Menaces

By the bye and just for the record, I have in my possession an unexpurgated copy of Mighty Joe Zenith's work-in-progress Thrillseeker, including the excised-for-blog-publication "bit which had the, shall we say, Mary Sue character."

Heh heh heh heh heh.
I am a very bad man.

And if you ask me nicely, I might be persuaded to post them here, soze you can judge for yourselves whether or not the words self-indulgent and wank apply...

(Myself, I think it's some sharp writing and a fun, appealing character, and if the dumb bastard hadn't gone and changed his log-in name this wouldn't be an issue...)

Heh heh heh heh.
Joe is going to fucking hate me.

Two For Joy

The view from now:

There’s a crow in my sights, perched on top of parked truck. My hands, raised to my face like a filmmaker’s scouting locations, make black shapes of birds on either side of him. Three for a girl.

I drop my hands. It wasn’t to be, of course. But the Wednesday before, waiting for D’s doctor to call with the test results, I’d started counting crows. An old superstition to tell the future. There was a rhyme:

One for sorrow, two for joy,
Three for a girl, four for a boy...

Three crows. That’s when I knew.

On Wednesday night, after hearing that D was five weeks along, we held hands in an uneasy conflux of exultation and foreboding. Her fingers fluttered in mine like wings.

D miscarried the next day, Thursday. Lost our daughter. And I knew it was a daughter (though the fleshy clot in D’s flow was not even the size of a fingertip). I knew. The crows had told.

Now it’s Monday, a Monday bitter as milkweed, and there’s one on a truck in the parking lot, a single deathbird like a rag in the wind. I raise one hand again; this time my fingers are a pistol. I’ll give you one for sorrow, you black-winged bastard, I murmur, and take careful aim.

“Boom,” I whisper.
And from nearby someone answers: Kaw kaw.

Another. Partners: this one hidden, but not far away. Startles me with a sudden cry and a rush of wings; changes the equation, leaving me in a whirlwind of feathers, surprised by joy.

The View From Her

The Sensual World

Herbs, hidden in the green, buried treasure landmines of the senses. There's a patch of lemon thyme growing wild in Mary's lawn, and it catches me by surprise every time I hit it with the mower—its fresh scent intoxicating, transporting.

Yesterday, while raking the leaves from the garden, I stirred up the beds of mint—and found myself just a splash of bourbon and a sugarcube away from Louisville—a wicker chair, a verandah, an ice-cream suit and a string tie. Sense memory? No. Sensory imagination: I've never even been to the racetrack, let alone to Kentucky.

I can't understand why so-called psychics make such a fuss about extra-sensory perception, when the five we have can already take us to places beyond our physical experience.

American Movie

A Hollywood player named Jason Pritchett who frequents Warren Ellis’s Forum on Delphi posted this a while ago...

Sometimes, checking the fax machine first thing in the morning can really make your day! I was the first one in the office today, so I had the pleasure of pulling this wonderful letter to me off of the fax machine:

PARENTS LEAVE.
MEN WANDER.
A GIRL ALWAYS HAS HER STICK.

Introducing... CHICKS WITH STICKS

Dear Mr. Pritchett:

We are preparing an action/drama in which we welcome your involvement. "CHICKS WITH STICKS" are delinquent girls who fight with sticks for the pleasure of rich men.

Trained by a retired woman martial artist, the girls stage these bouts for big bucks in erotic, underground performances. But the fighting turns horribly real when the old woman is killed, and a power struggle erupts between good girl and bad girl. We have produced a four-minute trailer which displays the style of fighting we intend to use. At your request, we can send you a VHS copy along with a synopsis.

May we send you the materials?”

How can anyone turn THAT pitch down??

Who indeed? But don’t take my word for it—because, beauty of beauties, the trailer is online...

If some visionary has the guts to make this, This Will Be The Greatest Movie Ever.

The Last Time Jack Quit Smoking

Camping trip. Late Summer. Took a wander down to the campground-office-cum-general-store to buy a can opener, after a luscious afternoon swimming and slapping skeeters and with an evening of Czech pilsener and tales by the fireside ahead. Can opener, pack of cards, cheap plastic sandals for the littl’un, a few sticks of firewood aaaand—what the hell?—a deck of smokes while we’re at it.

Hadn’t had a cigarette in two years. Smoked one or two with a Starobrno longneck whilst cooking our one-skillet supper: sweet.

The campground showed movies on a big screen in the snack bar. While D and Claire were at the show, I strolled over to the showers, pausing to light up. As I rounded the corner by the snack bar, I saw two kids—couldna been more’n nine or 10—sneaking smokes behind the Dumpster.

I looked at the cigarette between my fingers: dropped it, crushed it out, and threw the pack in with the garbage.

The View From Here

When the bombs started falling, I put on my leather, pulled my cap low, and went a-walking, alone. Perfect golden day, trees painted with fire, cloudless sky promising Winter. You don’t have to walk far around here before you lose the traffic sounds to birdsong and the chuck of squirrels and the nip-stiffening wind from the North.

There used to be a clearing in the pines, with a ramshackle fire-ring (you had to be careful cos there were always loads of broken bottles around) and a big tree we would climb when we were kids. Twenty years. But the paths were all overgrown, and I couldn’t find the way, though I rambled for what seemed like hours.

This war feels like a personal affront: if this war is happening, then everything I have believed—about faith, and the essential goodness of human nature, and the inherent justice of the universe—must be wrong. I am lonely, and scared, and mad as hell—but more than these I am grieving, grieving deep for something lost.

I picked a bad decade to quit smoking.

Pundit Fatigue

A week on, and the hot air is just getting started. I've read scads of op-ed pieces, listened to dozens of commentaries, and heard on-the-spot analyses from everyone from Wolf Blitzer to my postman. And I'm fucking sick of it.

Take Grant's essay, for instance. Like it or loathe it, no one seems to be asking the obvious question: was this column really necessary at all? I mean, is the world really clamoring to hear what some doped-up funnybook scribbler thinks about international terrorism?

In the mass media, everybody who gets a microphone stuck in hir face for a living is being called upon to make a statement. Baseball players, actresses, pop stars—all are being pressed into service as sociopolitical commentators—people who haven't any business commenting on anything besides the weather. And yet, in our insatiable hunger for opinion, we give 'em a forum. Has Britney issued a statement yet? What's Martha Stewart's take on the extradition question? I saw Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora doing an earnest Red Cross PSA 'tother day—Jon Bon Jovi, fa chrissake!

It's even worse on the 'net, where every fuckhead with a modem seems to think that s/he has, not just a right, but a sacred duty to hold and express an opinion, often at great length (yes, I am part of the problem: fuck you)—posting messages to message boards that really aren't messages at all, but manifestos—brooking no dialogue, no dissent.

Everybody's a know-it-all. Everybody's got an opinion, and you're all entitled to it. Everybody's a pundit.

Fuck the whole scabrous lot of 'em. I don't want to know what they think—I want to know what I think.

And I don't really want to think at all, right now.

I have no opinion about any of this: or if I do, you sure as hell don't need to know about it.

Silent Running

I’ve been deathly quiet in this medium for a long time now. I had a lot of big, clever, funny things I’d been saving up to say. Then Tuesday happened: and suddenly, I didn’t feel very big or very clever, and nothing seemed very funny.

I spent Tuesday night in church, which is not unusual in itself—that’s the night for choir practice. About two hours before the scheduled practice I was strongly considering cancelling—then I got a call that there a special Mass had been hastily arranged for 8:30 PM, and I said Let’s do it.

Only a few people showed for 7:00 rehearsal, but they were all game to stay and sing the Mass immediately following. We threw ourselves into the task of assembling a program of songs with a certain jolly desperation: C’mon, kids, let’s put on a show!—singing songs to keep the dark away. But as the church slowly filled with people, familiar faces made strange by an uncharacteristic whapped-upside-the-head-with-a-stout-plank cast to their expressions, I knew that this was the place to be. At least singing “Dona Nobis Pacem” with a lump in my throat felt a hell of a lot more useful than chewing my cuticles bloody in front of CNN.

I’m worried now about what choices my role might force me to take in the weeks and months ahead—what songs I will be asked to sing, in pursuit of what agendas. The church has an obvious role in bringing aid and comfort, and in asking mercy and blessing upon our nation and our people: but the church can also be used to whip a people into a belligerent frenzy (glory, glory hallelujah!), and of that I want no part.

Small problems, indeed. Pray for me. For all of us.

All your base are belong to us.

Sounds pretty fucking stupid six months on, doesn't it?

What were we thinking? And what d'you think Mahir is up to these days?