Labels, and that little voice in our head.

I am what I am.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about labels. By that I mean the labels we put on ourselves and on others.

Labels bug the hell out of me, for any number of reasons. I really don’t like it when someone sticks a label on me, because it’s always for their own reasons. I may not see the justice in it, or disagree with it strongly or find it insulting.

The worst labels are the ones that justify treating someone different from everybody else.

What brought this on was getting new Twitter followers. You can’t really be on Twitter without a bio. You have to fill in those fields when setting it up.

It is surprising what some people put in those fields—those little labels. We all want to be perceived as unique, and that comes through in the wit, the sarcasm, the facetiousness of some bios . Sameness is drab, and the fact is that we are all special, unique. That’s one thing, and I understand that.

People label themselves ‘nigga’ and I, a ‘white-bread honkey,’ can even understand the point. It is defiance. It is a kind of contempt. It is a statement made for very complex reasons, some of which I don’t get because I haven’t lived that experience…

What about the guy who called himself ‘a piece of shit?’ What about the lady who said ‘I’m a bitch?’

Putting labels on ourselves is stupid, but we do it all the time. Most labels are relatively benign.

“Hi, I’m Dave. I’m an architect. This is my wife Amy. She’s a registered nurse…”

Those labels aren’t causing a lot of harm. It conveys something about who we are and what our social status is. It is a measure of our pride, and solid proof of our hard work and effort. Not all labels are necessarily bad.

Some of them can be limiting.

Someone knocked over a glass and what they said next was kind of revealing.

“It’s okay, I’ve always been stupid…”

Who told you that? That was not my initial impression.

My initial impression was that you had knocked over a glass, and we all do that from time to time.

What happens when you label a girl ‘a slut?’ Then go off and tell everyone else. Doesn’t that sort of label lead to every skanky guy who just doesn’t care to go and hit on her? Aren’t they mostly false and misleading in their statements and treatment in order to get what they want? Don’t they all lie to her to get her to do what they want—to be a slut?

Labels become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You know, my mother was really impressed with me one day.

What happened was, she introduced me to somebody, I forget who, a realtor or whatever (another label, but you know what I mean,) and the inevitable question arose.

“So, what do you do for a living, Louis?”

“I’m a writer.” That was the first time in my entire life that I had ever said that to someone. More than anything, I want other people to call me a writer. Does that seem strange? I’d give my left nut for some really great writers to say I was a good writer. What other people think of us is surprisingly important, don’t get me wrong on that score.

“I’m a writer.” Notice I didn’t say, ‘crazy as a shit-house rat,’ or ‘mean person,’ or ‘asshole.’

But then, I don’t think of myself that way. Not at all—so the label is clearly inappropriate.

I have never said, upon an introduction, ‘I’m a Caucasian.’ (Sort of self-evident anyway.)

There were a lot of things I didn’t label myself over the years—alcoholic for example.

Oh, I can drink, and I like the feeling of being a bit drunk. I’ve drank out of sheer boredom, I’ve drank to help me go to sleep at night after a long afternoon shift at the fibreglass plant, and I’ve drank socially.

But I never labeled myself an alcoholic.

And when I don’t have any money, I’m not going through withdrawal. I miss it but don’t crave it. Yet you could say I need a beer once in a while.

Labeling me ‘some guy who needs a beer once in a while’ seems rather silly and pointless, as I am sure the reader would agree.

What if you constantly told a kid, ‘You’re no good.’

Wouldn’t they try to live up to that, or at least wouldn’t they find normal reinforcement, just as we all do, when things didn’t work out, or they got into some minor trouble? Wouldn’t everything work out in the end, and as they sat in a jail cell, later in life, wouldn’t it all seem so inevitable?

Wouldn't it appear, at least to them, that they never had a chance? That it was beyond their control?

I’m constantly surprised by the things that parents say to their children.

If someone is trying to label you something bad, don’t wear that label. Pick one out for yourself—and make it a good one.

At Shalako Publishing, we are always challenging assumptions, our own mostly.

That’s a good thing, mostly, for sometimes learning takes a long time. And sometimes it happens in an instant.

I spend a lot of time alone, as you can imagine, and I do a lot of this sort of introspective thinking, but the perspective of other people is vitally important because they see us from outside, which is a completely different perspective.

My mother is a real smart lady. You know what she said?

“The voice we hear most often is our own. It’s with us always, there inside of our heads, and we can’t get away from it. Your brain is the most powerful instrument you will ever have. And it doesn’t control you—that’s a fallacy. You control it…”

She’s a real smart lady, ain’t she? I’m lucky to have her, and don’t I know it.

The point is that other people don’t hear that voice that’s inside my head or yours. They don’t know anything about it.

They make their own observations.

I was thinking about some of my Facebook friends. I won’t just pick a name, but some very respectable people are on that list. I wondered what some of them would say about me, or how they would describe me. For the most part, they seem to tolerate me, or they would drop me, wouldn’t they?

I was surprised by the answers I got—from that little voice in my head. By going outside of myself and taking another look.

It turns out I’m not such a bad guy after all.

Where did I ever get the idea that I was a bad guy?

Every once in a while we should just pick someone out of a crowd and say something nice to them.

Mostly for our own sakes.

Anyhow, thanks for listening.

End

Sensations.

Human beings live in a world of sensation. For much of the time we simply ignore it.

We ignore the kids screaming in the yard, we ignore the pangs of hunger when lunch is an hour away and we have work to do and the boss looking over our shoulder.

We ignore the heat or the cold as best we can, in fact we lock it out of our homes and automobiles. We control those sensations to some degree.

Many of our sensations don’t even register on our consciousness. Closing my eyes due to the shampoo and turning a hundred and eighty degrees in the shower, was really the only time today when I considered my sense of balance, and a marvelous thing it is, too. Fighter pilots, in the peak of health and with all kinds of physical conditioning report that vertigo, the loss of the sense of balance and the well-being that it brings is not only terrifying but uncontrollable—they have to fight to focus on their instruments and take it on pure faith that the readings are true and credible, for their body tells them otherwise.

If someone offered you a piece of chocolate cake, and you put it in your mouth and it tasted awful, what would you do? Would you eat it anyway? I mean, it looks like cake and everything.

Your taste buds would trump your vision in this particular case, wouldn’t they? No matter how good it looks or even smells—your eyes don’t have to chew it up and swallow it, do they?

We trust our sensations, we rely on them.

I rode my bike to the beach today. With no major anxieties going on right now in my personal life, it was good to focus on those sensations exclusively—no raking over old coals, no over-analyzing what so and so said, no deep worries about what people think.

The waves lapped at the shore, children screamed and hollered in the distance. The air was hot and the water was cool. The sand felt gritty between my toes. Seagulls squawked and cardinals sang in the trees behind me. A bunch of moths have hatched out recently, possibly the oak-savannah environment has something to do with it, and the little buggers were brushing up against me as the wind dried me. I stood in the shade, for the sand was too hot for my feet and I’ve had enough sun for a couple of days. The western horizon was chock full of cumulus clouds and the sky over Lake Huron was pure oxygen-blue and I drank water that was still cool, with just a hint of plastic flavour from my water bottle and sucked tobacco smoke into my lungs.

There are other sensations. The sense of well-being, of being fed, of having a full belly or a bed to sleep on. The sense of injustice or hate, or anger, is a kind of physical sensation because it brings physical effects along with it.

We like the feeling of excitement when watching football, hockey or an auto race, we like the suspense or tension of baseball and golf.

Since I came into this world, I have experienced love, hate, desire, disgust, loneliness, friendship, pain, orgasm, terror and triumph. I have enjoyed or suffered the whole gamut of emotions that humans can feel.

It’s got its ups and downs, no doubt about it, but it’s just a whole helluva lot better than feeling nothing at all.

Enjoy your lives as best you can, for life is short and there is nothing that comes afterwards.

Don’t waste your time here. Do something with it.

I wrote this naked. For one thing, my shorts are still wet, and for another, I have this other sense, probably my best one: a sense of humour.

Hopefully you do too, but if not, I pity you, for surely you must be among the most miserable of men.

Now go on, get out of here. Go out and play or something.

Garage Sale.

Ildar Sagdejev (Specious.) > Wiki.

Suzie Caruthers sat in the family’s den, allegedly her den but for the heaps of laundry in baskets and Rex’s files from work which he’d been promising to go through and dispose of. Cardboard banker’s boxes lined all available floor space, so he had at least gotten that far.

She had been meaning to get around to creating some system, for they had heaps of Christmas cards. Suzie thought it would be nice to pull them out next year. It would make the job of finding names and addresses easier, especially if she kept a rubber band around each year and kept them all in one place.

“I know.” Aunt Muriel’s cookie tin would be just the thing.

Up until now it had been entirely useless.

Kicking around the house for years, a gift of course, the blue and gold metal box had decorative flowers on the lid. She’d been meaning to use it for herbal teas or something. Counter space was at a premium in their kitchen and she’d never gotten around to it.

It would have to be in the back of the bottom kitchen cupboards or maybe up on top somewhere. She kept big juice pitchers and stuff that wouldn’t fit anywhere else on top of the cabinets. It was just a waste of space otherwise. It wasn’t for display—it was all very utilitarian and you couldn’t really see much up there anyway.

The slender thirty-six year-old mother of three left the den in its turmoil and went looking for the cookie tin as it should probably hold a couple of big bundles and it was about the right size.

She spent ten minutes pulling open cupboards, closing them, and opening them up to check again, finally looking under the sink. Suzie tried to recall when she’d last seen it.

Going out into the living room where Rex was firmly planted in his armchair, reading all the Sunday papers and making a fine mess of her coffee table, she asked him.

“Have you seen Aunt Muffy’s cookie box?”

“Huh?” His mouth opened and his head swung and he stared at her.

The look of pure bewilderment on his face was priceless, and then she burst out laughing and had to explain it all right from the beginning.

***

Alison Martin, a nine-to-fiver down at the Monolith Insurance company head office, one of the town’s major employers and not far from the health center where she worked out almost religiously two or three times a week, pointed triumphantly at the top shelf of the oaken wall unit on the far end of her mostly brass and glass living room.

The thing was jammed with books, hard-covers on the lower shelves and paperbacks on the upper three layers, all romance writers Bill had never cared for. There was a cleaner spot on the shelf and she just knew she hadn’t moved it.

“What, what?” She was always going on about something.

“Justice is gone!”

He threw the financial section down in disgust.

“Alison. What in the hell are you talking about?”

It all came out in a rush and he wondered if she’d had her noon pill yet. She was such a good woman and he still loved her, still found her surprisingly good in bed after all these years.

“My little bronze figure—remember, the scales went up and down and stuff like that?”

Bill got up and gravely took her in his arms.

“Uh, not really.”

Apparently she was referring to a small bronze figure of a well-known Roman goddess, complete with working scales, the scales of justice, something that had uncomfortably suggested drug deals and illicit cash to Bill, but he’d never mentioned that. Their house wasn’t that kind of place.

***

Belinda Davies had a list of gripes.

“And that’s not the only thing.”

Brad Davies held her and tried to get to the bottom of what was really bothering her.
Their reflection, ghostly in the hallway mirror, mocked him in its enigmatic reflection of his tired, shopworn face and her back, and long red hair. She was a bit lumpy around the hips and thighs but she was all paid for and had a lot of good miles in her yet.

“No, what else, honey?” She’d been pretty good lately, but a relapse wasn’t unheard of in times of stress, although he couldn’t think of anything major in their lives presently.

Her distant cousin Sheela’s wedding couldn’t have anything to do with it, if anything it gave her purpose, something to look forward to and even meddle in. But Belinda had always been special. Her vulnerable neediness had appealed to him as a somewhat stodgy sophomore without a date, and, in the end, he really couldn’t have been happier.

Every family had some kind of a problem. Theirs had several.

“I can’t seem to find my meat grinder.”

Meat grinder. Meat grinder. Then Brad recalled.

“Oh, yes, the meat grinder.” He thought for a moment. “And you can’t find it?”

There was nothing unusual with that, not in this house, not with two teenage boys walking off with all of his tools all the time and never putting them back. He’d taken to keeping all the good stuff at work, where his job box was permanently locked and off-limits in terms of lending and borrowing. When he needed something, he brought it home in his lunch bucket and did whatever little job he had to do. Then he took it back to work.

“I could have sworn it was there just a month or so ago. It was in the back of the end drawer, by the back hallway.’

Belinda had bought the meat-grinder for twenty-five dollars at some garage sale and a long-suffering Brad had clamped down hard on his tongue and said not a thing about it. He knew the odds of her actually using it to grind meat were infinitely small. The grinder was all cast iron, or possibly aluminum, shiny and grey, and it clamped onto the end of a table or something. You fed in chunks of meat and turned a big handle and voila, you had ground meat for making meatballs or meatloaf.

Brad pondered the significance of all this. It seemed just so unlikely to turn out well. Every once in a while Belinda started looking through recipes in magazines, asking him over and over again what he thought of this, and that, and the other, and then look out.

“Well. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Why don’t you just go to the market if you need some, ah, ground pork, or lamb or something.”

She looked at him uncertainly.

There was no trace of sarcasm, and now, she realized, he would probably be expecting something good for supper.

“Never mind.” It’s just that it was right there, right in the back of that last kitchen drawer, only now it wasn’t.

It was gone, for all intents and purposes vanished into thin air, and no one cared to wonder why.

As for her husband’s innermost thoughts, they were perhaps a bit clearer than he might have known, which only tended to irritate Belinda further.

But that bloody meat-grinder had to be somewhere.

***

They were proceeding east down Pine Street in the Toyota, having just left the three-way stop at the intersection with Empire Circle, when Belinda grabbed Brad’s shoulder and bellowed in his ear, her stabbing arm pointing off to the left through the windshield.

“Stop! Stop the car!” Her voice was shrill and commanding, like some termagant in a TV commercial but she really wasn’t like that and it really must be an emergency.

He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary in a quick sweep where she was pointing…

Brad jammed on the brakes wondering what the problem was, although there were a lot of parked cars and people moving about…some sort of garage sale going on at that address, and yet there were no kids or dogs or people in the street. Mystified, he turned to inquire politely just what exactly was up and why was she yelling?

His wife whipped off her seatbelt, threw open the door, and as Brad stared in some oddly objective fascination, nipped around the front end of the vehicle, and she charged over there into that crowd of people and started yelling. He threw the car in park and went after her on sheer reflex, rather than any strong desire to get involved.

She was his wife, he loved her dearly, and something was up, mostly likely with her.

He’d been dreading this for some time. It was like things were going too well in the last couple of months or so.

With a deep sigh, Brad stepped up to the better half and gently tried to catch her elbow, which she flung off without a glance and then she lunged for the other woman, who, as a sick sense of what was going on settled over Bill, was clutching a cast-iron meat-grinder for all her stout arms were worth. Both ladies were screaming and shouting and the language coming out of his wife was distinctly troubling in front of all these nice people.

“Honey! Honey! Let’s not make a scene here.”

***

Sergeant Ed O’Herlihy stood by the back end of the cruiser as Patrol Officer Angie Marrietta recounted her observations. Real trouble in this upscale suburban neighbourhood was unusual, although people always had concerns. This looked like one big mix-up and not much more.

“So you were just talking to the caller when this other woman steps up?”

“Yes. Mrs. Caruthers She says she thinks this other thingy belongs to her—some kind of brass figure. It’s like Lady Justice or something. She swears it’s a carbon-copy of one that went missing from her bookshelf.” That one wasn’t really insisting on charges, but it helped to build a picture.

“So what do we have?” The idea of the homeowner, Steve Maynard, a Navy vet with an artificial leg, pensioned off for thirty years, going around burgling homes for knick-knacks and bric-a-brac seemed a bit far-fetched, and yet murder had been committed for fifty cents or a pack of smokes in some places.

Those places were some ways off, but you never knew.

“All right, let’s have a word with the man.” Sergeant O’Herlihy went up to Officer Marrietta’s cruiser and she opened up the door and stood aside with her hand on her weapon.

“So. What’s going on here, sir?”

Turns out Mister Maynard was hopping mad and had a vocabulary that was extensive.

***

After being held all night and going before a judge, Steve Maynard vehemently denied theft and insisted he’d bought all of the items in question. It turned out there were a lot more than just two suspicious items on those tables when bystanders and passers-by really started looking. He said he’d bought them all at garage sales.

The crowd jeered when they heard that. It’s a good thing they had backup, two more cruisers rolling up at just that instant settling the crowd of early-morning garage-sale shoppers right down.

It was a small town.

It was like the crime of the century around here. They just wanted to be helpful. They were being tough on crime. The moral stance was easy enough, but opportunities were few and far between.

It seemed half the people in town were sort of missing things, small things, and the sergeant himself had been a bit perturbed to find a gnarly old wooden lamp, broken, needing a new socket assembly and a shade perhaps, and it would be as good as new. That lamp looked awfully familiar. It was the spitting image of one he’d had in the recreation room for ages. The last time he’d seen it, it was maybe sitting on the end of the workbench in his two-car garage, just waiting for inspiration.

To go out and buy a shade and a new socket was a low priority, but undoubtedly he would get around to it one day.

Could it be?

When the sergeant called home and had his wife look in the garage, she told him a bit breathlessly over the phone that she couldn’t find it. But the garage was a mess and the lamp disassembled. He settled for thinking it could be there. It could be that she just didn’t recognize it.

“Honey, have we ever had a garage sale?”

It turned out they had, last summer or the summer before, she thought. All of this was pretty inconclusive, as the sergeant wouldn’t put it past her or Jinny, his fourteen year-old daughter and very snarky she was these days, to put that out on a table, in all cynicism, and try and get fifty cents for it. Why not, after all? It was just a piece of junk. The fact that his father once told him he had carved that in high school wood-working shop would mean nothing to them, would it?

Someone was claiming some crummy old wooden cigar box was theirs, and another person was looking through all their old photo albums, hoping to identify a maple end table, with a broken leg re-glued in an amateur fashion and with knife gouges in the top made by someone’s undisciplined child, perhaps the previous owner…

The sergeant sighed.

With a bit of luck they would get a murder or a big bank robbery, or something, any day now and then they could quietly drop the whole thing.

Otherwise, it looked pretty bad for old Maynard.

All in the name of justice, they would run him through the meat grinder.

The sergeant drummed his fingers on the desk top and looked at his coffee, already going cold.

He had the luxury of time, and a good dose of discretion. He would think on it.

For no particular reason, the sly look on Maynard’s face when leaving with his lawyer, released by the judge on his own recognizance, kind of bothered him. He couldn’t really say why, it was just an impression.

The words of a familiar nursery rhyme came to him. He’d sung it to his own daughter often enough.

“With a knick-knack, paddy-whack, give the dog a bone. This old man came rolling home…”

In the quiet background hum of the station, a small shiver went up and down his spine and the hairs prickled on the back of his neck.

Three more years until early retirement.

He rubbed his eyes and looked blearily over the squad-room through his glass partition.

Small evil lurked in small places. He mustn’t forget that. A cop could never forget that.

Right about then the sun went behind a cloud, his office seemed dimmer and it was like the temperature dropped three or four degrees—just enough to be a little spooky.

Ah, well. Maybe they’d get their murder after all.



END



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Writing: Short Story versus the Novel.

Sometimes I drive around thinking about stuff.

There are differences in writing the short story versus the novel.


The most obvious difference is sheer length. However, if you can write a good, stand-alone short story, then you can certainly write a good chapter. The chapter allows more leeway, not less, because you have all the stuff that went before, and all the stuff that comes after. It might have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it’s not so final—not until you get to the end of the book.

Assuming you write twenty or so chapters, each of four to six thousand words, you’ve got yourself a good first draft of a novel, at least in terms of sheer word count.

A good first draft takes me anywhere from two to three months to write. That takes care of the plot and the characters to some degree. I need to get to the ending before I begin to feel really comfortable with the thing as a totality.

Usually it’s around sixty thousand words. Re-writing usually makes it a bit longer, and yet I’m always paring words out as I go. With luck, I manage a thousand words a day for two or three months. Some days might not see any work at all, and on other days I might manage two or three thousand words. The thing has to be making progress to be motivating.

It’s not hard to write a thousand words a day. It takes about an hour, sometimes even less. First, you need to know what the next scene is.

You can’t write it if you can’t imagine it, seeing enough of the basic movements and settings, clearly in your head. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what comes next. I know where I’m going tomorrow when I sit down to write. My current novel is up to eighteen thousand words right now, and it’s my eleventh novel.

(Other than that, I have no real qualifications for speaking on such matters.)

A novel has to have some kind of compelling climax and a satisfying ending. When I begin a novel, I often don’t know exactly how it all turns out.

Working at a thousand words a day gives me time to figure that out, and work towards that end point.

When writing a short story, I can’t even begin to write the thing until I figure out the ‘gag.’ Once I have a gag, the structure reveals itself and works itself out.

I have to know the ending. In that sense it’s easier structurally. All the rest of the novel is left out of a short story. I say that because any good story can be made longer. I have short stories that arguably should be made into novels. Why I abandon them, is a very good question. That one I think is purely intuitive—they simply didn’t grab me by the guts and refuse to let go until I did the work and got it out of my system.

Another major difference is simple time. I wrote a seven thousand word short story over the weekend. It took two and a half days. It’s already submitted. There is the satisfaction of coming up with an idea, working with it, solving the problems and then completing it. There is that quick gratification with writing short stories. You write them and submit them and hope for the next good idea to come to you as soon as possible.

Making a submission is a fairly positive moment.

Right now I have probably a dozen, pretty strong short stories under submission in pro and semi-pro markets. As long as you’re writing new material and resubmitting as soon as a rejection slip comes in, that part of the business is relatively easy to maintain. Read the guidelines and keep track of your submissions. If you get even the silliest idea, write it up, polish it, and submit.

See what happens, and repeat as necessary.

As for writing a novel, the motivation, the urge must be sustained over a longer term. It takes enthusiasm generated over the long haul. There may be no real clear idea of where it is headed for the first twenty or thirty thousand words. You may have no idea of who the people are until they begin to react to each other in their own voices and their own characteristic way. It happens on the page as you write it. There is spontaneity in the novel. It just takes longer to write one.

In order to submit or self-publish a book, first you have to write one, and complete it, and polish it until all doubts are removed insofar as that is possible.

No one can teach you how to write or tell a story. It is a journey of discovery. If we want it bad enough, we will learn. We teach ourselves. Ultimately, we’re all alone out here.

You learn a lot about yourself as you go along.

 

End

The Comet.

Movies like Meteor, or Deep Impact, or the appallingly bad Space Cowboys always fucking piss me off, for some reason. I don’t plan on seeing 2012, anytime soon.

I’m not much of a scientist, although I taught grades six and seven for about thirty years at a couple of different schools in Des Plaines, and I was happy enough doing that. It seemed like such a privilege to help mould young minds; that is until I saw what happened to those minds when they became adults. For some reason some of, ‘the most brilliant young minds of our times,’ don’t even know the simplest, most basic facts of math, physics, or chemistry, or even that most uncommon of all things, common sense. As a teacher, I hate feeling like a total, abject failure, but that sort of thing happens from time to time. For some reason the human rejects seem to do awfully well later in life. It doesn’t seem fair for some reason. Some of the worst students go on to become doctors, lawyers, or newspaper editors, but our society is pretty sick to begin with. And science isn’t about the quest for truth or knowledge, it’s about patent applications and making money out of poorly-tested products that ultimately cause more harm than good. I suppose I saw them young, before they realized their true potential. And the old are entitled to be grumpy once in a while. I had always believed I would develop more patience as I aged. I was wrong! Oh, so wrong. But as our allotted time gets shorter, the value of time seems to go up proportionately. I guess you could say that the old appreciate life, while the young just seem to take it for granted.

So when a young guy that I taught years before showed up in the bar on a Friday night, and latched onto me like a long-lost friend, I had to be tolerant. I had to accept the fact that the boy I always thought of as, ‘poor Billy,’ had been hired by a prominent firm, a member of our military-industrial complex; and that he was in the business of making tools and devices for killing people. Sure enough, he caught sight of me and his eyes lit up.

“Mister Prentice,” he bellowed the length of the bar.

There wasn’t much point in slouching down in my seat at that point, was there?

Sometimes you just know. We spent some time reminiscing about old school chums, good times and bad times. Predictably enough, it wasn’t long before he started in on the complaints about his career, his wife, his job. It seems his wife didn’t understand him. He told me that three times before quaffing off his fourth martini and ordering another.

My unspoken comment, “I think she understands you very, very well,” remained unsaid.

It didn’t take too long before William, as he liked to call himself now, was drunk. And I mean stupidly drunk, where he was telling me stuff that he shouldn’t. Although I’m glad he did, as it gave me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save the world.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he slurred, then burped; then looked around with a guilty look: obviously married, in the worst possible way.

“Then don’t,” I replied shortly.

Some guys just can’t take a hint. He sure couldn’t, but that’s perhaps for the best, as was quickly demonstrated.

“There’s a comet,” he confessed, with a look of raw desperation. “It’s headed this way. It’s top-secret, of course, but you’re all right. I know you won’t tell.”

His eyes burned into mine.

Ah, yes; the masturbation incident. He was actually a little young for it at the time, but he had been reading some book—I think it was Desmond Morris’ ‘The Naked Ape,’ or something.

And he had tried it. Apparently his first climax was achieved while clutching that book, and following along like some kind of instruction manual. Morris’ rather clinical description of the higher primates engaging in sexual intercourse, was the chapter that did it. A lot of the kids passed that book around, and I eventually confiscated it. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t know what’s in it. It seems he got scared when nothing came out! His first climax was a dry one. And he couldn’t talk to anyone at home. His parents were right lunatics. They’d beaten an older brother half to death once when he was about fourteen years old and had come down with a cold.

His mom had found a few facial tissues in his waste-paper basket, and predictably enough, drawn the obvious-but-mistaken conclusion. As a teacher, I despise a certain kind of parent, but we have to treat them all like gold, or we get sued for a half a billion dollars or something ludicrous like that. The school board frowns on that sort of thing. It’s okay for the parents to foul up the kids, try to teach them anything useful, or accurate; or arcane notions, like evolution, or freedom of inquiry, and they get uptight. Recently the government of Canada has decreed that the subject of homosexuality, in conjunction with other sex education, has to be dealt with in the schools, beginning in grade four. Yet it is the parents, some of whose children are homosexuals, or will be later in life, that are objecting to the subject being dealt with in any terms other than outright condemnation. It is only after their kids have been beaten to death by the side of the road, that they realize that a parent can forgive a child for anything, even things the child could not control. We’re supposed to teach the kids tolerance, and the kids would be fine at that age.

It’s the parents who can’t hack it; it’s the parents who are truly ignorant.

I taught his brother history in grade seven, and quite frankly the bruises, the half-healed gashes and cuts were something to make one’s blood boil. Greg is doing eleven life sentences in some maximum-security prison out west somewhere. His record is a long litany of violent, sexual crimes against women, oddly enough. No, Greg is not a homosexual, he’s merely a violent psychopath.

Somehow that’s more socially acceptable, at least in his own mind.

Half the people in the Bible were violent psychopaths, unless I’m reading it wrong.

With a wrench I pulled myself back to the present day, and tried to show a little compassion, although I had this particular former student pegged as the classic, ‘A-type personality,’ which is a scholarly euphemism for the nethermost regions of the alimentary canal. I suppose he can’t help it. The upbringing has a huge influence, which even the best teachers can seldom correct. William was telling me that the meteor was going to hit the Earth, and we were all going to die, and there was no way that they could build a big enough nuclear weapon to, ‘vaporize it,’ in his words, and that’s when I put on my little thinking cap.

“See, I think you’re going at it all wrong,” I suggested in a gentle tone.

“No, no, we just can’t build a big enough friggin’ device,” he insisted. “That’s the only way we’re going to stop it.”

It seems the usual missiles and rockets just weren’t big enough to carry a zillion-megaton bomb. After all, they had been designed to drop much smaller bombs on our neighbor’s heads.

By destroying the world we prevent our enemies from winning, or something deucedly logical like that. They can design it, they can build it; they can test thousands of them to make sure they’re going to work. They can even use them from time to time. For some reason they can’t call it what it is: a bomb. I guess that’s considered rude.

I suppose I’d had a couple or three drinks myself; by this time, otherwise my patience would have held out against any assault.

“Dispersed gases,” I told him, and I don’t know where that came from.

Somewhere in the subconscious mind, I suppose.

“What?” he asked. “Dispersed what?”

William had his doctorate, for Christ’s sakes, and yet every one of them buggers all think the same way; the benefit of higher education. They all think like they’re supposed to. So I said it again.

“Dispersed gases,” I told him. “The meteor goes through a cloud of dispersed gases, and then it heats up from friction. It begins to outgas. That’s a verb, William. It radiates them in all directions, in a semi-spheroid pattern. Most of its mass won’t even approach Earth. You must have twenty or thirty thousand smaller missiles lying round, gathering dust, no good to anyone that way…perhaps you should use some of them up, before mice gnaw the insulation off all the wires and they self-ignite…”

William had talked about the comet’s transit past Saturn and Jupiter, and a couple of smaller planets. Let their gravity catch a-hold of some of that mass, while it was a liquid or a gas, and in the midst of decomposing from simple, abrasive heat. The key was to start a little earlier, and use just enough of it, or approximately one zillion megatons.

He sat up a bit then.

“What are you getting at?” he gasped in new-found hope.

“Think of it as driving a nail into a pencil lengthwise,” I offered. “If that comet had to go through something like a jet contrail, lengthwise, the heat of friction, from all the dispersed gases, say helium, or hydrogen, any kind of gas will do, although the denser the better…hell! You could use black powder from a bunch of firecrackers, if you wanted to do it on the cheap.”

Sure the world would go through a few years of climate upheaval. It would cost the taxpayers, who would have to subsidize the big corporations in order to guarantee massive profits, but at least the common man would still have a planetary biosphere to inhabit. And the bombs had all been paid off at the bank decades ago.

“That’s…that’s…” he said, wild-eyed, and no wonder.

The man was piss-drunk, and he was confronting the issue of calling the boss while under the influence and not in a very organized state of mind. “Brilliant!”

“It’s not brilliant at all,” I told him with just a hint of heat in my voice.

It suddenly occurred to me that William must have cheated on Section Five of our science class.

“You should have read the book, William,” I told him. “You get all your science off of the movie screen, or out of some crappy science-fiction book from some rank amateur who thinks kids floating through the air on a bike is cute.”

I couldn’t help it. It just came out that way. His pale, insipid, wishy-washy blue eyes stared into mine. Then he slapped his thigh, pulled a little phone out of some inner recess, and hit the ‘speed-dial’ button.

“Can you explain that, over the phone?” he asked in an agony of suspense.

Perhaps there was some hope for William after all. Sometimes massive forces, applied crudely, and all at once, just won’t work. Maybe he’ll get it someday.

“Of course, you ninny,” and he grinned a little at that.

Teachers have to say something, after all. That one was socially acceptable, although the parents and school board wouldn’t have liked it much. So William muttered away for a couple of minutes, while I checked my watch as unobtrusively as possible, wishing I were somewhere else. Then he handed me the phone.

I had to explain it again a couple of times, about little puff-balls of smoke or gases all lined up in a row ahead of the meteor, and how the thing would arrive in Earth’s vicinity as just a big clump of steam; without enough kinetic energy to cause any harm or penetrate the atmosphere, et cetera. Usually a couple of beers are enough for me. William’s company made my skin crawl, and I pounded back another. I’ve never thought of myself as an ugly drunk, but maybe the medications, the pain-pills and the alcohol were an unlucky combination.

I had to explain that if you took a half of a tenth of one percent of velocity off of that comet, there’s no way it could hit the Earth. I tried to explain how a simple bomb-blast behind the comet, up nice and close, in the cone of shadow where the sun’s light pressure was shielded by the body of the comet itself, would inevitably guarantee that the comet would pass behind and outside the orbit of the Earth harmlessly, but I don’t think he was actually capable of understanding that part. Perhaps it simply wasn’t an expensive enough option for his line of thinking.

After a long conversation with some four-star cluster-fuck in Washington, I handed William back the phone. Making my excuses, I headed for the washroom to relieve myself. Just coincidentally, the rear exit is right there, out of sight of the main lounge. I bought a huge cup of coffee at a well-known retailer, and went home. I haven’t been sleeping much lately, to tell the truth.

Sometimes I sit out back on a starry night and just enjoy the sky. And I’m glad I got the chance to talk to William. The universe is just too beautiful to let shit-heads, and ass-holes, and guys like William fuck it up for the rest of us. Incidentally, I heard later that ‘poor Billy’ got a big promotion. He lives in Cupertino, California, and makes about four hundred thousand dollars a year, and in a recent news story, it seems he got a fifty-million dollar bonus at Christmas.

The little creep never even called me or anything. But who knows? Maybe he blacked out and doesn’t even remember talking to me! It’s scary when you think of people like that involved in our national security.

About a year and a half later, a few of us schoolteachers were invited to the White House. our new president is big on beer, pretzels and, if it seems justified, a quiet conversation in the back room. She gave me some new medal that no one has ever heard of, and apparently, ‘If I’m ever out of work…’

I told her, “No fucking thanks, Madame President.”

I hope she accepts my decision in this matter. You see, I’m a Democrat, and I can’t stand them lying Republicans. About half of them should be put up against a wall and shot. The other half are just fine where they are, beating their kids half to death, promoting ignorance and bigotry, and preventing poor people from enjoying the common benefits of civil society. They make regular people look much better than they really are. Don’t take my word for it. Just sit back and watch for a while. Sit back and observe objectively.

Lately the stars seem a little dimmer at night, or perhaps my eyes are going. We all have to get old sometime. I’m tired, and I suppose that’s a good thing. It makes death look so much more attractive. You want the truth? I have cancer. I’m not in pain or anything, what with all the medications they’ve been giving me lately. I’ve had all the treatments. There is nothing further anyone can do for me. On the plus side, my wife is dead, my kids are all grown up, and I don’t owe anyone any money. I’m an only child, and my parents are long gone, although I do have an elderly aunt in Detroit. And I’m very grateful for all the kindnesses, of course.

There are times when I kind of resent saving the world.

I just know damned well they’re going to bury me with that fucking medal on my chest, and if I’m lucky, my granddaughter Sarah will put a little package of chocolate-chip cookies in there too, and maybe a little note saying how much she loves me.


END

'The Comet' appears in 'The Paranoid Cat and other tales,' available from fine online retailers everywhere.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Paranoid-Cat-other-tales/dp/0987972391