The Falsehoods of Common Household Appliances

 

It lies.

It is filled with falsehoods instead of dishes.

I ask it "are you clean?" and it will respond "sure" in an absent tone as if it can't be bothered to look away from ESPN. Its German accent is grating at these times.

I start putting the dishes away and - surprise - some egg from breakfast.

"Did you do this?" 

"Do what?"

I hold up the plate.

"This, right here." I'm pointing madly with emphasis.  "You said you were clean."

Then, laughter. It's a horrible sound: the laughter of an appliance.

 

Wanted: Dishwasher. Must not be pathological liar.

Mad, Crazy Love

At left, Drs. Tolman and Einstein at CalTech. Copyright free photo as the original copyright has expired and was not renewed.

Dr. Einstein you know from General relativity. Dr. Tolman is the father of relativistic mass - a closely related concept. Both men were ultimately mathematical physicists and both brilliant in that they could explain the complex in very simple terms.

I have a copy of Dr. Tolman's 1938 text Statistical Mechanics.

But, enough of the history lesson. I'm writing today about a favorite topic because I'm otherwise completely insecure. I've just finished a work and am sending it out on submission and so ...

You can find the insecure fabulosity  here.

We're here today because of mad, crazy love. I love mad scientists.

I love the evil and the benign. I love their crazy way of looking at the world. I love the fact that social interaction and all that comes with it seems beyond their comprehension.

Facebook? Would drive even the most sane mad scientist right over the edge. [ It does me. I'm among the 4 billion people on Earth without a Facebook account for a reason].

Twitter? Well. This might be a novel way to deliver a ransom note to the U.N.

@UnitedNations: Hand Over Australia or I unleash the Wombat of Doom. You have 24 hrs. #amcrazy #amlaughingmaniacally.

Might work. Maybe.

What I love most about mad scientists is the juxtaposition of their unique - and perhaps singular - worldview with those of everyday people.

Now, imagine your parents were mad scientists. I'm close to Ann Arbor so that isn't a huge stretch for me.

I think I've seen this family downtown.

Mom with discrete Geiger counter in a Longchamp purse.  Dad using an infrared monocular to take daytime sightings of the planet Venus for some hastily improvised orbital mechanics. Sissy with her Hello Kitty backpack. Alison lagging behind pretending she's not actually with this group and hoping no one from her class is downtown at the same time. She's intent on her phone tweeting "lame lame lame lame lame #familyouting #inhell #savemenow"

Of course, her spell check (iCorrupt) causes her to actually tweet #savemeow and 92,000 cat lovers are suddenly confused believing an actual cat has mastered the art of tweeting from the humane society.

Conflict?

The molecularizer seems a useless piece of failed experiment. Dr. Barnardo  tries to get it to work for hours one Saturday morning before declaring to Igor that "it's junk."

Of course, all over the world no one can make toast.  Bread inserted into a toaster merely stales at an accelerated rate. No toast.

The Queen addresses an anxious nation.

Throw in a mad scientist and this stuff writes itself.

Throw in an insecure mad scientist and there's a good chance California joins Atlantis in the annals of history.

I'm off to engage in some experimentation of my own.

I call it writing.

My family calls it that period of time when Dad wanders the house talking to himself and sloshing coffee - with a pen behind his ear.

Important distinction that pen bit.

Pony Rides

At left, a photo of a pony ride operation from 1909 as photographed by Frank H. Nowell and posted on wikicommons with the information that no known copyright claim is in effect. Thanks to the University of Washington Libraries digital collection for the image.

Pony ride.

A bit like authors. Queue up. Have a spin. Tel your little friends "It was just OK. He only knows one trick."

Remember the Paul Simon album: One Trick Pony ? Great song.

I think authors need to write whatever they conceive. I don't feel tied to genre conventions. Popularly, there has been some discussion lately of "literary" novels set within the mystery genre - as if this were some lark of excuse where the guise of the mystery trope is wrapping the deeper and more substantive emotional revelations of the characters in a contrived little world.

Please.

Good writing is good writing. Good storytelling is good storytelling.

When both these things co-exist, then we have literature.

It's the same pony ride, people. You pays your money, you take your turn. Call it a spotted elephant ride for all I care.

Pony still goes around the track and all your friends still watch waiting their turn.

Give him the spurs. See what happens.

There's a saying where I come from: green and green makes red.

If you don't know what that means, never get on a young horse. Better that way.

Better for everyone.

Treacherous Footing

At left, a photograph of an especially treacherous road from wikicommons taken by Jake Williams for the Geograph project.


I believe everyone in the Eastern half of the US is intimate with these illustrated conditions today. If so, watch your step.

I'm in a re-write (again) and it too is treacherous. One wrong word or awkward bit of dialogue and BAM, down it goes.

The practical advice in these conditions is to "walk like a penguin."

Seriously.

I worked for a company once whose grounds crew was shit. Their solution: a slogan. Don't fix the ice problem. No - encourage the employees to be careful.

Brilliant. No wonder they turned a $60B firm into a $12B firm in five years.

Nevertheless, I'd try the very same thing - walking like a penguin - but it won't help the story.

There's an idea. A children's book about murder on the ice floe by penguins. Plenty of eye-witnesses but then, what good are they?

Maybe I ought to stick to an audience accustomed to mature themes.

I wouldn't want to slip and fall on my narrative ass.

Mind you step. Watch out for Random Penguins., They're sneaky.

That's Absurd!

Douglas Adams.

I'd read a few things that were like Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide by the time I was acquainted with this work. The rebroadcast of the BBC radio adaptation was played on Hutchinson Public Radio which was my classical music station when the wind was just right.

Art Buckwald had a few fantastic pieces of absurdity which I'd read (the article about the Russian BatFox ..aka FoxBat ... was hilarious to me when the defense against this all-weather B-52 destroyer was in fact the Wright Flyer) .  Patrick McManus had the closing article in Field and Stream in those days and I found some of his stuff spectacularly absurd as well  ("iggles carrying off half-growed cows")

I was a boy. I loved to fish and hunt and was encouraged to work hard, keep my nose cleaner than it had been, and get smarter fast. Things that were funny were seen with a general air of distrust in my world. Remember, this was Western Kansas where the good are praised at the funeral as being "hard workers."

So, I discovered I liked the absurd. I liked the reflection in the mirror of absurdity of those things which strangled me. No, I saw a single Mad magazine in those days. My buddy Mike Day had one which featured Star Wars, a movie I didn't see for seven or eight years.

I miss Douglas Adams. My absurdity is not quite as developed, but then whose is? I'm trying. I'm trying.

I've done the satire and the cliche, the pastiche and the homage.

Now, it is the absurd twist that comes from my grubby little pen.

I once saw a play Dada Dada Dada. It's stuck with me.

I've spent a great deal of time watching the world in my life. People, events, politics, institutions, behaviors. It occurs to me that should humans have a motto,  it might well be "The logic doesn't follow."

I'm going to try the trick of absurdity in the most extreme of situations in this next story. We'll see how it goes. Might be shit. I think, however, Douglas might applaud the effort. It isn't based on convention.

I miss Douglas Adams. I'm going to write now.