Category: Journal

A gentleman I once worked for said that the way he determined if he was sick enough to miss work was to ask himself “Would I rather be at the office feeling well, or here feeling sick?” If the answer is “at work,” then you’re sick enough to stay home. I don’t know if he was a fan of Catch-22 or not, but it seems pretty safe assumption. That’s a roundabout way of saying that I really ought to have stayed home sick the last couple of days. I’m not certain exactly what sort of crud I have. I just feel all-around lousy, with no energy, dry mouth, sore muscles, and burning eyes. That last one is a killer since reading, writing, and working all involve staring at a screen.  Bother. On the plus side, take a look at the picture at the top of the screen. Nice, eh? We set out to do a little hiking at a popular park nearby and found the place packed. Well, we assume it was packed. We were turned away at the gate. So, we went a little further down the road and stopped at a park neither of us had ever heard of it.  It wasn’t an especially large park, but it was pretty and the hiking was a little more rugged than the other place would have offered. The park center was in a nondescript patch of prairie, but there were trails leading down the side of a box canyon to a miniature grotto. In a very short distance we went from tall grasses, scrubby trees, and utterly dry air, to cool, humid trails with ferns on all sides. I don’t think this is worthy of making a generalization about accidents working out for the best, but it’s pretty great when they do. Here’s hoping for a nice, peaceful weekend and a little recovery time. P.S. We are still not ready to talk about soccer/football at this time.  

Before we get started, let me tell you a story: Years and years ago, I bought a used copy of Larry Niven’s short story collection A Hole In Space because I bought absolutely every Larry Niven short story collection I could find. Niven is probably best known as a novelist, but his short stories are his best work. He has a gift for taking a single, weird idea and turning it into a compelling story. Only Warren Ellis, among contemporary writers, is his match in this regard. Anyway, there’s a story in that collection called “Rammer.” I won’t give away any details, but it’s a nifty mystery involving two kinds of (sort of) time travel, Bussard ramjets, and totalitarianism.  What I didn’t know at the time was that it was “Rammer” was the first chapter of Niven’s novel A World Out Of Time. What I also didn’t know was that the first chapter was almost completely unrelated to the rest of the novel. There was a massive time shift and suddenly, instead of being science fiction, it read much more like a fantasy novel in a space setting. It wasn’t bad but it was jarring, as though two different stories had been awkwardly spliced together. If you’ve read Seveneves, you know why I’m telling you this story. The structure of the book, to me at least, was jarring to the point where it took me out of the story. It’s either a novel and a half-novel, or two sets of two short novels, with the second set missing it’s final piece. I’ll keep the spoilers to a minimum here. The first two sections of the book concern a disaster which renders the Earth uninhabitable and how humanity tries to preserve the species by taking to space and then what happens once they get there. The story zips along, the science is interesting, and the characters are well-drawn and interesting (if not always sympathetic). These sections would have made a terrific novel on their own.  The final chapter of the second section, however, is a jarring change of pace. There’s no subtlety to the way it sets up the next part. It’s necessary, I suppose, but it is so very out of place with the rest of the book to that point that it not only takes you out of the narrative, it makes you a little apprehensive about what’s coming. And by “you,” I mean me. And by “apprehensive,” I don’t mean it in a good way. The third section is section skips ahead five thousand years. For perspective, five thousand years before today would be the start of the Mayan calendar, or the beginning of the Kish dynasty in Mesopotamia. We’re talking about a span from the Bronze Age to today. I harp on this because the changes at the end of the second section of the book are still very much in evidence and, in fact, the central paradigm of the third section.  Is that reasonable? It didn’t seem reasonable to me. Every time a character behaved a certain way because that’s how people of their race behaved, it grated. I understand that Stephenson is writing about societies which were created in a certain image as opposed to just evolving organically, but five thousand years is a very long time for racial traits to remain that distinct in all members of the race.  The story in the final section is fascinating, although the reveals aren’t especially surprising. It does end on a note which doesn’t feel especially like an “end,” so I wouldn’t be surprised if Stephenson returned to this story at a later date.  Therein lies my problem with the structure. The second section of the book was extremely similar in tone to the first. They’re either a single book, or a short book and a sequel. The third section is wildly different than the first two and it feels incomplete, like there was meant to be a fourth.   I’m probably harping on that more than I should. Seveneves is a page turner, and that’s a heck of a trick for hard science fiction. I learned more about orbital mechanics and whips than I ever expected to know, but the lengthy explanations never broke the narrative flow. I felt strongly about the main characters and genuinely wanted to throttle one of them. I strongly recommend it, flaws and all. 

Less than ten miles from the center of the city (thank you, Google Maps), there are canyons and waterfalls and primitive hiking trails. It’s 80 degrees outside in January. We’ve been hitting the gym pretty hard this month and felt like it’d be nice to get out and about. It was very nice to get out and about. There were times when we couldn’t hear any other people or see any sign of human activity. It’s a little surreal to be that close to such a large city and be completely isolated. It’s one of the things I love about this place. The people around here see value in preserving spaces like this. I value of the land the park is on is so great that I literally can’t imagine what it would be, but completely undeveloped and free to the public. Eight miles isn’t very far to have to go to feel like you’re someplace else entirely. ————————————————- The last two stories represented the two extremes of working with writing prompts. The first one never really clicked with me and it was a struggle every step of the way. The second produced a novel’s worth of ideas and, even when I cut most of them out of the story, it wouldn’t fit in a one-thousand word box.  I tried some silly stuff that I wouldn’t use in a “real” story with both of them. The first was entirely without dialog. I love writing dialog and I lean on it to an unhealthy degree. The other one was always going to be too big for the space, so I cheated a little by treating it as an “internet-only” story, using hyperlinks to explain things rather than laying it out in the text, and playing with the formatting a little.    

I’m a little past the halfway point through Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves as of this morning, and I’m baffled by the criticisms of this book claiming that Stephenson’s characters aren’t engaging. I’m not going to give anything away, but I’m enjoying the book tremendously and the characters are a big part of it. There are some I like, some I love, and a few I’d like to see come to very bad ends. In some of his more baroque novels, I understand that Stephenson’s writing can get a little dry, but for my money, this is his most readable novel since Snow Crash. This is the third apocalypse novel which is kind of odd since I’m not seeking them out. I’m making an effort to keep the reading list out of ruts, but there are a few must-reads for this coming year which are going to inevitably land me in a certain genre for much of the year. I need to pick up William Gibson’s The Peripheral and Warren Ellis’ Gun Machine (yes, I know, I’m a little behind) as well as something by Stross and Scalzi. It pleases me to see so many writers I’ve follow since their early works doing so well. Gibson, Ellis, Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Neil Gaiman all take up acres of space on my book shelves. I’m glad they’re successful, and I hope their success has brought them some happiness. They’ve earned it. I was up until the wee hours this morning working on a flash fiction prompt. It was such a great prompt that I’d decided I was going to ignore the 1,000 word limit. By the time I turned out the light, I was a little more than 4,000 words in and less than halfway done. Oops. The good news is that I’ve got a ton of salvagable ideas that I’m going to save for later. They need needed a bigger space in which to play anyway. The bad news is that the whole thing is going to have to be re-written from scratch for the prompt, so I know what I’m doing this evening.* Anyway, the lateness of the evening made going to the gym this morning less exciting than it normally is. Fortunately, my mix finally got around to The Futureheads’ “The Beginning of the Twist.” The Futureheads (rightly, in my opinion) got a great deal of attention for their debut album which featured a spectacular cover of Kate Bush’s “Hound of Love.” Their third album (not quite as rightly) didn’t get anywhere near as much notice, but it still had some marvelous songs. “The Beginning of the Twist” is a post-punk masterpiece, a little more mature but not less energentic than anything on the debut. Feel free to gank this and add it to your workout mix: *If you’re reading this and you’re going to be with me tonight, sorry, but it won’t take very long. Also, “Hi Nicole!”

I was drinking the stuff long before Jean-Luc Picard ever said “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.”* The name is so posh-sounding and the flavor is so very…well, so very what, exactly? I’d always assumed that the unique flavor had something to do with the “oil of bergamot.” It had never occurred to me wonder “Just what is a ‘bergamot’?” The taste was so odd and unique, it didn’t taste like anything else so I never had a mental image of what a bergamot would look like. That all changed last week. Our favorite local grocer is having a citrus event, and at the very top of the pyramid of unusual fruits was a giant, lemon-looking thing labelled “bergamot.” Eureka! You might not have guessed it from the flavor of the tea, but the bergamot is an orange that looks like a lemon and tastes like…what? We had to buy one. In the interest of science (and by ‘science’ I mean ‘satisfying our curiosity’) we cut it into slices and ate them They tasted like lemons with the intense flavor of, you guessed it, Earl Grey tea. I really can’t overstate the intensity. The fruit and especially the peel tasted almost like perfume. There’s something surreal about eating something that looks like one thing and tastes like another entirely. I experienced a little of that the first time I prepared jicama at home, but that was nothing compared to the bergamot. It tastes almost “old-timey,” if that makes sense. I’m tickled that we live in a place where we can just go down the street and get all the bergamots we want. I’ll wager there are some good recipes which take advantage of the bergamot, but off the top of my head, I can’t think of how I’d use it in cooking. It was just too much on it’s own.  -RK   * He was born in 2305, after all, so this isn’t really saying much.

I’ve been losing sleep thinking about today for three weeks now. For those of us who like spending a lot of time alone or with the company of Nicole or a few friends. Large groups make me very uncomfortable. Today is the start of the company-wide conference which I’m attending for the first time. Needless to say, I don’t think I slept more than an hour or so last night. In addition to attending the conference, I’m getting to lead a remote training session, so there’s that, too. I’m sitting in the lobby, trying my best to look as inconspicuous as possibly. I’m pretty good at looking inconspicuous when I set my mind to it and my mind is about as set as it gets. Typing on a laptop is a heck of a way to deflect conversation. Unfortunately, this particular laptop only has a five year old battery with twenty minutes of battery life so my best shielding device is about to go offline. On the plus side, I’m pretty sure that the Pandora station is one I created. R.E.M.’s “7 Chinese Bros.” isn’t something you hear in a lot of lobbies. For my money, Reckoning is right up their with their best albums and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise*.  P.S. If you like that tune and you’re just dying to know what it would sound like with Michael Stipe singing the liner notes to an old gospel album instead of singing his own lyrics, click this link and enjoy! The battery is starting to warn me with increasing urgency that it would be a Very Good Idea to shut down my laptop, but beastie has served its purpose well.  Six hours to go. Wish me luck! * And by “fight,” I mean “have a spirited discussion concerning the merits of any and all R.E.M. albums with.”

Let’s start with the worst things about 2015. The muck, the sludge, the dregs, the very worst that humanity had to offer over the course of the last 365 days. Or maybe, let’s not. Earlier this week, I wrote a long-ish post on the subject of “the worst of 2015.” How very Festivus of me, huh? I won’t be publishing it and I deleted the whole mess after I completed it. Nonetheless, it was a useful thing to do for a couple of reasons. Writing out a list of all the lousy things that happened in a year is an exercise rich in catharsis. I’d been holding on to some things for the purpose of unloading about them later and it’s hard to carry that much poison without some of it seeping into your system. I’m really good at finding that poison, too. Any time a divisive event happens, I know where to go to find dumb reactions, or, even better, smart-but-hateful takes on those events. There’s just enough of a rush from reading people justifying being horrible to other people that I find it hard to resist seeking them out*. Making my list got a lot of the bile out of my system and I feel a lot better for it. The other benefit is a little more subtle. Putting it all on paper, I couldn’t help but notice the enormous gap in the importance of the things I’d found outrageous. When you have an item labelled “Police killing minorities with impunity and getting away with it,” next to “Small group of science fiction fans try to hijack awards,” you kind of have to ask yourself why you’ve devoted approximately equal amounts of time to being angry about both of them. I’m not going to suggest that you should only be upset by the single worst thing and ignore the others until the first one is sorted; we humans have the capacity to multi-task our outrage. I’m just asking quesitons about my own priorities and feeling like there’s some room for improvement there. Your mileage may vary, but I think going through this process was a good and useful thing to do. It got some of the pent-up anger out, and it reminded me of where I’d been allowing myself to get angry and reconsider those choices.  Now, on to the good stuff!   * Note to self: Stop doing that. It isn’t helping

Thing about me that I’m not super excited about, #201293:  When I’m stressed out by something, I pretty much shut down on all fronts.  I have some really marvelous ways to distract myself from facing whatever I’m dreading, at least, if you consider “playing lots of games on my computer” worthy of marvel. My reading hasn’t suffered, but everything else has been set aside until “I beat the backgammon game three times in a row,” or something like that.  This is not a particularly effective way of dealing with this. Fortunately, the holidays are a great time for a reset. That’s doubly true when the holidays are what I’m trying to avoid. It’s not that I have any specific reason for dreading them this year, but I am a past master at needlessly dreading things. It’s been a lovely, if unseasonably warm, Christmas break. A certain unnamed beautiful someone has made more delicious food than anyone one man can possibly eat (not that it’s stopped me from trying). I just get nervous this time of year. This is all a long way of trying to explain why this space hasn’t been updated much lately. Anyway, one thing we’ve done with the free time is do some serious move-watching.  We finally saw the new Mad Max film and Ex Machina, both of which were every bit as good as the reviews. I was a little surprised by how beautiful, strange, and even dream-like Mad Max Fury Road was. I always forget about director George Miller’s involvement with the Babe movies. Ex Machina was a little more obviously “artsy” and I’m not wholly satisfied with the conclusion, but it’s taut, it’s smart, and it’s a good deal more ambitious than most sci-fi films. They’re both worthy of a second watching, but not just yet. As is our tradition on Christmas, we watched Bad Santa again. Even having seen it a dozen times, it still makes me laugh almost non-stop throughout the entire thing. Now that the shock of it has worn off a little, I can appreciate what a really good film it is. The performances are exceptional. Billy Bob Thorton deserves a stack of awards, obviously, and John Ritter managed to take “uncomfortable” to a whole new level, while Bernie Mac stole every scene he was in. I understand that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s executed so much better than it has any right to be. It’s  been a while since I’ve seen Fight Club, but it’s even better than I remembered. David Fincher is having a blast the whole time. He uses a whole closetful of clever tricks, but they support the tone of the film and never feel like showing off. If you haven’t seen it in a while, you might want to give it another look.  So, it’s been a really good Christmas break even if I’m not really into the spirit of it. I’m looking forward to a reset on the first of January. Or, in my particular case, the second.