Month: January 2015

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Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

The Men Who Stare at Goats
The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was part way through The Men Who Stare at Goats and I was thinking: “This is early Ronson. He gets better in his later books.” I just thought this early Ronson was a little bit silly. Not irreverent exactly, but… I don’t know. Just not taking things very seriously. Which is not to say that later Ronson is overly somber or serious or even academic.

But I was wrong. This early Ronson is every bit as good as later Ronson. I learned quite a bit from The Psychopath Test and Lost at Sea, and I learned maybe even more from Men. And even though the book is now 10 years old, it’s still very relevant, given new talk in the media about the CIA and torture.

Whoa, you say, torture? I saw the movie, what’s this about torture? Yeah, you see: like I said, I was wrong. Ronson’s not silly or something like irreverent—he was just setting me up. As I read more, and as I finished the book, it just got darker and darker. There’s the goofiness of conspiracy theories, there’s the smug satisfaction in rejecting them, and then there’s that terrible, dark place, the root of truth from which these theories are born. That’s where Ronson goes. Torture, ritual mass suicide, government-sanctioned murder.

What a like about Ronson, along with his engaging writing style and gung-ho approach (as opposed to ‘gonzo,’ if you’ll forgive me) is how he inverts cognitive dissonance. Human beings have a way to dismiss the terrible things that make up every day existence, and Ronson gets in there and lays it all out—accept it as terrible or call him a liar. There’s no dismissing the truth.

I can’t say that “fans of Ronson will enjoy The Men Who Stare at Goats” only because I’m pretty sure that fans of Ronson have already read it. I will say that newcomers to Ronson should read it. And those who don’t like Ronson, or haven’t read Ronson? What is wrong with you people?

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If I Had Mastery Over A Musical Instrument, I Probably Wouldn’t Write.

Postaday for January 8th: I Got Skills. If you could choose to be a master (or mistress) of any skill in the world, which skill would you pick?

Something musical. Guitar, drums, or piano. You should see me when I’m out on the road, going for a run, and something really good comes on the iPod. My fingers twitch, and I’ve been known to air-drum my way past amused on-lookers. Honestly, I secretly hope that one or more of them will, based solely on how my hands are moving, figure out what song I’m listening to.

Which is a silly dream but what are you going to do.

I would love to be able to shred like John Petrucci or Rodrigo of Rodrigo y Gabriella (or Gabriella, she’s awesome too) or Anouk or the lead guitarist for Daikaiju. Or any of a hundred other guitar maniacs that get me through my 5ks and 10ks. The way their fingers fly. Such mastery, such precision. I’d sit at home all day and just noodle. I have songs in my head, can make them up on the spot, no problem at all. I just can’t turn thoughts into notes

Not the way I can turn thoughts into words. And as I’ve mentioned before and will surely mention again, I love how, with writing, sometimes I don’t even know what’s going to be written until I’m in the middle of it. Imagine being able to do that with a wicked guitar solo!

Or piano. I’m a sucker for the Bach Partitas for solo harpsichord. There’s one in particular that I’ve heard a few different folks play, and this is going to sound super-arrogant, but none of them are playing it right. I don’t have a music degree, I’m no Bach-scholar, but what I wouldn’t give to be able to sit down and play that piece that I way I feel it should be be played.

Went to a Vanessa Carlton performance, once. In between songs she’d talk to the audience, and as she talked, her hands would just dance around the keyboard, making little things up without her putting too much thought or effort into. Effortless, that’s the key. I have a neighbor who can do that, just sit at the piano and make things happen without any planning or memorization.

But then there’s the drums. Oh man, the amount of energy that goes into pounding those skins. I’d love to sit down and just go nuts, sweat flying everywhere until my arms are on fire. I love it in a song when the drummer’s not just keeping the beat but workings his ass off.

I’ve often told people that I don’t think Danny Carey, the drummer for Tool, is a human being. He can’t be. Not the way he plays. If you kidnapped me 30 years ago and forced me to take lessons and practice drumming and threatened me Whiplash style, I still wouldn’t be able to play half as well as he does.

Oh, but if I could. Maybe it’s for the best though. If I had mastery over a musical instrument, I probably wouldn’t write.

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What I Think Of When I Think Of Getting Away For A While

Postaday for January 7th: Oasis

A sanctuary is a place you can escape to, to catch your breath and remember who you are. Write about the place you go to when everything is a bit too much.

It was the summer of too much pizza. I had moved to Seattle, been through a few relationships and a few roommates, and was living alone. A lot of loneliness, a lot of pizza, a lot of video games. One in particular was City of Heroes.

This was my first foray into any kind of online-with-other-people type of thing. I was very timid at first, but got over it, and eventually hooked up with a remarkable group of folks. I’m not going to tell you we all became super best friends or anything like that. I don’t even know their real names, and years later, don’t stay in touch. But during the summer of pizza, they were my tribe.

My character in the game was called Dakota Jones, and he was a Scrapper. Basically that means he fought with his bare hands and healed fast— more or less he was Wolverine. Hours spent roaming the city streets, fighting criminals, earning rep and leveling up. And eating pizza (haven’t really recovered a skinny body yet. Oh well).

I stopped playing as bigger, better things came along, and now, City of Heroes is no longer available. What I long for is a chance to get back in there and just… jump around. One of Dakota’s super-powers was the ability to “leap over tall buildings.” Not flying, per se, but I could steer in mid-air. I would spend hours just jumping around from one sky-scraper to the next, listening to music and not thinking about much.

Nowadays when I need to escape I wind up just browsing the internet. “Escape” is more a state of mind than anything else. I don’t lead the kind of break-neck life that requires any kind of actual physical sanctuary. I work from home, so I’m in this nest for most of the time anyway. No real need to “get away from it all.”

But I’d love to go back to City of Heroes and jump around, soar through the air, land with a satisfying thud under my boots and jump again. That’s what I think of when I think of getting away for a while.

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Let’s Stop Using The B Word

January 6th: For Posterity

Your blog just became a viral sensation. What’s the one post you’d like new readers to see and remember you by? Write that post.

Let’s stop using the B word. You know what word I mean. I’m not asking you censor people, or pass judgment on those who use it. I’m not trying to be a prescriptive in any sense. I know how language works (well, as much as anyone can know how language works), so I know we can’t control the evolution of language. But I can ask you to choose to not say that word.

The word means nothing more than “women are inferior.” If you say “that person is a B-” you’re saying “that person has the quality of an inferior type of person.” It’s the N- word for women. It’s the S-word for what comes out of a person’s back side.

And there’s no male equivalent. There is no word that means “men are inferior.” At least, not in English, not that I am aware of. There are very few contexts where calling someone a “man” is an insult. Very few contexts where a man wishes people would stop treating him like a man.

The word continues to insult women, even when used ironically. We see this in the media all the time. A strong get-things-done woman will say “Yeah, I’m a real B- and proud of it.” The statement has force only because if the irony involved— and the irony requires that the operative word be denigrating. Same as if a person said “Yep, I’m the kind of asshole that gets things done.”

Even if you come from some belief systems that requires men and women be treated differently, just remember this: no two people are alike, no matter what their gender is. Two woman have nothing more in common than a single strand of chromosome. After that, there’s no way you can say one’s actions, beliefs, or comportments accurately describe the other one. Using gender to identify people is about as predictive as astrology.

Which means that if your experience with one woman is negative, it’s because of who she is an individual, not because of what women are in general. Pick some random quality in yourself— like your height. Now go up to someone and spit on them. “That’s what 5-11s do!”

Absolutely ridiculous.

I’m asking you to choose, for yourself, to not say this word anymore. I’m asking you to ask others.I am NOT asking you to force anyone. This word will lose all of it’s power and meaning if we choose to forget about it. If you were told your new boss is a real Mrs. Grundy, would you get a picture in your mind of what she must be like— or would you instead start to wonder about the person who used the word in the first place? And would you pass it on?

I’m thinking no. Let’s stop using the B word.

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Review: Shooting Star/Spiderweb

Shooting Star/Spiderweb
Shooting Star/Spiderweb by Robert Bloch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sometimes I get a craving for mac n cheese, and I mean, nothing fancy. Just a box, a boil, a stir, and eat it straight out of the pot. Fiction can be like that too. Sometimes I just want to read. A plot, some characters, an ending. Nothing too complicated or meaningful.

These Hard Case Crimes reprints are starting to fulfill that need. That need for a few hours of reading, that need to actually finish a book. I’m like a lot of you. I start way more books than I finish. If my eyes are too big for my stomach at the buffet, I guess my brain is too big for my pocket watch at the bookstore.

Don’t like the metaphors? Don’t read Hard Case Crime books. Don’t read Robert Bloch’s Shooting Star/Spiderweb (it’s two novels in one binding). Not that he’s given, as such, to these kinds of metaphors. But cheesy writing? You know how we like to make fun of an over stylize the mannerisms and speech patterns of certain time periods? Talk about cheesy. But I’m pretty sure, at the time of original publication date, Bloch was one-hundred percent sincere.

But that was then and I read this in the now. Cartoonish characters, implausible scenarios, a plot taking out of Plotto. And imagery that, I’m sure, was supposed to make the reader queasy, nervous, scared: titillated. Nowadays it borders on camp.

And yet, for all that: an okay box of mac n cheese. I’m not going to say “fun” or “good,” because, when the pot is empty, resting on my protruding belly in my chair, I can’t say I had fun and I don’t exactly feel good. But the craving’s been satisfied. The book’s done it’s job. That’s always can ever ask of pulp fiction.

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About Half An Hour Later, I’ve Got Adrenaline Shakes, Bad

Postaday for January 5th: Daring Do

Tell us about the time you rescued someone else (person or animal) from a dangerous situation. What happened? How did you prevail?

My wife loves the Dollar Store. I don’t know why. Yes I know why: she’s a cheapskate. Hey, don’t yell at me! She’s the first person to call herself a cheapskate. “I like a bargain,” she says, “even if it means I’m buying crap.”

So there we are the Dollar Store. My wife’s… somewhere. I’m in the checkout line, behind an old lady, who’s behind a less old lady. I guess the old lady wanted to put her stuff on the belt, and the less old lady Just. Wasn’t. Having. It. Something about how she was making two separate purchases and deciding which things in her piles she did want and didn’t want and her kids kept asking her for things and also she was on the phone because somebody had cancer or something.

She finally raises her voice and now everyone’s staring but the old lady sort of backs off. A few days go by, the less old lady pays and leaves. The old lady pays, and leaves. I pay, and look for my wife, who’s trying to decided if we should get another bargain or two. You know, in case our garbage can’s not full enough. Got to get maximum value out of the garbage bag’s potential volume, right?

We go outside. We go to our car. But our car is blocked because somebody’s not moving. So I go to the guy and ask him (an old man) to back up a bit so we can leave. He doesn’t seem too happy but he does it. Then I get in my car, and only then do I assess the situation.

The old man’s not moving because he wants someone in another parking spot to give him her information. And I realize— it’s the old lady. So I get out, and ask the old guy what’s going on.

He tells me it’s none of my business. I tell him he can’t block this old lady in. If she wants to leave, he has to let her leave. He tells me she almost hit his car as he drove past. He points at a dent. He says he doesn’t remember if he had that dent before. He says he wants her information in case he remembers he didn’t have the dent and therefore she must have done it.

I tell him I don’t care, he can’t just trap her there. He yells at me, “What are you going to do about it?”

I puff up my chest. I smile. I tell him I’m going take a picture of her license plate, his plate, the dent, and give him my phone number so he can call me if he needs to. He says fine. I do the things I said I was going to do and he drives away.

The old lady gets out of her car. She’s crying. I say to her, you’re having a pretty rough day, huh? She laughs. I give her my phone number. I tell her “call me if your insurance company gets a claim from this guy. I’ll be a witness. You didn’t hit him.”

She says thanks.

I get in the car and we leave. I tell my wife the whole thing. “Nice job!” she says. She hands me a Snickers Bar. “Can you believe we got four of these for a dollar? Now that’s a bargain!” So I eat two.

About half an hour later, I’ve got adrenaline shakes, bad. Or sugar shakes from the Snickers. Not sure.

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Only In Hindsight Can We Appreciate

Postaday for January 4th: First!

Tell us about your first day at something — your first day of school, first day of work, first day living on your own, first day blogging, first day as a parent, whatever.

The first time I woke up on May the 5th, 2014, was at about 12:03 AM. I had been browsing Reddit for hours, and had fallen asleep in my chair. A loud noise woke me, probably my own snoring. My neck was stiff, my ass hurt from the way I was piled in my chair, and I had to pee, but bad. So I got up and when to the bathroom.

Washed my hands, and somewhere between the bathroom and my bed, some clothes came off.

That wasn’t the only time I woke up on May the 5th, 2014, which is why it was the first, and not the only time. There’s a difference. On May the 4th, for example, I woke up just the once, at about 5:00 AM. I had down a f-Hour Energy Drink, did some meditation, visited the rest-room, put on running clothes, ran a 5K, took a shower, sent my wife off to work, ate some oatmeal. All of those things can be accomplished if one only wakes up once per day.

But the next day I woke up seven times, and got nothing done:

  • Woke, as I said, for the first time, at 12:03.
  • Woke again at about 3:20 am or so, to pee.
  • Again at 5:00 AM, when my alarm went off.
  • Again at 5:30, when my wife got out of bed to take a shower.
  • Again at 6:30 when my wife left to go to work
  • Again at 7:54 for a conference call. And did I get anything done for the next four hours? No. Eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at noon does not count.
  • Woke again at about 2:30, again in my office chair, hot and sticky, and I have to tell you, for the next 30 minutes, I have never been so completely exhausted in my life. Somewhere between my home office and the 7-11, I managed to put in some clothes and buy a Mountain Dew.
  • Now, for when my wife came home at 4:30, I don’t know if what I did you’d call “waking up” since I don’t know if I was really asleep. I was just sort of sitting on our giant chair, sort of looking at the TV, sort of watching it, but I don’t remember what it was. It might have been Portlandia. I’m not sure.
  • And, finally, I woke up one more time, at 11:50 PM or so, in my office chair, after having fallen asleep while browsing Reddit.

But let’s talk about that first time I woke up on May the 5th, 2014. 12:03 AM, Cinco de Mayo in Seattle was a officially only a few minutes old. So much portent in that waking. So much foreshadowing. It would come to define my day, that waking, or shall I say “awakening.” If I had only know then what I know now, I would have treated that first waking with more respect. I would have cherished it more.

Funny, how only in hindsight can we truly appreciate the deep, meaningful importance of things, after they’re long gone.

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I Don’t Have To Write Anything If I Don’t Want To

January 3rd: No Prompt?

There does not appear to be a prompt for January 3rd. How does that make you feel?

Today is the 5th of May, and I am trying to catch up on a 4 months of missed daily prompts. This is a Herculean task. There’s no way I will accomplish it. No way I’m going to write something for 124 missed days.

It’ll take weeks, and even if I had started Postaday on January 1st, I would have lost interest before weeks had passed. This is a stupid idea. And no one going to read any of this, ever. Especially not me!

I’ve gone to the Postaday website and copied a whole bunch of prompts, but this one, for the 3rd, is missing. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was never there or if it was and got deleted by accident. I could do some sleuthing, read the blog entries of people who HAVE been doing Postaday since January 1st, see if they wrote something on the 3rd. In fact, maybe I will. Maybe I will once I’ve written the other 123 back entries.

I’ve bitten off WAY more than I can chew. This is ludicrous. I never finish ANYTHING. Okay, fine, I DID finish the Blogging University April class. But that was ONE entry per day, and nothing on weekends. I actually have it in my head that I’m going towrite SEVEN per day until I catch up!

Why? Is there a part of me that wants to punish me for bad behavior? Like when a dad catches his son sneaking a cigarette, and makes him smoke the whole pack? Am I trying to humiliate myself? Do I need hit the bottom so I can rebuild myself as a writer?

Maybe. I want to write this stupid book, the one I’ll probably mention again and again, the spy novel with the robot assassin. Am I encumbering myself with this stupidly impossible endeavor to avoid admitting I can’t write novels, I just can’t, give Stephen Hawking a pole-vaulters pole and he’ll do better than I do at novel writing?

How does it make me FEEL that there’s no prompt for today? I don’t know, relieved, I guess, that I don’t have to write anything if I don’t want to.

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I Have Changed The Skies Forever

Postaday for January 2nd: Be the Change

What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world?

I want the world to read more. And that’s it. I could probably volunteer for some literacy program, or donate funds to some book drive, or research and support politicians who’s foreign policies include humanitarian efforts to improve education worldwide But I’m lazy.

Or arrogant or conceited or megalomaniacal. Or whatever. I mean, I want people to read what I write. And laud me with praise. And ask me where my genius comes from. And throw flowers at my feet. Roses. Thorns and all. Gobs of them. Piles and piles. Florists profits skyrocket. Band-Aid stock through the roof cause of all the scratches I get. From the thorns on the roses thrown at me. Gorgeous women and heads-of-state gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair out in a frenzy as they try to throw more roses.

But there aren’t enough. A black market rose-industry pops up. People start selling other flowers as fake roses. Or make them out of felt and paper. One enterprising young man makes a mint selling roses he made out of aluminum foil. The aluminum foil market goes belly up. People can’t cover their casseroles anymore. Casseroel stocks plummet. Casserole corporation CEOs commit suicide in droves. Good riddance. Their spouses (mostly wives, a few husbands) wither and develop alcohol problems. The go to AA, meet some one nice. Most of them are nice. One of them is not nice.

He’s a spy. He’s been watching Scandal too much. Thinks he’s seducing a court stenographer. Is actually seducing the widow of the CEO of Tuna Suprisicon, who killed himself with a shillelagh. How does one even do that. Just because the government of Burmese put in an order for 10,000 units and the CEO was so thrilled he invested half of fiscal 2016’s profits in R&D. But that damn kid and his damn aluminum foil roses bought up all the stock! Just so the Daughters of the American Revolution Auxiliary club could get two hundred thousand dozen fake metal roses to throw at my feet!

Newspapers are writing about these piles and piles of roses— and people are reading the papers. Bloggists are blogging about the Rose Mountain at Bukkhead’s Feet Meme, tweeting and Pintersting and Tumblring— and people are reading. C students are becoming A students from all the reading, the improved critical thinking skills that frequent reading brings.

Terrible human beings who hardly read at all are reading more often, craving new sources for reading material, eschewing their one-newspaper-town’s only rag, discovering alternate points of view and abandoning their skin-deep racism and sexism and homophobia. They start voting with their hearts and not their yellow spines. Good women and men get elected. Campaign finance fraud is a thing of the past. Trillion dollar corporations with no PACs to dump their money into decided to dump money into libraries for the tax right-off.

Libraries grow to the size of super-malls. Teenagers hang out there. They tease the trailer-park trash for reading Dan Brown. The trailer park trash read books by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and find peaceful ways to show the rich kids the evil of being too judgmental. They sing songs together in the food courts. They pool their resources to buy more roses to throw at my feet.

The rose things starts to become a problem. I can’t write, there’s so many roses. In my office, choking up my hallways, I can’t even get to the bathroom, which means I’m forced to reduce my seven Mountain-Dews a day diet to three or four. I grow weak from a lack of caffeine. I don’t write as much. I’m not read as much. The thrill is gone. I spend more time with my wife. We go on vacations. Barren places where there’s no vegetation.

The Australian outback. The sky’s a funny color. An alien lands there. He (yes he, not it) tells me the sky’s a funny color because the earth’s tilted. All those roses. I’ve literally changed the world. Now his alien buddies don’t want to destroy it anymore. I have saved the earth. I have changed the skies forever.

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I’m Pretty Much Making This Up As I Go Along

Postaday for January 1st: New Skin

If you could spend the next year as someone radically different from the current “you” — a member of a different species, someone from a different gender or generation, etc. — who would you choose to be?

If I could spend time as anyone else, it would be as Lancaster, the evil robot assassin hell-bent on killing every secret agent in the world.

Why is killing all these agents? What’s his end-game? What happens if he succeeds? And why does he choose to kill them in such elaborate and increasingly ridiculous ways? Is killing agents really his main goal, or is there some greater purpose to his scheme?

I need to know, because I invented him, and I have no idea what he’s doing. He’s the main antagonist in my terrible spy novel, A Football Makes a Lousy Briefcase. Note: terrible is a subgenre of the spy novel genre. This is supposed to be terrible. I have whole sections called Deus Ex Machina. It’s a play on words, see, since Lancaster is a machine and all.

Lancaster is an AI based on a program that was built to test agents in the field. But things got out of control. I don’t want to reveal too much, even though I’ll probably never actually finish the novel… and even if I did I wouldn’t bother editing it… and if I somehow edited it I certainly wouldn’t get it published… and if I accidentally published it I just don’t see anyone buying it, much less reading it (not unlike the novel I published A Night Without Sunshine and my collection of short stories Still Life With Zombie).

But nevermind all that. The point is, I need to get inside Lancaster’s metal head and figure out what’s going on. It’s the principal of the thing. I’m struggling with the main plot line of the novel as it is, and if I can just figure out where this is going, maybe I can figure out a way to stop him.

What’s great about Lancaster is I could spend a whole year being him, and not really mess anything up, since he clones himself regularly so that he can personally conduct “exams” on agents in order to kill them. I don’t have to “be Lancaster” to be Lancaster.

And a year should be just the right amount of time. Lancaster once posed as coffee machine at a cheap motel in Reno just to get access to an ATF agent who had stolen a thumb drive from a CISEN operative. (I actually haven’t written that chapter yet, but, gosh, it’s a good idea and I’m totally going to use it.)

CISEN, by the way, is the acronym for Mexico’s intelligence agency. I just found that on Wikipedia, since I’m pretty much making this up as I go along.