Briane Pagel's Blog: Thinking The Lions, page 40

Here are two photos of things I like to think about instead of thinking about how I live in a world where people can pay $209 for a piece of cheese while other people starve and suffer.

This


is the exterior of the Milwaukee Art Museum's Brise Soleil. I went walking there yesterday when I took a break from work for a while to walk around in the sunshine. During the entire walk I was blissfully unaware that in less than 24 hours I would wake up and read a news story about how a bunch of stupid selfish mean people were selling cheese for $209 a pound.

And this

is a picture of an elephant I built using "Magna-Tiles" (TM) at the Middleton Public Library on Saturday, when I'd taken Mr F and Mr Bunches there.  We look for things to do for free, like go to the library, because I started a new job in January and money is tight.  Money is too tight for us to pay $209 for a pound of cheese, certainly.  But on Saturday I didn't even think that such a possibility could exist.  $209 for a piece of cheese! What a world we live in! 
Meanwhile, we are waiting to see if the State can give us a grant to help secure our house so that Mr F doesn't climb out the window and run away.  It takes about 2 1/2 years for that to be approved.  Until then, we duct-tape our windows shut and save our money up and don't leave him alone in the house at all, because the other day he tried to do that again.
$209 for a piece of cheese!
Did you know Wisconsin -- home to many cheeses, including the $209-per-piece cheese -- cut food stamps funding? Did you know they did it this year? Did you know that people who were getting as much as $96 per month (!) (they could afford a piece of cheese in just 2 1/4 months!) had their benefits cut to sixteen dollars per month?
I'd go back to bed and sleep this off if I could. But I can't. This is the world we live in.  So I'm just going to look at those pictures as much as I can and try not to wonder whether the beautiful savory melty taste of a $209 piece of cheese would still taste as good in Hell, which is where people who buy that cheese belong.

Why did they have to meet in person at all? I wonder this constantly in my own life and I DON'T have holographic projector communication devices. (Live blogging "The Clone Wars")

Andrew Leon and The Armchair Squid are doing this thing where they're going to blog about The Clone Wars.  I never take part in things, as a rule. But I have been looking for a new show to watch, having exhausted all current American Horror Stories and Bob's Burgers, and I decided I'd try this because Andrew's always telling me and other people to try things and I'm always not doing that.

So he blogged about Episode 1, "Ambush," and I decided to check it out, and live blog it.  So as I think of stuff I'm pausing the episode to note it.

1:38 in. George Lucas' creations have such dumb names.  "Count Dooku." "Toydarians." Oh, hey it's Yoda.

1:45. Yoda's a general?

3:30 Battle droids are shooting at an escape pod, Yoda's master plan being "Get out of the ambush by using an escape pod so the ship can go free but he can make it down to the planet," but then the pods don't launch all at once (to make it harder to shoot them all) but one at a time, in a line.  And then the droid shooting at the final one -- which is the one carrying Yoda? That's dumb: he'd have the best element of surprise in the first one -- misses, and then cracks a joke about how it's a bad shot because that's it's programming.

I thought at first Who would program a 'droid to be bad at its job but have a sense of humor about it?and then I remembered that the droids in Star Wars' universe are basically sentient, but are kept as slaves, and that made me sad.

Also, ever since I read this I've been suspicious of Imperial troops who are 'bad' at what they do.

3:44: AHA. Yoda agrees they got away but says they're going into another trap. SEE?

6:05: Why do the clones have different accents? One of them is Australian, it seems. I would be more worried about Yoda and three clones facing a 'full battalion' if I knew what a full battalion was.  It doesn't seem like Yoda's going to get the fair fight that hovering guy demanded Count Dooku's apprentice agree to.

8:29. More comic relief from the battle droids, still terrible (?) at the sole reason for their existence. But what made me pause here is how dumb the clones are. They have just watched as Yoda's plan has caused Dooku's forces to get out of their tanks, and have listened as Yoda has pointed out that size isn't what counts and that even though they (Yoda and his clone troopers) are smaller, they have larger minds. Then as Yoda heads off, the troopers agree they have no idea what he is talking about. I know it's supposed to be a funny moment but it jarred me out of the story. How are these troopers any improvement on the dunce robots?

9-10:00: Okay that was some pretty cool moves by Yoda but WHERE IS THE LIGHTSABER? I'm not watching Jedis for the acrobatics.




Also, the 'full battalion' turns out to be three tanks and about 20 foot soldiers, which doesn't seem that much. I thought 'battalion' would be at least 100 robots, given the stuff in the beginning about how 1 Jedi was the equivalent of 100 robots, which was some math I didn't follow: Dooku told the bird guy that he had 100 robots for every clone, but the flying king guy said that 1 Jedi is worth 100 robots, but if my math is correct that doesn't tip the odds much unless you have exactly 1 Jedi per clone.

10:08: Oh sorry those were only the advance troops. The full battalion is moving in. Judged too soon.  These clones are probably going to die just so Yoda can reach the rendezvous point to try to get an ally who's not a very good ally, given that he was thinking about going with Count Dooku.  But that's not the point. The point is: do you think you would die for a cause like a soldier would? We just watched Inglourious Basterds, and [SPOILER ALERT!] at the end the Basterds and Shosanna all died so that they could burn the Nazi high command in the theater and end the war.  It was pretty brave. I kept wondering if I would do that.  I mean, suppose you could go back in time and stop World War II early, but you would definitely die doing it. Would you do it? I think I would.  I hope I would.

11:00: One of the tougher robots has just said "Die Republic Dogs." It's weird to think that at this point the Empire was the rebels, and the Jedi were trying to save the Old Republic.  It's also weird to think that the Empire only lasted, what, 25 years?

11:01: YEAH LIGHTSABER GO YODA!!!!!

Also that was one supercool trick he used.

15:00: Yoda has just reminded his guys that they may be clones but the Force resides in all life forms. I'm not clear on what "The Force" is, but does everyone have midichlorians and some just have more than others? Also, are clones treated as real citizens of the Republic or are they slaves, too?



15:24: I am surprised Andrew didn't say anything about this.  Yoda and the clones are watching a whole column of tanks and troops come into the canyon, and Yoda's got some sort of plan and figures they can win, and he says "Know the time to help me you will" and then leaps down into battle. OK, so why not tell them the exact plan? If Yoda can see the future, or just has a good idea how things are going to work out here, HE SHOULD TELL THEM. I know it's more surprising to see the battle unfold, but you don't have to tell us.  Just show a shot of Yoda saying here's the plan and they all huddle and then Yoda leaps.  It's INSANE that the general is going into battle without telling his troops the plan and just counting on this bunch -- who couldn't understand his little koan before! -- to figure things out.

15:40: Yoda jumps down in front of the whole army. They do not fire immediately. They say to block his escape, which they do not do, and then the leader orders the robots to prepare to fire. GET READY TO GET READY TO KILL HIM GUYS.

Then they report in, and the leader lady has to tell them to shoot him. I'm not sure 100 robots to every clone is enough.

THEN the leader says ready aim fire.

But he has to say it twice. 

16:47: The robots are too goofy. Yoda's attacking one and he's complaining about how he just got promoted.  But the clones! They're watching and one says "Doesn't look like the General needs help to me."  Good work, guys.

18:35: The clones figured it out, and used the same trick Hercules used on the hydra in the Disney version: drop a rock on things.  (I have watched Hercules a lot lately because the boys like to watch it a lot, so we see it about once a day. It holds up well.)

20:13: Why do the bad guys all use two lightsabers? And how come none of the other Jedi think to just pull their opponent's lightsabers from them? Yoda's all right.

And it's over. It wasn't bad.  It made Star Wars a bit too Saturday-morning-cartoonish instead of Saturday-afternoon-matinee-ish, but I guess it was worth watching another one in the future.

Your first look at Mr Bunches' Garden Of Hope. (Thinking The Lions)

Every year, Mr Bunches and I plant a garden and Mr F unwillingly helps out and/or spills the dirt from wherever he can because he likes dirt but hates gardening.

I, too, hate gardening, which is why I don't really garden, per se.  I do not mow my lawn. I do not weed my flowerbeds.  I am in year 12 of a five-year project to turn my backyard into a beautiful wild perennial garden.  There is even a rudimentary 'path' around the yard.  It is probably horrifying to my neighbors.

When I do garden, I am as likely to get distracted by a bookstore, kidnap babies, or almost die of bees  as I am to actually grow plants, and that is only in part because I am bad at growing plants, in the sense that I think plants should be able to grow by themselves, the way everything else (e.g., people, goats, that weird branch of the federal government that tracks your Sears card purchases to see if you are a terrorist) does, so I don't want to be out there helping them.  Watering? Weeding? Do kids need that stuff? No. And kids are the highest-maintenance things there are.  So plants need to learn to fend for themselves.

The other reason I am bad at gardening is that my yard is secretly filled with nuclear waste or something, because nothing grows except weeds, and that apple tree that the neighbors' dog bit in half years ago. It is doing fine.  Everything else I plant dies nearly instantly.  I have three pine trees that are turning brown.  A bush that had been around the entire time we lived here died this year.  Another two in the back yard are gone.  Even my tulips didn't bloom this year. That is, one did but it died pretty quickly.  All around me my neighbors have beautiful yards full of flowers and trees and things that are not Zombie Plants, and my yard is just a mass of weeds and, somewhere, a path.  Don't try to tell me that if I put some effort into it it would get better.  First off, I'm not going to put effort into it. It's plants.  They are everywhere.  Look around you! I bet there's a plant within eyesight right now.  You can't stop them! Unless you plant them in my yard.

Secondly, when I do put effort into it it goes badly, like the time I bought half a weed trimmer.  That is a true story.  I needed a weed trimmer because everything in our yard is a weed, probably even the path is weeds now, so I went to "Home Depot" (motto: do not under any circumstances ask where something is because nobody know, they'll just say aisle 12") to get a new weed trimmer, and they had an entire aisle (of course they did) devoted to weed trimmers, because we live in a country where where the city of Madison is debating whether or not to force the homeless people to go somewherre besides the downtown -- not help them, just move them -- but we can choose among 153,457 different makes of weed trimmer.  I would support a YOU SUCK tax that imposes a 10% surcharge on anything that I personally dislike or think is stupid, with the proceeds going to raise the minimum wage provide housing and counseling for the homeless, and maybe funding Kansas schools for the final month of the year so that our now-most-backwards state (congrats Alabama you're only 49th!) could educate their kids.

Anyway, I went to "Home Depot" and wandered around the aisle trying to find a weed trimmer that wasn't wifi-enabled or GPS linked or made out of chainsaws or whatever ridiculous level of armament we now employ against dandelions so that men can feel like men in their yards for an hour before tucking their polo shirt back into their khaki expandable waist shorts and going back in to watch simulcasts of ESPN radio shows on TV.  And I finally settled on the least expensive one, a small weed trimmer that cost about $40 and promised to trim weeds.  I knew it wouldn't be capable of fighting off Charlize Theron for fuel or whatever, but I didn't need all that, so I bought it, went home, opened up the box, and found that what I had purchased was the lower half of a weed trimmer that needed to be attached to the upper half (SOLD SEPARATELY!) before being used.  On the plus side, I could buy any number of a bunch of attachments to store in my 'man cave' in between bouts of drinking hops-infused homebrew and hitching up my khaki shorts.  On the minus side, I could not trim weeds without investing another forty bucks, and so I have not trimmed any weeds in two years.

I still have the weed trimmer half, though.  So if you bought the upper half mistakenly and were too p***ed off at Home Depot/America/Dad and Mom for ever making you garden as a kid to go get the other half, let me know and we'll work out a deal.

Anyway, for the past several years we've moved from planting the garden in a 'spare' flowerbed, where it was overtaken by weeds, to planting seedlings in cups in hopes of then transplanting them into the yard where they could be overtaken by weeds,  to this year, when we planted the seeds in buckets and stuff (TM) where they would be flooded by rainwater before they could ever hope to make it far enough to be overtaken by weeds.

A few weeks back, we went to the hardware store -- NOT "Home Depot," because fool me once, that's capitalism, fool me twice that's how Americans keep voting for the GOP -- and bought a set of seeds Mr Bunches picked out.  We then gathered up various buckets and flowerpots and stuff (TM) we had laying around, dug some dirt out of a random location by the wagon planter we made in the backyard out of an old wagon and some backyard (suck it, Martha Stewart!) and put the seeds into the pots.

We had them on the front porch, where immediately a guy trying to sell me aluminum siding knocked one off the porch the next day.  He rang the bell and as I was trying to unlock the multiple security systems that keep Mr F from running away, I saw him through the door's window picking up the pot.

"Would you mind putting that back?" I asked him as I got the door open.  He claimed it was already knocked over and that he was just putting it back up but whatever he was obviously casing the joint.

So much for the carrots!

The zucchini -- MR BUNCHES PICKED THEM NOT ME!-- was sitting on the front porch the next day when it rained.  Oh good rain, I thought. Crops need rain.  When the rain ended the zucchini was under 4" of water, as it had sat in the exact spot where some runoff from the roof had hit.  Most of the dirt was washed out by the torrential waterfall the zucchini had suffered through.  What little wasn't washed out was dumped over by Mr F who did I mention likes dirt?

That same fate -- a dumping by Mr F -- befell one of the flowers we'd planted, so we are left with exactly four hopes for a successful garden this year.  It would be our first ever, after last year's late season drought killed the corn plant that had sprouted two ears.

Here is what we've got so far:

These are sunflowers.  I know it looks like I took them in the middle of the night using a flash but I didn't.  That's just some weird effect caused by the superbright sun this morning, a superbright sun that somehow is completely failing to warm the Earth.  It's FORTY DEGREES.  On June 2.  Screw you, Wisconsin. As soon as I can I'm leaving you.



Here are radishes, which are not growing the recommended 2" apart from each other.  I don't line up my plants in neat little rows.  This isn't Nazi Germany.  Every day I pick a radish to see how they're doing.  They're pretty skinny.  I have low-carb radishes growing here.  I'm going to be a millionaire!






And this


is probably the kind of flower shown on the package.  To make sure I could later identify the flowers, you can see, I kept the packages by them.  To make sure that I couldn't, I inadvertently tore the name of the flowers off the top of the package.  So I will go out on a limb and say this is "probably a yellow flower."

The fourth plant, the pumpkins in the wagon planter, I was not allowed to take a picture of today because we were waiting for the bus and Mr Bunches, who is in mortal fear of missing the bus, would not go with me to look at it and would not let me go by myself to the backyard to see how it is doing. I'm sure it's fine. What could go wrong? *sees pack of weeds armed with crowbars moving slowly towards backyard. * Probably nothing.

10 Minutes About: "The City And The City"

I have been trying to find a good blog or podcast about books, and it doesn't seem like there is a good one out there.  Not one I really want to listen to or read, anyway.  There are blogs that mention books and some of them are good (yes, yours, Andrew) but they're not exclusively about books the way some sites are about celebrity gossip or movies or such. There's a whole bunch of sites that talk about pop culture and which don't hardly ever mention books.  About the closest I can come is Buzzfeed's Books Feed (which means wading through pages of quizzes about which One Direction Harry Potter's Cat I am) or IO9, which only occasionally has books mentioned (about once a month, by my count.)

I bring this up because it's harder and harder to find books that I really want to read, and to read about books in general when I don't feel like reading a book.  And I find so few books that are really worth reading that I need as many sources as possible to find them.  

I found out about the book I'm reading right now, The City And The City, by China Mieville, through (I think) an IO9 article about scifi books for people who don't like scifi, or close enough to that.  They had Slaughterhouse-Five on there, which made my list of the top scifi books ever, and people forget that book is scifi.  So I read the list, and saw The City And The City on there, and the recommendation was something like "by the time you figure out what's going on, you won't even mind it's science fiction," which is a coin toss of a recommendation for me.

Books that make you work to figure out what is going on can either be phenomenally great (like my book Eclipse, if I say so myself), or can be incredibly stupid and offputting, like Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, one of the most overrated writers I've ever been suckered into paying money for a book from.  (I think that sentence makes sense? I wasn't sure how to end it.)  I was going to buy this one book recently because the review sounded good: a team of people goes into a forbidden zone and has to try to figure out what happened to the previous 12 or so teams, but then I read the Amazon reviews of the book, and many, MANY of them mentioned how it was really difficult to figure out what was going on, and not all of them seemed like they were saying that in a good way.  So I ended up never buying the book (and now I can't remember what it was and I don't want to use the 1:50 left in my 10 minutes looking it up.)

The City And The City isn't like that, at all.  It's confusing, but in a great way.  I got sucked into the story right away.  It's a murder mystery but it takes place in this weird city, Besz, and as the investigation starts there's a lot of talk about unseeing and crosshatching and various other terms getting thrown in, all of which slowly move the reader away from this is a murder mystery in a foreign city to hmmm what's going on here?  (My first guess was that they were all characters in a painting but I think I'm wrong about that, now that I'm about 25% through, and I don't currently have any guesses except that I think "Breach" might be an actual alien.)

That's 10 minutes.

Playlist: Songs For A Week In Which On 2 Of 5 Days You Clearly LOST And Now It's Cloudy On Saturday And Maybe Gonna Rain And So You Need To Build Up The Spirit To Face The Day And Maybe Go To A Museum Or Something

Let's say it was a rough week and on two of the five days you were just oh man I don't know I'll try again tomorrow.



And now it's Saturday morning and even at 6:53 a.m. it's so cloudy out that it's almost like the sun hasn't risen at all, and Sweetie said the high is supposed to be 59 degrees but your phone says 67 degrees, which doesn't even matter because either way, you're not going to the beach today, right? I mean it was Memorial Day a week ago and now you probably are going to have to wear a sweatshirt today.



Here is what I recommend.  Pour yourself a bowl of Cap'n Crunch Crunchberries.



Look at some funny stuff that will make you laugh, like the "Obvious Plant" Tumblr 







Remind yourself that late last night you finally beat that one level of Plants vs. Zombies 2 that had been bedeviling you for like three days

Check and see if any museums are open today and what they cost.  Remind yourself that there are indoor pools.  Put your Cap'n Crunch bowl in the sink.  Get up and move around.  

Don't say tomorrow's another day.  Say today's THE day.

This is all the things Mr F can do with his life right now. (Life With Unicorns)

This is Mr F's "Want Board."  Mr F still doesn't talk much, and only when prompted to do so. So when he wants something, he resorts to creative ways of getting it.  Like bringing you a candy bar for him to open, or pointing your hand towards the computer, or getting his shoes on and trying to 'throw' your hand at the keys up on the shelf.

We used to have a program on our iPad to try to help with this, but that program never worked so well.  For one thing, it was really complicated for him to use -- you had to go through several screens to get to the thing he wanted. If he wanted Cheese Puffs, say, he would have to open the program, then tap "I Want" then "Something To Eat" then "Cheese Puffs."  That's a lot of work for a cheese puff that is in the cupboard right above where the iPad charges.  Plus, if Mr Bunches was using the iPad, the program was unavailable.

Also, the iPad broke when Mr Bunches got frustrated one day and tossed it on the ground.  He got a lecture, and we had to buy a new tablet that wouldn't support the program, which wasn't that good anyway and cost a LOT of money.  The program, called "Proloquo2Go" costs $249.99. 

(That's a side not about autism and other special-needs -isms: things marketed to parents of those kids are almost ALWAYS overpriced. I suspect it's because of the guilt parents feel. A teacher says "Get this Proloquo program and Mr F will learn to communicate," and then you see it's $250 bucks, and you think WOW! but then you think I have to get it or I'm a horrible parent who is going to hell."  Consider this site, which sells 'teethers' for autistic kids. Mr F likes to chew things, and we buy him teething toys to help with that.  That site's "cool" teethers cost $12.99 and up, including an AMAZING $15.99 for silicone bracelets.

Regular baby teething toys -- not marketed as being somehow "cool" and appropriate for special needs kids -- start at $2.96 on Amazon. And you can get a pack of 24 silicone bracelets with inspirational sayings for $6.25.)

So rather than shell out another $250 for a program that wouldn't work well and which wouldn't always be available, we started taking pictures of the things Mr F likes, or which we think he might like.  $15 at the Dollar Store and a couple of hours of printing and gluing later, we had the "I Want" board, featuring such activities as "Go For A Ride In The Big Car."

So far, it has not caught on very well with Mr F, who naturally prefers the old way of doing things.  But we're working on it.

One of the things we keep doing is expanding it; our next task is to take pictures of the playgrounds we take them to, so he can pick a playground if he wants to go play somewhere.  We've got to add "bubbles" to the pictures because sometimes he gets in the mood to have me blow soap bubbles for him -- like yesterday when he watched me do it and popped them for thirty minutes.

At first, I looked at the pictures we had and got sad, because as the headline said, Mr F's world was severely circumscribed by what pictures were available: if he couldn't find a picture to say it and couldn't find a way to pantomime it for us, he couldn't do it.  We take him for rides, for example, and we have several different routes we take, that go by the Capitol or through farms or just around the neighborhood.  Mr Bunches knows how to ask for a particular ride.  Mr F does not.  So he's just stuck with what we choose for him, until we figure out a way to label the rides in a way that he can use.

He's getting more creative at telling us he doesn't like something.  If we put a movie on the TV that he doesn't like, he'll try to turn the TV off, and if he can't do that, he'll go stand behind the TV so he doesn't have to see it (the TV is up against a wall, so that's a bit tricky, which is probably the point: we move quick to change it rather than risk him knocking over the TV.)

After a while, though, I felt less sad for him, because the more pictures we put up, the greater his horizons will be.  Most of us take for granted our ability to communicate what we want, or need.  It's really daunting to realize that Mr F (who gets easily frustrated and we suspect that this is part of it) can't communicate even 1/100th of the things he might want to do in a day.

Try this:

Picture everything you did yesterday.  Now imagine you are an 8-year-old.  What things would you have needed help with, and what things would you have had to ask someone to let you do or do for you?

Now imagine asking for them without using a single word.  How would you do it?

When I think of the sheer number of things Mr F seems to like doing or might want to try -- go play in the yard, go for a walk, get french fries at Dairy Queen instead of McDonald's, find a particular book, go to swim in the lake or the pool or the other pool on the far side of town... -- it seems an almost impossible task to take a representative picture of them all, but, then, it seems worse not to try.

SEVEN? I have to think of SEVEN things?

Blagger and Spinner have only
hours to find their
missing equipment,
solve a murder, and
still keep the guests
from realizing
there’s a problem.
Click here for more.Kate Ressman -- the author of Sugar and Spice, a scifi novel that sounds like China Mieville's best stuff, recently tagged me on her blog Bitter Suites  for a meme in which writers tell their reader(s?) seven things about their writing.

Given that I am in the midst of a publicity tour for my newest, hottest, best-est book ever (CODES), and have been writing about other people's great books and about how other people write scifi stories, it's both a good idea to focus on my writing and finally lets me get back to talking about myself, which is of course my favorite subject.

I'm not sure what the guidelines if any for these meme are, and it doesn't really matter because I never follow the guidelines anyway, so I will simply say the first seven things about how and when and why and etc I write that pop into my head, beginning with

This, for example, inspired me to
lobby for a law prohibiting
anyone from becoming a
'jewelry designer.'I get inspiration from the weirdest things.  I've mentioned before that I wrote Codes after being inspired by a comment from Andrew Leon, but beyond that, I have had stories inspired by a quote from The Brothers Karamazov , by something author Rusty Carl said he ate for lunch one day (fish tacos), by a review of a book that said it was about a dysfunctional family which caused me to write my own novel about a dysfunctional family, by another thing Rusty Carl said, and by our middle kid, The Boy, saying what if you wrote a story about an astronaut drifting towards... well, I won't say what, that would spoil the surprise but it became this book.

I have way more ideas than I have time to write them.  I have ideas for stories about a human cannonball, about a guy wandering a post-apocalyptic earth, about two women who became pirates in another universe, about an accident at a factory that destroyed a town and left people haunted for years... and those are just the ones I'm planning on working on.  I haven't gone back to finish editing my epic Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!, I abandoned my plan to update The Odyssey as a steampunk adventure because I got bored with it (even though it was really good, it just wasn't for me), I haven't yet finished the third book in my Nick & Other Sexy Cop series even though it's like 9/10 written... I spend 20-60 minutes a day on writing, and at the pace I am going I will have to live to be 600 to write everything I want to write as of this moment.

I listen to different music depending on what I'm writing.  I've got a whole playlist just for Codes, which I use as I start on the sequel.  It includes songs like Bobby's Spacesuit



As well as more rock-and-roll things like After Hours, by We Are Scientists



to get a good mixture of weird-and-scifi, keeping my mood in that range that fits for Codes. But I listen to spookier music for horror stuff, and I tend towards The New Pornographers for my more literary stuff.  I even have a whole list of 'upbeat' music for when I write lighthearted things.

I am four stories away from completing a project where I wrote a story a day for a year.  I've also mentioned a few times here and there that since a year ago I have been working on a project I call "66,795 words," in which I wrote a story a day for a year, each one with one less word than the one before it.  The first story was 365 words, and actually was published by Yellow Mama back in June, 2014. (It was called No Souls Will Burn In The Sky Tonight ).  Tonight I wrote story 5, called, simply, What.  You'll have to wait for the book to be published, one way or the other, to read them all (as well as the interludes, which are a combination memoir/blog/treatise on life, writing, and people. It's truly a phenomenal book) but if you check out the tab at the top of this page on where to find my writing, many of the stories listed there are part of this collection.

My ultimate goal is to one day write a mystery, but not just any mystery: I want to write a mystery in which the detective is also the killer, but he doesn't know it -- and the trick is that he can't have suffered from amnesia, a split personality, or been under the influence of drugs/alcohol when he did the killing.

I love reading my own writing.  I write the kinds of things I like to read, and so I tend to be my own favorite author.  I like to go back and re-read things I wrote years ago, and rediscover how much I liked them.  I tend to write pantser-style, making it up as I go along and ultimately ending up someplace I hadn't usually imagined when I started out, and because I write only a little at a time and hop from project to project, my writing always feel fresh to me.

Almost everything I write is about something I don't really understand.

Back in college I took a creative writing class, and the teacher talked about various quotes from various authors who supposedly said various things.  The quote, as I remember it, is we write the things we will never understand.  I've tried looking up who said that quote, or something close to it, and can't find anything.  But I always liked it, and it really applies to my writing.  Whether it's scientific advances impacting what it means to be human, as in Codes, or what the afterlife might look like, or even more abstract stuff, almost all my writing tends to focus in on areas that I like to think about, but which I either have an imperfect understanding of, or which cannot be understood by us at all.

I think that's the most interesting way to write -- spinning out problem after problem, idea after idea, in an effort to make sense of it all.  I rarely do, in the end, understand it -- but at least I get a good story out of it.

I got this! It's
"TOOTH-HURTY."
No wait, that's for dentists...Now I'm supposed to tag someone for this, so I will tag two people and let them accept or decline it.  Andrew Leon, author of (most recently) What Time Is The Tea Kettle? a quirky short entry into a world where cats can talk and objects can come alive and terrible things can happen despite all the quirk.  Read it! It's good.  Andrew blogs at StrangePegs where he mentioned Star Wars today so expect he'll have about a jillion visitors.

And I'll tag Bryan and Brandon at A Beer For The Shower.  They've been answering reader questions, in a frustratingly slow way.  HEY GUYS I REALLY NEED MY QUESTION ANSWERED BECAUSE I CAN'T START MY CAR UNTIL YOU TELL ME WHERE I LEFT MY KEYS. Hopefully they'll answer 7 questions about their writing. I don't know -- like me, they're almost painfull shy when it comes to talking about themselves.

Shameless Self Promotion: "The Thinking Man's Blade Runner," a short story based on the novel I wrote!

DON'T HAVE
TIME TO READ THIS
ALL NOW? CLICK HERE
TO GO TO SCRIBD AND
DOWNLOAD A COPY FOR FREE.
(you can also get a copy at the end of the story.This story is set in the world of Codes, my new book available from Golden Fleece Press; there's a link to it over there on the left.

You can read it without having read Codes, but why WOULD you? Go buy Codes then while you wait for it to download, read this!

There are humans, and there are Codes, who are... human? Or not? What would you call a person who was born of a 28-day-old adult clone and had their personality implanted via computer program? Rick would call that person "Lila," and would be in love with her, maybe. Which is where the problem really begins...

The Thinking Man’s Blade Runner.Uploading. 9%

The sound of explosions, behind him. He ignored them.


Uploading, 10%.
The explosions grew louder.  There were police sirens, too, now.  He ignored them, as well.
Uploading, 14%.
Well, that was a bit better.  Maybe things would get done this morn…
…the floor shook from a bone-crunching, face-rattling (because it was hard enough to rattle more than his teeth), wife-waking-up thunderous tumult and before he could even say it, the shout echoed through the house:
For the love of all that is holy turn that $($#*#%& down.
Uploading, 20%.
Rick turned away from the screen and faced the television room, where the boys were watching, for the millionth time, Collision Of The Planets, a RIDICULOUS story about the gravity suddenly going haywire...
Uploading 22%
GD IT he thought, not willing to swear and wondering why Lila’s programming allowed her to do so,
....Gravity suddenly going haywire and the planets swinging out of their orbits and colliding with each other and in the resulting destruction, a warlord arose and tried to conquer what was left of humanity, most of whom lived on fragments of planets or small moons that drifted aimlessly about what used to be the solar system, sets that could be interchangeable and keep the budget low for the ongoing series, Rick figured, but the kids loved it.
Lila, did not, and Rick wondered again about some of the programming that she’d gotten, some of the tweaks that made her seem more
Uploading 38%
More human.
MORE THAN HUMAN IS NOW MORE HUMAN  was in fact the marketing campaign for the company that made Lila, and Rick never reflected, really, on what it said about society that originally genetic modifications to corn had resulted in protests and legislation being passed, while one generation later, created people – that was what the intelligentsia preferred to call the CodesUploading 41%
By their fathers, who thought it might make them more stable and productive at work, at the business their fathers had built, as well as help around the house a bit more, what with the boys and all and how Adestine was
Uploading 42%
Well there was no way around it was there son, she’s dead and you’ve got to move on.
And so there was Lila, programmed to love him, and the boys and born just six months ago which he tried to forget about when he laid against her 22-year-old-feeling body in the morning and listened to her sleep and wondered how she felt about being her.
Uploading, 43%.
“What’re you working on, honey?” said Lila now, coming over by his corner of the living room, and leaning against his shoulder.
He was too slow.  The da… D uplink was too slow and his reactions were too slow and it was all too slow
Uploading 45%
To click to a different screen, to a news feed or sports show or his own link to Collision of the Planets, whatever.
She had stopped talking and lifted up, her soft hand still on his shoulder but he could feel the tension in her now as she said:
“Why?”
The address on the screen was obviously one she would recognize, the link he was sending information to for a modification clearly one she would know, by heart.
Every Code… created human… whatever, would.  It was one of the sites where you could upload the code itself – the jillion or so lines of information that made a created human a created human, not counting the cloning process itself which was of course necessary too – and ask them to review it, to tweak it, to modify it.
To make a person more…
Uploading, 47%.
He reached out to touch the screen, to cancel the upload, but she shot her hand out faster
(More Than Human)
And grabbed his wrist.
[image error] “No.” She spun his chair around, so he was eye level with her small breasts, perky and visible through the t-shirt she wore that hung down to midthigh, hiding her underwear from three young boys who weren’t old enough to care about Lila’s underwear.  “Let it go through.”
“I can…”
“I’m interested. I’d like to see what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing…”
“Clearly, something is. You’re uploading my code to a website to fix it.”
Uploading, 52%.
JHC, but that link was slow!
He took a deep breath, reached out for her.  She danced back a little.  Muted explosions started again from the living room, and he knew the boys would turn it up soon, again, her previous yell notwithstanding. They loved the explosions.
“In fact  …”


He took a deep breath, reached out for her.  She danced back a little.  Muted explosions started again from the living room, and he knew the boys would turn it up soon, again, her previous yell notwithstanding. They loved the explosions.
“In fact  …” Lila reached and stretched past him, and he felt her breast on his face, felt himself flush, felt himself lean back.  “…let’s see what changes you wanted from me!”
“NO!” Rick shouted and leaned back further, his elbows digging into the desk and knocking against the screen. The lit keyboard blinked out, the screen shoved sideways, but Lila snatched it up and as he reached for it she held it up over her head, her t-shirt pulling up to an indecent height and he hoped the boys were still engrossed in colliding planets, and even after he stood up it was too late – she had scampered back towards the kitchen, holding the screen, tapping it to see what he’d done.  “Lila,” he said, quietly.
“I want to…” her voice stopped.
“Lila,” he said.
She looked up at him.  “I don’t understand…”
“No, you don’t,” he said angrily.
“This…”
“Give it back.”  She handed over the screen, slowly.  Rick glanced down at it.
Uploading 83%
“You…”
“I think I should explain,” he said.
“You’re not human,” Lila said.
“Dad? What’s going on?” said Tom, the oldest, just 9 years old, smart as a whip, staring at him from the living room.  “What’s Lila mean?”
“For the Love of… Henry,” Rick almost-swore.  “Tom, nothing. She meant nothing. She’s just kidding around, aren’t you?” He looked at Lila.
She stared back at him.  “I… sure. Sorry, Tommo.  I was only kidding. I guess it wasn’t funny.”
The kids did not know Lila was a code. Rick had decided they didn’t need to.  They didn’t really understand what codes were – Jerry was only 3, after all – and by the time they could Rick hoped the whole thing about codes might be a little more clarified, whether people should like them or hate them, whether they were people.
“What are you two fighting about?” Tom asked.
“Nothing,” Rick said. 
“Nothing,” Lila said, less certainly, trying to reach out a hand to Tom.  He ducked her. 
“She said you weren’t human.”
Rick sat down on the couch, staring at the screen.
Uploading 90%.
(GD slow connections.)
“Yeah, she did, sport.  She was only kidding.”
“She didn’t sound kidding.”
Rick patted the couch next to him.  Tom came over, and his absence from the living room caused Jerry and Pete to notice what was going on.  Pete sat up and looked at them, the expression on his face seeming to show that he was trying to figure out who was in trouble.  At six, Pete frequently was the one in trouble, and Rick looked away from him after trying (and failing) to give him a reassuring nod.
“We were arguing, Tom, and sometimes when you’re arguing things don’t sound like what they mean to sound like.”
He knew that didn’t make sense but was distracted by Lila storming off and the sound of her throwing things – clothes, mostly—around in the bedroom. 
“So you’re human?” Tom asked.
The other two kids were around him now, too.
He heard the rampaging stop in the bedroom.
There was, for a brief moment, total silence in the house, a moment that lasted a heartbeat, two, then was broken by the sounds of more explosions from the living room.  Boom boom boom and a space station or maybe a planet or maybe three blew up, then things quieted down again, as the screams of the dying, televised, faded into a commercial.
“Yeah,” Rick told his sons.
“Liar,” Lila said from the bedroom door.
“Look, I can easily explain…”
“Prove it,” Lila said.
“What?”
“Prove that you’re human,” Lila said, emphatically.  She was standing, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.
“How?”
“There’s a place,” Lila said.
“Where?”
“Downtown. It’s downtown.  The boys can’t come.”
“Well, obviously.”
Rick didn’t want to go downtown. He’d never take the boys there.
He looked at the boys, now, asked: “Who’s up for Happyville?”
The two younger ones cheered.  Tom grimaced a bit.  “That’s for babies.”
“Tom, you can spend the day at the shooting gallery. Or designing rockets. Or whatever. Just go along with this.”
“I want to go with you.”
“Absolutely not.”
It was settled. A quick bribe to Tom (screen of his own in his room, a nominal expense, really, given what I am paid monthly from Dad’s company for a job I rarely have to go in to) and we were in an autocab, which first took us to Happyville, “The Only Amusement Park That Will Babysit Your Kids For You!” (Happyville refers to parents’ homes after dropoff, was the common joke among adults), where Rick arranged for one sitter for the two younger ones, a friendly, roundish robot with a permanently happy face that took up 90% of its body, and trusted Tom to stay in the park without supervision, and then he programmed the autocab for downtown.
“What’s the address?” Rick asked.
“You can’t program it in.  Just head for 5th and Center,” Lila said back, tight-lipped.
“It’s not what you think,” Rick tried again.

She looked out the window as the buildings began to flash by, the suburbs then the businesses then the skyscrapers, and they were moving at a pretty high rate of speed by the time the cab neared Downtown, but it was still obviously Downtown, because even as fast as they were going the sense of decay and neglect and criminality became palpable. Even at 100 kilos per hour passengers could still notice boarded up buildings, vacant lots, and people just standing and staring off into space (or tracking your autocab with their eyes, eyes that could follow even vehicles going by that quickly.)

Most people don’t stop in Downtown. Rick and Lila got out right at what was generally considered the beginning of it, 5th and Center, previously the heart of the financial district but all that stuff was done offshore, if not offplanet, now.  There was no need for a centralized district when holocommuting was easy and practically free by now, limited only by the speed of light, the upper limit for the transmission of information (but scientists say they are working on it.)
Rick swiped his card in the autocab’s slot to pay, preferring the old-time feel of a magnacard as well as the anonymity, down here, of paying that way. He’d rather avoid having someone pirate a thumbprint or retinal scan off an autocab reader.
“Let’s walk,” Lila said.
So they walked, getting out of the autocab and starting past the first (but not the last) of the buildings that appeared to be deserted. About every other building seemed that way, even in the late morning, no activity inside or outside, bricks old and graying and seeming to sag.  Even the fact that they were made out of brick, rather than newer materials, marked them as depressingly old, and occupied only by the kind of people who couldn’t afford better (or wanted to lay low).
The buildings that were occupied seemed worse: they had strange-colored lights coming from them, probably marking illegal labs, or yells and other violent noises, or they had people, just hanging out. It probably isn’t fair to judge that, in a poor part of town: the rich (including Rick) can hang out on balconies that are environmentally-controlled and get tan and take a dip in pools, and not be judged or assumed up to no good, but the poor only get to look out of old windows that still slide open rather than operate as ion-screens, or sit on stoops that exist because teleportation doorstops aren’t common in 200-year-old buildings.
Rick tried very, very hard not to judge them.
Lila paid little attention to the people who stared at her; she was still wearing what amounted to pajamas, the shirt now with a pair of cut-off shorts below them and sneakers without socks, all of them RealClothes, because Rick could afford them and so she could afford them, too.  She paid little attention to Rick, either, other than to shake off his hand each time he touched her.
There were no signs for any of the businesses the walked past.  Lila occasionally paused or slowed down, getting her bearings.  They went about 8 blocks, at speed, and sometimes Rick could tell the stores had a purpose – liquor, groceries, amusement drugs, robot sex toy shops (those were common in Rick’s neighborhood, too, robot sex toys having been more easily adopted by society than Codes, probably because there was no question about ever accepting them into the family as equals.)
“Why are you so mad?” Rick asked Lila, as she walked across a street where there was no traffic, about the fifth so far, his latest attempt at forcing a conversation to calm her down.  The buildings were high enough now that they blocked out a lot of the sun, and the pair walked in shadow.  On the rich end of town, the buildings transmitted sunlight from one side to the other via specialized siding: as far as the sunlight was concerned, the buildings of the wealthy are translucent, and two buildings could be built right next to each other but each would feel as though the other is not there, based on amount of light and heat that gets through, as the draw-off for power only reduces the available light and heat by about 25%.
Lila stopped.
“That’s a good question,” she admitted.  Then she started walking again, changing directions abruptly, down a side street that was narrower, and more crowded, than Rick liked.
“At first,” she said, dodging a guy who dodged her just as quickly, neither wanting contact with the other; Rick wondered what he was hiding.  “I was mad because I thought you were trying to change me, and didn’t even have the guts to admit it to me.”
They were blocked by a stand that might once have been a flower shop or fruit vendor but now sold Personal Spiders, those little assistants that would do everything from clean up your desk to fetching small items from anywhere to holding your screen, blocked our way. Rick assumed they were all pirated. Or stolen. But the little jelly-flex robots were crawling all over and the proprietor, a short oriental-ish man watched with suspicious eyes as first Lila, then Rick paused at the side of the crowd of people picking up the wares and looking at them, flipping them around and around as they tried to figure out if they were worth the money. Lila paused, then walked into the street, off the curb. Rick followed.
“That would’ve been bad enough. Just because I’m a Code…”
… a few heads turned, then looked away; Codes were still rare enough to draw attention, even here, but then almost everyone remembered that people who are Downtown don’t want attention…
“…doesn’t mean you can just alter me at will. I mean, fucking-A, married people try to change each other all the time but they do it by nagging or bribery.”
Rick winced a little at her swearing.
“But then I saw what you were actually uploading and after I got past my surprise, I got really mad.”
“You don’t understand.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“You really don’t.”
She stopped, in the middle of the street again (they were going past a shop that apparently sold… women? There were a bunch of women in different dress standing around outside, under the watchful eye of a man in a business suit. The women wore kitchen aprons and housewife-gear from a hundred years ago, or spacesuits, or warrior gear, or regular clothing, or in one case something that appeared to be an attempt at a Sexy Dragon), and said:
“Don’t I? You were trying to upload your own code to have it altered. YOU ARE A CODE.”
That drew the attention of a few more people who tried to look like they weren’t paying attention, again.
“Not quite,” Rick said, quietly.
“Not quite?”
“I was trying to upload my own code, sure. I only found out how to get a code in the first place a few weeks ago and it is superexpensive and I couldn’t do it through Dad’s business for obvious reasons, but it just came in this morning and I wanted to see if I could alter it, but I’m not a Code,” Rick said.  He finished: “Not yet.”
“You expect me to believe that you’re fully human and yet you were going to just alter your code?”
“Yes.”
“Why should I believe that, Rick? Because you’re dying? Is that it? Have you been crippled? Are you 150? I know why people create codes, even rich assholes like you, and nobody does it when they’re fucking thirty-two and in perfect health.  So what was it, Rick? Were you Daddy’s favorite kid and you died in a spacejump accident and he had you made again and nobody’s supposed to know because Codes can’t inherit companies?”
“If that was it, I’d hardly be uploading my code to a public analysis website.”
“Where are your other bodies, Rick?”
“I don’t have any.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t have to, I suppose, although I wish you would.”
“So why was it that you wanted to upload your code, Mr  I’m-totally-fucking-human?”
She’d been walking again, and now had stopped in front of a small door that simply said:
TEST
She knocked on the door.
The script on the door altered.
THUMB
It said.
Rick started to tell her he wasn’t giving his thumbprint down here but she didn’t even ask, and instead stuck her own thumb up to the door, pressing it into a little hole. When she drew it back out, there was a tiny pinprick of blood on it.  She stuck the thumb in her mouth for a second and then pulled it out as the door opened.
“Should’ve made you do that,” she said.
They went inside, and there was a stairway right in front of them.  To the right was a door that was halfway open, leading into a room where Rick could see a couch and a small, dusty, probably 10-year-old, screen.  Nobody was visible.
“Come on,” Lila said, halfway up the stairs.
Rick followed her, checking on the kids through his screen as he did so.  The park monitors showed Tom was, indeed, at the shooting gallery, blasting lasers at pterodactyls or something.   Henry and Jerry were shadowboxing, flimsy half-ion constructions of monsters chasing them through similarly-flimsy castles and mazes.
Upstairs, they walked into a room where a few other people sat: an older man, with a kid that looked like he could be his son.  A woman with two young children.  A guy about Rick’s age, who looked up and buried his face in his screen.  The older man openly gaped at Lila; the others were discreet.
The waiting room had a door on the other side that said, simply:
TESTING.
Both sat down. Lila left an empty chair between them, one the older man looked at with momentary hopefulness.
“What’s this supposed to do?” Rick whispered.
“It’ll prove you’re not human,” Lila snapped back, not bothering to whisper.
The others (except the old man) tried to look like they weren’t listening.
“I’m human, Lila.”
“We’ll see.”
With that, she refused to talk anymore, and Rick couldn’t get her to.  They sat there for over two hours, Rick watching the kids have fun (Tom had moved in the park, his heat signature being followed by monitors, and was now on Bumper Balls, giant clear globes that operated by bursts of air in a room where air currents kept them flying, in a way, so that you could careen around and into others like ping-pong balls in an ancient Lotto machine) and checking headlines and reading messages from others, occasionally glancing at Lila, who sat with her eyes closed, lost in her own angry thoughts.  Her only reaction was when Rick would show her updates from the kids, which she would look at and smile at and then ignore him again.
She was, after all, programmed to love them.
Rick thought: she’s programmed to love me, too. He wished she would just let him explain.
The door opened again and they were let in, nobody waiting behind him now, the waiting room emptied out.
In the new room, Rick saw a desk and a screen.  There was a door to another room. 
“Sit,” said a voice.
Rick sat.
Lila walked to the door, which opened and she walked through.
“Where are you…”
“No talking unless spoken to first,” the voice said.
All that was left was Rick, the desk, the screen.
“Biometric scan commencing,” the voice said.
The screen lit up.  Rick felt the heat of infrascanning, getting pulse and skin temperature and internal temperature and EEGs and more, a full picture of him being built up.
There are several ways to tell if someone is a Code.  The first of course is just to ask them, because most Codes know what they are and will tell you.
The second is to check for certain genetic markers. 
It takes 9 months to grow a viable human being the natural way, a being that can survive with assistance.  It takes about 8 years to grow a human being that could (given the right environment, true of every animal) survive on its own with no other humans to help it.  This is a long time: many animals can do the same thing in just a few weeks, if not a few hours.  But those animals aren’t as complicated as human beings.  If we had no higher thoughts than sticking ourselves to a reef and filter feeding, as our distant, far-distant ancestors did, we could grow a new human easily in 24 hours.  If we wanted to be hunters who roamed the wilderness and ate any smaller animals, basking in the sun and taking whatever muted pleasures our small brains would allow, we could be self-sufficient in two, three weeks without much help.
But we are humans, homo sapiens, emphasis on the sapiens: We think, therefore we are, or we are, therefore we think, lately, and we have brains that take years to build and fill up with all the things that make us human: love of music, thoughts about what it all means, cravings for cranberry doughnuts, a desire to get back to this morning and not try to upload anything before Lila wakes up so that we could instead spend a lazy day watching Collision of the Planets with the boys instead of sitting in a room waiting for the
TEST
At least, it always did take 9 months to grow a human. Now, it takes 28 days, from fertilization to full-grown man, less if you want a kid, but it requires a lot of chemical and genetic manipulation: years and years and years of growth and experience needs to be worked into the system in just 28 days, and it has to be prepared for the real work, which is loading an entire human personality into a brain that is ready to take all that information at once: ordinarily, information is uploaded bit by bit, literally, over 28 years, but nowadays, with codes, we pack it in in a few hours, billions of lines of information downloaded by wifi into an organic computing machine we call a “brain.”
That kind of accelerated process leaves some genetic markers, as you’d imagine, and a simple test can show the presence of those. Rick imagined that was what showed up in Lila’s blood to get us in the door, thinking that as he sat here being scanned.  But those were unreliable: with genetic modification being done more and more to actual…
… Rick instantly regretted thinking that word, even if he was certain the scan couldn’t read his mind…
…humans, genetic markers were unreliable, and this caused some growing consternation, as the law (or what was left of law, and government, nowadays) didn’t know what to do about Codes and before we as a society could decide that basic thing: what are they, really, Codes were becoming harder and harder to detect.
Pretty soon, it seemed, everyone would have bellies with stars upon thars.
There was, as Rick was about to learn, another way, a way derived from an ancient text, an old book that had become canon among some of the scientists, and in fact probably inspired the creation of Codes in the first place.  This test, the one Rick was about to take, was designed to tell if you were human by digging into your emotional responses and empathy.
Humans, it seems, feel things differently  because they experienced those feelings first hand, whereas Codes were told about the feeling.  It is the difference between seeing a movie and living through the events, and this difference is why implanted memory vacations never really caught on. People can always tell they didn’t really do that.
And now Rick was going to be tested to see how he felt.
That was what the voice explained, and Rick’s first question was:
“What about Lila?”
The voice said:

“What about her?”
“What is she doing? Is she being tested, too?”
“Lila is in the next room.  She is hooked to a series of electrodes…”
“Why…”
“And if you give incorrect, incomplete or false answers, she will receive a series of increasing shocks.  If you give more than five nonqualifying answers, the shocks will be likely enough to knock her out. If you continue from there, they may kill her.”
“This is insane.” Rick understood why he was told that – whether it was true or not , he needed to be goaded into some kind of emotional reactions to allow the testing, but nevertheless stood up and tried the door he’d come in.  Locked.  He tried the other door, the one Lila had gone through.  Locked, also.
“You cannot leave until the test is complete.”
“When will that be?”
“When we have an answer.”
“I don’t want to do this.”
“If you do not answer, the question will be treated as having been answered in a nonqualifying way.”
“I’m not going to do this.”
“Tell what your first memory is, the first thing you can remember.”
“Look, I don’t want to…”
From the next room Rick heard an eep!
Lila.
She’d been shocked.
“That’s a trick,” he said.
Urk! From the next room.
The screen lit up: Lila sitting on a chair, electrodes attached to her pretty face, her trim body.  Rick could see some sweat on her forehead. 
“What is the first thing you can remember?” the voice asked.
Rick  looked at the monitor. Why couldn’t it have been a trick? He wondered, but he could guess: the emotions had to be genuine. If he felt something for Lila, the machine…?... wanted him to feel it for real, not as an instruction manual for emotion.
“Delay counts as a nonqualifying answer,” he was told.
Erghgh! Said Lila on the screen.  She writhed a little.
Rick answered.  He answered that question and another and another:
Why did the tortoise want to beat the hare?
What does sunshine feel like?
Describe a song you hate and tell why you hate it.
And, later: Sing that song you hated but do so in a manner that will make you like the song.
(Rick sang it opera style).
He was shown pictures: old men riding horses, fat ladies crying, rainclouds, a line of kids marching (“count them in three different ways” he was told, and so he counted them from left to right, and then right to left, and then from the tallest to the shortest, wondering if he should be instead trying to interpret their emotions or something.)
More questions, more images, more, more more:
The voice said:
Why a shark?
Rick couldn’t imagine how to answer that question, coming out of nowhere, no precedent, no explanation.  What shark? Why what shark?  He hesitated long enough that he heard Lila scream, saw her image for the first time in what seemed like hours, and blurted out:
“Because when one tooth falls out there are fifty more waiting to move into its position!”
The lights brightened, the screen went dark, the door swung open.
“Test complete,” the voice said and Rick was up and running into the next room, where Lila, moving slowly, and in some pain, was taking off the electrodes.
“I think you were deliberately answering late,” she said.
Before Rick could deny that – I really wasn’t, not after the start! He wanted to say —the voice said:
“Human.”
Lila looked at him, curiously.
Rick said: “I told you so.”
They left out the back door, going outside again and retracing their steps. Rick thought he saw the man who’d been in the waiting room near the Spider stand, but couldn’t be sure and when he tried to look again of course the man was gone.
Neither said anything.  It was about three blocks into the walk that Lila reached out and took his hand.  They paused once when some alerts came on the screen: the boys wanted ice cream for a snack, requiring approval. Rick tapped yes and they started walking again.
They were in the autocab before Rick realized it was 3 o’clock already, it had been hours, and before Lila said anything more to him.
“Why?” she finally asked.
“I don’t want to be,” Rick said. He looked at her miserably. “Three years ago, I was married. You know that. You know that Adestine is dead and that my father bought you…”
Rick winced at the words and so did she a little but they were really beyond such a minor discomfort mattering much, now.
“…but what you don’t know is why all that.”
She shook her head.
The autocab was awaiting instructions. Rick didn’t want to go home, yet. He tapped it to drive around, to take a loop around the parks.
Then he talked:
“I’m an … a-hole,” he told her.  “That’s part of why I try not to swear, why I try to be so good for the boys, why I never go into the office anymore.  Actually, that’s most of why I don’t go into the office anymore: Dad asked me not too.  Seems I was bad for business, bad for morale, bad for people.  Because I’m such a… jerk.  Because I’m a terrible person.”
He sighed.
“A terrible human.”
“You’re not…”
“You don’t know.  Don’t talk about things you don’t know.  I am terrible, and I’ve been worse.  You think I don’t care about you as much as I could, thought I was trying to change you.  The first part is true…”
She gasped, he carried on
“The second part you know isn’t.  But you don’t know why the first part is true. It’s because of emotions and how strong they are.”
They were in a greenspace now, trees and bushes and grasses and ponds. It was pleasant, too pleasant for what Rick was about to say.
“I was never very nice to Adestine.  In the 9 years we were married, I was at best a complete jerk to her, the way I was a complete jerk to everyone, ever.  I’m a rich kid, a spoiled kid.. Throughout my life I had everything I ever wanted – and mind you, I’m not blaming my parents, not at all.  Plenty of kids had everything I had and weren’t awful, awful human beings.
Awful at being a human.”
Rick stared outside at the hedges going past.
Lila cleared her throat, said “I’m sure you weren’t all that bad.”
“I was worse,” he said back.  “I was so awful to people at work that dad pays me not to go in: I picked on people and lorded my position over them, and I fired people just for the hell… heck of it.  And I was never, ever nice, unless it was to later be mean.  But the worst of all I saved for Adestine.”
Rick had tears in my eyes, now.  Three years ago he maybe couldn’t have cried, even if he would have wanted to.  Lila brushed at them. He didn’t brush her away even though that was his first instinct.  Old habits die hard.
“I don’t know why I was so mean to her. Maybe because she loved me so much I could, maybe because she loved me so much I wanted to test it.  Maybe I was uncomfortable with how anyone could love me so much when I knew how horrible I was.  That was the worst of it: I knew I was terrible and while I didn’t like it, not really, I didn’t care enough to change it.   But I knew I was being mean to Adestine, knew that I was tormenting her. I never complimented her, I belittled her, I didn’t include her in my life, I kept her at a distance. I took no interest in anything she liked and didn’t even let her be interested in my life.  That alone was bad enough, treating any person like that, especially someone who has loved you for years and who had given birth to your kids.”
The cab was stopped now, asking for a new route.  Rick sent it down to Happyville, told it to take the scenic route.
“I don’t honestly know why she put up with me for so long. I don’t know what she saw in me.  Sometimes she’d fight back, tell me that I didn’t have to be that way, that she knew I wasn’t that way, and I was especially cruel to her, then.”
They were on the move.  Lila stroked his hand, squeezed it.  She said nothing.
“The last fight we had, she said that: She said Rick, I know you are nicer than that. I know you can be.  You can care about me and the kids. Just try.”
The sun was lowering in the sky, the glare dampened automatically by the cab screens. Rick could stare at the great, smoky disc of the sun directly ahead and feel no more discomfort from it than if his eyes had been closed.  It was large and dusky, and occasionally it wavered as if it were underwater and he realized that it was his tears causing that effect.
“I told her,” he said to Lila, “That I’d never try.”
For a full ten minutes the autocab’s tires were the only sounds, the faint hum just loud enough to cover up the sounds of both of their breathing.  Happyville came into sight, the gates looking like a giant smiling face.
Irony.
“Adestine… always had trouble sleeping. So she had sleeptabs, from time to time, when she got too tired.  I found her the next morning – I’d gone out all night, of course – dead in bed.  The doctors said she must have taken about 100 of them.”
The autocab stopped.  Rick told it to wait until the kids decided to tell the robotsitter that they wanted to go.  He stared out the window at the people stepping into teleporters, or catching autocabs and –busses, or taking slidewalks to their own vehicles.
“It wasn’t like I started caring overnight, Lila.  I didn’t start caring hardly at all. I got worse for a while, and even with the boys—do you ever see how they look at me, sometimes? Like they’re not sure? Nervous?”  Lila nodded.  “They’re too young to remember much, let alone understand, but they can’t shake the feelings.”
Rick laughed, bitterly.
Feelings, he thought. 
“Rick, honey.”
“Two weeks ago,” Rick interrupted her, “I woke up and I was looking at you and I couldn’t get back to sleep.  You love me so much and you deserve so much better.   Remember the night? You found me in the kitchen, drinking a glass of milk.  It was all we had in the house. I wanted something a lot stronger.  I lied to you. I wasn’t feeling sick. Not really. Sick in the head.  I had woken up and stared at you and it all sort of hit me.  For nearly three years since Adestine killed herself I’ve let it in just slowly… slowly letting myself realize that I was the one who caused her to do that, that I was the one who’d left the boys without their mother and me without the only person who’d ever actually loved me, without being programmed to do it, and that’s not a knock on you. Not at all.
So that night was when finally I let myself think about it all, my whole miserable life and how I’d been working so hard to change it since finding Adestine, to make myself a better person, to try to not be the ass… a-hole I’d been for three decades and it was so hard and then on top of it finally I felt the full brunt of Adestine’s suicide, I’d never let myself think of it before, not fully, not so much, and I stared at you for hours before I got up and I went into the boys room.
I stood there, in their room, looking at them, and in the dark, I said to them: I’m why your mom killed herself.
I think they were asleep.  I hope they were, but maybe they weren’t and maybe it’d be better if they weren’t.
I went and got a glass of milk. It was that or water and I didn’t want water.  And that’s when you found me. I was sitting there at the kitchen counter with that glass of milk and all of Adestine’s old sleeptabs, 200 of them, easily.  They were in my pocket.”
“Oh, Rick,” Lila said.
“The thing is, Lila, I couldn’t be sure I’d ever really change, that I’d become a decent person, that I wouldn’t slip back into my old habits.  It’s so hard, and the only way I could do it, really, stay even kind of nice, was to keep remembering how it felt to find Adestine’s body, already cold and stiff, to remember that it was my fault.”
The screen buzzed. The kids were coming out.  Rick wiped at his face, rubbed his nose.  Lila leaned her forehead against his.
“So I was going to kill myself and I knew Dad would let you take care of the boys, help you out, and after I said I’d be in bed in in a minute, I watched you walk away and thought it doesn’t matter if she’s a Code, she’s a better person than I am, and that’s when I thought about doing it… about having myself turned into a Code.”
The kids were at the gate.  Rick opened the door, waved them over, turned back to Lila, and said: “That’s what I was uploading.  I wanted to see if they could redo me, take out the years of being a jerk.  Make me a better person, even if I wasn’t really a person anymore.”
“Dad?” Tommy was at the autocab door.  “What’s wrong?”
Rick shook his head.
“Your dad’s had a rough day, Tommy,” Lila said. 
“Were you guys fighting again?” asked  Pete.
“No,” Lila said.  “Your dad was just… telling me stories.”
“About Mom?” asked Tommy.
Rick nodded.  “Sort of, yeah.”
Lila programmed the autocab to go to a pizza restaurant, leading to cheers from the kids.***
That night, she sat up, looking at Rick, who slept next to her in the dim of the bedroom.  She wanted to reach out, to caress his hands, his face, tell him it was all right, that you couldn’t erase so much of your personality without becoming a new person.
He opened his eyes, looked up at her.
“Would you really do it?” she asked him.
He nodded.
“You could be disinherited. Nobody treats us like people.”
“It’d be worth it,” he told her.
“I don’t think they could erase your memories of what happened to Adestine,” Lila said carefully.
Rick shook his head.  “I didn’t want them to.”
He rolled over onto his other side, his back to her, his voice muffled by the covers.  “I just don’t want to feel them so strongly.”





  The Thinking Man's Blade Runner

10 Minutes About: Splinter In The Mind's Eye

I finished Splinter In The Mind's Eye the other day.  It took longer than I'd thought it would because I'm reading several books at once these days.  I didn't do that for a long time.  For most of the past few years I had a few rules about reading, like I would only read one book at a time, and I wouldn't re-read old books, but I've slowly abandoned those and now I just read whatever I want.  So for the past few weeks I have been reading Splinter In The Mind's Eye, and also Faithful Place by Tana French (which is a murder mystery that Sweetie and I are reading together.  We formed our own book club, and are now on our third book that we're reading together and discussing with each other, a chapter at a time), and I started reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, but I only get digital books for 14 days at a time, and that one expired before I finished and couldn't be renewed.

Splinter In The Mind's Eye was about as good as I remembered it: a sort of slightly-advanced YA novel, not very deep or hard to read but fun in the way a Star Wars book should be.  I'd forgotten a lot of it, and I'd forgotten, too, how fun it can be re-reading an old old book and remembering all the parts that I'd once loved.  In this case, the underground tunnels with the Coway and the battle with the stormtroopers I hadn't remembered at all, and once I got to that part, there was a oh yeah that's right this is okay moment that I enjoyed.

One thing I was surprised by was how much of the book seemed to leak into the later Star Wars movies.  I suppose I shouldn't be, not just because why wouldn't Lucas filch from what was the first official Star Wars tie-in (or so I think it was?) but also because they're sort of tropes of that kind of glossy space opera scifi anyway: the primitive natives joining forces with the technologically advanced rebels, for example: There wasn't much difference between the Coway and the Ewoks, so far as I could tell, except that the latter lived in trees rather than underground.

There was more, though: [SPOILER ALERT!] like Luke slicing off Vader's arm in their battle at the end, or hints about Leia's abilities with the force, too.  Leia, in this one, picks up Luke's saber and begins battling Vader while Luke is trapped, and doesn't do terribly (although it's made clear Vader is just toying with her.)  There's even an older lady who knows about the Force and helps Luke get in touch with it a bit.  Okay, so Yoda was no lady but still.

Overall, what I found myself thinking was why Star Wars seems so expandable where other universes did not.  There's not an expanded universe of Frozen, for example, or E.T., or any number of other Really Big Deal movies.  Star Wars, with only a few other titans of pop culture, has for some reason lent itself to the kind of incredible expansive creativity that literally has spawned an entire universe.

And here's my answer: Star Wars really is a blank slate that people fill in.  If you go back to the original trilogy that this whole shebang was built on, they tell you squat.  I was trying to remember what I learned about the Star Wars universe in the movie itself, and there wasn't a whole lot: there's an Empire, and an academy, and there's Alderaan, and the Kessel Spice Run, and almost none of it is explained.

So we, the viewers, are free to make stuff up to fill in those gaps.  It's almost the exact opposite of something like Lord Of The Rings or His Dark Materials or Star Trek; they give you everything, and it's incredible and detailed and well thought out and all, but it's not the same as the way Star Wars felt like you could make it your own.  We didn't have a backstory for Han Solo, had only hints about how Luke and Leia got where they were, knew nothing about Vader or Kenobi or anyone.

Maybe that's why the later sequels were so panned? Not that they were as bad as people said (I liked them all, even Phantom) but because they were more detailed, any by filling in the cracks, they felt closed off and inaccessible?

That's ten minutes.  Consider that your take-home question.

PS: If you didn't come over here from there, check out my What If? post on Liz's Laws Of Gravity blog. 

A Memorial Day Weekend Playlist

This weekend will mark the first time I've taken Memorial Day off in 14 years.  Don't cry for me, Argentina -- I usually took a Friday off before it, because what's the point of a Monday off of work? MONDAY IS STILL MONDAY, whether or not you work on it.  (For more on that subject, here's a 2008 post by me on The Best Day To Have Off Of Work.)

But to celebrate a three-day weekend, here's a playlist of songs that seem particularly fit for the kickoff of summer.

Stuck Between Stations: The Hold Steady




There's nothing I love more than a good road trip.  Unfortunately, this weekend does not include a road trip to anyplace more exciting than Best Buy to get printer ink. Or Michael's, to get velcro.  But if I were to head out on the open highway, I would blast this song as loud as I possibly could, because this song sounds like long stretches of countryside punctuated by bathroom breaks necessitated by the 144-ounce soda I bought on the way out of town.  Cars, highways, blue skies, loud music, more sugary liquid in a single cup than one person ought to be allowed to drink... AMERICA!

Unbelievers, Vampire Weekend




The subject may seem grim, but the song feels so uplifting.  I heard this song last summer, which was one of the worst of my life, and it helped me get through that horrible period, giving me a boost whenever I heard it.  I interpret it as sticking to your guns, no matter how uncaring the world seems to be.  It's a great song to have in the background while you and your sons spend a brilliant July afternoon rolling down a grassy hillside over and over.

Dance Dance Dance, Lykke Li



This song is the aural equivalent of taking a walk on one of those summer days that seems too bright to actually be a real day. Not going anywhere or doing anything.  Just walking, for the sake of walking.

Prove My Love, Violent Femmes



THIRD VERSE SAME AS THE FIRST we used to chant, driving around in Bob's white 1968 Chevy Impala in high school, looking for that very particular kind of not-really-threatening-trouble that suburban kids wanted to get into to feel dangerous.  This was the beach rock song for kids like me, who didn't really go to the beach but who wanted to rock out anyway.

Folding Chair, Regina Spektor:




It's about sitting on a beach! And it's so happy and bouncy.  And it makes you feel good about yourself: "I've got a perfect body/but sometimes I forget." Go have a snow cone, you perfect body person you.

I know Sweetie is horrified by this idea, but about 35% of the time, I would gladly get a silver bullet trailer and head out on the road forever.

I Will Live On Islands, Josh Rouse.



There's always the chance that one of those lottery tickets will pay off, or a hundred million people will buy my book, or on one of those lazy walks I will find a bag full of money with a note saying Don't bother returning it, it's yours to keep, signed, A RICH GUY.

And then I will live on islands.

Until then, we're going to a bakery today and for a walk.  Have a great weekend.