Scott Pearson's Blog, page 3

Writing Projects: My Steampunkish Novel

Many writers admit that it's a constant struggle to get at the page. There are always things to distract you from the keyboard: family, friends, day jobs, chores around the house, freelance gigs with actual pay checks involved, various neuroses, and blogging about all of the above. As I'm doing right now. See what I did there? Got all meta on you.

One recurring victim of all of the above is my sort-of-a-steampunk novel. I've been kicking it around for a couple of years now, and all I have are three chapters, a complete outline, a bunch of notes and research, and some great feedback from friends. When I was laid off earlier this year, one of my first thoughts—after the immediate "holy shite" reaction and the disappointment following the realization that the bar next to my now former job wasn't open yet as I walked down the sidewalk in the rain with my box of personal effects—was that I could get back to my novel. Here it is eight months later, and I've barely touched the thing.

Of course, I have also had a half-dozen freelance projects, worked on a couple of short stories (including "The Squid That Came to Phil's Basement," due out in January 2014 in Space and Time Magazine ), written The More Things Change (a Star Trek: The Original Series eBook due out July 2014), and written five chapters, an outline, and a series concept for a middle-grade media tie-in project that's being shopped to publishers by an agent . . . but that is kind of the point. There are always reasons, often very good reasons, why something has been left on the stoop quietly waiting for you to swing by and pick it up. In the rain. Before bars open.

But I have finally gotten back at the thing. My first goal is to rewrite the three existing chapters while incorporating the changes suggested by beta readers. Let's call the word-count goal 15,000. Having just started, I've only rewritten the first 637 words, as represented in the graphic below. I've already let putting lights on the solstice tree and writing this blog delay my work today, so I'm going to make shoveling the sidewalk wait for a while and get back into my alternate nineteenth century and have some fun.

637 / 15000
(4.25%)

From the Vault: Dude, You are Blowing My Mind

The other night Sandra and I were both having trouble sleeping. She got up and went to the bathroom, and when she came back we started talking. Then I woke up and was still alone . . . I’d dreamed that she’d come back to bed.

So then she got back from the bathroom, and I told her that I’d just dreamed that she’d come back, and that it was a little weird. Then I was startled awake by one of the cats jumping onto the bed . . . I’d still been dreaming.

I thought, “Wow, that was really weird, I had a dream within a dream.” Since the cat was on the bed, I figured Sandra must have left the bedroom door open when she came back from the bathroom. So I got up, put the cat out of the room, closed the door, and went back to bed. And then I woke up. I’d still been dreaming!

I’d had a dream within a dream within a dream . . . a bit disorienting. I was still wondering if I was really awake. But I was. Sandra had gotten back for real and was already asleep.

At least I think that’s what happened. It’s kind of hard to tell.

[Original version posted August 21, 2008]

The Improbable Adventures of Weird Doug

When I was a kid three or four decades ago, I had a friend I’ll call Doug. Weird Doug. The phrase “marches to his own drummer” was made for him, and then he replaced the drummer with a kazoo player and marching with running on stilts. He was weird, but I use that as a term of respect for the oddball, the iconoclast. Weird things always happened around him. What follows are a sampling of Doug’s greatest weird hits. I swear they are true to the best of my ability to recall them after all these years.

Once we were walking along some old railroad tracks. Hey, we grew up in the country in northern Minnesota, this was something you did. We came upon a couple of people walking the opposite direction. Doug said to them, “How far?” One of the guys replied, “A mile, mile and a half.” Then they and Doug happily resumed walking. Doug didn’t understand why I couldn’t stop laughing after this exchange. I had to explain, “You didn’t say how far to what. What were either of you talking about?” They could have been talking about where the body was for all we knew.

Our families were good friends, and we all spent a lot of time at their house. One of those times it was decided that someone should go into town and get a big pile of food from Kentucky Fried Chicken (this was so long ago they hadn’t invented the initials “KFC” yet). One of Doug’s older brothers drove, and Doug and I went along to help. As we waited for the food in the restaurant, Doug paced around, always hyper. I stood patiently still. As he walked by in front of me, he tripped over my feet, stumbled forward, and fell to his knees as he slammed into a plate glass window which reverberated loudly throughout the restaurant. Everyone in the place turned to stare. He pulled himself to his feet using the curtains, walked back to me, and, while everyone was looking at us, said loudly, “Why’d you trip me?” By the time we got out to the car all three of us were laughing so hard that his brother couldn’t even drive, we had to just wait it out in the parking lot for a while.

But that’s nothing. Doug was a bit of a pyromaniac and always had a Zippo lighter. Once again we were all over at his house, I think watching the Super Bowl. He went to his room to refill the fluid in his lighter. As he came back into the crowded living room, I glanced up and had to tell him, “Uh, Doug, your hand is on fire.” I kid you not. He had spilled lighter fluid on his hand, and as he came back into the room he had test flicked the Zippo and somehow didn’t notice that the fluid on his hand had ignited. It was just hanging at his side like normal . . . except for the flames. After I spoke he lifted his hand, looked at it, and then hopped around a bit as he shook it out.

His pyromania went in odd directions. He became obsessed with making his own squibs. For nonmovie geeks, squibs are the little explosive charges used to simulate bullet hits. When I arrived at his house one day, he took me to an outbuilding to show me what he’d been working on. Either he or one of his older brothers had cut and welded a little steel plate, about the size and shape of a Petri dish. The squib (for various reasons I’m not going to detail the design of the explosive!) was placed within this and then the whole thing was strapped to his chest. He had a plastic bag of fake blood taped over the tiny charge. Then he handed me the switch to electrically detonate the squib. I found the whole thing questionable on a variety of levels, but I knew he’d just do it himself if I refused, and it would be better for someone to be with him as he set off explosives on his chest. Taking a deep breath, I hit the switch. There was a loud crack and all the fake blood somehow shot straight upwards, blasting into his face. His head snapped back in surprise. It was disturbingly realistic, and for a second I feared it wasn’t all fake blood and I think he had the same doubts . . . but it was all fake and he was fine, though our ears were ringing. That was the end of the squib experiments though.

One year when Christmas rolled around, I was trying to figure out what to get Doug. But then I found out that his parents had gotten him a .22 rifle. You may be thinking, “Why would someone get this goofball a gun?” but this was the country, it was common to get a teenage boy a rifle as a gift, kind of a rite of passage, really (and it’s not like we’d told our parents we’d set off explosives on Doug). Problem solved, I thought, and I got him some ammo for his present. We went over to their house on Christmas Day. As we walked into the living room, there was Doug lying on the couch, a bandage on his forehead. “What happened?” we wondered. One of his older brothers said, “Doug accidentally shot himself in the head.” After he’d opened up his rifle, he’d gone out in the woods shooting. Apparently a bullet hit a tree, fragmented, and one of the pieces of shrapnel came back and hit him square in the forehead. “I pulled the trigger and then my head just snapped back,” he told us. It was actually a very small cut, and they’d pulled the sliver of bullet out themselves. And there I was with a nicely wrapped box of ammo for him.

I can’t imagine Doug being a blog-surfing kind of guy, but, if you’re out there and have stumbled across this, how you doing, man? Remember that time—years before you got the rifle—you were moving that end table and accidentally hit me in the head with it? And how much my head wound bled? And how your mom almost fainted at the sight? Good times, bro, good times.

A Tolkien Fanatic Ramble

I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the late seventies—wow, that’s thirty-five years ago. I was immediately entranced and read them once a year for several years following, then sporadically throughout the intervening years. One of the times was while I was a stay-at-home parent. They say it’s good for language development to read to children essentially from birth, and I found out that it doesn’t take as long as you might think to read all four books aloud to a baby. I eventually lost track of how many times I reread them. I would guess at least a dozen, perhaps fifteen or so.

One of the reasons the books are so captivating for me (and for many people, I would guess) is that they seem so real. Strange to say about a fantasy with dragons and giant spiders, but the sense of a vast history beyond the pages you’re turning creates that feeling and pervades The Hobbit and, to a greater extent, The Lord of the Rings. That impression of a deep history wasn’t achieved solely through well-turned flashbacks in the narratives at hand; Tolkien had created a rich tapestry of Middle-earth stories even before he wrote The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Those early stories, tinkered with by Tolkien in various degrees for decades (and touched upon in the appendices of Rings), were released posthumously, sometimes in multiple forms, in several books: The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Children of Húrin, and the multivolume History of Middle-earth, all edited by Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R.’s youngest son. I’ve read them all.

That foundational work outside of the four best-known books informs the destinies of Bilbo and Frodo. Just as the rough edges of World War I would eventually boil over into World War II, so too would Isildur’s cutting of the One Ring from Sauron’s hand at the end of the Second Age of Middle-earth lead to the War of the Ring some three thousand years later in the Third Age, as told in Rings. I don’t mean to imply any historical allegory—Tolkien said he disliked allegory—but to emphasize that the “reality” of Middle-earth is enhanced by such connections and consequences running through the various works.

With all that said, it’s clear I’m a Tolkien fanatic. So it was a bit of a dream come true to become professionally involved in a book about Middle-earth. In an earlier age of the world, I was consulted by a coworker at my then-employer, Quayside Publishing, about whether I thought we should do a Middle-earth book of some sort. I said YES. (As an aside, during this chat I was asked the same question about Star Trek. My equally loud YES to that eventually led to Robert Greenberger’s Star Trek: The Complete Unauthorized History , which I edited.) And, lo, thus was the humble beginning of Middle-earth Envisioned: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings On Screen, On Stage, and Beyond by Paul Simpson and Brian J. Robb, out now in time for that Middle-earth fanatic on your holiday list. Just helping it along in that little way was fun, but there was more to come.

I’ve known Paul for several years. I first worked for him when he was editing the official Star Trek Magazine, contributing articles about my first fanatic fave, which I’d discovered prior to Tolkien by about five years. Reversing roles, he wrote That’s What They Want You to Think , a conspiracy 101 eBook, for me at Quayside. Then he invited me to contribute a sidebar to the Middle-earth book. Woo-hoo! That meant I would be professionally published in my favorite fictional past as well as my favorite fictional future. I jumped at the chance, and you can read the result when you rush out and buy the book, which is gorgeously designed and illustrated. Go ahead, I’ll wait here, you can grab it from your local bookstore or order it from Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, or Amazon.

My sidebar, “Middle-earth Beyond The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings,” talks about those other Middle-earth texts mentioned above and how Peter Jackson drew on those sources for his film adaptations of the four novels. For space reasons, I wasn’t able to include every example of material outside the novels that informs the films, so what follows are a few interesting tidbits.

In part, The Silmarillion recounts the strife between Ilúvatar—the creator—and Melkor, who is, to greatly simplify things with a common archetype, a fallen angel. Melkor became the Dark Lord Morgoth in the First Age of Middle-earth, and he created the Balrogs, the last of which appears in The Lord of the Rings. Morgoth’s chief servant was Sauron, also a terrible threat across the ages of Middle-earth. These are prime examples of the deep history that resonates throughout Tolkien’s writings.

Jackson & Co. expanded Arwen’s role in the Rings films to counterbalance the novel’s dearth of female roles. When her father, Elrond, counsels her to leave Middle-earth by foreseeing her future after Aragorn’s death, his dialogue draws directly from Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings. Arwen and Aragorn’s future son, Eldarion—whose appearance in a vision turns Arwen away from the Grey Havens and back toward Rivendell—is another detail drawn from Appendix A.

Expanding The Hobbit into a three-film extravaganza also necessitated drawing on additional sources. The first film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, includes a meeting of the White Council—Elrond, Gandalf, Galadriel, and Saruman—where Gandalf expresses concern about how Sauron could use Smaug if the dragon were not destroyed, which is taken straight from dialogue in Unfinished Tales (although in a different setting).

Hardly a complete list, and more examples will certainly appear in the remaining two parts of The Hobbit. Now that a whole new generation of viewers have been drawn into Tolkien’s world by these films, I hope young fans discover that not only is Middle-earth more than the films, it’s more than the four books that inspired the films, and is well-worth exploring more deeply.

Some Rambles on eBooks vs. eMusic

The thing about recorded music is that it has always required buying an encoded object that you needed to put into a machine to listen to; everything from records to tapes to CDs required a player, and this hasn’t changed in the age of downloaded audio files. That matchbox-sized mp3 player in your shirt pocket really isn’t all that different from the paperback-sized Walkman clipped to my belt in 1982—the technology has advanced, obviously, but the role of the machine hasn’t.

But the book . . . ah, the book is a different story (as it were). You just open one with your hands and read the data on your own. It's a tactile, organic experience, which is not quite replicated by eBooks. I don't have anything at all against eBooks, I've bought them and I've written them. But unlike listening to recorded music, which still involves headphones or speakers just as in the days of LPs, the experience of reading has more fundamentally changed as it moved to the digital world from paper.

Sure, you're still reading the printed/displayed word, but the feel of it is not the same. I for one continue to crave the choice of the printed book, even as I buy more eBooks. I don't have the same feelings for my LPs gathering dust in the basement. Although the hiss and crackle of an oft-played LP induces a certain nostalgic fondness, I'd still rather hear the music clear and clean from an audio file. Outside of ancient texts, reading words from a page of a book doesn’t generally involve any comparable degradation, and the words from a printed novel will be just as easily read ten years from now. By contrast, I own eBooks—which, I must emphasize, were legally purchased—that I can no longer open due to outdated software or arcane DRM schemes. It’s like someone came into my house, pulled a book off the shelf, and glued all the pages together. Although, to be fair to eBooks, I do own some vintage printed books that would fall apart if I attempted to read them, that’s a little like a scratched old LP.

I think printed books and eBooks will exist side by side for a long time yet, even as LPs are still around alongside the iPod. And they will definitely come in handy after the zombie apocalypse, because they don’t require batteries. Just be careful with your glasses, Burgess. There’s no adjusting the font size on paper.

What a Weeks

Anyone who works freelance can put together a list like I’m about to rattle off, and this is far from as crazy as it can get, but I’m still trying to keep my head from spinning. Much of this also invokes those buzzwords that hover around writers like gnats: “online presence” and “platform.” These are the things you do to keep your name out there in the interclouds with little or no chance of directly creating income for the time you’ve spent working. Websites and Twitters and Facebooks are a part of that, and I’m not going to itemize those things, but in and around all these other tasks, Facebook posts and tweets and website updates were going on too. Well, mostly. I’ve gotten behind on those the last few days. Plus, was doing all that other life stuff, like washing clothes, cleaning house, picking kid up from school, etc.

Let’s get going shall we? 10/14–15, finished copyedit of freelance gig. Sent it back to client at 7 p.m. on fifteenth after two long days. 10/16, read The Riddles of the Hobbit and wrote the review for Sci-Fi Bulletin . 10/17, read Southside and wrote the review for Suspense Magazine . 10/18, relaxed a bit with the Kid, who had day off of school. Went to see Gravity, but that was also prep for upcoming Generations Geek podcast. More on that later. 10/19, watched The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and some other Robin Hood stuff, recorded part of upcoming podcast. That would be a different podcast from Gravity, because combining those would be silly. Still more on that later. 10/20, put together that week’s blog post. Picked up wife from airport, back from ten-day work trip to China. 10/21–24, tweaked first four chapters and wrote fifth chapter of super secret spec middle-grade project. I think I may have posted recently that it was YA . . . sorry about that. Sent to agent 10/24 at 3 p.m. 10/26, watched more Robin Hood stuff, did more recording for that podcast. (Went to friends house that night for dinner and Scrabble. At one point had seven-letter word, “trainer,” but didn’t get to play it. At one point had seven letters of “decanter,” only needed a suitably placed “e” for eighth letter. Never happened.) 10/27, recorded interview with astronaut Thomas D. Jones for the Gravity podcast. There it is, see, I told you there would be more on that. 10/28, planned to dig right into Robin Hood podcast editing, instead heard from my friend Jim Johnson about a local fiction editor position at Fantasy Flight Games. Wrote cover letter, tweaked resumé, and submitted. Working from my home office is fab, but you actually need paying work coming in to make that feasible in the long term. Funny how that is. So, took shot at day job, then did some podcast editing. 10/29, wrote this post then will get back to podcast editing. Over next couple days will finish recording/editing Robin Hood podcast and upload, read The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor and review for Author Magazine , and proofread new freelance project.

Hope to get this all cleared off my desk by next weekend and get in some relaxation. Plus some writing time. But haven’t even started raking leaves yet. And following week will bring another freelance proofread project. Oof.

From the Vault: My Peter O’Toole Story

Posting about Patrick Stewart last week made me think of other celebrity stories where I actually met the celebrity. Way back in 1992 Peter O’Toole had published the first volume of his memoirs, Loitering with Intent . I attended a signing appearance here in St. Paul at a bookstore that no longer exists.

Peter was running late, and a crowd of more than a hundred people was waiting patiently. Suddenly the crowd parted, and Peter, a head taller than anyone else in the room, walked briskly through us commoners in his inimitable lanky way. Women from sixteen to sixty swooned, as did approximately 10 percent of men. In his mid-sixties at the time, he still had an amazing aura of energy (metaphorically speaking), the quintessential magnetic personality.

I knew what I wanted him to write in the book. One of my favorite movies of his is the 1982 comedy My Favorite Year , in which he plays a washed-up drunk of an actor riding on the fame of bygone days. There’s a great deal of self-awareness in the role, you could say. In his first scene he shows up in the offices of a Sid Caesar–type show on which he’s the guest star, drunk as a skunk, and passes out. The boss wants to fire him on the spot. A young writer on the show bets that he’ll still be able to do the show later that week. Another writer takes the bet. Then Peter rises up, glares at the guy who bet against him, and says “Double the lad’s bet for me, you toad,” before he slowly timbers to the floor. What a great personalization that line would be.

However, as my turn approached, I saw the sign: “No personalizing.” Peter was just signing his name. When there’s a lot of people, it’s common to keep the line moving in this way. But Peter was chatting with everyone, so it was probably more about sparing him writer’s cramp than saving time.

Finally it was my turn. He focused his incredibly sharp bright blue eyes on me. Even as a straight man I almost swooned. “It’s too bad you’re only signing your name, because I had picked out my favorite line from My Favorite Year that I was going to have you write.” I purposefully didn’t say the line to see what his reaction would be. He leaned closer to me. “And what line is that?”

“Double the lad’s bet for me, you toad,” I said, trying not to do my impression but probably matching the intonation fairly closely from repeated viewings. He sat up straight, threw his head back, and guffawed as only he can. Then he looked back at me, leaned forward again, and said, as he put an elbow on the table, hand in the air, “And then … the fall.” He flopped his arm down just as he had collapsed in the scene.

Well, well. He signed his name and I was off, feeling that I had had a genuine moment with him. What a personable guy. The way he talked to everyone, looking straight at you … he really engaged. The whole thing is incredibly clear in my mind two decades after it happened.

So that’s my Peter O’Toole story.

[Original version posted February 4, 2009]

My Patrick Stewart Story

Back in 2001, I had the pleasure of seeing the Guthrie Theater’s production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The play starred
It was a great production, and all the actors were very good. I decided to try to get a memento of the performance. I packed up my paperback copy of the play and mailed it to Patrick Stewart care of the Guthrie. I enclosed this sincere and silly letter:

Dear Mr. Stewart,

I’ve followed your work for many years now, so it was a pleasure to see last Sunday’s matinee of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a thoroughly entertaining performance. I wonder if it wouldn’t be too much trouble for you to sign the enclosed copy of the play and send it back to me in the enclosed return mailer. If the rest of the fine cast had time to sign it as well, that would be most appreciated.

This was the first time I’ve seen the play on stage—I have, of course, seen the film version many times. Now, having seen it performed live, I understand Albee’s negative comments about the film, although I don’t entirely agree with him. The stage play, especially in the first act, is much funnier than the film. I think the black and white cinematography combined with the closeness of the film medium made for a darker, more claustrophobic atmosphere. And yet, this seems to me a valid interpretation, not necessarily ruining the play, as Albee has said; look at some of the marvelous reinventions of Shakespeare that have been done over the years. But perhaps if Shakespeare were alive today he would consider Ian McKellen’s fantastic fascistic interpretation of Richard III (which I also had the pleasure of seeing on stage) a ruining of the play as well—and who would have the nerve to disagree with a nearly four-hundred-and-forty-year-old man, especially given Elizabethan bathing habits?

Congratulations on a fine performance. In fact, I hope to see the play again this month. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
[signed] Scott Pearson

PS: I guess I should mention that I’ve been a raving Star Trek fan for almost thirty years. Do with that information what you will.

Only a week or so went by before my book came back signed by all four of the actors. That’s so cool. It’s a fun coincidence that the book was published by Pocket Books, who also publish Star Trek fiction (although this edition came out a couple years before Pocket got the franchise license).

So that's my Patrick Stewart story.

Another Accidental Freelancer

In a couple of days it will be six months since I parted ways with my former employer and found myself among the growing population of accidental freelancers—former day-job editors suddenly out on their own in the jungles of indie and self-publishing.

Perhaps the jungle metaphor sounds too ominous, because I do like this safari. But it can’t be denied that it has its scary moments. When’s the next manuscript coming? When’s the check coming? Those are the freelancer’s defining questions. So far, I’ve been lucky. I came out of my job with severance pay and, as a writer myself, a perfectly timed contract for a Star Trek eBook with Simon & Schuster.

My first big gig as a freelance editor, a novel from a self-publisher, also came within a couple of months. There have been hints and whispers of other jobs, but so far only one other editing gig. On the writing front, a spec project I’m developing with an agent may go somewhere . . . or it may not.

I’m still finding my way, developing new routines, searching for the right balance between social-media promotion and writing time. I have writing projects I’m organizing for indie publishing and others I’m preparing for traditional publishing. And I continue to advertise my freelance availability online (see Yeahsure Editorial Services for more info!) and in Suspense Magazine .

All along I’ve kept my eye on job openings. As much as I would prefer to stay home and pursue my writing while taking in editing gigs, it’s an uncertain revenue stream, and if the right offer came along I would have to seriously consider going back to a day job. So far, I’ve had six months of looking at ads for report writers, technical writers, attorney editors, and proposal writers and editors—nothing I’d really want to do, and nothing I’m  particularly qualified for. There was one job I had killer qualifications for, so I sent off my application and perfect résumé for the position . . . but I didn’t even get an interview.

So here I am, at home, sitting at the computer, typing away. I hope I get to stay. And, remember, if you know anyone who needs an editor . . . 

From the Vault: Happiness Through Philosophy

[Okay, here’s the deal with the title of this post. I started blogging on Live Journal in April 2008. Over the last five and a half years I’ve picked up followers here and there, especially since March 2011 when I started posting my blog on Word Press, Tumblr, and Blog Spot in addition to ol’ Live Journal. So I’ve decided to occasionally repost updated versions of entries from those first three years for my new followers. For my LJ peeps still with me after five years, I hope you don’t mind the revised reruns.]

This year my daughter got to meet Garrison Keillor at the Minnesota State Fair. She’s been listening to him on A Prairie Home Companion as long as she can remember, so she was excited to spot him walking through the crowds. She followed him around until she got the courage to rush up and ask for a photo (snapped by a friend of hers).

I’ve been listening to Garrison Keillor since about 1977. In 2003 I was one of only a few people who got a job interview with Keillor to join the show’s writing staff. The guy I'd been listening to since seventh grade said this to me in an email: "The sketch you wrote was funny and brisk and smart and all the things that we're looking for (and not finding in ourselves)."

That blew my mind. So did not getting the gig! But in honor of the tenth anniversary of my coolest and least successful job interview, here’s the sketch that allowed me to meet Garrison Keillor face-to-face, presented with all due bowing down to the cast it was written for, and in memory of Tom Keith (1946–2011).

"Happiness Through Philosophy"
by Scott Pearson

(GK: Garrison Keillor; SS: Sue Scott; TR: Tim Russell; Sound Effects: Tom Keith)

(CLINKING OF SILVERWARE STOPS)

SS: What’s the matter, dear? You’ve barely touched your tater tot bisque.

GK: I don’t know. It’s just—

SS: It’s the cumin, isn’t it? It’s too spicy.

GK: No, no, the cumin’s fine. I’m just not that hungry. I’ve been depressed lately. The whole country has taken a wrong turn. I don’t know if anything will work out. It’s all out of my control.

SS (AFTER A PAUSE): It’s the tater tots, isn’t it? It’s too crunchy for bisque.

GK: No, no, the tater tots are fine. I just can’t enjoy your nouveau Minnesota cuisine when I have this miasma of melancholy, this—

TR (FRENCH ACCENT THROUGHOUT): This malaise, this maladie, if you will?

SS: Oh, look, dear, the late Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous French existentialist. Would you like some tater tot bisque, Monsieur Sartre?

TR: No, thank you.

SS: It’s the cumin, isn’t it?

TR: No, I am certain the cumin is fine.

GK: May we offer you some absinthe, Monsieur Sartre?

TR: If you are having some, but do not get it just for me.

GK: It’s no trouble, really, we already had some made. (SOFT POP OF BOTTLE BEING OPENED FOLLOWED BY GENTLE GURGLE OF POURING ABSINTHE) I hope instant is okay.

TR: This is fine, thank you. (SIPS LOUDLY) Hoy-oh! That puts the “sin” in absinthe, does it not?

GK: (SIPPING) That’ll spin your beret, all right.

SS: (SIPS) Trè oui. Tête de jambon et fromage, n’est-ce pas? (GURGLE OF ANOTHER ROUND BEING POURED, SOMEHOW SOUNDING SLOPPY, THEN MORE SIPPING) Shall we sing “La Marseillaise?”

GK: No, please, I need to talk with Monsieur Sartre about something.

SS: It’s the tater tots, isn’t it?

GK AND TR: It’s not the tater tots.

GK: Monsieur Sartre, you must be here to help me. How can I stop worrying about everything? I want to be happy, but it seems there’s so little I can do to change the world for the better.

TR: Descartes said, “Conquer yourself rather than the world.” Very existential. If any solutions to your problems can be achieved by your actions, that is your responsibility. But if they are outside your influence, then forget about them. There is no outside force that can bend them to your will.

GK: You’re right. Why do I take the weight of the world on my back when it’s out of my hands? It’s so simple. I feel so much better, so carefree! Merci beaucoup, Monsieur! Honey, pass the bisque!

(MUSIC FOR “LA MARSEILLAISE” SWELLS, THEN FAST FADE UNDER....)

TR: Once again, happiness is achieved...through philosophy.

GK: A Public Service Announcement brought to you by the Philosophy Advisory Board. “Philosophy—just think about it.”

[Original version posted May 7, 2008]