I have a story, and the people involved didn’t want to help me with it. They decided that only their lives were important and left me to twist in the wind. So, since they’re gone and not coming back, I have two choices. The first is to stay silent and not cause unrest; the second is to cause a lot of unrest because I trust the FBI inasmuch as anyone can because “All Cops Are Bad.” Luckily, NoVA and SoMD are full of cops I like… the ones that can admit they’re complicit in a system. The blessing and the curse is that I am a documented bipolar patient who had “hallucinations” in the hospital… but who knows how many hallucinations were true stories too good to be true? Even I will never know that.
Wicked.
I have been changed for good, and that’s all I can say about that… because I am not sure about better or worse, just like Elphaba. I just know that I cannot go backwards, cannot seek solace in any of my old friends, and just need to live out my life in peace. I’m not cut out for government work, and not because I don’t have the smarts. I betrayed a friend after she betrayed me. She wanted all the benefits of being my closest confidante without any of the hard work. Therefore, it became harder and harder to put in work for her. I know what I have done is permanent, but you would have to read about the last 12 years to know both why I felt betrayed and why it was time to just let go and wash my fucking hands……….
Except I can’t.
“Out, out damned spot.”
I have always put in work for people who put in work for me. Her idea of work was being as remote as she possibly could so that nothing was ever fun or light; I am not the person that can be fun or light in the middle of fighting.
Here is our life together in a series of Jonathan Kellerman quotes, taken from “The Murderer’s Daughter:”
“They deserved more than the pathetic lie known as empathy.”
“Pre-monster happiness was out of the question.”
“In matters of healing, the body initiates and the mind follows. Malcolm had told her that. Only once, but it stuck.”
“Pals and chums and confidantes — what the textbooks sanitized as a social support system — were fine when you stubbed your emotional toe. With deep wounds, you needed a surgeon, not a barber.”
“Caulfield was basically a snide, spoiled twit. The arrival of the Messiah would leave him unimpressed.”
“Since learning of the catastrophe, she’d retreated into an insensate fog, as if locked in a sterile glass bubble where her eyes worked mechanically but couldn’t process and her ears were unplugged speakers. When she took a step, she knew she was moving, but she felt as if someone else was pushing the buttons. Her brain was flat and blank as unused paper. It was all she could do to sit and stand and walk.”
Now, imagine if you felt like that and you were responsible for it.
I don’t have one book I read over and over, except the year that “One L” by Scott Turow was in my bathroom. Every time I was indisposed, I read about his own shit sandwich and tried to empathize. It was easy after having read “Intern,” by Doctor X. I’m not sure, but matching style I think “Doctor X” is actually Michael Chrichton.
Except it’s not. It just sounds like him.
I looked it up. It’s Alan Nourse, the Mark Felt (Deep Throat) of Harvard Medical. If you like Chrichton, though, it will remind you very much of “Five Patients.” Turow, Nourse, and Chrichton all went to Harvard…. it’s not a big leap in style, and you will love all of them.
I do have lines from books that repeat:
“WHEN IT BECAME completely impossible for me to live without a pet chicken,”
“I turned to Kirsten, who was a great fallback best friend, because she had seven brothers and sisters and going to her house was like going to the zoo.”
“I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn’t have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls.”
I laughed so hard I nearly died. These are from “A Girl Named Zippy” by Haven Kimmel.
“Speed kills,” said General Faust, picking up the baton. “It’s nearly impossible to overstate its power. Darth Vader wouldn’t need a Death Star to destroy the Earth—or any explosives for that matter. He’d just need to put a single star cruiser on autopilot and ram it into the planet at a tenth of the speed of light. That would be more than enough to do the trick. If Vader had ever figured that one out, he would have put a lot of Death Star contractors out of work.”
Douglas E. Richards is my favorite living technothriller writer, and this is from “Infinity Born.”
“They deserved more than the pathetic lie known as empathy.”
“Pre-monster happiness was out of the question.”
“In matters of healing, the body initiates and the mind follows. Malcolm had told her that. Only once, but it stuck.”
“Pals and chums and confidantes—what the textbooks sanitized as a social support system—were fine when you stubbed your emotional toe. With deep wounds, you needed a surgeon, not a barber.”
“Caulfield was basically a snide, spoiled twit. The arrival of the Messiah would leave him unimpressed.”
“Since learning of the catastrophe, she’d retreated into an insensate fog, as if locked in a sterile glass bubble where her eyes worked mechanically but couldn’t process and her ears were unplugged speakers. When she took a step, she knew she was moving, but she felt as if someone else was pushing the buttons. Her brain was flat and blank as unused paper. It was all she could do to sit and stand and walk.”
“How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?”
“an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered,” (reminds me of Drew…. too old to be a princess, too young to be a queen. That’s why we’re both duchesses.
“What does one ever ask an author except: ‘How?’ And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: ‘Beats me!’”
“But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with ‘will do;’ it’s worse than living with yourself.”
“Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.”
“Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada.”
“How did they even know I was gay?” He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono. (This made me snort and howl with laughter.)
The Murmur of Bees gets its own section, because it lifted me up during the pandemic:
“It occurred to him that houses die when they are no longer fed with the energy of their owners.”
“He could not imagine how the country would survive if it allowed the rural areas to die, for in spite of all the changes—the emergence of iron cities like Monterrey, all the technological advances, all the marvels of the modern world—if there was one thing that never changed, it was that people, whether of a city or a village, needed to eat every day.”
“Simonopio closed his eyes, knowing that a look has the power to attract.”
“the true meaning of death: that there is no going back and that anything that was not said in time would never be said.”
“The empty hours of the night do not pass unnoticed, because in their unrelenting cruelty, they do not allow one to rest; they force one to think, and they demand a great deal.”
I love “The Murmur of Bees” so much that I heard it was originally written in Spanish. I don’t know enough Spanish to read it. Bought it, anyway just for the poetry. All of these lines are going to sound better in their original language…. most of the reason why I’m learning actual Finnish grammar and not just playing around.
I will update more because for some reason, I don’t have more recent books posting automatically. I know J.L., Evey, and Itzel will want to know what I highlighted. That’s the thing about having author friends.
When we’re together, Less is actually quite a bit More.
Just one book? Forever? If I only get to have one, it’s a Bible. Not because I’m a religious zealot. I enjoy theology and reading criticism… but in the absence of other books, I’d have to make my own. Very, very hard without the source material. Over time, I would absolutely entertain myself by writing both First and Second SpongeBob to see if anyone noticed.
The Bible isn’t an answer. It’s a lens through which I see everything else. By taking these stories seriously and not literally, I can tap into something useful… the power of me. When I look at the historical Jesus, I’m looking in a mirror. I feel like every Christian says this, but I’m never sure if they mean it. They leave out the “historical” part and that’s what creates problems. They’re not connecting to him, but the marketing campaign that tried to rebrand him as white. They’re connecting themselves to something that has never even existed.
The “prosperity gospel” people drive me up the wall, and it is extremely important to understand why. Jesus is all about setting priorities, and money wasn’t on the list. I am angry that so many people think Christianity is *only* mega churches so that small communities engaging in social justice are also thought of as suspect.
Meanwhile, the income disparity just gets more intense as people want church that looks like a rock concert, when to me it’s the very worst of both. It’s pedantic to preach to people on an eighth grade level. Assume your audience is smarter than you are, because it is true.
Moving what is basically my textbook out of the way, you guys already know I love Argo, but it’s not my favorite book by Team Mendez. That’s Spy Dust, the love story between Jonna and Tony. I read it shortly after I met Jonna in person, and it was exactly the book I needed at exactly the right time. They’d both been married before. It was their second act after facing lots of hardship, and it was beautiful (both their relationship and the prose that came out of it).
Fiction changes by the hour. It would be impossible to list all the novels I love. When push comes to shove, I still can’t pick one.
Catcher in the Rye comes up quite frequently. People love it because of the foul language (for the time) and the “Holden Caulfied is just cool” factor. I also love those things, but it’s more than that. It’s written from my favorite perspective, probably because I’m a blogger. It’s first person with an unreliable narrator. Holden’s were stories that were all true and God knows if any of them happened.
I am also very impressed with my own writing, but not in the moment. It takes about five years for me to be proud of an entry because I have to be a different person than I was when I wrote said piece. I’m proud when I look at it with a more objective eye… I feel like I’m connecting to another writer and critiquing their work because at that point, I’m not emotionally attached to it. I also have to be my own biggest fan, because to make my blog dependent on external validation is crazy. It’s a journal and you’re invited, both to read and talk back. To need your love and adoration is to handicap myself, because it’s letting the audience become my boss, writing what they want to read rather than this space actually being useful for my own growth and development.
I absolutely do go back and read what I’ve written, because again, that’s what’s useful to me. I read my entries and look at what I was trying to accomplish and ask myself if I’ve done it. Most of the time, I am not sure. What I do know is that people don’t think I know how I come across, and they are very worried. To me, that’s caring about what other people think more than I care about myself.
I’m not being cruel and callous about hurting people with fallout. I am saying that I can’t think about the outside world. I have to let the audience find me because I need this web site more than everyone else.
My personality type says there are callbacks and patterns, so I go back and find them. I throw things back in my face. I get angry at myself. And somehow, good writing comes out of it sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes I’m an angry, judgmental dickhead. I like the bumper sticker wisdom of “when you ask yourself ‘what would Jesus do,’ remember that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is a viable option.”
This is why I’d take a Bible over anything else. People worried over him the exact same way that people worry over me. They even say some of the same things. It is enough to make me shut down this whole site at times, and I have to force myself not to do it; I’ve done it once before and it really screwed up my future.
It screwed me up inside when the same people that tried to force my hand were so outraged in the moment, then months later said, “you were always such a great writer. Why don’t you do it anymore?” Notice I said that they tried to force my hand. It didn’t work. What did work was feeling so terrible about anything and everything I’d done that my poor self esteem cased and trashed everything I’d built in less than 20 seconds. At the height of my popularity, I was up there with Wil Wheaton and Heather Armstrong. Dooce had only started a couple of years before me, when she actually talked about things that got her in trouble. She built her entire audience off of brutal truth…… and then….. didn’t.
I can’t be bitter, because it was my decision. I am just telling you the cost of shamethat comes with having readers. As a writer, you only fear two things. The first is that no one will read your work. The second is that everyone will.
Over the years, people start to appreciate my writing more and more, and I’m not talking about strangers. I’m talking about my friends who don’t remember what happened when and I’m the only one that remembered to write it down. That’s why I’m so careful to talk about people in a three dimensional way. Once the subject removes themselves from the equation and starts reading about themselves as if they were a different person, “all of a sudden” I’m the greatest writer who ever lived because mine was the story that stuck.
Stories That Are All True 