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About Half An Hour Later, I’ve Got Adrenaline Shakes, Bad

Postaday for January 5th: Daring Do

Tell us about the time you rescued someone else (person or animal) from a dangerous situation. What happened? How did you prevail?

My wife loves the Dollar Store. I don’t know why. Yes I know why: she’s a cheapskate. Hey, don’t yell at me! She’s the first person to call herself a cheapskate. “I like a bargain,” she says, “even if it means I’m buying crap.”

So there we are the Dollar Store. My wife’s… somewhere. I’m in the checkout line, behind an old lady, who’s behind a less old lady. I guess the old lady wanted to put her stuff on the belt, and the less old lady Just. Wasn’t. Having. It. Something about how she was making two separate purchases and deciding which things in her piles she did want and didn’t want and her kids kept asking her for things and also she was on the phone because somebody had cancer or something.

She finally raises her voice and now everyone’s staring but the old lady sort of backs off. A few days go by, the less old lady pays and leaves. The old lady pays, and leaves. I pay, and look for my wife, who’s trying to decided if we should get another bargain or two. You know, in case our garbage can’s not full enough. Got to get maximum value out of the garbage bag’s potential volume, right?

We go outside. We go to our car. But our car is blocked because somebody’s not moving. So I go to the guy and ask him (an old man) to back up a bit so we can leave. He doesn’t seem too happy but he does it. Then I get in my car, and only then do I assess the situation.

The old man’s not moving because he wants someone in another parking spot to give him her information. And I realize— it’s the old lady. So I get out, and ask the old guy what’s going on.

He tells me it’s none of my business. I tell him he can’t block this old lady in. If she wants to leave, he has to let her leave. He tells me she almost hit his car as he drove past. He points at a dent. He says he doesn’t remember if he had that dent before. He says he wants her information in case he remembers he didn’t have the dent and therefore she must have done it.

I tell him I don’t care, he can’t just trap her there. He yells at me, “What are you going to do about it?”

I puff up my chest. I smile. I tell him I’m going take a picture of her license plate, his plate, the dent, and give him my phone number so he can call me if he needs to. He says fine. I do the things I said I was going to do and he drives away.

The old lady gets out of her car. She’s crying. I say to her, you’re having a pretty rough day, huh? She laughs. I give her my phone number. I tell her “call me if your insurance company gets a claim from this guy. I’ll be a witness. You didn’t hit him.”

She says thanks.

I get in the car and we leave. I tell my wife the whole thing. “Nice job!” she says. She hands me a Snickers Bar. “Can you believe we got four of these for a dollar? Now that’s a bargain!” So I eat two.

About half an hour later, I’ve got adrenaline shakes, bad. Or sugar shakes from the Snickers. Not sure.

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Only In Hindsight Can We Appreciate

Postaday for January 4th: First!

Tell us about your first day at something — your first day of school, first day of work, first day living on your own, first day blogging, first day as a parent, whatever.

The first time I woke up on May the 5th, 2014, was at about 12:03 AM. I had been browsing Reddit for hours, and had fallen asleep in my chair. A loud noise woke me, probably my own snoring. My neck was stiff, my ass hurt from the way I was piled in my chair, and I had to pee, but bad. So I got up and when to the bathroom.

Washed my hands, and somewhere between the bathroom and my bed, some clothes came off.

That wasn’t the only time I woke up on May the 5th, 2014, which is why it was the first, and not the only time. There’s a difference. On May the 4th, for example, I woke up just the once, at about 5:00 AM. I had down a f-Hour Energy Drink, did some meditation, visited the rest-room, put on running clothes, ran a 5K, took a shower, sent my wife off to work, ate some oatmeal. All of those things can be accomplished if one only wakes up once per day.

But the next day I woke up seven times, and got nothing done:

  • Woke, as I said, for the first time, at 12:03.
  • Woke again at about 3:20 am or so, to pee.
  • Again at 5:00 AM, when my alarm went off.
  • Again at 5:30, when my wife got out of bed to take a shower.
  • Again at 6:30 when my wife left to go to work
  • Again at 7:54 for a conference call. And did I get anything done for the next four hours? No. Eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at noon does not count.
  • Woke again at about 2:30, again in my office chair, hot and sticky, and I have to tell you, for the next 30 minutes, I have never been so completely exhausted in my life. Somewhere between my home office and the 7-11, I managed to put in some clothes and buy a Mountain Dew.
  • Now, for when my wife came home at 4:30, I don’t know if what I did you’d call “waking up” since I don’t know if I was really asleep. I was just sort of sitting on our giant chair, sort of looking at the TV, sort of watching it, but I don’t remember what it was. It might have been Portlandia. I’m not sure.
  • And, finally, I woke up one more time, at 11:50 PM or so, in my office chair, after having fallen asleep while browsing Reddit.

But let’s talk about that first time I woke up on May the 5th, 2014. 12:03 AM, Cinco de Mayo in Seattle was a officially only a few minutes old. So much portent in that waking. So much foreshadowing. It would come to define my day, that waking, or shall I say “awakening.” If I had only know then what I know now, I would have treated that first waking with more respect. I would have cherished it more.

Funny, how only in hindsight can we truly appreciate the deep, meaningful importance of things, after they’re long gone.

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I Don’t Have To Write Anything If I Don’t Want To

January 3rd: No Prompt?

There does not appear to be a prompt for January 3rd. How does that make you feel?

Today is the 5th of May, and I am trying to catch up on a 4 months of missed daily prompts. This is a Herculean task. There’s no way I will accomplish it. No way I’m going to write something for 124 missed days.

It’ll take weeks, and even if I had started Postaday on January 1st, I would have lost interest before weeks had passed. This is a stupid idea. And no one going to read any of this, ever. Especially not me!

I’ve gone to the Postaday website and copied a whole bunch of prompts, but this one, for the 3rd, is missing. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was never there or if it was and got deleted by accident. I could do some sleuthing, read the blog entries of people who HAVE been doing Postaday since January 1st, see if they wrote something on the 3rd. In fact, maybe I will. Maybe I will once I’ve written the other 123 back entries.

I’ve bitten off WAY more than I can chew. This is ludicrous. I never finish ANYTHING. Okay, fine, I DID finish the Blogging University April class. But that was ONE entry per day, and nothing on weekends. I actually have it in my head that I’m going towrite SEVEN per day until I catch up!

Why? Is there a part of me that wants to punish me for bad behavior? Like when a dad catches his son sneaking a cigarette, and makes him smoke the whole pack? Am I trying to humiliate myself? Do I need hit the bottom so I can rebuild myself as a writer?

Maybe. I want to write this stupid book, the one I’ll probably mention again and again, the spy novel with the robot assassin. Am I encumbering myself with this stupidly impossible endeavor to avoid admitting I can’t write novels, I just can’t, give Stephen Hawking a pole-vaulters pole and he’ll do better than I do at novel writing?

How does it make me FEEL that there’s no prompt for today? I don’t know, relieved, I guess, that I don’t have to write anything if I don’t want to.

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I Have Changed The Skies Forever

Postaday for January 2nd: Be the Change

What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world?

I want the world to read more. And that’s it. I could probably volunteer for some literacy program, or donate funds to some book drive, or research and support politicians who’s foreign policies include humanitarian efforts to improve education worldwide But I’m lazy.

Or arrogant or conceited or megalomaniacal. Or whatever. I mean, I want people to read what I write. And laud me with praise. And ask me where my genius comes from. And throw flowers at my feet. Roses. Thorns and all. Gobs of them. Piles and piles. Florists profits skyrocket. Band-Aid stock through the roof cause of all the scratches I get. From the thorns on the roses thrown at me. Gorgeous women and heads-of-state gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair out in a frenzy as they try to throw more roses.

But there aren’t enough. A black market rose-industry pops up. People start selling other flowers as fake roses. Or make them out of felt and paper. One enterprising young man makes a mint selling roses he made out of aluminum foil. The aluminum foil market goes belly up. People can’t cover their casseroles anymore. Casseroel stocks plummet. Casserole corporation CEOs commit suicide in droves. Good riddance. Their spouses (mostly wives, a few husbands) wither and develop alcohol problems. The go to AA, meet some one nice. Most of them are nice. One of them is not nice.

He’s a spy. He’s been watching Scandal too much. Thinks he’s seducing a court stenographer. Is actually seducing the widow of the CEO of Tuna Suprisicon, who killed himself with a shillelagh. How does one even do that. Just because the government of Burmese put in an order for 10,000 units and the CEO was so thrilled he invested half of fiscal 2016’s profits in R&D. But that damn kid and his damn aluminum foil roses bought up all the stock! Just so the Daughters of the American Revolution Auxiliary club could get two hundred thousand dozen fake metal roses to throw at my feet!

Newspapers are writing about these piles and piles of roses— and people are reading the papers. Bloggists are blogging about the Rose Mountain at Bukkhead’s Feet Meme, tweeting and Pintersting and Tumblring— and people are reading. C students are becoming A students from all the reading, the improved critical thinking skills that frequent reading brings.

Terrible human beings who hardly read at all are reading more often, craving new sources for reading material, eschewing their one-newspaper-town’s only rag, discovering alternate points of view and abandoning their skin-deep racism and sexism and homophobia. They start voting with their hearts and not their yellow spines. Good women and men get elected. Campaign finance fraud is a thing of the past. Trillion dollar corporations with no PACs to dump their money into decided to dump money into libraries for the tax right-off.

Libraries grow to the size of super-malls. Teenagers hang out there. They tease the trailer-park trash for reading Dan Brown. The trailer park trash read books by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and find peaceful ways to show the rich kids the evil of being too judgmental. They sing songs together in the food courts. They pool their resources to buy more roses to throw at my feet.

The rose things starts to become a problem. I can’t write, there’s so many roses. In my office, choking up my hallways, I can’t even get to the bathroom, which means I’m forced to reduce my seven Mountain-Dews a day diet to three or four. I grow weak from a lack of caffeine. I don’t write as much. I’m not read as much. The thrill is gone. I spend more time with my wife. We go on vacations. Barren places where there’s no vegetation.

The Australian outback. The sky’s a funny color. An alien lands there. He (yes he, not it) tells me the sky’s a funny color because the earth’s tilted. All those roses. I’ve literally changed the world. Now his alien buddies don’t want to destroy it anymore. I have saved the earth. I have changed the skies forever.

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I’m Pretty Much Making This Up As I Go Along

Postaday for January 1st: New Skin

If you could spend the next year as someone radically different from the current “you” — a member of a different species, someone from a different gender or generation, etc. — who would you choose to be?

If I could spend time as anyone else, it would be as Lancaster, the evil robot assassin hell-bent on killing every secret agent in the world.

Why is killing all these agents? What’s his end-game? What happens if he succeeds? And why does he choose to kill them in such elaborate and increasingly ridiculous ways? Is killing agents really his main goal, or is there some greater purpose to his scheme?

I need to know, because I invented him, and I have no idea what he’s doing. He’s the main antagonist in my terrible spy novel, A Football Makes a Lousy Briefcase. Note: terrible is a subgenre of the spy novel genre. This is supposed to be terrible. I have whole sections called Deus Ex Machina. It’s a play on words, see, since Lancaster is a machine and all.

Lancaster is an AI based on a program that was built to test agents in the field. But things got out of control. I don’t want to reveal too much, even though I’ll probably never actually finish the novel… and even if I did I wouldn’t bother editing it… and if I somehow edited it I certainly wouldn’t get it published… and if I accidentally published it I just don’t see anyone buying it, much less reading it (not unlike the novel I published A Night Without Sunshine and my collection of short stories Still Life With Zombie).

But nevermind all that. The point is, I need to get inside Lancaster’s metal head and figure out what’s going on. It’s the principal of the thing. I’m struggling with the main plot line of the novel as it is, and if I can just figure out where this is going, maybe I can figure out a way to stop him.

What’s great about Lancaster is I could spend a whole year being him, and not really mess anything up, since he clones himself regularly so that he can personally conduct “exams” on agents in order to kill them. I don’t have to “be Lancaster” to be Lancaster.

And a year should be just the right amount of time. Lancaster once posed as coffee machine at a cheap motel in Reno just to get access to an ATF agent who had stolen a thumb drive from a CISEN operative. (I actually haven’t written that chapter yet, but, gosh, it’s a good idea and I’m totally going to use it.)

CISEN, by the way, is the acronym for Mexico’s intelligence agency. I just found that on Wikipedia, since I’m pretty much making this up as I go along.

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Review: Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain

Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain by Steven D. Levitt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Was waiting in a bar for a friend to show up, so I sipped a beer and read a bit of Think Like a Freak. I had already read what I thought was half of it—and then suddenly the book was done. I had been fooled by the page count, not realizing that the end notes would take up a quarter of the pages. A bit of an anti-climax.

Which is sort of what this book is overall: anticlimactic. Not that it’s bad. But after the “cool” factor of Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics, Think Like a Freak was a bit thin. Like a good broth—a good broth can be very delicious, but not after a buttery baked potato and a thick steak.

The writers do offer a few examples to illustrate their lessons on “thinking like an economist i.e. consider people’s motivations” which are fun an interesting, and would make the book a decent bathroom read or something to pick up for a few bucks off the remainder shelves. But not nearly worth the full price I paid.

I don’t know if “publish or perish” is a compelling motivator for non-fiction writers like these, but that’s what this book felt like: something they needed to put out there so their names stay relevant and they get more folks listening to their podcasts. I know writing isn’t their full-time job— and Think Like a Freak feels like it.

This is a gimme, a side-bar, perhaps a fat appendix at the end of the of the SuperDuper Freakonomics Compendium. Read it if you’ve got disposable income and nothing better to do. Or you want to kill an evening. But don’t, like the other books, think of this as an investment at all.

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E-Mail to My Cousin’s Best Man re: Bachelor Party

fiction by Jason Edwards

Hey Dave—good seeing you and yours that last weekend. I’m still drinking the beers that were bought and not consumed, which sometimes makes for a rough morning, but that’s the definition of family if you ask me. Anywho, I haven’t heard from Evan yet about your bachelor party, so if you could forward to him the following, that would be great. I’m sure he’s a busy man, and I don’t want to put too much pressure on him or anything, but I figured while I’m sitting here drunk as hell with nothing better to do, I might as well get some thoughts down on paper.

Hi Evan. This is Samuel, Dave’s oldest cousin. I understand that as Dave’s best man, you’ll be in charge of his bachelor party. Just wanted to start off by saying that there are no hard feelings at all that he didn’t choose me as his best man, despite the fact that we’re related by blood and that if one of us needed a kidney the other one would probably be a good match. “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family,” they say. (I don’t know who they are, but apparently they don’t go to a lot of bachelor parties.)

I have a few ground rules when it comes to this sort of thing, bachelor parties I mean, and I wanted to let you know about them in advance. For example, bachelor parties always means strippers, and that’s fine, but there’s a brand of stripper-body-glitter that I’m allergic too, so if you could tell the strippers that in advance, it would be appreciated. It’s okay if they rub themselves on my face—it’s mainly my upper thighs that will break out into a rash. It only took my three or four parties to figure that one out!

Also, a long weekend with the boys usually means beer, and as a person who lives in Seattle, I, of course, know beer. I would appreciate it if only craft beer made with organic Pacific-Northwest hops is bought for everyone. I’ll contribute to the funds for that, no worries. You have to love the planet or the planet won’t love you back, after all.

I believe the Monday Night Football game that will be on when we’re all together will be the Bears at the Jets. I’m afraid this won’t work for me. I went to a Bears game once a few years ago when I was visiting Chicago, and a drunk guy in the men’s room shouted at me, saying “Hurry up, fatso.” (I assume he was talking to me, as I have struggled with an eating disorder since a particularly frightening episode of ‘Growing Pains’ that aired in 1988, the one where Carol is nominated for Homecoming Queen. I was so sure it was going to be a Carrie homage, I ate, like, three bags of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Minis, and I’ve been addicted ever since). I know bachelor parties are where men get to be men and real men like football, but since the Bears are one of my “triggers,” I’m sure everyone else will understand if we do something else instead. May I suggest a few games of Settlers of Cataan?

Dave indicated that he’s inviting my dad and his dad as well. Just wanted to assure you that while they both tend to get a little racist/homophic/mysoginistic/anti-semitic/pro-life/pro-Limbaugh/pro-Hobby-Lobby when they’re drunk, they’ve never actually killed anyone on purpose. Oh, I almost forgot to mention: both my dad and his dad have conceal-carry permits. But don’t worry. As long as Dave and I are more or less sober, we can handle them.

Sleeping arrangements: my sleep-apnea and snoring shouldn’t be a problem if everyone brings earplugs. Also, everyone gives GHB a bad rap but it really does help people sleep through loud noises. So just say the word, and I’ll bring some of my stash to share, and I’ll give everyone a fair price. I’ll also bring condoms if anyone’s worried.

I assume we’ll be showering together, as that’s a bachelor party tradition. I have no problem with this. I take very long showers.

And finally, wanted to let you know that I’m really looking forward to the fun! Ever since the car accident, my wife won’t let me out of the house, much less go to parties! But she had to give in on this one, house-arrest or not, since Dave and I are family after all. And you know what they say, “innocent until proven guilty;” so until the DA finds proof, I’m not letting some stupid ankle bracelet keep me from celebrating with my cuz!

Hope this email finds you well. Feel free to call me at (737) 874-2833 to discuss. English only, please.

–Samuel Hanson, age 42

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Unholy Night– review on Goodreads

Unholy NightUnholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Got this one from a friend who loaned me a whole stack of books. I’ve been out of the reading rhythm for a while so I decided to start with this one since it seemed light-hearted and silly. It really wasn’t. It was kind of tedious, but I chalked that up to my being a rusty reader. Having just finished it though, I’m not so sure if it was me or just the novel.

Ostensibly a re-telling of the baby-Jesus story and His flight to Egypt. But what do you expect from a re-telling: is it an homage, a parody, straight-up plagiarism? None of these in Unholy Night, I’m afraid. Just a loose framework used to tell a hack-n-slash adventure story.

Which is fine, and don’t get me wrong—if there’s cyberpunk and steampunk, why not history-punk? I’m all for innovative genres. But everything Unholy Night got from this “history” was also the only thing it had going for it. And that included a lot of deus ex machina.

I mean, a lot. A story about one of the three wise-man using his sword and hatred to protect the Messiah as they try to escape Herod- and whenever it looks like they’re trapped, voila, a miracle happens. Please. I feel as if a great opportunity for parody was utterly missed here. I get it—this is The Living God wrapped in his arms, so “deus ex machina” is almost obligatory. Maybe that’s why it felt flat.

Too many conveniences, too many coincidences, too much horror with too little consequence. I guess the best thing I can say about Unholy Night is that, like the Bible itself, it ended up just being a bunch of words, words words.

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What Are You Reading, Stupid?

Lest you start thinking you’re an intelligent person with discerning tastes, let me remind you that you’re not. You’re an idiot. And I know you’re an idiot because Slate and Flavorwire told me so. They didn’t use the word “idiot” but then they didn’t have to, because people who are intelligent and have discerning tastes can read between the lines. People like me!

So, you’re an idiot. You read Young Adult fiction, Donna Tart, and nothing else. I put those last three words in italics to emphasize them. You should be ashamed of yourselves, and your idea that these books are the kinds of things that represent literature today is completely wrong. Don’t you know that YOU are contributing to the death of literary criticism by buying books that other people will also end up buying?

I mean, look at you. With your education and your job and your family and your, ugh, life. Are you on Reddit? Are you even on Tumblr? Then how in the HELL do you even KNOW what’s even REAL? You wouldn’t know good literature if it glued you to a chair and made you watch Shakespeare. Did you know that Teller of Penn & Teller fame is currently directing The Tempest? Of course not: you read Divergent and The Goldfinch instead of listening to podcasts. Scum.

You are scum. You read your books (plural!) and listen to your music (collective plural!) and watch your television shows, when the real, actual critics don’t even own a TV. Who has time to own a TV when there’s Netflix and Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime subscriptions to maintain on laptops? Who has time for, what are they called, sports? Who has time for sports when the World Cup is on in bars that sells beers you haven’t even heard of?

I’m avoiding the H word, because it would hurt your feelings, but I am so tempted to use it. You know the word I mean. Rhymes with “dipster.” You dipster. I haven’t found it yet, because I only read websites even I haven’t heard of (like Flavorwire), but I know there’s a website that describes how my calling you the H word means I’m an H word and admitting I’m an H word means I’m not really an H word and so you are one.

The point is, you have got to stop. Stop reading things that you enjoy. Stop getting so much satisfaction out of your entertainment choices. Stop being an idiot. Literary criticism (which, for the purpose of this essay and the ones on Slate and Flavorwire is the same as writin’ reviews, even though it’s not at all, even) will die if you don’t start reading… well, reading things that are so good no plebian like you would read them.

And if literary criticism dies, how will people adequately contextualize my essay about some essays that were about reviews of books that these essays say you shouldn’t read? Idiot. Scum. Dipster.