writing

Sunday

So it’s been a couple of days.

They’ve been good days, mostly, and in fact quite remarkable by the poor standard that the rest of August had already set.

My back seems to be doing a lot better, in that there aren’t terrible twinges of pain every time I bend or move in the wrong way. Or, sometimes, in any way. That’s actually the worst part about having a bad back: is this the perfectly ordinary movement that’s going to cripple me for days or weeks? (Well, the worst part if you discount the pain itself.) My back is a lot better when I sit than when I stand, which is actually the exact opposite of how it was when I was first diagnosed with a herniated disc, when standing seemed to relieve it more than anything else. (I’d find reasons to work standing up, when I could, and I’d frequently not take a seat on the train.) This is probably better, since it’s usually easier to find somewhere to sit (or make excuses for having to do so) than needing to stand all the time, but it’s a little weird. And it does still kind of hurt when I’m standing. Not nearly so much that I can’t — or would prefer not to — move, but enough to make me cautious and I’m sure occasionally a little irritable. I don’t know if it’s getting better, or if this is as better as it’s going to get, but this is much, much better than it’s been for the past couple of weeks, and so I’ll take that.

And honestly, there are people who have it a lot worse than I do.

My parents spent most of Friday and Saturday away, visiting my mom’s brother in Connecticut, who isn’t doing very well. All of her brothers and sisters made the trip, and I spend the time at home looking after the dog.

Some things I did, in no particular order:

I read a couple of books. On Friday, I finished listening to David Mitchell’s Back Story and reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama. I think the former was probably better than the latter. What Mitchell may lack in a hugely exciting biography — he grew up fairly normal, went to school, became a comedic actor, and now does that for a living — but he tells that story well and amusingly, and I particularly enjoyed hearing it in his own voice on the audio book.

Meanwhile, I like Clarke, or at least I remember a great fondness for him when, as a young teen, I discovered the Space Odyssey series. I don’t remember if the books or Kubrick’s movie came first for me, but there’s more humanity in Clarke’s writing, more warmth and humor, and I quite enjoyed reading the books, even if I never went as far as the fourth and final volume in the series.

(3001 came out in 1997, and I have a dim recollection of it getting some bad commentary at the Penn State Science Fiction Society, which I was part of at the time…and which I discovered on Friday, quite sadly, appears to have disbanded. Or maybe I should say re-discovered, since this is apparently something I learned of back in 2007. I have a comment on that post and everything, so it’s not like I didn’t know. I was actually more distressed to learn that the Monty Python Society, of which I was a long-time member and two-time president, has probably also disbanded. With only a few exceptions, I sadly haven’t kept in touch with most of the people I knew through the club, but I’m saddened by the idea that it might be gone forever. There’s apparently a Harry Potter fan club on campus that’s taken up a lot of the slack of both clubs — inheriting the science fiction library, putting on sketch comedy for Red Nose Days — but it’s just not the same.)

Anyway, back to Rama. While I like Clarke — his short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” remains a favorite — I was a little surprised to discover this one both the Hugo and Nebula when it was published. I haven’t read any of the other nominees from the same year, but Rama is…well, kind of boring. Very little actually happens, and maybe that’s in part by design, and maybe that’s why Gentry Lee (who continued writing a number of sequels) apparently introduced a lot of new characters and plot, but it feels much more like a short story padded out to novel length. It’s never exactly unenjoyable — I was worried it would be risibly dated, remembering cosmonauts in 2061 — but that wasn’t ultimately a huge concern. There just wasn’t enough to the book. There’s a huge central mystery — and this is maybe a bit of a spoiler — and it’s one that never gets solved. Along the way a few other things happen, although the stakes never feel terribly high, but not nearly enough.

On Saturday, I finished reading Voltaire’s Calligrapher by Pablo De Santis. I hope to say more about it in the near future, since it’s an interesting book, but for now let me just say that when you pick books out of the local library based almost exclusively on their short length, you may wind up with some weird choices.

On Friday evening, I finished watching the last two episodes of the British crime drama Broadchurch. I could probably say a lot more about it than I’m gong to now — it’s late, but I also know some people who are not yet caught up with watching it — but let me just say I’m a bit torn, and my feelings about the finale in particular are hugely split. Is it possible to find something both completely compelling and effective and also a letdown?

On Saturday, while the neighbors partied and karaoked, I watched Lincoln. I’ve had it out from Netflix for a while, unable to watch it until my new computer (with its working Blu-Ray drive) arrived. It’s not a perfect movie, maybe a little too pat and certainly not a full biography of the man, but it’s quite entertaining, moves at fast clips, and the performances are terrific.

And today, I went to see The World’s End, which was quite funny.

That doesn’t feel like a busy weekend, and it probably wasn’t, but it was a decent one if nothing else. I had pancakes for dinner on Friday night, so there’s at least that.

And today I also wrote this:

“When the world ended, all the birds fell from the sky, and Rachel found out she was a cyborg.”

“That never happened,” said Rachel. “Don’t believe him, Mom, he’s just being dumb.”

“Thank you, Rachel,” said their mother. She’d been trying to finish the Sunday crossword when the two kids had come in from the yard, and her pen hovered momentarily over 8 down before filling in the now obvious four-letter MINX. “I might have believed your brother if you hadn’t said something. You have been looking a little cyborgy lately.”

“Told you!” said Peter. He snatched a cookie from the plate on the counter.

“Mmhmm,” said their mother, looking sternly at her son. “And those were for after supper, but I guess if the world’s really ended neither your father nor I have to cook tonight.”

“Pizza!” said Peter around a mouthful of chocolate chip. “Gino’s will still deliver.”

“How WILL they get around the mountains of dead birds?” his mother asked. Forty-seven across, she now saw, was FLIGHT. Which crossed, perhaps morbidly, with CRASH.

“The birds didn’t die,” said Peter. “They just fell from the sky. They’re all just walking around out there, looking stunned. The thing you’ve got to watch out for are the alligators. They’re the ones that can now fly.”

“You don’t see a lot of alligators in Pennsylvania.”

“End times,” Peter said. “Anything could happen.”

“Mmm,” said his mother. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe your sister really is a cyborg.”

“Mooooom!” Rachel said.

“There was that mad scientist who used to work at the hospital where your born. What was his name? Frankenstein?”

“You’re making that up! There was no Dr. Frankenstein at the hospital!”

“Not any more. Not if his cyborg creation was loose in the world. You did make a lot of weird whirring, clicking noises as a baby!”

“I knew it!” said Peter.

“Moooom!” said Rachel. “Quit encouraging him!”

“It would make things a lot easier,” said her mother. She dipped her pen down again: 18 across, NECTARINE. “Your father and I would just have to figure out the right computer code to make you clean your room. Maybe we could get you to do your homework by remote control.”

“Very funny, ha ha!” Rachel said. “And I suppose you believe the little brat about all the dead birds, too.”

“They’re just stunned,” said her mother.

“Right,” said Peter, “just stunned.”

“It’s the flying alligators that are the real problem.” She stumbled over 22 down, then saw that it was PIANO FORTE. “And, I imagine, the zombies.”

“Zombies?” said Peter and Rachel, almost as one.

“Well it wouldn’t be the end of the world if there weren’t zombies,” their mother said. “I mean, stunned birds, flying gators, and cyborg girls are one thing, but zombies seems like standard operating procedure to me.”

Five down, she finally saw, was EDAM. You only ever saw that in a crossword puzzle.

“In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Gino’s was the first places that got overrun with zombies. It’s always so crowded on a Sunday night.”

“Does that mean no pizza?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know. Is your sister really a cyborg?”

“Probably not,” he said, reluctantly.

“Then go wash your hands and we’ll talk. And wake your father — he’s asleep on the couch.”

Peter ran from the room, shouting, “Daaaad!” and snatching another cookie from the plate as he did so.

Rachel eyed her mother. She could never understand why her mother enjoyed doing those silly crossword puzzles.

“He’s starting to suspect,” she said.

It’s probably more a meandering joke than a story — thanks in large part to the cyborg bit, which is not part of the writing prompt I supplied — but I had fun writing it.

And that’s pretty much it.

Sunday

Just an ordinary Sunday. I wrote this:

They were refugees, and for that reason potential carriers, undocumented and assumed infected. If they’d come across the desert, it might just be to die here, Jer thought, waiting to be processed outside the city gates while their symptoms started to show or their supply of water and food ran out. There were stocks of food inside the city, as well as medkits and cure-alls, replenished by the Corps every forty or fifty days, but Jer and the rest of the guard were under strict orders to share none of this with the new arrivals, to interact with them only insofar as was absolutely necessary. Let the bots do the processing, they were told; let the bots take the blood, take the risks, herd the refugees into the makeshift camps that continued to spring up along the city’s edge. The city’s resources were limited and precious and costly, and there was nothing to be gained by wasting those resources on men and women who were very likely to die.

“Lead-lined clouds surround stars,” Cole, his immediate supervisor had said, and if his meaning was at first obscured by the metaphor, it was underlined by Jer’s knowledge of what had happened to guardsmen who in the early days had disobeyed this directive. Men who had been taught to learn first-hand how the refugees lived. The city guard, Jer knew, was the cloud; the city was the star; they surrounded it in darkness so that it might hold in more closely its light. If that meant that some would die in the cold shadows that they cast…

Jer watched these two: a man and a woman, perhaps only a few years older than himself, although it was difficult to tell from their dark and heavy garb. Both of them were wearing face masks as a ward against infection — not that that was a guarantee of anything. They could be carriers and not know it, or they could succumb after a few nights of life in the camp. They had the look of northeners, Jer thought, which would serve them well in the camp — everyone feared the dark whispers of the north — but might make their passage into the city difficult for the very same reason.

And that’s about it, really, but don’t think I’m complaining!

Hello, Sunday

If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been posting here much lately — and, if the site’s traffic in general is any indication, you probably haven’t — it’s because on Wednesday night, while I was in the middle of watching an episode of New Girl on Netflix, my computer suddenly shut down and starting puffing smoke.

This is not, it maybe goes without saying, normal or optimal behavior for a laptop computer, particularly one that isn’t all that old, quite possibly still under warranty. I pulled the plug and the battery, fretted for a while, and then ultimately decided to fret about it on more fully on Thursday. Of course, before turning in for the night — it was already kind of late — I placed an order for a new laptop at Dell’s website using my iPad.

An order which, apparently, never went through. I received an acknowledgement e-mail, but not the promised follow-up with my confirmation number and estimated delivery date. I spent more time on Thursday than I really wanted to talking with Dell’s very unhelpful customer service — including one gentlemen (presumably in India judging by his accent) who wanted me go step by step with him over the components and specs that I ordered. Forwarding him the acknowledgment e-mail with those specs wasn’t enough, even when I explained that I’d prefer not to re-order over the phone with just his say-so that I was actually ordering the same thing. I just wanted to confirm with him what I’d confirmed already with another Dell rep over chat: that the order had not actually be received, was not being processed, and the computer was not being shipped. (I may have been a little frazzled and impatient with him, but this was while I was at work, where I really couldn’t handle it.)

On Thursday evening, I ordered the new laptop for the second time. And discovered on Friday that that order had not gone through. Dell, apparently, does not want my money. Their customer service Twitter account was equally unhelpful, suggesting I wait until Monday or Tuesday, and then, if I still haven’t received a confirmation of my order, to phone them.

So that’s apparently what I’m doing, though I’m close to looking for alternatives and other brands, and I’m keeping a close eye on my bank account to make sure I’m not charged for these orders that haven’t been processed. I’m managing okay without a computer, with the iPad and iPhone and the work laptop, which is what I’m writing this thing on. I missed not really being able to watch a movie this weekend — I have Lincoln out on Blu-Ray but no Blu-Ray player, no TV to take the place of the computer screen, and watching something on the iPad just isn’t the same. (TV’s okay there; I just watched tonight’s Breaking Bad, for instance, and last night the first very mixed episode of Orange Is the New Black. I’ve also watched some more New Girl, maybe just to spite the dead laptop.) But it’s not all bad, the ways this has disrupted my life. It’s more the hassle of trying to order the thing and not being able to, and then getting no help from customer service. I’m no closer to solving my problem, and meanwhile the date when/if I get the new laptop just continues getting further away.

But anyway, enough of that. Today I went with friends to see Elysium, which was okay, and before that wrote this in my weekly writing group of the same friends:

If he hadn’t lost his way, Peter wouldn’t have needed the map, and then he wouldn’t have phoned Holly, just as she was getting ready to leave, and she wouldn’t have doubled back, gone upstairs to the bedroom and the locked chest at the foot of the bed where Peter had hidden the map, and then the twenty minutes she lost to finally prying the chest open and phoning Peter back wouldn’t have mattered, because she would have already been on the road, or even back at the lab, where the fact that she’d been poisoned wouldn’t have cost her her life, because the lab had plenty of the antidote (and, having themselves created the poison, could synthesize more), and the techs who worked with Holly would have recognized the symptoms that both she and Peter had been unknowingly ignoring for almost a week. Holly wouldn’t have died, and then neither would Peter, when an hour later he called her back and said he needed — this time rather desperately — to consult the map once again. For want of a nail, as the saying sometimes goes.

After Holly overdosed on the mutant formula, the lab techs brought her back to life, although they would have preferred not to do things this way, had anyone asked, and in fact they had a long list of regulations that suggested (quite strongly) that doing this could jeopardize the larger project, the single reason that the lab existed, and that even if it worked it would be no picnic for Holly, who would likely remember the deep physical pain of her death, the suddeneness with which the mutant formula played its final havoc upon the body, and she would definitely remember the terrible pain of ressucitation, which the lab techs could do — and would do, because they liked Holly — only with terrible cost and by using the machine. Only Peter had ever used the machine before, and the rumor was that he was lost somewhere in the wild darkness — which is what his notes had called it — with no way of contacting the outside world. Had only one of them thought to check the outgoing calls on Holly’s cellphone…

When he turned on the machine, Peter would have found it difficult to explain what he’d seen, not so much because it defied description or because he normally lacked for words, but because what he’d seen had seemed so mundane, so very ordinary, and none of those words seemed worth the trouble when he finally turned back to his notes about the map that he’d found…

I’m not really sure about this piece, which was born out three separate dependent clauses as a prompt. I was maybe more interested in it structurally — long run-on sentence, short cap, followed by a long-run on sentence, then a cap — than the plot, which leaves more questions than it answers.

Anyway, that sort of has been the last few days. By and large, I’m liking August considerably less than July. I described it the other day as July, but without the character. Same humidity, same long days, but not half as much fun so far. It was an incredibly slow week, interspersed with panic and frustration, and that isn’t anybody’s idea of a fun time.

The weekend what was

On Friday afternoon, since I got home from work early, I decided to watch Ghost Story. (It’s available on HBO Go.) The movie has a notable cast, with Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and John Houseman among others — it was the final film role for all of the men, with the lone exception of Houseman — but it’s pretty goofy and not really what I was expecting.

On Saturday morning, I drove with my father to get his car inspected. It meant I had to get up early, on a Saturday — and my attempt to seriously nap upon my return home failed, unfortunately — but he’d done the same for me last month, so it was the least that I could do.

On Saturday afternoon, I finished reading Ben Loory’s collection, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. I’m not sure there’s any way I can summarize the book, or the experience of reading its off-kilter, sometimes fairy-tale like stories, except to share this tweet (with scan) I made:

It’s a fun but weird book.

On Saturday evening, I watched another movie from 1981, Michael Mann’s Thief. (This one I’d rented from Netflix.) It’s an interesting movie, in that it feels like an artifact from a different time — a time when ’70s movies were becoming ’80s movies — and there’s some good acting in it, particularly from James Caan. But again, I can’t claim to have really loved it. It’s slow and over-stylized — though maybe the latter’s almost a given with Michael Mann — and it just didn’t thrill me.

On Sunday morning, I did the crossword puzzle (somewhat poorly), donated blood — partly inspired, I must admit, by Radiolab’s recent show about the red stuff — and discovered New Girl (it’s also on Netflix). I have, as of this writing, watched eight episodes, a full third of the first season. This is kind of how I like watching sitcoms: in large blocks. I find it’s easier to get emotionally invested with the characters, while ignoring some of the weaknesses that might become more apparent if I had a week to dwell on each episode. It’s how I encountered (and fell for) How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory, and it might explain why I’ve lately fallen out of watching those regularly, now that regularly means something other than watching a half dozen episodes back to back.

On Sunday afternoon, I wrote this:

“That’s me in the photo,” he says. “I’m there with a shovel.”

“And the plastic bucket and flippers,” she says, “I see. Were you at the beach or…?”

“That’s actually the mall,” he says. “One of those photo studio places at the one in Trenton? We went with the Hawaiian getaway theme.”

“Sounds romantic.”

“It was actually that or the landing on Mars. The place was kind of lackluster, didn’t have a lot of backdrops to choose from.”

“Why didn’t you just go to the beach? Wait, does Trenton have a beach?”

“I don’t know. Carol is — was — afraid of water. And planes. And hula dancers. That was the closest we ever got to Oahu.”

“She sounds like a real catch.”

He looks at her for a moment, then lets out a sigh.

“That’s what I used to think, too,” he tells her, shaking his head, “before she blew up the world.”

“Oh,” she answers. “I forgot that was her.”

“I want to say it wasn’t her fault,” he says, “that it could have happened to anybody. But not just anybody’s girlfriend was a mad scientist stockpiling plutonium.”

“That was Carol?”

“That was Carol. I mean, at first it was cute, just one of those little quirks that seem adorable at the start of any relationship. Like the way she’d giggle at movies, not just the funny ones, or the way she’d toy with her hair whenever she got nervous.”

“The way she was afraid of hula dancers?”

“That should have been a warning sign, I guess. Planes, the beach…I mean, those are normal enough phobias. But when you start coming home to robot armies designed to laser to death anything in a grass skirt, you start to worry, you know.”

“I didn’t know you were living with her,” she says. He knows that look.

“Not at her mountain lair, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he says. “I didn’t even know she had a mountain lair. Apparently she bought a hollowed-out volcano during the real estate boom.”

“And that’s where she kept the plutonium?”

“Well, it wasn’t at the apartment. We’d only been moved in together for about six months, but I think I would have noticed plutonium.”

“Six months?” she says. “That sounds serious.”

“She blew up the planet,” he answers. “I’d say she was a pretty serious girl.”

“It’s just, you don’t talk about her that much. I mean, this is the first time I’ve even seen that photograph.”

“I don’t like to be reminded of those days. The moon base doesn’t even have a mall.”

“Well if somebody’s girlfriend had given us all a little more warning she was going to detonate a world-killing plutonium bomb…”

“How did this become my fault?” he asks her. “I don’t want to fight.”

“There isn’t enough air even if you did,” she says. “They’re rationing the oxygen again.”

“That’s like the fifth time this month.”

“They brought in a few hundred new refugees just last week. Folks gotta breathe.”

“God I hope they’re not mutants like the last batch. All those third eyes and blistered skin.” He shudders.

“Well I didn’t see any hula skirts, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she says. “Not one single ukulele among them when we did our low-orbit pick-up.”

“Now you’re just being mean,” he tells her. “Besides, that was Carol’s thing, not mine.”

“It’s hard to tell. You two were apparently so close.”

He just stares at her. Neither one of them says anything for a while.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her,” he says finally. “It was a dark time in my life. Trouble at work, the stress of moving in together…the world blowing up. I forgot I even had that photo. If there was enough oxygen left, I probably burn it.”

With my weekly writing group. It’s not really a thing, more a sketch than a story, but I had some fun with it.

And on Sunday evening, I wrote this. That was the weekend.

Sunday

Not really a busy day. I saw The Wolverine — it’s quite enjoyable — and wrote this:

The Raven tortured the black box, turned it over in her hands, worrying the edges until the wood splintered in her palms, drawing blood and a wince of pain as it dug into her skin. They should have built it better, she thought, as the screws that held the clasp loosened and then fell away. She threw the useless metal to the dungeon floor. If they’d meant to trap me here, they should have built a stronger prison; they should have bound me like the others, burnt a ward into the ground, cut my throat and let it bleed. They never should have left me here alone, unguarded but for the boy already dozing outside. They never should have left me here with the means of my escape. But they had thought to torture her, to leave her weeping in the darkness, bloodied and beaten, with the power that she needed so close at hand and yet under lock and key. They’d warded the box, oh yes, as if such commoner’s magic wasn’t easily broken, as if she didn’t have the strength in her to break a small wooden box and spill out its contents, whatever glyphs had been hastily scratched into its surface. She had felled armies, nearly felled their own until they’d sent that damn mage to meet her on the field. He would not have made this same mistake. He would have recognized the battle as still only half won. She was beaten, yes, but never broken. She was the Raven.

The box was empty. She stared, turned it over in her hands, shook out nothing but air. This couldn’t be. She had seen the soldier place her locket in the box, seen him lock it and place the key inside the front pocket of his vest. She didn’t count these men incapable of subterfuge, but she had seen it — and moreover had seen it still, with was left to her of the second sight, when they’d placed the box before her, laughing, and left the room. That all of that had been a ruse…it made no sense, defied what she knew of magic, and should have been impossible even with that dark mage’s help. They could not have tricked her, tricked the sight, unless…

She turned the box back over in her hands. Oh yes, she thought, there it was, a glyph she had not seen, not scratched but deeply burnt into the hard finish inside the box. Not a ward but a trap. Not an escape but a deeper prison.

And that was when she felt the burning pain in her hands.

And now it’s raining. That’s about it.