A Birthday Wish List: Part 1
Whenever my birthday draws near, I get contemplative. I like to think about what I’ve done with my life and what I still want to do. At the risk of being a downer, what if this next year is my last? What can I do in the next few months that will make my life more complete — or, for that matter, make a difference in the lives of the folks around me?
In some respects, this comes down to a list of wishes and unfulfilled dreams. While I believe we should all strive to fulfill our dreams, I’m also a realist. Sometimes our dreams are self-destructive or hurtful to the ones we love. Sometimes they’re damned expensive. Thus, we must temper our dreams with a dose of good old-fashioned common sense and practicality.
It is in this spirit that I tender for your consideration the first installment of my 44th Birthday Wish List.
#10: A Good Massage.
I hope you’re paying attention, Michelle, cuz I bet you give a damned good massage. And, no, I am not talking about ‘sensual massage.’ Once, when we were visiting Karen’s parents in Los Altos, I went to a local masseuse whose name I pulled from a phone book. I’m a shiatsu fan, so I picked a Japanese name out of The Book and crossed my fingers.
So, what do I get? Some old gal whose idea of massage is running her fingernails up and down the insides of my thighs. I wanted to tell her, Lady, if you’re trying to give me wood, get your granddaughter in here to take over, ‘kay? Instead, I suffered in silence and payed my $$, because I’m still self-hating enough to figure a woman deserves that kind of money just for touching my naked body.
As for my wife, any day now I expect her to kill me for the insurance money. And you know? She’ll deserve it, too.
What I dream of: a half hour in a hot tub followed by a skillful two hour massage.
What I’ll be satisfied with: if I rub my back with chicken fat, our cats will walk all over me and give me a good licking.
#9: Dinner at Hoppe’s.
Picture this: it’s 1996. Jake is eight months old and he has already hit the terrible twos. I’ve just finished my remedial year *cough cough* my year as faculty at USC, and I have some down time before San Antonio expects me to show up and, um, be a doctor or something.
Karen and I decide to have one last fling on the California Coast (thank heavens we were wrong about that!) so we drive up north with our screaming, why can’t you understand I am the alpha and the omega, eight-month-old son. We have clams and lobster at a superb seafood joint on the Ventura Pier — which, sadly, has since washed away — and great grub at The Palace Cafe in Santa Barbara. Onward up the coast, until at last we come to Cambria, Morro Bay, and Cayucos.
We have a price fixe dinner at Hoppe’s in Morro Bay. Jake is in fine form; the only thing that will quiet him is constant stroller-strolling. Karen and I take turns eating and pram-pushing, and we both manage to eat a dinner that’s not quite hot and not quite cold.
Guess what? Even given those less than ideal circumstances, we agree to this day that our dinner at Hoppe’s was the best eats we’ve ever had, ever. Perfect food, from the salad to the vegetable garnish.
What I dream of: a quiet, romantic dinner with Karen at Hoppe’s. Jake can eat a burrito.
What I’ll be satisfied with: we had not-half-bad sushi tonight at the NWTEC Internet Cafe.
#8: The best birthday cake in the whole, wide world.
Which requires, natch, a Tahitian virgin.
What I’ll be satisfied with: a forkful of Bailey’s Irish Cream cheesecake from the NWTEC Internet Cafe.
D.
How weird is this?
Thanks to Rae for giving me this sugar load for the morning. Strange thing is (as Debi and Maureen know, but I’m not sure about the rest of y’all), my novel is all about oversized, too-intelligent-for-their-own-good parakeets. With, um, arms and hands instead of wings. Anyway . . .
This popular bird is kept as a pet in homes all over the world. Originating from Australia, parakeets like warm weather and lots of seeds and fruit. They are also known for being messy and quite loud! But you cannot look at one without falling in love.
You were almost a: Monkey or a Kitten
You are least like a: Turtle or a DucklingTake the Cute Animal Test!
Guess that character
Who Am I?Thanks to my powerful daddy, I found me a cushy spot in the American National Guard. Before long, I held a position of considerable rank and authority. Many fine young soldiers depended upon me for their lives. They died, but that wasn’t my fault. Nothing is ever my fault.
Hard liquor and me, we go way back. Some folks think you can’t find courage in a bottle, but I say, courage is as courage does. One man’s cowardice is another man’s good judgment. Besides, a stiff drink never hurt no one. Thing is, you can’t get yourself excited, and you can’t go losing your head while others about you are losing theirs.
All I ever wanted was to make Daddy proud. Make him see what a man I was. In the end, I’ll show him. One way or another, I’ll show him.
Give up?
Props to The News Blog for mentioning the movie Attack! a few days ago. Karen and I were sufficiently intrigued by the premise that we bought the DVD from Barnes & Noble.
Here’s the scoop. Eddie Albert plays the villain, Captain Erskine Cooney. Towards the end of WWII, Cooney is given command of a National Guard Infantry Company. He receives this command because he’s good at sucking up to positions in authority — networking in as sleazy a manner as possible — and his father is a judge. Lieutenant Costa (Jack Palance) sees Cooney for what he is, a coward unfit for command.
Through his cowardice, Cooney gets a squad killed. Costa vows revenge if Cooney ever screws up like that again. I think you can guess the rest.
Attack! (1956) has a modern sensibility. The film openly condones the idea of killing a commanding officer who is a danger to the soldiers under his command. The ending has a touch of the moralistic, but there’s also a strong (and cynical) hint of politics-as-usual.
Despite a strong cast (featuring not just Albert and Palance, but Lee Marvin, Richard Jaeckel, and Buddy Ebsen), it was a low budget film and lacked the usual Hollywood sensibilities as regards rah-rah WWII war movies. According to IMDB, the US military wanted nothing to do with the film and did nothing to lend support. Congressman Melvin Price criticized the military, labeling their disinterest “a shameful attempt at censorship.” The filmmakers capitalized on this, plastering their movie posters with, “Is this the most controversial picture of the year?” They grossed $2 million — not a bad haul.
You won’t find this one at Blockbuster, and I doubt you’ll ever see it on TV. Netflix has it. Rent it. You’ll be treated with top notch performances from Eddie Albert, Jack Palance, and Lee Marvin. And the sleeper hero of this pic is one William Smithers. No, not Mr. Burns’ sycophantic employee. (Remember Captain Merick on the old Star Trek? The episode about ancient Rome? Kirk and Spock as gladiators? Am I the only science fiction geek left on this blog?)
D.
What’s your perversion?
Know what’s really weird? Karen and I have the exact same perversion:
You sick bastard….but it’s soooo good.
What’s your sexual perversion?
Created by ptocheia
D.
Why I need to read Monica Jackson’s blog more often
Okay, I’m a day late with this one. Sue me.
Check out Monica’s Creative Ho Linkage. Cooch paintings, ‘pop star or porn star’, and more.
On ‘pop star or porn star’, I scored 90%. See if you can beat me.
D.
Adventures in story space
Hands up, people: who out there understands Hilbert space?
Karen, if you wave your arm any more vigorously it’s going to fall out of its socket. Good heavens, you’re not in high school anymore. Show some dignity.
For the rest of you (other than my quantum mechanically ept* wife), Hilbert space is a mathematical concept which has great utility in quantum mechanics. Here’s the relevant bit from Wikipedia:
In quantum mechanics for example, a physical system is described by a complex Hilbert space which contains the “wavefunctions” that stand for the possible states of the system.
There. Doesn’t that help?
Let me bring this down to earth before I lose every last one of you. I believe there is a theoretical story space which is a fictional analog to Hilbert space. In other words, there’s a ‘space’ out there where all stories exist side by side. Mathematically, the story space S is defined thus
Let me ask an easier question: any Jorge Luis Borges fans out there? (At the very least, Gabriele should be waving her hand.) Do you remember his story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”? Here’s a quick reminder from enotes:
In the form of a scholarly article, it tells of one Pierre Menard, a French symbolist recently deceased, who had undertaken the absurd task of rewriting Cervantes’ Don Quixote as a product of his own creativity.
This story — as well as a few others in Borges’ stable — convinced me that Borges believed in story space. Pierre Menard didn’t want to write just any Don Quixote; he wanted to write THE Don Quixote, word for word. Imagine picking up a grain of sand, then tossing it down again, not just on any beach but on any random beach in the world. Picking out that same grain of sand is considerably more likely than accomplishing Menard’s task.
What’s the point? Well, we’re not plucking just any story out of story space. We want the good ones, the ones that are entertaining, that perhaps bear a kernel of truth, that convince us we’re a little bit better for having read it. But — and here’s the real point — near every good story, there exists an infinite number of close cousins, some of whom are even better.
The trick, I think, is to never lose sight of this fact. To use “A Pirate’s Dilemma” as a silly example, I could have made Jack Sparrow the villainous British agent. Instead, I chose to leave Jack as a red herring** and put Hugh Grant in there instead. I did that because I thought it would be funnier, but I know, I have complete faith, that I might have pulled something even better out of idea space. I don’t know . . . it boggles the mind what I might have done with Margaret Thatcher in that role.
To continue with the sand analogy, I look at storytelling much as I look at beachcombing. I don’t pick up every interesting piece of flotsam I find on the shoreline, only the ones which appeal to my own peculiar sense of aesthetics. That’s the original story idea, but it doesn’t have to stop there. With my imagination, I can picture a stone, a shell, a bit of bone that’s even cooler than the one in my hands.
Folks with far more publication experience than I have pointed out that you eventually have to stop editing and call it a story. Otherwise, you risk spending your life wandering the beach, picking up one piece of crap, tossing away another, perennially dissatisfied.
Even still, sometimes it’s fun to take that ‘finished’ piece of driftwood and wonder how it might be different. Better.
D.
*You know — the opposite of inept.
**For you folks who aren’t crime novel buffs, a “red herring” is a distractor, something to divert the protagonist’s attention from the truth.
Inmates in Charge of the Asylum?
Is this for real? Or just some weird prank? From the Gainsville Sun:
Gov. Bush & his mystical buddy
After more than an hour of solemn ceremony naming Rep. Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, as the 2007-08 House speaker, Gov. Jeb Bush stepped to the podium in the House chamber last week and told a short story about “unleashing Chang,” his “mystical warrior” friend.
The rest of the article is here.
The things I’ll do fer love
A Pirate’s Dilemma: Part the Last
This here tale be poorly suited for young ‘uns and Puritans. Ye’ve been warned!
The beauties hoisted yer ill-fated Cap’n upstairs like a sack o’ bullion. I could scarcely credit me fortune, but me self-congratulations were a mite premature. And that warn’t the only thing premature. When they dunked me in a claw-footed tub o’ suds and washed me proper, I made a right fool o’ meself, I did.
“Damnation,” said I. “I suppose that’s what ye get fer years of abstinence.”
Arumba, the Nubian, pressed some vile grog to me lips and bid me drink. “For strength, Cap’n. We have plans for you.”
That they did, I tell ye. Once that bitter brew passed, I swooned, and felt meself borne up again by their fine strong arms. And then I felt no more.
When I came to, Maria of Cordoba and Mai Poon, me Cathay princess, were ministering to me rusty equipment. Oui Oui the Parisian was doing unspeakable things to me teak leg, and Arumba was pressing her ample bosom to me parched lips. Me head swam like some dark leviathan twenty-thousand leagues deep, yet I had the sense of others in the room, scurrying to and fro like hungry bilge rats.
Above me moans, I heard Stella’s voice. “Where is it?”
And another voice, a masculine voice, but not terribly so. “Damn it, woman, search again.”
Blast! I knew that voice. One of Her Majesty’s finest, an agent of the Crown. And a right ponce, too. I recalled that this one had a long history of consorting with beauties of the evening.
It all made sense. The malt vinegar bottles on the tables downstairs weren’t for feminine hygeine — they were for fish and chips. And the ferns and calla lilies weren’t for me rival, Jack Sparrow. Oh, no, me bucko.
The Jolliest Roger had taken to servicing Her Majesty’s fleet.
“Infernal limeys!” I cried, but with Arumba’s plump endowments in me face, it came out, “Mm, mmphms!” I struggled to rise, but the double-dealing vixens had bound me hands and foot.
“Step aside, ladies,” said that infernal Britisher, Randall Richards. I felt a cold draft of air on me nether regions as me beauties shoved off me rudder.
“Ye have me at a disadvantage, Randy Dick.”
“Indeed,” said the fop. “I would know where you keep the key to your lockbox, Captain Wood.”
“Ye’ll get it over me dead body, ye limey bastard.”
He gave me a waggish smile. “Have it your way. Stella? Waterboard him.”
Waterboard? I count meself a student of the torturing arts, yet I had not heard such a thing. But me ignorance would soon be cured.
Stella hove into view, that great glorious mountain of flesh I’d once called me own true love.
“Nothing personal, Cap’n. It’s just business.”
Buck naked, she straddled me face.
“One more time,” said Randy Dick. “You have stolen bullion from Her Majesty’s Ship The Drake. We’ve searched your ship, and haven’t found the bullion or the key to your lockbox. That leaves only one conclusion. Stella? Sit.”
The mistress of the Jolliest Roger settled herself, sealing off me grizzled mouth and nose with her plenteous booty. I struggled for air, all in vain. When I thought meself a goner, she stood.
“Well, Captain?” said Dick.
I gasped, coughed, spat. “Is that the best ye can do? That be heavenly.”
Randy Dick stroked his hairless chin, pondering me fate. “A hard case, this one,” he said. “Let’s try some softer torments, shall we?”
“Oui Oui,” said Stella. “Give him The Special.”
The Special. Something about the way she said those words shivered me timbers. But I found little to fear, at least at first. Oui Oui gave me rudder the Parisian treatment, as it were, and I figgered I could stand such torture for a year or more before I’d crack.
I spent me load of shot, but Oui Oui kept going.
“Damn it girl, stop!” said I. “I ain’t yer personal mess hall!”
“Oui Oui can suck the rind off a watermelon, Cap’n,” said Stella. “I beg you to reconsider before you lose your last coat of varnish.”
True enough, the pleasures of Paradise had given way to an infernal ache. What a way to meet me maker!
“Enough,” I cried. “Ye’ve unmanned me, ye dastardly succubus.”
“You may stop, Oui Oui,” said Randy Dick. “Where’s the key, Captain.”
“Ye’ll have to look where the sun don’t shine.”
And that be me story, mates. I lost The Drake’s hoard to these scurvy scoundrels, but at least I got them to do what no beauty had never done before. Arrr, not even Mrs. Morning Wood.