Month: March 2008

Bal • a • cast (BAL • uh • kast): 1. verb, tr.The specific act of throwing a pamphlet, esp. a ballot for voting, against a wall or through a window, as if in anger, disgust, or chagrin at the options displayed thereon. 2. verb, intr. A metaphoric way of describing anger, disgust or chagrin at the available options for voting.

“If I go through one more primary season holding my nose and voting for the least of two evils, I swear I will balacast so hard I will never get my cleaning deposit back.”

Kevin, write about the top, front page headline on today’s Oregonian and give your personal perspective on the topic.

Tracy and I were walking back to our hotel from the concert late last night, dark streets in an unfamiliar downtown. A white sedan, maybe a decade old, pulled up alongside us and I heard a man’s voice call out. “Excuse me, can you tell us how to get to–” I stepped towards the sidewalk, between Tracy and the car, and yelled, my voice cracking and hoarse from yelling lyrics I knew well. “I’m sorry, we’re not from here!” As the car drove off I turned to Tracy and laughed, “Why am I always getting asked directions?”

Jack and Ben were lost in an unfamiliar city, driving in circles among tall buildings that blocked the gray sky. Jack, piloting their battered sedan, implored Ben to ask for help but so far Ben had refused. Jack, impatient, decided to pull near a man in red and black with a snappy hat walking with a redheaded woman in a sky blue shirt. Ben sullenly rolled down the window and started to ask directions, but the man lurched towards the car and yelled out menacingly, “You’re not from around here!” Jack, startled, accelerated away as Ben rolled up the window against the cold night air. A full five minutes passed before Ben finally glared at his friend and grumbled, “I told you we shouldn’t have bothered the natives!”

Kevin, write a post as if you were an animal, but without explaining which animal. Give enough information for the reader to guess.

My apologies for this one being late. Yesterday Tracy and I drove to Seattle to see one of our favorite bands, Harvey Danger, play their 10th anniversary show. I’ll have a separate post on that later.

Also, I did not finish the nonsense poem, or “amphigoury”, that Kevin challenged me to. So to keep moving, I’m posting what I had, incomplete.

Mr. McBlogger
lived with a logger
on Stark, in a 10th story condo.

Said the young logger
to his roommate Mcblogger
“I crave a burrito, mas mondo.”

Kevin, Google your name, click “I’m feeling lucky”, and blog about the result.

Kevin asked, what are my top five favorite stories across all media?

Being a writerly sort of fellow, I think I’d like to answer this in a slightly different way.

In no particular order, my five favorite types of stories:

• I like stories about journeys, real or metaphysical, or, in some cases, both. Stories that take the main character along a path, where they grow from a naive young inexperienced child, to an older, wiser, tested adult. It may not be the first example that I encountered, but the story that had the largest impact on me in this vein is the Original Star Wars Trilogy, a.k.a., the adventures of Luke Skywalker. Digging in to the inspirations for that story, I encountered old Joe Campbell and his explication of the Hero’s Journey, also known as the monomyth. I found J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy chronologically after Star Wars, but remember reading “The Hobbit” before. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, specifically Frodo’s trials as Ring-Bearer, have obvious parallels to Luke’s trials facing his dark father.
• I like stories that take one idea, usually a Big Idea, and explore all of its implications. The seminal story of this type, for me, was Larry Niven’s “Ringworld”, a sci-fi epic about humans and advanced aliens exploring a giant artificial world, a ring around a star, the most massive engineering project imaginable. The people in the story are almost dwarfed just by the idea and the details of how such a world could even come into existence, and the novel is just a small piece of Niven’s Known Universe, a galactic history that only peripherally includes Earth and extends from the distant past to 3 billion years into the future. It’s a spectacular example of world-building, and the bits and pieces of the KU still live in my head. Obviously Tolkien’s world is another example, as is the Star Wars universe or Star Trek. Sadly, Star Trek is a bit more fragmented and discontinuous than the others, thanks to Paramount’s greediness in selling off parts of the Star Trek franchise.
• I like stories about hard choices and the consequences thereof. “Casablanca” is the story of a hard-bitten cynic who is faced with the choice between re-uniting with the woman he first loved, and helping a man who could save millions of people. Unfortunately, he can only choose one of them, because the woman is married to the man he needs to help. Ouch. Other characters faced with such a tough choice include Desmond and Penny from TV’s “Lost”, or (I am not kidding) Philip J. Fry trying to decide between saving the universe and his love for Captain Turanga Leela. Seriously, I’m not kidding – that animated television show produced some very touching moments in its four-year run, and I can’t wait to see it continue on DVD.
• I like stories of an underdog that triumphs over powerful forces. Average, or even sub-average people, trying to make their way in a world they can’t control. An atypical example of this is the movie “Office Space”, where the main character, Peter Gibbons is trying to deal with the soul-crushing beigeness of office work. Joe from “Joe vs. The Volcano” takes a similar journey in his quest to make the life-threatening “brain cloud” mean something. The main character of “The Fuck-Up”, Arthur Nersesian’s hilarious first novel, is also trying to find some meaning in a menial life. At least one of my unpublished novels is a Portland-based homage to “The Fuck-Up”, actually. Philip Dick’s characters also mostly fall into this category, although the world in a PKD novel is usually far, far more chaotic than, say, Nersesian’s Brooklyn or Mike Judge’s Initech. In fact, in a PKD novel, the world may transform or even cease to exist entirely.
• Lastly, there are stories that tell a well-known history or describe a well-known place, but reveal far more beneath the surface than most know. Tim Powers is a master of this – his version of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas seems familiar, except that Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein were not just scientists, but magicians of the highest power, and the smelly homeless that wander the streets in their gray clothes are in fact zombies and ghosts who have accreted their bodies from the trash that surrounds them. Powers’ colleague and friend, James Blaylock, has also written novels like this, where the Holy Grail is, in fact, an origami paper cup folded from a priceless drawing. PKD’s greatest novel, “Valis” is a masterful turn on this, where Horselover Fat, PKD’s alter-ego in the novel, discovers that the world in which we live is actually ancient Rome, and that Richard Nixon is really a Roman Caesar.

Sorry, Kevin, I couldn’t just pick five! I’m all un-decide-y.

Kevin, for Day 6, take a picture, post it, and write about it.

Part One: Slow Rise

Alert hours after awakening.

Part Two: Basement Work

Fixing things others broke.

Part Three: Clean clothes

Wash and rinse again.

Part Four: Online

People unmet move me.

Kevin, on Day 5, retell a fairy tale as a sitcom.

“Illuminate the world”? I’m not sure I know what that means.

I mean, I can dig into the bare meaning of the words. Perhaps there’s inspiration in that.

Illuminate – light up, brighten. From “lumen” which is (probably) Latin for “light”. Or a special typographic calligraphic technique especially used in Bibles. An illuminated text is one with amazing large first letters on a page, decorated and painted in intricate detail.

The world? Does that mean the globe? The Earth? The ~8000 mile diameter pear-shaped mass of nickel and iron and various trace elements on which we live? A speck of rock and dirt and water and air, and not much of those last two in comparison to the rest of it. I mean, check out this picture, showing the relative size of all the water on Earth, and all the air on Earth, compared to the planet as a whole. Seems like such a tiny amount to me.

Or maybe just my world. The world in which I live. Sellwood, Portland. The #70 bus. The dark black and red smoke-filled booze-enhanced party that is Devil’s Point. The beige basement in which my work desk sits. My friends, my family. The dark apartment I live in. The warm soft bed in which I sleep. My world.

Light up the Earth? That’s the Sun on the dayside, and the Sun reflected off the Moon (along with a tiny amount of light from distant stars) on the nightside. And all that artificial light, of course.

Illuminate the Earth? That’d be like gilding the lily.

Illuminate my world? My day-to-day work-a-day world, apartment to work to apartment again. That’s what I try to do by going to the strip club, or going out with my friends to coffee shops or music stores or live music or bookstores… I try to brighten my life every day. I try to smile at people, talk to pretty women, make people laugh.

I’m just rambling here. I’ve been thinking about this post idea for a day and I fear I’m not getting it.

That’s what I’ve got.

Kevin, Day 4: Would you be any different if you had a different name?

I remember two lives, my first small and humble
my second quite important and consequential.
It all started one day when quite on a whim
I slipped from one to another potential.

At my computer surfing the world wide web
I Googled my own name. Is that a sin?
Clicked the “I feel lucky” button
And watched as the page faded in.

First up was a headline in flashing purple
Followed by pictures of me, in my hat,
“Moon man modestly maintains Mankind”
and descriptions of my dreams, along with a cat.

The cat and I
Dreamed defenses
against invading
alien races.

This fictional Brian with his fictional feline
Appeared quite familiar and yet didn’t exist
as far as I could determine in my own memory
and all of the reasoning and logic I could enlist.

Trembling, shaking, my eyesight grew dim
and my Sellwood apartment was the last thing I saw
as I slipped into a deep and encompassing rest
Until, gently, gingerly, tenderly, my face felt a paw.

The steady green eyes of my furry friend
Watched me awaken and come to, quite alert.
And I remembered (but didn’t) the advancing armada
who could only be stopped by our minds in concert.

The cat and I
now dream defenses
against invading
alien races.

Kevin, write about truth.