Excerption To The Rule About Not Posting NaNoWriMo Excerpts

The easiest blog posts are the ones already written. Sure, this bit (haha - BIT!) from my 2010 NaNoWriMo project about undead people eaters needs a little more spit and polish, but whatever. I like it. And yes, Doug is a dog...

He held the cricket bat with his right hand and one of the 9mms in his left, told Doug to stay, then crouched down and crept, cat-burglar-style, across the asphalt to what was left of the body he'd just passed. Please have the keys, please have the keys, please have the keys, he thought. There they were - about five feet beyond the space in which she had fallen and died and been mostly devoured by monsters that until recently had been regular people. Bill tiptoed past her and wrapped his fingers around the keys, scanned his surroundings again and turned back toward the Jeep. As he passed her remains again, he couldn't help but take a closer look at her. That was when he saw it. Beneath her broken, bloody, half-eaten torso - clutched with a mangled skeletal dead hand between her mostly-intact and bloody-sweater-clad breasts - was a baby. Bill glanced around him again, then bent down low and looked more closely. It was wearing a little pink dress and appeared to be in one piece, and it was dead, staring vacantly into the parking lot with dry eyes devoid of life. "Look at that and tell me there's a god," Bill whispered, his voice shaking with a mixture of heartbreak and rage.

After learning that the Jeep had only a quarter-tank of gasoline - since it had become one of his central challenges over the past couple of weeks, Bill had taken to repeatedly saying "gasoline" with an Australian accent, like Mad Max - Bill had siphoned ten gallons from the car directly behind the Jeep. He had brought the small, battery-operated pump from the boat, but still it only had a six-foot tube, so he transferred the gay-zoh-line to the Jeep five gallons at a time, using the big empty paint bucket that had been in the back, behind the baby seat. Actually, it had been full when he found it - just not of paint. It had been full of baby toys.

While the second bucketful of gas was being pumped into the Jeep, Bill took as many of the toys as he could carry over to the bodies of mother and child. He knelt next to them and scattered the toys around. When he reached in to put a ring of oversized plastic, pastel-colored keys under the mother's half-body, close to the baby, it screamed and hissed and wriggled and bit at the keys with ghastly, toothless bites. "Shit! Zombie baby!!" Bill squealed as he jumped back, covering his mouth to prevent any other loud noises from flying out of it. The undead infant was still gurgling and growling as Bill backed away. "Okay, look at that and tell me there's a god!" He ran back to the Jeep, where the pump was sputtering, having already sucked the last of the gasoline from the bucket into the tank. He shut off the motor, tossed the pump and its hose into the bucket and threw put them in the back. The handful of zombies who had been aimlessly stumbling around in front of the convention center was now a fistful of zombies who had heard the baby and/or Bill's screams and now staggered rather less aimlessly in the direction of the Jeep.

Some Notes For Your Next Breakup

To: prednisone@blessingandcurse.drug
From: joe@mostlyharmless.patient
Date: June 5, 2011
Subject: Things I'd really like you to stop doing

Hey you. How's it going? Sorry I haven't returned any of your calls. You know I totally want to, but I just can't. I know by now you know this is not a drill. I'm not bluffing. It really is *over*. And I know that sucks. I know it does. But we are both adults (well, I'm an adult - you're more of a steroid). If we can't part ways as friends - and it is looking more and more as though we cannot - then we need to just part ways. Period.

You say you want to stay friends. If that is true, then there are some things I really need you to do or, more to the point, stop doing.

• If you're going to send flowers, here's a tip: send live ones. The stuff with which you've been flooding my life of late has been shriveled enough to adorn an Addams Family set.
• You know I love chocolate. You know from that one Valentine's Day that those sugar-free chocolates are really quite powerful laxatives. Yet, lo and behold, that is what you sent me. I lost a half-day of work and the respect of everyone in my office. Thanks a lot.
• Do not reenact the climactic scene from "Never Been Kissed" at the Frederick Keys game - especially on a night when I'm not even there. It's just embarrassing.
• I'd rather you didn't drunk-dial me late at night, especially if you're too drunk to hear the beep, leaving a voicemail of mostly dead air and inebriated steroidal breathing. Or if it's karaoke night wherever you are. Or if you're drunk enough to dial my mom's number instead of mine. Just stop. Get a wing-man or something - someone to take custody of your phone until the danger has passed.
• You know I love gifts, and you know I like cool toys for my cubicle at work, but seriously dude - a whole case of mortar-and-pestle-shaped stress balls emblazoned with "CADISTA PHARMACEUTICALS" is not exactly going to win me back.
• Yes, I loved the 1980s - music, TV, movies, Presidents - you name it. But OMG do NOT stand in my front yard holding up a boom box bellowing as loudly as its D-cell-powered wooferlets can bellow, especially if your "come back to me" songs of choice are The Piña Colada Song or Fat-Bottomed Girls.

So. Just to recap: Stop trying to stop me from breaking up with you. It won't work. There's nothing you can do to change my mind. I get no joy from seeing you suffer, and even less from seeing you make a fool of yourself, but this is happening. PLEASE do us both a favor and move on. Please?

Dear Prednisone - Don't Even Think About Quoting "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" Lyrics At Me

Dear Prednisone,

I'm no good at this kind of thing, so I'll just come right out and say it. I don't think this relationship is working anymore and I think it would be best for both of us if we just stop seeing each other. I know this is not what you want, and believe me when I tell you that it is one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do, but you know as well as I do that it is time. Hell, we pretty much knew when we started seeing each other that we were never meant to be a long-term thing. Six months to a year - isn't that what EVERYBODY said? And we stretched it to over four years! Impressive.

I'm not going to try to sugar-coat this with BS like "it's not you - it's me," because truthfully, it pretty much IS you. It's you who made me all roid-ragey and emo. It's you who made me gain all that weight - presumably so no one else would look at me. It's you who made me cry at TV commercials, yell at EVERYBODY and everything, and feel guilty and crappy afterward. Did you HEAR some of the monstrous sputum I launched in the direction of my friends, coworkers and family alike? What was that?

Now, I already know what you're going to say, so I'll save you the trouble: You saved my life. Yes, you probably did, and for that I will forever be in your debt. But that does not give you the right to treat me the way you have - especially lately. The minute I hinted that I needed a little space, you went all Fatal Attraction on me. I'm not sure how many of your previous relationships that reaction has managed to save (I'm guessing none), but I promise you that it won't save this one.

Look - I don't want to fight about this. You're an amazing drug, and I have no doubt that you'll find another wonderful patient in no time. Let's just be mature, take a deep breath, and go our separate ways as friends, okay?

Love,
Joe

Don't Put Deadlines On Your Dreams

Well, the Rapture didn't happen and the world is trudging right along, just as it was on Friday. I'm not here to make a bunch of jokes at the expense of Harold Camping or his misguided followers; that's just too easy and has been done to death already. I'm sure they continue to believe, blaming their massive public failure - as they did in 1994 - on some miscalculation or misinterpretation of the data. They'll go back and recalculate the date of the Rapture and the End of Days, then grow old and die without seeing any such thing actually occur. If they're smart, though, they won't tell anyone the date, next time.

Do NOT put deadlines on your dreams. This Rapture business must be devastating to the people who believed in it. Some of those devotees gave up all of their savings. Now, not only are they broke, not only are they still here, but they're also an international punchline, devoid of any semblance of credibility forever. In a lot of ways, they probably feel as though the Rapture DID happen, but they were not taken, and are now in some sort of hell on earth. It's really hard for me to resist making fun of that.

I don't say this because I don't believe in the Rapture (although I don't), or because I don't think the world will end (it totally will). I just don't recommend giving something so important, so utterly massive, a due date. And not just Judgment Day, either. No good ever comes from declaring that aliens are coming to take you away in exactly six years, three days and seven hours.

A few other important things for which I don't recommend a drop-dead due date:

Don't go through college telling everyone that you will make your first million by age 25. This one is a lose-lose. If you don't make it, you'll think yourself a failure when that might not even be the case. If you do make your million by 25, you'll be a douche who nobody likes. And no matter what the outcome, you'll annoy all of your college friends to no end and they will stop at nothing to keep you from succeeding.

No deadlines on life stuff. You might meet Mr. Right and have a perfect little boy and a precious little girl and live in a darling little house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and a dog in the yard - all by age 30. Then again, you might meet Mr. Right and marry him, only to have him leave you for the grad student he works with at Best Buy. Or you might get stuck with two sons and no daughter. Or it could all happen, but not until you're 39.

You can't just declare that you'll learn to juggle in exactly 60 days. Recipe for disaster.

I can't tell you how many target dates for getting my first novel published have come and gone. I can't even finish reading a book in an arbitrarily-allotted amount of time.

There's no sense in telling everyone that your 1/64-scale replica of the 184-mile C&O Canal, constructed entirely of cherry tomatoes, frilly sandwich toothpicks and half-chewed Hubba Bubba gum, will absolutely, positively be finished before your middle-school "graduation." Heartbreak will ensue, trust me.

I knew a girl in college who, after breaking up with her boyfriend, told all her friends that she would be 100% over him in precisely 30 days. Guess who was still riddled with anger and drunk-dialing him almost a year later.

Two words: World Domination. Sure, it's a worthy and respectable goal, but put a deadline on it, miss that deadline, and watch the field day that Leno and Letterman and Conan have with your sorry ass.

Now, I'm not saying we should never use deadlines for any of our goals. Just try to stay away from assigning them to big, uncertain events. Keep them away from your dreams. You can't just say "I am going to be WELL, and dammit, I'm going to be well in 39 days." Try to be well, as soon as possible. Your body doesn't care one wit about the calendar - never has, never will.

It's also fine to prepare for the Rapture, if that's your thing. Just don't waste your life trying to figure out exactly when it's coming, then tell everyone in no uncertain terms that it absolutely WILL happen on Saturday only to watch as your dream fails to come true. If going to heaven is that important to you, just live your life in such a way that you're ready whether it comes tomorrow, or 540 years from tomorrow. How hard is that to do without a deadline? Is it me? It must be me.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I am stepping down from a multi-year prednisone regimen, and I am going to be done by July 1st. If July 1st comes, and I'm still on the stuff and/or not WELL, I don't know what I'll do.

School Called. Why Must You Always Make Your Teachers Cry?

Greetings! I found a scene I kind of like, from my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel (first time reading it since I finished on 11/30/09). Enjoy... Or don't. Hahahahaha - no, really. Enjoy it...

One cold 4th-grade morning, we came into our double-wide classroom to find "SPELLING" scrawled on the blackboard. Beneath that, it said "Miss Adams." My chronically-knotted little stomach relaxed a bit. At least for now, there would be no math, and I preferred Miss Adams to Mrs. Martin, whom I found frightfully intimidating. Maybe I could survive the morning.

We sat in a circle on the floor, with all the desks shoved back toward the outer edges of the room. Mrs. Martin was sitting way back in the corner at her desk, grading tests or concocting new ways to torture us or reading a Harlequin Romance or whatever the hell teachers did when they weren't actively making us do stuff we didn't want to do. She was a big, sturdy, pretty woman in her forties, always impeccably and - I realize now - expensively-attired. Her black hair was always perfect and shellacked like one of those new non-stick skillets, and usually featured a bow or ribbon in the same color as her dress. She wasn't mean. She was just strong and firm and a little loud. She was a force in the classroom.

If Mrs. Martin was the bad cop in this double-teacher arrangement, then Miss Adams was clearly the good one. She was at least ten years younger than her co-teacher, and in many ways her opposite. She had a softness about her. She was much thinner than Mrs. Martin, her hair was wavy and usually left to its own devices, she wore simple dresses and occasionally - gasp - pants, and she had a gentle teaching style. Her southern accent probably added to that. She just always sounded sweet and encouraging and concerned. Miss Adams had the patience of a saint, so seeing her there walking slowly around inside the circle of students was comforting.

I suppose public humiliation is just a part of learning, and short of having one teacher per student in private cubicles, there doesn't seem to be any way around it. Spelling was especially brutal. Today, it appeared that Miss Adams was going to go around the entire class, counter-clockwise, starting just a few kids to my left. I could live with that. There would be plenty of little humiliations before she got to me, so any failure on my part would just be one of many by then. It was worst when you were the first kid to spell a word wrong. Looking around the circle, I was confident that at least ten mistakes would be made en route to me.

I wasn't too far off. The very first word given was misspelled by one of the girls, but she was known to be smart, so no one laughed at her. A couple of kids down the line, "mountain" was spelled wrong. To my right, one of my few acquaintances, Lewis Hardy, elbowed me.

"That was a tricky one," he whispered, "but that guy is kind of an idiot."

"Yeah." I laughed a bit too loudly, as evidenced by the glance Miss Adams shot my way over her shoulder. Lewis was the class genius and to this day is probably the most intelligent person I have known, so his casual friendship was both a blessing and a curse. It felt good to know that such a smart person valued my company, but he was extremely quiet and a little too smart to avoid the "weird" label. He was a nice guy and usually exceedingly diplomatic, so hearing him refer to someone as an idiot was kind of a jolt.

Lewis gave Miss Adams a minute to refocus on the boy who couldn't spell mountain, then he leaned in my direction. "Do you remember his Pilgrim hat from art class last Thanksgiving?"

"Yeah," I answered, much more carefully than before. "It was all pointy and cone-shaped, like a dunce cap."

"Right. And how many pictures of Pilgrims have you seen where their hats have big John Deere belt buckles on them?" he sneered.

I had to think about that for a second. I had remembered some sort of oversized buckle on that guy's construction paper hat, but it took my brain a moment to connect "John Deere," a name I barely knew, with the anatomically-incorrect dog-like monster sitting in the middle of that creation. "Is that what that thing was supposed to be? I thought it was a dragon getting blown up by an atom bomb." I whispered. "How about that diorama of the Nixon Resignation Signing he did last year? What a joke."

"I know!" Lewis chuckled. "He had Nixon signing with his left hand, and he put Earl Butz between Ford and Kissinger. Now, I don't know if Ford and Kissinger were in the Oval Office for the signing, but I'll bet you a million dollars that the Fucking Secretary of Agriculture was not! If any Cabinet members would have been there, it would have been Saxbe. What an imbecile."

I let another surprised laugh escape. I had never heard Lewis cuss before, let alone use the F-word. "Right. Saxbe. I mean, duh!" I said.

"Worst diorama ever." Lewis shook his head in disgust.

From my left, Marty Collins, Lewis' friend, interjected. "Don't act like you know who William Saxbe is, James." Marty was another smart one, but unlike Lewis, he always had an irresistible need to make sure everyone knew how intelligent he was. He wasn't brilliant - just a know-it-all, so it made me feel all warm inside when Miss Adams turned and uttered her southern little "shoosh" (She actually said "shoosh." It sounded as though there might even have been an extra O in there) squarely at Marty.

"Burn!" I whispered just as she returned her attention to the spelling torture at hand.

After a few more relatively uneventful stops around the circle of tormented spellers, Miss Adams arrived in front of Lewis. There was an expectant hush, as we all knew she'd give him a really hard word, as she always did. "Lewis, please spell 'scimitar.'"

Lewis sat up and cleared his throat thoughtfully. "Can you use it a sentence, please?"

"The dreaded pirate Blackbeard's weapon of choice was his scimitar." she said.

"With all due respect, ma'am, Blackbeard's primary weapons were the Queen Anne's Revenge and when push came to shove, his pistol." If anyone else in the class had made such a statement to one of the teachers, he or she would have been in trouble, but Lewis was always so respectful, quiet and correct that he got away with it. "May I have the word's origin, please?" he continued.

"This isn't a spellin' bee, sweetie." Miss Adams smiled. He spelled the word. Correctly. My turn.

"James," she said, "Please spell 'plowin'' - as in, 'The farmer was up early, plowin' his field." She winked at Lewis, then looked at me.

"Plowin'?" I asked.

"Plowin'." she repeated.

"P-L-O-W-I-N." I stopped. She looked at me expectantly. I heard a muted giggle from somewhere behind her.

"Almost, hon. Sound it all the way out as you think about all the letters in the word."

I was puzzled. "You said 'plowin'' - right?"

"That's right, James. Take your time." she was very focused on me and doing her best to keep me from getting upset, but it was not working.

"P-L-O-W-I-N." I said, already seeing the disappointment on Miss Adams' face. "As in, the farmer was up early PLOWIN' his field." Another giggle or two, then uncomfortable silence.

"No, sweetie. P-L-O-W-I-N-G." she said.

"Duh!" Marty blurted. A full round of laughter followed, before Miss Adams squelched it with another "Shooosh!" and a wave of her finger all the way around the circle.

"You didn't say G!" I protested.

"Well, sure I did, darlin' - P-L-O-W-I-N-G." She titled her head quizzically, then looked up momentarily, as if the next word was written on the ceiling tiles. "Okay. Let's try another one. Spell 'fishin' - as in, 'Tom Sawyer spent the day at the fishin' hole.'"

I could feel my neck and face flushing with anger. "Fishin'? You said FISHIN' - right?"

"Yes. Fishin'," she said again. Way back at her desk in the corner, Mrs. Martin had stopped working and was watching me intently.

I sighed and tried again. "F-I-S-H-I-N." Sniggering ensued and after another lengthy "are you sure you're done" stare, Miss Adams shook her head. "That's exactly what she said!" I insisted. "I spelled exactly what she said!" This only amused the class more. I'm quite certain I heard the word "stupid" more than once, out there.

Mrs. Martin had made her way over to the circle of chortling cruelty and was standing just behind Lewis, looking at me as though she were concerned that I might have been poisoned. With one sharp little stomp of her heel on the tile floor, she silenced the room. "James, let's try one more. Can you spell the word 'Spellin' for me, darlin'?" Yes, although hers was more aristocratic and a bit easier to deal with than Miss Adams' southern accent, she had one, too.

I was shaking with frustration. I spelled what I heard once more, and as the laughter started again, I looked at Mrs. Martin. She was nodding toward the chalk board across the room, where the word 'SPELLING' had been so clearly written. Just then Martin and at least two or three others started scolding me with "G! G! There's a G at the end, stupid. I-N-G!"

I leapt from my spot on the floor, knocking Martin into the girl to his left. "I know that! She didn't say 'spelling'! She said 'SPELLIN'!' There's no fucking G in 'SPELLIN' Goddamn it!! And I know how to fucking spell 'FISHING.' But she wasn't saying 'fishinG.' She kept saying 'FISHIN' - so that's what I fucking spelled. What is WRONG with you people???"

I was sent to the Principal's office, and later received a week-long grounding from my parents, for refusing to tell them where I'd heard such language because it sure as hell wasn't from them.

Lesson learned. Several, actually. Southern accents are a pain in the ass. Don't trust your ears when your brain knows better. Children are awful little predators who feast on any misstep or sign of weakness. Swearing a lot can make one a little bit cooler, if only temporarily and if only with the tough kids. Finally, it seemed that accuracy and precision were concepts in which I believed much more strongly than anyone around me.

I Here The Writeing's Are On The Wall: A Lurch In To The Dumbening

This has been a long time coming. I fought. I resisted with all my waning strength. [Maris] did, too. We clawed and punched and kicked and stabbed and slashed, but our enemy has proved far too powerful, too massive, too young and quick and impervious to our feeble blows. We found ourselves backed repeatedly into the corner, unable to escape. Faced with a choice between letting our nemesis obliterate us, or giving ourselves up, we have chosen the latter.

So. Ignorance, Laziness, Marketing: We bow before you, utterly, unequivocally, irrevocably defeated. We will fight you no more. Secretly, we've always wanted to sneak over to the Dark Side, as we have long heard it said that there would be cookies. We'll even join forces with you, and rule the galaxy as father and son! Wait. Not that. But you get the idea. We couldn't beat 'em, and never would, so we're ready to join 'em.

No longer will we bellow at the TV when news anchors tell us about fires caused by shortages in washing machines. We'll ignore stories from highly-respected global news outlets like Reuters and the Associated Press, telling us that Istanbul's main square had been teaming with tourists and shoppers when the bomber struck. We won't even notice when faced with headlines informing us that our recession is to be followed by a mancession, in which men will face more economic difficulties than women will.

We'll buy your insipid products full of cheesy and beefy, and the more modulicious they are, the better. I think, in time, we will even come to compare our fast to yours, and our ready will be more ready than your ready. We will make excellent happen.

But we won't stop there. We will abide by the rules of grammar, vocabulary and spelling in the new millennium, and stop fretting over each and every faux pas that heretofore would have made us bristle with angst. From now on, apostrophes WILL mean "here comes an S." Your and you're will be one and the same. There, they're and their? Why bother with three words, when just one (there, by the way) will suffice.

Now, before you go calling the Spelling Police Police on us -- we're not talking about the safe, silly havens of email, IM, Facebook etc.. We know that the rules have never really applied, there. No, we're talking about media and news and such - the professional communicators. Those are the victors in our little war. We surrender.

Now, if you'll excuse us, we have a bunch of noun's waiting to be used as verb's.

Dunsten Crackbarry in Graduate School

Another scintillating peek into the twisted - no, mangled - world of Crackbarry and Fleen:

By the time he had slummed and slurped and struggled his way to his 24th birthday, Dunsten's nickname had evolved from "Dun McCrack" to "Goin' Down McCrank" to "Goitervillanueva Cracklinberries" to "Smokin' The Crack" to simply "CrackSmoke." He had arrived at the Lake Wad School of Business Gloaming with an undergrad degree in Clown Arts (minor in Theology) and a burning desire to further his education and master auto-erotic asphyxiation.

He taped copies of his mother's latest letter all over his dormitory room, to inspire and propel him onward toward his goal of becoming Fleen's second-in-command.

"You stupid sod - why are you wasting your father's hard-earned ducats on that stupid circus degree? You'll burn in hell for this, you will! You could have been accepted at the horse
school, or even the sheep college - sea monkeys community institute, at the very least. But no.
We're ashamed to have ever found you by the side of the lane and brought you home to be raised by our dog, we are. Pooey on you, and write back soon, sweetie. Love, Mum" was all it said.

"Aw, sod off, mumsie," Crackbarry would say every night (excepting those on which he was too drunk to see or speak or both, and the rare night when he had co-ed company, or the time he spent the evening in the infirmary with that piece of balsa wood shoved under his toenail - ouch) as he
patted the note with his fingers on his way to bed...