Claire of the Sea Light and Do You Guys Remember Nibs?

Even from those very first hours, Claire was an easy and quiet child. It was as though she already knew that she could not afford to be picky or make demands. - Claire of the Sea Light, Edwidge Danticat

2015 has been a good year for me, books-wise. I read close to 50 books, which is pretty good I think considering how many video games I've been playing lately. The trick is just to ignore your kids. It's that easy! I wish I could do audio books, because then it would be way more, but listen, I don't have to justify anything to you. If you think that you can stand there (I assume you're standing while reading this, standing desks are so 2015) and tell me that filling in the gaps in my classic video game knowledge is any better than reading books, well I don't know. Maybe.

This isn't a discussion about what's cooler and makes you more interesting and handsome: books or Playstation One games. It's actually nothing yet. Right now this blog post is an intro with nowhere to go. Likely this whole paragraph will be gone when I think of something better. Put some money on it and then come back in a couple minutes. It will be a fun way to spend the day at the office.

Oh yeah, I was talking about how many books I've read and humble-bragging about it. I know a lot of people have read more than me, but what are they, sexy librarians? Not all of us can be sexy librarians. Some of us have to be sexy wildlife biologists. And we don't get to sit around and read all day like it's our job. This beard does not grow itself.

Some of us, in addition to reading and fighting bone dragons, have also been cooking delicious, low-sodium meals. We have been hiking, winning fantasy football leagues (YES), and getting into Facebook arguments about politics and Star Wars. We have been reading a lot of comic books. In other words, one full-sized book a week is pretty good for us.

Of the 50 books, I gave 18 a full 5-star rating on Goodreads (This post is sponsored by Goodreads. Goodreads: where failed writers use their mom's internet connection to demonstrate the reasons for their failures) which I think is a pretty good ratio. Many more got four stars. Few got less than three. This means close to nothing, by the way. It reflects how I felt at the moment and assigning a quantifiable number to an overall impression is a fools game. It also says that I want to enjoy every book I read and give them the full benefit of the doubt.

A few of them I didn't finish. I don't feel bad about this one bit. A couple I skimmed towards the end. Some of them I tore apart into little tiny pieces (metaphorically, all you sexy librarians) and devoured them like little niblets of licorice, savoring their corn-syrupy goodness, their words sticking in my mind like candy stuck in the filling I had to get replaced because of all the licorice. To be explored and probed by the tongue of my inquisitiveness and swallowed by the throat of my psyche.

Some of the ones that are still "sticking" (please let this be the end of that metaphor) with me are My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante, Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, Undermajordomo Minor, by Patrick Dewitt, and Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich is a book I think about literally every day.

You guys looking at that paragraph makes me realize that I'm going to have to link every one of those books to their corresponding blog post and that just makes me tired. If there are links up there I sincerely believe that I should be congratulated both for the accomplishment and for living such a life where menial tasks are a good justification for such extravagant praise.

Ugh, it isn't even a good list! H is for Hawk isn't on there! Neither is How to be Both and Breath, Eyes, Memory! I am so bad at this. Just read my blog. Or my Goodreads (Goodreads, I took a class in literature once in community college so I know what good fiction is) list. Talk to me. Like a human being does one to another. Let's go get cocoa (you can drink coffee, I don't judge) and talk about books. There is a doughnut shop right across from my office. Let's eat doughnuts together.

My point is that I read a lot of good books this year and am a better person for it. Just up there I mentioned Breath, Eyes, Memory which is the book that introduced me to Edwidge Danticat. She wrote another book, too! Well, a bunch, but the the one I read was Claire of the Sea Light. And guess what, I like it.

Claire is celebrating her seventh birthday, which is bittersweet for many reasons. The first being that her mother died in childbirth, so each birthday is an anniversary of the death of her father's wife. Her father, Nozias, is a poor fisherman who worries about dying in the sea as his best friend does at the beginning of the book. He wants to give Claire away to a wealthy widow in their community.

You know, upon thinking about it, it's actually just bitter. I don't think Claire is having a very happy birthday at all.

Anyway, though Claire is the central piece around which these characters focus, we find that each one has a long history that intertwines with one another like lives do in small communities. There is a mayor who is also the undertaker, there's a schoolmaster, and a radio host. There's murder and corrupt politicians and true love and tragedy.

Like with Breath, Eyes, Memory, the story takes place in Haiti. And her writing is just my favorite kind. Danticat can be poetic at times, but for the most part it's spare and doesn't call attention to itself. It's hard to pull "beautiful" language from the book to put in the blog, but that's good. She lets the stories spin out in a way that doesn't waste time or energy. When it comes to writing styles, I'll always pick spare and lean over flowery. Probably because I seem so incapable of doing that myself.

Here's to a good year, you guys. Let's have another one. Thanks for reading.

choose what to mend

How do you even choose what to mend when so much has already been destroyed? How could she think, she asked herself, that she could revive or save anything? 

- Claire of the Sea Light, Edwidge Danticat

Atwood's The Heart Goes Last and Falling In

My family has camped together for every year of my life. They may have been doing it before I was born but honestly I’m pretty iffy about whether that period really existed or is actually just elaborate back story to the universe that began on July 23, 1979. I am not fully convinced that any time before isn't basically a series of ret-conned prequels that didn't quite live up to the main event.

Anyway, whether or not said camping took place before that date aside, it has certainly happened since. I’ve missed but three of these outings. Two because I was off in Mexico eating fish heads and one because I was on a wildfire fighting crew and was duty-bound to be within one hour of my station.

Oh guys, don’t think I’m cool because I was a wildfire fighter, because I was not. That year there were no fires. Zero. I spent the summer installing sprinkler systems while waiting for a phone call to ring that would promise adventure and some measure of financial security that never came. Also I missed out on the family camping trip.

When I was young, a major part of these trips was hunting for minnows with my cousin in whatever stream was closest to camp. We would catch said minnows in Dixie cups and we got pretty good at it. We figured out where they hung out, one of us would sweep our cup under an overhang while the other waited on the other side. Some fish, scared by the one cup, would swim in to the other and vice versa. I’m told that coyotes and badgers hunt prairie dogs and burrowing rodents in a similar manner.

In my memories I feel like we left in the morning and came back at dinnertime, which is something that if my kids were doing the same thing would terrify me. If my kids were just gone in nature for more than an hour I think there would be helicopters looking for them. Maybe we were gone for just a couple of hours. I was drinking a lot of heroin back then so my memories are fragile.

Here’s what I’m getting at, though, and it only took four paragraphs to find the point. The point is that I became somewhat legendary for my inability to stay dry on these ventures. While my older cousin hopped nimbly from rock to rock, I always found the slick one, or the wobbly one, or just missed the one altogether. I always fell in.

If you were to track my movements, Billy from Family Circus style, across the various streams in which we adventured, you’d see lots of splashes. And I often returned to camp a muddy mess. If asked, I imagine I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I fell in a lot.”

Now, if you could track the progression of my life as if it were a mountain stream in the high uintas, you might see the same thing. A dotted line traveling in a not-so-straight line through a variety of obstacles, with plenty of splashes. Hey Howie, you ask, how did you travel through this life and come out such a muddy mess? Answer? I fell in a lot.

In my mind, at least, I don’t compare favorably with my peers. When it comes to things like career progression, home ownership, level of karate mastery, cleanliness of household, cleanliness of clothing, and hair ownership and placement, I constantly feel like I’m behind. While I look around and see people who have figured things out I still have no idea what I’m doing. I look back on my life and see lots of spots where I missed the rock, or it budged under my foot, or it was slippery and I didn’t have the balance.

And listen, you guys, I’m good. I know that when I fell in I got wet, maybe skinned my knee, got some mud on me that’s hard to scrub off, but I was not swept downstream. There’s something to be said for getting back up and catching more minnows, and I get that. This is not Howie’s pity party. I have a life that is enviable to the vast majority of humans both living now and who have lived all of the way up until this point. I have a wonderful wife and three great kids and we’re warm and comfortable and rarely hungry. We’re safe and have access to high-quality health care and a steady paycheck. All I’m saying that when I read a book about someone who seems to make as many poor decisions as good ones I see a little of myself in there.

The good stories, to me, are the ones where the main character isn’t a hero or a villain, though they could be easily painted as either depending on their narrator. The Heart Goes Last, by Margaret Atwood, is not one of those good stories. It may be the worst book I've read since starting this venture. Not that I read all of it. Oh no. I stopped when one of the main characters was being smuggled out of a totalitarian prison community while dressed as an Elvis impersonator, his companion a beautiful brain-washed woman who was supposed to be a slave but instead fell in love with a teddy bear that she carried in her purse.

I didn't make any of that up.

I know that not two posts ago I was praising Atwood, though I have had trouble with her books in the past. I've found that her speculative future universes tend to fall apart upon later reflection. Like the old-west towns in amusement parks. They look great if you stroll right down the middle, but you start to poke in the corners and you see through the slats of old-timey wood a bunch of roller coasters and children vomiting funnel cake. In the past, though, the stories have been compelling enough that I have at least a pretty good time, and sometimes a great one.

The Heart Goes Last starts well. It's about a married couple living in their car after a major financial collapse has left their city in near ruins. The reasons are vague, but it all sounds familiar. Housing crises, unregulated banking, a run on Beanie Boo brand plush toys (this blog is sponsored today by Beanie Boo. Beanie Boo, their eyes are big what do you want me to do), whatever. The point is things are bad and looking worse. Stan is tempted to join in to his brother's apparently criminal enterprise, and Charmaine works at a bar and is increasingly tempted by the local prostitutes' invitation for her to join the practice.

Then they see an ad on the TV for a new kind of community. Where there are jobs and food and safety. Like suckers, and because Atwood needs an excuse to get them there and we're supposed to think that in such a crisis the TV set wouldn't be constantly flooded with easy fixes and that our protagonists would be numb to it by now, they join.

It seems great at first, but there are hidden secrets, blah, blah, blah. Fine. I've been on board with flimsy future worlds as an excuse to deal with day-to-day domestic situations before. I mean I wrote one. But give me the benefit of the doubt here. To further the old-west town metaphor, this is less like the professional shootout-at-noon Main Street and more like some cardboard boxes my 7-year-old arranged and labeled in sharpie "Jel" and "Sharif" and "Horehous." It's like a J.J. Abrams Star Trek universe.

And even, after all of this, if the story between Charmaine and Stan were interesting against this flimsy backdrop, even then I would be fine. And yet it's not. Charmaine is supposed to be sweet and innocent with a dark side, but instead comes across as dumb and easily manipulated. Stan, I guess, is supposed to be resourceful, but instead we're forced to read his childish fantasies about rescuing women and having them show their gratitude in a way a 13-year old may expect. There is almost an interesting part where gender roles seem sort of reversed, but then it's abandoned. Neither character is, at any point, an agent in their own story. Instead they are constantly manipulated and moved around by others like little pegs in the Game of Life.

To return to my original point, these two fall in a lot, and I'm not sure I was rooting for them to get back up.

In the past I've felt conflicted in criticizing someone else's art. I know it's hard to write and publish a book. It's awful hard to make it work, and be entertaining, and tell us something. But man, you guys. I hated this book so bad.

No, we can't live at that pitch.

The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it. 

-Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves 

Who is Elena Ferrante and Why Have I Just Now Found Out About Her?

I feel no nostalgia for my childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.
-Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

In my last post I talked a lot about nostalgia. And I keep thinking about it. We often look back on our childhoods with fondness, but we express it by focusing on the goods that were available to purchase and consume at the time. There must be some deep chemical response to desiring and getting toys, games, books, and tapes that creates brain pathways. Listen, I’m not a brain surgeon, and while I certainly have a firmer grasp on foreign policy than one, I don’t know why we are how we are.

What I can say is that one need only to post a picture of a toy that existed when we were young and it will spread across the internet like the one time in Junior High when the rumor spread that I hadn’t hit puberty yet: inexplicable and kind of creepy.

What strikes me as particularly weird is how we seem to be so nostalgic for terrible things. I remember riding around in the back of my friend’s pickup truck when we would leave the high school campus for lunch. We’d lie down in the back to avoid police, essentially one wrong turn or drunk driver away from being a tragic memory for our graduating class when those three kids who nobody really knew but seemed nice enough I guess were thrown across four lanes of traffic. Our parents recount going on long car trips while being stacked in the back of the station wagon like sardines. Their only comfort being a solitary lick of a horehound lollypop and the soothing sounds of FDR on the wireless, declaring war.

Those were the good old days, I guess. Things were simpler. More moms grieved the death of their babies, but that’s a small price to pay for the fond memories we have of riding on the hoods of cars while our irresponsible older friend who should know better took tight turns and sent us rolling across a parking lot and then subsequently passing out at the sight of our own blood. I mean, we were fine, and that’s the thing that matters.

But now it’s nanny nation, you guys. We’re being told by big government that we should put our children in car seats as soon as they are born. They won’t even let us take our new baby home from the hospital without one! It’s almost like they see that brand new infant not as a cute little pet that we can’t wait to start posting on the social medias, but as a potential emergency room case and drain on resources within minutes, maybe even seconds, of letting it into our care.

Why, I remember when a man could punch his wife and the neighbors knew to mind their own business! When football players were actually allowed to play football, instead of all this namby-pamby oh-dear-you’re-going-to-be-senile-at-age-36-boo-hoo talk we hear now. If you didn’t want your life to be shortened on a football field you shouldn’t have let your dad try to live all of his spoiled dreams through you, is all I have to say about that. I mean nowadays in Obama’s America if a young girl is raped, she’s actually encouraged to report her rapist, even if it means he won’t be able to go on a mission! It’s like we’re telling young women that their lives are as important as a man’s. Can you imagine how dangerous that is?

Why, people are saying now that being sad is a disease! Can you even? I can not even. I know that “scientists” in “lab coats” are telling us that there’s “evidence” that there are “chemicals” in our “brains” that regulate “mood,” but I know from the bottom of my heart that people would be happy if they just stopped sinning. Why, look at Jesus! Just pulling out a random scripture we’ll see that “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Well. Obviously that’s a mistranslation because I believe every word of the Bible except for the parts I don’t agree with politically.

Anyway this concludes the broad straw-man satire of this post.

The reason I loved, loved, loved My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is because, like in that first line, she is brutally honest about childhood. Nobody knows anything about Ferrante. She’s considered the most important contemporary author in Italy and as far as I know nobody has even met her. But my goodness is her writing interesting.

They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.

Ferrante’s tiny, poor community outside of Naples feels completely authentic. The way Ferrante tells the story of two girls, Elena and Lila, growing up is frankly astonishing. When they’re young, there is only their neighborhood, and there are dangers. A local man who is despised by the community is thought by the girls to turn into a shadow at night and steal their dolls. As they grow older, you feel the community enlarging along with their awareness of it. Imaginary dangers are replaced with the more concrete. As they develop into young women, every interaction takes on a sinister tone and can be frightening and loaded with implications.

Elena and Lila learn the history of the people in the neighborhood, tracing back the sources of old feuds and tragedy. They witness new ones. There is no point when Ferrante sugar-coats the experience, she never talks down to her characters as children. Never tries to paint an idyllic childhood. It’s just so impressive. Ferrante must have some kind of memory of childhood the rest of us can’t tap into, to view an entire life so clearly.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been affected by a book like this.

Here’s where I try to put a button on this whole thing. I started with some personal observations and ended with a brief book review. It’s nice to have a format.

Look, I don’t want to make people feel bad. I get it. I get why we pine for earlier days that seem simpler but in fact were just as complicated. It’s crappy that kids look at iPads instead of out the window on long drives and we think we’re blowing it. We want our kids to have our childhood but what I’m saying is that we’re lucky we got through it, just like every generation of children is lucky they got through the meat grinder of human existence throughout history.

Here’s my take on today: it’s a good time to be a kid if you’re weird. You can draw dragons and play Magic or Pokemon during recess and you won’t get punched probably. That’s different from even when I was a kid. It’s a good time to be a kid if you have behavior disorders, or autism, or a wheelchair. There are people there for you that weren’t there 50 years ago. It’s a good time for kids with diseases that are now curable. If you’re black, or fresh from Mexico, or a little girl who likes science, or a little boy who likes ballet, or you don’t think you fit in the body you were given for whatever reason, there has never been a better time to be a kid.

It’s scary but it’s always scary. Today my kids have drills to deal with a shooter in the school; it makes me sick to think about it. When I was young I think I developed an ulcer fearing an earthquake because I’d been told all of the ways in which our school was not earthquake safe. There were bomb shelters at my school from when my parents went there and were under the constant perceived shadow of nuclear attack. Before then children had friends die of polio and tuberculosis. Before then maybe there were cave bear attacks at school, I don’t know.

Wikipedia

Outlaw cave bears!
"Yeah, but if we make cave bears criminal only criminals will have cave bears."

I'm just saying give your kids a break. Give yourselves a break. Give a delicious Kit Kat a break (this post has been sponsored by Kit Kat.)

Atwood's Stone Mattress and a Dalliance With Video Games

Does she ever see him watching her through the picture window? Most likely. Does she think he’s a lecherous old man? Very probably. But he isn’t exactly that. How to convey the mix of longing, wistfulness, and muted regret that he feels? His regret is that he isn’t a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be.
–Margaret Atwood, Stone Mattress

I was looking at my Amazon wishlist lately and realized that one could trace my obsessions through the years based on what I was wishing for at the time. It’s not subtle. It more or less starts with rock climbing paraphernalia, then longboarding, a brief dalliance with photography, US Presidents, board games, then disc golf. My most recent obsession, one that became at one point almost consuming, was collecting classic video games.

A story of frustration in three acts

It started when I brought home my childhood Super Nintendo and the games I managed to find. Then a friend gave me his Nintendo and some of his games. I started looking for more. I realized that I didn’t have a Sega Genesis and I was like what? So I went on social media and asked for one and soon one was under my TV. I started looking for rare games, buying and selling games from thrift stores and Goodwill sales in order to raise the money to get more. I met other people doing the same thing and admired their collections. I started meeting strangers wearing hoodies in parking lots, passing cash for gray cartridges in plastic baggies.

Doesn't it feel good just looking at it?

Rock bottom for me was bidding too much on a game I didn’t even want because it was scarce and valuable. Not because I wanted to buy it, even, but because I couldn’t stand someone else getting it that cheaply. I won the auction and had to scramble to sell games I actually wanted to keep in order to pay for this commitment I’d made. I was, in other words, sick.

I’ve stopped now. I sold that valuable game (Sunset Riders, if you’re curious) to a stranger in a gas station parking lot (like one does) and built a little computer that I can now plug into my TV that has virtually every game I could ever want and all of the bad ones I would never wish on my worst enemy (you know who you are), even though I would. I’m currently left drifting without a current obsession, but rest assured there will be one because it’s how I’m wired and at this point I try to just channel that energy into something cheap or at least beneficial to society.

Salvation

When I was obsessively acquiring games I found myself showing a clear bias for a window of gaming starting with the original Nintendo Entertainment System and ending at the end of the Super Nintendo life span. I told myself that it’s a golden age of video games. That I just loved the controllers back then. That there was purity to the 8 and 16 bit graphics that modern games with their polygons and their processors and their murder and full-frontal nudity just don’t rival. In reality, though, I was chasing a time period because of how it felt.

I wanted to collect the cartridges that the Matt of 1985-1995 or so coveted. Games I once held with reverence, that I rented from the mom and pop video stores before they were taken over by chains which were subsequently taken over by internet streaming sites which I’m supposed to feel bad about now. Games I found waiting for me on Christmas morning and had to face the prospect of playing for the rest of the year whether they were good or not. Games that reminded me of a slumber party at a friend’s house. Or playing until late at night during summer vacation on a tiny Commodore 64 monitor while rocking back and forth in a blue banana chair and eating Funyuns.

Reader, I was not seeking classic video games for their historical value, though that was my argument at the time. I was seeking the feeling of that era. Holding a Super Nintendo controller in my hand felt right. Like we’d been separated and it was only when I felt those buttons (the top two concave, the bottom two convex) under my fingers that I was whole again. Or at least felt something.

But you guys, there is no golden age of video games. I would argue that there’s no golden age of literature or movies or music, either. The only golden age was the one in Greek myth, when the Greek poet said “[Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace.” Sound familiar? It’s not the art, it’s the you. What you love comes from a time that you look back on with fondness.

I’m always interested in our inability to see things from someone else’s perspective. Because this experience is the only one you’ve lived, it’s easy to make declarations like “they really knew how to make games back then.” Or “this new music is garbage,” or “wasn’t it cool back when I didn’t know that I had kidney disease?”

Ok, that last one might be a little too specific. But you guys I grew up when grunge music was popular. Flannel shirts and massive shorts that touched your shoes but were still shorts were acceptable attire for school. Boys shaved half of their head and grew the other side long. Girls wore babydoll dresses over long-sleeved shirts and leggings. All media aimed at children had to do with mutated animals. I heard girls my age say that Dave Matthews was handsome. There is just no way this was a golden age for anything.

Why is Mad Men a big deal? Because the decision makers behind TV shows are in their 40s. They remember the 60s and 70s like I remember the 80s and 90s. It’s comforting to them to see that kind of thing on screen, to imagine what it was like to be an adult at a time when you were a kid. Does it surprise you that The Wonder Years came out in ’88? Well, it may shock you to realize that something you still remember as kind of recent happened almost 20 years ago but guys that’s life. Everything changes except for Danica McKellar. Deal with it.

And the passion we feel for the things from that time period is only rivaled by the hatred we feel for what immediately replaced it. The Nintendo 64 and Playstation are hot messes to me. I have almost no nostalgia for them and find the majority of their games repulsive to look at, but for someone just a few years younger than me they are the sweet spot of gaming. The golden age. I hate the bands that make up the post-grunge/nu-metal movement. Creed literally makes me barf. Nickelback blows. Bush, Puddle of Mudd, Staind. I can’t even manage to like the Foo Fighters and they seem like the coolest dudes on earth. That list of bands is like a litany of the worst music created by human beings. When I hear them all I remember is seething (also there was a band called Seether and they were terrible.)

Why do I hate these things? Because I was in my late teens/early twenties. Everything was trendy and bullcrap and I was the only one seeing through their phony veneer. I was so advanced. Didn’t people realize they were being force-fed pap and thanking the manipulative media overlords for the privilege? Never mind that for the generation before me Atari was the only decent system and grunge was just a bunch of hair-metal wannabes but with uglier stage costumes.

To summarize, all of our opinions are garbage and growing up sucks.

This is 36-year-old me talking, by the way. I’m currently in a place where things are pretty good. They could be better (basically if I had more money and a new kidney), but not much better. My kids are at a good age and Kristin is still getting hotter. Like legit hotter, not the thing that guys say when they’re being nice but where I get distracted at work thinking about her. Thanksgiving is fun. Christmas is fun. Going sledding is fun. Throwing around a football is fun. I play old Nintendo games with my kids and Super Nintendo games with my wife after they go to bed (not a euphemism). I’m delighted that I live in a world where I can buy a package of Starbursts that only includes shades of red.

But there’s something weird about us humans that if things are going good, good becomes the status quo. Anything less than that is terrible and good is only kind of OK. We want to be great. And remember, if we become great, then great is the new good. That’s why sometimes we need to read Margaret Atwood to remind us that it could always be worse.
Atwood, in Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, reminds us all that we will be old and die someday. She’s 76 now and giving us a little glimpse of what it’s like to be a senior. Even someone as hip as Atwood acknowledges that that hip needs replacing at advanced age (I’m sorry) and stuff starts to crap out on you. It’s a book of short stories, and most of them are about the combination of confidence and not-giving-a-crap that comes with age along with the frailty it entails. The creator of a famous fantasy novel series rambles around her apartment alone while an ice storm rages outside. An aged poet reflects on his one true love who he betrayed. Residents of an assisted living facility watch as extremists rally to rid the world of the elderly.

And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them – smelly, evil, undead – but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.

They’re not all like this. There’s the story of a child with a genetic abnormality who is mistaken by her village as a vampire. A middle-aged woman gets revenge, decades later, on her rapist. And a great noir story about a storage unit entrepreneur finding more than he bargained for in a unit that would make for a great Hitchcock movie. These characters dwell in the past. The good old days, the bad ones, past betrayals and triumphs. But instead of taking lessons from them, take a lesson from Atwood. In her 70s she’s still writing relevant fiction that feels fresh and new while we in our 30s pine for our youth.

Nintendo’s good, guys. It’s real good. But there’s a lot more out there than Nintendo. Nostalgia can be bad for us. Literally, in my case, as a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese has a day’s worth of sodium in one bowl. Stuff’s nasty. Let’s grow up.

Not too much

Children don't know the meaning of yesterday

“Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don't want to think about the rest. Children don't know the meaning of yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”
-Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

Undermajordomo Minor is the Title of a Book and Also the Name of a Character

“He wandered here and there over rolling hills. He never saw the ocean but dreamed of it often enough.”

It doesn’t happen a lot that the same author makes his or her way onto the esteemed pages of Howie’s Book Club, so let’s give a very special, warm welcome to Patrick deWitt. Oh, you didn’t know that there was a physical copy of this blog that contains actual pages? It’s written with the quill of an Egyptian goose and dipped in only the finest Indian ink. You see, in addition to being an exhausting pedant I’m also painfully pretentious and seem to have some kind of thing against geese and Indian squids.

Do you remember when I read and then wrote about The Sisters Brothers? If you click on that you’ll find that it was good and fun and cracked me the f up. Also thoughtful. Dewitt has a knack for writing characters of few words saying profound things in a way that hasn’t been said before. From The Sisters Brothers: “I do not know what it was about that boy but just looking at him, even I wanted to clout him on the head. It was a head that invited violence.”

This is a book I read last March and I think about it maybe 4 times a day, so when Undermajordomo Minor came out I read it, too. So far this is turning into a real good story.

Want to know another good story? Undermajordomo Minor, by Patrick deWitt.

“What are rooms for if not for entering, after all. Or also exiting. Indeed, think of how many rooms we enter and exit in our span of days, boy. Room to room to room. And we call it a life.”

I never know how much to tell you guys about a book, because my relationship with them is like this: I go into them just straight ignorant. Most of the time I pick a book based on a recommendation from a source that I trust. I have a little list in my phone and every time I’m at the library I grab three or four. Then I just read the suckers. I don’t even read the back.

This is fun because I have no idea what the setting is, who the main character is going to be, or even what genre it’s in. Like I’ll start a book and be forty pages in and be like, Oh man this is a mystery. But really if you read books like this every one is a mystery. The places books will go sometimes just gives me one heck of a thrill everybody. Also because they’re all at the library if I don’t like it I stop reading immediately and I’m not out anything. This is really a good way to live. I’ve got life figured out for sure.

So should I tell you what’s going on here or do you just figure it out? Double-edged sword, folks. On the one hand I don’t know if my recommendations on their own hold enough weight to sway you all, so I worry that if I don’t weave a compelling word picture you won’t read them. In the other hand are Oreos so I might be too busy.

Haha just kidding I spent all weekend filling a tiny computer with old video games. Like, every one. Oh my gosh you guys come to my house and we’ll play so many video games that were made when I was a kid. Games that used to cost $70 dollars and you would get one a year, so you had to play it every single day for months whether it was good or bad but now you’ll play for 10 seconds and say “that was once a thing.” It’s pretty fun, guys. Also no Oreos, which is a fact that just now made me a little sad.

Anyway, here: Lucien, who for most of the book goes by Lucy, is a shiftless kid in a tiny town who isn’t particularly happy there. The local religious leader gets him a job at a castle. There he finds true love, a rival, a few friends, a taste for raw fish, some confidence, and some snappy dialogue.

“I shall not sit idly by and settle for anything other than a perfect cup of tea.”

“No.”

“Compromise is a plague of sorts, would you agree, yes or no?”

“I don’t know that I’ve thought of it before, sir.”

“A man accepts an inferior cup of tea, telling himself it is only a small thing. But what comes next? Do you see?”

“I suppose, sir.”

“Very good. Now. After my breakfast, you will return to find your own breakfast awaiting you in the scullery. Do not forget to compliment Agnes’s fare, even if the fare does not warrant it.”

“I understand.”

“The fare will not warrant it.”

“I understand.”

OK, here’s another thing I’ll tell you. Undermajordomo Minor is a fairy tale. Unlikely things happen. You suspend your disbelief sometimes because you’re having so much fun. And somehow, though you won’t be one-hundred percent on board with Lucy at the beginning, you’ll root for that guy at the end and like me be real sad that this book has to end
.

We Need New Names, We Need New Dialogue

Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.

-NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

Oh my gosh you guys are you tired? I’m exhausted. Every morning when I see the fresh articles and blogs and think-pieces it just takes a toll. It whittles away at my soul. And do I fall for it? I do. I take the bait as bad or worse as the most annoying person you know on social media (which in this case may be me. Sorry) and fire off my missives. I comfort myself by saying that I only post things from reputable sources and try to fact-check before flying off the handle, but in the end I'm just a guy and can overreact with the best of them.

Oh and it never stops. It was police violence and then gun control and then Planned Parenthood and then LDS Church policy. And amidst that big burning conflict of the day, whatever it is, there’s little fights all of the time. Sexism and racism do or don’t exist and do or don’t affect minorities or actually it’s the majority that’s being affected this time. When the new thing pops up we all forget about it and move on. At one point a bunch of Mormons thought the earth was coming to an end in September and a few others were getting very wealthy from it. It’s been weird.

And here I am gleefully just taking whatever it is and running with it. Like I got my lines for today’s episode of the worst soap opera on earth and man I just start spouting them out. Sometimes I try to make a joke, but mostly I just post articles. Other people make their own jokes and post their own articles. Those make me mad. Sometimes I engage directly, sometimes I take a shower and get all worked up and post a manifesto. After I get out of the shower, of course. It’s almost always about the fight of the day (FOTD from here on out). And somehow we all got conscripted.

Like sometimes does it feel like we’re just ants and we have our job each day? One day we’re carrying a beetle and another it’s a caterpillar but in the end it’s just a big crowd of us gathered around a stinking carcass arguing about which direction it should go. And yet if we don’t fight, then what? Are we wise and above the fray? Are we diplomatic? Or are we cowards? Is it better to stay silent when, to you, the people around you are engaging in an echo-chamber of wrongness or is it your job to stand up and say “this is bull and here’s why”? Honestly I don't know and it's why I'm asking.

At one point I deleted my Facebook account and it was because of the ugliness during the McCain/Obama campaign which feels pretty quaint now. When I came back it was with a vow that I wouldn’t engage in politics and that lasted maybe a year. Let’s do this, I must have said to myself before comically cracking my knuckles and tilting my head back and forth to do that cool thing that The Rock does when he has been cooking and wants to share the aromatic bouquet. Can you smell what Ol’ Howie is cooking? It’s probably Jambalaya.

Jambalaya

Here’s the question I’ve been asking myself lately. Am I fighting for what I believe or am I fighting for my team? Do I take to the social media stream to defend my own conscience or am I defending a group I belong to in spite of it? If a political party or religion or pundit or author I ally myself with comes out with a stance that I am personally uncomfortable with, do I speak out against it or do I struggle to alter my worldview to fit this stance? You guys I think that’s the wrong thing to do.

If you’re honestly afraid of Syrian refugees living in your community, OK. I mean it doesn’t fit any of the data we have about refugees and it doesn’t address the recent attacks in Paris or the fact that we’re 200 times less likely to die in a terrorist attack than we are in our own bathtubs, but fine. We all have irrational fears. But guys, if you’re defending governors and legislators who are trying to block Syrian and Iraqi refugees and it goes against what the voice of right and wrong in your head is saying because they belong to your political party? Cut it out. Just stop it. Oh my gosh.

Most refugees want to stay in their country. That’s where their family is, their friends, their homes, their businesses, their food. It’s where their grandma held them when they were babies. It’s where they can speak without encumbrance in the language in which they think. It’s where their family members are buried.

“Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages,” NoViolet Bulawayo writes in her novel We Need New Names, “and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.”

And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances and smiled with the shyness of child brides. They said, Africa? We nodded yes. What part of Africa? We smiled. Is it that part where the vultures wait for famished children to die? We smiled. Where the life expectancy is thirty-five years? We smiled. Is it there where dissidents shove AK-47s between women’s legs? We smiled. Where people run about naked? We smiled. That part where they massacred each other? We smiled. Is it where the old president rigged the election and people were tortured and killed and a whole bunch of them put in prison and all, there where they are dying of cholera – oh my God, yes, we’ve seen your country; it’s been on the news.

In We Need New Names, Bulawayo writes what she knows. About being an immigrant from Zimbabwe after Robert Mugabe killed 20,000 political opponents and sent the rest to leave comfortable homes to live in slums. About every election being the one where change will come but when elections are rigged and change does not come they converge on the tin hut where the alcohol is. And she knows about leaving, and going to the place where dreams come true, and realizing that when you get there you need to adjust those dreams. “Leaving your country is like dying, and when you come back you are like a ghost returning to earth, roaming around with missing gaze in your eyes.”

It’s not a long book. It’s very good. There is no way to know what someone else is going through without being that person, but here you can get just a tiny glimpse of what these people are going through. If after that you analyze your conscience and can still walk away whistling while you deny them safety, you won’t hear a word about it from me.

Yeah I'm Pretty Much the Only Person To "Get" Jane Eyre No Big Deal

Do you remember how a couple of days ago I got all downer hour on everyone and I was like "ooh maybe we should stop worrying for one tiny second about if your tv show gets cancelled and start thinking about people living lives of quiet horror?" I know, I'm the worst. I got on that kick because I was thinking about this book I read. You might have heard about it. It's called The Sears Wishbook. No. I mean Jane Eyre. Poor Jane, you guys. What a life. It works out ok. I mean, she's dead now because it was published like 170 years ago. So that happened. But the book ends kind of nice. Spoiler alert.

If you read the Goodreads  reviews for Jane Eyre you’d think it was all about a romance between two central characters. (Goodreads! Manufacturing drivel in exchange for nothing! Misunderstanding even basic literature since 2006!) There’s a lot of talk about Mr. Rochester in the same hushed tones as the endless discussion of Mr. Darcy. All these misters in Victorian literature rarely seem like fully fleshed-out characters. Instead they are a well-dressed symbol of escape from poor life in a world where for a woman there is no other option.

It’s a shame that so many people read Jane Eyre in high school and never look at it again. To a young reader, it could come across as a treatise on how with enough wit and intelligence, even a plain girl can marry into money! Just as Les Miserables somehow cast off its discussion of French history, religion, philosophy, social justice, young radicalism, and Parisian architecture to become a trite story of two people who fall in love even though one of them is a personality-free blank-slate, Jane Eyre somehow becomes about Mr. Rochester. O Mr. Rochester!

Jane Eyre is not about Mr. Rochester, who is for the most part a whiny spoiled diaper baby. It’s about a young woman who overcomes impossible odds to become someone whole in spite of everyone around her telling her from a young age that she was born wicked.  Early in her life a good friend sees value in her. “If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.” It’s basically Harry Potter if Harry wasn’t useless without Hermione and if magic were raw intelligence and tuberculosis was killing everyone.

At the time, Jane Eyre was considered pretty subversive. It critiqued virtually every aspect of agreed-upon society. According to one review from the time, it committed “that highest moral offence a novel writer can commit that of making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of the reader.” The reviewer goes on to say, “It is true that Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength, but it is the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself. No Christian grace is perceptible upon her.” In other words, even though Jane consistently chooses the path that is best for her, because she does it without being told to by a religious figure, she’s wrong.

“We cannot help feeling that this work must be far from beneficial to that class of ladies whose cause it affects to advocate.” Sound advice for men who are concerned about what fool ideas these “novels” are putting into their previously docile wives’ pretty little heads.

In Victorian times, the poor were an underclass with no chance of mobility, and women doubly so. In a side plot we see a beautiful girl throw herself at one rich man after another, as was her duty. In this time having a lovely daughter was the potential to save your family from a life of squalor. To have Jane, a poor woman with no prospects, serve as the moral core of a mainstream novel is interesting. To have her represent so-called “masculine” traits is downright astonishing. She firmly asserts herself to her monstrous governess. She’s the rational one compared to the emotionally driven and often pathetic Rochester. The voice of reason compared to her religious zealot cousin. In one scene, Jane calmly puts out a fire without panicking or screaming for help.

 “I can live alone,” she says, “if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” I mean how dare she?

we were no longer people

We would never be the things we had wanted to be: doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers. No school for us, even though our visas were school visas. We knew we did not have the money for school to begin with, but we had applied for school visas because they were the only way out. 

Instead of going to school, we worked. Our Social Security cards said Valid for work only with INS authorization, but we gritted our teeth and broke the law and worked; what else could we do? What could we have done? What could anybody have done? And because we were breaking the law, we dropped our heads in shame; we had never broken any laws before. We dropped our heads because we were no longer people; we were illegals. 

When they debated what to do with illegals, we stopped breathing, stopped laughing, stopped everything, and listened. We heard; exporting America, broken borders, war on the middle class, invasion, deportation, illegals, illegals, illegals. We bit our tongues till we tasted blood, sat tensely on one butt cheek, afraid to sit on both because how can you sit properly when you don't know about your tomorrow? 

And because we were illegal and afraid to be discovered we kept to ourselves, stuck to our kind and shied away from those who were not like us. We did not know what they would think about us, what they would do about us. We did not want their wrath, we did not want their curiosity, we did not want any attention. We did not meet stares and we avoided gazes. We hid our real names, gave false ones when asked. We built mountains between us and them, we dug rivers, we planted thorns -- we had paid so much to be in America and we did not want to lose it all.

-NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

I have never seen it like this

As for the coldness, I have never seen it like this. I mean, coldness that makes like it wants to kill you, like it's telling you, with its snow, that you should go back to where you came from.

-NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

Welcome to Braggsville and Another Post Where I Don't Know the Answers

Charlie was a Saints fan, as he described it, about all things race. Best advice my father ever gave me: When you know your team can’t win, you hope, pray, and cheer, but don’t bet, curse, or get in anyways angry when they lose. That’s how you live without your heart drawing up into your ass. 

T. Geronimo Johnson, Welcome to Braggsville

Boy howdy did those words resonate with me. As a Raiders fan, of course I understand. No better metaphor could hammer into me so quickly just a glimpse of the frustration felt by a racial minority. Just a glimpse, you understand, as I am a member of the dominant race in my county (93.5% white), the dominant religion (89% Mormon), and share the average number of people living in my house (3.61 - in our case the 0.61 is Henry who lives in the space between the ground floor and the basement. We don't talk a lot about Henry.)

Furthermore, I'm tall, which means I will earn somewhere between 9 and 15% more during my life than an equally qualified version of me. Add this to the fact that in my state women make 67% of what men do (the second worst ratio in the country. Second only to Louisiana. You guys. LOUISIANA.) and I am part of a religion in which there is no woman whose authority is over a man at any level of its hierarchy, and yet there are no women who are not under a man's authority. Where grown men stand outside of church dances, looking closely at teenage girls' bodies and deciding whether what they are covering enough of them. So I guess I don't understand. I guess maybe I don't even begin to understand. I'm so used to people who look like me being in charge that to consider any other possibility is foreign.

The only things really going against me are baldness and failing kidneys. Baldness, ironically, may actually give me a further leg up in the professional world. And though the data is not yet in on kidney disease's affect on general winning at life, I would surmise a guess that it isn't particularly good. Admittedly the chronic disease thing is a pretty raw deal, but it's surmountable. If I were going to pick an organ that was going to crap out on me, I could have gone a lot worse, is what I'm saying.

I don't really want to talk about it anymore. Moving on.

See, it doesn't matter how much education I get, or books I read, or social media I follow, I'll never understand what it's like to be in a store and have security follow me around. I'll never be told that an apartment building is full when it isn't. I won't know what it's like to have the school police officer (honestly why do we have those) constantly asking my friends and I if we're in a gang. Aside from the one time when my friends and I were in a cemetery after hours around Halloween, I've never had even one second to be afraid of a police officer.

In that case he looked in our eyes and said they looked bloodshot and if we'd been smoking marijuana. When I told him no, he asked why we were there. I said, "Because I'm stupid."
He looked at my friends and said, "Is he stupid?"
They nodded.
He gave us a warning and sent us on our way.

Even at that time, when I was caught clearly breaking a law, and it was dark and I was in a danged cemetery, even then the extent of my fears were only that I might get a ticket which means I would buy fewer CDs that week. So no. I don't know what it's like when I see the red and blue in my rearview mirror, and instead of worrying that I may be inconvenienced or at worst have to pay a fine, I worry if maybe I might die today. The thought has not crossed my mind.

Why? Because I'm a white male. If I were me, but with darker skin, I would be 21 times more likely to be shot by a police officer. Do you like those odds? I do not like those odds. You guys those odds are crazy.

Maybe that's why I've always treated police officers with respect. Because nobody I know has been killed by a police officer. I had a friend die of a drug overdose. I had a friend die in a car accident that was probably caused by texting and driving. A friend almost lost his baby due to a drunk driver. Those things I worry about. I avoid them. But cops? Nicest folks on earth. I've been ticketed so rarely that I see a police encounter as something that will make me late. The one time I actually was given a ticket I took it to court because how dare they.

I'm not saying cops are evil. I'm not saying some shootings aren't justified. I have not been there and I have no idea. I used to work at a doughnut shop and yes, there were lots of police officers there. They seemed like great men and women. I currently work with and interact with some awesome folks who carry badges and protect wildlife. I've been able to train with them. We shot at each other with paint guns. I want them all to go home to their families, safe and sound. What I'm saying is that I can't begin to understand what it's like to be 21 times more likely to be shot by one because of my skin color and how that would change the way I look at the world. That's just one ethnic group, though. And not even the worst case.

My life is so safe and sound that I can pretend to be a bad guy and get into fake gunfights with real police officers. The most fun I've had at my job was play-acting someone else's worst nightmare.

Followed by pulled pork sandwiches.

The best I can do right now is just listen. So that's what I do. And by listen, I mean read.

Welcome to Braggsville is a book about race. In it, the main character is D'aron, a southern white boy who ends up going to Berkeley. There he makes friends with a bit of a posse. A white girl from Iowa, a black kid from Chicago, and an asian aspiring comedian from California. They call themselves the four little indians and decide to stage a protest at a Civil War reenactment in D'aron's hometown. In the form of a staged lynching.

The different locales gives T. Geronimo Johnson plenty of room to riff on race and politics, and he does so like a jazz musician. The writing style shifts, the timelines mix up, and narrators are in constant flux. Johnson is an equal opportunity critic. He goes after liberal Berkeley and it's apparent distance from the world outside of its borders. His parents, trying to help him find a job, look at the names of the courses on his transcripts (Johnson studied and later became a curriculum designer there) and laugh at how useless they are in the rural south.

He goes after white southern culture, including black-face lawn jockeys and bumper stickers saying "I hate his white half, too." The defense of the confederate flag as heritage, not hate. He goes after benevolent racism, and cultural appropriation, regardless of intention. He points out that young people eager to make the world a better place often do so in unfortunate ways. “Don’t curse a child for doing childish things, but don’t ’courage him none neither."

He talks about loyalty to where you grew up, regardless of how weird it is. And defending your own, whatever that means. It sounds like a textbook, but it's really a crackerjack story that's funny and scary and interesting.

I don't know, you guys. I haven't figured this stuff out. If you've read this blog at all, you'd know that I'm optimistic about the future. But that optimism isn't some The Secret bullcrap of us all wishing for it together. It comes from the assumption that we all try to be better. Let's figure this stuff out.

Karate Chop and How Dead Frogs Are Like Chocolate Truffles

But she had known many men like that. Many men like those reptiles in the zoo that could puff up their faces with fanciful color and raise themselves up onto thin toes and rattle.

I learned how to read in kindergarten, I guess. I don't remember much from those times other than there was another kid in my class who already knew how to read. He was a smug little monster with his own little reading corner where he could while away his time snuggled up with a good tome about teddy bears or whatever while we were stuck sounding out "ball." He got into cocaine later, I hear. But he turned it around and is the president of the United States now. No joke. Teach your kids to read, parents.

Anyway. I thought I was pretty hot stuff with my new reading ability. I was reading everything. Years later, in elementary school, my fifth grade teacher would give us each a certificate with one of our good traits on it that our teacher had observed about us. Mine said "voracious reader." This was kind of funny because I didn't know what "voracious" meant. The next year, a new year, a 6th grade year where I was on top of the pecking order, and I got a certificate from that teacher. What did it say? "Voracious reader." Apparently there's a book somewhere full of generic things you can say about students you barely know because their faces are obscured by Dragonlance books.

I was allowed in those two years of school to read in the middle of class, because when the teacher would ask me a question about what we'd been learning, I'd be able to answer him. I'm not saying this to brag. I'm saying it so that you think I'm awesome and smart. It's possible that I don't know what "brag" means, either.

I didn't learn how to really read until college, though. I started out as an English major. A creative writing major, actually, because even back then I didn't want to have a job. As is probably apparent if you read my blog, I didn't make it very far. Being a creative writing major teaches you two things: how to read a short story, and how to hate writing.

I changed majors a few years in because of three things: I didn't think that four years was enough to earn a bachelor's degree, I realized that there wasn't an actual job waiting at the other end that I could, like, interview for and get, and I'd started to despise every word that I typed onto a computer screen. It took years to get back into the habit of writing for fun, and if we're being honest I'm never very far from the self-hatred I felt then when I tried to put my thoughts into writing.

Does it annoy you when I post on Facebook and Instagram that I wrote another blog? Believe me, the loathing I feel for myself for it burns with an ardor exponential hotter than even your self-righteous rage over the breaking of one of the now-infinite social media rules. The alternative that nobody will read what I wrote after I spent so much work on it is somehow even worse, though. So there you go.

I never stopped loving short stories. You know those Lindt truffles? Well. I adore them. They're little, and there isn't very much to them, so you have to spend some time with one. If you manage to sneak one onto the conveyor belt in the grocery store while your wife isn't looking and furtively unwrap it later, you savor it. There's a lot of flavor packed into that little sphere, and you're going to wring every last bit out of it.

In the picture, you see that usually when you bite one of these in half you get a hollow side and a full side. The hollow side is your first read-through of a short story. You get the overall flavor, you get a feel for where it's going, but when you're done you want more. That's when you tackle the full half. It's similar in size but you work on it for longer. This time it's full of the softer chocolate inside.  Breaking it into little bites, you spread out the experience. Also you get a little sugar high and giggle too much.

This is how smarty pants English majors read a short story. Because it's small, you can spend more time on it. You dissect every word and spread them out on a table like that poor frog that gets dissected in high school TV shows but not in your real high school where all you dissected was that worm one time. With its guts all spread out, you can ask yourself questions about your short story/metaphorical ex-frog. Why was this word here? Why use this image? What does this rubbery slimy bit even do?

I don't eat a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup like this, by the way. Those I devour guiltily from my children's Halloween stash in the middle of the night after a good long Sega Genesis bender. With a Reese's, the overall product tastes good, but broken into its components makes my mouth feel dry and my soul deflate like a hot air balloon on its way to choke some birds.

Wait. How did we go from chocolate to dead frogs and back again?

Anyway, some short stories don't hold up to scrutiny. The ones collected in Karate Chop, by Dorthe Nors, do. To continue the mixed metaphor, they are delicious though smelling lightly of formaldehyde.

Short story collections are cool because I don't have to really tell you more about them than send you a link to one that you can read free on the internet. Here's one:
The Heron.

Nors's stories are packed. Each word meaningful. Propers go to Martin Aitkin, too, for translating it from the original Danish. This is her first book published in the U.S., and I hope we see her previous novels translated as well.

Some of the stories are creepy, some are weird, some are relatively benign. There are undercurrents of deep unpleasantness along with some genuinely funny observations. Short stories are great because they allow authors to experiment. You don't have to stay with a writing style for long, so you can mess around. Nors messes around a lot, and of the 15 stories in the book, there are no two that are alike.

You know why else they're good? They're short. I just finished Jane Eyre which took me roughly 17 years and just started A Brief History of Seven Killings which is 700-something pages of some very, very small text. A guy's got to read a slim volume or two to keep a blog going, that and lots of chocolate.

'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself

If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich. - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

At Some Point in Here I Review Kings in Disguise

We recently celebrated Labor Day again. Seems like we do this every year. These days it's celebrated kind of as a last hurrah of summer. My family and I threw a football around the park and I played a round of disc golf by myself because I don't have friends.

The park was full of revelers whose favorite past-time was, as far as I could tell, plopping a blanket down right in the middle of someone else's activity and then complaining about it. Also barbecuing.

It's not really uncommon in American culture to forget the reason behind a holiday. I mean, people celebrate Christmas without acknowledging its true meaning: the pagan worship of nature gods by bringing living trees into our homes and hanging baubles from them. I swear, the next time someone wishes me a "happy holiday" I'm going to shove mistletoe into their mouths and scream at them. "Don't you know that mistletoe aided Loki in his killing of Balder in the Norse Mythology! Remember Sol Invictus, the pagan god whose birthday we've celebrated on this day for thousands of years. Do not forget Odin, the All-Father, also known as Sinterklaas, or his black-faced minions will report it to his attending ravens, Huginn and Muninn. The results will not be pleasant I can tell you." Then I'll pay for my goods with my phone like they do in TV commercials.

We don't forget the true meaning of Labor Day, though. On that day when George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stood back to back with their semi-automatic assault muskets and singlehandedly fended off the entirety of the Muslim nation with only their wits and several hundred bunker buster bombs. To celebrate this victory, they emptied the nation of all immigrants (housekeeping and child-raising staff excluded) and ceremoniously (and literally) wiped their presidential unmentionables with the tax code. Finally, John Adams flew in on an F-16 and with a few surgical hellfire missile shots, managed to turn the Statue of Liberty around, her back then facing the crowd of dirty freeloaders looking for a free ride on Uncle Sam's 4-wheeler.
This is why we celebrate Labor Day with lines of American flags up and down the street. F you, socialism, the flags seem to say. In places where they are not arranged to literally say that, I mean, as outlined in the Flag Code. We call these places Blue States. And that's the last we'll say about them. On that day we celebrate Freedom. And Capitalism. And certainly not government intervention of any kind (unless it's enforcement of the aforementioned Flag Code.)

Wait, I say, my finger to my ear as if my staff is informing me of a new development. This just in, guys, Labor Day is actually a celebration of... a UNION RALLY?

Why, according to these generally agreed upon historical events, Labor Day came about in response to a labor union rally turned riot. A bomb was thrown into a crowd of police officers, who then fired into a crowd of union workers protesting the police killing of protestors the day before.

Listen. This is a gnarly story. Seven police officers died. While it probably doesn't justify firing guns willy-nilly into a crowd of innocent people, it's also impossible to understand people's decisions when there are explosions happening. It probably doesn't justify the general unrest that followed regarding foreign-born workers. Or the fact that eight people were arrested with no evidence, all of whom were sentenced to life, and four of whom were hung. Of the remaining, one committed suicide and the other three were pardoned seven years later (see the no evidence part of this paragraph.)

After this day, known as the Haymarket Affair of 1886 (we called massacres something different back then, as if they were CBS dramas that immediately follow football, prompting parents to rush to the remote in order to turn off the TV before the tawdry opening scene), May 1 was celebrated by reds, commies, and pinkos as International Worker's Day.

Grover Cleveland, in order to create a holiday without as much baggage, dictated that the national holiday be celebrated on September 7 and we've fired up the BBQs, bought stuff, and didn't wear white ever since. Luckily this is the only holiday I can think of where the original meaning was intentionally obfuscated in order to create a sanitary version that everyone can feel good about.

We were living at Prince Edward, in Virginia, and master had just purchased his hogs for the winter, for which he was unable to pay in full. To escape from his embarrassment it was necessary to sell one of the slaves. Little Joe, the son of the cook, was selected as the victim. His mother was ordered to dress him up in his Sunday clothes, and send him to the house. He came in with a bright face, was placed in the scales, and was sold, like the hogs, at so much per pound. His mother was kept in ignorance of the transaction, but her suspicions were aroused. When her son started for Petersburgh in the wagon, the truth began to dawn upon her mind, and she pleaded piteously that her boy should not be taken from her; but master quieted her by telling her that he was simply going to town with the wagon, and would be back in the morning. I'm surprised to keep coming across adults who don't realize that history is filled with ugliness. Now, they say, the world is in the worst state it has ever been in. Oh my gosh, you guys, this is getting so old. I don't even know how to respond anymore. Is it worse than when humans owned other humans and separated families in order to pay for hogs?

- 30 Years a Slave, Elizabeth Keckley 

 Is it worse than World War I?

It was 9 a.m. and the so-called trench was full of corpses and all sorts of equipment. We stood and sat on bodies as if they were stones or logs of wood. Nobody worried if one had its head stuck through or torn off, or a third had gory bones sticking out through its torn coat. And outside the trench one could see them lying in every kind of position. There was one quite young little chap, a Frenchman, sitting in a shell-hole, with his rifle on his arm and his head bent forward, but he was holding his hands as if to protect himself, in front of his chest in which there was a deep bayonet wound. And so they lay, in all their different positions, mostly Frenchman, with their heads battered in by blows from mallets and even spades, and all around rifles, equipment of all kinds and any number of kepis. The 154th had fought like furies in their attack, to revenge themselves for the shellfire. - German Students' War Letters, August Hope

What about in 1922 when Southern Democrats filibustered in order to stop an anti-lynching bill? A quick search for "Native American Massacre" on Wikipedia reveals 51 articles about individual massacres. FIFTY-ONE TIMES Americans shot unarmed groups of men, women and children. How about when we had to go outside to potty? Or when the best video games we had were Atari?

Mormons today wring their hands that they get made fun of on social media for opposing gay marriage, when in 1838 the Governor of Missouri passed a law declaring war on and asking for the "extermination" of Mormons. Is it better now? Mitt Romney thinks so!

Yeah, there are horrible things happening now. In Syria it's bad. In North Korea it's bad. Heck. In Detroit, it's bad. In Utah? It is not bad. Oh, Utah, you are so picked on. Are you picked on, Utah? Oooh, maybe you have to bake a cake for someone whose wedding you don't approve of? What, are they serving coffee at this wedding? Is it alcohol? Poor Utah. Did a landowner tell you that you can't drive your ATV somewhere because of a little thing like evidence of civilizations that have lasted over 2,000 years? I guess that leaves just a jillion other acres where you can do whatever you want. BOO-HOO, UTAH. I have a hard time sobbing for you and your persecution complex when your capital has the most plastic surgeons per capita of any city in the country. We have 6 for every 100,000 people. That's more than New York City (4), Los Angeles (4), and Miami (5).

This leads me to believe that many Utahns are doing pretty well. Also, when we Utahns are being constantly warned against worldliness and the decaying world around us, maybe the call is coming from inside the house, if you know what I mean.
I know. I know that every time we have a Democrat in office it's a precursor to the end of the world. How could the world be so wicked to elect a president who allegedly wants to take from the rich and give to the poor. Why, that's immoral!

Sorry, I got off on a tangent. What I was talking about was Labor Day and workers. Did you know that the Great Depression was pretty ugly, too? The more I learn about it the more it blows me away. I don't feel like I need to review The Grapes of Wrath, but it's a pretty good book. Another good one that incorporates the Dust Bowl is The Worst Hard Time. Ouch, that book. You should read both of them because they are riveting, can't-put-down books that make the world look like a different place when you put them down. I had a several hour long recorded conversation with my grandpa (who at one point lived with his family in a boxcar) about it that I need to revisit. Also I remember The Journey of Natty Gann as being good but I was young and thought that boogers were pretty good, too.

My most recent depression dive is the classic graphic novel Kings in Disguise, by James Vance and Dan Burr. In it, young Freddie Bloch experiences a few really bad breaks in his life and ends up living the hobo life.
This is not the romanticized hobo life of campfires and beans in a can. It's the kind where other hobos are killers and also the not-hobos are killers. Freddie is just a kid, so he's partially oblivious to the world around him. He's helped along by Sam, who saves his life. Freddie repays the favor and they become friends. Hobo friends. Sam decides to help Freddie find his dad, who was last heard from heading to Detroit for work.

A focal point of the story is the Detroit riot at the Ford Factory, where four layed-off Ford employees demonstrated outside a factory and ended up being shot at. Four died at the scene, another died later, and 60 other demonstrators were hospitalized.
Originally written as a play by James Vance and illustrated in heartbreaking black and white by Dan Burr, Kings in Disguise portrays some rough living during a rough time. Can times be rough again? Sure. Is it likely? Not really.

Sure, if you google "another Great Depression" you're going to get a cavalcade of every Connie Conspiracy and Patrick Patriot blathering about the end of times. Also, it turns out, they want to sell you gold. Or books. Or gold books filled with freeze-dried food. Paranoia sells. Whether it's lunar eclipses, the Y2K bug, or Obama taking your guns. There's no better way to get money out of gullible American pocketbooks like a good old fashioned doomsday prediction.

Is it dumb to save up some money and food in case of trouble? No. This weekend we had zero dollars. Just poor as can be. And I made a pretty nice chili out of dried beans we had in number 10 cans and tomatoes and herbs from our garden. Our lives are filled with little disasters. We pay for health, car, and home insurance just in case. Then we go on with our lives as if we won't need them.

Each day the great blackjack dealer in the sky says to us, "Place your bets, gentlemen," and we do. Some of us bet on calamity. We burrow into our basements with ammunition and dry food and prophecies of doom and gloom. We hoard our resources and we dare our neighbors who we have previously been told that we are to love as ourselves to even try to come and get them as we polish our guns. In essence, we spend all of our free time soaking up resources and give nothing back. It's us against the world and what has the world ever done for us?

Those guys I can take or leave. I like the optimists. The ones who bet on the future. I cried three times watching Inside Out. A Pixar movie takes somewhere between four and seven years to make and costs from $175 to $245 million to make. The company employs around 1,200 people. That's a pretty steep bet. Of course, it made almost a billion dollars back and taught kids that their emotions are not their enemies. That growing up has some sad in it but that the sad can actually be pretty important. It said that it's not wrong to be down in the dumps sometimes but overall there are lots of exciting things in the world.

Great people make great things. They invent computers and smart phones. The build massive bridges. They create theme parks, and gorgeous religious buildings. They save and rehabilitate national parks. They spend their lives protecting endangered species, or restoring rivers, or planting trees. There is no bolder bet on the future than planting a tree. People who bet on the future travel to Haiti to help rebuild a broken city. They create vaccines. They paddle around the flooded streets of New Orleans to pull elderly people off of their roofs. They take seven bullets while blocking a gunman at a university. They do this because they don't know if we'll survive as a society, but they sure hope so
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I know that a lot of people who read this blog aren't religious, but I often hear religion as a justification for pessimism. I'm sorry. I just don't buy it. 

Because Christ’s eyes were unfailingly fixed on the future, He could endure all that was required of Him, suffer as no man can suffer except it be “unto death,” as King Benjamin said, look upon the wreckage of individual lives and the promises of ancient Israel lying in ruins around Him and still say then and now, “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” How could He do this? How could He believe it? Because He knows that for the faithful, things will be made right soon enough. He is a King; He speaks for the crown; He knows what can be promised. He knows that “the Lord … will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in times of trouble. … For the needy shall not alway[s] be forgotten: the expectation of the poor shall not perish for ever.” He knows that “the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.” He knows that “the Lord redeemeth the soul of his servants: and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate.” -An High Priest of Good Things to Come, Jeffrey R. Holland

We bet on the future in spite of warnings of economic collapse, or a great earthquake, or wars or rumors of wars. We do it because betting on there being a future is better than betting on there being nothing. It feels better. It's healthier. It makes the world a little bit better of a place. And if we look at our history as a species, we tend to figure things out.