Not Guilty / It Wasn't Me / Party Up: My Hardcore Thugging Gangster Life and a Case of Mistaken Identity

I was going to post all this business on Wednesday, but it's never a good idea to talk about an ongoing investigation, no matter how dedicated you are to living publicly.  Now that the matter has been resolved, I give you the plot synopsis of the made-for-TV movie that was my life from Sunday until Wednesday of this last week.

It Wasn't Me! The Vytautas Malesh Story

The first thing you see is me driving down the freeway and he gets cut off by this tie-wearing jerk in a hot convertible viper.  He honks his horn, but the guy just shrugs like "Hey, I'm DRIVIN' HERE!" And I just shrug it off, because I'm a good guy.  A lot of audience empathy right there.  I'm played by Shia Labeouf.

So first thing is I'm getting out of the car at my dad's house, and that's our establishing shot  - suburbs, mid-winter, sunny and cold.   I'm on the phone with the incomparable Miss Stacy telling her that I will make sure to save her some pierogi, and that I will take pictures of the proceedings with my camera phone.  That's important foreshadowing - CAMERA phone, okay? The Camera is the important part.  . 

Inside, my dad (Morgan Freeman) is making pierogi and my family is all running around being loud and what not.  It's my sister's birthday (I'm thinking probably like Mila Kunis for this?  Someone a little more age appropriate, or?  What's Michelle Trachtenberg doing these days?)  so she's opening presents and what not, and as she opens presents in the background, Shia Lebeouf is opening his mail in the foreground.  

Now, start the ominous music, that sort of low-key slow one-piano note kind of thing.  Now, Shia Labeouf opens one letter after another without paying attention, until he comes to one with a green band at the top - that's got to really pop, so tell the prop guys we need an envelope that stands out, got it?  Okay, so his eyes are drawn to that envelope - he's got to open it, got to! 

His face is all scrunchy with concern as he reads the letter. Cut to an over-the-shoulder shot and we can see that the letter says that he is the prime suspect in an attempted car theft.  

Okay, but he's confused, right?  I mean, this can't be him - it can't be! So he asks his dad, who's a 30 year veteran of the police force and is 3 days away from retirement (Yeah, this should be the dad's retirement party too - we can do some sort of side plot where the daughter feels slighted because it's supposed to be her party, probably give it a little teen appeal), and Shia Labeouf asks him what it means.  

So the dad says one of those Morgan Freeman lines like "Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'," or like "This isn't going to have a happy ending."  ooh, that's a good one - let's use that one, it's from "Se7en."  Run with it.   Anyway, the last thing you see of the letter is a name, a Detective S, and a phone number.  Shia Lebeouf reads that sort of half aloud, that mumbly "I'm reading to myself" voice, so the audience knows it's important, and there's a close up on his eyes and brow, right? 

So there's a family party, we can do most of that in montage. Lots of hugs and stuff, let's give it that whole "good family having a good time" sort of thing.  Make sure everyone can see there's some drinking going on so that everybody loosens up. Okay, so later he's talking to an uncle or a cousin, it doesn't matter, and he gets that "light bulb look," and he explains that he just moved back to Michigan from Nevada, and with all the confusion on the plates, well that must be it right? 

(note - somewhere better than these two states, right?  More dramatic?  Either move back to New York from Kansas or Nebraska or something, or let's just put the whole thing somewhere nice.  Do they eat pierogi in Hawaii?  Are the pierogi important?  Let's have this whole thing be a luau - it's not a peirogi party, it's a poi party - okay, we'll change that before we pitch this thing.)  

So the poi party wraps up and it's the next day when Shia Labeouf calls the detective.  The detective's voice is really muffled, so you don't know anything about him.  Shia Labeouf says that he's calling about that complaint, and the detective gives him a real once-over, real bad cop sort of stuff, talking about how they had him on video and they were calling in the print lab and all that business.  

So Shia LaBeouf goes on about how he didn't steal a car, about how he's innocent and everything, and the detective just says something realy ominous, like "we'll see about that" okay, and that's good because we were all talking about cameras earlier, so you SEE things that are on a CAMERA.  

So Shia Labeouf starts to tell all his friends about this, and two of them totally say "Hey, maybe you got really drunk and don't remember!"  (Can we get Ashton Kucher for one of these guys? - ed.) and this totally freaks our guy out, right?  Okay, it's going to be a lot of expression stuff, but you've got to see that he's really worried because maybe that poi party shows that he's had a problem with drinking before, right?

So that night he goes into his closet and pulls out this big black duffel bag and inside is all this ninja gear, and cool batman devices like a grapple gun and whatever, and that's in the foreground, but in the background you see a decanter full of booze, and he has this real soul-searching moment where he picks up the bottle and his hands are shaking, and you can tell he's really fighting with it, but then he looks at a framed picture of his dad in a police uniform, right?  Okay, then he can see a picture of his girl, and she's like probably Cameron Diaz if we can get her, but otherwise some fresh-faced up-and-comer, whoever Joe Franklin is screwing, and he dumps the bottle out - big drama, moving really fast, montage. 

And he's all dressed up in black and he's got all this special forces training, but he kind of turns his collar down and takes his mask off and he goes into this dive bar and meets up with this lowlife, this grimey back-alley sort of guy, I'm thinking Billy Zane with a good stubble and some airbrushed tattoos, give him a chance to play the heavy. 

So he's in the bar, and he walks right up to the bad guy's table and you can tell they have this history, like maybe they were in a war or something, and they even say like "been a long time," and "not long enough," that sort of banter.  But all these guys come out to jump Shia Labeouf, so he goes all total bad-ass and takes them down and there's Billy Zane and he does that sort of slow clap thing, but when Shia Labeouf asks him about stuff he doesn't know anything except he kind of mentions a place, like a factory or something, real industrial and gritty. 

So we chew up a good ten minutes of Shia Labeouf infiltrating the compound with his grapple gun, and we can see he's that sort of good-guy action hero, like he doesn't kill anybody but he just knocks them out or ties them up, but mostly he's slippery and he just gets past people and they never see him.  

He gets to the parking lot and he sees this guy wearing a high school varsity jacket that looks just like his.  Did we write that in earlier?  Okay, note to self, go back and write that in.  Anyway, there's this jacket, and also this guy is trying to steal a car, but Shia Labeouf can't stop him because he's all the way up on top of this building, right?  So he's like "Hey, HEY!" and the guy hears him and runs.  Shia LaBeouf chases him, but the guy gets into a truck that looks a lot like Morgan Freemans.  Write that in too, it's important and it foreshadows things - okay, so Morgan Freeman has a truck that looks a lot like this guys, let's go back and put that in. 

So Shia Labeuf jumps down while the truck weaves it's way through the parking lot and there's ANOTHER ninja on top of the factory (does it snow in hawaii?  we really need it to look cold for the atmospherics here) and they fight, but you can tell that they're both going for the truck, and there's this scene where they both make it down to the truck and they're fighting in the back, doing lots of kung fu or whatever while this guy is trying to get away, and as they fight they both get thrown out of the back just as the cops show up, and they both vanish, but you know they will probably duel another day because you hear this oriental flute music.

The next day, Shia Labeouf is looking at the letter and he talks to the detective again, and the detective tells him to come in for an interview the next day, so Shia Labeouf hangs up the phone and stares off into the distance, like he's resigning himself to his fate.  

Take some time here to explore one of the sub-plots, either the thing with the retiring dad / birthday daughter or the romantic interest, something for the ladies.  Maybe both if we really want that teen demo. Anyway, someone gives Shia Labeouf some good advice and he takes heart and makes a note on his calendar that he has to go to that interview, then he goes to sleep. 

So it's the next day and Shia Labeouf is all wearing a tie, very professional.  He talks to his lawyer who tells him that he didn't do anything, that he should just be calm, answer the questions directly, and not to worry.  He goes into the police station and meets the detective, and holy shit - it's Jackie Fucking Chan!   So holy crap right, and Shial Labeouf is all nervous, but the detective goes "I got a better look at the tape - and now I can see that it wasn't you.  You're free to go."  And then they shake hands and Shia LaBeouf leaves and as he leaves he sees that Jackie Chan put something in the palm of his hand and it's one of his very own signature ninja stars, and we hear that same oriental flute music from before. 

Go back and write that in too - Shia Labeouf has special signature ninja stars. 

So Shia Labeouf walks out of the police station and there's his girl standing there, and she's like "Everything okay?"  and they have some witty and sexy banter, and she's like "Let's get out of here - I've got my car," and Shia Labeouf says "I have a better idea, let's steal one," and he just goes over to this super hot sports car, jumps right in, and hotwires it on the spot so that everyone can be like WHOA, HE REALLY IS A CAR THEIF!  And they drive away just as some jerky lawyer stiff type in a suit with a briefcase can chase after them and be like "Hey, that's my CAR!"  and we can see that it's the same car that cut him off earlier. 

Anyway, they drive off into the sunset.  Can we get "Bad Romance?"  I'm totally seeing this Viper convertible driving down to Malibu and hearing that Rama oh ma ma ga ga ba ba or whatever,  but I'm not married to it if ASCAP says no. 

Music, Sweet Music

There are songs we all like that don't fit in with our usual tastes.  While I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, I'm never one to turn up my nose at a good punk show.  That's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about those weirdo songs that seem to have nothing to do with liking anything else, but they get stuck in your head at random moments, and make you feel generally awesome whenever you hear them.

I have five.  Let me tell you about them.

Queen - Seven Seas of Rhye: 

This one is probably the most straightforward of my set.  For one thing, it's Queen.  Queen is fucking awesome.  Never mind that of the album Jazz, Rolling Stone magazine gave yet more evidence that they should for the fucking love of god get out of the editorial business by saying "Queen hasn’t the imagination to play jazz – Queen hasn't the imagination, for that matter, to play rock & roll." 

Rolling Stone was like the Vice magazine of the 1960's and now it clings to any threadbare sense of relevance by saying over and over again "OMGZ I WAS AT WOODSTOCK" or fucking whatever like an overbearing parent from the hippy days that tells embarrassing stories about how much acid they took when you were in the womb. Rolling Stone is so painfully wrong about Queen that I can't even in good conscience recommend their magazine for lining a bird cage lest you anger the birds so much that the birds attack their human masters with bloody bird fury exactly like that one movie. I think it was called Flappy Flappy Peck Peck.

But in addition to being generally Awesome, Seven Seas of Rhye is about the world of Rhye, a fantasy world filled with witches, ogres, giants, knights, and so on that Freddie Mercury invented with his sister when they were kids.  Yes, Freddie Mercury was basically playing Dungeons and Dragons Before there ever was such a thing.

I first heard the song in 1997 - I was living in East Lansing and drinking tons of beer, hanging out with great friends and not yet soured on the college experience.  Not a bad time to find a new song.


The Barkays - Soulfinger

First, this is an obviously bad-assed track.  It's got a sort of bloated big-band Mary-had-a-Little-Lamb intro that just barfs out into all these discordant horns and screaming disco freaks in a way that jumps through your ears, into your brain, and kicks things around.  There is nothing bad about this song - even the restful soulfinger, soulfinger refrain just delivers a nice break from the driving sex of the song.  Did you hear that goddamned guitar solo?  It does not GET funkier than that.

But that's only half of why I like it.  Any boy who came out of his sexual latency during the cold war remembers the Dan Aykroyd / Chevy Chase movie Spies Like Us.  We don't remember this movie for the hilarious cameo by Bob Hope, or the barely-not-tragic reference to Afghan Mujaheddin "Freedom Fighters" as American allies.

No, we remember the Russian girl coming out of her tent in bra and panties.  Just a little jiggle, a whole lot of stretch, and boom - an adolescence packed with fervent sweaty dreams of warm tents and white snow.  Soulfinger just happens to be the last thing in that dreadfully unfunny movie that we remember paying attention to before we saw her. 

The Seekers - Georgie Girl

This is a song I like because I used to like it, even though I don't remember liking it.  See, my mom got it in her head at some point that I really liked this song when I was about, oh, four years old.  I don't remember a thing from any time before I turned six or so, and thus I have to take her word for it.


But when I was a poor little child growing up in rural Michigan I had all of three albums of my own:  Pac-Man Fever, The Lone Ranger Adventures, and a copy of Georgie Girl performed by The Baja Marimba Band.

So really it wasn't even the original version that I liked, if I ever really liked it at all - it was a swanky instrumental played by a California novelty act.  This very much informs selection number four.


The Baja Marimba Band - Winchester Cathedral

The song is pretty much impossible to find, so here's the original. 


How meta is this, right?  Okay, so that above mentioned novelty act decided they would in turn cover a song by the New Vaudeville Band, themselves a novelty act as they found inspiration for their whistling, megaphone-amplified sound in old pressings of 1920's hits of Rudy Vallee. 


You're confused?  Screw you - I have to live with this every day.

The problem with liking this version of this song is there is basically NO chance I'm ever going to hear it again.  NOBODY outside of me, my mother, the old lady working the counter at the salvation army, and some weirdos on youtube have ever heard of the Baja Marimba Band. I only know this song at all because it was the track on the record (yes, record) before Georgie Girl.

To drive the point home, Tom T. Fucking Hall produced more records, achieved greater success, and is more accessible today, than the Baja Marimba Band.  Go ahead and listen - you probably deserve it because I probably hate you.

But never mind that this song may exist entirely in my head - it's a catchy tune with not one but two nifty novelty gimmicks, and when I have my psychotic blackouts in which I smell things that aren't there, taste colors that aren't real, and elevate my consciousness to a place no one else can follow, Winchester Cathedral as performed by the Baja Marimba Band is what I hear.



Boney M - The Rivers of Babylon

The latest addition of songs that basically make me flip out in a good way, I had never heard this song until probably 2008 or so.  I was in the best Italian restaurant in the world, drinking martinis like they were tap water, when I had to excuse myself to use the little boy's room.  As I stood evacuating the better part of a liter of Tanqueray, this song came on.

A little about that restaurant - it is a favorite local haunt with great food.  Even the tourist trap that it is attached too, the Liberace museum, is not much of a tourist trap.  Thus it's usually pretty easy to get a table. I recommend it to anyone visiting Vegas. 

Because it was in large part designed by Liberace himself (the bar was flown over from England and reconstructed board-by-board and brick-by-brick) it has a great deal of character and charm.  It's kitschy, it's weird, it's fun, and it's very obviously and awesomely dated.

It basically feels like it deserved to be a set piece for the Quentin Tarantino movie Jackie Brown.  And in that spirit, as Boney M's song played,  I pissed and marveled at the octagonal cherry-red sinks and thought man, this would be a weird time and place to get in a fight, and it occurred to me that it would be a perfectly Tarantino-esque setting and scene: two guys trying like hell to kill each other in a restroom imported from England by Liberace in the 1970's while Germany's only successful Reggae group played a song based on an old Jewish Psalm over the PA system.

It was perfect - in that moment, I had a wonderful connectedness to one unique skein of universal consciousness.  I tuned out.  I saw stars.  I smelled sandalwood.  I went back and had a sublime dinner and a few more cocktails, and I added this song to my collection of quirky, awesome tracks that until now I've kept just for me.

Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 16: Know When to say When.

So last night instead of coming home early and pre-writing today's SSS, I ate a ton of pirogi and drank a lot of scotch at my dad's house.  Now I find myself neck-deep in work and unable to crank out an entry. 

Previously, I posted that this was a big fail on my part, and that I would make it up to everyone later this week.

Well, I've changed my mind because as I sit at my desk going about my work, I feel a little bit refreshed and a little bit invigorated after going ahead and saying I wasn't going to post.  I'm starting to hit a groove and not feel so crappy despite having too much scotch and not enough sleep, and I think I could offer one little piece of advice to new writers today:

Know when to say when, know when you're just forcing it, and know when to blow off and go do something else.

As Billy Crystal said in Throw Mama from the Train, "A writer writes, always."   True enough - but a writer is not a perpetual motion machine.  A writer needs to rest. A writer needs to eat and drink, and take a day off.

So begins something like a day off - see you on Wednesday!

This Won't Ever Haunt Me When I Run for Office - NO COME-UPPANCE!

There are certain expectations we have of artists, though this varies by medium, by town, and by gender.  We always expect artists to be a little weird, a little off - seductive, but alien, like the way elves are always described in fantasy books, but then when you really think about it, that doesn't sound that great at all.  Like yeah, ears that stick out two feet from your head and eyes the size of tea saucers - cool story bro.

And with artists it's much the same - all that passion!  All that intensity!  All that truth bottled up into one soul just waiting to burst out!

Well, all that passion tends to manifest as mania, the intensity comes out as tics or paranoia, and most of us don't much believe in truth these days, so anything bursting out of us is probably something we drank in order to quiet the voices and still our beating hearts.

Regardless, there's a romance, a mystique, and an image that we've come to expect of the tormented creative soul, which is why at the turn of this century, I decided it would be a great idea to give bisexuality a try.

I was out with the incomparable Miss Stacey this last Wednesday when the topic came up.  One glass of wine led to a martini led to another, and somehow the topic of hot girl-on-girl or guy-on-guy or any combination thereof action came up, and I just sort of blurted out that of all the things I regretted being closed off to, any sort of "teh ghey" was out of the question.

I know this because after a lot of soul searching circa the year 2000, I had half-convinced myself that the only reason I had any aversion to guy-on-guy amore was some sort of rote societal conditioning which I made up my mind to break.  Plus, Boys Don't Cry came out the year before, and that made everyone a lot more sympathetic to Hillary Swank.  Though to be honest I didn't see it, not because I had a problem with Hillary Swank or Lesbians or anything, but because I totally had it mixed up with Boys on the Side, which I had seen, and I couldn't understand for the life of me why it deserved a sequel. 

The culture had gone way gay-friendly, and plus girls were starting to kind of dance with each other and grind and freak at clubs or whatever, and the rave scene was really liberal, so I actually started to feel like I was missing out.  I mean after all, a guy knows what a guy wants, right?  That's what the trannies at the truck station always say, and I don't want to live in a world where you can't trust ambiguously gendered methamphetamine addicts living in the back of a rusty abandoned Peterbilt.  .

So I tried to go through all my fantasies, and I hit my first obstacle:  not a single one involved a guy.  I mean, there's the one where you fantasize that you're James Caan and she's Cathy Bates and if the little ceramic penguin isn't always facing due south then you'll be hobbled to prevent your escape - but you're not fantasizing about a guy, you're fantasizing about being a guy.

Wait, what the fuck? 

Anyway, I figured there was no teacher like experience, and if I didn't have any gay fantasies, then maybe I just needed more stimulation, and my second big warning light came on - it doesn't matter how cute I thought Tom Selleck and Kevin Klein were in In and Out, there was no way I wanted to see either one going in and out of the other.  What I mean to say is that I discovered I had an almost pathological aversion to dong. 

I have one of course, and I think it's just great - it's been a real boon companion over the years, and we've had a lot of great adventures.  And who doesn't like to see the heavy artillery come out in their favorite porn, right?  I figured a little guy-on-guy video might be just what I needed to kick start the libido.

But having grown up around guns my entire life, I can tell you that whenever a firearm is pointed at me my adrenaline goes into overdrive.  I don't care if I know for a fact it's not loaded.  I don't care if nobody is within ten feet of the damn thing when I'm walking past it - my ass clenches like a venus fly trap and my only thought is on getting the hell away from that barrel before it goes off.

And that's how I felt about penises pointed in my direction - I just wanted to avoid a headshot.

But I didn't give up - I still maintained the slim hope that I could go ahead and be a swinging modern libertine, a real firecracker.  And so over the span of a few years this little project of mine simmered in the back of my head, like a book you keep meaning to finish just as soon as you get the time, and that time finally came in 2003 at one of my house parties: Shockin' Da Block VII.  (Yes, I had terrible skin in 2003 - I have no idea why.  I make no apologies for the way I dressed).

It was by every account a smashing festival full of merriment and revelry.  As the party swung into gear, I found myself standing in the archway between the dining room and the living room with two good friends (one XX, one XY), gossiping with only marginal interest about who had had, or who wanted, or would never get, whom.  Given the liberal nature of our little scene, it certainly seemed like just about everyone had had everyone else to some degree, and the lady suggested that the only two people who hadn't were me and the fellow standing with us.

At this point, a very drunken lightbulb clicked on over my head - I knew my friend was willing, I was extremely curious, and so with no shortage of zeal or waste of time, we got down to swapping spit in the middle of the party.

Three years of anticipation, self-examination, and self-persuasion had eventually come down to me and my friend tasting keg beer on each other's mustaches in the middle of a crowded house party.This was no kiss of mincing trepidation like giggly school girls playing spin the bottle - we went for it like a pair of Kenyan sprinters.

And how was it?  Only one word really does the experience justice:

Anticlimactic.

For all the fretting, for all the expectations I'd had, for all my imagined bon vivant, anything-goes / take-off-your-clothes liberality, I felt absolutely nothing in my heart or loins when I finally kissed a man.  It was mechanical.  It was unexciting.  It was an act.

The lady who'd subtly (and probably unintentionally) encouraged the whole thing informed me that, from the bleachers, it was incredibly hot.  For my part, I just felt let down.  There were no fireworks, no great awakening of that 10% gay that everyone is supposed to have somewhere deep down inside - just another experience to say I'd had, another thing to say I'd done just so I wouldn't ever have to say I  hadn't.

As for the young gentleman - he will remain nameless, but I will say that things were really awkward at our D&D game that week.

One has to push their limits to really know them, I think, and the whole incident still works as a fine case study for me -  I tried to walk on the wild side and I found it not so much a daunting challenge as a bit of a bore.  It's a strange and unfortunate double standard we have that allows, even encourages, women to engage in erotic play with one another, but frowns on even so much as a hug between two men that doesn't in some way involve A) sports B) violent pats on the back or C) your father dying. 


My own feeling on the matter becomes one of freedom:  just because I don't want to doesn't mean I don't want to be able to.  Just because I can't look sideways at a guy and think anything but whether or not he'd be any good in a fight or alternately could help me move furniture doesn't mean I think someone else shouldn't just go ahead and ask him out.  I mean, I'm not going to - but you go right ahead.  Go, go to him, make him yours and never look back!    

I'll be over here watching football or something. *cough* Yeah, how 'bout them Lions?

So Hard to Find Good Help - a Brief Overview of Industrial Evolution.

Preceding the industrial revolution, labor was cheap and materials were expensive.  That's why everything from before the 1800's is covered in lace and filigree or carved out in bas relief - some landlord would trade off a cow, a sheep, a hectare of land and a daughter of virtue true for about half an ounce of gold, and then he'd take the first-born son of one of his tenants, raise the boy up as a goldsmith (or whichever trade was appropriate) and, having taught the boy a skill, then taught the boy to turn his back on his birth parents and ascend such as he could through the ranks of the emerging bourgeoisie until he eventually overtook the lords estate and evicted his own parents before going mad and burning down the manor house, he inside,dying a painful and gruesome death, all so the the landlord could have a nice snuff box with a depiction of the crucifixion carved on its lid. 

There may have been some lead in the water.

The point is, there were all these people just hanging around breeding like rabbits and working their tenant lots or family farms, and they didn't have much in the way of interesting skills because their ancestors had spent the last few hundred years poking the ground with sticks, burning witches, and leeching the pox most foul from one anaether's humours fyve.  There was a labor force the likes of which had not been seen since Exodus, but most of the people involved still thought the sun was god's smiling face, and it went around the earth once per day bringing a spirit fayre to the aerth.

Stuff, on the other hand, was hard to come by.  Wood, cotton, and thatch are pretty easy to get, but unless you wanted to be a cotton-shirted peasant in a thatched-roof wooden cottage, you wanted things made out of gold, or silver, or, like, tungsten or whatever.  All of which has to be mined and refined or cut and polished or it just looks like dull rocks in the mud. The people who would be the refiners at this point still think the process be ye aulde devyl's alchems, and a nobleman won't sully his hands with that sort of work, which ought to be done by a peasant, if only peasants knew how.

So things happened pretty much as I described them above - landed gentry would sponsor promising persons of lower station to go and learn the crap that wasn't pheasant hunting and philandry, and the sponsored parties enjoyed greater wealth.  These new craftsmen began bringing up apprentices, and so from feudalism came mercantilism, and from mercantilism comes industrialization.

See, while peasants had reclaimed the lost arts of brick-making and not shitting in the same well they drank from, they still mostly just grew food, ate food, made babies, and danced around a maypole.

So the mercantile class sees all these peasants milling about and not making them any money, and not making any money themselves, and therefor not buying the goods that these new merchants are producing, and they say "hey, couldn't we do something with all these peasants?"  and indeed, the peasantry was the next big exploitable resource.  The problem is that all that baby making and food growing had rendered them, collectively, as smart and useful as a sack of hammers. 

So somebody comes along and invents a machine - this machine does almost exactly what the old hand process did, but it does it faster, more consistently, and only requires one person to work it.  Furthermore, that person doesn't even have to know how to do the original task - that person just has to hit a lever, put coal in the burner, and not get his hand caught in one of the 237 moving parts, every single one of which is capable of ripping his arm out of it's socket. 

Now all of a sudden these peasants, who before had been preoccupied mostly with not stepping in cow flop and watching sheep fornicate, could produce good wool cloth, or smelted iron, or any sort of product imaginable.  Waste was minimized and output maximized, and profits, at least for the industrialists, skyrocketed.

Over the next few decades, the pecuniary balance shifted, this time towards labor.  The exact reasoning for why is fuzzy, but basically newer industrial processes became a skill of sorts.  As the machines did more, so too did the people operating them.  Sure, you could still have children hauling iron ore out of  mines, but it turns out that you can't just put that ore in one end of a machine and get precisely tempered surgical steel out the other.  Any moron could push a cart up the street, but it took a certain degree of genius and innovation to make a cart that could comfortably transport a maximal number of passengers by way of a minimal number of horses.

If that last paragraph sounds familiar, it's because you can very easily transpose the situation of workers two hundred years ago with those of today.  The machines which do more today are computers and industrial robots.  The children hauling coal out of mines are third-world miners and production laborers.  The morons pushing carts need not be morons, what with increasing opportunities for education and such, but they still pretty much just guide a vessel (truck) down a pre-established path (road) at several hundred times more efficiency than their counterparts of ages past (2 months and considerable loss of life to get a covered wagon over the Rockies versus 3 days and a little crystal meth to move a 40-ton semi truck). 

My reason for mentioning all of this is not wholly to defend industrialization, but to come to terms with it and to share this rumination with anyone else who looks at the process and doesn't always like what they see. Although we can call ourselves post-industrial until we're blue in the face, the fact is the production model hasn't changed all that much.  Make things - sell things.  Now, we make goods on such a mind-boggling scale that it's cheaper and easier to replace things than to repair them.  It's no longer quite a matter of raw materials being cheap - the produced goods themselves are cheap.

But if prices just went down as income went up, there would be a very obvious length of slack in the system.  The way our system takes up that slack is the part that proves problematic for most people - in a word, exploitation.  Animals are pumped full of drugs so that they produce more meat, plants are genetically modified to grow fast and hearty, and the third world provides a source of cheap labor and raw materials while serving as a dumping ground for toxic waste.

It's a true baby-and-bathwater scenario.  I think it's all come to mind with the Pandora craze, a movie (produced by a big huge profitable corporation) that thrusts it's unsubtle "let's all live in teepees" politics so far in advance of itself that I accurately foretold the movie's theme after viewing half the trailer.  I used to be on board for that sort of earth-mother harmony live-off-the-land stuff, but I call shenanigans on it now.  It's a very pretty idea to indulge in the comfort of a modern home, but there is an oppressive reality forming it - nature is not a sweet caring mother: nature's a bitch!

Run too slow? You're food.  Get sick?  You're food. Break a bone?  You're food.

In a perverse way, industrialization IS mankind's natural defense.  We have big brains, sophisticated tools, writing, and stereoscopic vision.  We don't have claws, or fangs, or camouflage; we can't spit poison or spin webs.  Honestly, we can't even run very fast.  In short, we need technology the way fish need water.

It's a cruel mastery we have over this planet, but it need be no more cruel than the mastery of a wolf's teeth over a fawn's neck.  For my own part, I try to be conservative, taking what I need and reducing my waste.  It's my way of making peace with the whole scene, because I'm sure as hell not going back to animal skins, raw meat, and a thirty-five year life span without a fight.

Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 16: Measure Twice, Cut Once

About a week ago I got a very polite letter from a nice lady at an online literary 'zine stating that she liked one of my stories, she really did, but that their publication only takes stories of 10 pages or less.

My story is 17 pages long.

Neverminding just how I overlooked that particular editorial guideline, I decided that I would throw my hat into the ring and try to undertake the Solomon-like challenge of cutting a story in half.  While this is of course a tremendous pain in the dong, it does give me the opportunity to share my editorial process with you.

First, the back story:

Desperate to use the experience of my Israel trip in a short story, and wanting to do something politically tinted in terms of the exploitation of victims for partisan gain while also reflecting my own peculiar brand of "whiteness" as someone with ancestry extending back to a country no one else has heard of., I wrote Anchors Can't Pronounce It in late 2007 and workshopped it to mixed reviews.

Usual criticisms along the lines of "strong at the sentence level" and "I think this is compelling, thematically" aside, this story had the same problem as many of my one-shot works in that it needed to either be way shorter or way longer.   Heedless of this advice, I cleaned it up and sent it out twice (Fall 2008 and Spring2009) before giving it one more revision and putting it in a big batch of shotgun submissions in the fall of 2009.

Now, the Story itself (this section is a bit long, but I think you'll see what I do here):

Raymunas Alexandras is a third generation American of Lithuanian descent.  He graduates from college in 2006 and his Grandfather, a devout Roman Catholic, buys the two of them tickets to the holy land for a celebratory pilgrimage.  Jurgis Alexandras dies a week before the trip, but Raymunas goes anyway at the insistence of his family.  While there, he generally sulks and drinks, and makes to take the actual pilgrimage on the last possible day.  He takes a bus to Jerusalem and is escorted around the city by a young Arab boy who speaks no English.  Raymunas dismisses the boy and tries to tip him, but is unable to, having only very small change and very large bills.  While deliberating on his course of action, he is slightly injured by the premature detonation of a suicide bomber's device.

While recovering in the hospital, Raymunas speaks with a representative of Natal, who encourages him to return to America immediately believing (quite rightly) that while the state can offer counseling and medicine, only the comfort and support of his family will help him to deal with the events mentally.  Raymunas ignores her advice and checks himself out of the hospital, and returns to the old market of Jerusalem thinking he can find the boy again and give him his tip.  He finds an improvised martyrs shrine in the now closed-down tunnel, and realizes that the boy likely stole the money from his pockets when the blast knocked him unconscious.  He returns to America, and the story concludes with a summary: that the powers-that-be all had something big to say about the events, but nothing to say about the victim, whose name looks weird in the papers and was too hard for television anchors to pronounce.

Even the SUMMARY of this story is too long!  Look at what's going on here:  back story, epilogue, plotted story - this doesn't even get into the flashback of Jurgis' escape from the Communists in the 1940's which, while one of the better pieces of writing, serves all the purpose of wheels on a boat, and not one of those cool James Bond car-boats either.

This story suffers from an excess of what is called scaffolding.  Scaffolding, just like that used in construction, painting, and so on is what holds the work up while it's being built.  The comparison is particularly apt because if one were to imagine, say, the Empire State Building with it's very literal scaffolding still in place today then he would see a rough and jumbly excess blocking his view of the actual work of art.  So too is it the way with Anchors Can't Pronounce It.  In seeking to tell one story, I had to tell myself another, and rather than just tell it to myself, I decided it was just so damn important that I had to tell it to anyone who picked the story up, too.

When you've got a story like this, the best thing to do is go in with a chainsaw and hack it to pieces.  Rudely and crudely point to anything of ambiguous usage and sever it brutally.

Keep the part you've cut - in the example above, the story of Jurgis Alexandras escape from soviet Lithuania is probably worth exploring - but it serves very little purpose here.  The political commentary at the end would make a fine blog post, but it puts a bit too much load on the character of Raymunas.  He is pretty clearly just interested in drinking beer and chasing girls, and broad sweeping statements regarding the nature of the Israeli-Arab conflict just seem over his head and out of his league.

The one bit that's hard for me to cut in part because A) I think it's thematically important and B) it's closely interwoven throughout the story is the recurring notion that Raymunas can't live up to his Grandfather's expectations or accomplishments, and that he finds his Grandfather's pride in him embarrassing and unwarranted.  Jurgis Alexandras was shot in the back and fled to America wounded and impoverished, and managed to work his way into middle-class comfort, while Raymunas barely squeaked his way through state university and has no job prospects whatsoever.

The solution here, the culmination of this process and the thing worth sharing with the interested reader, is to make two separate and distinct stories.  The story of Raymunas Alexandras is not the story of the young man visiting Israel. Raymunas Alexandras has a lot of issues, but they're going to stay domestic.  While the story of the flight of Jurgis Alexandras will inform the Raymunas character, I'm free to have Raymunas deal with it in more active ways than regret and alienation.  

As for Anchors Can't Pronounce It, THAT is the story of someone being injured in Jerusalem and going a little bit crazy trying to find a  kid in the streets. No more, no less.  Even the drinking, the skirt-chasing, anything that doesn't directly inform the bombing incident and the narrator's connection to the boy must go.  Now freed from the constraints of the Raymunas Alexandras character, the young man visiting Israel doesn't even have to be a man anymore.  I'm free to do all sorts of interesting things. I can explore whatever little sub-themes I like:  gender, class, ethnicity, faith - having dropped the earlier baggage, I'm free to pick up something new.

And that is how you revise a story!

Put Up or Shut Up, Volume 2

This Post is the conclusion to something I posted Wednesday, and together they are a response to something I posted Monday.  Go back and have a look back, or you'll only be confused.  

Untitled 2       

Theodore found his brother in the mess.  He loaded up a tray of green beans and S-O-S and sat down across from him.

  “Say, what gives with Lumpy?” he asked.

  Wally probed his brother with squinted eyes.  His nostrils flared..

   “What do you mean ‘what gives’?” he said.

   Theodore told his brother about his exchange with Lumpy, and Wally rubbed his face with his palm.

  “We all do what we have to,” he said.

  “But – gee, I don’t know – that seems wrong,” Theodore said.

  “Well what do you know?  Eat your toast, then.  See if I care.”

  Indignant, Theodore got up to leave, but a boney hand on his shoulder kept him down.  He heard a familiar cackle come from behind.  He hadn’t heard it in four years, and it still made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

  “The thing about Lumpy,” Eddie said, “is that he’s a goddamned 4-F.”

   Wally dropped his eyes and shoveled in a mouthful of gravy and bread.

 “We’re all friends here – we can talk about it, right?  Like old friends?”  Eddie said, and he sat down next to Theodore, very close, his arm wrapped around Theodores shoulder and his mouth almost at his ear.

    “When the shit hits, see, Lumpy just ghosts right out.  He falls on the ground and throws a banana upwind, then he curls up and sucks his thumb, ain’t that right, Wally?”

  Wally stared down at the table.  His fork and knife lay across the top corners of his tray.

   “But that’s…why don’t they pull him out?”  Theodore asked.

   “Because we’re all that son of a bitch has got – isn’t that sweet?  We’re all he’s got, and we’re all you’ve got, and that means Lumpy too.  We’re all you’ve got in the big scary north, scrip.  We’re all you’ve got.”

    Eddie got up.  Wally picked up his tray and followed, leaving his brother alone in the mess.

***

   Wally had caught it.

   It played out just like they said it would, that they’d be out for a walk and then right in the middle of a ballgame.  First there was a loud rattle that slowed to a dull clap – AK-47 fire from outside their clearing.  A dumb setup, the dinks didn’t wait for them to pass, but tried to take them head-on.  Number ten.

  But they’d caught Wally dead front and center, right in the chest, and Theodore held him across his knees.

   Right through the heart.  Instant peanut.

   Paddy water soaked up into Theodores drawers.  Lumpy lay next to him, just as they’d said.  The scarecrow huddled deep into himself, his smoking M-16 laying in the mud at arm’s length.

  Then there was Eddy.  Tow headed, dragon-eyed and cruel. Untouchable, glowing with hot rage, pulling fuel from the horrid mud under his feet – Antaeus with an M-16.  Eddie roared, and the jungle shook – his voice like a chasm opening in the earth, like artillery shells, black fury.

   But he was alone, and Theodore could see it, and he knew that Eddie Haskell was all that was keeping him alive.  His brother was dead, Lumpy lay cowering in the filth.

  Theodore let his brother slide off his lap, limp and heavy.  He slumped into the mud the way a cinder block hits the ground – dull and heavy.  Theodore un-slung his rifle and took a knee.

  The rifle felt good to him, something firm and dangerous.  The butt gave him little love taps on his shoulder, just an old friend play-punching after a tough home game at Mayfield high.  He saw nothing but the tall grass, and the thick bamboo twenty yards away, little incandescent flashes from the end of his barrel, and the slow fade-out of blue-white gun smoke filling in the void.

   How was Eddie still standing?  He was a giant, a titan – larger than life, impossible to miss, but he was untouchable in the way that only a god can be. His gun spat fire, his mouth cackled hate.

   Not a god, but the devil, Theodore thought, and he’s my master now.  He’s what I’ve got – I had my brother, but he’s gone, and Lumpy was never here.  In hell, only the devil has safe passage.  Better to follow in the devil’s wake than to be washed aside and dashed on the rocks of the damned.

   In an instant the tree line unfolded, the bamboo bent inwards, outwards, to and fro, coming undone and flipping upside down.  Riding the crest of the sonic boom of the mortar fire came the screams of the incinerated VC.

   Theodore didn’t know who called in the strike – he hadn’t, he knew it for damn sure.  He had clenched his teeth so hard that he’d bitten through the inside of his cheeks and only now in the calm after the storm, in the deadly quiet after the jungle had come undone could he relax his throat and free his tongue.

   Not Lumpy, who still sobbed and heaved in the grime.

  And not Wally.

  It must have been Eddie Haskel.  Boonie number one, the blonde devil, death on two legs.

 All that hate – where did it come from?  Where did it go?  It came from the air, the dirt, the water, the stinking filth of the deep bush, the people, their alien language, their wholesale death - and it came out through his gun, spilled out of his mouth, leapt through the air in a hideous summons calling down napalm, mortars, and mini-gun bursts that mowed down slow, the brave, the cowardly, and the cruel alike.

  This was America.  This was what bought the dream of Mayfield – Detroit steel sharpened into a killing edge, ten thousand swords for every ploughshare.  There had been so much death, and there would be so much more.

   Theodore looked down at his brothers blue eyes staring up wild and unseeing into the sun.  He was one of many.  Theodore did not cry – what was one more body on this pyre?  Who was this man at his feet?  He had known him in another life, but out here in the bush, he was just a gaunt face and a name:  Cleaver, W., the man who wore his brother's face.

   He heard the jolly greens coming in.  Eddie helped Lumpy to his feet and Theodore bent over his brother’s body.  Wally had two dog dags - Theodore took one and put it on his own chain.

Mom will want it, he thought.

   The Jungle, it killed.  It was brutal and dark, unthinking, an animal.  It had been hard on Wally, and Eddie, and Lumpy.  It would be hard on him too.

Put Up or Shut Up, Volume 1

I spend over 1/3rd of this blog telling would-be writers what they should do, and most of the time I do so by telling them what they should NOT do.  However, I am nothing if not the best person in the entire world, and also just and equitable, and probably some sort of messiah, and so in deference to this past Monday's post, I will now indulge the readers of this blog with a bit of my own fan fiction, presented in two parts.  Part one is below, part two will debut this Friday, January 15th

Untitled

The stink of rotten paddy came up out of the ground, hung around Theodore’s nose, gushed up over his head and stayed there.  Sweat rolled off his forehead and into his eyes.  The chopper took off behind Theodore, it's dust-off cooling nothing – all that hot wind coming down just stirred the humid soup in which Theodore swam, the hot jungle, the molding dishrag wetness of it. He squinted straight ahead at the barracks and walked until he found his brother.

Theodore grinned his bucked teeth, and the grin wrinkled up his freckled nose, but his brothers eyes bored past him one thousand miles, a dead man’s eyes.  Theodore straightened up and saluted his brother.

“Put your goddamned hand down,” his brother said.

Theodore put his hand down. 

“Gosh, Wally, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Wally looked like a mad dog dressed up in clean green jungle fatigues.  His black boots were spit-shined, but his creases were slack and his cap sat too low on his brow.  He looked Theodore up and down, and he softened, just for an instant, just long enough to say “Come on, let’s get you set up,” and then he turned his back and was the mad dog again.   Theodore slung his duffel over his shoulder and followed behind.

“So who’s top?”  Theodore asked.

“You’ll see.  Keep your trap shut,” Wally said.

They walked to a row of Quonset huts and entered the last one on the right.  It was clean, immaculate, and there were three men inside, and Theodore recognized two.

Lumpy was a skeleton – he weighed a hundred and sixty pounds soaking wet with rocks in his pockets.  His old slack jaw was sharp as broken glass.  He stood like a man who wanted to run.  His hands were so straight and still at his sides that he had to be forcing it.

    Opposite him stood the LT.  Theodore only saw his back, and his pomade-slicked hair.  He carried a clipboard, which he handed over to the third man, a tow-headed sergeant.

    Theodore’s guts turned cold.  The top kick, Sergeant Haskell, E.  He took the clipboard from the LT, signed a paper on its face, and handed it back before offering a crisp little salute and standing at attention.

  
    The LT turned and left, and Eddie Haskell was at ease.  He turned to face Lumpy, and Theodore froze – but Eddie paid him no attention, as if he hadn’t seen him at all.

    Wally went forward.  Theodore followed.

    “He’s here,” Wally said, and saying so made it okay for Eddie to look Theodore over, and for Theodore to look back.

    Eddie was clean – pine-sol-lemon-pledge-spotless. His fatigues could have passed for dress greens, no holes, no spots, perfect creases: officer grade.  These clothes had never seen the bush, of that Theodore was sure, but Eddie had.  Eddie was carved out of wood, taught in every joint, tanned bronze and mad around the eyes.  Eddie must have gotten his duds new – bought, procured, swiped, stolen – they were Eddie’s clothes and they weren’t going out.

    “You see this sack of meat?”  Eddie asked Lumpy.

    “How’s it going, Eddie?”  Theodore asked as cordially as he could, the name sticking in his throat.

    Sweat ran down his sides and back.

    “I wasn’t talking to you, scrip.”  Eddie said.

    Theodore screwed up his face, confused.

    “You’re a f-f-fucking c-c-conscript,” Lumpy explained.

    “Don’t tell him nothing,” Eddie said.

    “Hey, lay off him,” Wally said to Eddie.

    Eddie took his eyes off Theodore for a second and met Wally face to face. It was no contest - Eddie was top kick - but Wally didn’t back down or flinch.

   Eddie took a different tack.

    “I don’t know whose cock you sucked to get into this outfit, but here’s how it goes down:  you do what I say, when I say it – same goes for Wally and Lump.  Shit rolls down hill and from where you’re standing, you’ve got a worm's eye view of our assholes, get it?”

    Theodore’s face paled, but he nodded and managed to say, “Sir, yes sir,” with reasonable confidence.

    “The kid sits up real good,” Eddie said as he passed Wally by, giving him a little pat on the shoulder.

    “Get him settled, get him debriefed, and get him ready.  We go out tomorrow,” he said.

    Wally took his brother’s duffel and threw it on an empty bunk.

    “That’s you, so’s the locker.  Unpack your ass and we’ll get some chop-chop,” he said.

    Wally started going through his brother’s pack.

    “You got anything good?”  he asked.

    Theodore shook his head and said “a whole bunch of pills is all.”

    Wally perked up and asked what kind.

    “Oh, all kinds of stuff – salt, iodine, Mondays, vitamins – everything they gave me,” Theodore said.

    Wally stopped going through the bag.

    “Hurry up – I’m hungry,” he said, and he left for the mess.

    Lumpy, unseen by anyone, had seated himself on the next bunk over, and sat staring at his hands in earnest 
    Theodore took notice of him.   “How you doing, Lump?”  he asked.

    “You got any stick?”  Lumpy asked.

    “Stick?”

    “D-d-dew, man, grass,” Lumpy said.

    “No, I don’t,” Theodore said reproachfully.

    “That’s just a god-damned shame.  Too god-damned b-b-bad.  Too god-damned bad.”

    Theodore made his bed and shoved his duffel underneath.  He wanted the fuck out of that room.  He wanted the fuck out right then and there.

[TO BE CONCLUDED 1-15-2010]

Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 15 - I'm your Biggest Fan

I don't read a lot of fan fiction, by which I mean I don't read any.  Some people totally get off on re-imaginings of their favorite fictive universes and characters, but I've never been one of them.  Rather than decry the enterprise as a whole, I'll say that when it comes to evaluating the quality of one piece of homoerotic Star Trek vampire slash over another, it just  isn't my thing.

Personal bias aside, I do have a thing or two to say about it, and while I certainly won't come out and advise any writer not to write fan fiction, I'm going to have to advise a great deal of caution.

First, the good:

Fan fiction is outstanding exercise.  Of six critical elements (plot, character, theme, setting, dialogue, and narration), the beginning writer can plug in any five and set to work creating something unique with the sixth (or vice versa, for that matter).  A writer who wishes to hone his dialogue writing ability might try transcribing a conversation between, say, Quentin and Benji Compson in which they discuss exactly which trees Caddy smells like, or imagine writing the adventures of Rick Deckard as he goes to, shit, I don't know, buy an ice cream sandwich and winds up finding out that the Good Humor man is really a replicant.

Fan fiction can be a ramp up to creating your own work with your own original characters, setting, etc.  In this case, FF serves as training wheels while the author finds her own voice, and learns to work at her own pace.  I've said before that imitation is not only the highest form of flattery, but also one of the best teachers, and in this case the writer puts herself very much in the position of the original author and hopefully learns a thing or two while there.

It's not like Fan Fiction is something entirely new, either.  While most articles on the subject point to the 1960's as the birth of modern FF, I think the spirit of the thing goes back further.  I would argue the case that John Milton's Paradise Lost arguably qualifies as one epic piece of FF, filling in the gaps of Genesis and further exploring the characters involved.

But even giving up that particular example, the ever-popular serial form requires a hardcore devotion to original source material, be that serial a TV series, movie sequel, or comic book.  It's not like the Newsgroups of the 1990's invented the concept of giving more to the reader who is left wanting it.

But, now for the bad.

"Leave 'em wanting more" is an old entertainment axiom for a reason - not only will leaving the audience wanting more fuel your own reputation (e.g., it's a good career move), but doing so is an essential part of the creative exchange.  Any story should leave questions unanswered - that's what stimulation is all about, and if you are to write a stimulating story, so too must you leave something for the reader to chew on. 

When you indulge in fan fiction, you're attempting to satiate that hunger, be it your own or that of your reader.  In the best possible circumstances, your own work will in turn ask more questions than the few it answers, but in the worst case you will actually complete the errand with which so many FF writers charge themselves:  you will tie up the loose ends.

If you truly like a work, it's worth considering that those loose ends were left dangling for a reason - perhaps what was written wound up on the cutting room floor because it destroyed the pace, or made obvious what should have been subtle, or what have you.  At the end of the day, so much fan fiction is a lot like Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho:  it didn't do anything that the original didn't do better. 

Another worthy consideration is that of your own readership  Oftentimes, it's other fans, and just as likely this roster includes other fans penning fan fiction.  Some of it's good, but like the performance art movement, most of it is somebody in a diaper fucking a rotten side of beef wrapped in an American flag and calling it "The Battle of Bunker Hill."  It's not interesting, it's certainly not canonical, and at the end of the day it's all forgettable exempting the smell. 

You're known in part by the company you keep, and if the company you keep writes nothing but Mary Sue Twilight stories, you're going to be lumped in with that crowd whether your stuff is any good or not. 

The final peril of FF is that the ramp which you've used to build up your style will become a crutch. An old prof of mine once asked a fellow student who was himself committed to H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy universe just how much of his intellectual capital he wished to invest in that particular project.  In other words, how hard do you want to run at another's race?   Then again, my friend is in talks to get his own Fuzzy book published, but for every one of him I've known dozens more who could wax poetic about Dr. Who and little else. 

Fan fiction is at its best when it answers the questions that the original work didn't even ask, explicitly or implicitly, and at that, only when the question is compelling.  One of the falling off points, for me at any rate, of the continuing Star Wars novels (those set after the fall of the galactic empire) was that the only questions so many bothered to ask was "what's next?"  The follow-up question to any work should be compelling in and of itself, either because it's a real good and driving question or because the question is so off-beat and quirky that it approaches the subject material from a new, possibly parodic, angle.   Don't ask "so what happened to Luke and the gang after Endor," ask "who was the janitor that found Luke's hand at the bottom of that shaft in Bespin, and what did he do with it?"  

Great Unanswered Questions, Volume 1

In the interest of cooking up something special for next week, I'm making a short post today.  This will save me some of the work time I normally spend on this blog so that I can get ahead of myself, and thus finish something a bit more thoughtful than:

Answers to Great Questions

Every so often, I ponder one of life's big questions, or failing that someone will ask me one of life's big questions.  This usually happens over several quarts of gin, but sometimes I'm sober enough to remember them, as is the case today.

1. In the song "I Would do Anything for Love (but I won't do that)," what is the "that" to which Meatloaf refers? 

Answer:  Meatloaf will not take off his shower cap.  In the video for the song, "Meatloaf" appears to be wearing a great deal of prosthetic makeup as if to express a demonic or satanic aspect - in fact, the monstrous subtext was an afterthought as the makeup artist tried to conceal the fact that the producers gave the part to Meatloaf's stunt double.  Meatloaf did not take off his shower cap until it was time to appear in David Fincher's 1999 hit movie Fight Club, but by then everyone had just come to think of the stunt double as Meatloaf, and so it didn't matter.  The stunt double's name is, in fact, Robert Paulson, and he really was shot in the back of the head during filming, but in a completely unrelated incident to the death of the character he played (he and Jared Leto were going for the same bagel).  Since Mr. Paulson's untimely demise, Meatloaf has resumed all normal Meatloaf-related duties.


2. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop? 

Answer: You can fuck right off.

3. Jay-Z and Rihanna plan to "run this town tonight."  What does that mean?

Answer:  Tired of the incessant bickering of the ineffectual and corrupt city council, Jay -Z and Rehanna wrote 2009's hit "Run this Town Tonight" as the anthem for their co-operative campaigns for city comptroller and city sanitation commissioner (Jay Z and Rihanna respectively) of Kokomo, Indiana.  As comptroller, Jay-Z will be responsible for overseeing the Accounts Receivable and Payable departments and for streamlining all book keeping processes, and as sanitation commissioner, Rihanna will have the responsibility of negotiating contracts between the city and various private sanitation contractors, maximizing the efficiency of trash and recycling  pick-up routes, and phasing out the few remaining civic sanitation employees in favor of those same private-sector contractors.  As the sanitation and comptroller offices work closely together, it looks like this dynamic hip-hop duo is getting ready for another hot single in 2010:  a cleaner, more fiscally responsible Kokomo.

4.  Where's the Links? 

Answer:    As I pretty much learned everything I know about blogging from the now defunct Suck.com, I'd planned to rely on links as digressive and / or informative content and funny sideways comments.  As I've gone through the archives, I'm seeing more and more broken links.  From this point forward, expect a lot less underlined text in this blog.

5.  In "That's Not my Name" by the Ting Tings, the lead singer never says what her name is.  While we know it's not her, or girl, or Joleisa, we never get the goods.  What is it?  

Answer: The lead singer of the Ting Tings, in a daring if miscalculated effort to connect to wallflowers everywhere, penned the band's seminal ode to passive-aggressive self non-assertion in 2008, planning to say to the listener "Hey, I may not be much, but you're calling me by the wrong name - call me by the right name, or I will continue to not catch balls thrown at me and also not be popular, which is also what I'll do if you call me by the right name."  However, midway through the song the singer realized that she had no intention of telling anyone her real name, which is Nachos Bell Grande Smith, but by then the band had already done their arrangements and booked studio time, so they just ran with what they had

That wraps up this post regarding great unanswered questions.  If you yourself have a great question, post it in the comments or email it to me:  vytautas at vytautasmalesh dot com.

Gotta Squeak One in Before Post Number 50

Yesterday I browsed my list of tags and found some that have appeared in other blogs to be conspicuously missing:  Gaming, D and D, and also Action Jackson RULES!   I plan to rectify that today.

Every so often in blogs past, usually once a year or so, I blog about gaming and the fact that it is awesome.  It's a great mix of socializing, fantasizing, and creativity.  The gaming, that is, not the blogging.  The blogging is mostly a lot of self-indulgent drivel.

Back in the '80's it seemed like everyone was gaming, or at the very least the activity was popular enough to be called satanic and to inspire an awesome movie with Tom Hanks in which he plays a tough Detroit cop who's been pushed over the edge and now has to take down one of the biggest names in the auto industry, or be framed for a crime he didn't commit.

Now in the twenty-teens, I'd be hard pressed to find a dungeon if it weren't for my hardcore stable of 20-rolling hustlers.  That's what I see around me now: groups that have been together since high school or college, and pick-up games at the friendly local gaming store.

I've never found the latter option all that attractive (also, most of the gaming stores in Detroit are history).  I think that's a fine solution for board games and tactical miniature play, but real role play is a surprisingly intimate thing.  You're saying a lot about yourself when you make a story, confessing (even subliminally) your own hopes, fears, and anxieties, like that you think of yourself as frail and vulnerable and so often roll up tough-guy characters who don't play by anybody's rules, or that you are dumb and weak and so play uber-powerful wizards, or even that you are afraid that you won't be able to quit shooting smack, even for the tough Detroit cop who who's been pushed over the edge, whom you love.

It seemed for a while like maybe Jack Chick and his anti-D&D posse had won.  Some readers of this blog weren't even alive in the 80's and so you don't remember that there were in fact actual D&D book burnings.    You won't find much about that on the internet because it was sort of extreme behavior, sort of faddish, and also a FUCKING BOOK BURNING IN FUCKING AMERICA. What the fuck, right?   They also burned heavy metal albums, which are two things that pretty much go hand-in-hand as they march down the aisle of fucking awesome.  That's how I remember the 80's - nothing to do with this hipster shit and the leg warmers or fucking whatever, but stealing cigarettes, listening to Iron Maiden, and playing dungeons and dragons. 

Come to think of it, that's pretty much how I spent this last Monday too.  Now who's retro?

Also, those people who burned books pretty much ran the country for the last eight years.  So I guess they are. 

But whatever exorcism you have to perform (in game or meta), it's a creative thing - it's a collaborative legend written by mostly sympathetic parties all looking to get away from the meh and whatevs of daily life.   It's not about escaping form reality, as was so often espoused in the book-burning days, but engaging in something beyond real.  Reality is waiting in line at the DMV, filing an endless stream of paperwork for your boss, and finding out that your best friend, with whom you ran track back in high school, has been killed to cover up a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.

That used to anger me so much:  somehow sitting on your ass and watching Designing Women or Monday Night Football was perfectly acceptable, but getting together, rolling dice, and discussing ancient mythology was perverted and weird.  Is it the lack of passive receptivity?  The socializing aspect?  Or the fact that there's no ads for Fruit Roll-Ups in a D&D book?  Or do we have to constantly embrace hot media icons like Delta Burke and Roger Staubach to be Americo-normative?

Whatever it is, I still love this damn hobby.  It sucks up hours and hours of time, is no way to meet girls, and is certainly misunderstood by the world at large, but fuck 'em.  Gaming makes me a better writer and a more analytical thinker.  When I run historically themed campaigns it makes me plunge into research in which I would not normally engage, and it's a lot cheaper than, well, everything.

I used to end these little posts with a little blurb about how everyone should start gaming again, but as I've mentioned, some people reading this don't even remember the 80's and so have no idea what I'm talking about.  They'll go get a copy of World of Warcraft and then come up to me six months later and be like "Oh man, you were soooo right about gaming!  I've been sitting in my basement since June and I haven't talked to anybody, so now I'm pasty, fat, and pale and unable to socialize - what's for dinner?"

And I will say: "Barbecue, huh?  How do you like your ribs?"

Which doesn't make any sense since real gamers subsist on Mountain Dew and Cheetos.

Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 14 - Grant me the Serenity

This time of year, all the online writer's helpers start to talk about how THIS is the year you're going to get published.  Go on girl; show them what you're made of!  In this, they are simply echoing the sentiment of most novice writers.  These magazines have headlines like "New Year’s Resolution: Get a Publishing Contract for Your Book" or some such, and that sounds really good, except that it's fabulously wrong. 

Saying that "this is the year I get published" is putting the cart before the horse, counting your chickens before they hatch, stitching in time and saving nine - look, I'm not sure about that last one because we're no longer an agrarian society and all our consumer goods come from Wal-Mart and are cheaper to replace than to repair and thus these old crafty nuggets of wisdom don't have real meaning for us in the high-tech and alienated 21st century, but publication is the result of a lot of hard work and solicitation.  It's the applause that comes after the show, and a big part of the reward for all your hours and hours of effort.

The author has very little control over when he or she gets published.  That is, unsurprisingly, up to the publisher. They tell you to do a lot of cute things like carefully read the publication you're submitting to, and to try to tailor your writing to that publication, but that's all bullshit.  Send your best work to absolutely anyone willing to look at it.  The last thing you should worry about is whether or not your piece is "right" for a publication. 

Believe me, you're going to be told in no uncertain terms if the piece is not "right" for a publication.  You'll know because you'll get a letter or email within 2-6 months of submitting that says "this piece is not right for our publication."  They may or may not really mean that - you might just be catching the publisher on a bad day.  Maybe you used a font they don't like. Maybe his favorite sports team lost last night and he's in a bad mood. Maybe she's suffering from chick problems, and, you know, Midol joke or something. 

They'll also wish you the best of luck placing that piece elsewhere.  They don't really mean it, nor does the person who drafted up the form letter in the first place.  They don't really care one way or another.

Still, if you want to get published, it's helpful to know what kind of venues are out there, and exempting trade publications, I've narrowed it down to three.

1 - Academic Journals

This is unsurprisingly where most academic writers get their starts. Academic writers are by and large never published in their school's own journals unless they are faculty, in which case they will have their students run a novel excerpt so that the faculty writer can now say that he has published for the year, and get back to banging students.  Academic journals have very small circulation, usually around 1000 - 1500 copies, and most of those copies don't leave the university campus, where the pages are torn out and used to roll the worst joints ever. 

2 - Contest Rags

Leading the pack is Glimmer Train, a magazine with a readership consisting entirely of contest entrants, of which it must be said there are quite a few. .  Contest rags usually run anywhere from four to twelve contests per year, which you can enter by submitting a moderate fee and sending in your best work.  These magazines count on you checking the website over and over again, looking to see if your entry got picked, and possibly checking out enough online content to be enticed into buying the hard copy of their journal in the vain hope that it might improve your odds of winning the next contest because, you know, there's like a database for all that stuff. Or something. 

3 - Genre Publications

Back in 1998 I picked up an issue of Amazing Stories Magazine.  This was the same Amazing Stories magazine that inspired the 1980's TV show of the same name, and which only recently ceased publication after an 80 year print run.  This is telling:  these things basically don't exist anymore.  When you do see a genre publication, it's usually because some old, rich crank got it in his head to reinvigorate the pulps that he so loved as a child regardless of whether or not anyone might actually buy one, or if an advertiser would actually buy space in the back.  These magazines pretty much exist to get your hopes up that pulps are making a comeback and that the age of the casual reader has returned. While casual reading has never really gone out of vogue, it has been replaced by the internet, the kindle, and by the thousands of cheap paperback novels you can pick up in the airport for a price comparable to that of a magazine, and with no ads.

So in short, don't make 2010 the year you're going to get published.  Make 2010 the year you're going to submit, submit, submit!  Write it and send it until your fingers bleed!  Don't be a pest about it, naturally - when a publication asks that you not send additional work until you've heard back from them on your first submission, they really do mean it - but the only way to get published is to write, write well, and submit often.  If you can make it your new year’s resolution to submit, then you might be able to make a 2011 resolution to get published again, because you don’t learn anything the first time around, do you?