I saw "The Passion of the Christ" last Saturday. It was a film I dearly wanted to like, but I came away dissatisfied and depressed. Since when is a movie about Jesus supposed to be a downer?

Mel is definitely a throwback in his esthetics. The movie is a Medieval Passion Play with 21st century special effects gore. Midget babies, crows pecking eyes out, gallons of blood in scene after scene... Weird. Not uplifting at all, as you would expect a film about Jesus to be. I usually rate films on their DVD-ability, as in "would I like to buy the DVD?" For Mel's "Passion," the answer is, unfortunately, NO. I did find the Latin and Aramaic interesting. Having recently studied Arabic, I was surprised about how many words I could recognize. And the simplified Latin was Italianate, so that didn't even need subtitles.

If you want to see a good film about Jesus, see Zefirelli's "Jesus of Nazareth." Zefirelli preserves the mystical beauty of the Gospels, which is something Mel's version is sorely lacking.

Tales of the Moderately Disturbing

I just got back from a trip to my local Barnes & Noble, and discovered that the Horror section has been reduced to an end-cap on the Literature aisle. Yikes! And the end-cap only had all the usual suspects: King, Saul, etc.

Is Horror further on the decline? If so, I've been reading all these genre mags, like City Slab, and can perhaps see a trend. Is it just me, or is most of what passes for HORROR these days more like, moderately unwholesome, disturbing and/or depressing, rather than horrorific? When we read Datlow's YBFH, I thought, "well, maybe it's been a bad year for horror." Nothing, really, gave me that electric thrill up and down the spine like I got the first time I picked up a book by, say, Clive Barker. Then I thought, "Well, maybe it's just Ellen's taste," since I find about half the stories she puts on SCIFICTION to be trivial, gross and dull. But, now I've plowed through Cemetery Dance, Weird Tales, City Slab, Flesh & Blood, and I find the same dull tone there. Where's the excitement?

If horror results from "fear for the soul," can we have horror in a materialistic age in which the soul plays second fiddle to the latest Chinese-manufactured gizmo? I read Ellen's interview in City Slab where she says she "doesn't believe in the supernatural," or in "life after death." Hell's Bells! Then what's the point? I'm not suggesting only the uber-religious can write good horror, but perhaps if horror has become only a prop for modern psychobabble, then that's why its market share is falling. It's just not satisfying.

This week will be the fourth and penultimate session for my Short Story II class. I'm going to step things up a bit this week and bring one of my "wilder" stories in. At first I wasn't sure if the class could deal with something really unusuall and "edgy," but now I see from my classmates' offerings that they should be okay with what I bring. Then, for the final class, I'll bring my new, 5300-word story, "The Parable of the Tapestry."

I spent a lot of the day pondering markets again. It's so hard to decide what's appropriate and what's not. And there's no point in wasting time and postage mailing a submission to a market you know won't care for it.

Speaking of horror, or Horror (with a capital h), last week on TV started the new Stephen King miniseries, "Kingdom Hospital." Most of the reviews, including that of Tom Shales, have wanted to blow this story back to "kingdom come." I don't think the show is that bad. Last week's premiere suffered from laggardly pacing, due largely to being stuffed with ads. I did like the talking ardvaark, crow and german shepard. The main problem with the show is the premise, though. It seems Kingdom Hospital rests on "uneasy ground" where the dead are restless, and therein lieth the horror.

But in fact, in my experience, hospital horror derives not from forgotten graveyards full of dead children's corpses, but rather the everyday horror of illness and the feeble attempts of human beings to endure them, or cure them. In a sense, hospitals would be more soothing if they DID have a few ghosts roaming about. At least ghosts would reassure us that there is an afterlife. The horror of hospitals derives from the mechanization of disease and its treatment: the white coats, the pink nurses' uniforms with the cutesy little teddy bears, the buzzes, dings and beeps, the glaring lights. I saw a recent news report on a study that showed hospital rooms as being noisier than a jet plane, on average. Dehumization is horrifying. Becoming a statistic is horrifying. Soullessness is the ultimate horror. If ghosts desired to roam a hospital, they would hardly need more justification than the locale itself. When I was a resident of the ICU for a whole summer back in 82, I couldn't help but imagine the many people who had died in the very same room I was staying in. Some years later, both my grandparents did pass away in that very ICU, in rooms adjacent to where I had been. Think of the things that occur in a typical hospital: dismemberments, disembowlings, forced feedings, castrations, removal of eyes, breasts, brains, kidneys, hearts lungs, and blood. Strange and poisonous chemicals are injected into inert victims .... er... "patients" just to see how they'll react.

The difference between a medical center and a good, old fashioned medieval torture chamber is that one is supposed to be grateful to the Gods of Medicine for the benificence that they bestow upon one. At least a victim of judicial torture is allowed to be pissed off at his or her tormenters! For in truth the medievalists were trying to save souls--confess and the torture will stop. Modern medicine is agnostic about the soul. Confession gains the inmate--inpatient--nothing. The attention is all devoted to the body, as though salvation of the body is all that matters, in a 13 billion-year-old universe in which we dwell for at best a century. And it's not even the whole body that counts. Patients are treated piecemeal. For example, to my doctors I was mainly a pair of lungs on a breathing machine. If something else went wrong, it was time for another specialist to come in and treat that specific limb of the body, as though the whole were not greater than the sum of the parts. All this being a long-winded way of pointing out that Herr King missed the real chance to explore horror in the modern world.

Hey it's March already...

Kerry has won the Democratic primary season. Bush is on the attack here in the state he so frequently ignored, California. I hope Kerry can turn things around for the party. I don't know how he'll deal with the "liberal" onslaught.

I feel like I live in another country, the way the election results turn out. I can pretty much predict anymore how an election will come out, based on picking the oposite of the candidates I vote for. Egads!

In better news, looks like Mars had a watery past... Did it sustain life? The prospects have certainly approved. Now Nasa needs to get a sample-return mission up, and soon.

Hmm ... that link for the article didn't work. Let's try it again!

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040223/news_1c23slant.html

Wel it's been raining lately. What is perhaps the last big storm of the season has been rolling through the county, leaving sewer spills and auto accidents in its wake. We will never learn, it seems.

But overall it's been a very good week for me. Last Friday, out of the blue, I got a call from the Currents Editor of the San Diego Union Tribune. "We're going to publish your article," he said. He added, "It's wonderful." Wow! I was taken aback. Finally, after months of struggling, a ray of hope shines through. If you're reading this blog and want to see the article online, go to this link:

Tonight, I have another class for Short Story II. It's been fun, so far, even if not as advanced as I had hoped. But then again, one gets out of a class in proportion to the effort one puts into it. Last week, I brought "Mother's Night" to the class and the other members of my group seemed to enjoy it. Tonight, it's "Europa's Children."

Movie-wise, I want to see "Hidalgo." It looks far more inspiring that Mel Gibson's dreadful Crucifixion film. Not that I won't go see Gibson's neo-Romanesque epic, but it's not as high on my priority list as it once might have been, despite having all dialog in either Aramaic or Latin. Any movie spoken in two dead languages can't be all bad!

Today is a beautiful, sunny day in San Diego. Highs expected to be in the low 70s, for all you snowbound people reading this.

Two newsworthy events of the past week. "Boobgate" and Bush's "Meet the Press" interview with Tim Russert. Of the former, need we say more? It wasn't the bare breast that was truly offensive, it was the entire Super Bowl halftime show. The thing was vulgar and unintelligible. Maybe if you were a regular MTV viewer and no more than 20 years old, the event was great. But the Budweiser-swilling middle-aged family guys who make up a preponderance of the Super Bowl's audience were unimpressed. The music industry is dying--and based on the product it purveys--the sooner the better. As long as the "stars" blow their money on coke-snorting, whore chasing and room-trashing, why should any of us feel pity for them? Or are we supposed to empathize with Sony Records? Go ahead and download all the "free" music you want, I say.

Now, for Bush, things don't look so great. Funny how a year can change everything. John Kerry's on the offensive, Bush is playing "prevent defense." I've not been a big fan of Kerry, but the ABB (Anybody But Bush) principle holds for now. It would also help if progressives (of whatever party) took back at least one of the houses of Congress. Otherwise, an elected Kerry will be an impotent Kerry.

Meanwhile, I've started a new career "ghostwriting" some people's papers. And you know who you are! But I'm happy to be doing it. Besides, I NEED the money!

Today is another good day for space research. The Opportunity rover successfully set itself down on Meridiani Planum. It initially showed pictures quite different from the rock-strewn areas we've seen in the past. Intriguingly, there is a rocky outcropping within driving distance for the rover. Who knows what it will find?

In other news, looks like Howard Dean's goose is cooked. Kerry leads in New Hampshire and I believe he will win. Looks like Hillary's idea of sitting out this election while the current "bum crop" of Democratic candidates run headlong into the Republican buzz-saw, was the wise decision to make. Kerry will be lambasted as a Kennedy-liberal and Bush will coast to victory.

Today's weather--cool and cloudy. Around 61 for a high. Originally rain was predicted, but I don't see any now. I'm off to Ethan's baptism at 10:30.

I had dinner with Donna and Marina at Dead Lobster on Friday night! Much fun!

It's January 2004! Welcome to the future! Hmmm ... looks a lot like 2003! There's a lot to follow in the news:

-- The Democratic Primary: Looks like Dean will win in Iowa. But the Dems seem hell-bent on self destruction. Lieberman and Kerry need to get their heads screwed on straight. Neither one had a chance of winning the primary season, or of beating Bush. They are just the "democratic wing of the Republican Party." Why vote for these losers when we already have GWB? And all the character assassination they have done against Dean will come back to bite the party in the general elections.

-- The Mars rovers. Hooray for Spirit! Let's hope Opportunity successfully lands in a couple of weeks. It was disappointing to see the Beagle 2 not make it, since that was the only probe specifically designed to search for life. American scientists pursue their determined rock-hunting, which is cool from a scientific point of view, but lacks much zip for the general public. -- I'm still doing writing. The rejections tick me off, but that's part of the biz. I'll keep at it until I succeed or starve.

-- Today I cancelled my ATT long-distance service. I can use my cell phone or one of those 10-10 numbers if necessary (I hardly make any LD calls anyway). But the process was ridiculous. First, I called ATT and had to speak to some idiotic VR system. "Just speak naturally," it intones. And oh, it's just SO friendly! Makes me want to remain a customer, NOT. Then after I speak "Cancel" three times into the receiver, I get transfered to an operator. Then I wait 15 minutes to speak to a human. The human I finally get to talk to turns out to be an Indian (and I don't mean an Apache). Finally, after much mumbling on her part and sarcastic invective on mine, I get it through to her that I want to cancel my long distance. Then she tells me I have to call SBC to tell them I have cancelled my ATT. What the??? So then I call SBC, who at least has a native-English speaker as an operator. She tells me that ATT just handles billing, and that SBC has to physically disconnect me from ATT's network. And that carries a $5.00 charge! So no matter what you do, the corporate vampires suck your blood try.

December is the Christmas mad rush season, during which we celebrate the glories of capitalism, a fat guy in a red suit, and, oh, by the way, that subversive Jewish guy who was born in Bethlehem 2003 years ago (more or less, give or take a year or two, or maybe a decade). The malls, our modern temples, are filled with worshippers of the Golden Calf, paying homage not with Gold, Frankincense and Myrh, but Visa, MasterCard and Discover.

This year, even more than last, I've done most of my shopping online. The Internet will, eventually, bury the mall. I've also gotten most of my Christmas cards mailed, though a few unexpected stragglers arrive in the mailbox daily that cause me to have to reach for the box o' cards once again.

Last week was a fun week for TV. Monday night was the finale of "Average Joe." Melana, the cheerleader, picked handsome mama's boy Jason over ordinary--but rich--Jewish boy Adam. I was disappointed in the outcome as well, but in the end, "show bidness" was what it was all about. Many of the "average Joes" were wannabe actors... For example, Tariq, the Indian "genius," will be appearing on the show "Miss Match" either this week or next. Also, perpetually nerdy accountant Dennis (the guy who got the egg on the head) also has a long list of entertainment credits. For those who want it, the publicity can be a stepping stone to an entertainment career.

I saw Melana and Jason on both "Today" and "Tonight" yesterday. Apparently their contracts stipulated that they not see each other for the last 7 months. Some romance! Seeing as how the "prize" was simply a vacation to the Caribbean with Melana, perhaps she decided if she were going to spend just a week with the "winner," it might as well have been the "hot" one. Anyway, on "Today" they called Adam, and he sounded happy. As one review put it, "most of the Joes seem terminally Jewish." He reminded me of a bulky Seinfeld. And he evidently has a new girlfriend and watched the conclusion of the show in his bar with 500 friends. Perhaps, as Katie Couric said, Adam was the real winner after all!

I probably will watch the second series, as one problem with Melana was her Midwestern "Miss Congeniality" attitude. She bore the stiff upper lip too well, and was pretty much too darned cheerful. Seeing her giggling like a schoolgirl with a crush on the quarterback during her two appearances yesterday further lowered my expectations of her. As in fiction, the most interesting characters on "reality TV" are the ones who have a little bit of an edginess, a little bit of a dark side. Remember annoying, gay Richard on the first, and only interesting, "Survivor"? Have you noticed that Melana is blonde and the new girl is a brunette, with darker skin? Is that a coincidence? I doubt it, as everything in these shows is calculated to a "tee."

As far as the election, I don't feel good about it. Americans vote their pocketbooks more than anything else, and if the statistics look good, Bush will be very hard to beat. Iraq also will play a big role, but unless there is something equivalent of 1968's Tet Offensive, I don't see Bush as doing a Lyndon Johnson. More of a Nixon, probably (not surprising in that his closest advisors are resurrected Nixonites). Have you seen the report that Wolfowitz (what a Dickensian name!) has banned France, Germany, Canada and Russia from reconstruction contracts? Bush continues to extend his Texas-sized middle finger to the world, and we'll all pay for that eventually. The dollar is plummeting vis-a-via the Euro. Greenspan's propping up Bush by keeping interest rates ridiculously low. Eventually this too shall come home to roost, and when it does, the economy will suffer. And will the Europeans feel inclined to bail us out? But, Bush won't be in office by then, he estimates, so why worry?

My birthday, November 6, came and went without much fanfare. I went to dinner at Chin's on Miramar Road with my family (parents and Monica). Since my writing class was that night, I just went to the class and had Nancy read my story, "Beth and the Silver Box." The story got spontaneous applause after the reading, which made me happy. People genuinely seemed to like it, and even asked me how it ended (only the first five pages were read in class). I've submitted the work to Nancy, and am looking forward to reading her comments.

Recently, I went to see "Matrix Revolutions." It was a decent SF-adventure flick. I think people got too caught up in the philosophical implications and forgot that, at heart, the movie is just pulp entertainment. Plus, there's a strong sense of "been there, done that," with the epic battle scenes and the Uber Burly Brawl finale between Anderson and Smith.

Finally, there's more chemistry between Monica Bellucci's ample breasts than between Neo and Trinity during their final kissing scene.

This past week has bee Hell on Earth in San Diego and the surrounding area. The fires raged, the winds blew, the smoke beclouded our skies for days. On Tuesday, in fact, it was so dark that I had to run my lights in the house all day. The sky was a murky pumpkin-yellow: appropriate for Halloween, perhaps, but the horror and agony of the victims outweighed the interesting spooky color scheme. Plus, I was locked up in my apartment all week, with the AC running, to try to avoid the outside toxic atmosphere. Schools were closed all week; I missed my Short Story I class.

The parking lot at St. Gregory's was half full with tents housing all kinds of relief supplies the community had donated. St. Gregory's has become the focal point for a lot of the relief efforts for the Scripps Ranch area. Some 50-odd parishioners lost homes to the fires. The parish is also coordinating some relief efforts for Crest, Ramona, and Julian.

It's been entertaining watching the politicians jockey for the blame-game. The local Republicans, who have cheapskated our community for years, all tried to blame Gov. Davis. Yet everyone knows the CDF procedures allocated firefighters (I would prefer to say "firemen," but hey, poticial correctness ueber alles!). And even the Union Tribune, snot rag of the local Republican Junta, ran articles last week on the front page showing how the Bush administration has been shortchanging the local communities, sending out a memo saying "cost containment has to be equally important with safety." (<-- Paraphrase)

On other news, my birthday is this coming Thursday. Number 48! Wheee! We will be celebrating this coming Tuesday at Chin's in Miramar, since I have class on Thursday.

Meanwhile, I keep getting rejects on stories. "Chalk it up to showbusiness," Nancy says. Yeah, right. But it still is "teh Suck," as my EverQuest friends would say. It wouldn't be so bad if writing were still a hobby, but now that I'm trying to make a career of it, every reject notice is money out of my wallet. Argh! That being said, 3 other stories/articles are out in circulation, maybe my ship will eventually come in. Please, God, don't make me have to grind away in a cubicle again! Noooooooooooooooo!!!

One other interesting note. I got a call from the Health and Human Services eligibility worker who's doing my Medi-Cal evaluation. She claims to have never received my packet of documents, which I mailed over a month ago. I was really upset, as some of those documents were originals (they always require originals). I don't understand where that envelope could have gone: it was printed with her HHS address and worker number on it. I think it's really there, probably buried on another worker's desk, perhaps. Tomorrow I'm calling Aleyda at Protection and Advocacy to complain and lay the groundwork for an appeal if this screws up my Medi-Cal and IHSS eligibility.

Today is Friday! That used to seem a lot more significant to me when I "worked for a living." Of course, now I still work, but the work is private until some editor decides it's worthy of publication. Last night we had Week 5 of Short Story I. This class has been worthwhile from the theoretical standpoint, but has been a lot less fun overall than the "Writing the Horror Story" class. It's not Nancy's fault--she puts a lot of effort into making the class work. But the students, for the most part, seem to be a lot less passionate about their work, and it shows in the kinds of stories they turn in. Mostly, these are introspective, pseudo-memoirs, of the dry, literary sort.

For example, there's the little old Jewish lady whose story starts out, "Sally wondered how she ended up lost on the top of a Greek island." Apparently it's based on a real-life adventure she had in 1968, but the adventure has mostly been stripped from the story. Then there was the one about the mother at a school PTA-type meeting. *yawns* Or the one about the girl whose car was stolen. Or the one by the loudmouthed psychologist in the group, who apparently has a problem with an absentee father (the kid in the story goes wandering around Mexico City by himself and discovers his long-lost dad).

Last night's stories were a bit better. One, called "Boy," centered around a young runaway, who took care of horses on Mr. Dougherty's ranch. It was told in first-person, in a hick dialect of indeterminate origin. Another story was drawn straight from "Wonder Years," about a kid who has to face down a bully. The last one, called "Funeral Homes," was the weakest. All three stories were told in first person, but the "I" of "Homes" was indistinct. We, the readers, never even got to know his name.

My story will be anything but bland and will shake things up a bit. I only hope Nancy doesn't blow the reading! Meanwhile, here's the essay I did on Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" for the class:

Plotting in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

"Heart of Darkness" is a novella, and as such has a plot structure a bit more complex than most short stories. The action doesn't boil down to "a single incident that happened once," but it rather an episodic and epic journey from the Nellie on the placid Thames, to Belgium, and deep into the Belgian Congo. The return trip, as traced by Marlow in his frame narrative, proceeds back up the Congo River, through the jungle, to that "Sepulchral City" (Brussels) and back onto the Nellie. Each waypoint incident on this journey into darkness is like an island in the vast and flowing stream of the narrative.

There are aspects to the story's construction that, while hardly innovative, might seem so to a novice reader (or writer). One is the frame narrative, invented by the Arabs, honed by Chaucer and Bocaccio, and used often in contemporary films and novels. Screenwriters call this technique "bookending," where a narrator starts the story in some kind of "present," but reminisces of some past incident, then returns to the "present" at the end of the story. This technique was used in Amadeus, for example.

Each island of narrative in "Heart of Darkness" builds on the tension of the previous one, until Kurtz's climactic "The horror. The horror." A plot diagram of Conrad's story might look more like the "death spiral" of a moth auguring into a candle flame than the classic, if oversimplified, "rising and falling action." The depth of this work has impressed me more and more since I first read it in the 8th grade, and I would take away from it, as a lesson in plotting, not to fear depth and complexity, even when attempting a work of commercial accessibility.

Another day, another Sunday. Another Chargers game--let's hope they win today!

Other news: My battle with IHSS is temporarily over. They agreed to a conditional withdrawal of my appeal, and Susan Moreno, the appeals worker, is sending the case back to the County. Turns out, as I insisted all along, I belong in the so-called "250 Working Disabled" program, meaning my IHSS should never have been cut off. Would have helped if Angela Knoll, my IHSS worker, had not left county service the day after she mailed me the cutoff notice.

I sent off two stories yesterday, to web zines. We'll see what happens. While there's a story in queue, there's hope!

Here's a brief review of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" I recently did for Short Story I:

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

On the offhand, I'd say this story has a great line of progeny, most notably almost every other "Twilight Zone" episode, and Stephen King's "Children of the Corn." The "universal truth" centering the story is the unending willingness of humans to sacrifice for some common good. If the sacrifice involves bloodshed, all the better! And if it involves ganging up on the weak, there's nothing amiss therewith, from the subjective view of the mob. Most disturbingly, the "common good" can be vague, unusual, half forgotten; the ritual subsumes the goal. Certainly in the '40s when "Lottery" was written, the world had seen ample examples of all of the behaviors mentioned above: Fascism, Nazism, Communism. And we're not bereft of modern examples, including the near stoning of the woman in Nigeria a few weeks ago.

This is very much an "external" narrative. Without going into specifics (too hard to lug that gigantic book around), "The Lottery" is almost a stage piece. Everything, the crowd, the children, the stones, the box, has its starting point almost etched out in the dusty town square. Visually, one can imagine a pan shot as the camera descends from a high level view of the town to the street level. Then it pans again to crowds, faces, and actions. The narrator truly is the camera's eye in this setting.

I've been doing these little reports on various short stories assigned to us in Nancy's class. Eventually I'll post them all; here's the most recent one (for tonight's class):

A Short Look at Characterization in Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited"

When thinking of "Babylon Revisited," one cannot help but think of the American relationship with Paris over the years. Since the '30s depicted in the story, the glitter, the charm, the art and the decadence of the City of Light have all been surpassed by one US city or another; the most monstrous domestic concoction of all those qualities (excepting the "art") being La Vegas, with its Paris Hotel and Casino towering over the denizens of the strip like a neon-lit avatar of Montaigne's Gargantua. Yet Paris remains, eternally elusive and alluring to the "stranger." Characterization in "Babylon Revisited" grows out of setting.

Charlie Wales is the quintessential "American in Paris," surviving in the post-crash depression era as best he can. He's a man who's "made mistakes," lived high and fallen low, only to begin digging himself out again. The narrator focuses on Charlie's view of the world, and sometimes we, the collective readers, have to wonder how reliable this viewpoint is. Charlie's vocabulary is striking for its use of "I." One senses Charlie still longs for his days of drunken "royalty" in the following passage:

"But it was nice while it lasted.... We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. In the bar this afternoon"--he stumbled, seeing his mistake--"there wasn't a man I knew."

Does he really want Honoria to live with him for her good, or his own? The steadfast but bourgeois Peters family have made good guardians for the child. With the brash intrusion of Charlie's former drinking buddies into the Peterson home, the reader can't help but sense a certain foreboding that Charlie eventually will succumb again to Babylon's glittering charms. The sadness he feels at the end is the sadness of a man both facing, and running from, the delinquencies of his past. The final sentence brings Charlie's piquant, self-inflicted misfortune into perspective: "He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn't have wanted him to be so alone." In the end, Honoria is the prop upon which Charlie hopes to hang his ego, not a fully fleshed human being who would benefit equally from her relationship to her father.

Last Tuesday, we the citizens of the once mighty State of California managed to turn participatory democracy into a circus sideshow. We now have a governor-elect who believes Native American tribes are "special interests" but thinks it's ok to take $300,000 in contributions from land-developer magnate and Chargers owner Alex Spanos. The media-corporate oligarchy has managed to finally throw aside any pretense at good government. This has been the greatest usurpation of a weak central government by an Austrian since Odoacer ripped the crown from the feeble head of Romulus Augustulus.

If I were a Republican (which I most assuredly am not), I would have voted for McClintock, who at least gives the faintest impression of knowing what he's talking about. Even if there's no way in HELL he or Arnold could balance the budget by eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse." These Neanderthals (and I take the term lightly, as otherwise using it would be an insult to our thick-browed forebearers) have no problem with looting the public treasury for corporate givaways. And people like Jay Leno with his 150 cars and Arnold with his garageful of Hummers whine about the vehicle tax. I say, if the tax is so damn onerous, why don't they sell a few of their prestigemobiles? And speaking of Leno--I used to be a big fan of his before he became Schwarzenegger's semi-offical campaign spokesman. Hey Jay! Wake the hell up! It's no longer 1998! You can cut with the Clinton jokes now! If there's a place in one of the inner circles of hell for commedians, I hope Leno winds up spending eternity with Jerry Lewis and Roseanne Barr. If Schwarzenegger wants to inaugurate "hydrogen highways" so badly, why doesn't he just drill a friggen hole in the side of his head and let the hot gas out?

So, let's all get out our Bear Flags and dance around the campfire to the Horst Wessel song. All hail the Fuhrenator! (and pay no attention to the midget behind the curtain--it's not Gary Coleman, it's Pete Wilson).

Here are a few notes and whatnot from my Short Story 1 class at UCSD. You can read them or skip them, if you find literary ramblings to be boring.

I was brainstorming about the characteristics of some of my favorite SF stories. These are some of the factors I came up with:

"Nightfall"
- Global scale
- Suspense builds
- Sense of history
- Night falls

"Rapaccini's Daughter"
- Scientist
-- daughter
-- narrator-
Disease/Death-
Perfection-
Inability of man to overcome decay and death

"Nine Million Names of God"
- Technological progress has unintended consequences

"The Veldt"
- What we get is not always what we want
- Generation gap in use of technology

Hey, it's almost mid-September! Here are a few random thoughts about recent events.

1) It just galls me, to the point of wanting to choke, cry, scream, to see Bush willing to pay $87 billion for one year in the occupation of Iraq, while things to to hell in this country. That $87 billion could have paid for every state's budget deficit, or it could have paid for expanded health care coverage, more public works (remember when our freeways were actually less filled with potholes than the highways of Mexico?). In an era when my nursing-care budget is balanced against reductions in my attendant-care and ventilator, something's seriously wrong. It's wrong enough that I begin to doubt my reasons for living in this country anymore. My latest fiasco is that the county wants to cut off my IHSS support. That means I have "excess income" that exceeds my share of cost for IHSS services. What does this mean for me? Well, I can get by without IHSS for a month or so. But Harold will lose the job he needs for his own family. Is Harold rich? Am I? NO!! But, God forbid we should raise the vehicle license fees up to what they were three years ago, lest some fat idiot in his gas-guzzling SUV be forced to pay a bit more for it. Now, why these people whine so much about the vehicle tax, when the can afford a $60,000 SUV and two-dollar a gallon gas to put in it, I just can't understand. It's like Bush giving away tax breaks while cutting back veterans' benefits and requiring moms and dads in the reserves to spend a year or more occupying Iraq. Sacrifice? No thanks, just keep them pork rinds on my plate and let somebody else slaughter the hogs.

2) I was watching Mulholland Drive on cable last night. It's one of my favorite movies. Truly a deep dive into the world of dreams. And it occured to me that Mulholland Drive is a sort of modern Wizard of Oz. Dorothy, aka "Betty," arrives in LA, the real-world Oz, as an innocent igenue. Or is she? Diane Selwick is the other side of Betty, the dark, jaded and schizo side. The Oz of Diane's dreams meets the sordid reality of her quashed desires in the suicide at the film's end (or beginning?).

Here's a poem I wrote a while back (year or so). Sort of Dickensonesque, though no flies buzz nor sepulchres groan within.

The Darkest Coat of Dreams

I wrap myself in cloaks of darkness,
Weaving black on black of night on night
While sparkling stars betray my insight,
Then stretch my fingers into blindness.

I sungaze to wipe the soul with light,
Then shut eyes and wish the world away--
To seal the windows and flee the day
Is to keep a promise made each night.

I sleep deep and dream and roll and cry
At all the vivid images, bright
That flash and burn in embedded flight
From hours and years lost to sunlit sky.

In dreams I weave frail dark strands around
Of fancied loves and unfulfilled fate.
Yet waking, I fear and know too late,
To all tainted mourning here I’m bound