Enthusiasm! (With a dash of pure terror…)

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Vanessa

Once upon a time, I promised I’d post a short story up here on the blog. Well, that day has come, my friends. After much sweaty fumbling, I’ve finally slapped this thing into some sort of acceptable shape. Whether it’s actually as good as it could be or not, I’m happy with it and I’m done fucking around with it for now. Keep in mind that I usually write science fiction, so real people (whatever that means) are very difficult for me. But the process of writing it was extra double-plus fun. Many, many thanks to the amazing Meg Zinky for giving it a proper editorial scrubbing. And thanks to all of you for indulging me. Also, sorry the paragraphs are weird. This thing won’t let me use the tab key like a tab key. I’ll work on it. Anyway, here you go. I’m going to go drink heavily now. Cheers. And hugs. Oh, so very many hugs.

Deadline

WEDNESDAY

And there, finally, was the dragon. His nemesis. The foul creature that he’d been chasing for months across this vast and now devastated land. It sat mocking him with its nonchalance, as though it had been waiting all along for him to simply catch up and prove his worth.
He unsheathed his sword, seeing that its silver glint of magical sharpness fade as he lost his strength…

Sean slammed his head down on the desk. “Magical sharpness?” Slam. “Fuck. Ow.” He looked at the cat and said, “Shut up, you.”
“Sean, I’m offended that you assume my first response would be a snarky comment,” said the cat, and proceeded to lick his own asshole in cat-like retaliation. He watched Sean dejectedly get ready for work and dejectedly leave the apartment and, through the window, dejectedly walk down the street.
Sean walked the same route, every day, to work. He stopped for a coffee at the corner diner at 9:15. He waved to the old lady at the newsstand at 9:20. Sean had habits, a predictable routine. Sean was prime real estate for stalkers. But Sean wrote fantasy stories about dragons and had a shitty job at his brother’s record store. He was probably too boring to stalk. He walked into Dave’s Records, setting off the horrible brass bell above the door, at 9:27.
“Sean! Did you kill your dragon?”
“Fuck no, Dave, I did not.”
“Drag. Tomorrow, maybe.”
“Maybe.” Sean threw his jacket and utilitarian manbag in the cubby behind the counter and clocked in. Dejectedly.
“What do you think? Magic sword? Awesome spell? What?”
“I guess we’ll both just have to see, Dave. That seems to be the problem, right?”
“Yeah, man,” Dave paused to contemplate the plight of the modern American novelist. Or the nature of the universe. Or something. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“Thanks for your support, Dave.”
“Dude, seriously? Anytime. You know how I feel about the prospect of dragons run rampant.”
“I do, Dave. I really do. You’ve made it abundantly and supportively clear.”
“I try, man. Want to see you get that bastard. Hey, could you do me a favor and change the music? Seems like folks are a little agro today. Maybe a little easy listening for their lunchtime activities?”
“It’s nine thirty in the morning. And you’re playing The Stooges.”
“It’s only nine thirty? That explains everything. Switch it up, something happy. And then open all that new stuff that came in yesterday.”
“Sure thing.” Sean walked to the back of the store and put on The Mamas and the Papas. He drank his coffee. He opened boxes with a razor blade and hated his life a little more.
Not that Sean’s life of routine was entirely joyless. It was Wednesday, payday, which meant he went to the bar after work. It was a personal rule. Get money, pay rent, drink heavily. Ideally, in that order. May’s was a hulking monstrosity, a stereotype of a bar. The sort of bar that would, in a movie, be built by aliens to fool some captive Earthlings. But the aliens had only ever watched television and never really been in a bar. Sean loved it. He ordered a beer, drained it, then asked May for another.
“So how’s it going, Sean? Did you slay the timorous beastie?”
“Fuck no, May, I did not.”
“Well why the hell not, man? Didn’t that demon fire spell casting thing work?”
“Demon orb. Nope. Didn’t work.”
“No?”
“No. Because the main element in the potion was gold, and, as I have explained to you…”
“Dragons eat gold. Right. Makes sense. So what? You changed the potion? You started over back at the village?”
“No, going up the road to the hill. All the village stuff can stay. I really liked spearing that one barkeep through the eye.”
“Yeah, I love that bit.”
“You know she’s you, right?”
“Of course I know she’s me, you great ass. That’s why I love it. I like thinking that I can be immortalized in literature.”
“No one will know it’s you but me and you.”
“Fuck do I care? Probably no one will read it but me and you, either.” She laughed like a cannon, loud and booming. It was a great laugh. “You want a shot today or no?”
“Give me a minute. Maybe.”
Sean sat sipping his beer. Expertly. With aplomb. The bell above the door tinkled. Why all these goddamn bells? Where did this tradition come from and how can we put a stop to it?
“Can I get you something, darling?” May said to the girl who stood blinking in the dim. Darling is what she called people who weren’t regulars, and they were few and far between. Sean looked up to examine this infiltrator. Who dared to interrupt his afternoon of sadness and alcohol abuse?
“Beer, please, something dark. And a shot of Maker’s Mark back.”
“Sure thing.”
Odd. Even more odd, the girl took a seat next to him rather than the conventionally polite seat one or two away.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he said back. How terribly, terribly odd.
“May, I’ll take that shot now, if you’ve got a second?” Sean said.
“I live to serve, my liege.”
“Thank you, smartass.”
“You spear me through the eye and smartass is what you’re going to get, mister.” May put the young lady’s beverages down on the bar and walked away, smirking. The newcomer looked confused.
“She doesn’t look like she’s been speared through the eye,” she said, once May was out of earshot.
“Most days, no, she doesn’t.” He cleared his throat. This part was always difficult. “Actually, I’m writing a novel and I based one of the characters on her.”
“A character whose face you chose to disfigure with a very sharp weapon.”
“Yes.”
“Not out of hatred for this nice lady, surely.”
“Of course not.”
“So you’re a regular here.”
“Um, yeah. Why?”
“Why would you tell a perfect stranger that you’d put them in your novel?”
“I wouldn’t, I guess.” He sipped his beer during the awkward pause, then stuck out his hand. “I’m Sean.”
“Lydia.”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
They shook. May brought his shot and he gulped it down. She gave Sean a look which was positively dripping with meaning, nodding toward the girl. Again with the smirk.
“So, Lydia. What’s your story?”
“My story?”
“Yeah. What’s your deal? What brings you here to this dingy drinking establishment, to which you have clearly never been, on a lovely Wednesday afternoon? Circumstances must have stacked up somehow.”
“Indeed, Sean, they did.” Heavy sigh. She took her shot and placed the glass back on the bar, upside-down. Bartender in a past life, Sean thought. “Yes, indeed. Well.” Another sigh. “I’m an artist. And I took it upon myself to peddle my wares on this glorious day. And failed. Miserably. Therefore I am drinking at five o’clock on a lovely Wednesday afternoon in a dingy drinking establishment with a gentleman I just met and his delightful cohort. Thank you, May,” she said as May dropped off a second shot and walked away. What is it, some secret bartender language? She didn’t even ask for a second shot. May did not acknowledge that the newcomer knew her name.
“Interesting,” Sean said.
“Is it?”
“I think so.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’?”
“I mean, what about that particular string of sentences interests you, Sean? Because from my end it’s looking pretty dismal and I’d like to see some silver glint of hope here. Right?”
Silver glint.
“Well. I’m a writer. I tend to find artsy people interesting. It’s a quirk. I’m working on it. What sort of art do you do?”
“Pfft. Who cares? No one in this neighborhood, I can tell you that.”
“Dude. All you know about me is that we both drink whiskey and I write books about stabbing bartenders through the eyes. Give.”
“Speared. You speared her through the eye, not stabbed. It’s a fine line, but an important one.”
“Acknowledged. Give.”
Lydia smiled, sipped her beer, and narrowed her eyes at Sean. She seemed to be sizing him up somehow. Maybe she wasn’t, but he certainly felt sized up.
“Comic books.”
“Do what now?”
“I write and draw comic books.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“The chances are pretty good. You, sir, spear innocent barkeeps through their eyes.” She drained her beer, threw money on the bar, winked at Sean and walked out the door. Odd, that.

THURSDAY

And there, finally, was the dragon. His nemesis. The foul creature that he’d been chasing for months across this vast and now devastated land. It sat mocking him with its shimmery nonchalance, as though it had been waiting all along for him to simply catch up and prove his worth.
He uncapped his potion, hoping that the gypsy hadn’t lied to him about its powerful and unholy origins…

“You can’t say ‘gypsy,’ dude,” said the cat.
“Seriously? Again with this?”
“It’s really insensitive to the Roma people and it’s unnecessary. Couldn’t you make it a rogue wizard or something?”
“Oh, how I loathe you.” Sean slammed his head into the desk once more for good measure.
“Hey, don’t loathe me so much you forget to food up my bowl again. When you can’t write, I should still get to eat.”
Sean fed the cat, grabbed his jacket, and left for work. Normally, he worried about the dragon during his long walk. He thought about all the books he’d read, all the movies he’d watched, every dragon he’d ever seen decapitated, disemboweled, defenestrated, flayed, charred, crushed, drowned. It wasn’t the healthiest way to spend his time, but it was an unavoidable occupational hazard. He walked through the door of the record shop, three minutes early, like always.
“Sean! You kill your dragon today?”
“Fuck no, Dave, I did not.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah. Do people actually say that? ‘Bummer’? Really? Still?”
“Well ‘good morning’ to you, too, little brother. Did we enjoy our Cranky Puffs we had for breakfast?”
“Sorry.”
“No worries. Yes, I do in fact say ‘bummer,’ but I’m doing it ironically.”
Sean sighed and made a snap decision. “Listen, Dave, do you care if I take the day off? I’m really not feeling so hot. I thought I’d be fine, but the walk over made me a little puny. I’d love to go home and lay down.”
“Don’t even sweat it. It’s Thursday. We don’t make any money on Thursdays. Go take a snooze. Work on your dragon magic shit.”
“Will do.”
“Awesome. Keep me posted. You think you’ll be in tomorrow?”
“I dunno. I’ll call you in the morning.”
“Word.”
“Do people actually say that?”
“Go home, Sean.”
Sean wanted to spend his free morning doing something really radical and different, something that would get the creative juices flowing, something utterly outrageous and out of character. He went to the diner and ate pancakes instead. He read the paper. He did the crossword. No creative juices flowed. And when he left, he really meant to go home and get some work done. But somewhere around the sixth block, he inexplicably started heading toward the bar. May was just wiping down the bar top when he walked in.
“May, can I have a beer?”
“It’s Thursday.”
“Is there no beer on Thursdays?”
“There is for other people. You come here on Wednesdays. It’s payday. And the universally accepted day of self-loathing.”
“So, you won’t give me a beer?”
“At eleven in the morning? I will. But I won’t feel good about it.”
“I’m fine with that. And why are you open at eleven in the morning if you don’t want people to drink in the morning?”
“It is not my job to moralize.”
“And yet, we quibble.”
“Sit down.” She poured him a beer and stood, hand on hip, watching him drink it. “So, you’re drinking for a reason today?” she finally said.
“Not really. I faked sick and left work. I can’t sleep. I don’t eat right. I can’t kill my stupid dragon.”
“Stupid dragon.”
“Stupid. Fucking. Dragon.”
“So it’s that writer’s curse drinking, then? You’re doing it to finish the thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Jesus, kid. You know how your people can’t get by without the occasional bout of heavy, stupid drinking, yeah? Hemingway. Poe. King. Burroughs.”
“That one was heroin, but okay. Sure.”
“Writer’s drinking. Once you’re out the other end you can finish the story. Neatly. Cleanly. Perhaps right before killing yourself. Natural born drinkers, you writers. Lubricates the brain or something.”
“True enough.” He was quiet for a minute, spinning his glass around and around, watching the bubbles march neatly from bottom to top. Fuck it. ”Hey, May?”
“Sean?”
“Line ‘em up.”
Sean was not a hard drinker. A frequent drinker, true, but he rarely set out with the intention of getting hammered. He didn’t even use the word “hammered” that often. But armed with a bellyful of pancakes, he decided to systematically become very, very drunk. His writer’s brain seemed to see this as an adventure, an experiment, an exercise in existence appreciation. It accepted this new challenge with enthusiasm. He had never spent this much time in the bar before. People came and went. People who drank on a different schedule than he did, who were obviously regulars and yet were unfamiliar. May tried to teach him card tricks. He pumped quarter after quarter into the jukebox. It was a very interesting day.
“You know what I hate, May?”
“What?”
“That goddamn bell on the door. Why’s there all these bells all the time? You can see the door. From right there where you’re standing. I know you can see it. You do not need a bell, May. And it sounds weird. Why’s it sound so weird?”
“Because apparently you drink on Thursdays now.”
“Urm. Yeah. Okay. ‘The Thursday Bell.’ That’d make a good title. If I didn’t hate the bells so much.” A fuzzy girl-shaped thing took the seat next to him. Why does that keep happening?
“Hey, Sean.”
“Oh, hey…Lydia! Your name is Lydia, and you are an artist.”
“That’s true. Why you so wobbly there, Sean?” she asked, steadying him on his barstool.
“Because of all these former beers that were here earlier. I’ve been here all day long. May! Would you get Lydia please a beer please? Whereya been, artist?”
“Doing artisty things.”
“That is not a word.”
“It’s not?”
“Nope. Don’t think so. Hey, do you have a quarter?”
“Sean, I swear to god if you play that David Bowie song one more time I will call your brother and tell on you,” May said, putting Lydia’s glass down out of the range of Sean’s wandering elbows.
“Tattle tale. Tattler of tales,” he said. He stuck his tongue out at her. Lydia laughed, so he stuck his tongue out at her, too.
“So you played hooky today, did you?” Lydia asked.
“Oh, hooky has been played, my friend. Much hooky was had by all. What are you doing here? Again, I mean? Two days in a row.”
“Trying to get the bookstore down the street to sell my comics.”
“Tell me about your comics.”
“Some other time, when you’re not quite so close to falling down.”
“You know, I do feel a bit like I want to pass out. Now that you mention it.”
“I think you should.”
“But I want to hang out with you. You’re an awfully pretty artist. And I like how your hair’s all held up with a pen there. A pen. So you’re always ready.”
“Thank you. Maybe we can hang out another day.”
“It’s a date.”
“It’s definitely not a date.”
“Damn it.”
“Go home, Sean. I’ll get May to call you a cab.”
“I can walk.”
“You sure?”
“Pfft. Am I sure? You watch me.” He stood up, quickly reconsidered standing up, and sat back down. “Okay, not so sure anymore.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Let’s go. Cab ahoy.”

FRIDAY

And there, finally, was the dragon. His nemesis. The foul creature that he’d been chasing for months across this vast and now devastated land. It sat mocking him with its scaly nonchalance, as though it had been waiting all along for him to simply catch up and prove his worth.
He squinted and wobbled in the dragon’s general direction. “Damn this sunlight! I can’t see anything! I shouldn’t have taken that mental acuity potion! It was poison!”

“I hate my life.”
“I hate your life, too,” said the cat. “Hey, you want to feed me before you go off to enjoy your hangover?”
“You’re stuck with me today, buddy.”
“You and me and the dragon? One big happy family?”
“Yep. Calling out sick.”
“Good for you.” The cat watched him walk towards the phone, then had to duck out of the way when Sean switched directions and sprinted to the bathroom instead. “Nice fakeout there. You almost stepped on me,” he said when Sean came out, sweaty and a little shaky.
“You earned it.” He picked up the phone and dialed the store.
“Dave’s Vinyl, Dave speaking, how can Dave help you?”
“Hey, Dave,” Sean croaked.
“Sean! Still sick?”
“Yep.”
“Drag. You staying home?”
“Yep.”
“Did you kill your dragon this morning?”
“Fuck no, Dave, I did not.”
“Maybe when you’re feeling better. See you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s my day off. I’ll be in on Sunday.”
“Cool. Take care.”
“I will. Thanks.” He hung up and threw the phone blindly at the couch. The cat was edgy now, ready to duck again.
“Good thing you set that one up in advance,” said the cat.
“I know, right? You want some breakfast?”
“Would we be sitting here having a conversation if I did not want breakfast? What good are you to me if there’s no breakfast involved?”
“Excellent point, cat.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He fed the damnable cat and settled in at his computer. The cursor blinked. Sean blinked. The cat blinked. He couldn’t tell if it was the lack of writing or the impending hangover, but time seemed to stand still. It was miserable.

And there, finally, was the dragon. His nemesis. The foul creature that he’d been chasing for months across this vast and now devastated land. It sat, mocking him with its toothy nonchalance, as though it had been waiting all along for him to simply catch up and prove his worth.
And he drew the dead barkeeper’s magic arrow from his quiver…

“Urgh…”

And he summoned the dissolution spell that he’d learned from the dead wizard, that he’d spoken with his dying words…

“God damn it…”

And he recalled the mental image of the mysterious fair maiden, and armed with that strength, ran headlong into the dragon, sword and sense of love and righteousness making him reckless with the will to live…

“Seriously, you need to stop,” the cat said, interrupting.
“What do you mean? I’ve got a whole day off to work on this.”
“Exactly. You’re trying too hard. You’re useless in the middle of the day.”
“Thank you for your feedback.”
“Sure thing.” He watched Sean stare at the screen, at the blinking cursor. “Hey, you know you’ve got a mouse living in your closet?”
“Why?”
“Because apartments are safer than the street?”
“No, why haven’t you killed it?”
“I’m a lover, man, not a fighter.”
“Useless fucking animal.”
“Useless? You can’t even kill an imaginary dragon.”

So he makes it up the hill and there’s the fucking dragon, looking at him all smug and shit like, “What you got, bro? Come at me.” And he charges at the big bastard with this mondo sword that he just stole off a dead guy…

“It’s epic fantasy, Sean, not epic surfing,” said the cat.
“I know. It’s awful.”
“‘Awful’ is the least painful word I would use to describe what you’re doing right now.”

And there, finally, was the dragon. It was wounded and eyed him warily, like any other creature that close to death, baring its teeth and panting. He stopped at the top of the hill and looked at it now, for the first time, as an animal and not as an enemy. It was golden and shining in the sunset’s glow, blood on its wings and claws. How could he possibly kill this beast that had just been following its instincts?

“Absolutely not.”
“Come on! What?”
“You can’t mercy kill the dragon. It’s a cop out.”
“You’re an editor now? Fuck you, cat.”
“No, fuck you for trying to take the easy way out. If you mercy kill the dragon, this whole book is just some stupid morality tale about not hurting little animals.”
“It’s not so little…”
“You should get out of here for a while. You’ve been staring at the screen too long. Your eyes are crossed. Well, more crossed than normal.”
“I’ll show you hurting little animals, you fuzzy bastard.”
He wandered aimlessly around the apartment for a while. He put on music. He turned the music off. He took a shower and put on a clean shirt. He straightened up his books. He fretted. He had no friends to invite over. Except Dave, and the last time Dave came by the neighbors bitched at him about the hallway smelling like hippies for a week. I need to get a life. Where does one get a life? He cooked himself dinner and tried to read a book for a while. He checked his email. He paced.
“Fine! I’m leaving! Happy?” He glared at the cat with the purest hatred one can feel for a cat who’s always right, grabbed his jacket and slammed the door. Having nowhere else to go, and feeling even more pitiful for it, he headed for the bar.
“Three days in a row, Sean?” said May.
“You should talk. Don’t you ever take a day off?”
“My private life is none of your business, son. Beer?”
“Ugh. Yeah. Please. Thanks.”
“Hair of the dog, eh?”
“Sure, if you want to call it that.”
“Drinking away a hangover? That’s the definition of ‘hair of the dog,’ actually.” She brought him his beer and he winced when the bell over the door rang. Lydia sat down next to him. She smells like old books. Damn it, why’d it have to be old books? She smiled at him, and if he didn’t know any better he would’ve let himself think that she looked him up and down. But he talked himself out of it.
“She returns. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”
“It is a stunning string of coincidences, isn’t it? Almost enough to make me think you’ve been sitting here waiting for me.”
“Oh, see, there’s the problem. You assume that my expensive and unhealthy drinking habit is somehow all about you. When, really, it preceded you.”
“Drink, Lydia?”
“Yes, May, thank you.” May seemed to be smirking more than usual. Maybe it’s just her face, maybe that thing moms say about your face getting stuck is true. There’s no humane way to disprove that theory. May winked at Lydia and Lydia winked back.
“You two are awfully chummy.”
“We had a heart-to-heart yesterday while we were waiting for your cab to show up.”
“Glad I could help.”
“Beers for the youth of America,” said May, plonking them down on the bar.
“Thanks.”
“Thanks.”
“So, Sean, tell me about this dragon of yours,” Lydia said.
“Well, he’s big and scaly. Eats gold. Terrorizes villagers. Breathes fire. Pretty standard dragon.”
“So why can’t you kill him?”
“Seems to be the question, doesn’t it?”
“Writer’s block?”
“Nope. I’ve written about forty different endings. I’m not blocked. I’m just producing a lot of crap that I can’t use. I think every possible means of destroying a house-sized lizard has already been explored.”
“Ah, yes. I know the feeling.”
“The bad writing feeling? Or the lizardy feeling?”
“Both.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm?”
“Yes, ‘hmm.’ It’s a general, nonjudgemental acknowledgement of something that a person has just said. It keeps me from having to air an opinion on the thing we were discussing. Clever, right?”
“Not especially.”
“What’s your comic about?”
“It’s kind of a postmodernist story about a broke comic book artist who can’t sell her work.”
“Irony.”
“Wasn’t at the time.” They sipped their beers and fiddled with bar napkins and stared into space, trapped in a bubble of commiseration.
“Can I ask you a question?” he asked, when the pause had become a lull.
“Jeez, another one? You’re killing me with your rapid-fire conversational style, Sean.”
“So for the last two days you’ve been schlepping around the hood trying to sell your stuff, failing miserably…”
“Could’ve gone without saying that part…”
“…and now you’re here, at midnight, what? Drowning your sorrows?”
“Clearly.”
“There aren’t that many bookstores around.”
“There are not.”
“Certainly none that are open this late.”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“So why are you still here?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I like the neighborhood. I like this bar.” A chuckle and shrug. “I met this horribly tortured writer that I’m kind of into.”
“Really?” Sean almost dropped his glass. “Tell me about this gentleman. He sounds fantastic.”
“He’s a drunk. Can’t finish his novel. Pretty worthless. But adorable.”
“Does he happen to have a dead-end job at the record store down the street? The one that reeks of weed?”
“It’s entirely possible.”
“Does he have elaborately verbose conversations with his cat?”
“God, I hope not.”
“It’s a really cute cat, if that helps.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Okay, forget about the cat. But otherwise, charming, right?” She laughed and waved at May for another beer.
“Do you remember telling me that I’m pretty yesterday?”
“Vaguely.”
“Did you mean to say that? Out loud, I mean?”
“Well. Urm…” He squirmed in his seat. Damn it. I was doing okay. He shredded a coaster on the bar. “Yes, well. I meant to say it. It’s true. I just wish I would’ve said it in a different scenario, when you might have taken me seriously. But I wasn’t expecting to see you, and I’d had a really weird day…”
“You were not at your smoothest.”
“My smoothest is pitiful. I’m glad I got to say it at all.”
“Me, too.”
“And that you didn’t, you know, hit me or anything.”
“Stop squirming.”
“Okay.” He squirmed. “Is that alright? That I said that?”
“Said what?” she asked, eyebrows arched in the loveliest, smelling-like-old-books way possible.
“Yeah, Sean. What’d you say?” asked May, who had materialized out of nowhere.
“Nothing, creepy booze fairy. Nothing at all.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that for a second.” She put another beer in front of Lydia.
“What? I don’t get another one?”
“You didn’t ask for one.”
“Can I please have another beer?”
“Can you please tell this girl that you like her so you’ll stop being a lonely, pathetic wanker and I won’t have to feel bad for you all the time anymore?”
“Yes. I can do that.”
“Alright. Good. I’ll be right back.”
“Thank you.” Those damned eyebrows were still raised. Expectant eyebrows. What a weird quirk of evolution. He cleared his throat and obliterated the rest of the coaster.
“Well. Hmm. Awkward.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm?”
“Yes, ‘hmm.’ We’ve been over this.”
“Right. Well. I think you’re pretty. And I like that you write comics. And that you’re an artist. And I think you’re interesting.”
“Thank you, Sean. I appreciate your honesty.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I think you’re interesting, too.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Um, could we maybe do something sometime?”
“Do you really talk to your cat?”
“Yes. I do. He’s kind of an asshole.”
“Sure.”
“‘Sure’ what?”
“We can do something sometime.”
“Something that doesn’t involve sitting here being chaperoned by May?”
“Absolutely.”
“You want to go for a walk?”
“Yes. Yes I do.” Sean threw money on the bar and they walked out, the bell clanging over their heads.

SATURDAY

And there, finally, was the dragon. His nemesis. The foul creature that he’d been chasing for months across this vast and now devastated land. It sat mocking him with its fire-breathing nonchalance, as though it had been waiting all along for him to simply catch up and prove his worth.

“You know there’s a girl in your bed, right?” asked the cat.
“Yes, I’m aware of that.”
“A very pretty girl. Who smells like books, which is weird.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So what the hell are you doing out here? If you’re not going to feed me?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, either put some kibble in the bowl or kill the dragon or get back in there. Because right now you’re just making me sad.”
“You’re right.”
“I’m hungry, is what I am.”
“There are more important things than dragons.”
“Things like food.”
“This can wait. I’ll figure it out. Thanks, cat.” And Sean went back to bed.

Collectively, we ARE good.

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Vanessa

So, yeah, Boston. Jeez. Wow.

It’s hard for me to write about this stuff. I wrote about the shooting in Aurora, and that was difficult. Which is why I didn’t write about the shooting in Connecticut. I feel like at some point it becomes repetitive. As heartbreaking as these things always are, my talking about my little feelings can and does get old. It’s a downer. But I’m still going to talk about it.

We’re always sad.

We’re always confused.

We despair, as a group.

That sense of “Oh, holy shit. How should I feel? What should I do?” is overwhelming when these events happen. And yeah, I know that in other parts of the world things like this are everyday occurrences, par for the course. Some people, unfortunately, have had to learn to just flinch and count the dead and go on with their day. That’s sad and horrifying and shouldn’t be the case, obviously. I am aware that, relatively speaking, what happened at the Boston Marathon is small potatoes, but that doesn’t diminish it. Not for me. Those involved or affected are still involved or affected. People still lost limbs and lives and loved ones and no amount of math or relativism will change that.

So. Moving on.

Interestingly, this is the first of these sorts of tragedies that I’ve watched unfold online. Usually I read about them later, after it’s all over. I don’t have tv, so I didn’t see it on the news. The first I heard was someone on Twitter telling Amanda Palmer to turn on CNN. Palmer’s from Boston and was in the city at the time (her blog piece about it is really great). And then I just watched the Twitter feed roll for the next few hours. It was pretty fascinating. The outpouring of love and condolences, mixed with people on the scene or nearby offering help, shelter, and information. The misinformation and bad reporting from actual news sources. The scammy motherfuckers who, only minutes after the bombs went off, set up fake organizations claiming to be accepting donations.

I like to think that I have a pretty tough shell, a reasonably thick skin. But through it all I felt horrible. I wanted to help somehow and couldn’t, which made me even sadder, feeling so impotent and ineffective. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hug my mom. I wanted to be in a room with people who love me and just sit and be alive and safe and sad and loved, together.

But I was alone. Me and my computer. And a few million people on Twitter. I got to thinking about how many historic tragedies I’ve seen. Columbine, Waco, two Middle East invasions, Aurora, Oklahoma City, 9/11. These are the things that have shaped our generation (or will, eventually), like the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam war shaped our parents’, and World War II our grandparents’. And on and on, all the way back. The people of Boston celebrate Patriots’ Day every year with Revolutionary War reenactments, a Red Sox game, and the Marathon. That juxtaposition is interesting. Different types of struggle. Different measures of accomplishment. We seem to be bound together by tragedy and misery more than we are by joyful festivities. By “observing,”"honoring,” or “paying tribute,” more than “celebrating.” But I guess it’s all just commemoration, of a sort, no matter what word you use.

We get through these shitty things, though. Some of us more quickly and easily than others. Maybe it’s that getting through that really binds us. Shared experience. We all have those moments when we look at each other and know that things will never be the same. And maybe this isn’t one of them, in the long run or in the bigger picture. It’s amazing what we can get used to. How adaptable we are. How horror can become so commonplace. But I like to think that coming together, supporting each other and showing love, that those become commonplace as well, by extension. The good outweighs the bad, then, doesn’t it?

It can.

It should.

And I know that those candlelight vigil kind of moments can seem cheesy or overblown, but they can be precious and powerful, as well. It says something about us as a group that we do those things. They’re deeply, purely, human responses to inhumane acts and they’re more than empty gestures. Solidarity is important. There really is strength in numbers. If we make it our mission in life to truly support and protect and love each other, ferociously and unconditionally, then the bad stuff can’t crush us. If we know that someone will always be there with a prayer or a hug or a pint of blood, we know we can get through. We know that we are never truly alone.

Anyway. All my love to Boston. All my love to anyone who was hurt or sad or scared, or even just sitting alone and crying. We’re all spinning on this rock together. Let’s make the best of it.

“And it makes me wonder…”

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Vanessa

It was a gorgeous day, sometime in the summer of 1997, and I was riding through the woods in a red convertible Jensen-Healey with my friend David. I said, “Hey, I really like this song. Who is this?” At which point he calmly pulled over, turned off the engine, and started lecturing (screaming) at me. Which I totally deserved. Because it was Stairway to Heaven.

I know, right?

I was fourteen! It was the 90s! I should’ve known Stairway. Or at least have heard it. Especially considering that my parents had every Led Zeppelin album on vinyl sitting in my living room. Guess I just hadn’t worked my way through the catalogue of awesome records yet. I got through Queen and Howlin’ Wolf and stopped, maybe? Anyway. David made me a mix tape (that’s right, I said tape!) with Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and a bunch of other classic stuff on it. He filled in the gaps in my rock canon knowledge, and I taught him about Nine Inch Nails, industrial, and electronica. And we talked music for the next sixteen years, among other things. I still have that tape somewhere, I just don’t have a tape player anymore. (Which is kind of a drag, isn’t it? How many mix tapes have been abandoned in the past decade or so? How much love is just sitting around in boxes collecting dust?)

So that tape started a kind of cascade, right? An avalanche of music stuff and life stuff. I firmly believe that some things are put on your path for a reason. (Even if they come along with, weirdly, a cute boy in a hot sports car. That doesn’t happen too often, let me tell you.) I became obsessed with classic rock, abruptly ending my goth phase and starting my pot-smoking/tie-dyed-shirt-wearing/Kerouac-reading phase. Maybe that all would’ve happened eventually on its own, but at least this way I had a badass soundtrack. The Doors, Hendrix, Joplin, the Grateful Dead, The Who, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and, most importantly, Led motherfucking Zeppelin.

Oh, Led Zeppelin. How I adore them so. And it’s been forty-four years since the first album came out, so I’m not going to waste your time telling you how awesome they are. You live in the world. You know how awesome they are. I do not need to plug Led Zeppelin. But I’ve been listening to them a lot the past couple of weeks and they’ve been on my mind so I want to talk about them. So there. And I should probably go ahead and tell you that if you don’t share my stance on Led Zeppelin being the greatest rock band ever, I respect your opinion. But bringing extra special snark to the blog comments table (and/or just telling me that I’m wrong) does not strengthen your argument. You know who you are.

Led Zeppelin received the Kennedy Center Honor in December, along with David Letterman, Buddy Guy, and Dustin Hoffman. All greats in their fields, obviously. In tribute, a bunch of artists performed their songs. That’s got to be nerve-wracking. I’ll say the Lenny Kravitz was alright (no worse than any of his other songs), and Kid Rock just needed to sober up and sit down. But, luckily, Ann and Nancy Wilson from Heart nailed it (nay – they fucking slaughtered it!) with their version of Stairway. And that gentleman on the drums? That’s Jason Bonham, son of John Bonham. He may never be as great as his dad, but no one else deserved to be playing that song on that stage. Amazing. It made Robert Plant cry, which, in turn, makes me cry every time I watch it. I’m such a sap.

Go ahead. Watch it again.

I always thought that song needed a gospel choir. Seriously, I did.

So after that show happened, I may have gotten sucked down a Led Zeppelin/YouTube rabbit hole. I think humans are hibernating mammals. This is not a widely accepted theory. However, I will submit as evidence that every winter I want to curl up with a book and a blankie and listen to the same five albums over and over and just eat chicken pot pie until spring comes. And this time I’ve been listening to Led Zeppelin albums constantly. (In my nest. With my chicken pot pie. It’s like heaven, except it can’t be because snow exists.) Also watching old concert footage of them. And documentaries. And I might have ordered a couple of biographies about them that haven’t shown up in the mail yet.

Yes, this seems obsessive. It happens. But for good reason. Their music never fails to melt my face. There’s pure blues in there. There are notes that shouldn’t be possible. There’s mandolin right alongside blistering electric guitar. There’s drumming that makes you appreciate madness. There’s sex and drugs and hunger and loss and love and death. There’s even fucking Hobbit stuff in there. A lot of it. Somehow Robert Plant makes Hobbit references sound very British and literary and deeply poetic and just a touch sexy. Not nerdy at all. I’d call that a superpower. But it might be the accent.

(Later, with caveats and addendums)

I spent about a week trying to find a way to end this blog post. There’s really no good way to do it. And I finally figured out that, while the Kennedy Center Honors make the subject convenient and topical, it wasn’t Led Zeppelin that I was trying to write about at all. Basically everything above just amounts to me saying, “I’ve always tended to geek out over music. Led Zeppelin = good.” And that’s boring.

Is it okay that it’s boring? I don’t know. My goal here has been to tell you about new and exciting things that I’ve run across in my efforts to try to be more well-rounded in my newly-minted digital paradigm. It’s been a year and I can’t say that I’ve plumbed all those depths yet, but I definitely feel like my writing is suffering for trying to maintain a sense of wonder about it all. It’s getting a little disheartening, frankly.

And I realized that with writing even this boring nonsense, as with all art, once you get past the surface, past the shiny colors or the new medium, all that’s left is the artist. It’s been creeping in. I’ve talked about myself more lately than I ever did in the posts a year ago or even six months ago. That’s a little scary. But good scary, right? Can I talk about what makes me mad? Or sad? Or terrified? Is it safe? Is it good? Is it art? Does it matter? Does talking about the best rock band ever change anything? No. It’s a drop in a bucket, a ripple in a pond. Is it going to make you run out and buy a Led Zeppelin album? Probably not, if only because they’ve been around long enough that by now if you were going to like them at all you already would. They’re not new and exciting, but they’re important. And more than that, they’re important to me.

So I took a little while and stepped away from this post and when I came back I saw that what I really wanted to write about was that long-ago mix tape from my friend. That makes me cringe. It’s just a tape. But it isn’t. And writing about why it’s so important to me seems self-indulgent and silly. Something worthy of conversation, but not necessarily of expository ramblings. But then, who’s to decide what’s “worthy”? (The voice in my head is saying, “I am, motherfuckers.” I have to fight her because clearly that’s just crazy talk.) As much as I don’t like to go on and on about myself it seems inevitable. It seems right. It seems, oddly enough, relevant. How the hell did that happen?

I know it sounds stupid, but there’s no way for me to thank David enough for making me that tape. Because of the aftermath of the thing, more than for the actual thing. First of all, you have to understand that I grew up in a place that exists about ten years behind the rest of the normal human timeline. So when I received that tape, our town was about where the everyone else in America was in the mid-1980s, feathered hair and all. A mix tape was hard work. And it meant a lot. I may technically be too young to appreciate the “Love is a mix tape” philosophy á la High Fidelity, but I’m damn close in practice.

Because of that tape, I learned about classic rock in the obsessive way that I learn about anything. I just swam in it for as long as possible, making it a part of everything that I did or thought or was at the time. That’s a fucked up way to live a life. Doesn’t make it wrong, though. And becoming well-versed in Led Zeppelin changed me in two very important ways. (I can’t believe I’m about to write this, you guys. Bear with me.)

1 – The Husband is a drummer, and he learned to play the drums by wearing out many a Led Zeppelin cd. (You know when they skip that fucks them up, right? Try playing drums next to a mid-90s boombox.) One of the first conversations we had, that wasn’t about me getting bumped out of a Magic tournament, was about how awesome Led Zeppelin is. We bonded over it. We dated. We got married. Our favorite song to sing together is Fool in the Rain. We actually take walks in the rain because of it. How dear and how precious are those moments.

2 – I learned enough about classic rock to be able to talk about it with my father. In the last year of his life, we talked about music constantly. He was a blues guitarist. We’d stay up all night discussing who was the better drummer, Ginger Baker or Mitch Mitchell. We’d go through albums and talk about why this note was best at this key change or that register wrong for that singer. We bonded over it. He died. But I’ve got all those lengthy conversations. And they’re not going anywhere. How dear and precious were those moments, as well.

I wonder if David realizes what he did with that tape. I don’t know if I’ve ever told him. (Sorry, buddy. But at least I asked your permission before telling that opening story. Hugs!) He’s one of a very few friends who knew my dad before he died. They had the same birthday. And they talked about music, too. Funny, at the time I thought it was weird that my dad knew that much about Led Zeppelin. And The Husband was the best man in David’s wedding. Everything comes full circle, somehow, with that. Maybe it’s just in my head. Probably.

So, yeah. Now I’m feeling all raw in the nerves. Maybe we’re starting a new phase here on the blog. Maybe not. I really don’t know. But I’m sorry I got all squidgy on you without fair warning. I didn’t expect it, either. But you’ve gotta write what wants written or it’ll drive you crazy. That particular hamster wheel is a bitch.

Is it always going to be weird?

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Vanessa

I got to come home for Christmas this year. I didn’t think we’d be able to, but my in-laws (correction: my awesome, awesome in-laws) bought us plane tickets so we could make it out to the east coast. I haven’t been home in almost two years. And it’s weird.

Why is it weird? It shouldn’t be. I know this town like the back of my hand, right? I lived here for thirteen years. As much as I hated growing up here it is, undeniably, home. This juxtaposition of comfort and anxiety kind of bugs me out. I feel like I’m always looking over my shoulder a little. Waiting for someone to recognize me or want to talk to me or, horror of horrors, reminisce about high school. Do they all have collective amnesia? Why does no one remember how they didn’t want to talk to me in high school? It’s like the one grocery store in town exists in some kind of awful sorcery bubble. Whatever. It’s fine. All angst is forgiven. But just because we’re all thirty now doesn’t mean that we have anything in common and I sure as shit don’t want to talk about sixteen-year-old me. She was kind of an asshole.

The town itself hasn’t changed much. Small southern towns don’t really do stunning transformations, barring some natural disaster or major financial revitalization. A couple of things have moved around. Some buildings are gone. Some have been renovated. There’s a new crosswalk on Main Street. Apparently the gymnasium of my elementary school recently caved in (twenty years too late for that little piece of serendipity). It’s like when you have a friend who you see every day and then you don’t see them for a long time, and suddenly you can see how drastically they’ve changed. Whereas before you wouldn’t have noticed because the weight gain or the weird hair seemed gradual, right? I don’t know. It’s a small town just like any other small town. But this one is mine. And that’s weird.

Again: why is it weird? I don’t fucking know, you guys. That’s the point. There’s this cultural assumption that coming home should be easy, especially at the holidays. You get to see your family and sit on familiar furniture and eat your mom’s cooking and tell stories and laugh and bask in the glow of comfort. And all of that is true, I suppose, about this particular trip (except that I’m eating my mother-in-law’s cooking so there’s way more deep frying involved and it is fan-fucking-tastic). But there’s an undercurrent of weirdness that I can’t quite pin down. An almost undetectable hum of anxiety. Maybe that’s just operant conditioning. I’m here therefore I’m anxious. Is that why I’m freaked out by being here as opposed to somewhere else? I don’t feel this way when I go other places that are familiar. But I never lived anywhere else for as long, either. I only grew up here. I only got my metaphorical battle scars here.

Another point that’s worth mentioning: I don’t really have a place that’s mine here anymore. My in-laws’ house is comfortable and familiar and I spent a lot of time here when I was younger, but this isn’t the house I grew up in. That house got sold several years ago and I can’t go back to it. There’s a lovely family living there now, fixing it up, raising kids, farming the land, doing right by the place. But it will never be my house again. It will never be the place I get to go for Christmas. That particular warm fuzzy does not exist for me. I could drive there with my eyes closed (and have, actually, with assistance – don’t tell my mother), but I can’t turn down the driveway anymore. I can’t walk the trail through the woods where I spent most of my childhood. I can’t take my maybe someday future kids to the river where I learned to fish. I can’t go sit and have a beer in the sunshine under the tree where we planted my dad’s ashes. This is all sounding really bucolic and sappy, isn’t it? A weird contradiction from my bitching about living here? It’s true. My childhood was a study in contradictions. But that’s a long story.

Don’t get me wrong. My in-laws and that whole side of the family are amazing people. I want to make it very clear that I love them and I’m always welcome here. Also, my sister is here, so I’m always able to hang out at her house. The other day she told me that she’s glad I’m comfortable enough to take a nap on her couch. Made me want to cry a little. So sweet, my little sister. And I have friends here who always make me welcome, unconditionally and without hesitation. They’re family, too. Their homes are my home, in their own way. I think that’s really what makes home home, more than a specific house or any set of particular places. When I’m with any of these people, that anxious hum goes away for a while. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s what I fail to remember when I get all tense thinking about coming home. That the hum can be alleviated, the anxiety made into a less formidable opponent.

Anyway. I didn’t mean to go off on a sentimental rant about the nature of home and family. But I guess it’s at the forefront of my thinking this time of year. It’s tough, being so isolated from friends and family like I am in California. Those people you want to hug when something good happens, or who you know wouldn’t care if you showed up on their doorstep sobbing at two in the morning? Those are the people who make it hard to live three thousand miles away. They’re what the “away” refers to (that sentence doesn’t technically work – my grammar seems to abandon me whenever I talk about this emotional stuff, please forgive me for that). I should probably try my best to absorb as many comfy home feely things as I can while I’m here, store them up. Here in the south, those feels seem to disguise themselves in the form of about eight kinds of fudge, which one must eat constantly to appease the gods of Christmas Fat. We’ll be back to nerdy things next week, I promise. Stay warm. Stay snuggly. Have a happy New Year.

Gobble, gobble, gobble, little consumer…

Posted on November 22, 2012 by Vanessa

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! I know a lot of you Americans won’t read this when I post it because of the holiday. It’s cool. Maybe this is the week I finally gain an international following. Non-holiday-related greetings, hypothetical comrades from far-off lands! Thanksgiving is one of my two favorite holidays. The other is the Fourth of July. Because stuffing ourselves senseless and blowing shit up are two of the great American traditions, and I just like to do my part to keep them alive, you know? Plus I really enjoy both of those activities so, bonus. Score.

Anyway. Go eat some turkey (or whatever fake turkey food-like product you enjoy as a vegetarian option). Sneak an extra special holiday scrap to the dog. Take a nap. Give thanks for the things that make your life worth living. Watch the parade. Hug your mom. Make some nieces and nephews giggle. Eat pie. Rinse and repeat.

Now. When all that’s over, that’s where I come in. Because I want to talk about Black Friday. Have you seen that Facebook meme that says “Because only in America would we trample each other to death for sales, one day after giving thanks for what we already have”? True story, that. Ironic and sad. And I won’t go into all the over-commercialization of Christmas, and the corporate scumfuckery that turned “Black Friday” from a boring accountant’s term into a self-indulgent, materialistic, made-up holiday in and of itself. But I could. Makes me a little ill, though. I’d rather skip it. Let’s skip it. Shall we reminisce instead?

At the Giant Evil Bookstore, we went to full holiday mode on November first. A different interpretation of that sentence: on one of the worst hangover callout days of the year, the company began its annual ritualistic two-month torture of us minions. Changing every single display in the store, so much overstock you couldn’t move around in the back room, weird shifts, training and working with new seasonal employees who don’t know what they’re doing, scheduling nightmares, bad weather, turning the heat up high enough to roast us all alive, and overtime (which is good money, but too much overtime and you would get a written warning from the company – that’s fucked up, right? It’s not just me?). Oh, and a blackout on being able to ask for time off. So no holiday travels to see my family for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Good times, let me tell you. I still have a bad taste in my mouth about the holidays from working retail. Hopefully someday that will go away.

Meanwhile, let’s all make a pact, right here and now, to try and be nice to retail minions this holiday season. These people work their asses off every day, even more so at this time of year, and they get paid very little for it. As I’ve said before, your horrible shopping crisis is just one of many that they’ll go through in any given shift. They may not know the answer to your question, but there is always someone available who they can ask. If the item you want is not in stock, they’ll do their best to get you what you need or at least come close. If you’re shopping at the last minute and you’re in a hurry, know that this person, too, has eight thousand things they need to be doing at that moment. And on top of that, they probably need to go pee and get a cup of coffee and maybe eat something at some point today. Everyone has bad days. Computers will fail. Credit cards will be declined. Special orders will fail to show up. The things you buy will break or malfunction. Cashiers really do need management’s approval to do certain things. None of these is that retail minion’s fault. And, most importantly, the person standing in front of you is not the whole company. They’re just trying to do their job under pretty heinous circumstances, like you would at your job. Which, by the way, is no better than theirs. Just because someone works behind a counter or sticks things on shelves for a living doesn’t mean that they’re dumber than you or less of a person than you. Maybe they’ve got two other jobs and a bunch of kids who are running wild while they’re out of school and probably won’t get the expensive presents they want. Maybe they’ve got a final exam this afternoon or a paper due tomorrow. Maybe they just got chewed out by their boss for being late because they couldn’t find a parking spot either and had to walk half a mile in the snow to get to work. Maybe they just had three horrible asshole customers in a row right before you and they’re trying not to cry. So be patient. Be kind. Be understanding. Maybe cultivate a bit of holiday cheer, yeah?

A couple of tips to make this easier on you: Don’t shop when you’re in a hurry. Your agro does not make anything go faster. Carry cash. If your check or your credit card won’t go through, it makes everyone’s lives easier if you can just hand over cash instead. The cashier and the people behind you in line will thank you. Be nice while you’re standing in line. You’re all in this together, and communal bitching doesn’t help the line move. Put things back where you got them. Half of a retail minion’s job is cleaning up after people. They’re there putting stuff away for two hours after the store closes. And if they can’t find the thing you want because it’s not where it’s supposed to be, that’s probably because someone else decided they didn’t want it and just set it down in some random place. Do not snark at someone because they told you “Happy Holidays” instead of your particular holiday of choice. This is not this person’s personal religious or political stance. It’s company policy put in place to avoid offending customers, and it’s designed to be inclusive, not exclusive. Keep your receipts or get gift receipts so the horror of January returns is easier on everyone. Tip your gift wrapper. Tip your barista. Tip the hell out of your bartender.

Or, skip the whole thing altogether. A couple of years ago I imposed Homemade Christmas on my family. Because I’d rather get one present that someone put a lot of love and effort into than a stack of corporate-funded shit that I don’t need or want and that some little brown kid got paid ten cents a year to make. That kid doesn’t get awesome Christmas presents, does he? No, because he has to work. (And maybe doesn’t celebrate Christmas anyway, so the point is kind of moot, but you see where I’m going.) So, Homemade Christmas rocks. If it’s the thought that counts, I like to know that my family knows I put real thought into something. Or buy local. Those little businesses need your money so much more than giant corporations do. And those are the people you know, who are a part of your community. You go to church with them, or your kids go to school together. You should support each other. Or buy used items. Things like books and movies are no less awesome just because they came from the thrift store, and that locally-owned thrift store probably needs your money. Or donate to charity in each other’s names. Do your research and pick a good one (here’s my vote), but use that money to actually help someone out who needs it rather than lining the pockets of some rich toy-maker asshole who probably doesn’t need another yacht. Or do something creative like buying a Christmas dinner for a poor family who doesn’t get to expect a feast as a matter of course. Maybe go take some firewood to the little old lady who lives down the road. Fix your neighbor’s broken-down car. Pay off someone’s medical bills or start a secret bank account for a kid who wants to go to college. And really, we should do these things year-round, shouldn’t we? But we put aside our money and our goodwill and save it up for this time of year. That makes me kind of sad. I’m not religious, but that feels a bit like bad karma.

So, yeah. Enjoy your turkey and your pumpkin pie. Really enjoy it. Be thankful for it. Say, “Thank you, turkey, for giving your little bird life so I can eat the best sandwiches ever for a week.” Be thankful for this world we live in, the dirt under your feet and the sky above your head. Be thankful for your family and the eons of time and genetics that stacked up just right so you could all be in a warm room together while it’s cold outside, enjoying each other’s company. Or if you’re spending Thanksgiving with friends (as I am), be thankful that the universe put these people on your path so you could love them. They’re family, too. Continue to be thankful tomorrow, while you’re shopping (or not). As we get closer to Christmas, remember that it’s not about the hassle, it’s about shared experience, and keep being thankful. When New Year’s rolls around, be thankful that you got this past year to live and breathe. Be thankful the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that…

A hundred-pound sturgeon on twenty-pound test…

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Vanessa

Let me explain to you the complete literary weirdness that happened to me this week. I’ll begin at the absolute beginning: in 1999 my cousin, the stagehand, snuck me in the back door of a Primus show. (And yes, I know that “snuck” is not a word.) I was a junior in high school and had been going to a ton of shows that year, spending unreal amounts of money on shitty metal bands. And I knew Primus, but I wasn’t a die-hard superfan or anything. I had Sailing the Seas of Cheese. But everyone has Sailing the Seas of Cheese (and if you don’t, you should), so that doesn’t really count. It was free (sort of) and I was on vacation so I figured what the hell. However, this particular show was in-fucking-credible. Buckethead opened for Incubus (before they started to suck) who opened for Primus and my mind was thoroughly blown. So, typical Vanessa long-story-short-but-not-short-enough, I went off the OCD deep end and bought every Primus album (on CD, whippersnappers). Huge Primus fan.

Fast forward to 2006, when I heard through the Giant Evil Bookstore grapevine that Les Claypool, the lead singer, bassist, and general heart and soul of Primus, had released a novel. I was stoked and confused and weirded out by the whole thing. Could not for the life of me, even with all my insider information, find a copy of this book. I asked every used bookstore in town to keep an eye out and call me if they saw a copy. I checked the Giant Evil Bookstore database day after day and there weren’t any available. And eventually I gave up, wrote it on my ridiculous books-to-buy-eventually spreadsheet, and forgot about it.

Then I was in the used bookstore in Arcata last week, just poking around. I usually avoid the fiction section. Too many books I want to read and I’ll spend all my money. So I stick to the scifi and fantasy sections because I have very specific things I’m looking for there. More cost-effective. See? I’m a responsible grownup. I irresponsibly wandered over to the fiction section and was reaching for a book on the very top shelf (to clarify: I am short and top shelves are usually difficult for me), when I tripped and knocked over a small stack of books that were precariously balanced on top of some other books. I was putting them back (even though they shouldn’t have been there in the first fucking place) and what do I see? South of the Pumphouse by Les Claypool. In the wrong section, of course. It was in the L’s and not the C’s. Damn it.

This is the third time that I’ve found something I was looking for in this particular bookstore by almost seriously injuring myself. I’m not sure if I should be more cautious or less cautious while in this establishment. Either might serve me well. Hypothetically. Fuck it, I’m just clumsy, and the universe seems to be rewarding me for that. By giving me books. Or something.

Anyway. It’s a pretty small book. I read it in about a day and a half. Weird. Very weird. If you’re a Primus fan, you’ll recognize a few lines from the song “Fish On.” It’s basically a story about two brothers who haven’t seen each other for years and are trying to work on being a bigger part of each others lives after the death of their father, even though now that they’re adults they have absolutely nothing in common anymore. There’s a lot of stuff about trying to go home and see things the way that you did when you were a kid. There’s a lot of fishing, which I kind of took as an extended metaphor for how one can’t force camaraderie through sharing an experience. But then, about three quarters of the way through, it takes a real hard left turn. I won’t give out any spoilers, but I have to say that was not the way I expected it to go. All in all, a good book. Not a great book, but worth the day and a half, for sure.

But I wasn’t quite sure what to think so I read a couple of reviews of it after I was done, just to see what other people had to say about it. And almost all of them (as well as the blurb on the back of my copy of the book) compare Claypool to Hunter S. Thompson. I don’t know that I agree with that comparison. There are drugs and madness involved, and some wacky shit goes down, but Thompson was a revolutionary and a complete crazy person and I wouldn’t in good conscience compare him to anyone. He’s the Pink Floyd of journalism. This novel reads a little more like Steinbeck, trying to squeeze profundity out of the mundane.

Point is, it wasn’t at all what I expected and I’m very disappointed in myself. Because I shouldn’t have hyped up the book based on my previous opinion of the author, right? Just because his music is this wonderfully weird thing doesn’t mean that his written work will be (which is not to say that writing lyrics is not, in itself, worthy of being called “writing,” but you know what I mean – long form prose versus lyrics which are essentially poetry? Apples and oranges, yes? We can all agree on that?). Why pigeonhole people because they’re really good at one thing that they’re famous for doing? Doesn’t mean that’s the only thing they’re good at. Or the only thing that they love. Frankly, I’m dismayed to learn that I even had that particular kind of bias in me. Made me sad. Mostly because when it’s the other way around (and, most often, when it’s someone else’s opinion) I rail against it. Like saying that just because Matthew Gray Gubler is an actor, that he can’t paint. Or that Henry Rollins can’t do spoken word poetry because he’s a punk singer. Or that Eddie Murphy can’t sing because he’s a comedian.

Wait, no, that one’s true.

And I’m not condemning Les Claypool’s work, or saying that he should just stick to shredding on the bass guitar (a fretless, six-string bass guitar). If he writes another book I’ll probably read it. And of course I would never discourage anyone from expanding their artistic horizons. You have a story in you? Fucking tell it or it will die. Period. But beware the preconceived notion monster. Because apparently it will eat your face without you even knowing about it. Lesson learned.

Aurora.

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Vanessa

Fair warning: as you can probably tell from the title, this isn’t going to be as funny a post as I’d usually go for. We live in a world where serious shit happens and I can’t get by with just talking about books and movies and my stupid feelings about them all the time. Just so you know.

We all heard about the shooting in Aurora, Colorado this past week. It’s hideous. I don’t want to talk about it because it makes me feel sick. But I think I should talk about it precisely because it makes me feel sick.

Here’s the thing: Batman is a big deal. The newest of the Nolan movies is a huge deal. But only because it’s American media hype. This gun-toting bullshit has nothing to do with Batman. And I won’t give wackadoo shooter guy the satisfaction of discussing his connection with an iconic superhero. I just won’t. Fans are fans, whatever they’re fans of, and really all that means is groups of innocent people in one place at one time. Happens every day.

As a side note, the other thing I’m not going to discuss is my view on gun laws, so if you leave something in the comments and it doesn’t make it through please don’t be offended. This is hardly the time or the place for politics. Feel free to send me an email and I’ll get back to you, but I don’t want to talk about it here.

But I do want to talk about crazy.

I’m a child of the Columbine generation. In April of 1999 I was a junior in high school. It’s really strange to talk about this in such a timeline kind of way, but those couple of years between the school shootings of the late 1990′s and the complete global madness of 9/11 were, frankly, a tremendously fucked up period of history to have to live through. It was fear before there was fear on such a blown-out scale. And it was limited to a very specific group. High school kids went to school every day terrified while everyone else got to walk around mostly unaffected (at least that was how it seemed to me and all my friends and classmates). Before we all talked about “terrorism” like it was a normal state of being. Before that word lost its meaning. Like the plan was to grow a whole group of adults who were already afraid for their lives. That’s a bit of a conspiracy theory thing to say. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t work, right?

Unless you were in that situation, though, you don’t really know what that was like, spending every single day petrified that someone would freak out in a classroom and blow you up. Or worse. Out of nowhere. Someone you’d known your whole life, someone you’d never expect. Which was especially scary for me because I’m from a small country town where coming to school straight from going hunting at sunrise wasn’t uncommon. Until Columbine, it was totally legal to come to school with a gun in your car if you had a hunting license. I’m sure it’s still like that in a lot of remote places. I don’t have a fundamental problem with guns. They’re a useful tool in the hands of people who know what they’re doing. But there’s a time and a place. And I was taught the hard way (although, admittedly, not the hardest way) that school is not the place. Sorry, I don’t mean to go on and on about a completely unrelated tragedy.

So now I’m having horrible flashbacks. Perhaps because those two words “Colorado” and “shooting” are in the same sentence again. A conditioned response, maybe, I don’t know. But that’s out of my control.

What pisses me off is that this crazy jackass dragged everyone else in that theater into his delusion. I understand crazy. Believe me, I’ve been at the bottom of several different crazy barrels, other peoples’ and my own. I get it. Reality sways, occasionally. I understand fully how people can…what? Get lost, maybe. Or forget. I’m not saying I sympathize, just for the record. I understand that some folks need serious help to keep their shit together, but that impulse to hurt people is totally beyond me. It just doesn’t seem fair when people pull others down with them when they’re drowning like that.

But it doesn’t surprise me that Americans tend to go on shooting rampages, honestly. Think about the way that we’re desensitized in our culture. We’ve accepted violence. We see death all the time and it seems painless. We shoot people in video games and they just disappear. Tv shows are full of rape and murder and death and home invasions and people beating the shit out of each other – all of which is way more graphic than the news. But censors are more concerned with seeing a nipple onscreen than someone’s guts all spilled out. And I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t mind a bit of blood and guts and gore in my movies/games/books/tv/etc. But I have the mental acuity (now, at 30, probably not so much during my more formative years) to deal with it as a fiction, as a tool to move the story forward. It probably helps that my mother is a trauma nurse (full disclosure: a badass trauma nurse) and brought home real-world horror stories all the time. You get used to it. But that’s just it: we shouldn’t get used to it. Unless you’re a cop or a fireman or a nurse or a doctor or a coroner or whatever, there’s no reason to be so cut off from how horrible these things are. Isn’t it a fucked up symptom of our media-fed culture that we can rationalize actual violence as just something that happens to someone else somewhere else, as long as we see it on a screen? The media treats war like infotainment and death like statistics. They’ve got no problem showing us starving babies in another country and then immediately following those horrendous images with a multi-million-dollar commercial for some overpriced restaurant whose food could probably kill us all. We shouldn’t be so ok with that juxtaposition, that hypocrisy.

I guess my point here, if I really have one besides just using this as a ranty outlet, is that we shouldn’t give this guy in Colorado a spot in our minds, in our history, in our hearts. Let’s remember the victims, the injured and the dead, the people who were just trying to have a night out like we all need occasionally because our lives are shit because we live in America and consuming something makes us feel happy for a minute. They were just people. It was just a movie. And they died. It’s tragic. It’s tremendously sad. The ripples that go out into the world from that event are incalculable.

But we can’t let fear take over. Take just a second, just one, and maybe think about those things that you do in your everyday little life that you don’t ever fathom could ever, ever hurt you. You go to the bank. You get a cup of coffee. You go to the grocery store. You go to the movies. At any given moment any of us could get shot or blown up or whatever. We’re vulnerable all the time to someone else’s crazy. And that’s not our fault. And that’s not society’s fault. And that’s not even necessarily a crazy guy’s fault. Shit, I could get eaten by a bear walking through my backyard, you know? Sad, ridiculous, fucked up things happen all the time. Don’t let those things that might maybe someday happen and that can’t possibly be predicted make you cower. Don’t let the possible make you hide away from the definite. Because trite as it may sound, life is fucking short. Do what you love. Live to the fullest. Tell the people you love that you love them. Smile. Laugh. Spread joy and love and light. Be good to each other. That’s all we can do. To do any less than that is a waste of time, a wasted opportunity, something lost forever that we can’t get back and might regret. And what a shame it is to regret, my friends. What a complete shame. Don’t let the bad guys win.

In which I am confounded by literature once again…

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Vanessa

So, I don’t know if you guys have noticed my widget over there on the right side of the screen. There are several. Below my Twitter feed (@geekinacardigan – feel free to follow me, I still only have like 45 followers) is my list of what books I’m reading/have read? I’m having an ethical crisis about that list, you guys. Total first world problem, right? Absolutely.

See where it says Accelerando by Charles Stross? That there is a big fat lie. I couldn’t finish it. I tried. I couldn’t even get halfway through it. Which is super frustrating. I so rarely put a book down unfinished. It irks and nibbles. And on top of that, now I’m in this conundrum, having a torturous back and forth with myself. Should I delete it off the list? Because I didn’t really read it. That’s false advertising, promoting myself as more well-read than I actually am. On the other hand, I think it could have been incredible. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right space for it. Perhaps someone else will see it on the list and go read it and love it. That’s worth leaving it on there, isn’t it?

Urgh. So torn.

Although I suppose now I’ve posted this I can’t really delete it off the list, can I? Fuck.

Well, problem solved. False advertising or no.

Anyway. I don’t know why I couldn’t make it through the book. Cyberpunk is hard for me, for some reason. I think it’s really interesting, that relationship between people and computers, especially when you get into stuff like microchips in brains and the impending singularity. A few cyberpunk novels that I really loved: The Unincorporated Man (by the Kollin brothers), Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi), and Neuromancer (William Gibson). And of course Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly are both classics (by Phillip K. Dick – by the way, that K. stands for “Kindred,” isn’t that awesome?). And I even liked Stross’s book Glasshouse, even though it’s a little less cyber and a little more punk. Good stuff. Really, really good. So why is it so difficult for me?

I don’t know. It kind of feels like when I read super swords-and-dragons-type fantasy. The worldbuilding is fantastic, but I can either love it or just get completely lost and then I can’t follow the story. Which is probably why so many people don’t read science fiction in the first place. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, why more people don’t enjoy scifi or fantasy. It’s an interesting question. All stories are just stories, aren’t they? Whether it’s people or aliens or monsters or animals, every story is somewhat anthropomorphized in our heads kind of by default. Therefore, all stories are just people stories. All stories are just interactions of one kind or another. Relationships. Actions and consequences.

But the trick is being able to get inside them, crawl around in there and live in that world for a minute. There must be something relatable for the reader or it’s all just blah blah blah. If you don’t care about the world, you’re not going to care about the people who inhabit it. Like how people who can’t understand Shakespeare’s language can’t get into the characters in the play. That’s actually probably a really great analogy for a lot of people’s dislike of scifi. And really, it’s not that I don’t follow the language of cyberpunk (even being as semi-computer-literate as I am), it’s more that I can’t get into a lot of the stories because they hide behind the language. That computery vernacular (or any sort of weird dialectical stuff in fiction), when it isn’t understood, tends to make people skip over those bits and then they miss important details. I’ve realized that I also do this with books with a lot of similarly weird names (like in any book by Dostoyevsky, for example) and then I forget which characters are supposed to be doing what. And I’ve heard folks say that they have this problem with Tolkien. Not surprising, but I think it’s really fascinating what will baffle one reader and not another. The way that each of our brains are so differently wired is just endlessly interesting.

And that’s a subject I could talk about for days and days, even if I’m not particularly well-versed in the actual science of it. I was almost a psych major in college, but a really fantastic professor told me that I’d never be able to get through the math. Which is totally true, and I thank her for that advice, but it makes me sad that I can’t talk about the brainy-pokey things I think are cool with a little more aplomb. Like dissecting this really weird cyberpunk book about people with the entire internet in their heads and the uploaded consciousnesses of lobsters that run a major corporation. That would be a lot easier if I understood brains. And computers. Maybe.

Anyway, if you read it, let me know how it is. I might pick it up again one day when I’m in the mood for something a bit difficult and dense. Meanwhile, it’s going to stay on my widget list, haunting me. Damnable conscience.

A perfectly valid reason to overuse the word “awesome.”

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Vanessa

“Who is Neil Gaiman?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to answer this question. It boggles my little nerdy mind. There seems to be a glitch in the awesomeness-to-famousness ratio matrix here. I recently answered the “Who’s Neil Gaiman?” question by saying that he’s the greatest living scifi/fantasy writer, having forgotten that Ray Bradbury and Terry Pratchett are both still with us. My sincerest apologies to those two elder statesmen, but to say that the three of them make up a triumvirate of badass is the highest form of flattery. That I can muster, anyway. I doubt there’s better company to be in amongst the living.

Here’s the thing about Neil Gaiman: the man can do anything. He writes comics, fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, kid’s books. A multifaceted ninja of the weird, this guy. Which is why it’s even more baffling that people don’t know who he is. Comic book geeks, literature geeks, movie geeks – all of these groups have a damn good reason to adore him, and in a sociological-Venn-diagram-of-normal-human-conversations kind of way, he should be a household name, right? You would think. Although to be fair, my love for Gaiman’s work mostly centers around his novels. Neverwhere blew my mind so completely when I read it. Fucking outstanding. I think I gave a copy to everyone I had to buy a birthday present for that year, which is saying a lot because I don’t normally give store-bought gifts. I could go into a lengthy, gushy review of all of his work, but it’s too much to take on. We’d be here for days.

So why bring him up, then? Well, because he made me cry the other day. (I’ve been talking about crying a lot on the blog lately. You should probably not read anything into that. I’m really ok, I promise.) He gave this year’s commencement speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, which was basically just some good advice for young artists from someone looking at them hopefully from the other end of a successful career. The sort of things I wish I’d been told ten or twelve years ago. You can watch and/or read the whole thing here. It’s about twenty minutes of awesome. He’s just so damn charming. One of those guys that you feel in your nerdy bones you’d like to hang out with some day, but you know you’re just not cool enough. Oh, well. One can dream.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what he said in that speech. I can’t imagine someone that talented ever struggling with the sorts of writery problems that schlubs like me deal with. The torture of syntax, the agony of the first draft, the heart palpitations when staring at a blank page. There’s a sort of hero-worshippy thing we do where we imagine those folks don’t sweat over their creations like us, the mere mortals. They just poop out perfect finished novels, don’t they? No, they don’t. Art is hard, but it should be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right. (Or, as my mother would say, “If it feels good, do it. If it feels bad, stop.”) I grapple with the idea of being a writer. Well, that’s not entirely true. I know I’m a writer. If I’m not here to write, I don’t know why the fuck I’m here, frankly. What gets me stuck on the hamster wheel is the word “successful.” What does that even mean, in the context of art? That one becomes rich? Famous? Well-known? Happy? I’m incredibly shy and nervous around people, and I hate money. So I’d like to say that happy is enough, that I can write for writing’s sake. And I do. If I don’t feed those ideas, get them out of my head, they just scream and scream and bounce around in there like angry demon children trapped in a ball pit. On the other hand, my brain is wired for words. I think about words probably more than I think about anything else. Putting them together, their sounds and harmonies, their meanings and implications when they’re strung along in a beautiful (or horrible) line. Thinking of them as little gears, clockwork in a bigger machine, and making that machine work properly – that’s heaven.

But to what end? So I can bitch about pop culture on the interwebs? Not really. Don’t get me wrong. This is tremendously fun, and I can’t even begin to express how much it means that you guys actually read this drivel. It keeps me writing; it keeps me thinking. But I look at my novel, sitting lonely in its sad little box, and I feel like I’ve ignored my child, forgotten to pick him up after school and he’s standing in the rain, waiting, trying not to cry. Would it be “success” for me to have it published and make my millions? At this point I’d be grateful to the universe if I could even finish it and be proud of the work. Robert Frost rewrote Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood ninety-two times before he would let it be published. Am I that much of a perfectionist? I really don’t know. But I would like the damn thing to someday see the light of day. To have someone say that they enjoyed it. That it made them think about something they’d never thought about before. That it made them happy. That whole process, the after-the-work-is-finished process? That’s the part that gives me nightmares. And I think that’s the most important part of Gaiman’s speech, that last bit about how the landscape of distribution of art is changing. This is all new territory. There’s no reason to wait for someone to discover you, or tell you your work is valuable. Just do it because you love it. And if it makes even one person happy, or makes even one person think they can do the thing they want or love to do, that’s got to be worth it. Doing it all yourself? We’re allowed to think that way now, and I’m kind of in that weird generation gap where that’s something I have to learn, something I was never taught. Hard to wrap my mind around, still.

I’m glad that there are folks out there like Neil Gaiman who, while they may not be household names, mean so much to the people who do know their work and take the time and the energy to share with us what they’ve learned. There’s something tremendously laudable about not just sitting in some high castle wallowing around in a pile of money, and instead choosing to come down to tell us how to be real artists because artists are important. That we are important, and that it’s up to us as much as it is to the people we admire to create good and beautiful things. So if you don’t know who Neil Gaiman is, I’m not going to try to explain him to you. My advice? Go pick up four books right now: The Absolute Sandman Volume One, American Gods, Graveyard Book, and Blueberry Girl. It’s an expensive but comprehensive overview of Gaiman’s…what?…I don’t know, but I can’t use “awesome” any more in this blog post or I’ll make myself ill. Check out all of his stuff and his wicked (haha! I didn’t say it!) blog at neilgaiman.com.

The Beardy One

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Vanessa

Oh, Patrick Rothfuss, where do I even begin? Perhaps at the beginning.

Once upon a time, I was in a writer’s group with some kickass scifi/fantasy nerds. One day, one of these excellent people, my buddy Jonathan (who will eventually bring us a fantastic graphic novel about the anthropomorphic exploits of the Seven Deadly Sins – I’ll keep you guys posted), handed me a book and said, “There are no words.” I had a total Matrix moment and was all “But books are just words, man.” Then I caught up and understood and went about my day. Then I started reading this book and the world fell apart for a minute.

It was that good. There are, in fact, no words. But I’ve got to try because that’s my gig here. Urm, so, here goes: Take everything you love about Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones and cut out all the bullshit. Take the good stuff that’s left and distill it down through a little bit dark, Joss Whedonesque, Quentin Tarantinoish, violent but beautiful and funny kind of filter. Then add obsessive lute playing, homeless starving orphans, drug addicts, mythical bad guys, some crazy demon spider monster things, unrequited love, and a dragon-lizard.

This will leave you reeling from an unreasonable amount of awesomeness.

So I read the book (The Name of the Wind, by the way, for titular clarity) in, like, a day. It’s a pretty hefty book. I may have laid out of work to finish it. Which I did more than once. (You can’t call out with “I hate my thankless, soulsucking job.” So fuck it. Call out sick and stay home and do what you love.) I immediately wrote an email to Mr. Rothfuss, telling him how mind-blowingly good his book was and that he had kind of fucked up the curve for the rest of the class and I felt like I didn’t have the chops to keep writing anymore, what with my face being melted by his greatness and all. And he wrote me back! A real live email, not a famous-guy form letter. He told me that no one’s going to write my stories if I don’t do it. And that we all need good books to remind us of that. Such a nice guy. Beardy guys are usually nice. Weird how that happens.

That all happened in early 2009. Book two in the series was supposed to come out that Christmas, according to the rumor mill at the Giant Evil Bookstore. So we waited and waited and Christmas came and went and we waited and reread book one and now it’s the end of 2010 and what the hell is going on?!? My nerds and I got agro. Meanwhile we’d been sustaining ourselves on Rothfuss’s blog and the fucking phenomenal graphic novel/picture book he put out (The Princess and Mr. Whiffle).

Long story short (or not) the second book (The Wise Man’s Fear) came out in March of 2011 and shot straight to the top of the NYT bestseller list. Hells yeah! I called out sick again to stay home and read it. And I forfeited my massive Giant Evil Bookstore employee discount to buy a signed edition from our local independent bookstore. Totally worth it, and I love that Rothfuss prefers to do signings and readings at small indie stores. Mad respect for that, sir; it’s important and means a lot. I tell you friends, in all honestly, and I don’t get to say this often: the second one was everything I wanted it to be. Just as good as the first. Not better, not worse. Just a seamless continuation. Which, judging by the few people who have been able to pull it off, must be hard as balls to do. I was so impressed. Usually I come out of a sequel wishing it was as good as the first one, or wishing it hadn’t been so good as to make the first one seem bad. But with Rothfuss’s books, it was like I had just turned a page. Brilliant.

And now I’m deep in the throes of waiting for the third book. Oh, the agony. The torture. But whatever. There are a lot of assholes out there who are giving the man guff about how long he takes between books. These are really long books, guys (according to Rothfuss, Name of the Wind is as long as Harry Potters 1-3, and Wise Man’s Fear is almost as long as the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy), and they have to be written, edited, rewritten, reedited, typeset, printed, distributed, etc, etc. You can’t just yell at an author to sit down in front of a computer and expect him to turn fucking tricks for you. Just, you know, for the record. Also, Rothfuss is a busy dude. Raising a kid, trying to have a somewhat normal (on a bestselling author, famous guy kind of scale) life, and running a pretty great charity. Cut him some slack. Chill out. Read his blog. Cultivate some patience. It will be worth the wait.

But I guess the real reason I wrote this blog, besides trying to spread the tao of Rothfuss, is that little note he wrote me. He’s totally right. We need some books to be better than others. To shake us up, remind us why we love them. I’ve read so many books. So. Many. And I don’t know if it’s just that my brain can only store so much, or that they’re really all the same, but I tend to forget most of them as soon as I’m done. I read The Name of the Wind at that perfect time: I’d been bored for a while, even reading the classics. The important ones that everyone should have read, but everything that’s been written since then is based on them, so when you read them you feel like you’ve read them before? Sad but true. Like Tolkien. I love Tolkien, but there are so many books that have been written by rabid Tolkien fans that when you read his stuff it can seem old hat, and it’s really unfortunate, for Tolkien and for us. But the ones that are great, the ones you want to read over and over, the ones that you remember everything about – those are the books that matter. When you’re struck down by good writing, rendered entirely useless because you’ve been sucked into another world and don’t want to leave, when you get it stuck in your head like a bad song. Man, that’s a great feeling, isn’t it? And, at least for me, it happens so rarely that it’s stunning. So, yeah, go read the first two so we can all do a delirious happy dance together when the third one comes out. Info on Rothfuss’s books, charity, and his awesome blog are all at patrickrothfuss.com.

Geek In A Cardigan

Adventures in Snark

Tag Archives: sincerity

Enthusiasm! (With a dash of pure terror…)

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Collectively, we ARE good.

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“And it makes me wonder…”

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Gobble, gobble, gobble, little consumer…

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A hundred-pound sturgeon on twenty-pound test…

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Aurora.

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In which I am confounded by literature once again…

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A perfectly valid reason to overuse the word “awesome.”

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The Beardy One

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