Did I nominate myself? You betcha. As I have pointed out previously, I play the lottery, too.
My parents’ reaction to Brokeback Mountain was disappointingly tame. “It was too long,” my dad said. “So these two cowboys love each other. They needed over two hours to show me two cowboys in love with each other?”
My mom said, “Feh,” or words to that effect.
Back to work.
D.
My 80-year-old dad and my 77-year-old mom went to see Brokeback Mountain the other day.
They thought they were going to see a traditional Hollywood Western.
I’ve been too busy to call them, but when I do, I’ll say, “So. How was the movie?”
Here’s how today went:
Up at 6:30 AM.
Operating from 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM.
Catching up on office work, surfing, and blogging: 3:30 to 6:00.
Hospital committee meeting: 6:00 to 8:00.
Home at about 8:20.
Chess with Jake until 10:00.
I’m going to type up Jake’s homework for tomorrow, and then I’m going to crash. G’night, moon.
D.
Jona nominated me for Blogwhore of the Year over at The Best of Blogs, so I thought, weeell, hell, I’d better do me some good whoring.
The real reason for this post: lately, several new names and faces have shown up in the comments. Some of you don’t even want to rip me a new one. Anyway, if you’d like to do some reciprocal blogrolling, let me know. You need only ask. And if you’re a lurker, it wouldn’t kill you to say hi.
By the way: I only drop people from my blogroll for two reasons. One, they haven’t updated in forever; two, they say something hateful or racist in their blog. (I don’t think I’ve dropped anyone for that reason, but it did keep me from listing someone.) If I’ve dropped you by accident, let me know.
Waking up from anesthesia, one of my patients today said, “Who are you?”
“I’m your doctor.”
“You’re full of shit.”
You know the best thing about these conversations? Repeating them back to the patient days later. It’s so tasty.
If you haven’t seen it yet, One Good Move has the video of O’Falafel’s interview with Dave Letterman. I love it when O’Falafel drinks his coffee ;o)
The General puts a human face on our government’s civil rights abuses. I feel so much safer now.
D.
Buggery Blogger is only part of the reason I haven’t been posting much lately. It’s back-to-work week, and my mind and body agree that waking up early sucks. I feel like crap, and even Edna Mode can’t cheer me up.
This comes from Bookseller Chick:
Since you’ve read lots of Harlequin Presents, would you maybe have any recollections of a book I’m trying to find? –A girl gets together with a guy in a van during a snowstorm. They are complete strangers. To keep warm, they may or may not have sex. Through most of the book, he thinks she is all too promiscuous. This tortures him. Of course she is actually a bookworm and introvert. He just happens to see her a second time after she has just had a makeover and is wearing a form-fitting sweater.
The cover features a brunette wearing a yellow sweater and maybe a plaid skirt. It’s a plain white background. Published before 1996 I believe but newer than the early 80s ones where nothing happens before marriage. Can you help?
If any of you can name that book, go help out the BSC, okay? Link above.
Here’s one of my own:
Pub date, 1970s. Science Fiction. A guy wakes up one day to find himself in a 12-year-old body — his own, about thirty years ago. Somehow, he’s living out the fantasy of being a kid again “with all I know now.” He turns the tables on his flirtatious cousin who used to make his life hell, and he rakes in the dough on horseraces (conveniently, he remembers some key race results). The mob gets wind of his success and wants to know how he does it. Eventually, he gets gunned down by the mob.
He wakes up on a space ship. Aliens have granted him three wishes, and he just screwed up his first wish. The next two-thirds of the book concern his other wishes. In one, he’s back in his 40-something-year-old body, but with superhuman strength and amazing sexual powers. Trouble is, his physiology is different, so alcohol makes him violently ill. Things end badly after he throws up on an important business client.
***
While I have Bookseller Chick’s attention . . .
Yesterday in the grocery store, I picked up a paperback edition of Tuesdays with Morrie. I remembered reading something about this in a magazine, and it sounded like a cool idea for a book. In the store, I looked at the acknowledgements. Author Mitch Albom acknowledges, among other people, a rabbi. Okay, so that’s good. Next, I read the first two pages. The writing is a bit too slick and a bit too cute, but still, the guy writes a good hook. I’m a millimeter away from buying this thing, but then I get to the deal-breaker.
You see, I’m curious about this “wisdom” thing. If Morrie is so full of wisdom, says I, I ought to be able to open the book at random and find some of that wisdom. I did just that, and soon realized that all dialog in the book is written like this:
“Here’s me saying something.” That’s Morrie. No ‘Morrie said,’ nothin’.
And here’s the author saying something back. No quotes. No ‘I said.’
Albom distinguishes between his voice and Morrie’s by the use of quotes or the lack of quotes. No saids at all.
I’m not saying it was intelligent or rational to put the book back on the rack, but I did. Maybe it’s a wonderful book. I’ll never know. Looking at that single page of dialog, I knew a whole book of that would drive me nuts.
I have other quirks, too. Pretentiousness is a deal-breaker for me; I’ve never made it past the first page of Unbearable Lightness of Being. I liked the first sentence of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger,
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
but after the second sentence, I put it back on the shelf:
The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what might have been parsecs in all directions.
First I’m looking at a crisp cinematic image (good), then I’m looking at King tap-tapping at his keyboard (not good).
The first paperback I ever bought with my own money (for fifty cents, I think), The Path Beyond the Stars, had as its first line,
It was axiomatic, Jon Wood groused.
How do I remember that? Because my brother, who thought it ridiculous for a six-year-old to spend his money on paperbacks, snatched the book from my hands and said, “Look at that! There’s two words in the first sentence you can’t possibly understand.” Never mind that he didn’t know the meaning of axiomatic or groused either. This was a dare and, dammit, I read the whole thing. And remembered that first sentence forevere’n’ever.
But I’m not six anymore. For adult Doug, if an author wants to throw apotheosis around, he’d damn well better have a good reason to do it.
Call me snobbish or neurotic or a miserable little prick. I deserve it. All I’m saying is, these are deal-breakers for me, and I’m one of the guys in your book-buying audience.
What are your deal-breakers? Bookseller Chick, do you have any thoughts about this?
D.
Blogger crashed for me earlier this evening. I had something in mind. Really, I did.
But I’m tired now, so instead of Balls and Walnuts’ usual high quality entertainment, I offer you tonight’s post over at Wax, Boogers, and Phlegm. Get a load of the hate mail I get from ear candling fanatics. (And this one is mild.)
More tomorrow, Blogger willing.
D.
Shaving* naked in front of the mirror last night, looking at the new roundishness of my abdomen — a pregnant muchness that wasn’t there three months ago, back before my gym closed — I thought of personal growth, the kind of growth that derives its substance from too many bags of microwave popcorn and too many Christmas cookies and too many pieces of Belgian chocolate (oh thank you very much, my beloved patients, but don’t you realize that if you kill me, I won’t be here to take care of you?)
Turning this way and that, trying to find some angle where I didn’t look like Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, only, you know, hairy, suppressing the urge to take a scalpel to my flesh because what the hell good is it being a surgeon anyway if I can’t even fix blubber belly, I reflected (in the mirror, get it?) that this was why I loved writing.
Think about it. Friends drift away, love affairs fly apart, bodies go to hell, and yet our writing chugs on, barring hard drive crashes, fire, floods, and fiction-hating dogs, of course. Every bit of writing we do improves us as writers. Well, that one month foray into screenwriting put me into an extended writer’s block, but I still learned from that, didn’t I? (Yeah. You learned not to fuck with me, sailor. — Doug’s muse.) And I may have spent my first two years and 100K words of ‘serious’ writing on a project that went nowhere fast, but if I hadn’t done that, could I have written a 300K word novel that actually went somewhere? I don’t think so.
What’s my problem with scale, anyway? I’ve sold flash fiction and stories in the 4K to 6K range, and I’ve written a humongous novel, but I can’t manage to turn out a modest 90K novel. But I digress.
Writing is the one compartment of my life where I feel like things are getting better**. I may be getting poorer thanks to this money pit of a house, and I may be getting older and fatter and balder, but at least with writing, if I put out the effort, I have something to show for it: not just the words on the page, but also an internal maturation which makes it possible to do that much more the next time my fingers hit the keyboard.
So I’m shaving, looking at that 4-month-preggers so-not-a-six-pack of mine, and I’m thinking, Maybe there is something growing in there. Maybe I could take that 2001-2002 project of mine, Karakoram, and turn it into something 90K-ish, tight, interesting, funny, poignant — in short, everything I wanted it to be when I first got started. Maybe I can do that now.
Yeah.
D.
*My face. Detail added for Maureen’s benefit.
**Before you ask: no, there’s nothing wrong with my marriage. Knockingonwood knockingonwood knockingonwood.
Ear wax may be good for some things*, but it doesn’t provide the most fertile ground for humor. Four times a day, sometimes more, I’ll be cleaning someone’s ear and the patient or his spouse will say, “Ooh, can you see through to the other side?” Gawd, I hate that joke. It ranks right up there with “Huh?” in response to, “How’s your hearing?”
However, I do have one good ear story, which I dedicate to the lovely Candy for thinking of me today, even if you don’t think enough of me to enter Kate’s contest. Grumble.
In college, I racked up enough credits to take time off for an internship. I thought I wanted to be a chemist, so I opted for a six month organic chemistry fellowship at Stauffer Chemical Company in Richmond, California. Stauffer manufactured herbicides. Most likely corporate mission statement: Stauffer. We take all the lovely green things in the world and kill them. The State of California owns that place now; it’s part of the Department of Toxic Substances Control. Ironic, eh?
One of the PhD chemists was a grizzly old man who would have made a damned good Scrooge. This guy was filthy — physically, morally, and spiritually filthy. Why, he was so filthy the Mitchell Brothers gave the guy an honorary chair at their theater. With his name on it. In gold lettering.
It’s what you would call a well endowed chair.
I suppose he might have landed himself in a world of trouble for sexual harassment, but the women he worked with didn’t take him seriously. A day or two in his presence and you became calloused to his bottomless pit of linguistic ooze. Even Maria, a sweet Catholic woman in her late 20s, tended to smile at his profane stories and look the other way.
One day, he launched into some weird diatribe about one of the new Vietnamese PhDs down at the chemical engineering end of the building. He had seen shoe-prints on the toilet seat — that’s what set him off — and, yes, you can add racism to his list of sins. After the thirtieth or fortieth “fuckin’ this fuckin’ that,” Maria said, “Oh! My virgin ears.”
To which our hero replied, “Wassamatter? Ain’t you never got it in your ear before?”
See, Candy? You never can tell what will jog my memory.
D.
*True fact: some heroin addicts use ear wax to grease their syringes. Now, that’s American ingenuity in action!