Progress on publication of the anthology “An Honest Lie, Volume 3: Justifible Hypocrisy” is thundering along. It’s still slated for a fall publication, and I should be interviewed for promotional purposes soon. When the interview is released, I’ll post the link. Stay tuned!
I feel like a jerk for not caring whether Harry Potter lives or dies. He’s such a nice fellow, friendly, self-sacrificing, destined to vanquish the forces of evil, and humble. You couldn’t want a finer friend than Potter. Yet I find myself far more moved by the fate of Groo, that evil, galloping skag from the movie Despicable Me.
I understand why people love Harry, and I’m in no way criticizing them for adoring the world-famous wizard. He has a crew of fascinating and devoted friends who assist him in fighting the evil Voldemort. Groo just has tiny yellow minions who squabble like the Three Stooges and create disasters that make their master look like a dork. True, the tiny minions number in the hundreds. Then again, Harry’s friends seem to number in the hundreds too, especially when you try to keep track of them through all seventeen movies. (I’ll double-check that number later. There might have been eighteen movies.)
Harry Potter’s story spans an impressive scope. We follow him across his teenage years, through the magical and mundane worlds, from hero to criminal and back. He’s as noble as Sir Lancelot, and he bounces back from defeat like Godzilla. Yet my buddy Groo walked on the outer skin of a rocket ship headed roughly towards the moon; that’s impressive, right? Maybe Harry has neat toys like invisibility cloaks and wands and such, but Groo has a couch shaped like an alligator.
Perhaps the virtue, nobility, generosity and cleanliness Harry displays across his entire adolescence have put me off. If he’d gotten drunk one night and slipped a horse into Dumbledore’s study then I could better relate to him. But instead he starts off good and remains good throughout the tale. Groo starts off planning to destroy the world, and he ends up tucking little orphan girls into gutted bombs. That’s character development.
My friends anticipated the release of the final Potter film like boa constrictors dangling above an unwary tourist in the rain forest. Song parodies about Harry Potter are flourishing on the internet. Fans will hold Harry Potter movie marathons to enjoy good fellowship, Dorito-overdoses, and brutal gang fights between would-be Gryffindors and Slytherins. Wholesome fun for everybody. But I just can’t find the Joy of Harry within my soul.
I admire Harry. He’s a great role model. I applaud the people who love him. But to help you understand my ambivalence over Harry’s goodness, I recently wrote a story in which a man chases a wounded, fleeing ruffian, knocks him down, and casually kills him. I asked my wife, “Is this character too cruel to relate to?”
She said, “I’m probably not the best person to ask.” When I persisted, she said, “I’ve been with you for 20 years, so my viewpoint has been affected.”
I pointed out that I’ve never chased down and murdered a helpless person, to which she replied, “But if it were allowed, you know that you’d do it.”
I sincerely hope everyone has a good time at the theater and enjoys all things Harry. You are all fine people. If you want to reach me in the meantime, my friend Groo and I will be hanging out on his alligator-shaped couch.
I hate bars. I think it’s because I spent too much time in bars when I was young, doing and saying stupid things. To me, a bar means cigarette smoke, over-priced liquor, and annoying people who like bars. I consider vomiting a deferred benefit. It’s not unheard of for me to wake up the next day with wounds I can’t explain. I once woke up on the floor with some serious back pain, only to find I’d spent the night sleeping on the telephone. It was one of those chunky black phones like you see in old movies. This should give you an idea of how much I hate bars.
I never behaved as stupidly in a bar as I now do on the internet. The parallels between a bar and the internet shocked me when I realized them. I now understand why people become addicted to the internet the same way alcoholics become addicted to whiskey sours. A bar and the internet both contain a core of nice things to appreciate. But they’re encased in a quagmire of life-sucking garbage.
For example, people hang out in bars, and some of those people know that they know everything. They’ll tell you how to incorporate your business for $15. They’ll explain how superconductors work and why Finland is trying to steal our technology. They’ll reveal how the Illuminati have now become Netflix and the company that makes Red Bull. Some people call these guys blowhards. But no one knows whether these people are right about anything, and the only ones who care to correct them are other blowhards. In bars they’re blowhards, but on the internet they’re called Wikipedia.
Occasionally you’ll see a fight in a bar. People lose a little control after the seventh maitai, and they were probably sad or angry when they came into the bar anyway. Usually they argue. Sometimes they yell. Once in a while they shove, kick, or throw things. Everyone who has had a relative killed in a bar fight, raise your hand. I know my hand is up. In a bar, when you see a guy haul off with a beer mug, it’s easy to know you should stay out of that. But on the internet when I see someone post an odd thing, such as how President Obama has lowered cholesterol for people over 55, I may resist saying anything. When another guy argues back that Obama sacrifices chickens in the White House basement, I get sucked in to responding. Then I realize I was a moron, as I sit in the middle of an electronic free range butt-kicking for the next 24 hours.
When I went to bars I generally went to hang out with my friends and drink. Friends and booze made up the content of the experience, as far as I had it planned. My friends were fun, at least until they got drunk. Then they annoyed me. The drinking was fun, at least until I had knocked back a few. Then people annoyed me because they said I was annoying. I just stayed at the bar too long. If I’d had a couple of drinks, told a few dirty jokes, and went home, the bar would have provided me a charming evening. And that’s how I am with the internet. If I would check out a blog or two, chat with my friends, buy battery-powered socks, and then shut the thing off I’d be fine. But no, three hours later I’m watching a video of a bunny rabbit and a kitten riding a tricycle. My IQ has dropped so far I’m drooling and eating paste off my toes.
You know your life has gone to a bad place when you’ve become a regular at a bar. I don’t give a damn about Cheers. When you walk into a dingy, smoke-filled room where people puke on the stools and the sprinklers don’t meet code, it is not good for everybody to know your name. If the bar patrons just assume that you will be there every night, you have gone astray. It’s the same with the internet. My friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, some of whom I despise, absolutely assume that I will visit the internet every day. They expect I will insert an Ethernet cable into one of my veins multiple times a day, so I may appreciate their emails and posts about new recipes, photos from 1988, and obscure political causes. On the internet everybody really does know my name. I’m thinking of creating a new online identity named SlopeBrowVerminLovesYourSister666. Maybe that will bring me some peace.
I recognize the irony of writing this piece, posting it on the internet, and wanting you to read it on the internet. In my defense, I did say that the internet made me stupid. But I didn’t blast internet content any more than I blasted a gin martini. Overdoing it is where I get really stupid. That may be a big rationalization on my part, but in the end I admit there are advantages to the internet. My breath smells better, and I’ve never woken up after a hard night of web surfing to find I’ve been sleeping on my router.
I accomplished a lot this weekend, if you count hair growth and peristalsis as accomplishments. If you don’t, then I didn’t make much happen in my part of the world. I’m sure my inert existence even prevented things from happening, as if I were a flabby, slack-jawed black hole reducing the net balance of energy in the universe. In my house we have something called The Whirling Vortex of Lethargy, and for 48 hours I lay at its core, as occasional infrared signals from the TV remote conveyed the only signs that I still lived.
On Friday I read a fantastic book about writing. It’s one of those books that’s so powerful and insightful that it plunges you into a profound depression about the inadequacy of everything you’ve ever written. This is like finding out that despite all your love and nurturing, your children have grown up to be carnival geeks. My weekend writing and editing goals evaporated. Cold air washed unchecked into the front yard beneath my un-weather stripped door. Weeds flourished, dirty laundry lay fallow, and my mom remained uncalled.
Saturday morning I crumple onto my green couch, which is twice as old as any of my friends’ children, and I click on my TV, which is shaped like footlocker and weighs as much as my refrigerator. I flip to a crime drama with 248 episodes available for instant viewing. If Netflix had a graven image, I would happily sacrifice goats to it. By Saturday afternoon I catch my wife, seated on the other end of the couch, giving me sidelong looks of concern usually reserved for the terminally ill. I either pretend I don’t notice, or I smile at her in what might be a reassuring manner, although I wouldn’t bet on it.
By Saturday night I resolve to climb out of this cesspool of pity, right after I find out who’s behind the murder of the genetically altered prostitutes, and whether he gets 25 to life. My cats continue to migrate across me one by one, as if I were an tiny island and they were seals pausing to sleep on their way to the Aleutian feeding grounds. My end of the couch is the perfect place to take a plaster cast of my butt, if someone were so perverse as to want such a thing. My wife goes to bed at an hour appropriate for sane people. I stare at the TV as if Dick Wolf were an electronic Svengali, until I slither into unconsciousness, my face mashed into a couch cushion.
On Sunday my wife has things to do with real people, and while I’m sure I’d be welcome, no one expects me to come along. I bring the TV to life once more. If Netflix had been out of service, I might have wept. Throughout the morning I witness a panorama of felonies—murders, fraud, sexual assault, drug possession, and more. Somebody has a disturbingly fertile imagination. “Bravo,” I think. I’d never appreciated how entertaining a series with no continuing storyline can be. It’s perfect for someone who’s depressed and inattentive.
My cats no longer come near me by Sunday afternoon. They seem to find my degree of lethargy excessive and unnatural. I realize that I have accomplished something. I’ve demonstrated that I can live for two days on Tostitos, Junior Mints, and Diet Coke. By mid-afternoon the TV presents me with the seventeenth child pornography case of the weekend, and my hand seizes the remote control in a spasm of button-pushing. The TV settles on another series without much continuity between episodes, but this one is about the military. I figure the potential for child pornography investigations is low during assassination missions in Afghanistan, so my hand flops back down, the remote rolling out of it.
My den sinks into dimness on Sunday night, and the loosely organized mass of body parts on the couch is barely recognizable as me. Inside, I’m trying to corral my willpower as I prepare for work on Monday. I’m failing. Then on TV I see a brief exchange between characters:
Girl: Do you think people can change?
Big Guy: No.
[Girl exits]
Small Guy: You really don’t think people can change?
Big Guy: No. But I have seen it happen.
I laugh at this for a while. For some reason this dialogue strikes me as hilarious and great. But not impossibly great. I could see myself writing something like this if I worked hard and took my vitamins. I rewind and look for the screenwriter, and I see it’s a David Mamet script. Well, go Dave. It’s not like I’d compare myself to DM, but maybe I’ve written something in the past that is not repugnant. Later Sunday night I slide a cat out of the way and flip back the bed covers at an appropriate hour for sane people, and I find the lullaby “My stuff’s not repugnant” to be oddly comforting.
I once owned the greatest pickup truck on Earth. It was a three-quarter ton, 4-wheel drive International Harvester pickup the color of vomit. The bumpers had been cut off and replaced with cast iron pipes. That truck could perform any feat of hauling, pulling, or intimidating. They truly do not make trucks like that anymore, since International stopped building them 35 years ago. When my life no longer required a truck, I sold it to a good home, and I haven’t owned a pickup since.
When my wife and I bought a house, I considered buying an old pickup. Home ownership occasionally demands that I buy expensive, heavy stuff and cart it to my house, so a truck might prove handy. But we didn’t have a good place in our garage or driveway to park the thing. I suggested parking it in front of the house. My wife reacted as if I’d suggested we build a satanic temple in the front yard, adorned with fountains of blood and a few impaled babies. No particle of my being had considered that parking a truck out front would be a bad thing. So, I found myself confronted by the fact that I am white trash.
That explains a lot. I’ve spent years in academic and business settings around the country and in other countries. Occasionally I’ve said or done something that caused others to react with surprise or mirth. The phenomenon hasn’t caused me great concern, but I have noted it.
I recently read an article on this topic, written by a sociologist. She wrote about her rural-born mother, who got a job in the big city and was embarrassed at how people reacted to her country ways. The writer observed how she herself had experienced this in the past. But she was no longer ashamed of her origin because she had dropped her accent, and she been in grad school, and she had been socialized into academia. She had eradicated evidence of her origin and had assimilated into her new culture. She now felt less fear that she’d be embarrassed because she failed to blend in. But she still might slip, and that was the burden of her uncouth upbringing.
Speaking as a fellow with some Sociology degrees, let me say that no person on Earth is more pretentious, with less justification, than a student in the process of earning a Sociology degree—or than a low-level Sociology professor pursuing tenure. If we want to live and work in a culture, we should learn it until we can navigate it like a native. We should understand that cultural events exist other than the rodeo. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the rodeo. The last time I went to the opera, nobody was selling cotton candy, and that’s hardly a big plus in my book.
I theorize that the “ashamed of our origin” problem stems from childhood. I like willful children. I don’t own one, and I’ll admit that if I did I might feel differently. But I identify with them. When I was one of them I required a lot of guidance and discipline so that I didn’t become a shrieking baboon with sticky fingers and snot on my upper lip. Of course, if I had been forced to attend today’s public schools I would’ve created problems. “Discipline” doesn’t describe what I would require. Alternative schools would be inadequate for me. I would probably end up in a forced labor camp guarded by insane clowns.
But here’s my point. If willful children reach adulthood without being murdered or sent to prison, they’re unlikely to worry about embarrassment or blending in. If they leave home for a fine university or a more cosmopolitan locale, they’ll certainly learn the culture, but they probably won’t hide their past. And any field of endeavor (especially Sociology!) is better off with some members who didn’t all throw spit wads in the same prep school.
In the end, shame over my white trash origin hurts me and also my new-found friends who brim with culture and grace. If they laugh then I laugh with them and show them I don’t care, because confidence is king. And if my paramount concern is to blend in and avoid embarrassment, I should just go back home and chop cotton.
This Independence Day my wife and I patriotically supported the economy by going to the movies. She chose the movie, which was fine with me. I like movies of all kinds. I’m not prejudiced against any genre of movie. I’m prejudiced against movies that suck, regardless of genre. When I say “suck”, I mean poorly written, badly acted, unimaginatively filmed, and so trite that the corpse of a blind flat-worm could see the plot twists coming through a concrete wall.
In these days of Netflix and Hulu, traveling to an actual movie theater seems unspeakably dowdy. Yet I don’t look at it that way. Driving to the multiplex, parking a quarter-mile away, and paying $5.00 for 28 cents worth of popcorn all feel like part of a cherished ritual. The annoyance they cause is in itself oddly comforting. Perhaps it reminds me that I should be expected to put forth at least a little effort if I want to be entertained.
I dislike one part of the experience however. I do not care for previews. I know that some people like them, but to hell with them. When I buy my ticket I have some inkling of whether the movie I’m attending will suck. But watching previews is like being forced to eat a box of demonic Twinkies. Some may contain creamy filling, but some will reek of bile and the corruption of the human spirit.
Theaters think about their preview strategy, of course. They show us the previews they think we’ll like based on the movie we paid to see. For example, if a theater is playing “Descent Into Hell” then it will probably not show a preview for one of the My Little Pony films, unless it’s “My Little Pony – The Reckoning”. They try to target the trailers, but that doesn’t change the fact that lots of the previewed movies suck, and therefore the trailers will suck as well.
When the previews began this afternoon I knew that several trailers would be washing over us. In fact, we saw eight trailers before the actual film. But the movie we’d come to see was a romantic comedy, so I figured the previews couldn’t get truly hideous. Then an amazing trailer appeared, for an upcoming film I shall not name. It’s the story of two guys who’ve been friends for life. One’s a stressed-out family man with no more spontaneity, privacy, or sex life. The other’s a successful, workaholic sex-maniac living a shallow existence. They’re each frustrated by their own lives and envious of the other’s. In the land of movies, there’s only one logical way to resolve this dramatic tension, and of course that’s for these two men to be magically swapped into each other’s bodies, without their knowledge or consent. Then they can have all the fun of seeing how green the grass is on the other side, and then they can get into hilarious trouble, and then they can realize that they want what they had all along, just before they’re magically swapped back and learn a valuable, heartwarming lesson. I understand that this is THE ONLY WAY for movies to handle this situation. I accept that. But it seems that every possible method of magical body-swapping has already been done:
- lightning bolt
- gypsy fortune teller
- magical amulet
- magical earrings
- breaking a voodoo mirror
- spell cast by statue of an Aztec god
- steering wheel blow to the head
- malfunctioning Starfleet transporter
- near-drowning experience
- drink brain-exchanging serum
- magic doodad inherited from a giant dead snake
- magical soul transfer at the point of death gone awry
- get drunk and have sex
- somebody flat out casts a magic spell on you
- brain transplant (after being captured by mutant thugs)
- fortune cookie
- wish that came true for some random, inexplicable reason
All of these mechanisms, and many more besides, have been employed by film makers to realize the artistic vision of the noble “Body Swap” storyline. Therefore, I viewed this afternoon’s preview skeptically. What would keep this movie from fading into the background? What creative twist could make it unique? And then the trailer revealed that these two friends will switch bodies because they’re talking about it while they’re both peeing in a public fountain!
That’s some amazing creativity right there. I can hardly wait.
As I work towards becoming a professionally successful writer, experts and advisors have slammed a message into my head with the force of a trip-hammer. I must develop a presence in the community of writing and publishing, as well as in the community for which I want to write. That includes an online presence, which means blogging, social networking, and websites. Creating my website has been my short-term goal for the past couple of weeks.
After a deluge of technical challenges, I got my website up and running last night. It resides at this highly creative url: www.bill-mccurry.com. Right now the content consists of 3 links to other sites, a sentence pointing out the 3 links to other sites, and a photo I think is kind of pretty. But it’s a beginning. More content will arrive soon!
I’m trying out a new process for responding whenever I jump on Facebook and see that someone has posted the most ignorant and misguided crap I’ve ever seen. For example, someone might post:
“Brazilians have cured cancer, and drug companies don’t want you to know! The article at this link reports a Brazilian study where injecting bee pollen under the tongue four times a day cured 90% of the cancer patients! Drug companies are squashing this research so they can rake in billions of dollars in profits while sick people die of cancer. Re-post this if you care!”
In STEP 1 of my process, I imagine writing the response I’d love to write. For example, I might think to myself:
“This kind of half-assed bullshit makes me want to lock you in an iron box and smash it with a tire iron for a week. You’re torturing sick people with false hope because you’re too lazy to think through the unsubstantiated drivel you read and then spew out of your fingers like electronic diarrhea. Shut the hell up already, or I’ll come to your house and paint ‘Too Stupid to Swallow Spit’ on your front door.”
I then indulge in some growling and perhaps I kick something soft and inanimate, like a sack of laundry I’m too lazy to tackle. After which I implement STEP 2. I sit down at my computer and write a response that’s something like the following:
“Your post is misleading. First, the article you linked is posted on www.drug-companies-die-like-dogs.com, so the objectivity is a little suspect there. Second, if you had read further than the first 14 words into the article, you might understand it better. The study wasn’t about bee pollen, it was about a new drug. The researchers just noticed that patients sat by an open window and bees flew in sometimes, so the researchers extrapolated the effects of bee pollen. That means they flat out guessed in the hopes someone would give them more money to do this asinine bee pollen research. This was an early safety trial with 10 patients, and 9 of them weren’t directly killed by the drug, so that’s where the 90% success rate came from. And by the way, even if this crap was re-posted by a million people, it wouldn’t affect anything in the world other than making Facebook noticeably stupider for a few days. On the other hand, your typing and grammar are lovely, so you must not be a complete waste of DNA.”
After typing this response, I immediately delete it un-posted and have a drink, or maybe two.
I follow up with STEP 3. I close my eyes and think to myself, “I could respond to your foolish post, but that means I’ll get notified about comments of outrage for the next two days. That would only be worth it if I cared even a tiny bit about what you thought, or if my response would have any positive impact on the real world. Since neither of those things is true…”
Thus far my process has been working marvelously. And every time I use it, I get a couple of drinks out of the deal.
I spend a lot of time editing right now. I suck at it because I’ve been through the story in question so often I can now no longer see what’s on the page. That’s a literal statement. I can’t see a misplaced comma any better than I could see Blackbeard’s ghost.
A number of friends have stepped in to rescue me as if I was trapped in the Alps and they were particularly intelligent and generous Saint Bernards. One of my friends, Linnea, came through like a champion, providing me with feedback such as, “I don’t like any of your characters.” Now that is the kind of friend every writer needs like a tick needs blood.
Linnea also observed that several hundred insults appear in the story and that no insults are repeated. I don’t have her verbatim comment at hand, but I think the words “cool” and “disturbing” may have been involved. Early in my first draft I realized that my characters were going to insult each other a lot. Possibly that is why Linnea didn’t like them. I challenged myself to come up with a new insult every time, just to keep things fresh for the reader, and for me as well.
Over the subsequent 8 weeks of writing, I realized that I have no reliable process for creating insults. However, I did come to understand a few guidelines. When I needed an insult, those guidelines reduced my insult-generation time to about 5 minutes of staring at my screen, rather than staring at my screen forever without producing any insults.
To create an insult I first have to know what kind of insult I require. The plain old insult is just a derogatory description. It often involves phrases like, “You are…”, “You smell…”, or “Your momma is…” For example:
“Your breath smells like the inside of a wino’s shoe.”
However, sometimes I need an epithet, which is a specialized insult. An epithet descriptively names the insulted party in some way. Famous epithets include “Oscar the Grouch” and “Capitalist Running Dog.” You can see that epithets include a noun (in some cases a proper noun). For example:
“Barrel full of dumbass.”
I’ve found that the loose guidelines below make for fun insults, although you don’t need to use all of them together.
1. Make sure the insult makes sense in some way. It should be relevant to the insulted party or the situation.
If the insulted party is an oppressive bastard, an insult like “You couldn’t tell fine wine from your mother’s piss,” would just confuse everyone. Something like “Baby-kicking chunk of butt-fungus,” seems more appropriate.
2. Employ alliteration and/or assonance.
Streamlined insults wound more deeply, or at least they sound better. Alliteration gives an insult extra zip. Hard consonants like “B”, “C”, “K”, “P”, and “T” yield especially pleasing results. Contrast this insult for a tall woman, “Telephone pole with breasts,” versus, “Tree trunk with tits.” You can see which one pierces more deeply. With regard to assonance, compare these insults for a shiftless, untrustworthy person: “Lazy, no-good cur,” versus “Ass-dragging jackal.” Assonance can transform a tedious insult into something close to poetry.
3. Build insults with rhythm in mind.
A rhythmic flow of words, as in poetry or song lyrics, makes the insult fly off your tongue. Such insults produce beauty and malevolent venom at the same time. As an example, for a mean-spirited, petty woman consider these insults: “Cruel, fearful vat of goat drool,” vs. “Vindictive, cowardly yak’s twat.” The first one is fine, and it does the job. But the second has a rhythmic flow that makes it a little sweeter on the ears, in my opinion.
I’ll be headed back to my blind and mostly ineffective editing now. I hope that these insights have enabled you to be just a little bit meaner to your characters—or maybe to your friends.
Today I’m struggling with a title. I’ve read that Hemingway went through hundreds of possible titles for each book. I’ve only been through 100 or so, but every one of them reeks of inadequacy. I need a title that compels people to read my story–they must be incapable of resisting once my title has seized them. The title must evoke a sense of the story, but it mustn’t be too obvious. Hopefully the title’s meaning and relevance will be gracefully revealed to the reader and then completely realized as he finishes the story. Ideally, the title’s beauty will cause people to weep.
To give you a sense of how close I am to the ideal title, my best candidate so far is, “Santa Claus is My Bitch”.
All right, back to work.