73 - They somehow manage it.

The problem with writing what you know is that what you know is often embarassing. If I wrote from what I know, good people might come out portrayed in ugly ways, as cheats, liars, gossips, brawlers, deluded, medicated, hypocritical, resentful, pitiable.

That's not who they are, but everyone is so happy to rush to a judgement so they can stop experiencing, stop thinking.

Someday, soon? I'll put that certain book in my head to paper, it's already written, up there in my head, until then, I'll admit my cowardice, until then I only want to entertain and mildly disturb you, I don't think either of us is ready for the other yet.

Missing since yesterday.

The player

Tools of the trade

74 - The courage to call it conventional

“That’s our director.”
“So it’s true, the bear thing.”
“Yeah, he still talks to it, one of the earliest models, since he was a kid, it’s been modified internally up to the latest state of the art, but it’s the same AI kernel.”
“You have any talking toys growing up?”
“Talking, yeah, full animatronics? No.”
“The director’s bear? Has everything.”
“Even the pistols?”
“Even the bomb-mod.”
“That decides it, the bear has to go.”

p.s. After years of effort there is only years of effort. Rewards must come in through the window, never the door. If every word is a fragment of cliche then projects of anti-story are futile. Here is the end of the story: The bear, the actual bear, locked in a bank vault and operating its mobile unit remotely, contacted the authorities as the Director's clone was shot to shreds.

Mr. Deckard drinks here

Android Bar.

Some notes on fiction or for the cognoscenti: meditations on what Bart Testa and Frank Kermode were on about

Life ends while time goes on. There is no natural concordance between events. We are always in the middle, so we become anxious.

We have a natural inclination to make the moment make sense although we know it does not.

Stories are a human invention, the ease with which we narrativize our lives belies a hidden complexity. The satisfaction of fiction is, at least partly, found in how elegantly its greatest illusions (beginnings and endings) are constructed.

Just as in a stage illusion, the effect of a beginning (more so, an end) appears wonderous, explained through magic, isn't it remarkable? We recognize something we have never experienced in life, for we do not remember our own beginning nor can we witness our own end.

Upon examination, whatever calamities and triumphs we have labelled 'beginning' and 'ending' in our lives proves to be false; there is always a morning after, until there isn't.

If finding a beginning or an end were easy, I wish someone would tell the phenomenologists.

In the meantime, the anxiety caused by living in a chaotic world (with little reason and no order to the shape of events) can be alleviated through a good story.

To be good, a story must suspend our disbelief and the average reader overlooks the two greatests feats of suspension a story offers, its most salient benefit perhaps, it begins and it ends.

Moreover, it's a beginning and end you can point to. Literally put the beginning under your thumb. Page 1.

A book, its very structure conspires with the author to create the illusion. Even when the author attempts the opposite: A book without beginning or end?

Finnegan's Wake begins with a sentence fragment and ends in a sentence fragment and if start with the last one and continue to the first one then the two fragments form a sentence. They join the end to the beginning and the narrative becomes endless.

Clever, but it doesn't satisfy my craving for completion, it does not relieve my anxieties.

If you lack any, allow me to help:

10 Reasons to be anxious about life and crave stories.

1. You don't get to find out how your story ends but you'd still like to.
2. All the great movies that'll come out the summer after you're dead.
3. All the great music bands that you'll never hear about.
4. All the great books that'll be written too late for you to enjoy.
5. All the new sports and leisure activities that won't be invented in time.
6. All the parties your friends will enjoy after you're dead.
7. All the vacations.
8. All the summers.
9. All the winters.
10. All the morning sunshine.

We know these things but we wish for distraction nevertheless. This does not argue that fiction cannot address real issues or examine society, for its role as examiner is well established. Insoluble problems are the meat of a good story, it is precisely the satisfaction of insoluble problems through the magic of beginnings and endings that delivers the anxiety-smashing punch.
Until the next time, until there is no next time,
The end.

76 - Notes on a pleasant nightmare

1. Festival of smoking crosses in Belgium. Cross connoisseurs smoking church sized pipes in every manner and style of cross.
2. A large successful English class nearly derailed by gremlins at the blackboard who keep erasing the word lists.
3. A teacher furious because my classes are so loud she can't hear herself think.
4. A individual class interrupted for a workshop then extended indefinitely.
5. Kidnapping attempt on Professor Heinman's daughter foiled at the last moment.
6. A bilocating hall of mirrors such that one couple walks in and 6 walk out, operating in sufficiently out of sync timelines and realities that each couple is unaware of the others although nevertheless meeting from time to time as that is what waves do.
7. A five dimensional vase.
8. Reality viewed as a cross-section
9. Electing to stay versus lobbying to go.
10. Life as a choose-your-own-adventure game. Why not?

Wei Lu Wei - Master of Higgledy-Piggledy

Wei Lu Wei, his friends called him Frank, was a master of arts both Eastern and Western, he had become so accomplished in the practice of 'Satori through Zen Procrastination, the Art of Not Trying as the Road of Success' that the less effort he made, the more material success he enjoyed.

"Your enemies have all the resources inside them they need to destroy themselves, to defeat them, you must only remove their distractions," he would intone wisely through a mouthful of breakfast cereal playing videogames in the lotus position.

His friends sometimes found his pronouncements strange, nobody could doubt they worked.

Once, in a bar, Wei insulted an angry drunk by accident who suddenly towered before Wei, shaking with rage.

Wei didn't even tense up, he stayed seated where he was, merely spoke in the scalding tone of a contemptuous master to a disobedient slave, "Later, your girlfriend is going to kill you, behaving like that, you've got a real problem with aggression asshole."

The hulking brute left in confusion, arms waving wildly and words spewing randomly. Lucky to be healthy.

As all his friends knew, Wei could have killed him.

These days it went against his philosophy to be so crass.