming January. Ground break falls on the 9th of that month and god help all the poor bastard bus drivers who’ll be force to re-route or catch a grill full of civic construction worker. Better to net myself a job on this side of the blasted river, leaving downtown to its own chaotic madness. This I have done, so that is that.

But that is still not the truth of why I quite my job. I could (and will) easily adapt to the gutting of downtown. I can (and will) willing unwrap myself from the sweet embrace of my beloved Partner every morning for no other purpose than to do something I do not care a wick for.

No, I quite my job because on Monday, the 24th of September, I woke from a terrible dream I cannot remember in a cold and clammy sweat at four a.m. I coughed and felt the stirrings of the sickness that (by week’s end) would blossom into a respiratory infection. My tonsils were swollen and tinder. By morning they would be the size and consistency of children’s marbles.

But in the night they were only tender, and they were not what motivated me to call in sick. A still, calm voice in my head did that. It was the voice that woke me at four a.m. The voice that moved my hand hours later when I punched the alarm clock and reached for the phone.

Call in sick, it told me. It did not need to speak again.

The next morning I found the ad for my new job amid the refuse of posting in the customer service section of cragislist. I visited the place, filled out my application and passed my typing test with seventy words per minute, two errors.

By week’s end I was snorting and sniffling my way through my interview, head full of snot and cough medicine. By the beginning of next week my lymph nodes felt like twin golf balls straining to meet each other in the center of my throat...and, somehow, I managed to make myself heard over the phone. Yes, I would love a job with your esteemed company. Yes, I would have to give my current employer notice. Yes, I would love to start on the 17th. Seven a.m.? Perfect.

I gave my current employer exactly one day of notice, more than enough to show up, turn in my badge and collect my last paycheck. Thus have I lied my way into a solid week of no external responsibilities. I’ve kicked cigarettes and am well supplied with booze. There is nothing but sheer laziness standing between me and a full week’s worth of honest-to-god-writing.

Not blog writing, obviously, for blog posts are the vain, self-publishing writer’s crack rock. They are the thing I write when I am too lazy to write the movie reviews that stock my website or (and this is key, here) the fiction that will one day pay my bills.

Those are the projects that have consumed me these past weeks and I’ve charged away at them with a rough single-mindedness that would seem insane to those who do not see the creation of prose expressions as an end unto themselves. Hell, I don’t even do that half the time, but when I do I am more than willing to gather strange looks and sharp comments from those I know and love.

I can only imagine what they’d say if I told them, Yes, I quit my job because the voice in my head told me to. After all, we all have voices. But it’s not everyday they wake you up to tell you what to do.

Unless your name happens to be Burkowitz.

Tag it and bag it: Personal: Writing: Fiction: Short Stories: Authorial Bitching: The Job:

National Fuck Your Job Day: 2006

Thursday: Spend hour and a half writing article I will never publish. Last half of first draft interrupted by night time call from my girlfriend. “Do you want to do something crazy?” she asks.

Nothing too crazy. Only a late supper. Or an early breakfast, depending on one’s perspective and considering what we’re having. A date, and a good one at that. We meet at My Fair City’s one-and-only known all-night waffle house. I order a Strawberry Belgian, side of bacon, and a chocolate milk shake. For her, a veggie omelet with hash browns. Milkshake: strawberry. And all is right with the world.

Lat night bus schedule dictates we must eat our break quite fast, or else face the long walk home with full, rolling stomachs. We wrap our left-overs in tin foil and huff it, both sated and drowsy with digestion.

We get home and I smoke my last cigarette. I fall asleep in my lover’s arms and wait.

Friday: Pay day. I open the article I’d left in situ the night before. I find it’s suffered and died during the interim. I’ve lost its thread somewhere, somewhen.

Fuck it, I think, leaving to pick up my pay check.

It’s a ninety minute commute to my place of work. My cube farm in the Silicon Forest. I get there and receive the third degree from my manager. “Were you scheduled today?” he asks.

The scheduling program is open right before his face. I can see myself there, and the blank space that is Friday. For two months I’ve worked four, ten hour days for the explicit purpose of keeping Friday to myself. I’ve not worked a Friday since July. Since my birthday, in fact.

“Well, you were scheduled today, and you’re already late.”

Bullshit. The word rushes up through the breakers of my mind, whole, rabid, wanting nothing more than to build a home in my boss’s ear.

Instead I say something far less articulate. “Nuh-uh,” or somesuch like. “My schedule, it just says, ‘Off’. I’m always off on Friday. I’ve already worked my forty hours.”

Bullshit, indeed, but to say so would not be polite, now would it? And it would certainly not fall into my plan of keeping the mask in place. We all wear our masks in public, do we not? I certainly find I must…to function if nothing else.

“No, look, it says ‘Nine-to-ten-thirty, off.’ Then ‘ten-thirty to noon, off’. So you were scheduled from nine to noon and you’re already late.’”

The hell I am, fool, I think to him. Unless your dumb ass is about to pay me over time, ‘Off’ still means ‘off’ in my part of the English language. “Off,” as in, “I go home, you stay here.” “Off,” as in, “this time is my time.” “Off,” as in, “You will cease to pay me for this amount of time, and I will cease to think a single, blessed thing about you, you managerial monster.”

So for ten minutes my boss and I dance a dance of ignorance. Apparently, a good number of my coworkers misread their own schedules and failed to show up on this fine Friday. I am not one of those workers. Ten minutes, a quick walk to my desk, and a comparison of schedules later and my boss, he says, “Don’t worry about it.”

I smile. Oh, don’t worry, I think to him, but do not say. I won’t.

I don’t say it because his eyes are wild and spinning in their caves. His mind is haggard and thrown to the four winds. He must do the work of twelve now, to make up for the missed work of five. He has no pension, no savings, and no plan beyond the coming weekend which, for him, will be exactly one day long. He is a poor, small, frightened man and I do pity him.

But I’m not about to worry for him. Not one damn bit. His accusation, mistaken though it may be, stung a deep and very Protestant part of my brain. The part that honors its obligations and tells me, Work. And save. The part that drags me from my girlfriend’s side every morning and brings me to that awful place and now realizes it doesn’t matter. That I am, once again, guilty until proven innocent. After all, the call center employee is a useless jack-about, unsuited for even the simplest unsupervised task. They must be watched and called to task at the slightest provocation because the entry-level call center employee is little more than a half-bright animal really. Child-like and sad. Their sloth and laziness really can’t be helped, you see, though it is the (white) Manager’s Burden to eternally try. Through goading, through promising, through careful persuasion. And, if all else fails, through bald-faced accusation.

So I won’t worry about my boss, or “it.” No. Instead I’ll worry about the fact that I call in, by God, when I’m gonna cut work. And how much of a fool does that really make me?

As I leave, another six-hundred forty-four ill-gotten dollars in hand, I think of the long, odd causal chain of association that must flourish inside my bosses head. After all, he assumed (1) that I was scheduled to work, despite the evidence before his face (2) that I then skipped work for God-only-knows what reason, before ignorantly (3) stopping by, and walking right to the man’s desk. What kind of fool cuts work, only to show up with his hand out a few hours later?

The kind of fool foolish enough to voluntarily work my job.

To that end I realized I do not hate my job, but I will soon. It won’t take long and when it comes it will come a’ sneaking under the invisible seams along the side of my face. My mask will slip as surely as Vic Sage’s did when he took up smoking. (Filthy habit, kids. Don’t ever pick it up.) I can feel this happening already, during the long, slow progressions of my ten hour days. It’s the trapped-animal feeling that always comes to me whenever I’m forced to do something I do not wish to do. Do not believe in. Do not care for, with, or about. When I’m doing any job, in other words, that is not this, my real Work, the writing.

What else?

Saturday: I write. I drink. I do not smoke.

Sunday: I do the same, with reading thrown in for good measure. Because those without time to read do not have time to write and that’s a fact, as the video game says.

In between I nurse my girlfriend, who’s come down with what, at first, she thought were allergies. Now her eyes water and her nose runs and its day two of these “allergies.” She and I both know there something else. “Don’t get to close,” she warns me. This I ignore, as I ignore so much good advice.

Monday: I wake at 4:16 a.m. The voice in my head tells me, Call in sick. It is the calm, still voice inside my mind and this is the first time its woken me up in the middle of the night. In the past, I’ve dismissed it as a hallucinogenic fantasy, a paranoid delusion, or something worse. But at four in the morning its words carry more weight…a weight I feel creeping slowly through spaces in my head that are usually empty.

Not their clogged. I can barely breath. Swallowing is a godly effort. My head feels twice as large as I know it should and I think, Maybe the Magic Voice is on to something here. Yep, sure seems that way.

Restless sleep takes me back into itself. In my dream I call in sick and am summarily fired. I call in sick and my manager screams down the line, the Wicked Witch of the South West. “How ‘bout a little fire, Scarecrow?” he asks in his new high keening Wicked voice.

My alarm rings. Its seven a.m. A ninety minute commute stares down into my gullet but I am just asleep enough to remember Friday. And the voice. Separately, the two would be forgotten and dismissed and I would be waiting for a train home now, miles away from my computer. But taken together, the Magic Voice and bitter experience have led me to declare this National Fuck Your Job day.

So I did. I dialed the Sick Line number, handily provided on the back of every employee badge. I negotiated the Byzantine automated phone system that answered my call, story primed and at the ready for the inevitable questions. “Why are you calling in sick, D?” Well, it’s like this: the little voice in my head woke me up at four a.m. to tell me to. Because it hates your guts, and all you stand for. Suck on that, you mistrusting bastard.

“Thank you for calling ——‘s Automated Help Line. No manager is available to take your call. To leave a message, press—”

I press one, speak my piece, and crawl back into bed with my beloved, head pounding, voice cracked and spent.

Hours later I wake to the sun in my eyes and think, I can’t waste this day. Oh, no. The old Protestant part of my brain would never allow that.

So I scan the classifieds, plan out bus routes and chorus lines, and format a short story I plan to send to Asimov’s. Within hours I’ve located another call center, less than thirty minutes from my home. They’re hiring, and on my way from the post office.

I consider myself lucky, despite the way daylight stings my watering, salt encrusted eyes. Despite the way bus fumes and screaming children make my head throb. The receptionist doesn’t seem to mind. She hands me the sheet, times me on the typing test, and within thirty minutes I’m back out the door, spent, but happy.

Fuck work. I’ve lived today. And someday, God’s willing (har har) I’ll make the difference very clear to a certain boss of mine.

Then we’ll see who worries.

Scratching the Congressonal Record

Reading the daily brown flow of rhetorical muck that rushes from our nation’s capital swamp in the oh-so-blithely named Congressional Record can be both a Herculean challenge and a monumental waste of time…often both, simultaneously.

And yet, given patience, good people, and the correct motivation, even the stuffed-shirted sycophants who supposedly “lead” this country can turn a choice phrase or three, and even put together a nice routine.

Within the Empire presents one such, from today, in this exchange between Senators Harry Reed (D-NV) and Dick Durban (D-IL):

Mr. Durbin: Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. Reid: I will be happy to yield for a question.

Mr. Durbin: Can the Senator refresh my memory? Was Mr. Bremmer the recipient of a gold medal or something from the President? Didn't he receive some high decoration or medal for his performance in Iraq?

Mr. Reid: The answer is, yes, he received that. I assume one would expect that from somebody who had a throne while he was over there.

Mr. Durbin: Isn't it also true that George Tenet, who was responsible for the intelligence that was so bad that led us into the war in Iraq, got a medal from the President the same day?

Mr. Reid: That is true.

Mr. Durbin: Did Michael Brown with FEMA receive a gold medal from the White House before he was dismissed?

Mr. Reid: I don't think he did. Even though he was doing a heck of a job, I don't think he obtained a medal from the White House.

Mr. Durbin: Apparently, these gold medals were being awarded for incompetence. They missed Mr. Brown, but they did give one to Mr. Bremmer. Will the Senator yield for another question?

Mr. Reid: I will be happy to.

Mr. Durbin: I am trying to recall the exact number -- it was in the billions of dollars -- that we gave to the President for the reconstruction of Iraq; is that not true?

Mr. Reid: It started out at $18 billion. But as the Senator from Illinois will remember, part of that money, stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, was used by some of the contractors who were sent over there to play football games -- some of these same people.

Mr. Durbin: It is also true, is it not, that the Democratic policy conference has been holding hearings -- in fact, I think it is the only agency on the Hill holding hearings -- on this waste and abuse, this profiteering and corruption at the expense of American taxpayers and even, equally important -- more importantly -- at the expense of our troops?

Mr. Reid: I say to my friend, this war is approaching 3 1/2 years, and there has not been a single congressional oversight hearing on the conduct of the war. This war has now cost us, the American taxpayers, about $325 billion. There has not been a single congressional oversight hearing on the war.

Mr. Durbin: I ask the Senator from Nevada if he might comment on this as well: Are we not in a situation where the President has told us that he wants to "stay the course'' in Iraq, and Vice President Cheney, when asked a week ago, said he wouldn't change a thing in the way they have done this war in Iraq? Is it very clear that unless there is a change in leadership in this town soon, we are going to continue down this disastrous course, exposing our soldiers to danger every single day, their families to the anxiety of separation, and the taxpayers of this country to billions and billions of dollars more being spent that don't make us any safer?

Mr. Reid: I say to my friend, I spent the weekend reading a book. I did other things. I spent a lot of time on an airplane. The book is called "Fiasco,'' written by a man named Thomas Ricks who has spent his life covering the military. He has written books on the military. I don't know his political persuasion. This book is on the best seller's list of the New York Times.

In this book, he talks in such detail about what has happened as a result of the incompetence of this administration to our valiant fighting men and women over there. I recommend the book to anyone. It is a searing indictment of this administration.

Via Daily Kos, BobGeiger and the Congressional Record.

Dog Vomit

Dog parents will tell you, when a dog pukes on your lap it’s really a sign of affection. “She felt bad so she went to you. She was, like, ‘Dave, help me, I don’t feel good.’”

You will believe this.

You will go home and review a superhero cartoon movie, Ultimate Avengers. Because what the hell else is there to do around here? It’s not like you’re trying to combat the rising tide of entropy or anything.

No. Nothing like that at all.

The Tragedy of 9/11 is Spread Upont the Earth and Men Do Not See It

I hope this day will become more than a glass scattering of memory. I hope this day will become more than a day of morning. I hope the nervous, pregnant energy that haunts this day will dissipate in time and it will pass, not just like any other, but better than most. It’ll never be Christmas. Or Easter. Or Chanukah. You only get one Independence Day per revolutionè but c’mon, America. You’d think 9/11 could at least top Father’s Day.

Frank Miller said something today

For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years.
Patriotism, I now believe, isn't some sentimental, old conceit. It's self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation's survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don't all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back.
So you've got to do what you can to help your country survive. That's if you think your country is worth a damn. Warts and all.

Left unanswered is the question no one ever dares to ask.

Is it?

Mr. Miller knows the answer is yes, having never conceived that “we” could just up and have a new country any time enough of “us” decided to do so. It’s happened before, all over the world, as have tragedies destructive as, or more destructive than, the events at New York City, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on September 11th, 2001.

They are happening even now, all over the globe, and we are lighting candles in the hope of stopping them. We are doing exactly as we’re told. We are going to work. We are shopping. September 11th changed the world. Five years later, I look back fondly at what I had. It was and innocence. I recognize that now. A high vantage point where I could lob eggs at the “responsible” and pat myself on the back for doing it. No more.

We, the people, have not changed a damn bit for the better. We’ve become paranoid, fearful, even more insecure. We are a nation of perpetual teenagers, crying and destroying furniture because “they” hate us.

“Why,” someone once asked, “do they hate us?” Five years out, it seems like something a Group Leader might at the bi-weekly Abusive Husbands United support group meet-n-great/potluck. We’ve shown them why, as we’ve shown them before, and will undoubtedly show them again if, as I believe must happen, our memories improve.

The War Against Terror has already been fought and won. Ronald Regan declared in his first term, when state-sponsored terrorism became the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy as soon as he entered office in 1981. By 1985, President Regan was denouncing the “evil scourge of terrorism” in both the Middle East and Central America, both of which became hot fronts in a period marked by slowly, but unevenly, heating war. He “won” it the way all wars are won: by building a broad coalition of Third World strong men with murderous thug armies and, occasionally, injecting American troops where needed, in various hot spots…but always on the cheap, always quickly and succinctly. The memory of Vietnam was till with Regan’s war planners.

“We” (that is, our government) is fighting the same war today, with the same tactics, the same ill-laid plans. I realized this when I saw Mohammad Karzai and General Perez Musharraf standing side by side, our “allies” in the war on terror. One a CIA asset, hand picked to lead the still-unreconstructed Afghanistan. The other a General who seized power after a failed war with our other regional ally, India. Who forced the democratically elected president, the president he swore to serve, into exile and retroactively pardoned himself for his own successful coupe. Who’s army and intelligence service have just signed an “agreement” with the Taliban forces camped out along the porous, mountain-cluttered border lands of northern Pakistan. A treaty, the terms of which basically amount to, “You don’t fuck with us, we don’t fuck with you. Try not to have too much fun.”

We cannot stand for “friends” like these. To say nothing of the Saudi Royal Family. But it’s not enough to simply say that. We must tell those we elect to represent us exactly what we think about America’s bestest friends. We should remember that nothing breeds terrorists like the collapse of a Third World Nation. And nothing helps that collapse more like the leadership of an unbalanced, dictatorial ass.

We must inform our leaders that they hold the true keys to war and peace, not the one man in the white building down the street. They have ceded that power for far to long and they must take it back from him.

Once that’s done it’ll be a piece of cake for us to take it back from them. Because until they realize that they can no longer blithely send our sons and daughters, our husbands and wives, our sisters, brothers, cousins, parents and grandparents, to kill and die at a whim, then and only then, will we have begun the long and arduous task of honor the victims of September the 11th.

To do anything less is the real tragedy of this day.

Tale of Minutes

12: 31 a.m.: I give up ghost, shut down computer, sleep.

4:45 a.m.: Alarm goes off. I dress for success in black pants, a United Federation of Planets T-shirt and my black, Vash the Stampede-model trench coat. Haul my ass down the shadowed blocks to the bus stop. The luggage cart I’m dragging beside me sounds inordinately loud as its wheels scrap over the deserted, pre-dawn sidewalk. I feel exposed every time I step into the streetlights. Nicotine and endorphins clear the cobwebs from my head. After three months of Fear, Loathing and Insecurity I’m going to meet my girlfriend at the Grayhound station downtown.

5:09 a.m.: Bus arrives, crowded with early morning commuters. The man next to me is recovering from an operation. The doctors removed a nasty bit of industrial debris from the lens of his right eye. “They gave me Vicodin,” he says to the twenty-something in the red shoes sitting across from us. “But I can’t take that at work. I get all loopy.” The Man in the Red Shoes smiles, nods. “Yeah, that shit fucks you up.”

My own experience with Vicodin is somewhat different. It produced none of the disassociative euphoria of, say, actual morphine, Percocet or Rush Limbaugh’s drug of choice, Oxycontin. Instead I find it gives me a brief (half-hour, tops) excitable head- and body-rush, culminating in a deep, deep crash as my metabolism adjusts to the new chemical input. I chalk this up to some strange accident of my equally strange body chemistry and do not contribute these observations to the conversation going on before me. I’m counting down minutes until my girlfriend’s arrival. And I’m watching street signs.

5:31 a.m.: Arrive at Grayhound station in the sprawling field of parking lots that is Old Town. Union Station’s blue, neon signage glares down on me from its tower. Scattered lights burn inside the fortress that is My Fair City’s main Post Office. The street is deserted. I enter through the main doors, ignoring signs that proclaim the Grayhound won’t officially open until six a.m. The light dusting of people waiting in line at the ticket counter puts a lie to this anyway.

5:41 a.m.: Wait. And wait. Seconds drag to minutes which drag to hours and seem as days. The tile floors are dirty brown, scab brown and I am waiting. Three months I’ve been without my girl, my partner, my heart, my Imzadi. She left Our Fair City on June 2nd to return to our state of origin, Missouri, and be a councilor at Girl Scout Camp. Among her many (many) loves, my girlfriend has a deep and abiding loyalty to the Scouts and all they stand for. What they are has fundamentally informed who she is and I owe them no small debt for that. My father continues to lump them in with those quasi-fascist assholes over at the Boy Scouts but, as Penn Gillette noted on his show, Bullshit, the two organizations are wholly separate entities. While the Girl Scout’s national leadership has its own set of problems (such as a creepy shift in emphasis toward twenty-first century materialism) at least they’re smart enough to remain covertly homophobic.

5:45 a.m.: I’m still waiting. It’s been three months since I’ve kissed this girl, held her close and told her I loved her. I think of the Founding Fathers, particularly John Adams, who wrote whole volumes of letters to his wife, Abbey, back in Boston while he sweltered in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress. Back then, three months away from your Significant Other was (at best) the norm. Back then, the fastest means of overland transport was a good horse and prayer that the roads hadn’t turned to swamps.

A line of passengers file in through the door with the four foot numeral “3” above it. My girlfriend is not among them.

I wait more.

5:47 a.m.: Door Number Four opens and another line of haggard, travel stiffened people file in. My girlfriend is, at last, among them. She wears a voluminous, multi-colored shirt with more drape in its arms than the suit coat they buried with Biggie Smalls. Beads click between her breasts. A purple bandana holds back her hair. It rides high on her forehead, giving her the look of a cancer survivor. But I’m the smoker in the house and when I have her in my arms she feels trim and fit and wonderfully alive. We kiss beside a stack of her luggage and I don’t think because I can’t. My head is too full of her and the stunning realization that this long, fearful, hated waste of a summer is finally and completely over. At last.

We lash her luggage to the cart I’ve brought and exit through the now-operation sliding doors.

6:09 a.m.: Walk to China town. Dawn is threatening in the east. Gangstars and homeless people begin to populate the sidewalks. We make out, oblivious to them, wait ten minutes and catch our bus home.

6:31 a.m.: Arrive home. Have sex. During the post-coital conversation I try my damnedest to explain the short story I’ve just finished in somewhat interesting terms.

7:15 a.m.: Post-coital snooze.

12:30 p.m.: Wake up to find her unpacking. I stay out of her way, watching all the time for a chance to surreptitiously pinch her ass. I’ve missed that, and a million other things about her. Our nerd-tastic conversations. Our mutual love of Star Trek. Our years-old debate on the right and proper way to bring down civilization. The way she laughs at me. The way she helps me laugh at myself. Her confidence and grace, the light inside her eyes and heart, and the simple, unpretentious way she has of saying absolutely everything, even, “I love you,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

1:30 p.m.: More sex. More conversation.

3:30 p.m.: Build book shelf in the living room.

6:17 p.m.: Sup.

7:15p.m.: Watch Ultimate Avengers. Realize I still need to write the damn thing up as I’ve completely let And You Thought It Was Safe slip through the cracks for the month of August. But watching her eat ice cream, make jokes and roll her eyes at Captain America’s straight-faced jingoisms I could care less about websites, writing or superheroes. A piece of my life has come back to me. I feel whole again, safe and secure, and all else is gravy from here on out.

9:45 p.m.: Fall asleep in girlfriend’s arms. Realize how much I’ve missed the relatively simple act of doing this.

Sometimes you have to live to write, and not the other way around.

I Am Jack's Peanut Gallery

I take issue with a great deal of what JA Koranth says. He’s the author of books I’ve never read, staring a hard-bitten female police detective with the very…intriguing name of “Jack” Daniels.

A Freudian psychologist would have a field day with Mr. Koranth and that handful of facts, but this particular wordslinger is not slouch, True Believer. No, he’s just completed a 50 day, continental book tour on his own frickin’ dime. Beat that shit with a stick, homes. What we have here is a king of self-promotion.

The details of said book tour are available to those of us who work during the day on Mr. Koranth’s (award winning) blog, which certainly puts this one to shame. Even if it begins by revealing one of my issues.

(The Scene: Our Hero is introducing himself to the poor schmuck behind the Customer Service counter at your local Corporation Bookstore)

JA: Hi. My name is JA Konrath, and I'm a Hyperion author on a national tour promoting my third hardcover, RUSTY NAIL. Thanks for carrying my books.

Bookseller: Thanks for coming by. Would you like to speak to a manager?

JA: If one is available, I'd love to say hello.

Did you catch it? Were you a faithful reader you would know me well enough by now to know exactly what in the above makes my spider-sense tingle.

Hyperion is a moon of Saturn known for is spongy, pocked-marked surface, a painting by Friedrich Hölderlin (above, left) and (among other things) a book publishing division of the Disney Corporation, founded in 1991. Their sparse website proudly reminds me they have published John Stossel’s Myths Lies and Outright Stupidity. Not surprising, considering Disney’s ownership of ABC and, thus, John.

“Jack” Daniels, as well. Or, at present, her first three adventures. Number four is on the way. We’ll see how Mr. Koranth does, or how long he self-identifies with such a massive corporate edifice.

Thankfully, Mr. Koranth consistently chalks his success right up to his own Herculean efforts, which are well worth close study by all who are serious about the business of twenty-first century writing. As with so much else, working your ass off appears to lead to success. I read his blog with the feeling I am listening to a wizened Kung Fu master, despite JA’s relative youth. You’re not old until they begin to print your full name on your books.

Hell Box

That’s right. I have a blog, don’t I?

That title has nothing to do with what follows. Nothing at all.

Thursday is my Friday. I celebrated by finishing a short story. Not only had the scope, shape, and content of the piece bedeviled me for (far too many) months, but I’d all but given up hope of finishing it. Which sucked, considering its thematic elements were largely drawn from my life. (Aren’t they all?) I’d thought that this would at least be fertile territory in a desert of tedious, time wasting boredom.

I was right, but it took a third reading to see that. Not only was my original idea strong enough to support an entire story, I uncovered at least two more really good nuggets inside the whinny drivel…all of which I cut out.

Well, almost.

But you’ll never know, will you? Not unless you ask.

You know the best part? From an absurdly nerdy, writer-perspective? I did it all in under five thousand words. One hundred eighty-nine to spare means a lot when you’re thinking in column inches.

Nothin’s gonna stop me now.

(You can’t see it, but I wrote that with a self-contemptuous smirk on my face. )

Snappy Titles Don't Come Up With Themselves

There’s a car alarm going on outside and right now, instead of writing, I’m cursing the Devil Child who created it. It’s not one of those wailing, Emergency Siren models so favored by the yuppies of NoLo or the salesmen at CarToys. That I could tune out with a minimum of headache thanks to my two years of living beside a semi-major suburban highway. But the makers of this….monstrous thing felt the need to supplement the standard alarm blare with automated horn honking. Instead of a cool, rhythmic wee-oo-wee-oo my ears are under assault by intermittent, attention-shattering blasts of honk-honk, woo-wee-oo, HONK-HONK.

It’s enough to drive a man to road rage.

By God, I love this town. Even if it is a toxic, sprawling, concrete stain on what was once one of the most beautiful strips of land in the hemisphere. If you believe Lewis and Clark. Even if its lights block out 94% of the northern stars and its sounds consistently break my concentration.

And that’s about how I’ve felt these last few days: conflicted, scattered. A little broken. Every night I crawl home from my Job hungry and enraged, eat a sandwich, and mutter to myself about all the things I should be doing. “You should work out, or you’ll just get fat again. Lazy bastard.” “You should run that dishwasher before your roommate starts to hate you. Again. Lazy bastard.” “You should shower. You smell like boy. And for goddsakes you should write.”

Then I don’t. And that’s the issue.

Or (and here’s where the conflicted comes in again) I get more specific. “You should write, but not the damn blog. Bloging is to writing what crack is to the dedicated coke fiend. It’s a quick rush, soon dissipated, leaving that hollow, used feeling in your gut. I and I both know this feeling. It’s brought on by the fact that I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing.

Blog entry notwithstanding.

Because these things aren’t built to withstand a stiff wind. It certainly won’t free me from the evils of the dreaded Real Job. I fear this blog will only choke my already-idling creative engine, making tonight (ostensibly my night off) a complete waste…in my eyes, if no one else’s.

Since I have the house to myself, mine are the only eyes that really count. And maybe I’m setting myself up for failure with my abysmally high standards. Maybe I enjoy failing, as it gives me license for these bouts of self-flagellation. As if I need license. Or permission.

Maybe I’ve just been reading too many Batman comics.

I’ve built a great deal of my personal philosophy out of the Dark Knight’s adventures…which is probably my mistake, right there. I know he’d look upon that admission with nothing but contempt. Maybe a spark of pitying humor would flare up under that black sigil on his chest…but probably not. If there’s someone with an odder sense of humor than Bruce Wayne I’ve yet to meet him…in real life, or fiction.

I’m about a third of the way through No Man’s Land, the Gotham Knight’s year-long super-frickin’-mega-crossover-event series that near-every Gotham City-related title for most of 1999. I missed whole swaths of the series in its original run, but at long last it is mine, mine all mine, to enjoy.

And enjoying it I am. Mystery writer Greg Ruka’s prose adaptation of the saga, while good, left much to be desired. It benefited from a consistent narrative voice while simultaneously suffering from selective focus. Example: most of Batman’s dealings with Poison Ivy, Killer Croc, Clayface, the Scarecrow and Mr. Freeze were referred to only in passing, if they were mentioned at all. The same hold true for the adventures of what Dr. Leslie Thompkins’ calls “Bruce’s disciples.” Nightwing, Robin (#3), the Huntress, and the Spoiler are all put through the ringer in this exodus and most of their adventures were sacrificed on (I assume) the Alter of Space Considerations. What publishing house in their right mind would want to publish a thousand-plus-page long hardcover about a bunch of damned superheroes?

Warner Books, that’s who…but that’s beside the point. Even DC’s trade paperback division felt it necessary to split the series into multiple volumes. The only way to get the whole thing in one glorious swath is to illegally download it from the internet…something I would certainly never advocate…even if the artists and corporations involved hadn’t already been paid.

After all, I plan to be paid handsomely for the verbiage I crank out. Someday. Even if it means Emperor Shumate will be forced to come and kill me. At least I’ll finally get to see the man and shake his hand, face-to-face.

Back to it, then. To the Work, as Stephen King once called it. With God’s help I’ll beat this terrible affliction of ennui. Think I’ll pour a nice tall one of lemonade, shoot it through with Jose Cuervo Especial, and finish a shot story.

Finally.

24, 905

Tag yourself: Personal: Writing: Fiction: Short Stories: Drinking: Authorial Bitching: Batman: No Man's Land: Portland

News from the War

I can remember a time when the The Daily Show didn’t bother to cover mid-term elections. I can remember a time (2002, an absolutely evil year if ever there was one) when I didn’t bother to vote in them.
So much has happened since. It’s hard to believe things move so fast. Already its August and November is staring us in the face. The ground troops are mobilized and frothing. The money machine is humming along quite nicely. The Democrats are outspending Republican’s by a fair and definite margin. What’s more, a “liberal,” anti-war Democrat has defeated a warmongering, “centrist” (that is, conservative) in that national heart of hearts, their stalwart of strongholds, the good state of Connecticut.
By now, if you have the package of premium TV channels I still insist on calling “cable”, you’ve heard of Ned Lamont. Had he not defeated former Vice Presidential Candidate Joe Liberman I (and most of you, I imagine) would regard him with little more than a shrug. “Ho-hum,” I’d think, “another millionaire running for office. And, oh, look at all the funny little ground troops, believing that somehow this will change something. Make things ‘better’.”
The Great Hope of this Indecision 2006—which seems to have become a foregone conclusion inside TV Land’s puditocracy—is that Democrats will capture one, perhaps both, seats of Congress, forcing Our Glorious Leader into a final corner of accountability. Some howl at this possibility, and speak the dreaded I-word, not heard since the reign of our First Black President, Bill Clinton.
As if the Decider will voluntarily give up all the power he has gathered unto himself. As if Uncle Dick will let him. I’m sure the Vice President will shoot him the face before that comes to pass. Why would an Executive branch dedicated to the proposition that the President can do whatever the hell he wants to do whenever he wants to, cede that power in the face of an opposition Legislature? When it has done nothing but snub, glad-hand, and deride that very same Legislature for years? When it has stacked the Judicial in its favor?
Hard as it is for me to believe, there are those who still think Our Glorious Leader (and his Crew) will voluntarily surrender power.
I wonder if these people (you people) have heard: we’re a nation at War. A War that could last forever. Even if Bush does life the crown from off his head he’ll only pass it to another. Dick is too hated, so it’ll have to be Condi. George could be her Vice President, as Bill could—and probably should—be Hillary’s.
That would be a hell of a fight to see. Dubya’s own littel Waterloo. What is to be his triumphant return will send him fleeing, tears in his eyes, a death wish on his lips, from the battlefield.
There. Right there. Did you see it?
“Battlefield.”
That’s the thing about politics. It can be as dangerous a drug as E. It can provide the illusion of actual victory. Vicarious participation in a seemingly life-or-death conflict. The only life-or-death conflict that really matters.
I’m talking about the Eternal Battle Between Good and Evil. The very War Our Glorious Leader believes we are fighting. His absolutism prevents him from understanding that “good” and “evil” are words, subject to interpretation by humans. Big part of the problem, right there. His chosen profession prevents him (and every other politican) from realizing, or even understanding, how I feel about electoral politics.
Party primary’s, in particular, are an especial bore. They are the boring, pre-game shows of the political season. They, and all elections, function on the premise that elections actually matter. That they will really make a difference.
But victories only happen in wars. With a truce holding between Israel and Lebanon—despite the two hundred rockets Hezbollah fired over the border, despite the “bold” statements of Israel’s leaders that basically amount to, “Cease fire? What cease fire?”—there’s only one war left on the planet that we (as a nation) really care about. And it ain’t Afghanistan.
As in years past, American’s find themselves half a planet away from the real war, seduced by the false war at home, the puppet show of Politics.
I know I’m not offering anything original or terribly constructive. My hobbies, for the most part, revolve around destruction. I could never encourage, condone or authorize the use of violence against the government of the United States George W. Bush. That would net me a fast, one-way trip to the sunny side of Cuba. I can only remind you, the People, that there is a surefire way to bring the war home…if that’s what you really want.
Your past records of voter participation say otherwise. As do mine. Hopefully we'll both defy expectations.

Cubefarm, Act One

For a moment there I almost gave in. For I moment I promised myself not to write about my job.

Here’s something about my job. On slow days I turn Google News on random and read until my eyes cross. In the midst of the media haze I see signs that bloggers (one “g” or two…damnit) are quickly and serupticiously getting their buds nipped by employers for blogging on the job…or even about the job. Writers from London to Amityville to En-Why-Cee face termination, suspension or (horror of horrors) the dreaded Non-Disclosure Agreement, all for doing what the Great Author of Us All merely commanded us to do…speak.

There’s not a law in the world that says corporations can’t force their employees to into silence. Whole books of law explicitly state that this is exactly what corporations have the right to do whensoever they judges their “best interest” are served. Their “best interests” in all cases being self-aggrandizement, expansion of power, of control, whatever the current phraseology (“maximizing capital dividends for Q3, fiscal 2006”) might be.

I admit, these stories scarred me. They fucked me up something awful because I need(ed) this job to survive. Currently dominate visions of Western culture hold that one must pay to exist. All goods and services (from the water you drink to the food you eat to the land on which you exist) are available for exchanged thanks to a magically fictitious substance we call “money”, a handy substitute for power. For control.

Humans, for most of their recorded history, have imbued rare and beautiful stones with the properties of this magically fictitious substance. This practice allowed for some spectacular art and architecture, but could easily grow cumbersome for the unwary rich man. The old saying, “You really can’t take it with you,” means a lot more when it is a royal treasury, you are the king and you are trying to sneak out the back of your summer house in a summer house in a southern province with all your gold and a raving mob of half-starved peasants breaking in the front.

But I digress. I admit, for a moment I was afraid to write about my job. I admit, for a moment there, they had me good and afraid. I apologize for the lapse. As a gesture of miea culpa, I present the first in our Within The Empire’s god-only-knows-how-many-part series:



Cubefarm. Act one.

I’ll tell you what’s good about my job.

The piece of paper thumb-tacked to my cube calls me a Customer Service Specialist. I work for a large software company I will not name (thank god it isn’t Microsoft…I don’t want to live in India), base in the suburban development zone to the west of My Fair City.

Politicians call it “the Silicon Forrest,” an evil term for what was once a beautiful forest. Three of them actually. Pine, spruce, aspen and firs climbed down the Rocky Mountains, crashing into an unbroken swath of sequoa, oak, redwood, sorrel, maple and ferns that marched all the way over the Cascades to the Pacific Ocean. The expedition led by Lewis and Clark trudged through this land two hundred years ago, riding the major rivers down hill after so many months of no where to go but up. By this point they were so desperate to taste something other than fish that they traded salmon to the locals for dogs, which were summarily slaughtered for their meat.

Now trans-national corporations (Nike being top dog) mow the forest down to build golf courses, housing developments, cul-de-sacs, and the root of all Evil, the dreaded “office parks” (another evil phrase that means, “a sprawling, monolithic building composed for right angles and glass and steel, surrounded by acres of parking lot).

My job’s “office park” borders what I’ll charitably describe as “the wetland.” Three large pipes allow brown water to flow beneath a highway over pass. It creates a swamp of cattails, wild barley and crabgrass. The English Ivy my job’s landscapers planted for easy clipping have migrated across the parking lot, and are slowly encroaching. A train track runs beside this place. I’ve never seen a train go by. A flock of ducks lives in the slow moving, murky water. They never seem to do much, either. Most are content to dip their heads below the surface, float along, and clean themselves. In the morning some waddle up into the parking lot and sit in the sun. There droppings stretch across six parking spaces. I’ve come in and nine a.m. to find several with their heads beneath their wings, taking early morning naps. They are either brave, or hopelessly cowed, so trusting of humans they’re doomed to be the first to die should anything happen to our country’s industrial agriculture (another piece of America totally dependent on oil).

There is one Canadian goose living the swamp behind my job. His/her left wing is, or was at some point broken. It juts, curving and hooked, from the goose’s side, immobile, inflexible. S/he obviously will never fly again and seems to be at peace with that. How can you tell, unless you’re Dr. Dolittle? In any case, s/he’s made a life for hishself, waddling up the hill with the ducks, honking at the human gawkers, giving them one beady, yellow eye. The goose is not cowed. S/he will not go down without a fight…or a good running away, at least. A few good pecks, maybe. A few slaps with his/her one good wing before someone…well…

(Incidentally, how come “choking the chickens” gets to be a commonly used euphemism pounding your pud, but no one ever calls it “strangling the goose”?)

Tomorrow (yeah, right, and Joe Lieberman will get beaten in a primary…oh, wait…): I’ll tell you what’s bad about my job.

Tag yourself: Job, The:Ducks:Wage Slavery

Cellophane

There’s very little to say. All things considered, I’d rather drive nails into my eyes than write a lick of descriptive prose about the many, niggling annoyances that weight down my so-called Real Life and keep me from writing anything…descriptive or no. Since Wednesday, at least.

This Wednesday was a bitch for no particular reason I can name. I would’ve mentioned this in real time if I’d had anything worthwhile to say about it…beyond, “Today was a stone-cold bitch,” that is. Bad form, that. Vague, profane, and not at inspiring. That’s the kind of blog entry stoned teenagers would write before going on to complain about that damn girl in the front row who never says more than five words to them at a time.

I could launch into similar complaints, which similar net results (i.e., zero). Because life really can be high school at times. Or, to be more accurate, high school has grown into a toxic mimic of our lives. Ten years ago I was the maligned freak in the back of the class, alternatively annoying my fellows (with my inept attempts at socialization) or frightening them (with same).

Flashback to my deepest childhood. I’m watching television, because that’s what I did. Fox’s long-missed X-men cartoon series, to be exact. Much better than the movies. On my screen the mutant time-traveler Bishop falls through a temporal portal into his own, dystopian waste of a future. New York city is a ruined no man’s land of shattered buildings, twenty foot tall Sentinels and mutant concentration camps. “I’m back in the future,” Bishop says (odd, considering this is supposed to be his present). His voice is thick with loss, regret and shame as he realizes, “Nothing’s changed. It’s all just like I remember it.”

There’s a lot of pathos in that line…especially when you consider that, under any other circumstances, the line would be paradoxically silly. Witness the fact that a decade later it’s still playing through my head. Bishop’s line is the plaintive cry of a man who’s done everything he could to better his own world…and found out he’s made little-to-no real difference.

That’s how I feel. That’s how I’ve felt (I should say) for going on a month now. It’s what keeps me from writing. My feelings on work, school, relationships (or lack thereof) are all combined and summed up in that haunting phrase. “Nothing’s changed. It’s all just like I remember it.”

18818

A Story Well Told

The following was relayed to me by a coworker this afternoon. I’ve embellished somewhat in the name of clarity and my personal voice. All writers are propagandists and I’m no different in that regard. But the meat and potatoes of this story remain as they were, relayed to me in confidence and providing what I believe to be an accurate picture of life inside the American service industry.

“So,” (she said to me in the smoker’s ghetto outside our shared workplace) “I only worked at one call center before this one. This was in Texas. So I asked for the day off on July 3rd, like, two months in advance. My daughter’s first birthday, right?”

(Here I rolled my eyes in precognitive understanding, letting inertia carry my head with around with them. I knew where this would surely head.)

“Day rolls around and what do you know? They scheduled me to work that day. And up until this point I had, like, two occurrences* so I’m like, ‘Oh, what the fuck ever.’ ‘Cuz it’s either show up or lose your job, right? So I worked it. And all throughout the day I was miserable. My daughter’s first birthday, right?”

(Here I nodded, out of mutual respect if not surprise. It’s hard to be surprised by the vicious indifference of our employers. Look at me. Five years in this game and already I know the rules are always stacked against us.)

“So I get through it. Miserable, but I do. I think, Okay, not the end of the world, right? I just have to get Christmas off. My daughter’s first Christmas, right? You have to get that off. So I figure, it’s July. What the hell, right? I request the time off, it gets approved, Christmas rolls around and guess what?”

(I don’t have to guess. I can see it coming, as she could not, the way damsels in distress can see the train barreling down on them.)

“They. Fucking. Scheduled me.

“So I figure, It’s morning shift. In at six a.m., get off at four p.m, go home, have Christmas dinner. And then, on my last call, this woman asked me in this sticky-sweet, unknowning, way-too-fuckin’-happy voice, ‘Why are you working on Christmas, honey?’

“I felt my face start to twitch. Spasms, right? My left arm went numb, my chest started to hurt and I said, polite as you please, ‘Because stupid bitches like you can’t wait until tomorrow to call in with you’re fucking problems.

“Click

“I got up, walked over my supervisor, and said, ‘I quit.’ And I left. Fuckin’ security guard was all mad when I went into turn in my badge. I was like, ‘Suck my clit, bitch.’ And so I left.

“And that’s why I haven’t don customer service since then. I fuckin’ hate it, man.

(I nodded, completely agreeing. But as I crushed my cigarette against the ground I reminded her that we’re not, technically, customer service. We’re Entitlement to Customer Service.)

“Yeah,” (she said) “keep saying that. Eventually, you might believe it.”

As I rounded the obtuse corner that seperates the smoker’s ghetto from the rest of the building I smiled and shook my head. Never believe. Mouth, parrot, and regurgitate all you want. But never believe.

After all, once you do, it means they’ve already won. Beaten the fight out of you as surely as the slave drivers beat it out of my ancestors in cotton fields of Mississippi.

I keep meaning to research the origins of the term “wage slavery.” Its Wikipedia entry hides, as most do these days, behind a veneer of “fairness” and “balance” that all but assures negative aspects of this harsh, capricious world will never be called out as such. Can’t have the unwashed masses recognize their own state. That went out with the so-called Gilded Age, one hundred years ago.

Hell with it. Make of this story what you will. I’m too tired to care.