Child care!

Something Paul Newman says quite often, as a vehement curse, whenever Tom Cruise or MaryElizabeth Mastrontonio do something really really stupid in COLOR OF MONEY.

Lately I’ve been feeling that way a lot here, too. But let’s move on.

Florida’s Unemployment Department gave me another lesson in the foolishness of being honest this morning, as they responded to my truthful admittance of the fact that I’d changed my address by suspending me from the computer registration system and making me call an 866 number that was, of course, busy for two hours before I got through. Gotta love a world in which honesty is always rewarded with yet more inconvenience. Had I simply lied, I’m sure my check would have been direct deposited as always and the stub would have gone to my old address and I wouldn’t have cared. Since I told the truth, I had to dick around for two hours until I could get through to an admittedly very nice woman named Ingrid (who, oddly, had either an Asian or Spanish accent) who took my new address and got me hooked up with the system again. And now my bank account should once more be recharged by the end of the week… which is good, because we’ve been spending money here at Casa Cucarocha like it’s going out of style.

Leaving aside the cleaning and roach killing supplies, which I shouldn’t leave aside because I’ve probably spent $60 on them since moving in, I’ve also made a $40 trip to the grocery store and a $120+ trip to Walmart, where I picked up an ionizing air cleaner thingie (as suggested via email by Nate last week, to help with the cigarette smoke issues) and a replacement filter and a few other odds and ends, like a pair of good earplugs for nights when The Boys Are Back In Town (or, rather, in the kitchen) and I don’t feel like staying up with them (I’m the Old Guy, remember).

And then, just a few minutes ago, I paid Paul’s outstanding Florida Power bill over the phone with the debit card… or, anyway, I paid someone’s power bill. The system is automated and never once mentioned the name on the account, so I just have to hope I put the account number in correctly… otherwise I’m out $112 and we may get the power turned off anyway. Wouldn’t THAT suck.

Cousin Chad dropped by… when… Saturday night? I think? We played a couple of games of Wiz War, which was fun except I lost both games… but there’s no skill involved in Wiz War, it’s all just what spells you draw, so I didn’t feel all that bad about it. It’s always nice to see Chad again. Cuz in law Mel (Chad’s delightful and beautiful wife) got bored on Saturday (or Sunday? Time is odd here in Paradise) and came over and drove Paul and I over to Wal-Mart… must have been Saturday, because that’s when I got the air-ionizer thingie. Always nice to see Mel, too. And the usual bunch (Pat and Kyle) dropped by last night, and instead of playing some boardgame I had them start setting up characters for my roleplaying campaign. They were all very confused by the complexities of the system and Kyle and Paul seem completely incapable of adding two numbers and then dividing the result by 4, which makes me understand how someone like Dubya can win an election in this country (although I’m still baffled as to how he loses one and still takes office, but never mind, old topic, let’s move on), but I recollect I was very confused by this system’s less complex ancestor when I started playing in Gary’s campaign back in 1983 or so, and once you’ve played in it a while it becomes much more natural. So hopefully that will work out.

We have tentative plans for me to run on Fridays from 6 to 2 a.m. (Pat has to leave at 2 a.m. every night to go to work) and we’ll see how that goes. There are like four other people vaguely orbiting in Paul’s social group who are ‘well, maybe we could play’, and they’re going to find out that ‘well, maybe we could play’ doesn’t float with me as a DM… they either show up every week on time or they find something else to do. No drop ins. But as long as I have three more or less committed players (even if two of them can’t do basic arithmetic), I’m okay to move on and give it a try.

Paul’s landlady dropped by today. Paul is completely paranoid that she’ll find out I’m living here and raise his rent, which I admit, seems like a landlady thing to do (landlords are fairly low on the ethical totem pole; anyone who rents a necessity to poor folks, like living space, strikes me as needing some basic moral hygiene lessons). However, today I just spun a lot of smoke about me having moved to Zephyrhills and living with an imaginary girlfriend elsewhere (her name is Laurie, if anyone ever asks any of you, and what the hell, she looks quite a lot like Katie Holmes) and having dropped by to look at Paul’s computer for him (I gravely advised him in front of her that it was just obsolete junk and instead of upgrading it he should buy a new system) and she seemed to buy it. Fortunately it’s dim out in Paul’s front room (Paul is a mushroom; he flourishes in darkness and grows well on weed and shit you wouldn’t feed a pig you didn’t like much) so I don’t think she noticed I was stupidly wearing my slippers (they’re black, so it’s hard to notice them anyway, and most people don’t look at other people’s feet). But it was a stupid oversight, anyway. Should have taken a moment to slip my loafers on.

Personally, I think that if she tumbles to my residency, we can probably simply have a talk with her about how some rent is better than none, which is what she’s going to get if she raises her rent here too much while my Unemployment check is the only income, and Paul and I have to go sleep on someone else’s couches. But I agree with Paul that there’s no point to have that confrontation if we can keep her in the dark. And she does like how much I’ve made Paul clean the place up.

Keeping on top of Paul to keep the place clean is getting old, but he’s getting a little better about it. I suspect when I move to my own place, he’ll happily relapse and be living in drifts of filth four hours after I’m out the door, but, well, if he’s happy staring at the TV screen wrecked out of his mind while roaches crawl across his forehead and roll around happily in his overflowing ashtrays, then he should just rock on with his bad self. It ain’t happening while I’m living here, though.

I’ve also been cooking for Paul when I go out to the kitchen and make a meal for myself, which I suppose is good for him, but, again… see my opening statement. The irony here is that Paul works as a cook at a restaurant when he’s working, whereas I am a shitty bachelor cook and know it… but Paul won’t cook at home. He just microwaves. And I can’t live that way full time. At least with the electric griddle (the other thing we bought at Wal-mart) I can make grilled cheese sandwiches or cheeseburgers or scrambled eggs, and fry sausages, hot dogs and chicken, if I want to.

I finished the Jeff book and shipped it off to Jonathan. He may have changes he wants me to make, but as far as I know right now, it’s done. It’s a pity that annoying things like copyright laws kept me from using a lot of Jeff’s best stuff in the book, since those drawings featured trademarked characters that are well known enough that I’m pretty sure DC, Marvel, and probably Disney would have collective corporate aneurysms if they ever saw, say, Batgirl or Rogue or Ariel prancing around showing their naked bosoms to the world, after which they would immediately sic a legion of lamprey-like lawyers on our asses. But that stuff is all available at The Jeff Webb Art Site, along with, I think, everything else I put in the book, with some brief editorial type comments that are not, I believe, TOO painful, although with the gorgeous pictures, it’s not like anyone should bother reading my tripe when they can just look at Jeff’s art.

The weather has prohibitively sucked since I moved out here… rain every goddam day, and the rest of the time it’s hot and humid and horrible… worse than Tampa, I mean. I knew I was going to miss my pool and thought I’d just dealt with that, but who knew I was going to miss the meteorological influence of the fucking Gulf of Mexico this much? CHRIST it’s hot out here in the fucking sticks.

Just got a call from some nice lady in Tallahassee. The system finally got around to processing the emergency ‘help!’ email I sent over a month ago, when I hadn’t gotten my first Unemployment check yet and was kind of freaking out. I’ll tell you, don’t send an email to a State office if your house is on fire. They’ll show up five weeks later and apologetically sift through the ashes.

What’s more interesting than that is that this nice lady called Paul’s number, which I just gave to the system this morning. Which I assume means she hasn’t tried to call my old number, because as far as I know, it should still be hooked up, just not answering. (I had a prepaid phone… well, probably still do, until the 16th of this month… and you don’t have to call them to disconnect, they just do it automatically when you don’t renew.) So she must have simply accessed my file today, found Paul’s number an hour or so after I gave it to the system, and given me a call… about a situation I handled five weeks ago.

Our life lessons for the day: never tell the truth to a government organization. And never count on a government organization for emergency help, just deal with it yourself.

THE FUTURE AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

Paul just confessed to me that he hates SF stories in which actual dates are used, because when that date comes and goes and the story hasn’t come true, it ruins it for him. He’s watching Minority Report and given that he’s not particularly analytical, he’ll probably like that godawful stupid thing, too… at least, until 2039 rolls around and they don’t actually have telepathic police. At that point, he’ll hate it, I guess.

I have never understood the point of view that says ‘well, this SF story is set in 1985 and we know that in the real world mind controlling slugs from Titan did not invade Earth, so that ruins it for me’. This is the mindset that leads to comic book companies constantly keeping each monthly issue ‘current’ regardless of how that impacts the timeline of the characters involved… Superman is always 29 years old and right now he’s 29 years old in 2003, despite the fact that he’s fought Nazis, shaken hands with President Kennedy, done a lot of other obviously date stamped stuff, and next year he’ll be 29 years old in 2004. It’s incredibly stupid… personally I’d rather see Superman have a definite birth year and have each of his adventures have a specific date on them, and if that means Superman is currently older than 29, well, he’s a genetically optimized ultrabeing from another planet, maybe he doesn’t age as fast as Earth humans. Or, maybe the adventures he has when he’s 30 years old all take place in, say, 1969. If they were well written, I’d still buy them. Why does he have to always be 29, and always be that age in whatever the current year is?

When Stephen King’s The Stand first came out, it was 1977, and the book was set just barely in the future… in 1980. By the time the paperback had come out, they’d ‘corrected’ this to 1985, because it was 1978 by then and 1980 must have seemed too ‘close’. When the Uncut Edition of The Stand came out, whenever it did, they’d changed the dates again (to 1995, I believe). It’s all a desperate attempt to keep a story ‘futuristic’ that is foredoomed to failure, and it’s all just stupid and pointless. So in 1980 in some alternate universe much like ours, God and Satan had a bet and released a government tailored plague on the world to wipe out most of humanity. It didn’t happen in our world (which is nice; otherwise there would be no BUFFY, nor would there be any Counting Crows CDs, to say the very least, and besides, I’m not wild about the idea that God and Satan actually exist in our world, anyway), and why can’t people just accept that? The Stand is fiction. Superman comic books are fiction. Minority Report is really really bad stupid abysmally awful fiction. Whatever the date of the story is, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not real. Why can’t people just deal with that, get over it, and move on?

Anyway, I pointed out to Paul that apparently he now has a severe problem with the Terminator movies, since none of that stuff has happened yet, and he looked at me blankly for a second and then said, “oh, yeah”. (I have severe problems with the second Terminator film, but it has to do with it being a grotesquely and insultingly bad movie; I don’t care that in the year 1996, killer cyborgs from the future didn’t really run amok in Los Angeles. I understand what the term ‘science fiction’ means.)

About ten years ago, Mike Norton and I were discussing this specific situation as it applies to comic book time. It gets really ridiculous in the Marvel Universe, for example, where the editorial conceit is that it’s been ‘about ten years’ since the Fantastic Four first went up in their experimental rocket, got superpowers, and came back to Earth, which was the start of the modern Age of Marvels, with all the other current superheroes showing up shortly thereafter.

The problem with this is, first, Reed Richards building an experimental rocket was pretty cool back in 1962. Nowadays it just seems stupid… we’ve been to the moon, dudes. If Reed, Ben, Sue and Johnny went up in an experimental rocket back in 1993, it’s like, big whoop. And originally, Tony Stark was wounded and captured by the VietCong in 1964 or so, and had to build his first set of Iron Man armor in captivity and escape. That was pretty cool. But now it happened in 1994 or so, and, well, that’s just stupid. Who captured him, North Koreans? The Iraqi army?

What I explained to Mike is that I wanted to see the various adventures firmly date stamped. Keep the calendar the same. Yes, this means that Peter Parker got his spider powers when he was 16 years old back in 1961, and now a days, he’s 57 years old, and I grant you, most kids aren’t going to buy his adventures if he’s old, because that’s not very cool. But why can’t they publish adventures of Spider-Man that are SET in 1967, or 1972, or 1980, as Parker gets gradually older? A little research is all it would take. And all our heroes could age normally, and have kids, and by now there could be an entirely new generation of heroes, with an older generation still present to act as mentors.

It would take serious attention to detail, but I think it could be done, and it would mean there would be a lot of different superheroes out there for people of varying different ages and generations.

Anyway, that’s what Mike and I decided to do with our concept ‘Team Venture’… set the book in 1964, and put a date stamp on each adventure… each issue would open with a different date, and we’d follow the team as they gradually, realistically, got older. Since the adventures would all be set in the past anyway, we wouldn’t have to mess around with the internal timeline any to keep everything ‘current’. Gradually our heroes would age… the kids would grow up and have kids of their, the adults would become middle aged or elderly and retire, new heroes would take over… and if the book never caught up to the ‘real world’ and was always thirty or forty years in the past, who cared? It would be a nostalgia thing.

Of course, when you have two writers who can barely draw working on a comics concept, you know it isn’t really going to go anywhere, and Team Venture never went anywhere… and since superhero comics is always perpetually on the verge of going entirely bankrupt these days, and will be until it finally just dies, it’s never going to go anywhere. But my point is, I have never understood why so many people insist that the dates on their fiction have to be ‘realistic’ and ‘current’ or it ruins it for them. It’s fiction, for Christ’s sake. Get over it.

HOLY HOLE IN A DONUT, BATMAN

Hartmut’s warning came too late. I finished watching Wonder Boys last night.

It’s much better than I’d expected. The characters are all pretty eccentric, and while none of them are as charming as the writers obviously wanted them to be, none of them are as obnoxious as, say, the characters in Trainspotting, so that was okay.

Since I’m a writer myself, it was interesting to get this kind of glimpse… however inaccurate and exaggerated it may be… into the world of literary authors and professorial life. I realized early on in my life that I was never ever going to be a serious, literary author… in fact, Tobias Wolffe once refused to take me on as a student at SU because, although he admitted I had a lot of talent, he didn’t want to teach someone who simply wanted to write commercial fiction. Personally, I think Tobias Wolffe is a pompous asshole and I do not believe that those who are accepting salaries for doing a job (like teaching someone to write fiction) have any right to reject a talented applicant who is helping to pay said salary simply because they disagree with what that applicant wants to use his talent for. If he’d said I couldn’t write and he couldn’t help me, that would have been fine, but his attitude is ridiculous, unprofessional, unethical, and immoral.

However, leaving that aside, I’ve always known I didn’t want to write ‘literature’ (please, someone just put a bullet in my head if I ever start trying to write anything that sounds remotely like it was written by John Irvin or Thomas Pynchon or, for christ’s sake, Tobias Wolffe), so the writers depicted in Wonder Boys have little to do with me. When the main character is bitching about a rival author who completes a novel every 18 months like clockwork, I realized that this is not a world I will ever be welcome in, since I wrote SIX novels in the last three years. (And Tobias Wolffe would profusely spit on every single one of them, and maybe he should. I haven’t read This Boy’s Life or anything else Wolffe has written, but he’s probably a much better writer than I am. He’s just never going to write about some fat geek getting super powers and having to fight his way back to Earth across a hostile galaxy, so I’m never going to read any of his shit and he’s never going to read any of mine.)

Anyway, I found Wonder Boys interesting due to the writing tie in, although it had very little to do with my own personal experiences. And I have to admit, most of the cast did pretty decent work. I generally don’t like Michael Douglas much, but his character in this wasn’t overly obnoxious. In fact, overall, I have to say that the only thing that really ruined the movie for me was Frances McDormand. And Frances McDormand generally ruins any movie for me if she’s in it for longer than a minute; there’s just something utterly grating about her on every level… voice, appearance, the way she moves, the way she acts… it’s just aggravating. And given that the central character spends the entire movie ignoring Katie Holmes’ character (who would obviously fuck him if he so much as twitched an eyebrow at him) while trying desperately to figure out how to get Frances McDormand to marry him, and in the end, he DOES marry her and she has his kid, while Katie Holmes goes off to be a junior editor somewhere… I mean, this is just completely absurd.

Okay, I know, I get it. The whole ‘he always marries a young, beautiful girl but he’s really happy with Frances McDormand’ thing, and his final choice to marry her was meant to show he’s finally growing up and getting his act together. Well, I say that if growing up and getting your act together means choosing Frances McDormand over Katie Holmes, jesus christ, put the bullet here.