Turpentine Mouthwash

My Fiance

2011-09-20T22:46:00.000-07:00

I'd note that Mandy was wearing her Happy Egg Gnome hoodie while at the gun range.

August, My New Enemy

2011-08-27T23:10:00.000-07:00

I'm usually not one for public moaning about the trials and travails life brings. Usually, I keep my trouble to myself, at least on the internet. But this month deserves mention, if only because it has raised the bar of terrible months. I want you to understand, this is coming from a person who once slept in parks, who has broken both his legs, and has, on several occasions, lost all his friends and have to pack up and move. Even with the above sloppy shit sandwiches in mind, August, oh horrid August, will go down as one of the crappier months I've ever had.

First, Mandy learns that her mother died. I'm not going to claim that as a bad thing for me, but it is hard to watch someone you love in pain. So she has to fly out to her hometown, which is one way or another, gonna cost money.

For the record, most people don't realize just how tough and resilient Mandy is. She has not had an easy life and she's still a genuinely nice person. I know lots of children of privilege who seethe bitterly at every little setback.

Okay, so not but a week after that, my cat dies. So that sucked. Had to get the cat cremated-- again, money.

Mandy gets back from her hometown to learn that while she was away, her unemployment benefits ran out. So while we file an extension, we have two or three weeks with no income. My temp agency doesn't exactly come through with anything for the next few weeks.

Last week, we get an eviction notice from the landlord. He swears we owe 600.00 more than we actually do. After some bickering, he finally admits that he put a check of ours in the wrong column.

The next day, we wake up to find out the power got turned off. Awesome. So yeah, we knew it was late, but the multiple expensive dead things put us painfully behind on everything. We get lucky-- Mandy's unemployment gets reinstated that day. So we can pay off our huge balance--but not anything else.

So day after that, our landlord is back with another eviction notice. I mean, he had it printed out, and it's a silly thing to waste paper. Hey, did you know that in Washington you have three days to pay in full if you get an eviction notice? And if you don't pay in full, if you're even a penny off, you're getting evicted. Tenant laws in this state are shit. You have no protections. Not a one.

Thankfully, Mandy comes to the rescue once again. We sell her car for a whopping 600.00 American pesos. It's enough to keep us from living on someone's couch.

Then, this morning, we woke up to find out the internet is shut off. After the past month, it doesn't even raise my blood pressure (which is well above normal anyway). We might be able to pay it in a week. Maybe not. It's not like I use the internet for, oh, say, everything.

Goodbye, August. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

I miss my kitty

2011-08-03T04:25:00.001-07:00

Tonight, Madeline Waffles was hit by a car and died. She was a sweet, loving, loud and skittish little thing. She loved to sleep beside me and Mandy, wriggling between us until she'd achieved the maximum surface area exposure to snuggles possible. She'd follow the chinchilla around the house at a safe distance, then leap out of the way when the fearless Elmo would trot right up to her. Madeline was tiny and scared of her own shadow.

A couple months ago she decided she would climb a tree outside out apartment. The tree led to the roof of the apartment next door. She naturally jumped onto the roof. Two hours later, I'm climbing up a rickety painting ladder up the side of a two-story building with a bag of kitty treats in my hand to lure her away.

Stanley is walking around the house crying. They were inseparable their whole life, and now he's on his own. My wife-to-be is trapped in Virginia dealing with a death in her immediate family. I had to call her to tell her Madeline was dead. I actually said, 'are you sitting down,' because I just didn't know what else to say. The lady that hit her carried her body, wrapped in a stranger's t-shirt to our front door. Stanley led her here. She was devastated. It takes a certain kind of decency to do that.

I loved that cat. Mandy loved that cat, and so does her little brother Stanley. Goodbye, Madeline Waffles. You were my favorite.

Bang Bang, They Shot Him Down

2011-05-03T15:37:00.000-07:00

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of people's motivations for celebrating the assassination of Bin Laden.

For the past decade, our entire culture has been twisting in the wind, waiting for the other shoe to explode. We, as a people, watched our civil liberties erode, our wealth squandered, and our impotence on the world stage mocked (most viciously by us). All of this happened because one man scared the shit out of us. Oh, there were bottom-feeding opportunists waiting in the wings, but there always were those people. People who wanted to bomb the Soviets to powder, or take over Iran, or traipse across the globe like infantile giants. They were sometimes powerful, usually fringe voices, but for all the excesses of our crude views of the world, they never gained ascendancy. Then came September 11th, 2001.

The loss of life was numbing, the motivations so prosaic it boggled the mind. We're sort of used to dumb crackers who blow up abortion clinics, and we know (or knew) how to deal with them.

But here came this strange ascetic who openly spoke about world domination, who took pleasure in the misery he caused, whose power was so out of proportion with his stature that even the thief-hunters didn't really know what to do with him. He was important to the terrorist subculture, a superhero to suicide bombers. Over a period of ten years he turned a disparate group of bombers into a dedicated cult through sheer charisma. He took a brutalized Egyptian and turned him from being a marginalized failure into a criminal mastermind. He took another marginalized failure and inadvertently turned him into a 'war president'.

For seven and a half years, the CIA ran in circles, dodging Bush's absurd public statements, following up on every lead until they were spread so thin they didn't know what was happening next door, the FBI was forced to chase domestic phantoms, the military sold it's tarnished soul to private contractors, and the machinery of our dysfunctional government sputtered and failed and splintered. We lost control of our government, all because some rich boy's son decided to make us look like fools. To our shame, we obliged.

Then, in 2006, Bush essentially threw his hands in the air and gave up. We all knew he had no real interest in finding Bin Laden, at least not any more. We were trapped in two wars, our wealth was funneling to the upper 1% at an astonishing rate, and for me and my generation, we were watching our futures vanish. Absurdity piled on absurdity, each encroachment on our dignity justified with more fear, another attack in Mumbai, or London, or Indonesia. In the back of our minds we knew that terrorists were empowered by Bin Laden-- his power wasn't in planning, but in championing, in letting a teenager with a pipebomb and a hatred of dancing feel like the daring man who escaped the clutches of the infidel time and time again.

Things changed in the past six months. The mostly peaceful (but willing to use force is self-defense) uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt did what Bin Laden's coterie never managed, and all without a single bomb. It put the lie to myth Bin Laden told the Middle East, that murder was the only tool that could affect change. It put the lie to the Liberal myth of the powerlessness of third worlders in the face of American wealth and influence, too.

Bin Laden's death marks the end of an era. Reasons to stay in Afghanistan will be hard to come by, the justifications for detentions and human rights abuses thinner and thinner. Change will not come overnight--there are still thousands of angry little men with bombs, warring tribes in the hills, countries in shambles-- but we can finally straighten our spines and look to the future without the demons of the past hounding us. Our mistakes are, were, and will be many. We will misstep and fall, we will back dictators to avoid the worse unknown, we will go broke and fail our citizens. But we will do all these things of our own misguided, arrogant, painfully well-meaning reasoning, and not because of some shadow in the mountain.

That is what they are celebrating. Not the death of a man, no matter how vile.

Was there dancing in the street when Dahlmer died? Or when Oswalt was shot? No. We did not dance in the streets when Afghan civilians were killed in bombings, we did not rejoice when the town of Mai Lai was massacred. We are not that people. Attempting to claim an unbroken line of moral causality from the tears of joy in Times Square to dragging bodies through the street is superficial reasoning, more about smug moralizing than serious thought.

People celebrate because it's over. A decade long fever dream is over. We can wake up now.

Do You Trust Your Mechanic, Pt 1

2011-03-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

Do You Trust Your Mechanic?

Barring an unlikely intervention, he figured he had a minute before he was rendered sterile. It was moments like these (if by 'like these' one referred to dangling above the exhaust thrust, being pelted with cosmic radiation, and hoping one's EVA shield holds up) that he finally felt he understood the vast, incomprehensible stupidity of his lifelong dream. Jupiter lounged in the star field, turgid and inviting. Something childish and primordial in his brain tried to convince him that is wasn't all that large and quite likely very soft, like a massive beanbag. A boost in that direction and who knows, he could be sitting in the first relaxing position he had in nine years.

The electromagnets wobbled in their moorings, millions of tiny craters dusting the ceramic and carbon shell of the exhaust assembly. Up close, the whole contraption looked slipshod, an amateur hack to keep the rocket looking stereotypically rocket-like. He pried the panel off and gave his helmet a moment to adjust to the blinding exhaust flame. The trick was spotting the leak in the nozzle field. Maizey figured that it was somewhere around here on her exhaust assembly, but Heisenberg, that principled prick, kept the specific cause and location hidden in a bath of plasma. Maizey's little helpers couldn't get close; the electromagnetic field wiped their brains with the subtlety of a hammer.

He extended his cable controlled ceramic pincers into the couplings, watched as ions tried their damnest to give him cancer. There, where the ice blue whorl of plasma escaped in eddying flickers, there's your problem. A pebble, about the size of a--well, a pebble, lodged with literally astronomical strength in the superconducting plates. Most every ferrous material was repelled by the field, but this nugget of whatever (probably uranium, the outer solar system was lousy with the stuff) wrenched their monkey but good.

He pushed off the exterior and spun to face Jupiter. It was like this: they either killed the engines for repairs and hope they had enough gas to avoid slingshotting out of Titan's orbit in nine months, or they did nothing and hope the escaping plasma didn't burn a hole through the nozzle and then explode. While the former seemed a better plan, he couldn't argue with the sense of closure the latter could provide. As ignominious deaths go, nothing beats spiraling out into the Oort cloud, getting pummeled to death as Maizey tried to bob and weave around a million asteroids a minute.

Jupiter did look inviting. How far off could it be? A million miles? Two? Close enough to risk a trajectory change and hang out around Io until they sussed out how to fix the nozzle. Far enough that getting there meant scrubbing the mission, which would put Maizey in a terrible mood. She'd be impossible to work with until she ran all the probabilities and come up with the same conclusion.

His skin began to burn from the cosmic rays. Lightning fired behind his eyes, pinpoints and halos as particles burnt through his retinas. If he ever got back to Mars base any babies he made would come out with flippers. Fatalism, he figured, was completely understandable for a man in his position. Maizey plucked him from the stars with a dainty appendage. His meteorite shield looked like the back of a cheap recliner, foam poking out from shredded foil. She opened her doors and placed him with mechanical precision into the airlock.

He floated into the decontamination chamber, stripped his pressure suit off like an especially cantankerous condom, and collapsed under the decontamination spray.

"Maizey," he rasped through raw and bleeding lips. A face extended from the wall-- not a physical face, but an illusion deviously mapped directly onto his retinas by the thousands of tiny projectors on the walls. It was cartoonishly matronly, the Disney-fication of some archetypal Chinese grandmother. She peered at him over her nonexistent glasses, a ridiculous affectation that no one was sure where she picked up.

"Wake everyone up," he continued, expecting to be interrupted at any moment, even though Maizey never interrupted anyone under any circumstance. "Tell them-- tell them the past nine years of their lives have been a total waste. Or tell them we're going to blow up. Your choice."

She harrumphed and vanished to her task. This would be the least pleasant conversation he'd ever have to have with his boss. But on the bright side, depending on the vote, it may be the last conversation he'd ever have with his boss. Either way, he crossed his arms and waited for the shouting to start.

Creating the Audience

2010-09-25T21:30:00.001-07:00

So this Saturday night I'm doing laundry and crunching numbers on comic creation. It doesn't take an accountant to tell you that printing, distributing, and selling your own books won't make you a profit. Case in point: If I print out 500 copies of the B&W issue of Virtuoso, I have to sell 315 of them just to break even. That's selling them at 3.00 a piece, which is on the cheap end of comics. But selling that many means doing the convention circuit, which drains the coffers fast. So take that profit I earned in and flush it if I do it that way. This isn't even thinking about paying myself or Krista.

(Consequently, if you want to make sure that a fellow Whitechapeler gets paid for doing great art, go here:)

Virtuoso
Anyway, seeing as how this profit model doesn't really work, not if you want to make a living at comics, you have to think laterally. Most webcomics make money on merchandising. The comic is free and online, and connected to a merch store. Collections are sold to the readers, and the profit margin on trade paperbacks is considerably higher than floppies. Actually, it doesn't make much sense to print floppies for an indie creator. Unless you're a big name like Kirkman, or doing something totally groundbreakingly brilliant like Hickman, you're probably going to be eating ramen noodles and dodging landlords until the trades come out. I know that's what killed Phonogram, and in a sane world Phonogram would be carried in every record store on Earth, and Gillen and McKelvie would be snorting blow off skinny indie girl's backs.

Back to making money. Money depends on audience, and audience depends on value. Also, being good helps, but isn't necessary. People like Amanda Palmer give their audience value by being accessible, passionate, and very very good at what they do, and so people will give money to be part of that. She creates a amorphous community of a sorts, a cult of personality all dedicated to making sure she eats and pays rent.

But Palmer has a lot of advantages. She was on a major label for years with a popular band, and even though the label screwed her in the end, she had huge international exposure because of it. She paid her dues, you know? What about guys like me, who don't have a massive audience, who have to build an audience?

I suspect that building a community at this level cannot be about the person. For example, if Amanda Palmer stops making music and starts, I dunno, a macaroni duck greeting card business, she'd have a significant number of hanger's on. If Warren stopped writing Freakangels, there would be a huge loss of readers. They have clout, history, and proven value.

So the community has to be built around something more interesting than the comic creator. Which is why I'm launching the Virtuoso Compendium. The idea is to bind the community to the collaborative process of world-building. It's a risky venture-- if it turns out that writing the imaginary history of a pseudo-Africa is boring, or such a tiny niche of a niche that it only supports a dozen contributors, I've hooked my cart up to the wrong horse.

On the other hand, if people begin to feel a sense of ownership with the world, the chances of gaining financial support from the community increases considerably, and it provides a launch pad for other creators to riff on ideas, broadening people's exposure to the world and characters. Here's hoping.

My Kickstarter is up!

2010-08-31T15:02:00.000-07:00

Kickstart is just cool. That's all there is to it. But I really need everyone's help to get the word out on this. If for no other reason than to let me send out the incredibly cool rewards Noah, Thom and I have come up with.

Why RPGs are important

2010-07-15T03:01:00.000-07:00

There is a tendency amongst my peers to either deride or exalt their pastimes, often to an extreme. The former smacks of the sneering disdain for experiences that marks the hipster, while the latter lends a hand-wringing quality. Both are the acts of uncertainty. This uncertainty isn't implicit in play of any kind, it is imposed upon us by market forces beyond our control. If a thing does not make you money, or train you in the acquisition of wealth, it is worthless. This is the shabby tragedy of our time. Play has its own value, and is not the purview of only the idle and the immature.

I grew up on role playing games. I still remember the first RPG I bought with my allowance monies- Night of the Walking Dead.
My budding interest in all things gross and ghoulish forced my hand-- the first movie I ever watched without my parents was A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, and it made an impression. The downside to this purchase was that the game was incomplete. I had no way of knowing that I was expected to own three other hardbound books that explained the inscrutable abbreviations. So I did what came naturally and made my own rules up.

Its this aspect of RPGs that keeps me coming back. The role playing game is infinitely mutable, limited only by how much nonsense your friends were willing to put up with. Once upon a time, computer games held the same promise. I could count myself a competent Quake mod maker for a few short years until the technology outpaced my talent. Now, though, its a rare beast who has the spare time to mod a game into anything, and the variations grow fewer and further between. (I hear rumblings that the indie game developers are making very interesting things, but to me it looks like a bunch of multicolored spaghetti shooting pellets.)

Perhaps more than any other form of entertainment, RPGs encourage a collective ownership. Its impossible to passively watch and be considered a part of the group. To participate is to create.

In a fundamental way, RPGs are the vacuum tube to the future of entertainment. They are the clumsy, slightly embarrassing forerunners to whatever collective entertainment becomes once we've figured out what to do with the excess processing power we have. As computer games and MMORPGs become bigger business, they are moving away from any real interactivity between players and systems, ending up more like a cross between a roller-coaster ride and a game of checkers. A few games are dedicated to the idea of player driven content, such as EVE online and WURM, but for the most part we've replaced passive channel surfing with passive level grinding. I long to see a game that accommodates creativity and collective story telling. But for now, hand me my dice.

This Tribe

2010-07-06T22:04:00.000-07:00

I've never been a fan of conspiracy theories. To me they have the same simplicity that creationism has, the same need to reduce complicated events into bumper sticker meanings. The irony being that once you adhere to the simple doctrine, you have to perform mental acrobatics to make your worldview explain contradictory evidence. So while I hate simplistic explanations, I do love a good acrobat.

I'm thinking about this because I'm thinking about the comic, and I'm thinking about that because I'm finally able to think about that. A peculiar thing happens to your mind when there isn't any certainty in your future. Your horizon recedes to the next day, the next meal, the next dollar. Nothing matters past that point, because all points after that are contingent and ethereal. Its not the first time I've been in that state, and will likely not be the last, but this time around I accomplished something I'd hitherto failed.

I managed to find a group of friends, a tribe, a collection of beautiful, intelligent, willful people who stand by each other. They bicker, and forget, and sometimes distrust, but if it needs to happen everyone will band together and take care of each other. Its a supportive family; something I never expected.

We all want to accomplish great things. Some of us are steps ahead of others, some of us are struggling just to make it through another day, but we all acknowledge an ambition. We all are driven to stand when we should stay down, to be bold when we want to be meek, and to ignore privations and missteps.

Its because of you that I push further. You have communally set my standards of perseverance, creativity, community, organization, and decency to new levels.

Thank you.

The Postage Stamp Renaissance

2010-05-26T00:35:00.000-07:00

This is the story of how a postage stamp, a rocket scientist, and a blind bluesman brought an obscure musical tradition of outer Mongolia to the world.

I'm sitting in a Portland, Oregon rock club. It's situated right smack in the middle of the downtown meat market. To the right of me is Voodoo Donuts. Gutter punks spange outside, grabbing a few bucks from the drunks attracted to the scent of bacon and glazing. To the left of me is a flophouse, the human overflow sleeping in the streets outside it. On a normal night, the club caters to bored frat boys and enterprising bank tellers, everyone dressed in their cleanest polo shirts, Axe so thick it smells like a Thai ladyboy exploded.

Tonight it's different. The club is filled with drifting incense. People crowd the stage, sitting on the floor indian style, necks aching to see the white robed performers. Passers by wander in, hoping for the usual drunken party, and stand struck dumb. The stage is lit from every angle by candles, and in the center sits a massive iron cross. The performers mournfully ascend the stairs to the stage. Which is appropriate, because I have it on good authority that the cross once belonged to a particular headstone in a particular cemetery.

The sound comes then, the groaning, resonant moan that pitches wildly. People glance around, trying to pinpoint the sound's origin. Part didgereedoo, part Gregorian chant, its a sound that doesn't originate so much as emanate from the stage. I turn to my friend, who sits with an ecstatic grin I must be sharing and say: "What is this?"

I'm ahead of myself by at least eighty years. Starting from the top--

If you're Richard Feynman, you're a genius physicist with a penchant for chicanery and the sensibilities of a Bohemian. He spent his spare time at the Los Alamos labs back during WW2 cracking safes, or tricking people into opening them and then claiming them cracked, which is just as good. He collected stamps, and as a stamp collector, the rarer and the stranger the better.

One night he asks a friends and fellow adventurer, "Whatever happened to Tannu Tuva?"

Back in 1927, a set of stamps were issued from the tiny Mongolian prefecture of Tannu Tuva. As a newly independent country, finally wresting their freedom from Imperial China, the next logical step was to issue a stamp. Somehow this stamp made its way around the world and into Feynman's hands.

This stamp stuck out to Feynman-- here, have a look.

Now, that might not be the exact stamp, but you get the idea. He decided that he had to know more about this place. Tannu Tuva -- it sounds like a fantasy realm. In fact, Feynman's friend thought it may well be made up. That was just the sort of thing Richard would do to people. He'd invent a country, a whole culture, and see how long he could trick people into believing in it. Did I mention this man worked on the atom bomb?

What followed that question is recorded in "Tuva or Bust!", by Ralph Leighton. Richard Feynman spent the rest of his life trying to visit Tuva. He collected scratchy field recordings of Tuvan music, old photos of Tuvan costumes, anything he could lay his hands on. He and his friends created the "Friends of Tuva" foundation to archive this knowledge, and it lives on today.

Now keep in mind this was the middle of the Cold War, and a former atomic scientist wanted entry into the Soviet Union. Even if the Soviets wanted him in, the State Department probably wasn't too keen to let an outspoken cultural critic like Feynman anywhere near Russia. And so his requests existed in an endless bureaucratic loop. Perhaps they were hoping he'd forget about it. Never underestimate the memory and tenacity of a man who remembered a postage stamp he'd seen a decade earlier. Feynman never gave up.

Finally the State Department relented. After nearly twenty years, they granted Richard Feynman the right to travel to Tuva.

Unfortunately, Feynman died of cancer the day before.

The world was poorer for the loss, but before he went, Richard Feynman taught thousands, earned Nobel Prizes in physics, became an outspoken proponent of science, and lived life with a wry smile and set of bongos.

Step back a little. There's someone else in this story.

Paul Pena was born with congenital glaucoma. His eyesight was bad at fifteen, and gone by twenty. It didn't slow him down--he learned to play music with an intimidating ease. By the mid seventies, right at the time Ralph Leighton and Richard Feynman were having their dinner discussions, he was playing with anyone who had a name in the blues community. Pick a name out of a hat, and Paul Pena played with them. B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Leon Redbone, Steve Ray Vaughn, Mississippi Fred McDowell, 'Big Bones,' John Lee Hooker and T. Bone Walker-- he even had a song of his recorded by the Steve Miller Band. Paul Pena was going up, and fast.

Then his wife, Babe, got sick--kidney failure. He dropped everything to take care of her. One night, December 29th, 1984 to be exact, Paul was listening to his shortwave radio. This isn't something people do too much these days, but if the air was just right and the night was clear you could hear broadcasts from all over the world. Paul was hunting for a Korean language lesson he'd heard.

Instead, he heard a Russian broadcast centered on the music of Tuva. That when he heard Tuvan throat singing. To a musician, specifically to a blues musician, that rumbling growl must have been a revelation. Two, sometimes three separate tones overlapped in one voice. This became an obsession for Paul.

For the next eight years he searched record stores high and low for this music. He asked musician friends, he tried to explain the unearthly sounds he heard that winter night. For eight years, no one had an answer for him.

It wasn't until 1991 that he found a CD of Tuvan music. He taught himself the sound he heard. Two years later, he finally made it to a concert.

The promoters? The Friends of Tuva. They never forgot Feynman's love of the unique culture, and his enthusiasm outlived him. They flew the master throat singer Kongar ol-Ondar into the states. Paul Pena approached Kongar after the show, and gave an impromptu demonstration of the art Kongar spent a lifetime mastering. Kongar was so impressed that the two became fast friends, touring the United States together and sharing their musical interests. Kongar invited Paul Pena to Tuva. His trip is documented in the film "Ghengis Blues."

Something happened in the late nineties. The Tuvan Invasion, you might call it. Passed along by word of mouth, Tuvan artists began touring the United States. First came Kongar, then groups like Huun Huur-Tu, Sainkho Namtchylak, and Shu-De.

And there you have it. That's how I ended up sitting in a rock club, listening to Soriah perform an art developed by shamans in Outer Mongolia, promoted by a physicist, and popularized by a blind blues man.

Now sit back and tell me that doesn't make you smile.

BOO

2010-03-05T09:56:00.001-08:00

Photo by Mandy McGee

Societas Insomnia

2010-02-02T13:53:00.000-08:00

After hunting around the internet for a few minutes, I found a few pictures from my time performing for the Portland performing arts troupe Societas Insomnia. It was a deeply disorganized group, with dozens of performers dropping out and being replaced, sound and lighting issues, and big egos getting stepped on constantly. But man oh man, do I enjoy performing.

Re-Emergence

2010-02-01T23:39:00.000-08:00

Five years ago I was prolific.
In the multiple moves I've done since then, amidst the stress and chaos of life for the past few years, my output and vociferousness has fallen somewhat. My attention span isn't what it used to be, my hands hurt after a few hours of typing (thanks to all the fractures), and while I'm loathe to admit it, the mental alacrity of youth has abandoned me somewhat. I've exchanged it with greater depth of thought, a more pragmatic approach to problems, but I miss the mad lurchings of my youthful ideas.

So I'm doing what anyone in my situation would do. Republishing my old work, sprucing it up, and letting it reinvigorate me. Its not nostalgia, my least favorite emotion, but a kind of vampiric time travel. I'm stealing my own ideas.

March 17, 2005
"So what do you believe? I mean, do you believe in God?"

He scratched the stubble on his chin. After a moment, he kneeled into the sand and drew two circles above an arc.

"What do you see here?"

"It's a smiley face."

"No. It's just two circles and a semicircle. It's a random pattern, or one I constructed and holds some alternate meaning. But I assure you, It's not a smiley face."

His friend stared at the pictograph for a hard second.

"It looks like a smiley face."

"Sure. And to most every functioning human on the planet, it's a smiley face. But that's because we're all hard-wired pretty much the same way, we'll interpret this random collection of squiggles as a smiley face."

"But its not random. Like, there's a pattern."

"To us there's a pattern. To an alien it's just some bizarre kanji thing."

"I'm really not seeing how this has anything to do with the God thing."

"Think about it. We're looking at the world, taking it in, and most of us see smiley faces everywhere. It's what we're wired to do. WE look for patterns, we put a human face on things. You look at the universe, the stars, and you group them like they're intended to be. But the stars don't care what we want, they don't tell us anything, they're just there. Everything else is in our own heads."

"But sometimes the smiley face--excuse me, can we drop this 'smiley face' thing?"

"Be my guest."

"But sometimes there really IS a pattern, isn't there? Things that seem random really aren't. Hidden connections."

"Oh boy."

"What?"

"'Hidden Connections'. You're starting to sound like one of the paranormal people. You're gonna be talking to me about Uri Gellar in a second."

"They have a point, don't they? Isn't it a bit presumptuous to assume that just because we can't see exactly what the connections are that there aren't any connections?"

"Well, that's why you have to test. If you do it right, a connection will appear or it won't. But you have to be really strict, or else you're fucked."

"Even then, if the interaction's complex enough, there could be way too many things to test and we'd never be able to sort them. And what's this got to do with God, anyhow?"

"I'm saying that just because the universe looks like some great grandaddy farted it into existence doesn't mean they really did. It could just be a bunch of circles in the sand."

"What about faith?"

"It amazing to me that what people call faith these days really means a stopgap to keep the Other things out of their lives. They think that putting a cross or whatever on their door will keep the bad things out of their lives. That's not faith. That's institutionalized denial."

"That's really harsh."

"Harsh world. I read in some hippy magazine lately that the purpose of religion is to make us confront the other, to make us learn to accept it's presence."

"Okay, I'm devil's advocate and I know that's bullshit."

"Well, it's all well and fine for the mystics. I've always had a soft spot for the mystics; at least they were interested in the bigger questions. More 'hmmm' and less 'grrr'."

"Okay, but what about ethics? The most recent ones, they all seem to agree that being nice to other people is better in the long run than being a prick."

"A safe bet. Altruism is all about reciprocity. But to borrow your phrase, I'm not sure what that has to do with God."

"Okay, then. Let's look at people. Don't you think people, on some level, need to believe that there is something bigger than them out there that will judge them, keep them on the straight and narrow?"

"Sure. And look how well that works. I'm sure every petty thief and thug learned that the only consequences their actions had were imposed by other people, not all powerful entities. And that has a dangerous colliery: if people are suffering, they must have done something wrong."

"So what's the option then, genius? You've gotta give them something that they can hang their hopes on."

"Fuck 'em. Let them wallow in despair."

"Hey, altruism?"

"Okay, fair enough. I don't know what to do about that. But I have the feeling that the God you're thinking of won't have any part in it."

"I got that feeling too."

And with that, the seraphim spread their wings and slid into the air.

Flash Fiction - Thin-Skinned

2009-11-06T23:16:00.000-08:00

1.

Getting out of her way wasn't hard, but it was difficult. What I mean is that she lived like a hurricane, big eyes and big hair, ready to smile that witch smile or cut you down. What I mean is that you saw her coming a mile away, a thousand miles away, you heard her name whispered in warning, carved in the fucking stones saying 'do not go there.' But all those warnings did little to convince me. When she came skipping down the street she looked like a girl, and nothing more.

2.
So I got sucked in. It happens to the best of us, and the best of us prostrate ourselves to whatever she needed. The midnight screaming fights, those were for the best. The first knife she pulled, the one she swore up and down killed her mother and father and then pointed at my heart, that was a catharsis long needed. I lied to myself with born-again ferocity, ignored the strange brown stains under her fingernails and the watery glimmer in her eyes. Then she showed me the tattoos.

3.
The truth was I enjoyed the murder. She said I shouldn't, that what she did, what I now did was sacred. We took the most valued and gave them to the grave so the grave would look past us. Her skin became paper thin and we could no longer make love without it tearing. It wasn't enough, she said, pointing the knife at me, close enough that I could read the letters the bloodstains made. I shivered in the corner, her arms red and corded, her lips drawn back over yellow teeth. I should be ashamed of myself. I pulled the blade from her hand and pushed it through her heart, sawed it as she howled and bucked.

4.
I'm going through my things, packing them up and getting ready to vanish. I kept the knife, and even though I can't read what the bloodstains say, I can feel my skin getting thinner.

The Theory of Narrative Gestalt

2009-10-21T01:43:00.000-07:00

Story happens.

The human animal is a storytelling machine. We never need to be taught the basics of narrative, because the basis for all story is simple causality. Events that follow one another are likely linked, our brains dictate, and we scour the environment for clues to the nature of that link. If nature does not provide an obvious answer, we confabulate and confuse, projecting our intuitive understanding of human motivations upon the world. It is this inborn need that is the core of narrative.

We understand stories on a primal level; they trick our limbic system and beguile our amygdala. True, on the higher levels of thought we understand this is an illusion, but one we are willing to indulge in for the sake of a thrill; we aren't such slaves to our passions as to allow them unchecked reign. The methods of this manipulation have been codified, expanded upon, and undercut since the Classical period, but the core of story -- causality with meaning-- is maintained. A great story may reveal a hidden truth, and a shoddy story may stretch verisimilitude, but a story only needs causality with meaning.

If it is a natural thing to understand stories, why then does it seem so difficult to create one? This question misunderstands the difficulty. For a great many artists, the challenge is not inventing the fiction, but translating it from it's neural semiotic form into one that other people can experience. That, however, is a matter of craftsmanship, and because of that craftsmanship the story of a professional has a definite quality of ease to it. There is a totality to their narrative, a sense that every action and reaction is happening within the imaginary framework of the story, and that each event is interconnected.

I have rather ostentatiously dubbed this phenomenon Narrative Gestalt, defined as the sense of completeness a piece of fiction generates in the reader. While the stories of the amateur may entertain, they are filled with loose ends, characters that have no importance, and forgotten side plots. This is because life is filled with such. What the professional realizes, regardless of the style they work in, is that narrative fiction is not depicting life as it is--it depicts life as the mind construes it, as an uninterrupted flow of events. The storyteller, like the realist painter, indulges in the illusion of persistence and so draws us into the tale.

The Horror Protagonist

2009-10-11T20:36:00.000-07:00

The core of the tragic character is, despite their hubris, rational. In fact, it is this rationality that allows the audience to empathize with their plight. If hardships befall a fool, or if the protagonist willingly walks into their own doom without forethought, the audience may cheer their dissolution, and will very likely be bored. The character's actions and motivations are understandable, and therein lies the pathos. If a character finds themselves in a horrible situation, even by their own hand, the audience must feel that they'd be in the same situation given the same circumstances.

The horror protagonist must be self-propelled towards their doom, and those choices must ring true. This is almost self-evident, but think to all of the cheap and lazy horror stories that depend on the main character's intense stupidity and stubborn refusal to acknowledge anything like danger. Without the protagonist's rationality (and note that I do not mean that each choice they make follows the rules of logic; the choices must simply follow from their understanding of the world), there is no tragedy. The horror movie becomes little more than victim porn, and while the imagery of victimization is powerful and visceral, it's fragile unto itself. Consider that if the character chooses a path that is explicit in it's danger or likely to end in the protagonist's death, they must have a powerful motivation to do so. Otherwise, the suspension of disbelief is ruined and the audience turns on the protagonist. The entirety of the Slasher genre is based around this phenomenon.

However, neither can the doom be secreted from the audience. If the protagonist is struck down by a random bullet, we may say it is horrifying, but we really mean it is shocking. Shock had a very short shelf life, and is only good for one use. The point of no return must be the most necessary action at the time-- and the audience must understand that action.

As a specific example, consider the British movie "The Descent". In it, a group of spelunkers head into a cave system where they are terrorized by the morlock-like creatures that live there. In the hands of a poor writer, this could be a disaster. Exploring an unknown cave is dangerous, and doing so without proper equipment is criminally stupid. But "The Descent" succeeds in placing the audience in the skins of the characters to such an extent that while we may wish they didn't engage in such a dangerous move. We know that circumstance has aligned against them, rather than them inviting disaster.

Many horror writers focus on the scenario above the characters, and to shoehorn the characters into that situation they force all manner of stupid choices down their throat. For example, in the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the heroine is confronted with a choice: flee down the deserted highway and hope for rescue, or run into the abandoned meat packing plant. Any sane person would find level ground, run their ass off, and put miles between the mutant family and themselves. Jessica Biel opts for the slaughterhouse, because the writer wanted a set piece there. It's lazy writing, and as a result, the audience turned against the hero.

Up Next: The Theory of Narrative Gestalt

Inaugural Post: Horror's Tragic Roots

2009-10-07T02:26:00.000-07:00

Oedipus Rex tears his eyes from their sockets, self inflicted punishment for his inability to see clearly. In Antigone, the heroine (Oedipus's exiled daughter, for those fans of continuity) is surrounded by the suicides of her friends and family. In Sophocles version, these horrors are piled on with the aloof air of a divine insurgency. When Seneca the Younger remade the plays (because there is nothing new in show business) he ramped the violence and occultism up, turning tales of hubris into tales of revenge. It's grim stuff. The tension builds, the stakes raise, and the hero, despite his best intentions and honorable actions, finds every avenue of action closed to him. By the end of the play the audience is begging for some release and all too wise to the hero's doom. They want only a cessation of the tension, and exhale only as Oedipus laments his blindness, or when the villainous Clytaemenstra stands over the butchered bodies of brave Agamemnon and unheard Cassandra. Aristotle called this catharsis. It means 'a purging'. Horror attempts the same thing.

The modern Horror story, so often the maligned step child of the arts, is in fact the spiritual descendant of these ancient tragedians. The tools are the same, the intent is the same, but few horror writers make use of them. These techniques are just as cogent for other mediums. Whether a comic book, videogame, or role playing session, the structures are the same, only their applications differ. I'm hoping that by showing how to use these tools I can show the difference between a film that horrifies and a horror film.

Up next: The Horror Protagonist