Get your war on #42

Okay, voted.
Now if I can just remember to mail the absentee ballot back in time.

It was a 1968 Pontiac something-something station wagon. It was blue. I would have to have been ten or eleven; I feel smaller in the memory, but I would have to have been at least that old because my parents never bought cars new back then. On the way home from the beach, on a long, straight empty stretch of road, mom in the passenger seat, us three kids in the back seat with our crackers and games and the coffee can full of urine (Dad was a busdriver and didn’t like to stop for anything) dad stepped on it. (On the accelerator, not the coffee can.)

He floored it.

“What are you doing?” my mom asked him in a voice that suggested white knuckles and fingernails digging into blue imitation leather upholstery.

“Cleaning the cobwebs out,” he said.

I looked over the top of the seat at the speed-o-meter. He got the needle all the way to the right, to where it maxxed out at 120 mph. Then he took his foot off the accelerator pedal and we coasted back down to 65.

I did that once in February 1981 in Czechoslovakia, which has (or at least had then) some long straightaways and nice flat freeways en route to Poland. I was driving a Polish woman to Cracow in her blue Volkswagen Scirocco and got it up to 240 kph before she started screaming.

It’s fun to do that when you’re writing, pile on the hyperbole until you burn out the cobwebs. It works best with humor. If people think you’re serious about it it sounds stupid, so you act like you’re not serious.

It was pitch dark this morning and I couldn’t see a damn thing. It was drizzling and my headlights seemed to be powered by fading AA batteries. The heat was on and so was the Bylsma/Bach CD and Beta was snoozing in the passenger seat. Sometimes I wish I understood her better. Maybe I do, and just amn’t sure. Maybe I understand no one really; bad for someone who wants to write, on the one hand, but I have sworn allegiance to bewilderment and confusion, on the other.

I posted to Painsuit a story I wrote about 15 1/2 years ago, just before Beta was born. I posted it because I recently found it again and hadn’t posted anything there for so long.

Re-reading it, I saw it was not brilliant but also I seem to have worked harder on the structure end of things back then. It still needs work, but it’s not a bad story. It’s interesting to see how I’ve changed and how I’ve stayed the same since then.

In particular, from a non-literary point of view, I found three things most interesting:

• There is an “adult bookstore” in it, which no longer exist in that form so much, due I suppose to the Internets etc.

• There are no cell phones
• The description of the one character at the end proved to be a near-perfect match for the way Beta looked when she was born

This story, in fact, was one of about three I wrote back then that came true in unexpected ways. Since most of what I wrote back then — no, all of it — was negative or scary or sad, I quit writing for a long time.

Oblivio has a story about this very thing, called End of Story, that you should go read. He writes better than I do.

Here is a bit of the description from my story:

…face was purple… tubes ran up … nose… respirator tube …
… so tiny… on bleached white sheets.
…I stroked his forehead. All his hair had been shaved, eyebrows, everything. “I never knew you were so tiny,” I said. There were big yellow and purple bruises on his arms where needles and tubes were taped. I sat on the edge of his bed and listened to the machines click and hum and peep. I … held his tiny hand. … I cradled him in my arms and he felt hot. It wasn’t until I saw tears falling on my skin that I realized I was crying…
I was so close to him that I could feel my own hot breath bouncing back when I whispered. I smelled acrid medicine on his skin. I held him close. He was so light in my arms, like a single breath.

Whatever. Writing the story, I thought I was describing a little guy who had been beaten, but when my daughter was born 10 weeks early, it was too close for comfort.

George W. Bush and the 14 points of fascism

[Via Eeksy-Peeksy]

On my home planet we recognize the fundamental oneness of all beings and therefore don’t get too exercised over names. This of course causes problems for my fellow planetarians and me while here on Earth, where people say things like “Hi, Mig,” when they meet you and sort of expect you to say their name, too, when you issue your countergreeting, or at least react more positively to that if not actually a little disappointed when you just say, “Hi,” back or at best, “Hi, beautiful” because who, face it, who doesn’t like to be called beautiful?

Except there’s no way to say that in German that doesn’t sound even more stupid than it already does in English. So yesterday evening, when I went to this meeting after getting a haircut at a place where everyone was dropping things — first the customer next to me dropped her cigarettes, then some insert fell out of the magazine I was reading, where I read the coolest Plutarch quote: “Der Geist ist kein Schiff, das man beladen kann, sondern ein Feuer, das man entfachen muss,” (which really got me thinking (it translates as “The spirit (or intellect (or mind)) is not a boat that you can load, but rather a fire you have to set”) because I had always sort of seen the intellect, the mind, as this big warehouse, or maybe this big gigantic library to which you are adding books upon books during your education; and now I realize, it’s a pyre, or the books are not just books, they’re fuel and not worth a damn until you light them on fire, it’s the conflagration that counts, not the pile of wood (give me a second to get my puncuation straight here…) and then the hair stylist’s apprentice (Goethe version, not Walt Disney) dropped a stack of towels — everyone was all, you know, “Hi, Mig,” and I was all, “Hi, hi, hi, how you doing, hi, what’s new” wondering if my name problem was a sign of senility and convincing myself I’d had it all my life, which I have and in addition to feeling stupid about that, I also felt stupid because I had sauce from the kebab sandwich (kebab bits in a toasted pita bread, with lettuce and tomato bits, with a big squirt of kebab sandwich sauce) I had gone and bought after my haircut to kill time becasue I was still early for the meeting all down the leg of my suit because I had stupidly tried eating it on the go and by the time I thought, “I’d better be careful with this, it’s pretty juicy,” I already had the sauce down my leg and the sauce was white of course and the girl had only given me one little dinky napkin with the sandwich, and it quickly transformed itself from a napkin into a little ball of cellulose saturated with white sauce and was more painting the sauce around the leg of my suit than wiping it off, and there I was at the meeting hoping the sauce will dry invisibly and it did go pretty far in that direction, leaving just these suspicious-looking grey traces which I tried to scratch off surreptitiously but unfortunately the stains just turned vivid white where scratched so I had to darken them, again surreptitiously, with a bit of saliva, which probably made an even odder impression than my inability to remember names. Stupid humans.

Gamma: Ireland’s green, right?
Mig: Pretty green. It rains a lot.
Gamma: We’ll go there sometime, right?
Mig: You bet.
Gamma: Austria’s yellow.
Mig: Sure.
Gamma: It is. And America, America’s blue.
Mig: [Sigh]
Gamma: Red, what country is red? Iraq is red, because of all the war there.
Mig: …