Some thoughts on finishing Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

1. Story - plot, characters, and action - is paramount.
     a. Translated works are the best reminder than novels need more than nifty language to have legs of their own on which to stand.
     b. Murder, death, insanity, sex, & scandal are all permissible to write about when done well (and in the right circumstances, are downright encouraged); the very real and raw tension of each should be exploited to their fullest if used.

2. F.D.* was the premier soap opera writer of his time.

3. As far as involuntary facial expressions go, C&P invokes one less experienced when reading modern 'serious' fiction - a sudden widening of the eyes.
     a. Today's most frequent involuntary fiction-triggered facial expression is a smug twist of the lips, which I think is a pretty good example of the point David Foster Wallace is trying to make in his essay,"Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky": that the main difference between writers today and writers in D.F.'s era is that today, we as writers seem to lack earnestness, that we resort to casual irony as a self-defense, and that our very hipness and edginess is in fact a response to the fear that perhaps we won't (or fundamentally can't) be taken seriously.

4. Character is best realized as a texture, and less so as a collection or string of ideas. What makes Rodion Romanych Raskolnikov so real is not the assemblage of his personality traits (which are less intentionally-varied and distinct than those of 'exciting' characters in today's fiction), but the texture of his person as created by witnessing R.R.R. through a number of stylistic and situational lenses.
     a. The monologues in particular do major work for D.F., giving his characters 3-4 pages (at minimum) to define themselves in a stylistically newish light (1st person), while still driving plot and action, the true bread & butter of D.F.'s work.

5. Upon completion, the only phrase that comes to mind to describe C&P is as follows: "That book be ill as fuck."

*In writing these notes in my journal, it became apparent that though I enjoy speaking (butchering?) Russian names aloud, I can't spell them worth a damn.

On Funding

Our Kickstarter for Hipsters: The Card Game has been live for 10 days at the time of this posting. We’ve raised $2,025 dollars of our $9,500 goal. We have 53 backers – 53 people made up of friends, family, and total strangers – who want to see our game get made and own a copy of the final product. At 21 percent of our full funding goal, we’ve definitely made some considerable stride – but we have a long way, a very long way, to go.

From what I understand, Kickstarter campaigns go something like this: You see a surge of funding in the beginning of your campaign, a plateau in the middle, and a big push at its end, when that invaluable 48 hour remind notice kicks in for folks that are interested, but haven’t backed just yet. At three days and counting of hovering right around $2,000, I’d say we’re pretty thoroughly entrenched in the plateau stretch of our campaign.

Matthew and myself getting ready for a Hipsters playtest event.

So, what now?

Historically, I’ve always been pretty uneasy asking other people for things. I didn’t grow up poor per se, but my mom was single and putting herself through college until I was in high school, and so I grew up feeling like asking for anything was not only in bad taste, but shameful to a certain degree. As a result, the moments in my life where I’ve needed to ask for help have stung considerably.

But so here I am, running a Kickstarter for Hipsters and finding that in order to make this game happen, I’m going to need to do just that. Ask people for help.

The caveat here is that I’m not soliciting donations for the sake of keeping myself afloat, covering my rent, etc. – we’re trying to make a quality game with quality materials, and we’re looking for people that believe in our game and want to own and play it. And so far, we’ve met a lot of people outside of our backers who like the game, who believe in its character and design. But still, there’s that gap between belief and action, the translation of removing your wallet from your pocket, entering your information, and then clicking submit. A lot of people might want our game (our 2-player Youtube video has racked up a few hundred views, and we’ve got a good thing going on Facebook, too), but going through the work of making that donation on Kickstarter is a few steps beyond wanting it.

So here it is, the pitch. If you believe in my game – if you think it looks fun, cool, or interesting (even if only in terms of the text and illustrations) – please take a few minutes and back us on Kickstarter. There’s a cliché about every dollar counting, but it’s certainly true in this case. The more people donate and the more frequently they do so, the better chance we have of being surfaced higher up on the Kickstarter website, and the better chance we have of being featured as a staff pick. Both of those things can boost a Kickstarter campaign tremendously.

The Mini Van Card

Beyond donating, I can’t stress enough how important telling your friends and acquaintances is to us. Posts on Facebook & Twitter are priceless. Seeding our page us on discovery sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg and Reddit even more so. Hell, just describing it to someone in person and telling them to look it up is huge for us. Want to actually play the game with some friends who are on the fence? Hit me up – I will send you a copy of our game to do so with.

Okay, pitch over. It feels weird to make it, but I believe in this game enough to endure the awkward and uncomfortable feelings that come with, well, asking for money.

If our game doesn’t get funded, it won’t be the end of the world. It’ll be a huge bummer, and it’ll hurt, but life will go on. And we’ll probably go on to make other games (there are talks of a time travel board game and something currently titled, “Giant Dead Author Killer Robots”) regardless of whether or not this project gets funded. But if we do make this game, those future projects will come sooner, they’ll come with more oomph and excitement, and hopefully, they’ll have folks who are already excited to play them.

And hey, let’s not forget about why we’re here right this moment – back us, and you’ll have a kick ass Hipsters Game to play with your friends and family to boot. Thank you for reading, and for your support.

Hipsters: Our Kickstarter & Reflections on Collaboration

Today, I launched my first ever Kickstarter Campaign for Hipsters: The Card Game. As much as I'd like to toot my own horn, I couldn't have come this far without a good friend and business partner (Matthew). If you check out my last post, you’ll see some images/ideas from early development. Since then, Matthew and myself have been tirelessly iterating, arguing, and inking tiny pictures. The result is a 59-card deck fully fleshed out in terms of characters and items, and about 50 percent complete in terms of art.

Art, art, and more art

Now comes the long haul – the marketing push, the completion of the game art, and the continued development for some of our stretch goals. On any other project, right about now is when I’d be tugging at my collar and looking for the exit. But I find myself today pumped and entirely ready to do this thing.

As Hipsters is the first real collaborative effort I’ve been a part of (as a writer, I tend to hide in the shadows and scurry behind large rocks when groups or potential partners emerge into view), I've learned a thing or two about the creative process in a collaborative environment, namely the numerous benefits it’s provided so far.  For one, argument is paramount. And it’s just as necessary (no more, no less), than compromise. One benefit of working with a partner is that you can voice your opinion outside of your own head, which – if you’re like me – ends up sounding a lot different than it does rattling around your skull. Secondly, you have someone to either confirm or deny the value of your ideas. If you know how to listen, it’s a huge help in side-stepping landmines and cashing in on tiny gold mines (if you’ll forgive the stale metaphors there). Lastly, if your ideas do genuinely suck, you've got someone to help you pick up the slack.

Check out a quick look at the game in action.

I can honestly say I would not have launched this project were I working alone. Sure, I might have had the idea and pushed it a bit, but it likely would have been stuck on a previous, sub-par iteration, and I seriously doubt I would have remained focused enough to power through over these past two months to produce as much content – and as focused content – as we have together.

So yeah, here we are – 29 days to go and tons of work to do. In the next month I’ll be drawing, writing, celebrating, despairing, and most definitely arguing. As of the time of this post, we have only 6 donors and are at 3% of our final goal. I don’t know if we’ll get there –I’ll do everything I possibly can to see that we do, but as of right now, I have no guarantee.

The only thing I do know is that this project won’t be my last collaboration.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to check out our Kickstarter!

Hipsters: The Card Game

I wanted to take some time today to talk about a project I've been working on for the past few months with my good friend and colleague Matthew Gravelyn. It's not a piece of fiction or an essay or a script - it's a game; Hipsters: The Card Game, to be specific. 

What is Hipsters? It's a 2-4 player game in which players race to build a hipster character for cred (points). You can win by making a raw vegan academic hipster who carries old chicken drumsticks and a cheap six-pack of Schitz beer in canvas bags. Or you can win with an cappuccino-sipping grungeling who's finishing up his master's thesis in between bouts of panhandling for drug money or gnawing on candy necklaces. Or maybe your particular style is looking down your nose at mainstream lackeys with unsophisticated music preferences and pouring buckets fake blood on fur-wearers while secretly hiding the smooth jazz collection stored beneath the driver's seat of your minivan.

You get the idea.

At its heart I think Hipsters is actually playing with some big questions. There's a kind of uncanny intangibility  as to what a hipster really is, and this game takes that somewhat uncomfortable conversation and runs with it at full speed. In a way, it's a game about defining that which has no real definition. It's a game about forming an incongruous identity and rejoicing in the resulting ironies.

It's also supposed to be fun, quick, and humorous, if you're not into the whole identity crisis convo. 

Mr. Gravelyn and myself are all but done finalizing the 59 cards that will constitute the Hipsters deck - we've just got to settle on some final items for our four hipster archetypes (Academic, Activist, Elitist, and Grungeling). The rules are all but completed too, though we plan on cementing those at our upcoming play test event at The Raygun Lounge (courtesy of Gamma Ray Games) in Seattle on October 7th. If you live in Seattle, we'd love to see you there.

For more info on development (and eventually availability) for Hipsters: The Card Game, please check out our Facebook and Twitter pages.

Oh, and if this made you chuckle, grimace, or otherwise change your facial expression, please do us a favor and share this page with a friend (I would insert a smiley here, but I'm far too hip to do so). 

Malapropist Tribune: 9/9/2012 (Zone One Edition, Part 1/2)

It's been a full month since the last edition of the Malapropist Tribune, so I thought I'd shake things up and feature words from a single novel - in this case, Colson Whitehead's fantastic Zone One. If lumbering zombies and sprightly prose are your thing, be sure to snag a copy.

aspersion (n) - A damaging or derogatory remark or criticism, slandering. "I'm not the best at meeting new people. I sweat profusely and start blurting aspersions with little to no idea of what I'm saying."

wending (v) - To pursue or direct (one's way); to proceed or go. "I'm so incompetent when it comes to mall shopping that I end up following in my girlfriend's wending wake from store to store." 

moribund (adj) - In a dying state, near death, or on the verge of expiration; not proceeding or advancing. "My apartment isn't the most pleasant place, what with my surplus of moribund houseplants."

subcutaneous (adj) - Located or placed just below the skin. "Don't mind Lisa - she's got a knack for crafting insults with subcutaneous tendencies."

harrow (v) - To inflict great torment or distress. "Nothing's quite as harrowing as long, early AM drive sans coffee."

disabuse (v) - To free from a misconception or falsehood. "I've been disabused in recent years of my belief that all Thai food is tasty."

comportment (n) - A manner of behaving. "I'm of a slightly less pleasant comportment since getting sober."

pratfall (n) - A fall on the buttocks; a humiliating error, failure, or defeat. "If nothing else, Youtube has proven pratfalls to be universal."

hector (v) - To intimidate or dominate in a blustering way. "I'm writing a relationship book on how to hector your loved one."

louche (adj) - Of questionable morality or repute. "My handful of corporate escapades so far have earned me a rather louche reputation."

desultory (adj) - Lacking in consistency, constancy, or visible order; disconnected; fitful. "The wedding ended in awkward, desultory applause."

interregnum (n) - Any period during which a state has no ruler or only a temporary executive. "I miss those days of elementary school interregnums, where the students would band together to terrorize whatever poor sub walked through the classroom door." 

depilatory (n) - Capable of removing hair. "My last relationship ended when I accidentally swapped my girlfriend's specialized shampoo with her depilatory."

passel (n) - A group or lot of indeterminate number. "Nothing like a passel of peonies to liven a living room."

mien (n) - Air, bearing, demeanor. "My dad's of a mean mien when he's drunk."

erstwhile (adj) -  Former, of times past. "Excuse me my crankiness - result of an erstwhile nap."

abrade (v) - To wear off or down by scraping or rubbing. "I've abraded one shin clean of hair from crossing over the other leg."

multifarious (adj) - Having great variety; diverse. "My schemes are insidious and multifarious."

enervate (v) - To weaken or destroy the strength or vitality of. "The foundation of the house has been enervated by termites for the better part of a decade now."

defenestration (n) - The act of throwing someone or something out of a window. "My first goldfish met it's demise via defenestration. Have I mentioned my father is an alcoholic?" 

ichor (n) - A watery, acrid discharge from a wound or ulcer. "I keep having nightmares of hospital hallways slick with ichor."

maunder (v) - To talk incoherently or aimlessly; to move or act vaguely or aimlessly. "Bill's got the sort of maundering speech that induces sudden narcolepsy." 

depredation (n) - A predatory attack; a raid. "The supply lines have been subject to harrowing depredations for the past few weeks." 

sundry (adj) - Various, miscellaneous. "This summer's travel destinations includes sundry sunny climes."

venal (adj) - Open to bribery; mercenary. "I can't help but suspect any given congressman or senator is as venal as the next, regardless of party lines."

insalubrious (adj) - Not promoting health; unwholesome. "I have a bad habit in imbibing insalubrious libations."

Malapropist Tribune: 8/8/2012

Words looked up in the course of reading. Definitions copied (with some degree of error) from my American Heritage Dictionary. Examples pulled straight out of my ass.

acromegaly (n) - A chronic disease of adults marked by enlargement of the bones in the extremities, face, and jaw. "Andre the Giant comes to mind as notable figures afflicted with acromegaly."

shale (n) - A fissile rock composed of layers of clay-like, fine grained sediments. "I have this recurring nightmare where I go to chew on my nails, and they crack and crumble like shale."

permutation (n) - The process of altering the order of a given set of objects in a group. "The sandwich shop by my house has like one sandwich with endless permutations of the same four high-sodium Italian meats."

genuflect (v) - To touch the knee or bend the knee to the floor or ground, as in worship. "I get entirely uncomfortable when my shoe comes untied - there's nothing worse than having to sort of genuflect in public to set the laces straight again."

apse (n) - Architecture: A usually semi-circular or polygonal, often vaulted, recess, especially the termination of the sanctuary of a church. "The Catholic Church offered an apology today after a newly-instated Cardinal was caught pogo-sticking in the apse of Notre Dame in the middle of the night."

capacious (adj) - Capable of containing a large quantity, spacious or roomy. "There's nothing as sacred to a Cadillac owner as a capacious parking space."

rejoinder (n) - An answer, especially to a reply. "Acrid adolescent rejoinders have been one of the more sore points of my teaching career."

revenant (n) - One that returns after a lengthy absence; one who returns after death. "As far as revenants go, I like to think that Zombie Steinbeck would make an excellent drinking partner."

transom (n) - A horizontal crosspiece above a door, or between a door and the window above it. "My brother, at 6'6" has a sort of permanent indent in his forehead from tromping into transoms."

claret (n) - A red table wine produced in the Bordeaux region of France; a dark or grey purplish red, to dark purplish pink. "She lifted her shirt to reveal a series of claret-colored bruises along her side."

picric acid (n) - A poisonous, explosive yellow crystalline solid, used in explosives, dyes, and for etching copper. "His teeth were rotted through, the canines especially having an almost picric tint to them."

sobriquet (n) - An affectionate or humorous nickname. "I've come to think of being called a Polak as a sort of endearing sobriquet."

Malapropist Tribune: 8/1/2012

Words looked up in the course of reading. Definitions copied (with some degree of error) from my American Heritage Dictionary. Examples pulled straight out of my ass.

perfunctory (adj) - Done routinely and with little interest or care; acting w/ indifference. "After several years of attendance, even a quadruple hit of LSD can't do much to liven perfunctory company dinners."

portcullis (n)- A grating of iron or wooden bars or slats, suspended in the gateway of a fortified place & lowered to block passage. "The King had an ugly habit of ordering his men to drop the portcullis on ever other passing peasant, making more or less unpopular among the masses."

codicil (n)- Law: A supplement or appendix. "It turned out that according to some buried codicil in my contract, I was in fact required to work 60 hours during Christmas week."
cordite (n)- Any of a family of smokeless explosive powders consisting chiefly of nitrocellulose, nitroglycerin, & petroleum that have been dissolved in acetone, dried, & extruded in cords. "The gunman blew a string of cordite vapor from the barrel of his revolver."
extrude (v)- To push or thrust out, to shape by forcing through a die. "I don't remember my mother well, save for a series of sunlit memories of her in which she extruded icing through a silver-tipped nozzle onto fresh-baked cakes & cookies."

miasma (n)- A noxious atmosphere, an influence. "I have to be careful with what I say at work, lest I spread a miasma of hate about the office."

contracture (n)- An abnormal, often-permanent shortening, as of muscle or scar tissue, that results in distortion or disfiguration. "The gate attendant's contractured arms forced Bill to sort of lean way in to hand him his tickets.
votary (n)- A person bound by vows to live a life of religious worship or service; a devout adherent of a cult or religion. "He wasn't so much an agent as he was a votary of the secret service, bathing, exercising, and during particular stretches of loneliness, even sleeping with his gun and badge."
vicissitude (n)- A change or variation; a usually unforeseen change in circumstance or experience that affects one's life, especially in a trying way. "It's life's little vicissitudes that have a cute habit of leaving you scratching your noggin and trying to decide between the noose, revolver, or family-sized bottle of Tylenol."

acrostic (n)- A poem or series of lines in which certain letters, usually the first in each line, form a name, motto, or sentence when read in order. "Post modern anti-structuralists be damned - the acrostic poem is our generation's richest art form."
wimple (n)- A cloth worn around the head, framing the face, and drawn into folds beneath the chin, worn by women in medieval times as part of the habit for certain orders of nuns. "Do you ever feel like you were born on the wrong era? I often find myself on the bus longing to make eye contact for a lovely-eyed and primly-wimpled young lady."

ort (n)- Small scrap of food leftover after a meal is finished. "I refuse to make cornbread when we have company. David's like a human vacuum cleaner when it comes to those inevitable golden orts."

FOR SALE: Stained Glass Wings of Shine - OR - Meditations on Throwing Yourself Against the Cold and Steely Husk of the Publishing Industry

Writing a book is difficult. It’s difficult the way that say sawing your left and right arm off and then re-attaching your right arm to your left nub and your right nub to your left arm is difficult – it’s like this very barbaric process of taking yourself apart and then reassembling the pieces, except that they don’t quite go back the way you thought they would. You spend a long time trying to be polite to the people that ask about the scars.
                It also apparently makes you melodramatic.

                Okay, so maybe writing a book isn’t all that bad, but trying to sell it to an agent certainly is. It’s like the above process, only you for some reason decided to film this process and are now trying to get complete strangers to watch the video, explaining, in a sentence or two, the significance behind the fact that you used your pinky toes to thread the needle.

                Apparently this process too reinforces melodramatic tendencies.

                All hyperbole aside, I came to an interesting realization today – it’s been just over one year since I last attempted to hawk my book. The very first query letter I sent was on July 13, 2011, and read as follows:

Dear Ms. B____,

I should warn you—my experience with disability, until last year, was limited to my own, and those of my family: namely drinking, drugging, and the emotional schizophrenia that accompanies both (you know, the whole-package deal). This was before I spent a week with Joe, a severely autistic boy, attached to my wrist; before I suddenly found myself responsible for his well-being; before I went to Camp and wrote this book.

My commercial/literary novel is titled Someone Worth knowing, and when asked about it, I usually say something along these lines: “It’s the story of an ill-tempered, alcoholic ginger (Good Bobby Good) who finds himself at a New Jersey summer camp for children with autism, brain damage, and Down’s syndrome, and how he manages to survive the week.”

And then, because I like to talk, I’ll go on: it’s about the relationship between disability and inability—the spotty boundary that exists between, say, a young man with autism so sever he requires full-time care, and a slightly-less-young man feeding an alcoholism so rampant that, left to his own devices, he will surely destroy himself. It’s a coming of age novel, in a sense, and at no point does it spare any of the humor, sadness, and insanity that constitute the camp experience.

I like to think of this novel’s style falling in the same vein as Jack Kerouac’s work (but, you know, actually good), while my readers insist that the manuscript is more along the lines of Jonathan Ames, Dave Eggers, and J.D. Salinger.

Whatever it is, it will leave you laughing, brokenhearted, and perhaps slightly sunburnt.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

etc. etc.

To give away the ending (spoiler alert!), the book was not picked up. Skimming through several pages of my email, it looks like I tried sending more-or-less this same letter to almost 40 agencies, and though I heard back from a few… well, I did just give away the ending. To provide some context, I wrote this particular letter after reading an article on an agent that picked up a book after receiving a quirky but endearing cover letter, and I thought it was a neat way to try and “sell” my book. I did most of my book editing/submitting last summer while traveling through Yosemite, California and Madrid, Spain, which is to say that I spent a lot of time with my laptop amidst overweight and perspiring tourists as well as a family of like deeply confounded Spaniards. My letters on the whole felt fired from the hip, not to mention ripe with a sort of manic slavering for publication.

No wonder it didn’t go over
                So I let it go. I worked this past year, forgot about writing for what time I could, and started picking the books and pen back up when I couldn’t stay away from ‘em any longer. And of course, I came back to this book, which has since re-donned its original title: Stained Glass Wings of Shine. In going through the book, I see it’s not quite the style I’m writing in today, but it’s not the piece of garbage I pessimistically wrote it off as this winter, either. It’s actually pretty good.

                So yesterday, July 25^th, I sent my first query letter for 2012. It reads as follows:

To D____ S______,

I'm writing on behalf of my novel, Stained Glass Wings of Shine. The book features one Good Bobby Good, who's something of an unhinged alcoholic short in stature but tall in heart. G.B.G. finds himself detoxing & en route to a camp for kids with disabilities (autism, down syndrome, brain damage, etc.), where he meets Mikey G., a 6'5" mostly-non-verbal eighteen year old kid with autism and an inexplicable penchant for diapers. Through the course of the story, Bobby copes with the shakes, learns to care for another human being, and even goes so far as to confront and conquer what lies at the root of his past several years of self-destructive behavior (well, kind of - maybe). Stained Glass Wings of Shine is a smart, quick read, and is rich in both detail and heart - it would be an honor to share my story with you.

As for myself, I'm a 25 year-old Seattleite…

Etc. etc.

To be honest, I expected to find my older letters to be more manic, to seem completely off-the-handle crazy – I think I hoped that writing these new ones would be a breeze in comparison. Looking at the two of them here now, well, they’re not all that different. I’m trying to be more direct, more honest – I’m worried less about selling the damn thing and just trying to show it as it is. Who knows, maybe this time around, someone will ask for pages and fall in love. Because that’s how they describe it in all those agent-interview articles, you know – they say that the right agent reads your book and falls in love and can’t help but to represent it.
                Sounds a bit sappy to me.

                But in any case, I believe in this book. And if I can believe in it and share that belief, well hell – maybe a complete stranger will too.

Why I’m like increasingly disappointed with The Dark Knight Rises, not to mention kind of confounded by the general public’s seemingly-gushing reaction to it

Please note: the following is like rife with spoilers, bad language, and all around curmudgeonly sentiments.

 Batman Begins floored me, quite literally. I went home after seeing it, sprawled out on the floor of my bedroom, and sort of just let my brain unfold in reverse-origami fashion. I’ve had this reaction to other movies: Amelie, The Matrix, Requiem for a Dream, and Memento, to name a few. I won’t make claims of superior cinematic achievement for any of these films (I’m no movie critic, and kind of a cinema-hater in general), but will posit that they’re all extremely sound w/r/t form & structure, and that they’re all incredibly earnest. They fight to earn your trust for every minute of their total runtime, and when the credits roll, there’s the sense that your trust has been rewarded in full. So to return to BB and yours truly kind of like incapacitated and supine on the floor, you could sum up my reaction as a kind of exaggerating geeking-out over a movie that proposed a frame, stayed within that frame, and attended in earnest to you and your established expectations for its duration.

                I saw The Dark Knight in the theater five times, a personal record, which is actually kind of weird considering I didn’t actually like the movie as much as BB, which I saw in theaters only once. While darker, better-acted, and more ambitious, the movie kind of fell outside of its own lines, and not in that intentional-art-house kind of way but the oh-shit-we-ran-out-of-screen-time kind of way. It felt more piecemeal, a bit less whole, and seemed sort of like strained under the effort of packing in all of its content.

                Walking home from The Dark Knight Rises, my general reaction was more or less, “Okay, the movie was fine in most ways, but in some ways, it was really kind of a piece of shit,” which is unfortunate, seeing as how I was pretty sold from say the 40 percent mark – where Batman gets his body, brain, and soul positively smashed by Bane – to the 85 percent mark – where Batman makes his march on Bane and the “war” for Gotham begins. I found the pit-of-hell prison itself as a pleasant and unexpected surprise, and it housed some of the more earnest attempts at Batman’s character in the movie, much more so than the cardboard-cutout of a reclusive martyr presented to us at the movie’s inception and the cardboard cut-out martyr/just-kidding-not-a -martyr hoisted up onto a gleaming black pedestal at its finish. Also, Bane’s Gotham was in and of itself pretty fascinating, presenting some pretty solid social commentary (“Oh what’s up Occupy Movement”) and philosophical ponderings, not to mention succeeding as a character all its own. But then there we are at the 85% mark and Batman is shrieking “WHERE IS THE TRIGGER?! WHERE IS IT!” and I’m like, “Oh, shit, I’ve seen this movie and I’m like fucking dying to pee over here, is this thing over yet or what?” Which, okay, each of the three movie had its laughable lines/moments – but honestly, I was ready to get out of my seat not only due to an almost-insatiable need to urinate, but because I was just sick and tired of Batman at that point.

                On that note, let me say here that my overall reflection concerning TDKR since seeing it is that I enjoyed the movie least when Batman was on screen, which sucks considerably seeing as how I was in the theater in the first place to see Batman. Bale’s acting could be critiqued, sure (we’ve all seen Terminator: Salvation), but I don’t hold him accountable as much as I attribute this feeling to laziness in writing and direction.

To best illustrate this point, let’s take a look at two very similar scenes in BB and TDKR – Batman skulking through the dark to eliminate his foes. In BB, this scene takes place in the shipyard – in TDKR, it takes place when Batman and Catwoman team up to clear a tunnel-route to Bane. In the former, we understand that Batman is hard to see/kill via a focus on his enemies & their terror. We watch them sweat, switch paths suddenly, spray bullets at passing glimpses of black. In TDKR, we see Batman weave toward the camera across a series of strobe-light shots. The main difference between these scenes could be boiled down to this: in the first movie, Nolan proves to us that Batman is fucking scarily efficient. In TDKR, he just assumes we get it, that we’re like onboard or whatever. But I argue that it is always an author/director’s work to prove to us what they are trying to convey. This is why the admittedly stale epigram of “show don’t tell” gets so much play in the writing world – it’s simply accepted that the author needs to earn our trust, and that they need to work to maintain it. Great books/movies/TV shows earn out trust in each & every word/shot/scene. There is always an element of proof, an appeal for just a little more of your trust.

This is, I think, why Bane was pulled off & executed so well – obvious effort was invested in proving him as a character to us, the audience. It wasn’t assumed we’d accept & understand him from the get go – the team that made TDKR worked for it. They earned his success and our belief. This, I think, is my main beef w/ the movie, as all of my other gripes feel like an extension of this main critique. “Oh, you liked what we did with the Batmobile, eh? Then you’ll love this motorcycle w/ like its like flip-floppy tires or whatever, and you’ll go straight-up-bananas for this flying scarab thing.”

Okay, maybe I’m overly-biased about the flying scarab, but to make a more concrete point, take a look at the opening minutes of TDKR, which is more-or-less a straight rip-off of TDK’s start: a seemingly straight-forward high-tension situation unfolds into unexpected complexity, our main baddy appears disguised as one of his common thugs, and the thing ends with an intricate and kind-of-neat getaway twist. The general sentiment of TDKR’s opening five minutes was something like, “Y’all liked this sort of thing in the last movie, so guess what! We’re doing it again!” Except what made it work the first time around was that so much more effort & thought went into making it special, unique – into proving to you that you gave a damn about what was unfolding onscreen.

And honestly, I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. This sentiment is embedded in the way people talk about the film. “A great capstone to end the series,” or “flawed, but completes the saga.” I can’t help but get the feeling that the general consensus is that because TDKR is connected to both a great and a very good film (and please feel free to take your pick as to which is which), it’s good by association. That is has the right to stand on those films’ shoulders. Sure, the movie is fine, but it’s also kind of a piece of shit, the way I’ve had to admit to myself in recent years that Return of the Jedi is fine, but also kind of a piece of shit. And really, did we know the “saga” needed ending before seeing TDKR?  Sure, I get that most people don’t like unhappy endings, and that I’ll continue to be alone in feeling just fine w/r/t the idea of Batman being forever the fall guy in Nolan’s universe, but I don’t think any of us were kicking around thinking, “You know, that League of Shadows thing kind feels like it’s just hanging open w/ a lot of unanswered questions. Who was Liam Neeson referring to when he said he lost a woman he loved?” TDKR was extremely successful in terms of graceful writing to fit with its predecessors, but let’s not confuse grace with necessity.

Anyways. I don’t think TDKR was a bad movie. It’s fine – it’s got great elements & moments – but I would argue that on its own, it wouldn’t really be much of anything. And I don’t think I can say that of TDK, which stands just fine on its own, without its predecessor. The third film in the Bale/Nolan rises, sure, but it never manages to get wings of its own.

Malapropist Tribune: 7/23/2012

Words looked up in the course of reading. Definitions copied (with some degree of error) from my American Heritage Dictionary. Examples pulled straight out of my ass.

coquette- (n) A woman who regularly makes romantic or sexual overtures; a flirt. “There’s something lurid about high society – take for instance the sheer volume of coquettes on the croquet field today.”

eschatology- (n) The branch of theology that is concerned with the end of the world or humankind. “A scholar of eschatology, Father Francis has taken to toting a polished and primed Glock in his hollowed King James bible.”

maelstrom- (n) A violent or turbulent situation; a whirlpool of extraordinary size and violence. “They built a roundabout in place of a freeway exit by my girlfriend’s place, meaning that every time I go to pick her up I’m forced to navigate a maelstrom of traffic and near-collisions.”

ephebe- (n) A youth between 18-20 years of age in ancient Greece. “There’s something haunting about the drug-addled ephebes that float like ghosts through Pike Place Market early Sunday afternoons.”

hydrocephalus- (n) A usually congenital condition in which abnormal accumulation of fluid in the cerebral ventricles causes enlargement of the skull and compression of the brain, destroying much neural tissue. “Toddlers all seem to possess a certain top-heavy, hydrocehalitic quality that I find positively unnerving.”

subsume- (v) To classify or include in a more comprehensive category or under a general principle. “The research Joseph was doing on our parent company’s volatile and lethal cell phone batteries was subsumed suddenly into the Acceptable Cost and Loss Mitigation department.”

fantod- (n) A state of nervous irritability; nervous movements caused by tension; an outburst of emotion, a fit. “If you so much as mention the Wizard of Oz to Daniel, he’ll get like the raging fantods all up and down the left side of his face.”

efficacious- (adj) Producing or capable of a desired effect. “The pot brownies, efficacious as they were, rendered Susan catatonic for about 36 hours.”

maffick- (v) To rejoice or celebrate boisterously. “There’s something special about an LA team winning a championship – you know, the sort of mafficking that involves flipping cars, looting video stores, and throwing fire bombs.”

chiaroscuro- (n) The technique of using light & shade in a pictorial representation; the arrangement of light & dark elements in a work of art. “I have an especially soft spot in my heart for the chiaroscuro hard-boiled detective series of Calvin and Hobbes comics.”

Force Field (Preview)

It's been a while since I published any fiction here on JfJ, so I wanted to share a glimpse of what I'm working on currently. Hope you enjoy, and as always, comments & emails welcome.

Spaceman Jones, in case you weren’t born on planet Earth, aired originally in 1982 and was a sort of bastardized leftover of Blaxsploitation that ended up being extremely popular with the early-Saturday-morning-rebroadcast-TV crowd. The pilot, which like initially created large waves in the sci-fi world, was an etiology of Jones’ pursuit of inner-peace. Through a series cheesecloth flashbacks, it was revealed that Jones’ seemingly aimless meandering through modern space was supposed to be a sort of atonement for indirectly ending his own family (specifically, Jones’ family was coldly slaughtered by an Argatoadian Spacelord whose son – heir to the Argatoadian throne – Jones had shot dead in a bar fight, Jones’ reputable temper having got the best of him there).

Jones, having witnessed wife, son, and two daughters blasted into dry dust before his very eyes by the business-end of the Argatoadian Lord’s Megawatt Vapulverize Ray, had more-or-less arrived at a personal philosophy of non-violence, which was pretty bluntly communicated in a close up of Jones toward the end of that first episode: Jones, teary-eyed, lip-biting, and choking through the emotion, grunted in his husky baritone, “Violence, man? Violence ain’t the answer to the problems I got.” The pilot set the stage for thirteen more episodes in which Jones took a lot of lip from hostile and oddly racist space strangers and didn’t do too much about it, unless of course he absolutely had to, which happened about every three episodes or so. This led to the season’s finale, where the nation held its collective breath as Jones found the Argatoadian Spacelord pinned beneath the business end of his own (Jones’) Megawatt Vapulverize Ray. In the end cooler heads prevailed and Jones decided to spare the toad-like Spacelord, who was in fact quite-literally toad-like, Argatoadians being little more than poorly-paid extras stuffed into claustrophobic rubber & styrafoam bullfrog costumes. It’s worth mentioning that Spaceman Jones was little more than a debased rip-off of Kung Fu.

                Though the first season was received with sensational public enthusiasm (this was five years after Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back  mind you, and so the American public was not only accepting of but positively slavering for Argatoadian Spacelords and Megawatt Vapulverize Rays), the premise of a passive-minded protagonist could only go so far in the ‘80s. The second season, bolstered by a bloated FX budget and a writer’s room fueled by not-inexpensive cocaine, introduced a wide array of dazzling green-screen effects and computer-generated animations. The most applauded of these  was Spaceman Jones’ to-be signature gadget: a brilliant blue personal force field. When Jones strutted into a rough fringe colony spaceport or sketchy asteroid mining facility or Starspice trading hub (which he did invariably in the first 2-7 minutes of every episode), the force field was his way of saying back off bub, you’ve come close enough. It was his puffed-up chest, his bristled hair, and it came on only under direct threat, of which that second season provided plenty. A thug would raise a fist or Megawatt Vapulverize Ray or hydroelectric-light-drive tuning wrench and with a whir-click from Jones’ brown-leather utility belt the field would snap on: a perfectly-spherical blue bubble bloomed about his body, swirling like cerulean TV snow and hissing like a new record before its first note. As a rule the field came on around minute 11 or so, and by minutes 14-15 the fringe colonists/asteroid miners/spice merchants would devise a way to bypass the field or render it useless, forcing Jones’ hand so that by the end of the episode (minutes 18-21) Jones had no choice but to like return to his roots and whoop some serious ass by way of terrific and technically dazzling massacre.

                The original Jones, a sort of hawk-faced, caramel skinned, and Shakespearian actor, was so outraged by this sudden selling out that he called it quits halfway through reading the first script, which was fine considering there was no shortage of struggling black actors who would gladly play the beloved spaceman, tinges of homicidal mania or no. The replacement Jones had a hard mug and deep-black skin and sported muscles that clearly belonged to a far-large man. He had a sort of lip-curled quality that contrasted with Spaceman Jones’ putative reticence, a snarl that sizzled  behind his translucent blue force field with a similar heat & bite. It was this rendition of Spaceman Jones that inspired 11-year-old Billy Ogvile – shock-white and knob-kneed and thickly-glassed – to construct from disassembled kitchen appliances and spare garage debris his own force field belt.

¡

Last thoughts for an expiring notebook: 6/24 - 7/16

"EAT
ANY
HELP"
-sign, black marker on cardboard, Broadway

Jesus, I just saw a pigeon with orange eyes, and then another. Do all pigeons have orange eyes?
-note

"...when each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises."
-Paul Coelho, The Alchemist

Turns out all pigeons have orange eyes.
-note

"I preformed as a shark last night."
-overheard, park bench, Cal Anderson

I sneeze, and the woman on the bench behind me says "bless you." I have no idea what she looks like, which feels like a disadvantage. Through the back of my wool coat, I feel a strong heat coming off this woman, though I'm also fairly certain I'm running a fever by now.
-note

"Blackmoose keeping it outside."
-overheard, hipster bicycle-polo, Cal Anderson Park

"A number of panelists admitted to being so vexed by the word [banal] that they tended to avoid it in conversation."
-usage note, American Heritage Dictionary

My girlfriend insists that I meet her friends, and my immediate reaction is that I should kill myself. I might be the most selfish person I know.
-note

"I hate it when darts become questionable."
-overheard, unknown bar, unknown

...tattoo of a tie-die mouse...
-note

"I'd feel closer to you if it weren't for this giant metal wall."
-overheard, work, cubicle

"Dude, happy 4th of July duode."
"Dude, back to back World War Champions."
"Word, dude."
"Dude, right? BACK TO BACK World War Champions."
"For sure bro. We got the nukes dude."
-overheard, unknown bar urinal, unknown

...shell-breathing...
-note

Tons of addicts in this city, in all cities, but hard to notice them sometimes, interpolated in the general flow of average & unremarkable citizens, folded in. Like the few shining bits of glass in a handful of sand.
-note

"...furniture and the little niceties which are not only the diagnoses but the boundaries of our civilization."
-John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

"It means 'Celebrate America' in Vietnamese."
-overheard, unknown country club dining room, Federal Way

"First US President to ever use boss as an adjective."
-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

"Kiara got a rude awakening. This shit is not no joke. Not no joke."
-overheard, daytime walk, Madison

"For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be a better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. This last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma."
-John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

[Describing a hangover] "Doc awakened very slowly and clumsily, like a fat man getting out of a swimming pool."
-John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

"The thunder's died down to a mutter, and the window's spatter's gone to a post-storm sad."
-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Last thoughts for an expiring notebook?
Every day sober is just as hard as they were before. They're not more so, they're not less. They just are, and they probably will continue to be so.
I long for my future.
I ache for my past.
I am.
I am.
And I have to work very hard to remember that.
-note

Malapropist Tribune: 7/14/2012

Words I look up in the course of reading. Definitions borrowed from my American Heritage Dictionary. Examples pulled straight out of my ass. 

blotto- (adj) Slang: intoxicated, drunk. “Ben wasn't blacked out, just badly blotto.”

putative- (adj) Generally regarded as such; supposed. “As far as he could tell, it had been the burger chain’s putative beef patty that made him sick.”

diffraction- (n) Change in directions and intensities in a group of waves after passing by an obstacle or through an aperture whose size is generally the same wavelength of the waves. “The diffraction of the fading sunlight through the fishbowl formed a tidal smear of light along the living room wall.”

brogue- (n) A strong dialectal accent, especially a strong Irish or Scottish accent. “I think they may call the drink an ‘Irish Car Bomb’ because, if you have enough of them, you end up with a heavy and imperceptible brogue by night’s end.”

sordid- (adj) Morally degraded. “There’s something sadly sordid about the bickering between presidential candidates this time of year.”

arachnodactylic- (adj) Assumed/supposed definition (meaning I had to infer this guy): Having spiderlike fingers or toes. “The pianist had enormous & awful arachnodactylic hands.”

mucronate- (adj)- Ending abruptly at a sharp point. “Samuel? He had these bizarrely mucronate nipples, it turned out, and I had to end the relationship.”

swaddle- (v) To wrap, as in a cloth. “The sidewalks were stuffed with homeless swaddled in hairy, wine-stained blankets.”

reticent- (adj) Inclined to keep one’s thoughts, feelings, & personal affairs to oneself. “You have to fear the reticent ones. Those are the guys who end up shooting up the workplace, admitting to zoophilia, or else just really, really liking smooth jazz.”

dysplasia- (n) An abnormal development or growth of the tissues, organs, or cells. “I once compared, as an answer to my grandmother's inquiry, the sensation of getting stoned to feeling like a sudden dysplasia of the brain. She told me thank you, as I’d helped her feel very confirmed in her beliefs and life choices.chyme- (n) The thick semifluid mass of partly digested food that is passed from the stomach to the duodenum. “I hate waking in the middle of the dream, as the chyme of those unprocessed thoughts remain stuck in my brain all day.”

lucent- (adj) Giving off light, luminous. “There’s something comforting about dozing off in the lucent glow of the TV screen.”

antipode (n)- A direct or diametrical opposite. “I don’t have any hard or odd feelings toward my ex. Things are actually pretty good now that I’ve moved to the geological antipode of our old apartment."

Bibliophile

Books in the bathroom, bedcovers, cupboard.

Books on the desk, fridge, counters, & couch.

Books for breakfast but rarely for dinner.

Books before bed, half-page narcotic.

Books printed on printer paper.

Books printed on the backsides of books printed on printer paper.

Books for birthdays, holidays, weddings.

Books to say I love you, I’m sorry, goodbye.

Books on tape. Tape on books.

Books barely held together.

Books in pieces.

Books in volumes.

Booking it to and from work, & never reading.

All of this, & never reading.

Books: when there’s absolutely nothing else to do.

Malapropist Tribune: 7/8/2012

Words I look up in the course of reading. Definitions borrowed from my American Heritage Dictionary. Examples pulled straight out my ass.


bedizen- (v) To ornament or dress in a showy, gaudy manner. "I'm sorry, but bedizening your 4-year-old in sequins and high heels just isn't appropriate, and no, I don't care if it's her birthday."
celedon- (n) A pale to very pale green. "Her eyes were celedon, the color of underwater robot armies."
bivalve- (n) Any of numerous freshwater and marine mollusks of the class Bivalva, having a shell consisting of two hinged valves and a ligament, including clams, muscles, oysters, and scallops. "I enjoy paella insofar as I can salvage a few bivalves, but frankly, yellow rice just isn't my thing."
cunctation- (n) A procrastination, delay. "I did all I could to avoid coming to the party, but at a point, I'd simply exhausted my supply of ready cunctations."
etiology- (n) The study of origins. "I'd share the etiology of my drug use with you, but I don't know that you're that interested in hearing about Kansas."
prolix- (adj) Tediously prolonged, wordy; tending to speak or write at excessive length. "I wanted to like the Malapropist Tribune, but the thing was just too goddamn prolix to stand."
cordate- (adj) Having a heart shaped outline. "Let's just say the cordate cookie cutters are a big hit with the ladies."
phylum- (n) Biology: A taxonomic category of organisms ranking below a kingdom but above a class. "You ever look at a tree frog and feel like you're just not part of the same phylum? Phylial reunions are the worst."
proffer- (v) To offer for acceptance, tender. "I'm afraid proffering the above joke might have been a bit too desperate. Sorry readers."
vacuole- (n) A membrane-bound organelle in the cytoplasm of most cells (especially plant cells) containing water and dissolved substances such as slats, sugars, enzymes, and amino acids. "I think I might have fried about 99 percent of my vacuoles at the baseball game last night with that seventh salted pretzel."
prurient- (adj) Characterized by an inordinate interest in sex. "To teach sixth grade health class is to cross an ocean of prurient preteens."
breviary- (n) Book containing hymns, prayers, and the canonical hours. "My mother really relied on her breviary to teach us kids morals & manners. She used to beat the hell out of us with that thing." 
abscond- (v) To leave quickly & secretly & to hide oneself often to avoid arrest or persecution. "I've been accused of absconding outright, but I prefer to think of it as taking a permanent vacation from the state of Arizona."
axiom- (n) A self-evident or universally recognized truth; an established rule or principle. "The munchies are more or less the primary axiom of smoking dope."
avaricious- (n) Characterized by avarice; greedy, covetous. "Jim been a real avaricious son of a bitch since he's taken up pogs again."
stricture- (n) A remark or comment, especially an adverse criticism. "You can't really walk through the city without catching at least one stray stricture from a passing loon."
lascivious- (adj) Inclined toward lustfulness; arousing sexual desire. "I wouldn't go so far as to call myself prurient, but I'm certainly known to be lascivious from time to time."
mallow- (n) Any plants of the genus Malva, including several popular garden plants. "There are so many mentions of mallow in Steinbeck's work that I can't hardly read a chapter without an allergy attack."
gaff- (n) An iron hook w/ a handle for landing large fish. "I had to abandon pescetarianism when I couldn't shake the recurrent nightmares of being gaffed."
concupiscence- (n) A strong desire, especially sexual desire; lust. "My concupiscence as inspired by the Chaquita Banana Lady has resulted as some very weird feelings toward fruit."
thallus- (n) A leaf body undifferentiated into stem, root, or leaf. "I swear to god if you call your seaweed crackers thallus crackers one more time I will slap the snark out of you."
calcareous- (adj) composed of, containing, or characterized of calcium carbonate, calcium, or limestone; chalky. "The calcareous hills shone like unearthed bones in the early morning light."
sere- (adj) Withered, dry. "The once-lovely bouquet had turned sadly sere almost overnight."
austere- (adj) Severe or stern in disposition or appearance. Severe and grave. "My initial and false impression was that Tiffany's great aunt was an austere woman. My second and correct impression was that she was dead."
panoply- (n) A splendid or striking array or arrangement; ceremonial attire w/ all accessories. "The pantry of the late George Washington Carver houses an impressive panoply of peanut butters. 
angostura- (n) The bitter, aromatic bark of two south American trees used as a flavoring in bitters and as a tonic. "Nothing like a little angostura to correct a hodgepodge of leftover liquors." 

The Time Traveler

Note: This is what happens apparently when I wake up and try to record a dream. 

Joe Employment is looking for another job, has been for months. He wakes at like 4 a.m. and holds his swollen head in his hands w/neck on fire and stubble all but carving away and his soft and already-sweating palms. At night he drinks cold silted coffee and punches through page after page of job postings and says “fuck my life” in this sort of this emptily abstract but meaningful way.
                So Joe ‘Ployment goes to work one morning and his boss tells him to do the dishes, a whole full greasy sink of Tupperware and stained coffee mugs and forks with inextricable debris entwined in the tines – which is weird, ‘cause to the best of Joe ‘Ployment’s knowledge, he’s paid to take customer service calls where he like gets yelled at for interrupting meal time, as if the printer-warm call-schedule handed to him each morning were strategically arranged to catch each potential customer during dinner, as if it’s some new plan of attack handed down from the corporate heads, whom Joe ‘Ployment figures are at this moment laughing hard and getting loosely drunk on a golf course somewhere and are not taking calls, and sure as hell not doing dishes. But so like Joe ‘Ployment does these dishes, gets in there up to his elbows in the gingivitis-yellow suds, and he figures he’s okay because right then he remembers that this morning, before his boss came down the line with the suds’n’scrub verdict, he sent an application out to a company he’d been fancying in those late night hunts.

                Except then he has a better idea for the final line in the letter and sort of despairs for a moment before he realizes that there in the water, specifically in a sud-less patch with the rainbow shimmer of an oil slick, he can well see himself sitting at his desk getting ready to send the letter, and he gets kind of bright and shiny inside when he remembers that in like 30 seconds he’ll lock his computer screen to stand and follow his boss to her office, where he’ll hear about the whole dishwashing mandate before sulking back to his computer desk and pressing send. So Joe ‘Ployment pinches his nose and just up and dives into the sink and comes sloshing out through the ceiling, landing with a soft enough plop that his earlier self and stocky boss don’t turn to see his sopping mop gaping from the carpet. Joe ‘Ployment creeps to the comp’ and updates as necessary, and then tiptoes back to the sink where the dishes are even taller than they were a minute ago, ‘cause he hasn’t had a chance to scrub ‘em down yet, as least as far as this temporal moment is concerned. So he figures he ought to get to work to help his past self who in a minute’s future will discover the same tower of dishes (though lightly dented, is the plan) when he sort of dies inside realizing he should have made not one but like two changes – and then lo and behold in the shimmering film of one floating coffee cup’s sludge he sees his sopping self tip-toeing away from the scene of the crime, and with what he guesses is his 45 second window he squeezes himself through the mouth of the coffee cup and comes worming up from under the desk, reeking and head-to-toe covered in brown sludge. He punches in, makes the changes, and creeps along the wall to the kitchen in time to see himself starting his plunge into the mug, right arm first, and he closes his eyes because he remembers the part where he got to the shoulder as being like particularly sickening, and when he hears the plop of disappearance ahead and the slop of reemergence behind he dashes into the kitchen, but not without despair because he realizes he said “who it may concern” rather than the proper “whom it may concern” but there, in a single bubble floating like an enlarged monochromatic cell, is the blinking screen available for one last refresh, and so he pulls the elastic sud over his head and crashes right into the stocky boss and premiere Joe ‘Ployment, and then the universe sort of starts folding in on itself, first the building collapsing straight through the three of them in a mess of Ethernet cables and piping and of course a monsoon of dirty dish water bfore giving way then to a sort of firework riot of exploding stars,  which is when the boss tells him Joe Employment he’s fired and shit really hits the fan. 

All About Options

Right coffee, left coffee, cocoa*? Care for your double shot vanilla latte with whole milk, two percent, half that, or half and half? Want fries with that? Supersized? One size fits all, but we can have that fitted for you. You on Facebook, You on Twitter, You on Google+. +1 at parties or, if you know the host and care to call, maybe even +2 (there's bound to be at least a few +0s). The toilet has two options: UP for #1 (liquid waste); DOWN for #2 (solid waste).

In the future, everything will be automated. The choices will still exist, but the tedium of choosing will be solved around. Really, we're almost there today. Telemetry in advertising, customer service, online shopping. Your seamless web experience. Seems the last step into the next great frontier will be teaching computers to detect whether or not you just took a shit.

*The coffee machines at work display these three options for regular coffee, decaf coffee, and cocoa, respectively. 

I Dream of Eidetic Envy

What does it mean to be a writer reading David Foster Wallace? It means you spend an inordinate amount of time in your dictionary, for one. It means that you not only look words up, but that you write them down and - if they're less than six syllables and not an obscure medical term - you consider using them in your own work. It means you begin again to trust in compound (and in extreme cases, run-on) sentences again.

It means that you truly begin to glean what they mean by 'detail,' not as a string of descriptors or an infinite list of character qualities or every scene captured down to the split second; but as small receipts of proof that the content on the page wasn't imagined as much as lived.

It means that you need to be a better writer, and it means that in the best possible way.