Every morning on my way to work, I stop at the convenience store, and every morning, he’s there. He’s always in the same place, just right of the building, hunched on a battered milk crate. His beard hangs prickly, gray pine needles sprouting from his gnarled skin. He has green-gray eyes, like the sky before a tornado. His jeans are covered in different patches, all worn to the same dingy non-color. He wears a navy sweatshirt that hangs vast on his lanky frame, with a faded lightning bolt emblazoned on the chest.
Every morning, it’s the same. His battered bicycle is behind him. An ancient dog with clouded cataract eyes sprawls at his feet. And always, they’re there. Teenaged girls in private school uniforms. Professionals in suits. Landscapers in heathered t-shirts. Tattoo artists and nurses.
They approach him like old friends, smiling and laughing. They bring him things, offerings in plastic bags printed with the convenience store’s logo. They feed him, or satisfy his thirst. They buy him magazines. A few times, I’ve seen them bring him shoes, or at least, shoe boxes. He examines what they bring, and he smiles a gentle, comforting smile, and then he talks to them quietly. I’ve never heard what he tells them. But they always thank him, and go on their way. I’ve never seen the same person twice.
I bought him a drink once, because he asked me to. I asked him about the people, and he told me that that he told them what they needed to hear. I asked him if there was anything I needed to hear, and he smiled.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Thanks for the drink.”
Flying in the Hurricane
Tampa doesn’t usually get hit by hurricanes. Through some miracle of tidal currents and weather patterns, or some fortuitous tuck and fold of geography, things are pretty quiet here. The last time the Tampa Bay area got hit head on was in the 1930s. I think the closest brush we’ve had was hurricane Elena, in 1985.
I’d just turned nine a few months before Elena tore through the Gulf of Mexico. I was incredibly small for my age, I mean, I wore a size 2T shirt; that’s for toddlers. She, on the other hand, was a category three behemoth. Her path was a determined march straight at New Orleans until, at the last minute, she staggered and turned back. Suddenly, Tampa seemed to be in danger of a direct hit. It was the first time I can remember seeing lines at the grocery store for water. The first time I remember seeing the brutalized, bare shelves where canned goods should be. I tried not to be afraid, but with CNN or the Weather Channel on all the time at my grandparents, it was hard. I was watching the hurricane’s progress. The people evacuating the coasts. Natural disasters hold a special, helpless terror for me. All my life, I’ve been lilapsophobic. Tornados scare the hell out of me, but we’ll get into that later. For now, let’s just stipulate that as a tiny 9 year-old, Elena was profoundly alarming. Or at least, she could have been.
I don’t know if he knew how scared I was, or if he just wasn’t taking the storm very seriously in the first place. I mean, I was nine. It could have all seemed so much more vast and horrible than it was. Whatever the case, my grandpa kept joking about how he was going to have to tie me down to keep me from flying away. He made it sound like I’d get blown to Neverland, or Oz. He talked about flying me like a kite.
That bit stuck. We joked, and I got ahold of one of my uncle’s shirts. Dale looks like Hagrid. Saying his shirt was large on me is like saying Harry Potter was a moderate success. So yeah. The storm hits with decent winds, but absolutely nothing compared to what the doomsayers on the Weather Channel had warned us about for days. By this point, I wasn’t watching the news anymore.
I was outside with my grandpa, lashed to a tree and draped in an enormous Air Force t-shirt, waiting to fly.
The wind did whip that shirt out like a flying squirrel, but I never quite achieved lift off. We got soaked, and laughed, and we both got in so much trouble when my grandma found out, but I wasn’t afraid.
Grandpa
When I was younger, my grandfather and I used to take long walks together. It didn’t really matter where we were… The forest or a park, or even just down the road outside my great-grandparents’ house in Arkansas. We walked together, and we talked. Sometimes, we fished. He likes to tell a story about one of those walks. He says I was three, or maybe four. I don’t know if I remember the particular walk because I remember it, or if I remember him telling the story so many times.
“I sure do like these walks,” he said.
“This isn’t just a walk, grandpa,” I replied.
“It’s not?” He asked, and I can see the mischievous twinkle in his eye, even now, the gentle smile. “Then what are we doing, son?”
And I looked at him like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Oh, Grandpa,“ I said. “We’re making memories.”
…
Something happened to my grandpa last weekend. It wasn’t a stroke, according to the doctors. He has contingencies in place that prevent them from putting him through a long and uncomfortable period of suffering, and that is the only sort of help they can offer him now. I’m two days away by car, there’s no way I can be by his side. So I’m going to write some of the memories we made here. That’s the only sort of help I can offer him now.
Ewell Goodwin in Alaska as a young man, missing my grandmother.
My Dreams Make the Strangest Connections
INT. CONTROL ROOM – DIM
A series of panels gives the room a somehow surreal, not-quite industrial look. All the instruments and surfaces are covered with clear plastic tarps. BRIAN is bound to a table by plastic wrap. His mouth is covered by the wrap. A SHADOWY FIGURE stands a few feet away.
BRIAN
mmmfff
SHADOWY FIGURE
Oh, you’re awake. Good, we can get started.
The SHADOWY FIGURE pulls a strange cylinder out of his pocket and points it at the ceiling. Its tip glows red and it buzzes, activating dramatic spot lighting that shines down on BRIAN and illuminates a series of photographs. The photos depict young, beautiful girls of approximately high school age.
BRIAN
MMMFFF MUH MMFFF
The SHADOWY FIGURE leans into the light, and we see him clearly for the first time. He’s a handsome man in his forties, with ginger hair and soulless eyes. He’s wearing a thick black apron and elbow-length gloves over an olive shirt and green pants. He raises his right hand and flips the cylindrical object, and we see the gleam of a scalpel just before it cuts BRIAN’s cheek. The SHADOWY FIGURE takes a quick sample of BRIAN’s blood.
BRIAN
MMMMFFFF MMFFMFMFFF
SHADOWY FIGURE
What was that? I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry. Of course, you can’t talk through the gag. Let me help you with that.
The SHADOWY FIGURE cuts the plastic covering BRIAN’s mouth, cutting BRIAN again in the process.
BRIAN
What the fuck, man? Who the hell ARE you? What have I ever done to you?
SHADOWY FIGURE
You’re right, you’re right. Please, allow me to introduce myself. I’m THE PASSENGER, and it’s not what you’ve done to me, but what you’ll do to these girls.
BRIAN
I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t even KNOW those girls!
THE PASSENGER
You don’t, no. Not yet. But the things you’ll do to them if I let you live... You become a monster, Brian. I can’t let that happen.
BRIAN
What? You can’t know that!
THE PASSENGER
Oh, but I can, Brian. If you don’t believe me... I can show you.
THE PASSENGER raises his sonic scalpel and activates something. The room begins to shake and a light begins to pulse in the center of the console. The entire structure begins to make a noise like a broken vacuum cleaner. We slide away from the pair, out through a pair of doors that reveal we were inside the TARDIS all along.
Yes, that’s right. I dreamed of Dexter Who. What the hell, brain?
Bigger Than Steve Jobs
On Monday, Apple teased the world with a blurb on their web page. “Tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget.” No press conference was announced, no keynote address, nothing. Just an announcement with those hyperbolic words. Tech sites, bloggers, fanboys and even the mainstream press freaked out, coming up with outlandish rumors about the mind-blowing announcement.
Really? Do you think Steve Jobs would let them quietly announce a streaming cloud-based iTunes storage solution? No, as much as I love Apple’s products, Steve Jobs held a keynote to announce a speaker as if it were the second coming. iTunes music raining down from the cloud would have been a game changer, not the kind of thing they announce on the web page without a big press party.
If you want to know why Apple made fanboy-squee noises and acted like the news was the biggest thing since Paul McCartney finally killed Wings, you don’t need to look any further than the name of the company. Apple Corp. (nee Apple Computer) was named after the Beatles’ record label because Jobs is a Beatles fanboy. Tuesday, November 16th, is the final nail in the coffin of a long and complicated legal battle between the two Apples. It’s done. This was Armistice Day, the reconciliation of Steve Jobs’ love for the Fab Four and his need to protect the company he built.
It doesn’t matter that “most” Beatles fans already have their music (I do, so I’m not exactly the target audience to buy it on iTunes), it doesn’t matter that the marketing team perhaps oversold the announcement (though to be fair, the message was a reference to a line from a Paul McCartney song, “Another Day,” and a reference to a line from a Beatles song, “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” and the clocks were set up like the cover to “Help!”)… It’s that important to Apple, and it’s the first time the Beatles have been available legally on a digital service. Sure, you could buy the apple-shaped USB drive last year, but you couldn’t pick up a few songs here and there, legally. It’s not for everyone, but its not a bad thing. Just because you or I have their albums (or don’t care to have the albums), why begrudge someone else the choice of buying it from iTunes?
Too often, “it doesn’t matter to me,” becomes “it doesn’t matter.”
Now, as Chuck Wendig pointed out over on Terribleminds in his latest Painting With Shotguns, the other part of the nerdrage and disappointment is the assertion that “teh Beatles suck!”
As he said, “I don’t like it,” is not necessarily the same thing as “it sucks.” Are the Beatles as complicated or as (over)produced as modern music? Nope. Are they as deep lyrically as some modern musicians? Not always, though I’d argue that even “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is deeper than some of the popular music on the radio these days. Do they need to be? No.
Here’s the thing. The musicians you love today wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the Beatles, at least not in the same configuration. John Lennon “invented” distortion. They directly influenced the fundamental creation of rock ‘n roll. The Beatles ignited a fever across the world. Musicians like the Who, Rush and Jimi Hendrix were born from that febrile inspiration. They, in turn inspired bands who inspired bands who… Listen to the Beatles rawer stuff, and you can hear the nascent strains of punk acts like the Ramones, the shrill and jangly birth of bands like Aerosmith. Listen to the lyrics and you can hear the echo of the light and yet somehow terribly dark poetry of the Smiths (“She’s Dressed In Black,” or “Eleanor Rigby” are dark, dark songs).
Trust me. Your favorite band was influenced by the Beatles. They’re one of the most important building blocks of modern music. You don’t have to like them, but you should respect them.
The Tyranny of Darkness
The clock said 4:57 when gunfire woke me from strange dreams. I think it was a revolver, or at least I counted five more shots after the one that woke me.
I lay in the dark, not knowing what happened, who was shot or why, or if the gunman was still outside. I was afraid to turn on the light, to draw attention. Still half-asleep, tangled in the vestigial strands of my dreams, my fear was amplified to an almost paralyzing level. If I moved, if light shone out the window, they would come for me. They would come for Kat, asleep beside me.
So I lay there, trying to go back to sleep. In the dark, the crack of the shots loomed. They became other gunshots, echoing from childhood. My father teaching me to shoot in the mountains of Arkansas. The deafening sounds of the pistol that would eventually take his life reverberating through the foothills while he drilled into my head that someone wanted to hurt me, hurt us, and that I had to be able to defend myself. Shades of the fear I felt when I hid under the bed while he volleyed fire with the men who came to repossess our car added to the fear I already felt.
Six gunshots in the darkness became all of these shattering moments in my head.
Now, in the sunny morning light, I know I should have called the cops. I should have done something. But I was afraid in the dark of my room, where shadows lingered and swelled rational self-preservation into irrational terror.
I understand the villagers of gothic horror so much more, now. As the sun set, they locked their doors, fearful of every crack and thump outside. The sounds of night creatures transmuted into the snarls of werewolves and the howls of vengeful spirits. In the dark, alone, it’s easy for your rational mind to run away and hide.
To wait for sunrise.
Inception
“You Mustn’t Be Afraid to Dream Bigger, Darling.”
People seem to have a hard time describing Inception. They get bogged down in the twisting dream imagery and lose track of its core. Basically, Inception is a super-serious version of Leverage. Yes, it takes place in dreams, but at its core, this is a caper movie.
I’m going to try very hard not to spoil things here. This will not be a play-by-play review, but I am going to give you the set-up, so you understand what we’re talking about. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team are thieves. They steal information. But they do so using a process designed by the military for combat training. They steal into a target’s bedroom, or train car, or first-class on a ten-hour flight, and they hook him up to a machine that lets them enter his dreams.
In place of a hacker, you have the chemist who makes tailored designer drugs to facilitate the process, and the architect who builds the dream world. Then you have the extraction team go in and con the information out of the dreamer, hopefully leaving the target none the wiser when they wake up. Now, the dreamer’s subconscious is aware of the external forces meddling in the dream, so the team acting in the dream have to avoid the people that populate the dreamworld. They are projections of the dreamer’s subconscious, and they act something like white blood cells, rejecting the foreign influence. To that end, the architect builds the dream as a maze, a labyrinth that the team can hide in, to give them more time.
The cast is amazing. DiCaprio is, I think, a little outshined by the rest of the crew. Ellen Page is adorable and curious as the new architect, Ariadne (whom you might remember as the Mistress of the Labyrinth in Greek myth). Tom Hardy steals nearly every scene he’s in as Eames, the forger. Ken Watanabe is fun, Marion Cotillard is beautiful and mysterious and subtle. Cillian Murphy is great and sympathetic as the target, though I wish (as always) that he had more to do.
And Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Well… The biggest thing that I took away from his performance was this: if you give Joseph Gordon-Levitt a suit? He. Will. Rock. It. Seriously. His performance was stellar, and he got a lot of really great scenes. But the only thing I could think of was how well he wore those suits.
Great setup. Really fun idea. The story is a tight, intricately woven puzzle, a Russian doll of dreams and reality. I almost loved it. Christopher Nolan is a great director in many ways. But his movies all have this… gravity. There’s a stateliness to his films that causes a slight emotional disconnect. Like a waltz, the whole movie felt like it stayed on an even tempo from start to finish. Even when Ariadne is learning how to control dreams, there’s no whimsy, no light-heartedness to contrast the DANGER and HEAVY EMOTION of the rest of the film. I mean, good job keeping a consistent tone and mood, Mr. Nolan! But at some point, I lost that vital emotional connection with what was going on. I think he burned out the circuit, or something.
I’m a crybaby. I go into movies wanting an emotional experience, primed and ready for it to make me feel. Kat and I bawled like infants at the end of Angel. The ending of the movie should have left us a puddle on the floor, but because of that mood fatigue, we were left feeling a little cold.
Inception is a great movie that, with a little more variation in the tone, could have been an amazing one.
The Shape of Me, Part One: Sherlock Holmes
It’s crazy when you think about how much the world has changed in such a short time. When I was born, way back in 1976, there were barely even home computers. There were no mobile phones. Now we carry phones in our pockets with more processing power than the supercomputers of the ’70s.
Louis C.K. says it best:
Thirty-four years ago today, I was born. Today, I thought it might be fun if we talked about things that shaped us. Movies, books, music… It’s all fair game. I’ll start:
Sherlock Holmes
I learned to read on classics. Treasure Island, Oliver Twist, Robinson Crusoe, etc. But none of them grabbed me like Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes.
Brains over brawn appealed heavily to me, since I was tiny and easily bullied. I mean really, I was tiny. I wore a size 2-toddler shirt until 8th grade. But beyond Holmes’ combustible wit and deductive skills, he could hold his own if things came down to a fight. My parents were judo instructors and, thanks to my size, I was a perfect fulcrum. Things rarely got that far, but when they did, I usually got out of it pretty clean.
I had a friend, named Kevin, who was also a huge fan of Holmes. He was a husky boy, muscular in the vague way school bullies generally are. But he was my friend, not a bully. Of course, he fancied himself Holmes, and me Watson, but whatever.
We used to watch Mystery! on PBS every week, he in his room, me in mine, tethered together by the telephone line. Of course, we’d both read all the stories, but Jeremy Brett’s Holmes was perfection. We talked about the changes we noticed between the story and the show. Kevin wasn’t my only friend. He wasn’t even my best friend. But he was the only one I could share Sherlock Holmes with.
I even wrote horrible stories about Holmes’ descendent and his assistant, Chip Watson. I’ll get back to him, but it’s my birthday, so I’m going to cut this short.
What about you? What shaped you?
Of Typewriters and Storm Shelters
When I was nine, my dad took me to live with his parents for a while. I’d grown up in Denver and Tampa, so it was my first real experience living on a farm and, for reasons I’ll get into later on down the line, it was a stressful, crazy time.
My grandfather Del was a ghostly presence, even then. He woke up early to do farming chores, then worked a normal job at a factory, then came home and did more farming. The main image I have of him is a grimy, sweating man in a light blue work shirt sitting in a ratty la-z-boy watching John Wayne movies in the evening. His glasses were thick, and his hair was always combed tight against his scalp, like Franklin Roosevelt, who took office a month after Del was born.
My grandmother Patricia, on the other hand, was a constant presence. She was always there, taking us out to pick blackberries, or burning off the inevitable ticks we picked up in the process. Even if she was out working, she was within shouting distance of the ramshackle house we lived in. The strange thing is, I have less of an image of her burned into my head. I remember her hair was curly, and she wore an apron over old-fashioned dresses.
It was the most traditional environment I’ve ever experienced. In many ways, it was more like I’d been transported to the 50s than it was like 1986.
These were dark days. My dad’s mind had never really recovered from Vietnam, and this was deep in his final spiral. I spent a lot of time inventing stories with G.I. Joe figures (old-school giant ones, my modern Joe vs. Cobra toys were back in Tampa) and creating my own little newspaper. I buried my head in the sand.
One day, my grandfather took me down into the tornado shelter. He’d set up a makeshift desk in front of one of the low concrete benches and on it, there was an antique Royal typewriter.
“That belongs to your grandmother, so you take care of it, y’hear?” he said. “Figured you make a newspaper, you oughta do it right.” That shelter, cool and dark, safe under heavy metal doors… That fussy old typewriter… That was the first time I truly escaped into writing.
After my father’s death, his family blamed my mom for it, and I lost touch with them. I visited them once, years ago, but we never really got past the estrangement.
I just found out that Delano Otto Simmons died on December 31st, 2009, followed by Patricia Glenn Simmons on June 10th, 2010. You’d think that the attenuated relationship would make it hurt less, but somehow, finding out so belatedly hurts even worse.
They were family, no matter what stupid, broken drama had accreted between us, no matter what walls had been built by misunderstanding and pained memory. I’m sorry we never really repaired things, grandma and grandpa.
Farewell.
When Toasters Were Toasters…
In my day, men pretended to be robots, and we liked it!
My dad was a Vietnam vet. The war messed him up, that’s no surprise… He had a screwed up knee that meant lots of trips to the VA hospital when I was little. And of course, back in the dark ages of the early 80s, before iPods and iPads and hell, even before Gameboys, we had to make our own fun.
Let’s just say that the VA hospital was not exactly designed for entertaining small children, at least not in the wing where I spent most of my time. In fact, aside from the odd copy of Highlights or an illustrated Bible, there was nothing. Well, nothing aside from the hall-cleaner.
The hospital had an automated cleaning system, like the massive evolutionary ancestor of a Roomba. It came from behind a black metal door, and plowed down the halls on a system of rails near the floor. Seriously, this thing was like a zamboni mated with the rat-things from Snow Crash. And it had an eye.
An oscillating red eye, sliding back and forth like the front end of the Knight Industries Two Thousand or, far more important to me at the time, a fracking Cylon.
Yes, in my mind, the Cylon war had reached Earth, and the shock troops were scrubbing the floors at the VA. So I did what any good Jedi–
What? I was five. Bite me. If it was in space, it was fair game.
Anyway. I did what any good Jedi would do. I attacked the cleaners with my inflatable lightsaber. Down there in the bowels of the hospital, people rarely walked the halls. So when I heard movement in the hall, I ran out to do battle with the Cylon before it retreated back into its base. My mom didn’t care because, seriously, inflatable lightsaber.
And then, one day, everything changed. I heard the noise in the hall. I grabbed my trusty lightsaber, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age, and I ran out into the hall to catch the mechanical villain. Only, it wasn’t the cleaner.
It was a Cylon.
Seriously. There was a silver-and-black Cylon Centurion standing in the hall all red-eyed and “by your command.” I lost my shit. And I did what any good Jedi would do. I unleashed holy hell on that poor Cylon.
It turns out that a guy in a Cylon suit had come by the children’s ward, much like the Imperial 501st do now, dressed in Stormtrooper gear. One of the nurses had mentioned me, and he came all the way over to that wing of the hospital to try and entertain me while my dad was in surgery.
My mom had to pry me off of him.
And the next month, when Darth Vader made an appearance at Cinderella City, the local mall? She made me leave my lightsaber in the car.