Non-linearity in a cascading tag cloud – 10-20-09

Putting this up raw, without a second thought, more in the nature of online archiving than for presenting as a polished bit of thinking.  I was mostly concerned with trying to untangle the threads that were winding about.

It feels like there’s gold somewhere in here…much slag to clear away first.

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So, first write the whole story, many threads, typical KSR, but broken out into their separate threads.  Duplication where overlap, rather than shorthand.  Then, tag the hell out of it, both hidden and visible.  Define several meta-tags that will be prime orgainzers, and several hidden tags that will relate importance to a coherent narrative.  Player, at the start, chooses one of the meta-tags, and the game then performs a random sorting, taking into account the hidden tags to maintain overall narrative coherence, and giving the player a unique balance of the meta-tags that will create a specific narrative.  This isn’t branching narrative, nor parallel branching narratives:  it’s narrative defined by a central set, and many other partially overlapping sets, with each moment of interaction defined by the tags that connect them, however closely or loosely.

The difficult equations come where sets/tags intersect, depending on what other values/sets/tags are in this particular instance of the overall narrative.

Possible that each decision moment reshuffles the weighting of various tags, which would also require a redefinition of those intersection moments based not just on current states but past shuffles.

And branches—because those are unavoidable—are determined not so much by specific user choice as by the collocated value of the intersection where the choice is made:  that’s what determines the weighted values of the reshuffling.

Here’s the example:

3 very basic meta-tags for our prime story, election of a new mayor:  Government, Press, Business.

Each meta-tag has anywhere from a few to a few dozen possible story threads within them.  Government allows you to pursue a role as a candidate (for which party, or a fringe 3^rd party, or independent), or an advisor, or lobbyist, or independent PAC leader, or other governmental employee (Police, Fire Department, etc.), etc.  Journalism allows you to pursue a role as a reporter (beat or investigative…and at which paper/tv station/website), columnist, editor, business/advertising/marketing scum, etc.  Business allows you to pursue a role as a real estate developer, organized labor leader, governmental sub-contractor, etc.

Each of these story threads is conceived and written as part of the larger, overall story of the election…and realistically, there are only a few possible outcomes to the election, and for each of the roles depending upon (or independent of) the election’s outcome.  The non-linearity being pursued here is not the exact final destination, it’s the path taken to get there, and the unexpectedness of that outcome depending on what’s come before.

So, you’ve got these meta-tags, like so:

And then each meta-tag has a whole bunch of sub-threads, like so:

And of course there’s a wide variety of possible ways each sub-thread could go:  an advisor to a candidate could be angling to help win the election, so they get an appointment in the government, or to get a job with a business that supports the election, or to tank the election in hopes of a position with the winning side afterwards…a labor leader could decide to run as a 3^rd candidate, a blogger could angle for a position in one of the campaigns…these possibilities would have to be somewhat limited, just for feasibility, but that’s more a function of the initial concept for the overall narrative (i.e. choose something somewhat simple) than the inherent nature of the choices.  You want the player to not feel restrained by the choices available to them—if they can think it, they can do it—you just want to make sure that the amount of possible choices and thoughts are reasonable based on what initial states are given to them.  For example, the deputy chief of police could angle to support one candidate to get a promotion, or another because he’s sincerely in favor of his policies, but can’t decide to quit his job and join a bluegrass band…because the game’s about an election, not a damn Altman film.

So here’s where the non-linearity happens:  within each sub-thread, each and every moment where a choice is made that is more affecting their course than “turn left” or “turn right” (though in the proper circumstances, those could be profound choices), is tagged with a variety of values:  not numeric, at least not at this point, but contextual.  So, you can figure that 99% of the possible moments within the game will be tagged with “Money”, or “Power”, but only some of them will also be tagged with “Zero-sum outcome”, and even less with “Positive-sum outcome”…while all possible moments will either be tagged with “quid-pro-quo” or “selfless” or “advantageous”, but only one of those three.

Each moment will have multiple tags, as many as makes sense.  And it is the resulting tag cloud that will impact the progression of the player through the narrative.

The player will choose initially one of the three meta’s, and a random shuffling of all tags will occur, with weighting being given to those most prominent within the meta they chose.  This shuffling determines what possible moments in each sub-thread are available to them (the hidden “coherence” tags determining how likely one is to be kept or not”), with the outcome being weighted but inherently random.

Each moment they make a choice, the tags that apply to the chosen option will be given higher weighting, and those that apply to the non-chosen option will be given lower weighting…a lot of this will cancel out, as both possible choices might have the tag “Money”, so while it will both be higher and lower weighting, regardless of what is chosen, those will cancel each other out…but other tags will not…for example, “Money” might cancel out, but “Profit” might only be tagged to one of the two choices…and “Long-term Profit” vs. “Short-term Profit” would be a black-white type choice…or both options could be tagged with “Short-term Profit”, but only one with “Long-term Profit”…the key is to make sure that all possible tags are meaningful, and properly applied.

Then, at key moments where larger decisions are being made—the first primary election, or the first debate, or what have you—the accumulated value of all weighted tags is used as a modifier to reshuffle the basic tag cloud.  So it’s possible that you could play through the game twice, making exactly the same decisions each time, and get different meta results each time, or you could play through twice making entirely different decisions each time, and end up with the same basic meta results each time.

New-to-you – Angel Wings

Another piece from the archives.  In reading through it…I’m not sure what I think of it.  There’s certainly a lot of pretension here.  Given the name of this site, maybe it’s a good time to balance out all the eloquence and microfiction and get some good old fashion pretentiousness up here too.

There’s no major crisis, no insight into areas of the human soul normally left in darkness…just a story.  Sometimes simplicity is the ultimate pretension, like walking out onto a stage in front of 250,000 screaming rock  fans and starting in with just an acoustic guitar.  Consider this my stoned Joan Baez at Woodstock set.

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ANGEL WINGS

There are those happy people, who’ve found their place in life, comfortable, smiling, well-groomed, bothersome, distant, and always with important meetings after lunch.  Then there’s the rest of us, still searching for a place, hopeful, depressed, confused, hurting, loving, muddling along as best we can.

And then, there are those for whom a place is made.

Once upon a time, there lived an eccentric millionaire.  He lived in Los Angeles, so he never stood out much, though he should’ve, a rare camel with a real chance to pass the Needle’s Eye.  He’d spent most of his life poor, or at least payday to payday, like the rest of us.  One of the local aerospace companies—where he’d spent forty years as an on-call engineer, ready to look at some problem, something’s  broken, fix it quick there are a hundred and twenty-six drunk businessmen and crying kids backing up in the terminal, please just one more trip, then we’ll get the new jets (and we won’t need you anymore)—had ‘encouraged’ him to retire in 1986, and within six months he had become the victim of a con-game aimed at the double-A-R-P crowd.

A well-dressed young man with a ponytail had convinced him, and most of his neighborly peers, to invest their savings—five hundred, a thousand, or in our camel’s case, fifteen thousand dollars—to buy studio time for an up-and-coming rock band.  In exchange, they’d get ‘points’, a percentage of a percentage of all the money people paid for the album in stores.  And with the profit margin on these new compact discs, they were still guaranteed to make twice, even three times their money back, whether the album sold or not.

It sounded risky, but there were charts and graphs with projections and everything was so professional; they couldn’t help themselves.  It was supposed to get the band a good demo and the nice young man with the ponytail a kilo of cocaine and the use of the drummer’s girlfriend for a week.  It was supposed to end with fifteen people living on social security in worse shape than they had been before.  Instead, an executive thought the demo was good enough to release, as is.  He did, and it went on to sell over ten million copies.  And fifteen people had to rethink their ideas of retirement.

Vernon Adams was eccentric because he knew his new-found fortune wasn’t his.  He’d lived a small life, and enjoyed it—you weren’t supposed to get anything less or more than what you worked for, and Vernon had always worked hard, and was happy with what he got.  He liked it when the world worked the way it should.  And when he had realized that he and his neighbors had probably been tricked, his first thoughts hadn’t been of revenge, or despair, but instead that living on peanut butter and dried cereal and week-old fruit wasn’t luxury, but he’d done it before, and it wasn’t so bad.  Not when it was all you had.

And then, after only six monthly deposits, he had more money than he had spent on every home he’d ever lived in, combined.  Plus every car he’d ever owned.  More money in six months than he’d earned with hard work, total, in the past fifty years.  It was staggering.  It was unbelievable.  He didn’t know what to do with all of that money.  It wasn’t in him to even comprehend how much money he now had.  And that’s when he understood—it wasn’t for him.  God had dropped this gift out of the sky, into his lap, and if He had meant for Vernon to spend it for himself, He’d have made sure he knew what to do with it.  But what did he know?  How to take care of things.  Make them last.  Make them work so that others could make what they could of their own lives.

The money wasn’t his.  His job was to find out who it was really for.

That’s not to say he didn’t touch a dime.  His lawns grew green, under professional care, and a new import replaced the relic of American stubbornness in his driveway.  In a wild fit, he went to the store, bought every jar of peanut butter on the shelves, and gave every last one of them away to the homeless and hungry in the parks and alleys near where he lived.  But this was a lot of money.  You couldn’t nickel and dime a thing like this to death, though it was fun trying.  And Vernon didn’t try very hard.

For the first few years, he simply waited, hoping the answer would come the way the question had, with a mysterious phone call and a quick leap of faith.  Everyone he met suddenly became a candidate, whether they knew it or not.  Would this one know what to do with the money?  Would that one understand that it was for something, to be used well?  But no one fit.  Vernon was hardly a recluse—the few close friends he finally revealed his search to had spread the news within hours over three zip codes.  It wasn’t long before someone—several people, actually—hit upon the idea that they should give him a mysterious-sounding phone call.  Set up a time to drop by; introduce themselves; explain that they’ve always wanted to do just one thing, had a plan, if only they were to win the lottery, or something like that.  And, hey, if the old man was sincere. . .well, it was worth an afternoon to find out, wasn’t it?

Vernon became very popular.  And, the small, quiet neighborhood where he lived saw an increase in pure imagination so powerful, had it spread to cover an area the size of, say, Europe, it might have been its own Renaissance.  As it was, Vernon considered hiring a secretary to keep track of everyone (he settled for a new computer instead).  But, as even he had to admit, the old man was sincere, and maybe this was how God was going to bring the right person to him.

So day in and day out, from ten o’clock in the morning until five at night, he sat patiently, listening to the cures (there were numerous) for cancer; ends to world hunger and, therefore, war; plans for monuments for him, for America, for most of the forty-something presidents—though most named Elvis as their honoree.  He met hundreds of the most honest souls, telling it plain:  they were going to drink a lot, smoke a lot, eat a lot, and see every movie ever made twice, so how about some credit for not trying to pull the wool over the old man’s eyes?  He listened intently to every single one of them, looking for something, a sign maybe, to let him know that this was the one.  But years went by, one long confessional with people that weren’t any more deserving of the money than he was.

And then, she finally came.  She was young, no more than fifteen, a mix of most of Earth’s races, nervous as hell but feeding off of it at the same time.  She’d researched Vernon carefully, had spent a month writing and re-writing and burning and writing again before she felt she had something that would work.  And it didn’t matter one bit.  She walked through his front door (which he kept open during business hours), into his living room, and before she’d opened her mouth, he knew.  The money was hers.  He hadn’t even taken in her face, or how she was dressed, before he knew with the same certainty he had known that the money wasn’t his:  it was hers.  He nodded politely through her speech, not paying attention to the details—something about sky-writing and his name—and when she finished, he just sat there, staring at her, tears peering over the lower edge of his eyes, checking to see if it was safe to come out.  He thanked her, put her file on top of his desk, saw her out, and canceled the rest of his appointments.  An hour later, after a call to a lawyer to make sure everything went the way it should, he called her and told her the news.  She was on her way to his place when he had a stroke and slipped into a coma, from which he never woke up.

The money was hers; the lawyer had merely filled in the blanks on a document Vernon had already signed, and the next morning she awoke in her mom’s apartment and found no police, no government agents, come to take it back—someone like her wasn’t supposed to have that much money.  But there it was.

The girl’s story was infected with the same irony Vernon’s was.  She had been seeing a boy for the past six months, and her period had been only a memory for the last sixty-eight days.  On the sixty-ninth she had gone to see Vernon, and become a millionaire, as only the tiniest part of her (one afternoon out of eighty years) had been allowed to believe.  On the seventy-first, she had her period.  The boy was, needless to say, history, and with no more financial monsters looming (besides the day to day of ‘getting by’), she found herself in an awkward place.  She didn’t know what to do with it, any more than Vernon had.

And a month or so later, after every local mall had been terrorized at least a couple of times, she got a mysterious phone call.  From the lawyer, the guy who’d set everything up.  He wanted to know how her plan was going.  Which was funny, since she hadn’t thought about it once since the first meeting.  She was so stunned with memory that she actually mentioned this, that she hadn’t even thought about it since.  She was embarrased, immediately, but the lack of silence on the other end of the call suggested that the lawyer wasn’t surprised at all.  Had, in fact, been expecting this.

The lawyer asked her if she’d managed to read through all of the documents yet, if she had noticed the amendment Vernon had added.  She asked him to refresh her memory.  The original plan had been this:  she was to use the money to live a simple life.  She would finish high school and then take flying classes.  She’d learn to fly, and then learn how to sky-write.  She’d buy a plane, and equipment, and hire what help she needed, and spend every penny not maintaining her simple existence on the plane, keeping it flying.  And every day she would fly over the executive offices of the aerospace company that had so callously used him up and spit him out, and write his name in the sky.  Every day, until the money ran out or she died (or they shot her down), whichever came first.  It hadn’t been the plan that had convinced Vernon.

The amendment was a small one, but important:  never his name, and never within sight of his former employer.  Otherwise, full speed ahead.  And if she actually sat down and thought about it—which she didn’t do often—it occurred to her that she didn’t have anything better to do with her life.  She had done a lot of growing up somewhere between day forty and seventy-one of the lost period, and suddenly she didn’t have to, but it was already too late.  She was in a different place, seeing things through different eyes, and on a lazy afternoon she committed herself.  She would finish high school, she would take flying lessons, she would buy a plane, and she would. . .well, fly.  It wasn’t glamorous, it wasn’t productive, but it was a damn sight better than the other possibilities she’d faced.  She’d fly.

What if I’m scared of heights?

She wasn’t, thankfully, and after a few bumpy landings on what passes for a runway at the small, local airport, she found that she actually enjoyed it.  She had a new CD-changer, speakers and a sub-woofer installed, and would map her flight plan along the coast around her music.  And she’d fly.  The drone of the engines would fade into the background, and she could hear her heart, beating, always faster.

And then she discovered clouds.  The kind that drift in, off the ocean, like cotton candy all stretched out.  She’d find a way in, and hide, making tunnels, getting lost in the white, trusting that something would beep long before she was in danger of crashing into what she couldn’t see.  She’d swoop, and dive, and fly.  She’d build up speed, and come tearing out one side, a long trail of intangible cloud clinging behind her.  She’d shake it free, swerving the plane back and forth, sometimes taking her hands off the stick and holding them up high above her head, like on a roller coaster.  And behind would stretch a soft, wide blanket, rippled, curving familiarly to an invisible point at the end.

From the ground, looking up, the wings of hidden angels, watching over.

Mutterings – 9/29/09

A few disjointed thoughts as I wait for the engines to wind fully back up to production volume…

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We have really long, straight hallways at work.  You can see people coming from quite a ways off.  And I never have any idea what to do when I see someone, down at the other end, that I would say hi to when passing them in the hall.  Because I’m not passing them yet…we’re like 50 yards away from each other, passing is still 10-20 seconds off.  Not enough time for a conversation, even if we wanted to start one off by yelling.

So what am I supposed to do?  Do I say “hey” when they’re still down at the other end, and then have a nice uncomfortable silence as we continue walking towards each other, eventually passing and being clear of it?  Or do I wait until they’re close, like pretending I haven’t seen them, even though I clearly have, just so I can say hi in a normal volume of voice in the second or two before we pass and not have to worry about maintaining a completely aimless connection with them for as long as it takes to walk the length of the hallway?

This kind of thing has, at times, prevented me from actually getting up from my desk.  Though I’m comforted by knowing that most of the time the other guy looks just as conflicted as I feel.

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I had a much longer piece I was working on to go up here, and it took one too many turns, and now is so far off center that a few simple tweaks isn’t going to get it back on the beam.  It needs to be broken down for parts and rebuilt.  So, instead, a summary:

I am sick and tired of your post-playa/retreat/epiphany/ecstatic/drug glow and commitment to change your life.  And yes, I’m talking about you, specifically you, so get over it; I wouldn’t be writing about this if I hadn’t gone through the same thing myself plenty of times, we’re all a bunch of dumbfucks.

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

Which means, briefly, that if you think that a weekend or a week in a carefully insulated environment designed to provoke the maximum possible ecstatic experience is going to change your life forever, you’re dreaming, and need to sober up.  You could see the face of the Buddha himself on Sunday morning at sunrise, and come Monday morning, you will still–guaranteed–fail to completely wipe your ass and leave a little brown streak on your drawers.  You will still need to go to work, and fill your car with gas, and eat dinner to avoid a low-blood-sugar headache.  You will still need to continue living…chopping wood and carrying water.

Unless and until you can bring your pursuit of enlightenment down from the playa/desert/mountain/wherever, and into the mundane details of your daily life, then those details will never change, and over time–might be a few weeks, or days, or even hours–their accumulation will bury any enlightenment you might have thought you had while chilling on your sleeping bag near the campfire while some long-haired goatee’ed hemp-wearing soft-spoken environmentally-conscious sub-100-IQ’ed small-dicked high-on-E’ed (but only half a dose) faw-food-eating barely-passable excuse for a human-sized version of a generic-brand tampon strummed lightly on a guitar and sang an off-key version of a confused protest song written by a fucking Canadian prog-rock band and covered by a third-tier 80’s hair band which this doofus thinks wrote the song in the first place since that’s the only version he’s ever heard.

*deep breath*

To paraphrase thousands of years of Taoist thought, enlightenment’s not where you think enlightenment is, it’s where enlightenment’s not.

New-to-you – Saturday, June 6

I’m almost clear of it; the project is nearly done, all that’s left is the death spiral of closing it out, offering sacrifices to the great god First Party…there’s a clarity dawning, shapes protruding through the fog.

Work has begun again on something new, picking up the tools and materials and dusting them off, trying to remember where I was, what I was aiming for, when I set them down such a short while ago.

In the meantime, here’s another treat from the pre-drought days…I can’t pretend that I got it right, but my mom did read it, back in the day, and said she liked it, so I must’ve hit somewhere close to the mark.

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Saturday, June 6

1

She figures it’s way beyond habit, much more than conditioning.  The day to day after day after week after month after…Christ, it’s been years.  How many?  From the top:  twelve of elementary and prep school, two of eight AM survey courses, five times a week, three years of getting to the office early enough to have the coffee ready when everyone else arrived, four years married (but with the same responsibilities), then the last fourteen with the kids.  Plus the last four months.  Just the three of them.  Even consciously trying, she can’t remember the last time she’s slept past six o’clock in the morning.  Slept in.  All week she’s been trying to convince herself to look forward to this.  As a reward, maybe, for making it to the weekend.  But here it is, the first Saturday in June, and it’s six-oh-three in the morning and it’s taking such a deliberate effort to keep her eyes shut that sleep’s already gone.

She tries to enjoy it anyway, but automated alarms start going off inside of her.  The kids’ll be up soon, and they’ll need breakfast and someone to break up the fights over the television.  Except they won’t.  Or, rather, will, but not here, not in her home, not today or any day until the end of the summer, when their father will pack them up (probably putting all of the expensive things he bought for them on top, where she can see them), and drive them back.  Then every other weekend with him, until the holidays, which is already looking like it’s going to get messy.  So they’re at his place, and probably already awake, and alone, and trying to fight quietly ‘cause they know better than to wake up their father before he does it himself.

But still, she can almost hear them, thumping lightly down the carpeted stairs, hitting the eighth and ninth square in the middle, thankfully (to her mothering heart) not yet knowing how to step on the edge of them to silence the creaks and gunshot pops.

Before she’s fully aware she’s doing it, she stands, grabs her robe from the chair in the corner, and follows their memory down the hallway and stairs.

2

There’s something wrong in the kitchen.  She doesn’t know what it is, if something’s missing or severely out of place or a different color—like the fridge, for instance.  She gets out the pan, the bacon first, then two eggs fried in the bacon grease.  Some orange juice and a couple of chocolate donuts for a chaser.  She gets the paper, finding it where she should, and sits down in the silence for her breakfast and Dear Abby, like she does every morning.  Except that’s what’s wrong.  It’s never this quiet.

She allows no time for thought, just lets the impulse take over.  By the time she’s on her feet she’s already made a mental note to call Anne and tell her to clear her couch all next week.  This is definitely getting certifiable.  But she won’t think about that now.  Just pick up the remote, change to channel nine, another super-hero battling another super-villain.  She turns the volume up to the earsplitting level where the kids would have it, and goes back to her food.  She eats in peace, enjoying reading about another bridal shower snafu, blessed for a bit, living without having to think about it.

3

There isn’t much she needs; she could, in fact, probably hold off until Monday and swing by the store near her office on the way home.  But nobody bothered asking her.  It’s Saturday morning, a little after seven-thirty:  it’s time to go to the store.  Q.E.D.  No question mark in sight.  And as such, it’s easy to tune out and let her autopilot take over.  She drives past the 7-11 two blocks down, gets onto the freeway, and drives for ten minutes, all the way to Playa Del Rey.  To the only supermarket in Southern California that carries a certain kind of chocolate toaster pastry which the kids are addicted to.  There’s no need to drive all the way out here for milk and wine and tampons, but again, no one’s asking.

She wanders the aisles slowly, leaning on her unneeded cart, following the regular route.  Occasionally her arm starts to rise as she reaches for one or another of the items she’d usually buy.  If the kids had been around to have used the old up.  It hadn’t been so noticeable during the week.  Work had been particularly hectic, and she’d only barely been aware that all of the little artifacts that the kids would leave behind in the course of their after-school lives weren’t popping up anymore.  The quiet had actually been nice, particularly after half a bottle of white wine.  What she is feeling now is subtle, almost devious.  It hits her like a bullet shattering her spine:  no pain, just a slowly dawning awareness that something significant has already happened to her.

She comes to aisle six, her autopilot steering a true course, and doesn’t notice the other shopper in the aisle until her cart runs into his.  She looks up, and even under the blanket of numbness she’s been knitting herself all morning, she can feel shapes moving, shock and surprise overwhelming the last parts of her worth taking.

“David.”

Her ex-husband looks, she’s sure, as bad as she does, if not worse.  He hasn’t shaved yet, and clumps of gray-speckled hair poke out from beneath an old baseball cap.  His T-shirt and sweatpants were probably slept in.  He’s staring feverishly at the shelf with the toaster pastries on it, the grinding gears of his memory nearly sending smoke out of his ears.  He hadn’t even noticed when she’d bumped his cart, but when she says his name he turns to her, the same compressed astonishment bringing his eyes briefly to life.

They look at each other for a moment, a long one.  This is no time for improvisation.  And then inspiration comes.  She motions with her head towards a section of the shelf he’d been staring at.

“Devil Bombs.”

He follows her gaze and finds what he’d been looking for.  He takes one, then thinks better of it and grabs another two boxes, dumping them into his jumbled cart.  A small smile hangs briefly from the side of his mouth, and for a bit they’re blessed.

“It’s hard.  To tell them no.”
“Isn’t it.”

The burning insults and threats that should follow dissolve on her lips.  They don’t mean anything right now.  She offers him a sad, wry smile, and continues on her way, trying hard not to look back and see if he’s watching her go.

Brief rant on rights

In an odd bit of reverse irony, I’m cross-posting something here that I initially put up as a note on my Facebook today.  But before I get to that:

No, my project isn’t done yet.

No, nothing new else to post here; when my project is done, I’ll have breath to write again…the worst part being that I know where it’s going, but if I’ve got an hour to myself when it’s quiet and I would normally write, I’m sleeping.

No, it does not affect progression nor stability, WNF.  (Those of you who’ve shipped a video game can laugh now.)

And so here it is (unedited and a bit awkward, as those things that are written in 5 minutes on a lunch break are wont to be); I’ll probably expand on these thoughts in the future…I have zero desire to be political on here, but this is more about philosophy than it is politics, and touches the core of some things that are most important to me…

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Wasn’t going to respond to the health care meme going around today, until I realized why it’s been bugging me. Too much of the language being tossed around is calling health care a “right” (or implying it), as though it’s something that everyone is owed, just for being alive.

When I say that someone “has a right” to something, it’s something within their control, and the “right” to it means that no one can prevent the individual from exercising that something: the government cannot pass laws preventing it (like free speech or religion), and the government is obligated to protect private individuals when they’re threatened by other private entities (like assault or theft threatening the right to feel safe and secure).

Here’s the thing: health care isn’t something that an individual can do for themselves. Health care requires many, many skilled people to train and gain experience at certain skills, and then apply those skills.

And there’s too much of the objectivist in me to say “I have a right to other people’s hard work, regardless of whether or not they want to give it to me.”

That’s not to say I’m opposed to a publicly-financed health solution; I think it’s a good idea. There are other things that government is supposed to do beyond protecting your rights as a citizen, and providing services at a reduced cost and/or supplementing the cost of those services–particularly when they are as important as health care–is something I would be glad to see my tax dollars applied to.

And it’s not like most doctors need protecting; I don’t have any facts to back this up (always a fun way to start off a point), but medicine is a profession where the bottom-end of compensation is still well above the bottom-end of compensation in most other fields, and the high-end is virtually limitless. This isn’t about worrying about protecting the poor, helpless doctors.

Nor is it about being intensely anti-government-solution...the public-option plan doesn’t call for doctors to be hired by and trained by the government (which I think would terrify anyone who’s been to the post office or DMV lately)…that’s the true “socialist healthcare solution”.

My reluctance to jump with both feet onto any side of this debate–with today’s meme as just one example–comes from a desire to distinguish between supporting the use of my tax dollars to provide a way to help people gain access to a service that they couldn’t on their own, to the betterment of society as a whole (less sick people makes things better), and the idea that anyone, anywhere can have a “right” to a single moment of my time or effort, or anyone else’s time or effort.

edge – 8-19-09

Heard back from the final microfiction publisher that I submitted “edge” to, and as the ones before it, it’s a no-go.  I’m reminding myself that I’m not writing for publication anymore…so the hell with them, here it is.  My readership here is probably bigger than theirs anyway.

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edge

Age occurring, edges, firming, definition increasing.  The essential kept, timeless embedded, the common abandoned.  Light marking where it ends, showing the lines of his face.

It was to be a birthday party, and at this exact moment, she can’t remember why.  Birth and day ceased to speak with breath and tongues.

The light unsteady as it fell and spilled, uneven and clinging, yellow in the afternoon.  The other guests were arriving well into night; this was just for them.

She moves closer, steps slow and definite.  He hasn’t seen her yet, his head down, slightly to the side-like, kenning something on the paper before him.

The air breathes for them, choosing the tone, the tempo, the pause and the gasp.  They rode, and abandoned.  He, still unaware, she, still, fully.

Rotations, a passing of one to the other, a passage, as eyes rotate, passing over.  A word pulling, paper falling, feet moving, moment crowning.

He gets to his feet, moving towards her.  Stretching, will enforcing, begging, a moment sliding aside, forgotten and cherished.  That moment, that specific moment, that air, and light, and moment, momentous, aside, and gone.

And for a while, for as long as they can, two of them, old and timeless, living there, giving life.

Two of them, sliced, branched, branching.  In this one of infinite nows, the wave is poised, the foot raised, the light still, spilling but unspoilt.  In this one of infinite nows, two of them, the word birthing on his lips, collapse imminent but eternally hesitant.  Two of them, now, now, and again, unseen with infinite ache, unfulfilled.  Fulfillment brings an end, and for this once, this now, the scent and first wetness upon the lips slips and hides between the length and width of now.

His foot reaches the floor, and they leave them behind.  Edges adapt, pressing in, pressure and change collapsing, wave crashing, love laughing, at the traces left before, behind, and now.

Untitled – 8.13.09

Letters from my daughter.  5, so not much in the way of words, her name (the E backwards, usually), my name, a “love” in there sometimes, if she can make it fit.  No regard for lines or spacing…words reach the right side, then head down, then back to the left.  Mostly pictures, a duck, a cat, our house, the sun.  Us, standing together.

So proud, so excited to show me.  “Daddy daddy!  Look at the letter I made for you!”  And a piece of paper, folded in four, edges crumpled.  We open it together, and she points out, “There’s me, there’s you, there’s momma, and there’s our house!  And a duck, and Olivia (our cat)!”

I kneel down, hugging her, kissing her on her head (her hand absently rising to brush it away, mussing her hair even more than I had), and telling her how proud I am of her, and that I love her.

I go to sit down, take my shoes off, drop my keys and wallet from my pockets, home at last, and hear behind me, “I’m gonna make another one!”

And two minutes later, she runs over with another one.  She’s in her “duck and home” phase, a series of meditations on family, and love, and her name.  And ducks.

And I lean over from my chair, hugging her, kissing her on her head (her hand absently rising to brush it away, mussing her hair even more than I had), and telling her how proud I am of her, and that I love her.

And I hear, as she runs off, “I’m gonna make another one!”

She can do this all night.  A dozen times an hour, at least.  I’m tired, I ache.  I’m stuck between washing my mind’s feet of the dust from the day and placing them firmly at home—something I’m never very good at and often can’t fully do—an in-between where I’m neither there nor here.  And back and forth she comes, some hidden quota of letters to meet.

They’re what’s left, now.  Memories fade and blur one into the other…they were gone before I started drinking, and now that “started” has become “mastered”, I hold no hope of reconstructing them.  The holes they leave are permanent, monuments, scars…though not empty.  Nothing stays empty for long.  Even the darkest of holes lure things looking for a home.

Like too many “God, I wish I’d been there for that”s.  Too many “Didn’t think it was that important”s.  And an entire fucking burgeoning civilization’s worth of “Too busy now, I’ll make it up to her later”s.

There are no Laters.  Whatever’s here now, that her, that me, that then…they’re all gone.  Later is now.  Later will always be now.  From wherever you stand, tumbling through the passage of time, pretending that Later will someday come, someday make up for now…it’s like splitting your soul, thinking you can have twice as much, and ending up rent, and torn.

Later means Gone.  Missed.

There are so many Laters.  So much missed.

There are so few things I see now.  I’ve mastered what I have so as not to see.  Each seeing pushes me down one of those holes.  There’s no bottom, just a nightmare fall into screaming oblivion.  Followed by another and another.  But one seeing I will allow.

A duck, and a cat.  And me, and her, and momma, and a house.  A series…a meditation, even.

I have saved them.  Every.  Single.  One.

New-to-you – If We Had A Yard

So, posting is slow these days.  Work is unchanged i.e. if I saw it coming towards me down a dark alley, I’d cast about for the nearest heavy object that might suffice to bash its skull in.  And would do so with a sick, drooling grin on my face.

New writing continues apace regardless, but apace means damn slow, so in the second of what I think will be an ongoing series (at least for as long as I’m lacking in latest-and-greatest), here’s another old story of mine.

If “The Maid” was the last real piece of fiction I wrote before the Dry Years, then “If We Had a Yard” was the first…it’s easily the oldest story that I can go back and read and not want to get blisteringly drunk afterwards.  Or if I do, it’s not from the shame of discovering the awkwardness that comes from huge desire, huge talent…and little acutal skill.  IWHAY is the first time I felt like the story that was in me actually made it to the page, at least mostly.

Enough fanfare…though I will pause to remind you that it, like all the New-to-you stories I post here, are included in the collection The Messy Divorce of Faith and Belief; buy one and know that you’ll have given my beautiful, waif-like daughter at least one fleeting moment of happiness (in other words, help subsidize our trip to Disneyland for her birthday).

From way back in 1996, an oldie-but-goodie, a platter that matters…

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If We Had A Yard

There’s a yard below—I see it, sitting here at my desk.  It sees me too, but still, I feel invisible, like I’m the usual twenty or thirty floors up instead of just on the second.  The story I’m supposed to be writing sits, and waits—and its patience is infuriating—while I look out my window, and see.

There’s a yard below—kids are playing in it, but only two.  The first—eleven years old, all angles and joints still grinding the rough edges off against each other—has a plastic hockey stick and a plastic hockey net and a bunch of plastic hockey pucks and (I have one word for you) is hitting the third with the first into the second, over and over and over again.  The asphalt underneath is rough, and the sss—crAPE! of every shot echoes between our two small buildings until it’s all that I hear, and my poor, humble, clear window sings of it.

There’s a yard below—and the second kid is the older brother of the first.  They don’t look much alike, but that doesn’t mean much anymore.  The family dog is there too (named So-Co after dad’s favorite alcoholic comfort) and he’s found a purpose to his domesticated life.  Every time little bro takes a shot, So-Co leaps after it, snatching the puck in mid-rebound with a loud (plastic) click as his jaw snaps shut.  But whom does he retrieve the pucks to?  Older brother, of course, and when the meager supply of practice pucks runs dry, life happens.

There’s a yard below—and I can hear them as clearly as though the words and voices are my own.

“Hey.”

“What?”

“Little help?”

“. . .Oh.  You mean these?”

“Yeah.”

“. . .And?”

“Toss ‘em over here.”

“You’re the one up and moving ‘n shit. . .”

“Fine.”

“. . .Hold on.”

“What?”

“Possession. . .is. . .nine-tenths of the law.”

“So what?”

“What’re you gonna’ give me for ‘em?”

“This fucking stick through your fucking head.”

From the open window behind them comes a voice, old and masculine, drunk and preaching, Dad,

“WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE!”

They’re silent for a while, then just quieter.  There wasn’t any intimidation in little bro’s threat, but the older brother doesn’t seem to want to spend the effort to keep his game going.  The pucks are returned to their rightful owner, and then back into the net, and here comes So-Co, and so on.  But before little bro can run dry a second time, an increasingly loud, deep, rhythmic thumping draws close enough to be noticeable, recognizable.  A white car with windows tinted nearly opaque; small, with equally small and pretentious tires.  The bass track to another rap song has my window shaking in terror.  Little bro knows how his brother’s friends drive; he does not walk—he runs to the relative safety of inside, well down the hallway.  The car screeches to a stop less than a foot away from the family’s minivan, a door whooshes open (and the volume briefly trebles, and my window goes into seizures), and the firstborn is in and gone, without a trace.

There’s a yard below—I see little bro leaning in the doorway, plastic hockey stick dangling loosely in his hand.  He sees his brother, cruising through his city, doing. . .something.  Something important, maybe, or at least better than hitting plastic hockey pucks into a plastic hockey net with a plastic hockey stick.  Dad yells at him that he doesn’t care which side he’s on, just shut the fucking door.

There’s a yard below—it’s an alley, really, concrete and cinder-block walls and the occasional bricked-off patch of dirt.  But kids need a yard to play in, and you make do with what you have.  Things grow busy for a while, as the other tenants come home, parking their cars and treading listlessly up stairs and down hallways.  And night falls, quietly, without fanfare or debate.

Belated thoughts…

Fucking hell.  Does anyone really understand the cracks in reality this kind of thing causes?  One moment, there’s life, the universe, and everything…and the next, there’s something more, something new that wasn’t accounted for when we were taking stock just a moment ago.

Imagine looking down at your arm.  You can see the hair, fine and soft (or not-so-fine and not-so-soft, depending on whether your parents were freaking werewolves or not)…the occasional freckle…how the skin so smoothly bends and contracts as you flex at your elbow…  Now imagine the skin starting to crack and split, and instead of blood welling up and muscle and bone protruding into air, you see more flesh, a pulsing growth expanding outwards.  It’s coming from you, but you’re not doing this:  you’re frozen still, watching as some unearthly force expands from within you.

Fingers appear, clawing forth, and they have the gall to grab on to your own arm, the very flesh they’re breaking through, to help pull them along.  And then, like they’re goddamn flowers, they stretch forth, and are drawn outwards, a hand and a wrist following, and then another pillar of flesh, with it’s own soft and fine (or not-so-much) hair springing to life, and then the bend where an elbow should be, and is…and the next thing you know, you’ve got another fucking arm, a third one, sticking out of you.

I think this may be how the universe feels each time someone new comes along, except, instead of having Steve or Clive write the story…the universe gets Norman Fucking Rockwell to do the narrative.  Because, despite how bizarre, how uncertain and surprising something like this is, the universe loves it, celebrates it…is defined, ultimately, by how full-bodied it embraces it, each time it happens.

All of this is to say that five years ago today (okay, yesterday…I had laundry to get started before I could sit down to write, sue me), my daughter Jane Barrie Hunt was born.  One moment, the universe existed, as it had before…and the next, it was changed, fundamentally, and Jane was here, and nothing would ever be the same again.

I can’t even come close to describing what it’s done to me.  If, on my deathbed, I look back at the entire volume of work that I’ve accomplished over long decades of fruitful creative expression, and glimpse just the faintest outline of the suggestion in all those words of how important she is to me, then I will die with a smile on my face, whatever comes after; I will tiptoe through the sulfur and brimstone, knowing that there’s a tiny chance that someone, someday, will glimpse the depth of my love for my little girl.

Happy birthday, my Boo.  Were you not here, and had I an inclination of what you would mean to me, I would sunder the universe, and defy the very face of creation to bring you to me.

Sketches – 8/7/09

Wow, this place gets dusty when I’m gone for a few days.

Have been wanting to wait until what I’m working on is done before posting it here…it’s much longer than what I’ve posted previously, sort of taking the microfiction I’ve been doing and seeking a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.  But, then I realized two things:  it’s going to take a long time before I’m done, given how little time I have to work on it now; and I started this place up to share what, how and why I’m writing.  And that means not having to wait until every last little detail is perfect.

So, here’s a bit of what I’m working on right now.  Let me know what you think, and keep an eye out for more bits and pieces to show up over the next few weeks.

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Of bleeding stars, and screams, ancient and quiet.

Like that one guy, that one time, who did that thing in that place.

And the temple walls fell.

*****

She shakes, muscles primed and failing.  The voices echo, ache in her head.  Pictures fly past her closed eyes, dizzying, incoherent narrative of everyone she used to be, and the holes they’ve left behind in her.

She sees sadness with held tears, creases filled with dust, hands unable to find the right movement, and words from toothless mouths that gnaw at her long after they’re gone.

She sees laughter cut short, limbs cut short, Death’s celebratory streamers of red, pink and white.

She sees sweat, and heat, and coughing constriction, knowing the tightness in her chest will last long after she’s unstrapped and removed her armor.

She sees a fly land on an unblinking eye, and can’t bring herself to brush it away, to confirm this place and time.

She sees a vortex, a maelstrom of the half-remembered and half-forgotten, and the shame of both.

Through it all, just one anchor, one solid place she clings to.  Before she does it, as she does it, she sees it, the knife taking hold, skin bending, then breaking, can feel the shatter through her whole she, reaffirming it’s there.  In that moment, the blinding flash drives it all away, it’s ecstatic, the release, all the tension, the confusion between hateful dreams and dark fantasies and why she can’t tell the fucking difference between them…all of it, fear and doubt and pregnant weeping, pulsing and burning, until finally cut.

She sees it before she does it, and as she does it.  She doesn’t see it after…after is nothing, is quiet, is nothing but hands, arms, legs, the core in between, and a soft, gentle, warm caress dripping down.

She hides it from him.