The Only Thing Difficult About Writing

A writer’s work space should be free from distractions.

I have done nothing – right or wrong – to deserve this, but I am paid to write. Which is to say, I am paid to sit staring out my window at the lizard who is sprawled on the cement flagstones of my patio. I am required to manufacture some arrangement of words appropriate to the context of a bookstore in the bank district of downtown LA, which also sells vinyl, comics and “ephemera”.  Here I sit, fingers triggered above a slim machine that can bring the knowledge and ignorance of the entire planet to me, and about which I am employed to think, wonder and opinionize – so long as I write it down – and I cannot take my eyes from a motionless reptile.  I mean, he’s real and he’s right there.

It can be difficult to control your work space, if you have kids or windows.

I need to think about books or something, but before I do that, I want to point out that this lizard and I share many characteristics. For example, just like the lizard, I will sometimes sit unmoving for long minutes, eyes bulging, trying to think of how to proceed. Also, we both live in terror. My job could evaporate the instant it becomes clear that my efforts are not worth even the paltry wage I receive, while he could get eaten by a California Black-Tipped Hawk. Our powers of concentration are similarly thwarted by the slightest, most oblique changes in our mise en scene. Fingers arrested mid-sentence and for no particular reason, I have remembered the name of a neighbor I had in 1987 whose husband worked for Sparkletts: Carol.

Carol’s husband had one of these.  They gave me their orange Pinto; it rode with a limp, because it was missing one shock absorber, but it was my first car.  Very nice people.  They sold the Porsche when they had a kid, and bought a Datsun.

This – not epiphany, not memory – somewhere in between… epiphory? – might come from two or three “memory neurons” popping unstuck in a dark, curvy fold of my brain. Very distracting. The observant lizard is in turn distracted by the abrupt cessation of typing, over here at the window. He notices everything.  Amazing.  This startles him out of staring into space. I notice him noticing me. I wish I could get a closer look at him. It then occurs to me that if I were out on those flagstones and half an inch high, he might try to eat me.

Unless he were a vegetarian. Or a de facto vegan, because where would lizards get anything dairy? Can you milk a lizard? Do lizards have teats? Goat cheese, cow cheese, lizard cheese – ah!  Nachos.

I could just do lunch now, and come back to this.

super hard to grasp those teats

ELEVEN THINGS YOU NEED TO DO TO BECOME BATMAN

ELEVEN THINGS YOU NEED TO DO TO BECOME BATMAN

1. Somehow arrange to have your parents murdered right in front of you. If you are already an adult, it won’t have the same impact it had on wee Bruce Wayne, but it’ll still mess you up pretty bad. Just do the best you can.  (Note: Do not arrange to have your parents murdered.  The point is, if you’re going to risk death/prison by standing up bad guys through basically unlawful means, you’d better have a good damn reason.  If you just want to fight injustice, join IJM.)

2. Be rich. If you aren’t already rich, this will be extremely difficult, but you won’t have the time to do all this other stuff if you have to work for a living. Also, a lot of the things you need are prohibitively expensive for normal (non-rich) people. Another problem is that it is hard to become rich without also becoming a total dick. If you have the ability to wish-fulfill at will, there’s a good chance you’ll lose touch with your humanity. This will make you a dick. Be careful.

3. Get into really, really good shape. This is almost as hard as becoming rich, but there is no luck involved, which puts it more under your control. You can get a decent set of free weights on Craigslist (I did).

  Gym membership?  Why?

Get one of those practical fitness books,  something for the military or fire fighters.  For these folks, fitness could be a matter of life or death.  You will be in the same position if you decide to take on men who dress like penguins.  The problem with getting a personal trainer is that they will ask you what your goals for getting in shape are, and you will have to make up some bullshit like “losing weight” or “looking good in a bikini” because you can not say, “dishing out and taking unsanctioned beatings.”  You need burst, so include sprinting.

4. Learn fighting.

5. Build or procure an amazing vehicle(s). It needs to be really tough to destroy, have defensive/offensive capabilities, remote control, break-away secondary vehicle (say, a motorcycle), ability to drive on rooftops and a bunch of computer stuff. Also: stunt driving ! If you live in Los Angeles (or any city with a big film industry), this is easy: just take stunt driving classes. If you’re in the south, some kind of Nascar “fantasy camp” might suffice.

6. Learn forensics. You can’t just watch CSI. You need to be an actual detective, and a really good one, because you always have to be one step ahead of the police. Remember: DC means Detective Comics. Include a study of the law in this, because there’s a good chance you’re going to get arrested a lot if you go around beating the crap out of people.

7. Learn any random skills James Bond or a special forces soldier would know: repelling, hang-gliding, lock-picking, explosives, throwing sharp objects, etc.. 

8. Make or have an armored costume with one-of-a-kind gadgets. For instance: listening devices (you do not have super powers), a grappling hook gun, smoke bombs, non-lethal weapons (like a stun gun or a batarang – which is easy to make if you know how to sculpt metal), a cape that extends instantly into a glider.

Don’t use one of those flying-squirrel suits; if you can’t lift your arm above your shoulder, you’re gonna absorb a lot of blows to the head.

9. Have a secret headquarters attached to your real house. You need to be able to slip in and out of your secret identity as a normal person. You can’t kill people who know the secret (you can’t even hit the Joker with your motorcycle), so build it yourself or with your friends (see below).

10. Have discrete, trustworthy friends. No matter how amazing you think you are, you cannot do this without support. Remember in Batman Begins when Batman gets lit on a fire by Scarecrow? He ends up half-melted on a roof, “Allffrred! Allffrred! I need you! A man with a bag on his head sprayed me with some stuff! I’m really freaked out right now!” [italics mine] See? Can’t do it alone. These friends should also be intelligent, brave, egoless and have carpentry skills (see above). One of them should be an honest cop who’s down with vigilantism.

These guys could be helpful, but they don’t exist.  You’re on your own, jack.

11. Make enemies. You need someone to fight.  Make sure they are actually evil; don’t oppose someone just because you don’t like them. They should have plans, powers or both. It’s no good just walking around your neighborhood; you probably won’t find any crime happening. And you can’t know what’s happening all over your city all the time. You need bad guys with a big mouth and a big footprint, so you’ll know where to find them. Luckily, your existence should really inspire and empower any latent evil geniuses in your town.

If you do all of these things, you are pretty much Batman.

.

Don’t let anyone discourage you; becoming Batman is a process. 

TAKE THIS BREAD – book review

Take This Bread: a radical conversion – Sara Miles

The style of eucharist at the center of Sara Miles’ memoir is less ritual more feast, more laughter than tears. She repeatedly connects the eucharist with feeding people (poor or otherwise). Miles spent her pre-journalist years in the kitchens of New York, cooking, feeding, bonding with co-laborers. This experience becomes the cipher she applies to hitherto scorned Christianity. She presents the act of sharing food with someone as a form of the eucharist and therefore a form of remembering Christ. Bread. Flesh. Christ. I’ve been a Christian for a long time, and I never thought of it so plainly. Duh.

Raised an atheist (by her MK parents), she spent the 80s journalizing in the jungles of brutal Central American wars.  Eventually, she settles into San Fransisco, AIDS activism and a warming domesticity with her wife and daughter. Her conversion happens in an accidental instant, taking communion at St. Gregory’s out of “a reporter’s habitual curiosity”.

I had no particular affection for this figure named “Jesus”, no echo of childhood

friendly feeling for the guy with the beard and the robes. If I had ever suspected

that there was such a force as “God”… I hadn’t bothered to name it, much less eat

it, for crying out loud… So why did communion move me? Why did I feel as if I

were being entered and taken over, completely stirred up by someone whose name

I’d only spoken before as a casual expletive?

Miles leads us through every doubt and fight, inside and outside of the church, the hood, and her own family, on the journey through first communion, conversion and her fervent development of food pantries all over the Bay Area.

What some of her views give up to orthodoxy, she wins back with a challenging orthopraxy.  And maybe arm-wrestling about orthodoxy should take a backseat to feeding people, at least for a few years.  Or decades or centuries. For us non-seminarian Christians, maybe less concern with disputed points of doctrine and more concern with people who are (almost) hopelessly marginalized – ranting street folk, non-English speaking immigrants, junkies, last-stand poor, zealots, fishermen, tax collectors – is in order.  If we are doing that, we’re in the sheep line, not the goat line.

Here’s a great little interview of Sara Miles with Spencer Burke at St. Gregory’s.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ THINGS WHICH ARE OUT OF YOUR LEAGUE – a mercifully short essay

Why You Should Read Things Which Are Out of Your League

I read about science, but I only understand a fraction of what I read. The problem is the math; there’s always damn math. But I persist. I always feel like a dog watching television, noise noise high-pitched sound that no one else can hear noise Higgs-Boson? noise biscuit. I just don’t have the background. I always took “Life Science” classes, which is about ripping apart dead things and identifying their organs. Easy. Fun! But quantum physics coaxes me into a dark alley and mugs me. I read it because the tiny bits I do understand make me a tiny bit smarter. It toughens me up. I am slowly building muscles I never developed when I was younger. I remember Mr. Cassel’s science class, and guessing what happens to the water in a glass with a piece of iron. (It disappears because… it is becoming rust. Formative moment – he called me a genius.) But that was my science education peak.  4th grade.  If, by grinding thru Michio Kaku’s Hyperspace or Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages I can add a few words to my vocabulary: string, GUT  (nothing to do with tennis or cats) and a few concepts to my thinking, like field theory  (gahh – I’m not saying I understand it, but I can nod knowingly if someone brings it up at a party – “yes, I have heard of that thing you just mentioned.”)  I think it’s worth the effort.  I will never be the guy who proves/disproves/develops/understands String Theory, but if I’m going to invest in a book, I want to have something new in my head by the time I’m done.  Gotta fill all that space with something. 

Incidentally, I do the same thing with theology – noise noise alternative community noise biscuit.

THE BOOK OF FIVE RINGS – book review

 The Book of Five Rings – Miyamoto Musashi

I would read anything I thought would turn me into a samurai (or a ninja – either one). The magic samurai dust in Five Rings is frustratingly hard to find, though. The text is broken into 5 “rings” (actually, “spheres”, according to translator Thomas Cleary), and broken down further into short dictums of swordplay and broader martial strategies. They are of varying degrees of usefulness for everyday life. I found most of the swordplay dictums a source of face-palming. For example, from “The Water Scroll” – “The Single Stroke – This means to gain victory with certainty by the accuracy of the single stroke. This cannot be comprehended without learning martial arts well. If you practice this well, you will master martial arts, and this will be a way to attain victory at will. Study carefully.” ? Duh, bro.

Other sections, however, have actually stuck with me. From “The Earth Scroll” – “You should not have any special fondness for a particular weapon, or anything else, for that matter… To entertain likes and dislikes is bad for both commanders and soldiers. Pragmatic thinking is essential.” And again, from “The Fire Scroll” – “When fighting with enemies, if you get to feeling snarled up and are making no progress, you toss your mood away and think in your heart that you are starting everything anew…. Any time you feel tension and friction building up between yourself and others, if you change your mind that very moment, you can prevail by the advantage of radical difference.” Everything is a straight line, to a samurai.

And that’s maybe the heart of the book, the shinken or “true sword” Cleary talks about in his preface “to do something with a real sword means to do it with utmost earnestness”. With apologies to B.H. Liddell Hart, hit it square between the eyes. That’s why there’s no magic samurai dust in Five Rings: to take Socho out of context, Hito ni oshinabe, michi zo tadashiki “To all men everywhere, the Way lies straight ahead.” Very Klingon – errr I mean, samurai.  Like this

 

Another very unmagic samurai book is the often opaque Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. Probably it’s amazing, but all I remember reading is something like “Use rouge so your men won’t think you’re afraid.” It’s the book Forest Whitaker quotes in Ghost Dog, though, so it has that going for it.