Category: Life

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Cogito Argot Sum

Nothing exists except as an opinion, and that opinion can only be communicated to people who already get it. If you don’t know the lingo, you can’t know the truth.

Instagram Baddie. A young lady with remarkable skill and patience spends considerable time applying cosmetics. The result is flawless. Impeccable. Instantly classic. She is beautiful, but why? Not to attract a mate and procreate. Not to impress or suppress a rival. Not even take satisfaction in her own beauty and talent, to reflect on her self-worth as a self-realized creature captured in a selfie. No, she does it for one reason only: the lingo.

Incel. A young man, raised in a world of Chads bagging Bettys, is taught that sexual satisfaction is his right. His right as a human, his right as a man, his right as a horny man. But the same world explains to him that rights are just promises and promises are made to be broken. Women, otherwise powerless, deny him what’s rightfully his. So he goes online and ejaculates epithets at the XX species. His seed impregnates other young men trapped in their virginity, and they conceive more hate and vitriol. So what. It’s been happening forever. But now we have a word for it. 

An interesting word, maybe even a fun word. A label, yes, but calling an orange and apple doesn’t make it red. The word is fun to throw around, to say, to pretend to describe.

“I paid for dinner, you should have sex with me.”

“Fuckin’ incel.”

“No I’m not.”

“When you post about it on r/redpill, don’t forget to tell them you took me Applebee’s.”

“Whatever, whore.”

“If you meant to say IG Baddie, thanks.”

“Who’d want to fuck three inches of pancake batter anyway?”

“You did, apparently.”

“Nah, that’s why God invented doggy style.”

“Or maybe it’s so even tiny dicks have a chance of getting in.”

“No, but seriously. Why do you wear so much makeup.”

“Because I want to.”

“I bet you’re pretty without it.”

“I bet you’re ugly no matter what I wear.”

“That’s kind of profound.”

“Thanks. Order me another IPA.”

“Okay.”

“We’re still not fucking.”

“I agree one hundred percent.”

She’s not an IG Baddie. She’s just a woman who wants to eat, crap, screw, and sleep. He’s not an incel. He’s just a guy who wants to dine, shit, fuck, and take a nap. But the lingo is easier to deal with than a supercomplex, ever-changing, often chaotic amalgam of emotions, attitudes, and ethics. 

You use words to say what you’re going to say, and then you use words to say what you said. And usually what you’re going to say is that what you said is not what you were going to say (and then you say what you’re going to say is that what you were going to say is not what you were going to say you said).

That’s hard to keep track of, so lingo. Jargon. Not just words, but words with fuzzy connotations built in so you can connect them up with any context you feel like. Metaphors, inverted. A TikTok Thot sits at home, sipping whiskey, watching the local news on TV. She’s in PJs, in a robe, she’s just had a shower, she spent the day reffing youth soccer. The news is over, she picks up her phone, goes to her bedroom, her dresser, picks out a fun two-piece she got last time she was in Cabo.

You know the rest. Why? Lingo.

That’s character development, right there. I said TikTok Thot, and then I added all kinds of artifacts. Whiskey, the news, PJs and a robe. If I hadn’t used lingo, you would need to know what kind of whiskey, what was on the news. Instead of building the girl detail by detail, I carved away at the lingo, detail by detail. 

And that’s me writing, but we do it all the time, in real-life, in real-time. We use lingo to cast the characters, stock the scene with props, and develop the script.

A guy who loves playing Super Smash Brothers picks up a controller and gives it to the nurse assigned to monitor his vital signs. Wait, wait, what’s the significance of Super Smash Brothers, are we to understand a theme of violence, or a theme of violence as entertainment? Why is it a controller, is control going to be a theme? Why is a nurse monitoring him? Are we supposed to draw a connection between his video-game character’s “hit points” and his own “vital signs”?

That’s too much to think about after just one sentence, and to keep track of when the next sentence recontextualizes all of that stuff. Even for the guy, who likes Super Smash Brothers because he’s good at it. And for the nurse, who has been secretly practicing SSB just for this day.

A gamer grabs a joycon and hands it to his caregiver. She proceeds to whip his ass.

Lingo. Now we can point out that the game was a melee game. That the kid’s on life-support. That the nurse forgot about the monitoring screen. This could have happened: while they were playing, one of the alarms went off. She could have let the kid die! No, he didn’t die, but he almost could have died. Well, no, that alarm goes off all the time. The nurse knows, without even thinking about it, when it matters and when it doesn’t. If the kid had really could have been dying, the nurse would have been able to tell, even as she was concentrating on executing a sweet combo.

It’s a joke that no one gets. The game and the caregiver had a shared experience that existed entirely devoid of the bits and pieces that define them as people and define their relationship. An alarm went off and it didn’t matter (he was fine; stupid machine) and it also didn’t matter (no one was paying attention). 

By using lingo, we can ignore the “could’ves.” I’m explaining all of this via fictional examples, but this is real life too. There’s a real human being having an ironic interaction with another real human being. But they don’t think of themselves as a collection of their individual traits. They think of themselves in easy-to-think-about words, special words.

Lingo, jargon, argot. Slang, if you want. This is why you’re not allowed to use the N word.

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Back Into the Blizzard

I’ve been playing Blizzard’s massively multiplayer role playing game World of Warcraft on an off since its launch. Recently came off an off of more than a year, not too very long after the Battle for Azeroth expansion launched. I was burnt-out. I had been playing way too much up to the launch, trying to level one of every class type to the max. 

That was not a wise thing to do. 

If anything, I should have been playing way WAY less before the launch. So that the new content had a chance to feel, you know, new. Instead, I was still in the grip of that “must get levels as fast as possible!” mentality, trying to force my main character to the top with all (un)due haste.

A new expansion has been announced, and I’ve recently started playing again. Blizzard has decided to give everyone an xp boost for the time being, so I decided, why not, let’s start a brand new character and get her to the top as quickly as I can. Old habits die hard, right?

Thanks to the boost, though, it went really really fast, and after just a week or so, she’s already at level 120. Yeehah. But I’m not burnt out yet, because it all felt fresh after a year off. Hooray for me.

Right before I quit (in 2018!) I was playing a Blood Elf Affliction Warlock running around a desert. As of this writing, I am in the middle of a haunted forest, playing a Human Destruction Warlock. Different environment, different faction, different aspect. This haunted forest is a lot of fun.

I keep saying to myself, if only I’d been playing in the forest, and not the desert, I might not have quit. What I should be telling myself is that I, thankfully, didn’t get burnt out in the middle of this cool forest.

Why am I telling you this? I dunno. The WoW servers are down right now for maintenance, and I have to do something… also, whenever I’m into WoW, reading and writing come to a halt. 

So I need to take advantage of these opportunities to not play (again). I guess.

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Rico. Over Quya.

Helicopters aren’t what they used to be. Not a bad thing. Fuel injected, fewer parts, not reliable but more reliable. Rico has managed to secure one, or, more precisely, secure the services of a helicopter pilot who has one. A Spinoza Whirlyjet, fast, small on radar, and silent. Relatively speaking, as even the quietest ‘copter will still out-shout the loudest Ford Fiesta.

His manly man-breath, hot, spicy, redolent of tacos al pastor, cheap tequila, cheaper putanas. Caresses the microphone on his headset, bathes it in humidity, making it wet and shiny like a lover’s taut nipple. “There,” he says. 

Why am I shivering, the pilot, Forutna, thinks to herself. This is Solis, a tropical island nation. Mean temperature: 27 degrees. Celsius. I’m 27. I’ve been 27 for what feels like years now. And still not a woman. And yet this man. What did he say? She’s a little girl again, warm, safe in her papi’s arms, pretending to sleep as he carries her up to her room. His calloused, strong hands laying her gently in her bed, the kiss on her forehead, and the sweet, sweet succumbing to sleep. Papi always smelled of cerveza, sweat, she remembers, like every other man in the village. But something else, something more. Leather.

“A little lower, I think,” he says. A growl, but smooth, like a puma’s, seduces her. She’s shivering. She’s sweating. Her heart is pounding in rhythm to the Whirlyjet’s Turbo Mecca Ariel. She wants to abandon the controls, rip off her headset, leap over the seat, sink her teeth into this desperado’s neck, and as the chopper falls out of the sky, devour him whole, coming alive, finally, at 27, with the fiery crash setting the jungle ablaze and splashing the atmosphere with the stink of this man’s lambskin-soft leather jacket, her lust.

Rico belches. Lime, cilantro, onions. Opens the door, throws himself out without ceremony. Six hundred feet above the Bautista building. Trades the roar of the Whirlyjet for the roar of Galileo’s  nine point eight meters per second per second in his ears. Five hundred. Three hundred. One. Pops his ‘chute, conquers the din, floats. His contact waits below. Her name is Izzy. She’s a spy, gathering intelligence for the Army of Chaos, a rebel born. 

Later, Izzy and Fortuna will discuss Rico. Oh yes they will.

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New Runnin Watch

So I got me one of them there Apple watches. My trusty Garmin 10 was losing some of its juice, and I wanted to upgrade my running buddy. Also, I’ve been carrying an iPod Nano on my hip forever, and I thought it would be nice to have an all-in-one contraption, now that Bluetooth is a thing (yeah, it’s been a thing, but it wasn’t ten years ago). Also, the fam just switch to a new mobile provider and got iPhones (my first) so it was kinda fait acompli, as those ol’ Romans useda say.

Took it out on a maiden voyage this morning with an hour run, using the Strava app. Worked like a dream. A little too dreamy—I’m used to hitting a button and waiting for GPS to connect. This time, the connection was already there, so off I went. Of course I kept checking my pace for the first few minutes, and was dismayed to see that I was going super slow. Finally I realized that I was looking at my over-all average, which I had shot in the foot by starting off with a walk (a clumsy metaphor, but as a meta-metaphor, it aptly describe what kind of doofus I am).

And just now I went out for another foray, this one a long walk to find a Friday bar. But the bar I ventured for was closed when I arrived. Oh well. Got in a decent 4.25 miles and burned, what 400 or so calories. More than double what I would have consumed at the bar. Add that to the 600 or so from this morning and I should be one skinny feller.

But I’m not, which is why I need this watch. And this phone. Yeah, sure, “need” is a strong word here, and reeks of First World. But what am I supposed to do, just accept that at 47 my gettin-lean years are all well behind me? Nah. I’m too much of a doofus to do that. Yet.

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Exercises in Style

Today my niece was watching me do a bit of writing, and asked why I had written a certain sentence. I explained to her that I was writing in a certain style, and we decided to write our own story to practice different styles.

First, I asked her to think up a place, a person, a problem, and a solution. She came up with:

  • The beach.
  • Izzy and her uncle.
  • Crabs were pinching us.
  • Use a rock to push the pinchers away.

This is the story we wrote:

One day, Izzy and her uncle were at the beach. They were having a wonderful time, but then crabs started to pinch them. Izzy said, “Let’s use a rock to push the pinchers away!” So her uncle found a rock, and tried Izzy’s solution. It worked! They went back to having a wonderful day.

Here’s the same story with shorter sentences:

It was day. Izzy and her uncle were playing ball. The ball was at the beach. It was fun. But then there were crabs. They pinched. Izzy said, “We need a rock!” Her uncle found one. The rock stopped the pinchers. Hurray. They played more ball.

Here’s the same story again, with me showing off and being extremely silly:

On a glorious summer’s day replete with heady sunshine and the kind of breeze that made you pine for chocolate ice-cream under a snow-white veranda, Izzy, aged 5 and her uncle, who was too old to count, were frolicking on a sandy beach that stretched from left to right for miles and miles. They were having so much fun, they didn’t even see the hoary legions of crabs that were marching forth-with from the frothy surf. So, it was much to their dismay when the fell crabs began their pinching. Such woe and suffering. But Izzy, aged 5, had a brilliant idea, the likes of which had not been seen on God’s green earth since the invention of bread cut into slices sufficient for making toast and/or sandwiches. “Find a rock, Uncle, and put to rest this foul and most horrendous succession of deeds accomplished in a pinching fashion.” And lo, her uncle searched the expansive sand-bars and found the perfect amalgamation of stony pebble construction. He pushed it, with puissance and determination, into the pinchers. The crabs were thus thwarted. And so, Izzy and her uncle were able to return to their most joyous adventures of fun-having.

My niece, by the way, is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

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Bones and All

My wife and I and our son were down from Seattle, visiting her sister, and their parents from Huntsville were there as well. Also my wife’s father’s sister’s son, who is my wife’s cousin as well as my wife’s sister’s cousin, and from San Francisco. Also his nephew, from Atlanta, although the nephew did not participate in this story. I don’t know how it came up, but my sister-in-law told my niece, who is also my wife’s cousin’s mother’s brother’s grand-daughter, that they, her grandparents, almost named her Schumpta (if you don’t hear the name often it sounds like SCHOOMP-THUH). My niece was not impressed by this, so she went with her second cousin into the play room to make a tower out of Magnatiles for my son, who was at the time taking a nap, to knock over.

So I mentioned to my wife that if I had been a girl, my parents would have named me Angela. And I said if they had, it would have been awkward for her, falling in love with an Angela and everything. My wife said it would have been no problem; she would have just called me Mangela. This made me laugh uproariously, and I tried to think of a way to use Mangela in a tweet about gender fluidity, but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t potentially offensive.

My wife’s cousin was explaining how he and his wife had a business that sourced gluten-free flour to companies. And my mother-in-law said she was very proud of all of the cousins (her sibling’s children and her sibling-in-law’s children). My sister-in-law made a joke about our stripper cousin. (We don’t have a stripper cousin but if we did I would respect the job, as I have had the privilege of watching a stripper perform and it would be hypocritical to judge. Also, it’s a job that I imagine is much more difficult than it looks, and something I couldn’t do, even if I wasn’t middle-aged and out of shape and going bald and a man and have terrible taste in g-strings. Basically, I’m too lazy).

The conversation got a bit garbled and we had to repeat what my sister-in-law had said, and my wife laughed and replied that our stripper cousin’s name was Mangela. And again I tried to think of some kind of joke, like maybe Mangela was a special-needs stripper, and in much the same way that people reference a so-called “short bus” for special-needs kids, Mangela him/herself worked a half-pole, or a “short-pole,” but again I couldn’t think of a way to bring it up without being offensive, not to mention the difficulty in even setting up the joke without being ponderous and tedious.

And then my wife mentioned how “Mangela” was a funny name because it sounds like “Manjula,” a not-uncommon Indian name. Upon hearing this my father-in-law said he had a masi named Manjula, masi being a word for your mother’s sister. Incidentally, the word for father’s sister is foi, so my wife’s cousin’s mother is her foi. That’s not material to this story either. But when my father-in-law mentioned his Manjula-masi that made my wife and her sister laugh, and then I had to explain to my sister-in-law how we got to Manjula in the first place.

This sparked my father-in-law to ask if I didn’t have an ex-girlfriend named Angela, or a friend maybe, and my wife and I said we did, once. Friend not girlfriend. My sister-in-law asked if she was the crazy one, and we said yes, although that might have been another friend of ours. And then she asked if that was the friend who’s brother went missing on a hike for three days, and we had to keep saying that Angela didn’t have a brother. Which made us think she must be referring to a different crazy friend. And to be clear, crazy in these contexts means mentally ill, not zany.

At this point I was trying to think of other woman’s name with “man” in them, so I could add a W-O, and I came up with “Samantha is such a hard-core feminist, she changed her named so Sawomantha.” I may tweet that. I don’t actually know anyone named Samantha.

Finally my wife remembered that the friend who had the brother who went missing for three days was her co-worker Anne. Who isn’t a friend at all. And that Angela, by the way, was also a co-worker, and a friend, and by coincidence our neighbor before she moved to Austin. Also, she suffered from a crippling depression, poor thing. But I think she’s better now. And I might as well mention that Angela’s ex-boyfriend bought her house from her, not right when they broke up of course, but after she had rented it to another coworker for a while, who, when his wife got pregnant, ended up moving just a few miles away from where my wife and I had moved, although we still own that first house and rent it to some very nice people. Angela’s ex-boyfriend got married and they had a baby but they still live in that house he bought from his ex. But never mind. None of that has anything to do with this.

Anne’s brother, the one who had been missing for three days on a hike, it turns out, is a cardiologist. In fact, when my father-in-law was in Seattle, visiting my wife and I and our son, he was having some chest pains, so first we called his sister’s husband, who is a cardiologist, the same sister’s husband who’s son was visiting my wife’s sister at the same time we were. And then we called my wife’s sister for some reason, maybe because she knew someone who knew cardiologists, because she gave us the number for a cardiologist in a San Francisco, who recommended we talk to someone he knew and highly recommended in Seattle, who was, you guessed it, my wife’s co-worker’s brother, the one who had once gone missing for three days.

My wife remembered all of this and reminded us about it. And then my wife’s cousin asked us if we’d read that long article in the new York Times about the four Indian’s who had died on Mt. Everest, about how their families were trying to recover the bodies. He’d brought it up, he explained, because a cardiologist had also been on the mountain that day, and he had not only filmed the four Indians, way above him on the mountain, as they died, but he had felt bad about not helping them, even though doing so probably would have gotten him killed too.

My sister-in-law’s father asked who was the Indian with the camera, and my wife said not an Indian, a cardiologist, and I made a joke about it wasn’t an Indian, but instead a cardiologist, as if an Indian can’t be a cardiologist, which was funny given that my wife’s father’s sister’s husband, who is also my sister-in-law’s cousin’s father, is a cardiologist, and also Indian. And I tried to think of a joke about how if you’re Indian and studying cardiology you spend so much time inside with books that you turn pale and aren’t Indian anymore, but I also tried to think of a way to tie in how climbing Mt. Everest would turn you white, especially if you died. But nothing came to mind.

Then my wife recalled than when she and her sister were kids, they went to Switzerland, with their parents, and it was pointed out to them that a person who was travelling past Jungfrau could see little black dots on the mountain face, and those were people who had died, and been left there, as it was too expensive and dangerous to retrieve the bodies. I managed to say something that wasn’t a joke about how folks could use drones to retrieve the bodies, these days, and then I found a way to turn it into a joke about gung-ho drone-flying bros upping their game from drone racing to a competition to see who could fetch the most bodies off a mountain. Everyone laughed.

My wife’s cousin’s mother’s brother then mentioned how there were some Indians, Parsees, who don’t burn or bury their dead, but hanging them in a well for birds to eat. I replied that not only was I aware of this, but that I happened to know that there was a Parsee sanctuary very close to where his brother lived in Mumbai (a place my wife and I had visited before we were married). Then my wife’s mother asked what did Jews do with their dead, and my wife’s cousin made a joke about not knowing if she’d said Jews or Juice. I was going to try and think of a joke about Jews and Juice, but instead I told my mother-in-law that Jews bury their died just like Christians do, something I know because my wife and my son and necessarily the coworker who had moved out of Angela’s house when he and his wife had a baby, live within a few miles of a Jewish cemetery.

My sister-in-law’s cousin’s father’s wife’s brother’s wife then said she thought that Jews and Parsees were a lot alike, which is why she’d asked, but my wife’s sister’s daughter’s second cousin’s grandmother’s brother said no, the Parsees had originally come from a different part of the Middle East. I tried to think of a way to use the word “Semitic” but couldn’t. But I did mention how it was odd that when I was growing up in Wichita, I happened to live with a few miles of several cemeteries, and now, in Seattle, I also live within a few miles of several cemeteries.

I explained this was because when these towns were smaller, the cemeteries were outside of town, and then as the towns grew, they overtook the cemeteries. My mother’s in-law’s nephew then said that in a town on the East Coast, which I am assuming was not far from where his nephew’s grandfather the cardiologist lived, they kept their cemetery right in the center of town, which was a problem because when hurricane Sandy came through it uprooted several large elm trees, which unearthed lots of graves, bones and all.

I don’t remember what we talked about after that.

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100 Micro-Reviews of Well-Loved Novels, Most of Which I Have Not Read

This list comes from the BBC, in 2003, of England’s most loved novels. I don’t know why I decided to review them all. I think this was sent to me as some kind of list to check-off, to see how literate I am. Results: not very.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Have not read it but saw that movie Clueless which was based on Emma so we’re good, Jane?

The Lord of the Rings series by JRR Tolkien
I read the first one, saw the first two movies. I think I got it.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Not only have I not read this, I don’t even know what it’s about. At least I’ve heard of it.

Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
I liked the warm coziness of hanging with HP in the dorm, but in book 5 he turned into a whiny little jerk.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I read this book but I don’t remember much. I remember thinking that Scout kid was a little too big for her britches.

The Bible by God, Allegedly
I’ve read this part and that. Since I don’t read Greek or Aramaic, I’m pretty sure what I’m seeing isn’t the real deal, so I’m not too chuffed to read more.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
If the Bronte sisters were brought back from the dead and vied for my heart or some such crap they’d have to reconcile themselves to the fact that it wouldn’t be the quality of one their novels over the other that swayed me, as I have read neither.

Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
I should read this so I can irritate the crap out of intellectuals by saying George was right but 30 years too early and inverted.

His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman
I have not read this but I have a son and I want to read everything he reads so if I don’t read this one I bet I’ll end up reading something like it. In my day it was The Chronicles of Prydain, FYI.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Chaz was a serialist, right? So reading him’s more about the parts than the sum, right? I mean, if you’re that kinda critic. And I am. And if one was going to read a lot of Chuckle’s oevre, that’s a lot of parts to get to. Me, I’m satisfied with my Dickens parts. Such larks!

Little Women by Louisa M Alcott
I have not read this book but it would be the kind of weird thing where I’m awake at 2 am and for no good reason watching clips from the Winona Ryder film adaptation. And if that happens I’ll tweet about it.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
I’ve read some Hardy, easily the most readable of all the boring dead old white dude novelists. Kind of a stereotypical British version of Gabrial Garcia Marquez, in terms of readability, in my opinion. When I’m old, and don’t have a good memory, I will keep Hardy and Marquez by my bedside, and just read random passages until I fall asleep.

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
I did a character sketch from this book, in highschool, which included taking all my clothes off (down to skivvies) in front of the whole class.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare by
I’ve read my fair share of Bill S. Not the boring ones. Not Troll boy and Crescent Wrench. Not the duller histories. Also, my vote on the “its not supposed to be read, it’s supposed to be performed” debate is: it’s not supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to enact procreation, but that doesn’t stop most of us.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
In another review I said I don’t know what Jane Eyre is even about. Let’s go up a notch: I have not even heard of this book.

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
I’m going to be real honest here: the book is fine, whatever, but whenever I have occasion to think “Bilbo Baggins” I start to giggle. It’s a long story, involving memes, 4chan, my brother-in-law-n-law, and the Big Bang Theory, and I don’t even like two out of those four things.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulk
This book had such a huge impact on me, in a manner of speaking, that manner being I’d never heard of it so who knows how many paths it never took me down to wind up here.

Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
My god who hasn’t read this book. No review necessary.

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
A girl I knew once thought this was great and asked me to read it, so I did, and I did not care for it. And in a weird twist this was one of the few girls’ I didn’t have a crush on, so I told her what I thought. Probably why we’re not friends anymore. One of the reasons.

Middlemarch by George Eliot
Although I have not read this book, I loathe someone who has. Not anyone, just this one person in particular.

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Someday I’m going to read this novel just for the novelty of having read it, and yes, I see the pun there.

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
I will admit I didn’t really get it. I mean it was okay but I’m too naïve to get all the references to class and whatnot.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens
In another review I said I was one and done with Great Expectations. But I have to admit, this title is interesting. I wish Stephen King had written a book with this title.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Too long. Seriously. There’s too much bad TV to be seduced by these days.

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Seminal.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Myself, I’ve never visited Brideshead, so I don’t know how to revist it. Wait, is that a virginity reference. Was Madonna channelling Waugh?

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Someday I’ll dip my toes in this book if only because someone for whom I have a lot of respect called this, more or less, one of the few “novels” he has any kind of time for.

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Did you know I’m part Okie? Everybody thinks Steinbeck is the bees knees but those of us he used for his little screed don’t appreciate it too much.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
When pedophiles take LSD. Don’t laugh at that.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
My cousin really loved the Redwall series when he was a kid. This novel is the adult version, right? I’d be able to argue why if I’d ever read it.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Yes, I’ll read books if a girl I have a crush on is reading it. But not this one, even though, at the time, I was so full of hormones I’m pretty sure I glowed in the dark.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
I haven’t read this book, but I did see David Copperfiled perform at a small theater in Las Vegas. There was a Q&A afterwards and he answered my question! I don’t remember what it was.

Chronicles of Narnia seriesby CS Lewis
I’ll admit it, I have this bias against a) knowing what a book is “about” before I even read it, and b) Jesus stories. Not that I have anything against Jesus. I like main characters who are assholes (that’s not blasphemy, but respect i.e. John 2:13-16)/.

Emma by Jane Austen
I sort of ruined this review by having already mentioned Clueless in my Pride and Prejudice review. Having read neither, that probably doesn’t even matter.

Persuasion by Jane Austen
Sigh. How many books has Jane Austen written? Hint: all the ones I haven’t read.

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
See above re: The Chronicles of Narnia. I have not read the series at all, so I have not read this one especially.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
I see this on people’s book shelves and not only do I not remember what they tell me about it, I don’t even remember if I asked them.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
I read his trilogy, the one that starts with The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts. Oh my god those books were amazing. I should review those. And The Milagro Beanfield War triology.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
There was a big hulabaloo about this book a while ago so I bet could find a free version on some e-book pirate site if I wanted to. Maybe someday.

Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
I have a two year old. I’ve read umpteen tiny book about Winnie the Pooh, if not the OG tome. I also have not seen any of the new Star Wars movies but they’re everywhere so I feel like I have.

Animal Farm by George Orwell
I have not read this. It’s about socialism, right? Or something.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Like a drug, this book fools you into thinking you’re reading something. Kind of like falling down a staircase fools you into thinking you’re going somewhere.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In another review I said Thomas Hardy was kind of a stereotypical British version of Gabrial Garcia Marquez, so I’ll double-dpwn here and say GGM is sort of a wealthy Mexican version of Hardy. I mean I haven’t read this one but I read Love in the Time of Cholera, so there’s that.

A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
I have not read this. But Wikipedia tells me Irving has confirmed it was inspired by Grass’s nove The Tin Drum. Say, did you know Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Going to Take It” was insipred by “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful”?

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Have not read it. Is it about a ghost? A bride? A ghost bride? Now I don’t want to read it just in case it isn’t.

Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
Not only have I not read this book, if I was at a pub trivia night, and the question “who wrote Anne of Green Gables?” came up, I would drunkley buly my teammates into answering “Thomas Hardy.”

Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
After I got done with this one I thought “Well, that was no fun. I wonder what else this Hardy guy has up his sleeve.” So I read Jude the Obscure. Holy crap, dude, take some welbutrin.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
I didn’t read this, but I saw the old movie version before the cool HBO version came out. And I did read something else by Atwood, Cat’s Eye, maybe, I’m not sure. It was for grad school. I didn’t do well in grad school.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding
I’m going to read this someday just so I can write a steampunk Lego Marvel-SuperHeroes Muppet noir parody of it. I am serious

Atonement by Ian McEwan
I think I’d like to read this one. I have a friend who recommends it. I thought I was reading it when I started reading Notes on a Scandal, but that’s because I’m bad with titles.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Spoiler: he lost me when he found that “island.”

Dune by Frank Herbert
Whoa. Way better than I thought it would be. I should read more. Did you know his kid wrote a book too? It was kind of weird. Fun, but weird.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
I haven’t heard of this one. But once I made a “meme” about a gibbon with lupus. I have no idea why.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
For the love of god, how many Jane Austen books that I haven’t read am I going to review? Maybe I should just $%^&* read one.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
I might be wrong about this, but I think someone gave me this book, and the age count was, like, “I don’t even read books I like that are this long.”

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Really good. And what’s ironic about that “nano” review right there is how woefully terse it is compared to Zafon’s engaging, fluid style.

A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
This is how immature I am: I haven’t read this book, but every time I see the title, I do the spoonerism thing to make it naughty. What if I ended up reading the whole book this way? “It was the test if wimes, it was the terst of bimes…” Oh brother.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
One of my dad’s favorites, so I’ll read it this someday.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
A Spot of Bother was better.

Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Still can’t believe a human being wrote this.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
You know, if I could find someone who was as plain as sparse as Hemigway, as plain as Steinbeck, and as devious as Faulkner, I’d eat it up like ice-cream.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
And The Collector by John Fowles and The Collector Collector by Tibor Fischer. Go pervs go.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
In another review I mentioned a guy who I said likes Dostoyevsky. He used to love this book. I think cause of the Greek stuff.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
This is one of those books that I think might be good but then I reasd the inside flap of the dust jacket and the description makes me want to play video games instead.

Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
I think I’ll read this one someday. I like sword fights. Dumas is the guy who’s always writing abour sword fights, right? And I bet it’s, like, free to download and such.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac
I like gimmicks as much as the next person. But too many finger-snapping poetry-slammist who want to secretly hump Hunter S. Thompson’s corpse have turned me off of writings Kerouacian.

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Holy crap was this depressing. I mean I really really liked it. I am in therapy now, and take drugs. That’s just a coincidence. Listen, if you read one Hardy, read this one.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
I know people are always saying that the book is better than movie. What if you’ve never consumed either? Then which one? Based on Pride and Prejudice.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
I tried to read The Satanaic Verses and it just felt just too unnecessarily complex in sentence structure, like David Foster Wallace with olive skin. So I’m probably not going to try this one.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville
I don’t need a manual on whale hunting. Abridge the good bits, maybe I’ll look ‘em over.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Yet another Dickens novel I have not read. Book club idea: books on tape that you only listen to while going on epic walks across London.

Dracula by Bram Stoker
I tried to read this when I went through my Vampire phase, which unfortunetly coincided with my “keep it real” phase (like eating burgers with no condiments only drinking Coca-Cola. It was a dumb phase.) I was too young for the language. Now I’m too old. Ah, life.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
When an adult told the child me that this was right up my alley, since I like secrets and mazes and stuff, it only took about ten pages before I realized I couldn’t really trust adultsd anymore. A coming of age story.

Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson
This Bryson guy, he’s a professional writer. It’s his job. He shows up at the office and writes books and then goes home. I feel like the one I did read by him, although it wasn’t this one, sufficed.

Ulysses by James Joyce
I am still, to this day, convinced that James Joyce secretly hated everyone who thought “writing” was “art” and wrote this to mess with people heads. And when that didn’t work, he wrote Finnegan’s Wake. And when that didn’t work, he died of being Irish in the wrong century.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Got to admit, there’s a sneaky part of me that wants to stop taking my medication, wait for the suicidal thoughts, then read this. A sneaky, stupid, self-indulgent part of me.

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
Sounds like an adult film title as written by someone who thinks they get the joke of adult film titles but doesn’t. Sorry if that’s irreverant. Have never even heard of this novel.

Germinal by Emile Zola
Myabe I’ll read this just to be able to use the word “germinal” in sentence, correctly. Tell me if this is even close “He put his germinal hand on her shoulder and she winced, insid.”

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
While I have not read this, I have read books by the food critic who writes for a magazine I often get confused with the one named after it.

Possession by AS Byatt
Haunting. Okay I don’t know if that’s right. I read this so long ago, all I remember is that it was one of those “multiple literary styles” novels. Or, I was reading another book at the same time that was.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Had to read this a lot as a kid, in school. Now I wonder what they were trying to teach us. This story is all over the place. I mean, do people even ‘read’ the book anymore? Just go watch the Bill Murray version.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Stumbled across this one by accident, found it aweseome, read lots of his other stuff, also awesome.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Saw the movie. Made me really mad and sad. So did Fried Green Tomatoes. That one I read though.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
I may have read this. I may have seen the movie. I may have had a sandwhich yesterday. I can never be sure about things. Anyway. did pmen just straight ask women to marry them, no fuss no muss?

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Although I took French, I never took enough French that I had to read this book. Not sure why else people read it, unless it’s, I don’t know, good, or whatever.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Wow this look like a long, complicated book with lots of characters and such. An Indian Tolstoy, maybe. I’ve never read Tolstoy, either.

Charlotte’s Web by EB White
Read it when I was a kid. Who hasn’t. As I said in other reviews, what where they trying to teach us back in the day.

The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
If someone told me those five people are Dopey, Happy, Sneezy, Lucky, and Smelly, I would read this book.

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I haven’t read all of them, but I watched the brilliant TV series, and I did read one of those “writing as Sir ACD” books, and I liked it.

The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
I have not read this book but I sure do like that title. That’s the kind of title I would come up with. Yes I’m tooting my own horn. (Story title idea: ‘A Collection of Self-Tooting Horns’ … okay nevermind).

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
I started reading this because “It’s short! Piece of cake!” But damn, it took forever. Kind of how long it took to get from the novel’s publication to the movie Rushmore.

The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Is this a whole book, or a kids’ book with pictures and stuff?

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Everytime I try to remember if I’ve read this book, I remember parts of it, then I re-read it to see if I was right, and I was, and then a few years later I go through this little pageant again.

Watership Down by Richard Adams
Is this a sequel to The Wind in the Willows? All I remember is that scene in the movie, which I saw on TV when I was a kid, where the guy was hanging from the wheel and turning it and then he died. Oops, sorry, spoiler.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Not only is this book a heck of a lot of fun, and well written, and when you’re done reading it you can tell your friends you read a “picaresque,” but someone I really don’t like hated this book, so it’s even better now.

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
This has an intriguingh title. One of my all time favorite stories is ‘A Rose for Emily.’ If this is a whole novel like that, I’m in.

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Never read it, but love that dudes named after guns are more famous for their swords. Betcha Dumas didn’t plan for that.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Bill contemplates suicide. I wonder what was going on in his life that he had to hash this one out in his longest play (note to self: check to see if that’s true). I’ll bet it was existential angst. It’s the kind of uncle that would sleep with anyone’s mother, let alone yours.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
The other day I read a review of Ready Player One that said it was basically this novel, modernized. Well, heck. I didn’t much like Ready Player One.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Read the book, drove halfway across the country to see the musical with a girl who I thought loved me, drove halfway across town to see the musical with a girl who loved me enough to marry me. I liked the Napolean parts; they weren’t in the musical.

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Went up to Big Wine Country for Thanksgiving

Went up to Big Wine Country for Thanksgiving. That’s what I call Pioneer, CA, up in the mountains about ninety minutes east of Sacramento. Not that we were there for the wine. My parents live there, and it was high time my toddler got to spend turkey day with his grandparents.

It was a nice and nothing long weekend. We got there on Thursday, and made it early enough to help with some of the preparation. My mother, bless her heart, asked me to peel “six or seven” potatoes for mashing. I tripled that. Anything less than five pounds of mashed potatoes and it’s not Thanksgiving.

On Saturday we drove into Jackson to meet Santa Claus and watch the lighting of the holiday tree. Yep, I’m going to call it that even though I just mentioned Santa Claus and virtually everyone in Amador county is Christian (with most of them leaning right on the political sway). But the big thrill for my two-year-old was, of course, the fire truck. The look on his face was like an early Christmas for me.

The weather treated us nice, with temperatures in the 50s until Monday when it finally snowed. I managed to get a run in- a four mile jaunt that started at 3900 feet, dipped down to 3800, then peaked at 4200 a mile and half later at the turn around. It was the return, that 100 foot climb over half a mile at the end that about killed me. But a cheap Mexican beer and a few shots of cheaper tequila afterwards brought me back to life.

When it did snow it wasn’t all that much, but enough for grandpa to scrape the deck and build a snowman for the kid. Grandpa also helped the wife turn a pen (that’s shop talk for: put a block of wood on a lathe, shape it, insert pen parts, coat in plastic, rejoice). And grandma made me some notebook covers (“fauxdori”) out of a few leather scraps. It was a crafty weekend.

I finally told mom and dad about my depression and anxiety. They took it in stride

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It’s a quarter to 7, PM, which is post meridian, which means after noon. It’s an excruciatingly beautiful June day in northern Seattle. Not that Seattle is so vast that I need to differentiate different parts of it to assign the weather appropriately. It’s excruciatingly beautiful all over the god damned place. I’m walking to Starbucks.

Which is not true, but more interesting that what I was actually doing at that time: falling asleep as my wife sang a song to our son, about an alligator eating monkeys out of a tree, one by one. First there were five of the little bastards, teasing Mr. Alligator, so he snuck up and snatched one. Then there were four, but the monkeys didn’t seem to notice, and kept right on hassling the guy. So he snatched another. I was actually fighting sleep because I wanted to know how it ended. Would the last one figure it out, maybe repent his ways?

Nah, he got et too. Idiot.

But that’s boring, so instead, I’m walking to Starbucks. It’s warm outside, all the trees are green, and the sky is that deep blue color you get when you give up using four-letter monosyllabic words for colors and look for something fancy and poetic and crap. Like “azure” or “cobalt.”

We like our coffee here in Seattle, mostly because it’s overcast all the time and we need the caffeine to fight off the drearies. People who don’t drink coffee either take heroin or make music, or if it’s the early 90s, they do both. But today the only heroin a person could think of is heroine, with an e, like Wonder Woman, because the sky is the color of Linda Carter’s eyes. There you go.

Which begs the question: why am I walking to Starbucks at 7 PM on a gorgeous day? I dunno. On the one hand, I’m not; I’m mostly asleep on the floor in my kids room as my wife tries to get him to sit still while she changes his diaper. But there would have to be a reason, even if I’m not really walking to Starbucks. Go ahead, find Wonder Woman, have her throw that lasso around me, make me tell the truth. I’d love to know myself.

I mean, on the one hand, I’ve been dipping my toes into philosophy via books and podcasts and browsing Wikipedia. That can get a man down, whether he’s literally down on the floor in his son’s bedroom listening to his wife fight a sleep sack onto the little rascal, or merely spiritually down due to the hop-skip-jump journey he just took from Plato to Descartes to Camus to The Matrix. So there you go. Again. Even the deep warmth of Linda Carter’s deep blue eyes are nothing against a single toe frozen in the ice-cold waters of existential angst.

But on the other hand, there’s this Mindfulness thing that’s been going around. An antidote to angst. Or, an antidote to Angst’s little brother Anxiety, who is way more annoying if you ask me. And to be sure, if I’m lying on the floor of my son’s bedroom as my wife rocks him in the glider and sings Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (his favorite song) five times in a row, I can hardly consider myself “mindful” if I’m imagining myself walking to Starbucks underneath skies so blue it’s like everything else’s not-blueness just contributes to how blue it is. Maybe, though, I’m so immersed in this imaginary walk I’m mindful of the walk.

Afterall, I’m not feeling any anxiety, thinking about the sky, the press of the cement through my shoes, the traffic tootling by, the siren call of a venti mocha. I am in THAT moment. Sort of. And it’s all in MY head, see. My wife puts our son in his crib with his lovey and a stuffed rhinoceros, and I adjust my face just a bit to move out of my drool spot, and she turns on the white-noisemaker and turns off the light, and there are no shadows on the cave wall in my head, there are no demons messing with my five senses. I am really good at imagining things. I’ve got the Matrix right there inside my noggin.

My son starts to snore. I mean, I get to a crosswalk. I dutifully wait for the light, and when the little white man appears, I get up off the floor. Starbucks is just there, but it’s kind of hard to see in the dark. I am also hard to see in the dark, and a car totally ignore the red light. Probably some jerk on his cell phone. Or maybe the sky is too blue for red to even exist anymore. Camus decided that there’s no purpose to anything, so you might as well just do what you’re good at. I smile at my boy. I’m pretty good at that.

The car is a 1957 Facel Vega, of course, and it plows through me like the fifth dad pun in a string of a dozen. I never make it to Starbucks, but I do make it out of my son’s room. I walk downstairs, find my shoes. There where I took them off. It’s nice when things work out like that.

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Donut Day

It’s 6 pm or maybe closer to 7 on a Friday, in the beginning of June, in Seattle, the year 2017, only a day after whatisface announced that he was ready to really destroy the earth. Really destroy it this time. I’m standing in line at Krispy Kreme. Every single teenage girl in Seattle is here. Every. Single. One.

They’re just being people, for the most part. They’re not being geese. They’re not being stereotypes. I wouldn’t even have noticed if I hadn’t noticed. Me, I’m here because I promised someone donuts as a kind of mea culpa. My wife has shanghai’d the gesture to get some donuts for herself and her parents as well. Fair enough. I’d do the same. I really like donuts.

And so does every single teenage girl in Seattle, apparently. No, really, there are a lot of them here. This is how many of them there are: if there were one more, it would be one less than too much. And one less of too much creates anxiety. Almost like, go ahead, squeeze one more in, let’s have that tipping point, let the universe collapse on itself here at the Krispy Kreme on 125th and Aurora under the weight of every single teenage girl.

That’s angst. But we’re still one away from that. The prepunultimate teenage girl is maybe that one by the door, with the blonde hair, blue eyes, braces, shirt, shorts, shoes, cell phone, donut-hungry grin. She represents pre-angst. Let’s call it prangst.

I am, me, hungry for prangst. I have been noticing a lot of things lately that are semi-connected which add up to a kind of frisson. I listened to a podcast today about Camus, and absurdism, which drifted into a discussion of Mindfulness. I have a friend who has been encouraging to me to try mindfulness, by coincidence. I have anxiety. But I value it because it makes me hypervigilant, which I take pride in. If I give up my anxiety entirely, I’ll lose my identity. But it’s making me miserable. I need to be almost anxious. Prangst.

And that’s where the frisson comes in. I am not worried, yet, that the number of teenage girls in here will reach a critical mass, yet. But I am maybe worried that I’ll be worried about it if one more comes in. And, here’s the thing, I’m being very mindful of my worries. I am in the moment. I am surrounded by almost but not quite nearly too many teenage girls.

At no point whatsoever do I wonder, at all, WHY there are so many freakin’ teenage girls here.

Somehow, the lines moves, and I’m in front of the counter. I look back– the line is exactly as long as it was when I came in. For every teenage girl that left, a new one has come. I don’t know you, whoever you are, reading this. I don’t know what teenage girls symbolize for you. And I don’t want to guess, and I refuse to worry about what you think I must mean by saying I don’t want to guess. I’m just saying that these teenage girls are not a mass of individuals, but are collective consciousness, and they are timing their exits and entries with mathematical precision. I’d thank one of them if I thought she could speak for all of them. But of course she can’t.

The guy behind the counter asks me what I’d like to have. He is utterly oblivious to how many teenage girls are in here. That’s either because he’s not hypervigilant like me, or he’s used to it. Probably, this precise number of teenage girls has been here all day. Every day. Teenage girls, it turns out, existentially, are defined by how there are always the exact same number of them in the universe, and this Krispy Kreme on 125th and Aurora is a splinter of the hologram that reflects that entire universe.

I tell the guy I want three of those and two of those and one of those and one of those and two of those. He asks me if I want a free donut.

The question is so straightforward, so simple. “Do you want a free donut?” In any other context I would assume it’s a rhetorical question. I mean, the answer is always yes. Always. Even after I’ve chose nine other donuts that I clearly have every intention of paying for, the answer is yes. And so, despite myself, I say yes. It’s automatic. And he asks me which one I want. He doesn’t mean one of the ones in the box he’s building for me. He means a tenth donut.

I glance around. The line is now one teenage girl longer than it was before. I start to sweat. I need to leave. I tell him I’ll have one of the hot ones. He tries to hand it to me, I point at the box. I glance back at the door. There’s a teenage girl standing outside of it, dark hair, dark eyes, jeans with holes on the knees, baggy sweathshirt. She’s not coming inside yet, she just talking on her cell phone. A baggy sweatshirt in Seattle on absolutely gorgeous day, a warm sunny day. We’re all going to die.

The guy scoots over to the registers and I follow suit. You know those new chip-card readers? If you have a credit card with one of those chips on it, what you do is you try to slide it like you used to do with your older credit cards, and then the machine tells you, no, stupid, insert the chip part and wait. Well, this time I don’t fuck it up. I insert. The machine almost sighs. Like, finally. For myself, I am willfully not using my peripheral vision to see if that final teenage girl has come in yet. Because my peripheral vision has already told me that  none of them have left.

The guy hands me my receipt. I try to grab it but I’ve already got my box of nine donuts plus one free one in my hands. I can’t use a number higher than nine anymore, because that’s one too many and I don’t want the impending teenage girl singularity and the donut singularity to fight over which one will collapse the universe and which one is just going to be along for the ride. I don’t even remember the guy handing me the box in the first place.
It occurs to me that whoever wins, the donuts or the teenage girls, I better call “shotgun” because you don’t want to be in the backseat when the universe ends.

But it doesn’t end, and I make it outside. I get in my car and sit there, looking at the teenage girls swarming in the door, out the door. I could say what it’s like, but I’ve already said I don’t know you, don’t know what you think of when you read the words “teenage girls.” So I can’t say what it’s like.

I start the car. The radio blares. The DJ is blathering about something, and doing an excellent job of it. Earning that daily bread. He says that I shouldn’t forget that today is Free Donut Day. I can here the capital letters in his voice.

Well, shit.