"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
It was winter when I woke up this morning, rain quickly turning to wet flurries of cold snow, then spring around lunchtime, and winter again (though minus the snow) this evening. Seriously, if the weather was a person, I’d almost certainly be referring it to one of the mental health books on my shelf at work.
And that’s about what passes for excitement on this particular Monday, I’m afraid.
A rainy Sunday. I did the New York Times crossword, I watched a little Red Dwarf, I did a little editing for Kaleidotrope*, and I wrote this:
Waiting for a train that never comes is an occupational hazard for a temporal operative, time loops being anything but a freak occurrence on this kind of job. There are whole chapters dedicated to it in the standard operating procedures, endless shelves of academic books detailing their adverse (and, on rare occasion, surprisingly useful) effects, and no time agent is ever graduated without first experiencing at least one such linearity-fracturing event first-hand. But it was still starting to piss Veronica off. She needed to be back uptown in half an hour, and her agency handlers weren’t going to care if that half hour for her simply failed to occur. That was from her perspective, and her perspective alone, and the agency had a habit of simply not caring about any individual agent’s personal experience of cause and effect. If the time loop didn’t end, then she was damn well obligated to break free from it on her own.
Which wasn’t going to be easy. One of the reasons that time loops filled the pages of so many books was that were just so many different types of them, endless indices enumerating the various causes and remedies — and misjudging either one of those could just make matters worse. Some loops were the product of over-ripe neutrinos (whatever that meant); some were caused by more fundamental problems in the time-stream, fractures and tears at the subatomic and even quantum level. And Veronica was no physicist, just a covert operative caught in the wrong place at the wrong constantly-repeating-time. The only supplies she had were the handful of documents she’d packed for her meeting uptown, coded reports and tedious spreadsheets, and the pocket umbrella she’d brought along because they’d promised to send her back to last Thursday when the meeting was over. She seemed to remember that last Thursday it had been raining. Nothing she was carrying was going to set the time-stream back on its course; none of it was going to make her subway train appear.
Based on this writing prompt from my friend (and fellow writing group member) Maurice. I did not manage to work the word “confute” in there, however.
* Have I mentioned that starting in 2012 I’m almost definitely taking the zine all digital, dropping the print edition in favor of what will probably be a quarterly online version? I may have just hinted at this over Twitter. Anyway, that’s the likely plan, once I get through the next three (fully booked) issues. I’ll talk about it more soon, I’m sure.
Not much of a Saturday, all things being equal, just the kind that seems to vanish out from under you. Beyond stopping by the library and the post office, I’m not sure that I did much of anything today.
This evening, I did watch Monsters, which manages to do a whole lot with almost nothing…and yet ultimately not feel like a whole lot in the end. It’s sort of a cross between Cloverfield, with that movie’s oft-unseen alien nasties but minus its shaky-cam aesthetic and interchangeable characters, and District 9, with that movie’s impressive yet low-budget special effects but minus the political commentary, or actually much of any script. The two leads work well together, with the unforced chemistry (perhaps of two people looking for chemistry), and the movie does a remarkable amount of world-building and raising of tension with very few appearances of the titular alien monsters. The Mexican locations are both exotic and familiar, suggesting a very real and lived-in world, with the creature effects, impressive as they might be, relegated mostly to the background.
Which would be fine if the movie were as interesting as it was amiably exotic. In many ways, it’s effective because it isn’t a traditional, scary creature-feature. It’s less effective because it doesn’t ever seem to figure out what else it wants to be instead.
Yesterday, I fell asleep while reading — I know, I am so exciting, am I not? — before I could post much of anything here. What the little I did post was actually written at around one in the morning, shortly before I went back to sleep, for reals this time, and it only really hinted at how busy my day was.
But then again, I mostly just spent it in the tiresome and difficult, but critically necessary, task of compiling and consolidating manuscript reviews into something approaching a document the authors can use to make revisions, something we can use to judge the extent to which revisions are actually necessary, and something I felt it necessary to organize not just by chapter but by individual manuscript page. (Some of the reviewers were thorough — or sadistic, depending on your perspective — enough to provide full-on track changes for some of the chapters, rather than just overall comments, so I had those to wade through.) And you don’t want to hear about any of that.
You want to hear about how I started my morning off by tripping and falling in the parking lot next to my train station.
In all the snow we’ve had this winter, several of the blocks in the parking lot — those nameless concrete and rebar dividers that theoretically keep you from banging your car into a wall — had been kicked up, all in a single pile, knotted together if large concrete blocks can be said to be knotted. This is right at the corner, about half a block (or a building’s length) from the train station, and a car was pulling into the spot in front of me. I tried to maneuver…and obviously did not do so very deftly.
“I hurt mostly my pride,” I told the gentleman who asked me if I was okay. But, to quote They Might Be Giants, confidentially — I never had much pride. I’d actually banged my left knee pretty bad and scraped up the palm of my left hand. Bad enough that I decided to turn around and head home rather than run (or maybe limply stumble) to catch my train. The cuts weren’t so bad; I smeared on some Bacitracin, slapped a bandage on my knee, and was actually on the next train fifteen minutes later.
(Herein lies the benefit of living a five-minute walk from the station. Then again, if I’d missed that train, therein lies the disadvantage of living a five-minute walk from this particular station. The next next train wouldn’t be for another hour.)
Anyway, once I got to the office, I managed to find some bandages that fit (and would stay on, at least temporarily) for the palm of my hand, and I changed the dressing on my knee. I’m actually not as badly hurt as I could have been. The last time I slipped and fell, landing (I think) unfortunately on the same knee, I actually ruined a pair of pants, and walking on the leg afterward hurt more than it did for most of today. My hand is still pretty scratched up, and I’ll likely have a bump and/or bruise on my knee for the next few days, but all things considered? I’m fine.
And so is my iPod, which went flying out of my hands as I went plummeting to the gravel below.
I’m hoping for a much less eventful weekend, full of reading and writing and very little falling down, going boom.
Busy, busy day.