Dorm life
One of the things that sucks about my profession: I catch every cold that comes into the office. If I were a podiatrist, I’d do just fine, since no one ever became ill from close exposure to little kids’ feet*. But, no. I have to look up their goopy little noses, which brings me within firing range of their snot rockets.
Yesterday evening, I developed that vague ache in my soft palate which heralds a cold. Now my neck is stiff, my nose is twitchy, and my brain is all marshmallowy. This makes blogging difficult.
You may lower your expectations . . . now.
What should I write about? I came up with a not-t00-bad idea: “All I really need to know I learned watching Rocky Horror Picture Show.” With that idea came a single joke: “Eat your Meat Loaf.” Not bad, but not great, since it presupposes a knowledge of the movie. Even if I pony up an image of Meat Loaf, some folks are gonna say, “Huh?” Cuz if you haven’t seen the movie, it just ain’t funny.
So: that line of blog reasoning came to a dead end. I decided to free associate.
I saw RHPS in 1980, my second year in college and my first year in the dorms. Dorm life makes me think of:
- Dale getting drunk and pissing in the hallway
- Dale getting drunk and pissing off the balcony
- Dale getting drunk and pissing everyone off
I’m sure you’re wondering, “Who’s Dale?” But, really, don’t you know everything you need to know about him?
Maybe I should do a piece entitled, “All I really need to know I learned in the dorms.” I’m still making the assumption that you guys know that bit, “All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten,” which includes such pearls as:
- Play fair.
- Clean up your own mess.
- Don’t hit people.
- Share everything.
Okay, let’s see where this leads. What did I learn in the dorms?
- Play fair. If you fill your roommates’ room with crumpled newspaper, Eric, don’t whine when you find out your prank lost them some important shit and you’re responsible for the damages.
- Clean up your own mess. Oh, how I would love to say we ganged up on Dale and used his head as a mop to take care of that pissing-in-the-hallway stunt. Alas, we had to content ourselves with the fact that he flunked out after the first quarter.
- Don’t hit people. Hit on them. And, oh, by the way, you know that bit about, “If you listen to a woman’s bullshit until 2AM she’ll have sex with you”? Ain’t true. Jennifer, I think listening to you tell me at cracked-tooth-painful length how Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance changed your father’s life was at least worth some tongue.
- Share everything, but please be aware that if your roommate is busy humping the gal from next door** — five feet away from you — he may take exception to this rule. Oh, and by the way, Joe. If she whimpers after you’ve finished, it is not a good sign. Let a Real Man satisfy her next time***.
Not bad, but that’s all I got. My brain has maxed out, folks. Ever see Scanners?
Off topic: Have you folks been watching The Daily Show this week? Jon Stewart rocks.
D.
*I may be wrong about that.
**Co-ed dorms, including the bathrooms. Some chicks are nasty in the morning, I tell ya.
***Yeah, that would be me.
The things we do for love
How far will we go for love?
I think some guys are willing to work a lot harder for it than others. In particular, if you look like this
(that was for you, bam) you’re likely to expend far less time and effort snagging this
than if you look like this
.Before you howl, “But Rick Moranis is cuuuute!” let me say: I’m one hell of a lot cuter than Rick Moranis, and I’ve had two, count ’em two women in my life (no, I’m not counting my mom), and it hasn’t been for lack of trying.
Matter of fact, I got pretty good at trying.
I’ve already written ad nauseum about my courtship with Karen. Nuff said already. Thinking about today’s theme, it occurred to me that I haven’t told you much about my first girlfriend, GFv1.0*.
GFv1.0 never put me through much grief, not in our courtship phase. No, she let her parents do it for her. They liked having me over for dinner for a game I liked to call, “Torment the Howlie.” Or was it, Torment the Gwailo? Can’t remember what slang we used for whitey in those days. Anyway, GF’s mom would feed me yummy stuff like fish stomach. Grinning madly, she’d say, “SO? How do you like?” Then GF’s dad would make me drink Chinese tea that smelled like tobacco and kept me up for days.
I realize now they were being nice, accepting me into the fold. GFv1.0 has since told me that they actually really liked me. But at the time, I saw it all as an awful test.
Black mushroom: that’s the one I failed.
GFv1.0 couldn’t understand why I didn’t like black mushroom. It upset her. It was worse than, say, hating chocolate. Oh, how we fought over black mushroom. Nowadays, of course, I crave the stuff.
Would you believe that for love of GFv1.0, I once watched a chick flick from the first row of the movie theater and then raved about it afterwards? Well, of course I did. I’ll bet lots of high school guys do that, especially those of us who hung out at the Rick Moranis end of the gene pool.
We saw The Turning Point, with Shirley MacLaine (*shiver*), Anne Bancroft, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. But I didn’t care that I was watching a chick flick and getting a whopping case of neck strain. Why? I’ll tell you why.
We’d had dinner at a nearby pizza parlor, and then we decided to fit in some necking time before the movie. This was mighty early in the relationship; open-mouth kissing resembled Mr. and Ms. Pac Man trying to eat each other’s faces. It was a messy affair, with much gnashing of teeth and bruising of lips, because, you know, they just don’t teach this stuff in school.
At one point, she reached over and patted the lump in my crotch and said, “What is that thing?”
That’s how I managed to get through The Turning Point with a grin plastered all over my face. Granted, there were Levis in the way, but she’d actually touched it.
Something just occurred to me. Given the fact that Mikhail Baryshnikov spends most of that movie in tights, I don’t think GFv1.0 would have asked me that question after the movie.
D.
*Who shall remain nameless. There’s a distant chance she may visit the blog one day. If so, my only chance of survival will be the fact that I haven’t spread her name to hell and back.
Mysterious Island
Mysterious Island, 1961
I grew up with Mysterious Island. In those pre-Betamax dark ages, you had to keep a keen eye on the TV Guide if you wanted to watch your favorite movie again and again. Then, inevitably, you’d have to run out of the room to go pee just as your favorite giant-animal-monster was about to terrorize the buxom heroine. Oh, DAMN! I missed the first thirty seconds of the giant bees!
Watching it nowadays, my finger is never too far from the fast forward button. Ray Harryhausen’s good stuff (note giant crab, bee, and chickenish thing in the poster above — and that’s not all!) is intercut with long, boring bits of dialog as our castaways struggle to survive on (badummm!) the Mysterious Island. I have no patience for this as an adult. As a kid, the talkie stuff functioned as foreplay, raising tension in anticipation of the orgiastic monster scenes.
When I set about the process of world-building for my novel, I think Mysterious Island must have been lurking through my unconscious mind, diddling my muse. My aliens are little more than giant Harryhausen-style critters. Big birds, dogs, pigs, spiders, and so forth. Sure, they have their little quirks that make them alien, but I wanted my creatures to be immediately imaginable by the reader. I dislike extraterrestrials which demand much from me in the ‘inner eye’ department. Moties? Feh. Niven’s puppeteer? Uh. I’ll take Niven’s Kzin (giant cats), thank you very much.
I suppose many readers are just the opposite. They crave the strange. Show me something I’ve never seen before. Yeah, I know there are SF fans out there who think that way. I cracked the problem in a different (and, I hope, equally satisfactory) way, by giving my readers situations they might never have imagined possible. Like, say, a giant fly going down on a giant spider. When was the last time Niven gave you that, huh?
D.
Future Republican talking points
A-well-a don’t you know about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
Surfin’ Bird
The Trashmen, 1963
Writers of America:
With the Bush Administration’s poll numbers striking out into uncharted territory, your help is needed now. Active crises abound. More crises loom in the near future. Given its sluggardly response to Hurricane Katrina, the Administration cannot afford to appear slow-to-respond when the next disaster unfolds.
They need fresh, hot memes, ready to go for each new crisis. Rapid meme application should give Americans that “Dubya’s on top of things” feeling they crave from their President.
Memes such as “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”, “compassionate conservative”, “culture of life”, and “the blame game” have a finite shelf life. Before long, they lose their mind-altering efficacy and become focal points of parody. Truly effective mind control requires a steady flow of new memes.
To get you all thinking in the right manner, I have provided a list of potential crises with appropriate meme-laden responses. (See below. Memes will be in bold face.) Do your best to think of other fine memes and/or other crises that this Administration may soon face. Remember, we want the common man to think that Dubya’s all over this; we want him to look at Dubya and say, “That man’s brain kicks ass!”
For you libbrels reading this blog, look at the pretty bird.
Crisis: Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald presents evidence to the Grand Jury arguing for indictments of Vice President Dick Cheney, I. Louis Libby, and Karl Rove.
GWB’s Response: “Know what I think? I think Hitzy-Fitzy has an obviously partisan agenda. These aren’t indictments. These are spitements. And we’re forgetting the victim here, Valerie Plame. It’s a Plame shame, that’s what it is. But we gotta get beyond all that. We gotta get on with our lives. And if that doesn’t work, I say we blame Plame.”
Crisis: An unnamed White House insider leaks documents proving the Bush Administration intentionally delayed its response to Hurricane Katrina because “it’ll be a whole lot cheaper once most of ’em are dead,” and “none of them po darkies vote Republican anyways.”
GWB’s Response: “Who you gonna believe, me or someone who won’t even tell you his name? But you know me. Like my favorite author wrote, that great Negro-American writer Ralph Ellison, I yam what I am.”
Grins.
“I’m telling you the truth. I’m a truth-teller. That’s what I do, I tell the truth. I’m not lying. Mr. Unnamed Source, he’s a liar. Heh heh heh.”
He pats Condi Rice on the back. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job. And, speaking of brownies, know what my second-favorite philosopher Martin Luther King said? He said, ‘I have a dream.’ And in my dream, America respects the truth. They don’t respect no Mr. Unnamed Source who won’t even tell you his name.
As for me, I stand for the truth. Know what my favorite Negro-American activist Malcolm in the Middle said? He said, “If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.” So I ask you, my fellow Americans: who you gonna fall for, me, or some guy who won’t even tell you his name?”
Ugh. I thought I could do a whole blog on this, but I’m making myself sick.
Your turn.
D.
“I’m a baby eater. An eater of babies.”
Jonathan Swift ain’t got nothin’ on Bob Cesca. Check out this satire on the Huffington Post.
Excerpt:
The president’s mother, Barbara Bush told reporters during a visit to Texas, “Those puppies were going to be used as fishing bait anyway, they’re much better off now. BWA-HAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHA! HA!”
D.
Postscript to the Great Mississippi Flood
I forgot to mention one of the more disillusioning aspects of the story: How Hoover managed to bury the story.
After his investigators confirmed the abuses in the concentration camps (that was the actual term used), Hoover formed a Colored Advisory Commission made up of blacks and led by Robert Russa Moton, a very prominent black conservative leader. Their report also confirmed the allegations.
Hoover was relying on his successful handling of the crisis to win the presidency; he did NOT want any scandal to ruin his reputation as the “Great Humanitarian”. I’m not kidding, they actually called him that.
Hoover cut a deal with Moton to kill the story. Hoover would give Moton and his friends positions in government and give small plots of land to some sharecroppers. Moton jumped at the offer.
A funny thing happens when you sell your integrity to the devil. The devil bends you over and screws you in the ass. Hoover broke all his promises to Moton.
In 1932, Moton threw his support to FDR (who refused to desegregate the military in WWII, by the way). Many blacks left the Republican Party and never came back.
The white plantation owners lost their slaves, erm, um, “workers”, who left the poverty in the south to emigrate to Chicago and other northern cities. Greenville never regained its former prosperity.
Why am I flashing on Mayor Nagin and how he changed his tune about George Bush?
The O’Reilly pacifier . . .
Oh, how I wish I’d thought of this first.
Check out Jurassicpork’s blog today, LA Neoconfidential. George Bush as Sam Spade. ‘Nuff said. Don’t waste time here, click on the link.
D.
PS: While I’m at it:
Damn, Beth, I could hear that scream all the way over here half a freakin’ continent away. But your post reminded me of another great critter story. I’ll save it for another day, though; y’all are crittered out, I’m sure.
Review of Asimov’s, December 2005
For you SF fans, my review of Asimov’s December edition is up at Tangent.
I’ve been kvetching to my editor, Eugie Foster, about having to read so much mainstream SF, but honestly, this issue rocked. Two superb stories, and I mean top drawer (Damian Kilby’s “Earthtime”, and James Maxey’s “To the East, a Bright Star”), three good stories, and only one tale which required Mr. Snarkypencil.
I liked Kilby’s and Maxey’s stories best because of their rich sense of humanity. Which is a poofy way of saying, they wrote about believable human beings and made me care about them. I’m a sucker for heartstring-tugs, and both stories gave me lots of the good stuff.
Those two stories also gave me a better sense of what’s wrong with my current short, “Renee”. The damned thing lacks heart. I wrote it for one of Keith’s 500 word challenges, so I’d had to cut back on everything. Minimal description, bare bones characterization, everything pared down to the core idea. It’s a fine idea, but the story will be much better if I can give it a heart and soul.
Back to the drawing board.
D.
Formication
Subtitle: We be schleppin’ spiders
formication
An abnormal sensation as of insects running over or into the skin, associated with cocaine intoxication or disease of the spinal cord and peripheral nerves.
Vote with your wallets
No, this isn’t a plea for money. Not exactly.
You can defeat the Neocon machine. Doesn’t even matter if you’re American. You buy from American companies, right? When was the last time you sent money to Amazon?
Yeah, baby. That’s right. Amazon is a rightwing tool.