Archive for Slices of Life

| July 16, 2011
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Dental Blogging

The doctor gave me three choices: Novocaine, Novocaine and laughing gas, or Novocaine and total anesthesia. I picked the middle option. I had good memories of laughing gas from some procedure I’d had done as a teenager. I remembered an initially bad smell that faded quickly, then the room spinning around like the old Time Tunnel TV series, hearing lots and lots of people laughing, and then realizing, before blackness, that all those people were me. The doctor said for most people, the effect of laughing gas was to make the patient simply not care what was being done to them, but that different folks had different reactions, and differing reactions at different ages.

At first, breathing in the laughing gas through my nose made me about 400% more nervous than I’d been. Which of course made me fear it wasn’t working the way it should. The doctor inserted the Novocaine needle in my mouth, and I felt it. I almost freaked. I said, “Laughing gas isn’t working. Felt that!” She reminded me that the laughing gas wasn’t meant to numb me; the Novocaine would do that, and it hadn’t had a chance to work yet. She also reminded me to stop breathing through my mouth and to breathe the laughing gas in deeply.

I found myself becoming more nonchalant. The room didn’t spin around me. I didn’t hear any laughter, not my own or anyone else’s. This was somewhat disappointing. But it wasn’t that disappointing, because I was feeling so nonchalant.

Then the doctor and her assistant began doing things inside my mouth. Serious things. Violent things. Violence involving an electric saw and a drill and at least one pair of pliers. I found this rather fascinating. Also horrifying, but in a distanced way, as though I were watching a film of some imagined person being subjected to violence. I thought to myself, If these women wanted to kill me, there would be nothing to stop them. They could do absolutely anything they want to me. I could make no real protest and offer exceedingly little in the way of resistance. All I can do at this point is trust them. It’s all I can do.

The violence being done inside my mouth grew more intense. More brutal. One likes to think that when one is being operated on, when one’s precious body (the only body one has) is being subjected to a procedure, that one’s substance will be treated with great delicacy and respect, like a damaged piece of crystal. In fact, one’s body is treated by surgeons about as roughly as mechanics treat the underparts of a car. I sensed my right bottom wisdom tooth being wrenched from my jaw like a recalcitrant bolt being unscrewed from the cover of an engine air filter. The amount of torque being applied inside my mouth was terrifying, or would be terrifying if I weren’t ten miles above it all. This is really brutal, I thought. Extremely violent. And yet my hands did not clench the arms of the chair. It was as though I was an observer on a bomber soaring at thirty thousand feet, seeing bombs being dropped from the bay and watching the explosions blossom like quick-time flowers on the terrain so far below. Huge violence was being done. Tears streamed from my eyes down the sides of my face. But I was so very far away. This is definitely the way to go, I thought. This is flying first class. I wondered who in their vaguely right mind would opt for Novocaine alone. If I hadn’t been given laughing gas, I’d be crapping my pants.

After they finished working on the right tooth, I began choking. This wasn’t terribly distressing. It was interesting, in a crude way, like watching the vomiting scene in Trainspotters. Hello, I thought. I’m choking. I’m choking here. My own voice in my head sounded like HAL’s voice in 2001: A Space Odyssey. You know the voice. Dave. . . Dave, I’m losing my memories. . . my mind. . . Dave, I’m scared. . . Daisy, daisy. . . The doctor told me to breathe through my nose. I obeyed and stopped choking.

They moved on to my left bottom wisdom tooth. I counted the freckles on the right cheek of the surgical assistant. I thought to myself, I am having teeth brutally wrenched from my jaw, and I am counting freckles on the assistant’s face, and I am consciously noting that I am counting freckles because I want to be able to remember this later and write it down. After a while, I noted that they had been taking what seemed to be a very long time working on that left tooth, perhaps three times as long as they’d worked on the right one. I asked myself, Has something gone dreadfully wrong? I searched for signs of panic in the face of the assistant. I saw none, and so I figured no catastrophe was occurring, at least no catastrophe out of the ordinary.

Then, at last, they either sewed me up or flossed my gums to get fragments of bone out. I couldn’t be sure. But they told me it was over. They stuffed gauze into the sides of mouth and told me to bite down. My lower jaw felt like a prosthesis, a glued-on piece of ape makeup, as though I were an extra in the original Planet of the Apes. Or, if I were one of the featured players, I realized with a slight shudder of surprise that I would be Dr. Zaius. Not Cornelius, the idealistic young chimpanzee whom I’d always imagined myself as when I was a young boy. But Dr. Zaius, the ornery old conservative, the protector of his civilization’s most sacred traditions, willing to sacrifice even truth and friendships if that’s what it took to do his job. I might not completely agree with the distinguished old orangutan, but I could definitely sympathize. I wasn’t the same person I’d been when I’d been ten years old, at least not fully. My skin had completely replaced itself five times since then. Laughing gas affected me differently now.

My wife helped me out to the van. Dr. Zaius climbed into the van. Dr. Zaius, minus his two bottom wisdom teeth.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags: ,
| July 15, 2011
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Losing Wisdom (Teeth)

 

After decades of putting it off, putting it off, putting it off, I’m finally having my two bottom wisdom teeth extracted (sawed out of my head, to be more exact).  So blogging will be put on hold, probably until this coming Monday, when I’ll return to the office looking like Alvin and the Chipmunks.

On the positive side, I’ve opted for laughing gas, rather than full anaesthesia, all in the interest of you, my readers — I chose to remember the sounds and muffled sensations of power tools hammering away at my jaw so that I can enrich your lives with some DENTAL BLOGGING.  Post-op, of course; I won’t have my Blackberry in my hands while the electric saw is whining away.

At least a good buddy at work, a fellow military buff, let me borrow his DVD of a four-part BBC series on the history of battleships.  So I’ll have that to watch while I lie, writhing in discomfort, in bed.  I doubt I’ll be doing much roughhousing with the kids over the weekend, or even reading more of Mr. Sammler’s Planet.  Too much exertion, physical on the one hand, mental on the other.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags:
| July 11, 2011
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My Little Mapmaker

map of City of Mentropenia

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map of Country of Feganosenia

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Levi, my seven year-old, thinks this website is one of the coolest things his daddy has ever done. Maybe the coolest. He wants in the worst way to help out. If he were a few years older and as adept at web design as many of his eleven year-old peers, I’d be able to find plenty of ways for him to help out. Right now, though? It’s a little tougher.

One thing Levi loves to do is make maps. No one encouraged him to do this. He just started doing it one day, and now he draws five or six maps each week. Most of the maps are of cities or new countries he dreams up. They make me think of the maps that often appear in the front of Big, Fat, Fantasy Epics, or in novels of the New Weird.

Levi is keenly interested in coming up with ways to make money. So how about it, Jeff Vandermeer or China Mieville? How about hiring Levi to draw maps for your next Ambergris or Embassytown books?

By the way, when Levi heard I was going to post some of his maps on my site, he made me an ad to go with them:
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Category: Horror and Fantasy, Slices of Life | Tags:
| July 10, 2011
5 comments

The Worst Family Film of the Year?


Yes, 2011 is just a little more than half over, but I have probably seen the worst family film of the year. This reeking hairball was so abysmal, I challenge any other studio to release something as bad in the next five and a half months.

I’ve gotten into the habit of taking my kids and Dara to the Family Drive-In in Stephens City, Virginia. We’ve been five times now. It’s a bit of a schlep — about an eighty-minute drive from our house — but it’s a great Saturday evening outing. The vibe at the drive-in is pure late 1960s, early 1970s. Every time I drive through the gate, I half expect the lot to be filled with Chevy Caprices and Chevelles and Ford Galaxies and Dodge Coronets, rather than the Honda Pilots and Toyota Siennas and Chevy Traverses that are actually parked there, their open hatches facing the screens. Every time we’ve ever gone, the place has been teeming with families. The parents are all very considerate of one another and the racing clumps of kids. You get a double feature for $7.50 (adults) or $3.50 (kids under 12), which is a great honking deal. Plus, you get Ye Olde Playground of Death, a well-preserved example of early 1970s hard steel playground architecture straight out of my elementary school’s recess yard. Forget the softly curved plastics and rubber bumpers that are de rigor today; this playground is pretty no-nonsense about its ability to put out a kid’s eye if the kid gets too adventurous. Soft, yielding ground cover of wood chips or rubber pellets made from recycled tires? HAH! How about dirt? And not dirt meant to cushion a fall, but dirt that resulted from decades of little sneakers wearing away the grass. There are monkey bars that look like an Andy Warhol-inspired prison or the bones of a courthouse from wartime Dresden. There’s a tall, steep slide that is welded to a set of swings on one side and a chin-up bar on the other, the confluence inviting all sorts of acrobatic mischief. There are horsey swings with grasping steel hinges and chains that foretell the amputation of little fingers. Needless to say, my kids love the place.

Anyway, last night’s double feature was Cars 2 and The Zookeeper. I knew there was no way I would get through the summer without taking the boys to see Cars 2. It was mandatory. That film was non-objectionable and occasionally entertaining. The second feature, however, was a whole different animal. This was Kevin James’s follow-on to that cinema classic, Mall Cop. I hadn’t read any reviews, so I went in blind; the boys had seen previews on their favorite TV station, Cartoon Network, and they were fairly jazzed to see it. I’m not a snob when it comes to children’s movies. I’m generally content to sit there and absorb whatever I can, so long as the boys are enjoying themselves. Rio was fine by me. Diary of A Wimpy Kid was worth my expenditure of ninety minutes. Rango was unexpectedly delightful, a film I wouldn’t mind watching another couple of times. But The Zookeeper. . . I simply find it hard to imagine who in Hollywood would ever have green-lighted this misbegotten cross between Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Doolittle and The Water Boy. Even given the lame premise, that a hapless, lovelorn zookeeper is given romantic advice by the talking animals inhabiting his workplace, the script writers and actors did amazingly little to bring out what comedic potential the premise may have had. How can scenes of a fat man variously peeing on a tree, making an aggressive bullfrog face to intimidate a romantic rival, and splitting his pants fail to elicit laughter from six year-old and seven year-old boys? Is that physically possible? Asher, my six year-old, may have snickered just a little bit; he swears he did, although I didn’t hear him (and I was listening). But for Levi, my seven year-old, not to laugh at all? Levi is the type of kid who laughs so loud in a movie that half the audience turns around to stare. Yet all he wanted to do was go home and go to sleep.

I discovered later, looking at a round-up of reviews (15% “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes) that the producers, in a forlorn attempt to make the film relevant and entertaining for audience members older than four, had hired an eclectic cast of former A-list stars to do voice acting for the animals. The lion and lioness were voiced, respectively, by Sylvester Stallone and Cher. Had I not read this, I would have had no idea. I was so appalled by the dialogue coming from those CGI-animated feline lips that I had no mental energy left to ponder whom the voices might belong to or where I recognized them from.

Most tellingly, this was the first time in my entire forty-three year history of moviegoing that I ever felt embarrassed for a subject of product placement. The unlucky victim in this case was TGI Friday’s Restaurants. There is a scene involving Kevin James and a talking gorilla set in a TGI Friday’s that made me cringe. I actually felt sorry for the corporate executives and all the stockholders, it was such a humiliation for them. And I don’t even like the restaurant.

The only member of my family who might possibly have enjoyed the film, Judah, my four year-old, fell asleep about ten minutes in.

Don’t ask me how the movie ended. I overruled Asher’s objections and we left after about an hour. I have an appointment to get two wisdom teeth sawed out my head this Thursday. I view that coming appointment with more positive anticipation than I would seeing the last half hour of The Zookeeper.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags: , ,
| July 8, 2011
5 comments

Farewell to the Space Age As We Knew It


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It’s over.

With the final launch of the last of the space shuttles today, we are witnessing the end of “NASA Classic,” manned missions into space aboard vehicles designed and built by the government-space-industrial complex. An age that began in 1960, four years before I was born, is coming to a close.

That’s not to say that Americans will never again travel into space, or that they will only do so as passengers on rockets built by other nations. But whenever Americans eventually return to space, it will be thanks to a mode of development and procurement far different from the top-down, heavily bureaucratic, NASA-centric model we’ve been familiar with up till now.

It’s odd for me to think that the last moon voyage is as historically distant to my boys as the final years of the Herbert Hoover Administration were to me when I was their age. They haven’t yet thought to ask me why we stopped going to the moon; not even Levi, my oldest, who has shown a strong interest in astronomy and the planets. Whenever they get around to asking, I suppose I’ll answer, “We stopped going because we’d done it already. We brought back our moon rocks. Just like the shirt says — ‘My parents went to the moon, and all I got was these dumb rocks and bragging rights to beating the Soviet Union.'”

I’ll tell them we’ll go back to the moon when we have a real reason to go back. Meaning, whenever someone figures out how to make money from going there and doing things there.

In the meantime, we have J. G. Ballard and Barry N. Malzberg to read.

Younger SF fans may not realize this (nor particularly care), but there was a time when both those authors were regarded by many “traditional” SF readers, those who venerated Campbell’s Astounding and Heinlein and Van Vogt, as heretics, traitors to the true faith of science fiction. Because they didn’t believe the hype of the Space Age. Because they, unlike most of their peers, predicted it would be a transitory phase, that the public and the sponsoring governments would grow bored of it, and that it would ultimately prove to be far more expensive than we were willing to pay, given the limited goals set forth. They also anticipated that organizational and personal pathologies would be among the factors to grind the Space Age to a halt.

Ballard, great fan of the Surrealists, left us painterly images of the ruins of the Space Age, stories set in a Cape Kennedy as abandoned and desolate as Chernobyl. Gary Westfahl has a perceptive essay on this.

Ballard, unfortunately, did not live long enough to watch the final Space Shuttle flight lift off today. Barry Malzberg, however, is still very much with us. His trio of early 1970s novels on the collapse of the space program, Beyond Apollo, The Falling Astronauts, and Revelations, focused on how the intersections of the bureaucratic rigidities of NASA, the psychological vulnerabilities of the astronauts, and the unforeseen terrors of the extraterrestrial environment would lead to personal and organizational disaster and decay. Barry’s biggest “I-told-you-so” moment came in 2007, when NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak drove cross country wearing a diaper and packing a BB gun to assault her rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut. If Hollywood ever makes a bio pic based on Lisa Marie Nowak’s story, Barry should get an acknowledgement in the credits.

Barry, in observance of the day, I raise a glass of Tang in your honor!

Category: Science Fiction, Slices of Life | Tags: , ,
| July 6, 2011
4 comments

Jules vs. Breezy


I added the only Fat White Vampire short story I’ve ever written, “Jules Versus Breezy,” which also serves as a little memorial piece for my very dear friend, Robert Borsodi. To me, Bob was one of the people who made New Orleans such a fantastical, enchanting place. He had operated bohemian coffeehouses in ten different locations by the time he arrived in New Orleans in the late 1970s; he’d founded his first in New Haven in 1959, when he’d been a student at Yale, before he went into the Marines (it is so very, very hard for me to imagine Bob Borsodi in the United States Marines; but Bob, like Walt Whitman, contained multitudes). He opened his first New Orleans coffeehouse on Daneel Street, next door to what was then the Penny Post and is now the Neutral Ground Coffeehouse, a folk music club. His second, best known location was on Freret Street, about a half mile east of Tulane and Loyola Universities. It was a huge, warehouse-like space, with the espresso bar in front and a stage in back big enough for full scale plays. Bob lived in a kind of hidden alcove above the stage, with access to the building’s roof. The entire coffeehouse served as a colossal collage, an ever-evolving art installation made up of whatever Bob and his regulars felt like gluing to the walls and furniture. I first met Bob in 1983, while I was an undergraduate at Loyola, shortly after I moved into an apartment in the neighborhood. I did my laundry at a shabby little washateria next to Bob’s place, and while I was waiting for my wash to finish, I’d go next door for a cup of tea or an Italian soda and a chat with Bob. He didn’t have his beard then, and he was open during the afternoons, which he wasn’t in later years, although the place was mostly deserted before about seven at night. He was interested in Loyola because he thought his son might attend. We got to be pretty good friends over the next three years. Upon graduation, I swore to him that I intended to move back to New Orleans someday. I don’t think he believed me.

The next time I saw Bob was after I moved to Northport, New York in Long Island’s Suffolk County. Bob had taken a crew of his friends and regulars to perform one of his plays, Musk, at Theater for the New City in the East Village in Manhattan. The stage set looked just like Borsodi’s Coffeehouse in New Orleans. I immediately felt homesick. I invited Bob and his lady friend, Sara Beth, to come stay with me at my apartment in Northport. They stayed the night and walked around the harbor and the old downtown. I promised again that I would move back to New Orleans someday. Again, I don’t think Bob believed me.

Less than two years later, I picked myself up and plunked myself back in New Orleans, with no plans or prospects other than finishing my first novel. . . at Borsodi’s Coffeehouse. Bob was really the one who drew me back to New Orleans. So I have much to thank him for, since everything that is most wonderful in my life has its roots in my time in New Orleans. I’ll write more about my return to New Orleans and my experiences at Borsodi’s Coffeehouse in an essay I’m finishing up called “Lust for a Laptop, or the Madness of the Obsessive Collector.”

I wrote the little story here linked to in 1998, for Bob’s sixtieth birthday. Four years later, suffering from incurable cancer that had spread through much of his body, in unbearable pain, Bob threw himself off the Hale Boggs Bridge in Luling, about thirty miles west of New Orleans. The city hasn’t quite been itself since.

Category: Big Easy, Horror and Fantasy, Slices of Life | Tags: , , ,
| July 5, 2011
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Bones of the Ancient Website

Oh, just for giggles, here’s a link to the old Andrew Fox Books website, circa its “glory days” of August, 2004, thanks to the magic of the Internet Wayback Machine. Feast your eyes on the low resolution graphics! Thrill to my book signing schedule in the summer of 2004! Chill to the porn invasion yet to come!

Category: Big Easy, Slices of Life, Stuff I Like | Tags: ,
| July 5, 2011
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Sparklers

I haven’t bought fireworks since I was a kid. Come to think of it, maybe I never bought fireworks, prior to this past weekend; my dad usually had a little stash of them hidden away that he’d pull out for the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve, stuff that he’d had sitting in a drawer since his bachelor days in an apartment on Miami Beach. Anyway, this past Sunday, my three boys and I drove past a fireworks stand, and I decided to buy them some sparklers. Something non-intimidating and relatively safe to start them off with, since my oldest is only seven and my youngest is four.

The folks manning the stand couldn’t have been friendlier. I asked a sales lady where the sparklers were, and she pointed out an entire assortment of the things. The last time I handled a sparkler, maybe thirty-five years ago, there’d only been one type, so far as I knew — the metal stick kind that stayed good and hot after it burned out, unless you stuck it in water. I asked the sales lady what she would recommend for my little guys, given that none of them had ever handled (or even seen) a sparkler before. She pointed me to much larger, longer wooden sticks wound around with pink and green and orange crepe paper; she said the wooden holding sticks didn’t get hot like traditional sparkers’ sticks do, and rather than shooting sparks out at all angles, which could be frightening for a small child, these behaved more like a torch, shooting a colored fire forward. They came bundled in packs of five. I bought four packs of the new-fangled kind and two boxes of the old-fashioned kind, figuring I’d let the boys use the big ones, while I’d demonstrate the traditional ones myself.

Dara wisely insisted that I also demonstrate the long kind before handing any to the kids. Good thing I did. That little incendiary device could’ve burned Japanese infantry out of caves on Iwo Jima.

The boys were very impressed.

They didn’t get to hold any sparklers this Fourth of July. Maybe next year.

Category: Slices of Life | Tags: , , ,
| July 1, 2011
One comment

Welcome to My New Online “Den”

Well, well, it’s been a while. . .

Aside from little forays here and there — some interviews, commenting on other folks’ blogs — I’ve been “off the net” for a few years now.  My original website, erected in 2003 to coincide with the publication of my first book, Fat White Vampire Blues, died three years later in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  My webmaster owned a beautiful, historic home in the Bywater neighborhood, which ended up covered in seven feet of flood waters after the levees broke.  He vanished, and I, distracted by a bazillion post-disaster concerns, allowed my website to languish, failing even to pay the renewal fee on my domain name.

Gentle readers, here’s a hint — don’t let your domain name expire.  It will be immediately colonized by a porn site.  I began receiving emails from dismayed or bemused readers and friends: “Hey, what’s the deal?  Did you go into the porn business???”  No, I did not.  However, my former domain name, which I will not list here because I have no desire to send more business to the rascals who took over my abandoned property, is now forever associated with bad photography, plain paper wrappings, and men living in their mother’s basements (not that there’s anything wrong with that).  I know this for certain because, during my recent exertions putting together this new site, I went to the Internet Wayback Machine in an effort to salvage materials from my old site.  I attempted to do this at the office (not wise, but I’ve been eager to get this site up and running).  Taxpayers, rest easy — your government has very secure filters to block employees from viewing porn.  Even when I directed the Internet Wayback Machine to take me back to 2003, to years before I abandoned my domain name, still the electronic nanny blocked my access and informed me that I had attempted to view porn.  There I was, trying to salvage old articles about George Alec Effinger and my obsession of collecting vintage laptop computers, and the censor built into my network was berating me for trying to view porn, porn, PORN.  Let that be a lesson to you.  Pay your bills in a timely fashion, particularly for your domain name.

After the pornification of my website, I took to blogging at the Night Shades Books message boards, which, in the middle years of the last decade, were a thriving community of hundreds of science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers and fans.  I used their boards as an emergency communication tool to reach friends and family during the months my immediate family and I were trapped away from our home in Katrina’s wake, first in Albuquerque and later in Miami, and my posts evolved into an ongoing commentary on being exiled, returning home, and participating in the rebuilding of New Orleans.  Unfortunately, an invasion of spambots utterly infested the message boards sometime in 2007, driving out the majority of participants, and eventually Night Shade shut their boards down.  The demise of that community was a real shame.  Lucius Shepherd, all by himself, had nearly 30,000 posts on his boards and sub-boards by the time the end came.  Maybe this August, when the next anniversary of Katrina approaches, I’ll try to salvage some of those old disaster-related posts and provide a sampling here.

Anyway, over the next few weeks, I’ll be unboxing my old knicknacks, touching up their paint, and displaying them on the freshly dusted shelves of my new den here, along with lots of new stuff.  Among the new stuff will be an article called “A New Hope, A New Tack,” which explains where I’ve been these past few years, what I’ve been up to, and why I’ve chosen now to get back into the swing of blogging.

Meanwhile, I’ll be doing my darndest to get the hang of WordPress.  I’m liking it so far.  A lot.  Putting up my own site is a much different experience than paying someone to do it for me.  Rather than having it updated three or four times a year, I’ll be fiddling with this den of mine constantly, moving the furniture, adjusting the pictures on the walls, and patching drafty spots around the windows.  I expect it’ll be a lot of fun.

Category: Big Easy, Slices of Life | Tags: , ,
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