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We Are We Are, Apethetic

faux-slam by Jason Edwards

I know this girl named Anne. Her last name is Alice. And Ann Alice’s analysis of our present political situation is that there’s too much consternation over the alleged conflagration from the perturbation of right versus left, paciderm v. mule, old fart versus fool, shit versus stool, tool versus mess, the eight years of republican theft and our third year running now of what little hope we have, bereft of choice cause the freedom of choosing’s bruising anyone cruising to a school of thinking that if we’re all sinking it’s because the boat’s floating on the bloated corpses of corporation-floor killing. Miss Ann is no misanthrope, knows we no longer linger in an Eden of cooperation, a nation as guided by Kardashian flashing as the cash passing haphazardly and ever faster between slick-suited bastards richer for bitching at politicians itching to get re-elected at the cost of respect from the incorrect left. Miss Alice strokes her toes in the sand and understands better than any woman or man we stopped living in Wonderland in a time long long ago and so far far away you might as well say it was all a load of fiction from the start anyway. Ann Alice insists she doesn’t know much about politics except it’s full of Dicks and Chaneys chained to their rage and claiming we need to hate a man just because he loves another man, or hate a woman who’s a lesbian, or hate woman who’s forced to get an abortion, or a family that needs to go on welfare again, hate all of them, while at the same time it’s no crime for a corporation to drop a dime and steal a man’s pension, perfectly fine to ship his job to another land. Ann knows all of this. But that’s not the point, she says. You’re the point, she says. You point and you rail and say we need to raise hell but if there’s a devil in madness why do you all stay sane? Complacency’s not laziness it’s just a tight leash on craziness and you can make fun of the 99 sittin in streets slapping white-boy beats on drums paid for from sheets of sleeping with the enemy from new-born wail to age twenty three, but Alice told me she doesn’t see your op-ed pieces and your talk-radio pleadings doing anything except singing to choirs themselves made of liars carrying hymnals where every song’s the same: the other’s side’s to blame. Your masters are baiting you and creating pollution masked as solutions but there’s no execution in the excruciating sameness of every-day hollering at white collared bothering while retro kids eat collard greens cause it’s ironic and not because it’s the only thing. And don’t bother asking Ann Alice to ponder a preferred course of action, there’s no satisfaction in traction if the hill you end up climbing still sublime with the slime of just another set of elites replete with the sod of the defeated on their cleats, no matter what message they’re bleating. Short of retreating, Ann Alice’s analysis of the present political situation is that we’re shit out of luck, because we can either keep beating our feet on streets of stupidity, or just not give a fuck.

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A Publishing Glut

Rife With TyposBeen meaning to get some of these “published” over at Rife With Typos for a while now, from last year… I got lazy around July or so, and while I did write a few things, I entered a heavy meh stage. I don’t know of meh is a Yiddish word, but I bet they got a word for it.

Then there’s the daily stories I’ve been writing over at 750words.com. This, you see, is the examined life, for I examined mine and determined that I’d been wasting too much time with mindless internet surfing and meme chasing. The new trivia, memes, and being up-to-date on the latest just means I haven’t been doing anything remotely productive. For crying out loud, I’m 40, and I know where “Jelly?” comes from. (And no, damnit, I’m not hyperlinking that.) The point is, I figure if I write at least 750 words every day, that’s better than the nuthin’ I was doin’ before.

So here’s the fruit of other labors. I’m not saying this is any better, in the long run, for the world, than me just sitting there clicking on pictures of cats. But if you want ‘em, come and get em.

Gratuitous Violence (1741 words) is a silly dialogue written with no regard to factual history, contains some 24 footnotes, and is on the subject of predestination. Sort of.

One Vagina in Particular (2068 words) was written for no other reason than the last sentence.

The Fattest Zombie in the World (1802 words) is yet another zombie story (I’m trying to write enough to get a whole book of ‘em together) and is almost nearly in a more traditional vein than my usual zombie nonsense.

On the Day of My Mother’s Funeral I Woke Up a Changed Man (3368 words) is written with no apologies or even regard for Franz Kafka, and didn’t get put up on the website sooner because it’s so darn (for me) long (that’s what she said!).

Max is a Total Retard (663 words) was written back in 2004, an “assignment” from a little writing club we were trying to get started. I don’t recall what the assignment was.

The Way of the Hummingbird (951 words) was written in 2006 and I don’t know why I wrote it, but it’s got a stinger at the end, where I get all sanctimonious on your ass.

And the following ten were written one on each day this year, in more or less one sitting, and with no real purpose in mind. If you want, send me an email and I’ll print them in booklet form and you can give it to your friends and they will say “Gosh, I never met anyone before who really does know an actual megalomaniacal lunatic.”

Being Mila Kunis (posted on this blog January 1st) | Fate for Dummies | Death by Laundry | Suicide Note | The Most Important Person in the Restaurant | Lester Waiting (posted on this blog January 7th) | Your Name Was Albert | Step On A Crack | Twins | There Is No I in Assume

Enjoy.

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Goldfinger- review on Goodreads

GoldfingerGoldfinger by Ian Fleming

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Took me a long time to get through this, much much longer than needed. You decide if that’s good or bad– I was able to put it down for long periods of time, but always able to come back to it. All things considered, a pretty straight-forward read.

This is the only Fleming I’ve read, so I can’t compare this one with other Bond novels. I can compare it with the films, I suppose, though I’ve never seen the film version of Goldfinger (although I have seen A View to a Kill, which was based on Goldfinger). To say the book Bond is different from the film Bond is a huge understatement. The book Bond goes in for the finer things, cars, wines, delicacies, exotic women. But otherwise he’s nowhere near as slick. Full of doubt, not nearly as cocksure and confident. Less of a McGyver, and not at all equipped with cool gadgets.

The book includes unabashed sexism, which we might claim to see in the films. But the racism is almost reason to not read the book at all. Other than that, the plot itself is simply ridiculous. And Bond doesn’t really do much at all except follow Goldfinger around Europe. There are a few “spy” scenes with the sneaking around and the intel-gathering, but they’re meager– or, at least, not at all what I expected. Sort of boring, really, which is the opposite of what spy-work should be, in my opinion.

That said, I’m sure Fleming fans are just as satisfied with Godlfinger as they are with other Bond novels. This is not a book that’s going to change one’s status as a reader or non-reader of Ian Fleming. I only started it myself because I wanted to write a spy novel myself and I felt I should look at the archetype. Turns out what I wanted to write was the book version of the movie versions, not the original books themselves. Lesson learned.

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The Week In Review

Can’t decide if the weekly Week in Review should be on Saturday or Sunday. I like the idea of Saturday, seventh day and all that. But then Sunday’s really the end of the weekend, and the weekend is the cap to the week. So I’m leaning towards Sunday.

That means Saturday is fiction day, not Sunday, although January 1st, first blog of the year, was fiction. A story I wrote called “Being Mila Kunis,” which I started via the daily exercise at 750words.com. I’m going to post that story over at Rife With Typos, my short-story archive. I have a bunch of others to post there as well: “Fate for Dummies,” “Death by Laundry,” “Suicide Note,” “The Most Important Person in the Restaurant,” “Lester Waiting,” “Your Name was Albert,” and “Step on a Crack.” Those were the stories I wrote, each day, this week. “Lester Waiting” you can read now- I posted it as my Saturday blog entry.

Monday I posted a review, from Goodreads, of The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick. Right now Mondays are looking good as book review days. That’ll, maybe, keep me on track to read one book per week this year, a long time resolution of mine. Tomorrow I’ll post a review of Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger. I tell you this so you can skip Mondays with no fear of missing out on anything.

Tuesday was a post about testing out a Facebook thing, and squaking a bit about how I want to be productive. Not sure if that means Tuesdays will be rant n’ rave days, or what. We’ll have to see. Nothing’s set in stone. Speaking of stone, here’s a picture of Emma Stone, also for no good reason.

Wednesday was a faux-slam poem, one I wrote to read at my birthday party, and since I like writing that kind of thing, I’m liking the idea of Wednesday being faux-slam poetry day. You have been warned.

Thursday was a column on sleep-texting, written as if I worked for a college newspaper and was majoring in I-Want-to-Be-Dave-Barry. I hope that’s only insulting to college-newspaper journalists, and not Dave Barry himself, who is legend. I only called it that to differentiate from I-Want-to-Work-for-the-Onion. Thursdays may feature one or either style.

Friday was about home improvement. In so far as I very much doubt I possess the work ethic to actually stick to regular blogging for any extended length of time, it’s pointless for me to say Fridays will always be about home improvement. Maybe next Friday I’ll write about World of Warcraft. Or maybe I won’t write anything at all, and just play World of Warcraft. That’s usually how it goes.

Saturday I didn’t post anything, but just now I posted “Lester Waiting” and dated it as if it had been posted Saturday. That’s not cheating; that’s blogging.

So there’s the week in review. Next week’s week in review might not be about blogging. It might be about running. Or about World of Warcraft. Or Emma Stone. I’m not making any promises.

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Lester Waiting

fiction by Jason Edwards

Lester sits in his rocking chair on his porch smoking a cheroot. Well, almost. The rocking chair doesn’t really rock very much, because it’s more of an overstuffed easy chair, had it longer than his oldest child (42, a complete waste of space). And the porch is more like a den, since it’s really a den, something the real-estate bitches call a “bonus room.” Bonus, my ass, Lester likes to say to himself. And the cheroot is really just an old ball-point pen he found lying around. One of his wife’s. The ones she used to do the crossword puzzles with. She used to be pretty damned good at them.

Actually, come to think of it, Lester isn’t really sure what a cheroot is. He knows cowboys smoke them on occasion, out on the prairie. Or out in the Badlands, wherever those are. Lester likes to think he had a pretty good life once, idle, sitting around in his rocking chair, reading westerns, sipping on coffee so bitter it would stain your socks. But he’s never really ever read a western. Go up to him some time and say “just washed my hair with some Zane Grey” and he’d chalk that up to the fancy way those Madison avenue assholes advertise shampoo.

It’s not dark in the den, but it soon will be. Lester decided, when his wife died, he’d stick it out in the house as long as there was one bulb still burning. Then he waited for that pop in each room. The bedrooms went first. When the bathroom went, he barely noticed. When the bulbs in the kitchen went, there was some trouble, but then he started opening the refrigerator to see things if he needed to. Then he had a bad thought– does the refrigerator bulb count? Because those never go out. And then one day it did go out and he decided that was that and now, four years later, the only bulb left was here in the den. And so he waited.

He waits under the bulb, which now burns twenty-four hours a day, in his overstuffed chair, a gift from his wife. Anniversary. His gift to her was that damned baby, which she discovered was inside her a month or so later. Then they had another one. A girl, not much use to anyone. Then one more boy, a sickly thing, liked rock n’ roll and voted democrat and Lester sometimes forgot his name. He hadn’t spoken to any of them since the wife died.

He waits under the bulb, pretends he’s in a rocking chair, pretends he’s on the porch, smoking a cheroot and sipping really bad coffee, waiting for his wife to come back from some damn charity thing or another. She was always doing that, volunteering down at the church or taking baked goods to the old folks in that home they had on Park. Well, sort of. She never actually volunteered for anything, was sort of a bitter woman, and a cynic, and died of heart failure one night in their bed. It had been years since he’d touched her, and when he did, and she was cold, he wasn’t sure if that meant she was dead, or if that was just what old women felt like. But after he’d shouted in her ear a few times and threatened to burn his own toast if she didn’t wake up, and she didn’t wake up, he called the paramedics.

Sits in that chair and sometimes gets up to eat a cold can of soup or maybe some bread that those volunteer bitches bring over now and again. Real soup, not pretend soup this time. Real bread. He barely tastes it. Drinks water from a glass he never washes, never needs to, water right out of the tap. Did you know they sell bottled water to people these days? Small little bottles if you want them, even for people who have plumbing? Waste of space.

Sometimes he falls asleep in the chair, and every so often he wakes up and thinks about it and goes to clean himself and change his clothes. Somebody washes them every once in a while. He never turns on the TV. Sometimes, if he’s feeling frisky, he pretends to turn on the TV. But then he realizes it’s pretty stupid to keep a TV on the porch, so he pretends to turn it off and then unpretends it away.

Lester had led an unremarkable life, he knows it, and he also knows that he’ll be dead soon, which is fine. Not that he’s looking forward to it, anticipating it. More like death is a Wednesday and who complains about Wednesdays? Just a day like any other. He’s pretty sure he’ll be dead when this last bulb burns out. Knows it like he knows he doesn’t know what a cheroot is.

Once, when he was asleep, that girl, his daughter, came over. She flipped the switch off so he could sleep in the dark, and the darn thing went pop, so she changed it. Climbed right up on top of him and changed it. Actually, that happened more than once. The bulbs he keeps in the garage are pretty damned cheap.

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Brightness

We did some home unimprovement tonight. One problem with our house is that’s a bit dark in places, and the living room doesn’t have any light fixtures at all, so we’ve been making do with lamps. But it’s just not enough. And we barely ever use the ceiling fan, anyway.

It was a bit of a chore. Getting the ceiling fan down was easier than we let it be. I ended up taking about more of the motor assemply than needed, but I would have had to have done so eventually anyway, to store the darn thing, so there’s that. Unwiring the fan was easy, and wiring the new light was even easier. And we did it all in the dark, since the circuit breaker was off. Used the headlamp that I got when I ran the Las Vegas Half Marathon (the one that’s run at night).

The truly hard part, the 45 minute part of the hour-long job, was getting the new fixture mounted. We were the victim of some shenanigans, as whomever it was the installed the ceiling fan in the first place did so at the expense of the light box in the ceiling, which I had to twist back into shape. That made my mounting screws crooked, but with a little perseverance, we managed.

Why tell you all this? Because it’s Friday, it’s a little after 9 PM, I don’t want to spend the rest of the night surfing Reddit, so I’m giving myself a pat on the back via blog bragging. What’s that? You’re out drinking and partying like people are supposed to on Friday nights? Heh. Youth.

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I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This, Forgive Me If It Goes Astray

Have you heard that texting is ruining the English language? Well, it’s true. Just like every other small innovation that comes along and gives us a new way to communicate. All those kids with their LOLs and their WTFs (that last one stands for “Why the Face,” by the way. I love you, Phil).

And you’ve heard of sexting, of course. That’s the word “sex” mashed together with “texting.” An example of the degradation of our language, indeed! A word created in this manner, by smooshing two other words together, is called a “portmanteau.” That last word comes to us from the French, who themselves have been ruining the English language since the Norman invasion in 1066. Portmanteau itself was coined in 1871 by Lewis Carroll, which itself, as examples go, a demonstration of how insidious and long-running this ruination exactly has been occurring is. (And if you think that last sentence was horrible, blame the Germans.)

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about sleep-texting. According to an article I read today in the Seattle Times, there are teens and college students texting in their sleep. Sometimes gibberish, sometimes legible sentences. And of course, when they wake up, they don’t remember doing it. I am neither a teen nor a college student, but this has happened to me too:

I got your text last night, asshole.
What?
The one where you said “I’m drunk. Die in a fire.”
Uh, I don’t remember that. I must have been sleep-texting!

According to the article, this could have serious consequences for the sleep-texter, because it could be embarrassing for them. You wouldn’t want to accidentally sleep-text your boss! Because we all know how important it is to keep a good job for a long time when you’re a teen!

It seems we live in a digital world, and we text all the time, and teens and college students don’t get enough sleep anyway, so nearby cell-phones too easily keep them from sleeping well. The automatic part of our brains, the parts where we pick up cell phones and press buttons, wakes us up more easily than the parts of our brains responsible for judgment. (So says the article.) Take that, evolution!

But I think the real issue at hand here is what we’re going to call sleep-texting. Slexting is the obvious choice, and I think we should start getting into the habit of hashtagging the word whenever we text, just so people know what’s going on:

Just ate a truly gigantic marshallow. Now I can’t find my pillow. #slexting.

And if person finds him or herself sleep-sexting, maybe we should call that slepsexting. And if you text someone in your sleep about having sex with them seven times on the stairs while wearing glasses, that would be slepseptstepspecsexting. And what’s great about that is if it really does happen to you, the English language is honestly the least of your worries.

Jason Edwards has never slexted, but has been known to flibberdeetweet on occasion.

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Faux Slam, for Turning Forty

(transcript, as it were, of the slam-style poem I read at my Birthday party, as requested)

Voila! In view, a humble vaudevillian clown, trying to get down, here in downtown, south of downtown, for my white friends and my brown, with my nonsense and my non-rhymes, all up in your face in this little space where we’ve gathered from near and far, from Chicago and Fremont and London, our nice little bar, to get good and drunk because I’m funnier inebriated, this belated celebration, itself a negation of the body’s tendency to break down as it ages, pages of life’s novel crumpled as much from rereading as the fell damages of existence, half-hearted resistance against wrinkles and saggings and soar-throated braggings of what we were like when were faster and stronger and foolish and wronger but better looking and taller and nevermind the squalor I’ll clean my room later don’t be a hater I’m as mean as Darth Vader if you get between me and my desires, those unquenchable fires filling my belly with urges and the courage to splurge the few precious seconds we have between screaming lamb and croaking goat on frivolities, ephemera, posing for digital cameras in nightclubs sadistic and pickup lines simplistic begging for lipstick stains on body parts otherwise hidden, forbidden graffiti illustrating a personality masticating the scenery and obscenely estranging any sense of decency since such stupidity should only be reserved for conservative jerks who wouldn’t know a good time if they were wearing rubber pants in a car wash and dancing to the squeaky clean beats of DJ Hell Yes and his rock-steady cleats on life’s AstroTurf with a Nerf gun thrumming foam bullets of fun all up in your grill and when the bill comes due, when I’m supposed to be through, when there’s nothing left to do, at least I can say I’ve got all of you, my friends, my family, father and mother, sister-in-law and brother, and over there my number one lover, the one I take under the covers to discover how awesome it is to be one with another (ya damn right I love her) and the rest of you got to know I love you all too, which is why I say thank-you, for being here, for drinking beer, and even if I’m not funny, I know you love me, so laugh off your rear, or shed a tear, and never fear, I mean never forget, I may be 40, but I ain’t done yet.

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Aspirations, from the Latin “to breathe”

On Monday I posted a quick little short story I wrote on 750words.com, and yesterday I posted a review I wrote over at Goodreads. Today’s blog-post is for the purpose of testing out a Facebook thing. It was recommended to me by someone who knows a thing or two about Facebook, and I set it all up, and now I want to test it, but I want to do so in such a way as to make for a slightly nearly entertaining read. I have such aspirations!

I’m more or less covered in aspirations, so far this year. Coated. And maybe I’m jinxing myself, telling you about all of my aspirations. But if my convictions are not strong enough to survive being mentioned in public, then they’re not really convictions at all. They’re barely plea-bargains. PUN!

One of the things I’m trying to accomplish is better physical fitness, via sit-ups and flossing. These two things don’t go together per-se, but I’ve set my routine such that after I am done flossing, I go and do some crunches on one of those fitness balls. It’s a momentum kind of thing, where I’m hoping that while not doing one of those two things every once in a while is possible, not doing both is too much guilt to bear. So far so good, as they say.

Another aspiration is to write everyday (750words.com) and if that results in some new short stories by me, hooray. But I’m not going to promise that every day there’ll be a new story. Tomorrow, for example, I may use the daily exercise to write an email to my wife. In fact, I’ve already started composing it in my head. It’s about a missing pillowcase. I swear that’s not a euphemism for anything.

Other convictions/aspirations/resolutions include running more often, reading more books, and getting really aggressive with my to-do-list. I’m using a moleskine for my to-do list, which, as everyone knows, makes me a bad-ass GTDer.

Speaking of to-do-lists, I have about a million things to get to today, so I’ll stop writing for now. I need a cup of tea. That’s on my list, by the way. Green tea has antioxidants, which are good for me, I’ve been told (note to self: add “research antioxidants” to to-do list).

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The Facebook Effect– review on Goodreads

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the WorldThe Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

One of the bad things about my trying to review a non-fiction book is that I’ll wind up complaining about writing style and pacing, things that are more relevant to fiction (in my opinion). So forgive me if 2 stars seems like a harsh rating for this one. I was just not impressed with Kirpatrick’s book. He tends to repeat himself, and maybe it’s a journalistic tone, or an attempt to get away from a strictly journalistic tone, that makes The Facebook Effect a real yawner.

Kirkpatrick mentions the Mark Zuckerberg wardrobe at least at least half a dozen times, if not more, making sure we’re aware that the irreverent young CEO likes to wear t-shirts and rubber Adidas sandals. The book is simply too long for what it tells us, and I feel it tries too hard to paint a nice human picture of Facebooks’s creator and CEO. And please note that I am not simply decrying a false huminazation of Zuckerberg: Before I read this, I was not aware I was even supposed to be afraid of him (I never watched that that silly David Fincher movie). As apologetics go, this one was a little over the top. Kirpatrick says, at the back of the book, that no one at Facebook had any reading or editing rights to the final draft. That just makes him seem more like a kiss-ass, in my opinion.

You don’t need this much book to say: Zuckerberg had an idea, there was some controversy over ownership of the idea, he worked hard, got lucky, and founded a paradigm shift. In fact, take Zuckerberg out of this book, and it might even be readable. The history of the development of the Facebook vision IS interesting. And Kirkpatrick does an excellent job of describing that. I did learn things about Facebook that I didn’t know before– so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

But I do wish there was an abridged version. One that isn’t so obviously aimed at “telling the other side of the story.” One that isn’t written to show Zuckerberg how well Kirkpatrick “gets it.” I really don’t care if he gets it. I do care that there’s more to Facebook than just Farmville and pokes, so I’ll at least give Kirkpatrick credit for showing me that.

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