Dead Reckoning, Chapter One, Scene One. Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery #10. Louis Shalako.

It's been a long week in the homicide business.

Dead Reckoning

Chapter One

Scene One

Louis Shalako

Anticipation.

Police work was dangerous, boring, tedious at times, and also prone to moments of grim satisfaction—an arrest, a charge, the successful prosecution of a case, for example.

Justice, or at least the appearance of it, having been served.

A kind of symbolic recompense, yet it hardly seemed worth it sometimes.

As for excitement, it was a rare commodity, although not unknown. Shoot-outs and automobile chases did happen, but nowhere near as often as the average person might have thought. There were real differences between actual police work and what was in the pulps, the comic books and magazines, the Saturday matinees with their serials and their popcorn-gobbling, all-ages audiences. Written for the ten year-old mind and devoid of any real intellectual content.

What the average person did not know, and could never understand, was the waiting, waiting and waiting for something to happen, and when it did, it was almost invariably unexpected, in which case, the police were often caught with their pants down. Then there was the galling cost, the psychological toll that it took from a man sometimes. More than anything else, Gilles was looking forward to the weekend. A weekend alone, at home, with the cat and the radio, newspapers, the brandy and the cigars…a good meal or two along the way, and more than anything, the quiet. A good night’s sleep, as if that were even possible anymore.

Good, old-fashioned peace and quiet; dozing in his chair. If only the phone would not ring—

It had been a tough week, a long enough week, and more than anything Maintenon just wanted to get home. To toss the jacket aside, still damp in the armpits, the old fedora moist around the inner band, to sit there on the maple chair beside the door and just to get those damned shoes and socks off…

Yes, it had been a long week in the homicide business, and a sour grin crossed his face. One of the boys had said that. These younger guys were really something these days, irreverent of authority and yet hard-bitten soon enough, perhaps showing a cynicism that was merely an eggshell-thin shield against what lay without—and within. Very few had started out in life as cynics…quite a few had ended up that way.

A little bit of gratuitous gun porn...

He wasn’t sure what was doing it, possibly a combination of brand-new shoes and brand-new socks, which was resulting in a kind of black goo between the toes, very smelly and very hard to get rid of. It must be the lint, from the socks, perhaps a little bit of dye from the shoes, he had decided. All it took was moisture and a few spores. Ten or twelve hours a day with the feet stuffed in there, it was more than enough. Yet one had to have new socks sometimes, black socks, as for the shoes, it was that time of the year when the chits, an allowance for work-approved shoes went out, and he’d simply gone out and gotten the thing done one afternoon last week. Blame the safety committee, who, like many a committee, had to be seen to be doing something at all times. The best thing for toe-rot, an occupational hazard in the profession, was to bathe the toes and feet in cider vinegar. He’d asked Madame to pick up a jug of it, and she had always seemed to forget, to the extent he’d decided to get it on his own time—and just like her, he kept forgetting it too. It was something that wasn’t exactly a staple of diet, a regular feature on the good old shopping list.

Only a fool turned down a free pair of shoes, after all. And it was still three flights of stairs, always had been, and always would be.

Turning the key, slightly out of breath after three flights up from the street, the kitchen was warm indeed in these first early days of June. Madame, a certain Yvonne d’Coutu, had gone for the day, and he had expected that. Hired through an employment agency, she was very competent, very prompt in the coming and going, and just a little bit intimidating. Which probably worked both ways, as he had quickly realized.

Maybe they just didn’t like each other very much, but were afraid to admit it. Neither one wanted to be the first to initiate any sort of exchange—or discussion or resolution of any kind. It was just one of those things. She still needed the work and he still needed a housekeeper.

What was unexpected, was the giant deep freeze planted in the exact middle of the open space, there between the big kitchen table and the door…

“What in the hell—” Gilles stood there with his mouth open. “Putain de merde.”

Holy shit, in other words—

That sure as hell hadn’t been there this morning. Curiously enough, someone had run a small extension cord from the nearest wall outlet, and the thing was plugged-in and apparently running, judging by a faint humming sound coming from the back and bottom of the thing.

Opening the lid, at first glance, the machine appeared to be full of ice, nothing but cubes and cubes of ice and that was also very strange indeed.

That will keep them cold...

There was a barely-audible thump from the other side of the thick, load-bearing wall that divided the structure into a front and a rear…

Right about then, Sylvestre came in from the front room or somewhere, a black and white mongrel of a cat, and it was time for Gilles to feed him before the thing tripped him up in its incessant purring, circling in figure eights around his ankles and rubbing up against him.

Mindlessly, he reached for the buttons on the jacket.

Next, he’d have to give the lady a quick call and find out more about it—but he sure as hell hadn’t ordered it and there was no reason for Madame d’Coutu to do so either.

It had to be some kind of mistake.

END

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

His audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, is presently free from Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

Dead Reckoning. Be Happy In Your Work. Louis Shalako.

Maintenon as a very young man.

Louis Shalako

Be happy in your work.

Dead Reckoning, (provisional title), the tenth in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series, is well on the way.

I’ve gotten the story up to well over 10,000 words, since I started it on October 26/24. Interestingly, I had three lines, and a few notations at the bottom of the brand-new document, a grand total of 57 words, when I shut it down for the day and basically, just sat there and thought about the story. It was a form of commitment and I knew I was prepared to work at it.

How does it begin? (A dead body. – ed.)

How does it end? (A variation on a theme. – ed.)

And what do I do to fill up the middle. Almost any idea is good, and I’ve even written one of my own dreams into a chapter, in a book, which if nothing else adds something to the inner narrative of one of our characters.

I think about the stories at work, I think about them driving down the road, I suppose I think about them in the shower.

What really sucks is when you think of something in the middle of the night, and you have to fight the urge to clamber out of bed, fire up the machine, and tack that in somewhere before you forget…which you almost surely will.

My last mystery novel, A Stranger In Paris, took three winters to write, with bouts of about 20,000 words each, resulting in a novel of over 60,000 words. It’s also something of a masterpiece, but then, I did have plenty of time to think about it.

It’s genre fiction, pulp essentially, the only real advantage is that I’ve read hundreds of them and seen hundreds of them on film and on television. We get to see their strengths and their weaknesses, and if we think we can do better, then we should—and good for us if we do.

To steal from one may be plagiarism, to steal from many is pure genius. That’s a cliché, but I will go it one better.

I might steal, but only from the very best. This is how I end up with an idea, a gag, one that came from Conan Doyle, or Agatha Christie, and perhaps others, all mixed up like a dog’s breakfast in a story that is new, it’s fresh, and it is nothing if not original. But if you think about it, Sherlock Holmes was a master of disguise. Agatha Christie was known for gentle gender-benders, for example the accomplished actress who dressed as a man, in order to commit the perfect crime. (Ah, but as an accomplished actress, she was also the only one that could have pulled it off, which might have been her undoing in the end.) I promise you this much—if I live long enough, I will do the parody, where at the end of the book, every single damned character reaches up under the chin, grabs a hold of a little loose bit, and then peels off the rubber mask in order to become somebody else. (Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die.) This is the one where every single character in the book all end up in the same place, and every single one of them is pointing a gun at the next one’s head. Okay, I am exaggerating, but not really…sort of.

(There is such a thing as bad television. – ed.)

Yeah, but seriously. Everyone in the whole damned book is pulling off a rubber mask with one hand, and pointing a gun at the next guy's head with the other...the poor #basterd at the front of the line says, "...hey, wait a minute..." (it's not fair), and then he sort of shuffles along sideways, very, very carefully, until they all form a circle and then he can point his gun at the head of the last guy at the other end of the line. And then, the one you least suspect will pull the fucking trigger...

Probably me, but you never know.

(No one would ever suspect. – ed.)

And if you don’t believe me, you really should read A Stranger In Paris. As formulaic as the genre is and can be, the ending will still surprise.

And then you will know—

You can always throw in another hot babe.

So, if I peck away at this on some small, daily basis, it really doesn’t take much more than five or six hundred words a day to get a pretty good manuscript in two or three months. The key thing is to get to the end of the plot—we can go back and dress our figures, decorate our sets, explain the floor plans, talk about the town, describe the personalities, and add in essential details. We can plant clues to account for little events later in the book, we can take clues out, we can change the name of a character, we can copy and paste paragraphs so that they make a better kind of linear sense.

We cut words out here and add words in there…

I would like to equal or better my last work, and it may even be possible but you just never know.

I enjoy the work. You know, last week I recovered five email accounts. I still can’t get into one Amazon account. I need to get in there and update the tax page…I need to get in there just to change the recovery email and phone number. It took two and a half hours to change my telephone service provider, and the thing is still eating the battery at an alarming rate, and truth is, I’m still messing around with it.

I do not enjoy that work.

Writing is like sex, ladies and gentlemen. When it’s good, it’s great, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

This is not a contradiction.

Trust me, I know.

I’ve done a little bit of both in my life. Which brings me to the last point. If I get bored, I throw in another hot babe, and that helps to keep me interested.

And if some nice young guy falls in love with her, well, it all goes toward filling up that big long middle part.

 

END

Check out Louis Shalako’s A Stranger In Paris, available from Google Play. The audiobook is free, the ebook a reasonable $3.99.

Our good friend and colleague Harold C. Jones has just released Shipwrecked on Google Play.

Thank you for reading.

Take a Little Power. Louis Shalako.

Standing up to your Grandma.

Louis Shalako

Take a Little Power.

 

Why I don’t eat breakfast. I was twelve or thirteen years old. I shuffled out to the kitchen one morning. I grabbed a bowl and put some cereal in it. There was no milk in the fridge.

There was an empty jug beside the kitchen sink. And there, on the kitchen table, was a bowl, three-quarters full of milk, three soggy Cheerios floating in it, and when I lifted the spoon out of it, a kind of syrupy goo from all the sugar Cisco had put on his cereal. There was no way in Hades that I was going to use that milk, ladies and gentlemen. Cisco was the one who ate six out of every seven bananas in the house, to the extent that my little sister got one, and the rest of us were wondering where all the bananas had gone.

Here’s a funny thing. It’s mind over matter. If I don’t mind, it don’t matter—and this is one way of taking back the power.

If I want breakfast, I’ll go somewhere and get myself a nice plate of bacon and eggs, home fries, toast, coffee, jam or peanut butter. The table will be clean, the service fast and friendly, and I don’t have to do your dishes as well as mine.

Why I refuse to eat cake. It was Thanksgiving dinner, with roast turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and all the trimmings. Ten or twelve people gathered around the dining room table.

When it was time for dessert, my maternal grandmother Blanche asked if I wanted cake and ice cream.

Pretty full after a couple of good servings, I figured I could handle a little ice cream.

“Oh, but you’ve got to have cake and ice cream.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“What?”

“No, thank you.”

My brother would have taken it, who wouldn’t, and maybe even left a good portion, sort of ruined in terms of leftover cake. My sister might have refused the peas, sweet potatoes, or the beets and maybe had a little more room for it.

Here is a ten year-old kid, taking back a little bit of the power from his grandmother—and she was a grand old lady. She’d taught eight grades under one roof in Enniskillen Township, and when one of those big hulking farm-boys acted up, she’d keep them after school and they would be politely requested to chop a little wood for the stove. She started teaching, a mere slip of a girl, about 22, not standing more than five-foot-six. She could handle herself well enough. She had all the power, after all.

It was a real achievement, to have it my way—or the highway. She might have even been impressed.

***

We were teenagers. One of the things I learned as a teenager, was that if half a dozen kids in someone’s family station wagon wanted cheeseburgers and fries, and there was one lone holdout for fried chicken, the stronger personality wins. I don’t mind fried chicken, it’s only a little more expensive. What really hurts is when you all have to chip in and lend them the money—

It’s better than going hungry.

What is really interesting is when you have made the observation, and learned something from it. What if it was you that suggested fried chicken? Or a pizza, or fries under the bridge. And what if all you really wanted was cheeseburgers.

What if those other kids were nothing if not suggestible. What if the stubborn holdout is just messing with their heads, or maybe he just didn’t have any money.

What then, eh.

Grandma at 100.

***

Never really been established. One day, visiting my dad’s house, he told me I had never really been ‘established’. It was a code word. I knew what he meant.

I was a grown man, mid-forties, and I had never really been established. Next time I stopped in, I had an envelope.

“What’s this,” he asked, probably wondering if I was going to ask him for money—

I sat down beside him and pulled out the mortgage papers. I showed him the property taxes, the gas bill, the power bill, the water bill, the insurance papers, all with my name on them.

My old man had a real bad habit, inherited from his own mother, of assuming I was still a child, and that I was never going to grow up.

“If that isn’t established, then I don’t know what is,” I told him. “Every one of these has my name on it. Like it or not, I have been established, sir.”

Years later, the old man had Parkinson’s, and I was there to look after him. Looking after an elderly parent, who was dying very, very slowly, gives one a certain perspective.

The other siblings had full-time jobs and busy lives. It’s not that they didn’t help out, but I was there every day.

I have no regrets about that, and it was probably the best thing I have ever done in my life. One night we had a little campfire out back, sat under the stars in our lawn chairs, sipping our beers, and we had the best conversation of our mutual lives. We understood each other, possibly even accepted each other—finally. Maybe we learned a little something about anger and forgiveness, life, death and the power of love. Maybe the old man accepted that he needed me for a change, rather than the other way around. We were friends at last. He had accepted me as an equal or something.

It was one of those precious things that can’t really be described.

At some point, somewhere along the way, I was all grown up, and there was no going back.

A little power, a little control, a little mastery over one’s own self, goes a long way.

If you can master yourself, you can master pretty much anything that life puts in your way.

And we have much to be grateful for.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Google Play. A Stranger In Paris, an audiobook, is free for a limited time.

This story originally appeared somewhere else.

Thank you for reading.

 

Troubleshooting Epubs with a View to Producing Audiobooks on Google Play. Louis Shalako.

A public domain image and a little effort. #Louis

Louis Shalako

Troubleshooting.

 

My 2,000 word short story epub, converted from a PDF, (saved from a doc), worked fine on Google Play. You have to have the epub to create the audiobook. Mushroom Magic is now live as an audiobook. All very well, but the longer story, 11,500 words, did not go. The epub was bogus or something, yet they'd both been converted by Convertio. I tried another service this morning, same shit, different day.

Opening the file, I checked the formatting line by line. (A gentleman on Fb suggested checking for hidden bookmarks). Converted again, no dice. Finally, I took the file to Lulu (dot) com, where I uploaded a docx file, (confused yet? – ed.), downloaded the resulting epub, and uploaded that to Google Play. Lulu wants a $4.99 distribution fee, which I did not pay. I have sold about three dollars on Lulu since about 2011, so my reluctance is understandable. I had also tried uploading to Smashwords’ meat-grinder, thinking if I could beat that, I’d have a clean file. Unfortunately, one of the links in the Table of Contents dropped out and clearly that wasn’t going to work. The ebook might need internal navigation, but the audiobook does not. I see on Google Play that the epub uploaded successfully, and I should be able to complete the audiobook at my leisure.

A Facebook friend was asking why I didn’t put it up on Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, Draft2Digital.

Yeah, but this is a reason—I want a good clean file before tossing that up across all available platforms, also, I have two stories, not one, in fact four if you count audio files…I’m an old man, I go pretty slow these days.

(Yeah, you're slow all right. - ed.)

And I do have my reasons. It’s a process, and I go step-by-step, thinking it through as I go along. Trust me, I will figure this shit out sooner or later. If I find a typo during this process, I only have to upload the corrected file to one platform…capiche?

While working on The Castaways, I scraped Mushroom Magic off of this very blog. It was experimental, a test-bed for the longer story. I hadn't published anything in a year, and a bit of review might be in order...right? Also, there are other stories that have not made it into the ebook, short-story list. Those all represent potential products. These are books and stories, they are products, there is nothing mystical about them. There is no room for fulminations, ruminations, bloviations about the sanctity of art. I'm too busy taking cheques to the bank, ah, figuratively speaking...

Beginning October 1, The Castaways took about eighteen days, from start to finish, and now I get a day off...

When I get a minute, I need to recover five accounts on Draft2Digital, now that they have been migrated over from Smashwords due to some sort of amalgamation of the two companies, and now, even I am beginning to get confused.

#cheap_hacks

I don’t know if this is a milestone or merely a first for me, but the cover, which admittedly, is not very good; for Constance ‘Dusty’ Miller’s new short romance and adventure story The Castaways was created using AI, artificial intelligence. I had the choice of paying $29.00 for two images from Shutterstock, only problem was that I only needed one image and I couldn’t find anything really appropriate anyways. Theoretically, each image would be $14.50, but you have to grab the second image within 30 days and why bother, if you have no idea of what you might write next, and you probably can’t find anything really appropriate anyways.

You can spend days, weeks, browsing for the perfect image and never find it.

Oh, and the enhanced license was $175.00 for one image, this for a book that likely won’t sell anything like that in the next twenty years. I have always tried to avoid vanity in publishing. It has never been about getting a handful of books into our local independent bookstore, and my once-in-a-lifetime story in a local news outlet. Local journalists and the advertisers love those kinds of stories, but then those nice folks went to a local printer, dropped a couple of grand on the table, got their hundred or so paperbacks, and learned nothing about the process.

The vast majority will do one, maybe two books, give it up as a bad job, and never get back to it again...a couple of grand isn't exactly chicken feed, and boxes of unsold books in the back of a closet tell a story of their own.

Whereas I have seized the means of production. And I have learned how to run it, too.

We had a little help from Dall-E.

***

Somehow, I just clicked on Copilot, right here on the good old desktop PC, and saw something labeled ‘create an image’. What the hell, why not, right. And it really is as quick and simple as typing in a few key words, ‘romance’, ‘young woman’, ‘tropical beach’, ‘desert island’, and the thing produces the image in jig time. It’s not the most appropriate, in terms of what I would visualize myself, but at some point you have to make the compromise and move on to the next thing. The cover of Mushroom Magic used a public domain image of a classic painting, and it’s actually very good. Go figure.

What really pisses me off, like an ant climbing up an elephant’s leg, is the fact that I can’t seem to get back there. So, I got one free image and that’s it for the time being…as for copyright, who in the hell is going to steal my book cover—why, what for, what good is it to anyone else but me. Every bit of original work in my book belongs to me, and to no one else.

Period.

Neither story is going to sell a million copies and we know that going in, so in that sense vanity, ‘the fucking ego’, can take a back seat and let the intellect do a little work for a change…these are the folks that say you have to spend money to make money—then shit all over you for trying to make some money by sheer dint of hard work and honest effort.

Idiots, as we are all aware, can justify pretty much anything. It occupies their minds and keeps them busy if nothing else.

If you look at the lower image, you can see that we are coming up on one million blog hits, a rare achievement. It’s all incremental, over fifteen years. The most recent story has, in a week or so, 19 hits. Now that, is what I call incremental—

At this point, Google owes me about $25.88 for Adsense, which is about what it’s worth on some level. I had to shut them down. I will never see a penny of that, because the ads were a distraction, with two gigantic horizontal banner ads, identical, appearing right in the middle of my fucking text…the reader will sort of imagine what that looks like, but you have to admit, it’s a pretty nice blog. I can create my own ads, for my own products, in the sidebar. What do I need their shit for? Especially as it doesn't pay. The threshold for payment is $100.00, so there you go.

Click to enlarge.

So, why do it?

Right? Why even do it…

I enjoy the work, doing the audiobooks, partly because it’s different. I can listen to a voice read the text back to me, and it really does take things to a whole new level. Hell, I've even caught a couple of typos along the way. (Louis found and fixed three typos, which he found by listening rather than reading. Ebook corrections have already been uploaded. What is interesting is just how many times he'd already read the effing book, and somehow missed those. In that sense, his process of going straight to audio has its uses. - ed.)

It is, in the sense of classic radio plays from a bygone age, Theatre of the Mind, ladies and gentlemen. And I got to write the play...

Of course I want to hear it.

When I first began self-publishing, the word ‘greedy’ was used quite a bit, in rather oblique social media posts from people that really should have known better. Whether I do this as a hobby, or for fun, I sure as hell ain’t doing it for the money, and that is for sure.

If so, I would have been terribly disappointed.

It’s also no one’s business but my own.

It’s my money, and I’m the one having all the fun here.

"Be happy in your work."

Other peoples' perceptions are not my problem.

 

END

Be happy in your work.

Radio Drama, or Theatre of the Mind. (Wikipedia)

Convertio.

Free Convert.

Mushroom Magic, by Louis Shalako.

The Castaways, by Constance ‘Dusty’ Miller.

(I will put up a link when I get that done. Ah, Saturday at the latest, ladies and gentlemen. #Louis)

 

Thank you for reading, and for listening.

Update: Louis has uploaded Mushroom Magic to Kobo using a doc file, there are several file types accepted by Kobo. Downloading the resulting epub, and checking it using Adobe reader takes but a moment and it looks fine. Theoretically, we can now take the Kobo-generated epub, or any other nice, clean file, and publish that somewhere else. As said in the text above, it is a process.

So, he still has to upload The Castaways to Kobo, and then both stories to Amazon. The thing to do is to follow through, (finish what you start), admittedly while doing at least some thinking about his next little hare-brained stunt.

And we all know he will come up with something.

What’s With All These Inflections and Irregular Verbs and Gerunds and Shit. Louis Shalako.

Poor old Louis testifying before the Crown Inquiry on Inflections, Gerunds and Dangling Participles for Fuck's Sakes.

Louis Shalako

What’s With All These Inflections and Irregular Verbs and Gerunds and Shit.

 

John had been saving his nickels and had finally gotted enough for—sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that should read gotten, which is an inflection or something or other. I don’t really even know—I dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen, and even then, no one cared.

It’s not like we cannot speak, or write or read and shit like that, eh.

English is an inflected language.

It was a bring-your-own-bottle sort of a party, and John brought beer. There was street racing, of the run-what-you-brung variety, an unofficial inflection if there ever was one.

There was no bringed in this context.

The dove (duv) dove (doav) down from the sun. The dove did not dived, which is how it is often used in the modern context, and this one definitely goes back some years. It is also clearly wrong, and yet once it’s in the popular lexicon, it would seem there is no going back.

Sing, sang sung. Song—

Choose, chose, chosen—or choosed, in our sick little modern world. There are all kinds of inflections. To seek, something is sought after. But now, we have to say seeked.

You can buy something, tomorrow you might say you bought something the day before.

In a world without inflections, this will now become buyed.

Rung, rang, rung—or should it be ringed. The boy ringed the doorbell and runned away, laugheding.

The sun shone down—this one’s a toughie, even big rock stars say ‘shown’, I will try to find the Canadian band, but the line is, ‘…where the sun had never shown (or shone)…’ and then there’s the bit about the rustic spoon. Okay, it’s April Wine, covering the song by Elton John—and his lyrics clearly use ‘shone’. So the singer for April Wine didn’t know how to pronounce what is a pretty simple word.

Okay, I am not exactly a grammar Nazi, grammar socialist maybe, for what that’s worth; but inflections have been useful enough for all these centuries, and doing away with them will have unknowed consequences.

Show me—you have been showed, rather than shown.

When all is said and didded, it will be difficult to say just who has wonned this rather peculiar linguistic battle. (Win, won).

Yes, when the battle is fighted, not fought, only then will the winneders (those who have winned) be declared.

Bite, to be bit (present tense), and to be bitten—but now, you have been bited.

Fight and fought, or should it be fighted.

“…I shooted the sheriff, but I did not shot the deputy…”

Has something been proven, (prooven), or has it been proved.

So, what is the provenance of that classic Ferrari, or perhaps we might say, ‘provedenance’.

(And just for the record, the plural of aircraft is aircraft. – ed.)

I don’t know about that, but hopefully I have maded or worse, maked, my point.

(And what the fuck is a participle anyways, and how is it that they can dangle, ladies and gentlemen. – ed.)

(So, what you are saiding, is that what I thought was a inflection, was or were or is, a fuckeding irregular verb. Louis).

(Yes. And the period should go inside, or outside of, the brackets. - ed.)

(So, what you are saying, is that my book is okay, you just don't want it.)

And.

English is one sick language indeed.

 

END

 

Poor old Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

Notes. 

Inflections are a morphological process where the word changes spelling in relation to its meaning.

Irregular Verbs are the Whole Sing, Sang, Sung Thing. So Louis ain’t so smart after all. He mistook them for inflections, but just soldiered on with the story...for better or worse.

What is a Fucking Participle, and Why Does This Keep Getting Worse and Worse and Worser.

Of Course We Now Have to Ask What a Fucking Gerund Is.