Journal mcgrew's Journal: Cory Doctorow hurt me! 4
Some people never learn. I'm one of them, apparently. I keep getting proven wrong.
I've said, and repeated many times, that no man can hurt me. He can punch me, kick me, stab me, shoot me, break my bones, but only a woman can hurt me. But damn it...
Cory, why in the fuck did you write that Goddamn book?? I've never had a book make me cry before. This one did.
After reading Little Brother I was hooked on Doctorow's writing. I wanted my daughter Patty to buy Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom for me for Christmas, but that wasn't among the books she gave me. So a couple of weeks ago I was in the library, and I thought I'd check it out. It wasn't on the shelf; they had to reserve it for me.
Springfield's Lincoln Library -- not the big, new, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, but the city library that's been here since before I moved to this cartoon town -- has a shitty card catalog. It was apparently programmed by a cartoon character, but hey, this is Springfield. I reserved the book, and last weekend a notice came by snail mail that they were holding it for me. So I schlepped down there and checked it out.
I was reminded again that Doctorow can fucking write. His writing style reminds me of Isaac Asimov's, and Asimov has been my favorite author for decades. The story sucked me in, despite the suspension of disbelief made necessary by its backing up one's brain to a computer. That was necessary to the story, and if I can accept faster than light spaceship travel, well hell, I can get past rebooting one's brain. Maybe some day they will be able to map all the neurons and protiens and neural connections in one's brain, and reconstruct it. Who knows? Hell, today's newspaper is saying that Star Trek's Warp drive isn't impossible.
this speed limit only applies within space-time (the continuum of three dimensions of space plus one of time that we live in). While any given object can't travel faster than light speed within space-time, theory holds, perhaps space-time itself could travel.
"The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it," said Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. "The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it's not moving at all. It's the space-time that's moving."
One reason this idea seems credible is that scientists think it may already have happened. Some models suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed during a period of rapid inflation shortly after the Big Bang.
"If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives?" Millis said.
I identified with the main character in Doctorow's first person perspective book almost immediately. The character is a lot like me. He's old (a lot older than I am, but then he's been cloned and rebooted and I haven't), he's a cyborg like everybody else in the story's universe, with a choclear implant for a cell phone and a heads up display for the built-in internet connection. I've only got the CrystaLens device implanted in one eye, but Magic Kingdom is quite far into the future. I'm a primitive cyborg.
Like Julius, the main character, I've died before, even though I've never been cloned and rebooted.
Julius works in Disney World in Florida, and I spent five years working there back in the eighties. The hundred year old Julius has a twenty three year old girlfriend. I've not had any girlfriends that much younger than me - the character Lil is 23, my daughters are 22 and 24. I'd feel like a pedophile if I had a girlfriend that young, but I do like 'em young. Robyn was ten years or more younger than me. Annie, not a girlfriend but a fuckbuddy, has a father a year younger than me. He died of MRSA the day after I met him.
You probably noticed I haven't been at slashdot much lately. Like Jules, I've been offline much of the time for the last month, although it wasn't because of a nerf gun.
The character "Dan" reminds me of Danny Waters, an old friend I knew for years, but lost track of. He was my next door neighbor when I worked at Disney World. Every Monday he'd say "I ain't gonna do it no more", then Friday he'd show up with a case of Coors and a bag of weed and we'd get blasted. We had a really bitchin' time.
"Bitchin'" is a California term that was around when I was stationed at Beale in 1974. I've previously called Beale "Armageddon AFB" because there were more B-52s than I could count, all loaded with nukes and ready to turn the USSR into radioactive glass when I was stationed there. AFAIK the nukes are all gone now; there is no more Strategic Air Command. The B-52s and other stuff I'm afraid to mention because so much of it was top secret and may still be (I don't want to go to prison) are surely gone as well. But the word "Bitchin'", meaning "really ultra cool", gained national prominence some time in the late '70s (or maybe it was the early '80s) before dying out and reverting to its regional California useage, which probably suits the Californians well. The "government" in Doctorow's book, if you can call it a government, is called the Bitchun Society.
I got to page 19 and laughed - Lil was a crackhead. I called one of the crack whores I know and showed her page 19. "That's my kind of book!" she said.
I tried crack once. I didn't like it.
I met this girl, Laurie Peppers, whose nickname was "Peps" and had been known elsewhere as "Odie", at George Ranks. Alas, Rank's closed down a couple of years ago. Anyway, Danny Taylor (there's Dan again) introduced me to her. She would have fit Kingdom well, as I thought she was in her twenties, but she was in fact in her forties. A week after I met her she asked to borrow some money, and I loaned it to her.
A week or two later as I was getting out of my car at Rank's, at the time my favorite bar, and she hopped in the passenger seat. "I can't pay you that money back," she said. "I'm sorry. You do know what I do, don't you?"
I didn't, and she explained that she was a prostitute. A crackwhore. I hadn't seen Chris, the girlfriend whose live in boyfriend hated my guts, for months and therefore I hadn't been laid in months. So I was pretty horney, horney enough that even skeletal "Odie" looked good. I agreed to let her work off the money she owed me.
We had a few drinks and went back to my little apartment to let her work it off by having sex. We smoked a joint naked, and I had such a woodie I thought the thing was going to start bleeding. She pulled out a glass pipe. "Ever try smoking crack?"
No, I hadn't. She pulled a white rock out, balanced it on the end of the pipe and put a lighter to it, and it melted into the "chore". She handed it to me and I lit it and sucked. I got a tremendous rush, and my dick got soft and shrank. I didn't like the rush, had never liked cocaine anyway, and GODDAMN IT I COULDN'T FUCK!
It only lasted ten minutes. She'd put ten bucks worth of drug on the pipe, and it lasted less than ten minutes. It took a couple of hours for my dick to work again.
She may not have been good looking, but she sure could fuck!
She's the one who later stole my car and traded it for crack. The girl she traded it for crack to tried to kill her parents with it, breaking both of her mother's legs. The police got the car back for me.
All of it except the driver's side window, which cost me $200 to get replaced.
A few months later, Odie/Peps/Laurie called me begging forgiveness from a drug rehab center she was trying to turn her life around in. I saw her again maybe a year later, and she'd gained quite a bit of weight, and she'd needed it. Most crackheads are rail thin, and Laurie was no exception. I saw that some good had come of my car's being used as a murder weapon, as it had gotten Laurie into rehab. As far as I know she's still off the shit, no longer prostitutes (she's a lesbian) and has a real job.
I don't like crack. And I don't trust crackheads; you can see why. But the girl I showed page 19 to was intrigued; she loves the shit. I don't get it.
Actually, Mr. Doctorow didn't hurt me himself. He just tore open an ancient wound I thought had healed and been gone long ago.
I had dinner with Patty and Leila and Evil-X at Top Cat's (yes, the cartoon Top Cat) when Patty came back from Ohio a coupled of weeks ago. Again I was repulsed by X; she's five years younger than me, but now looks ten years older than I am. She's gained a lot of weight - a whole lot of weight. She's as far from hot as a woman can get. There's no way I'd want her back. As Redd Foxx used to say, "beauty's only skin deep, but ugly's to the bone!" Evil-X is ugly to the bone.
I had a few beers at Felber's last night and went home. I can't remember the name of the show, but WQNA, the station with "about the power of four light bulbs" was playing belly dancing music, and its drums were hypnotic. The weather was beautiful, and I decided to back the car into the driveway, roll the windows down, and sit on my porch swing drinking beer and listening to belly dancing music and reading Doctorow's book.
I got to the part where Dan takes Lil from Julius, and I had a flashback. Not a drug flashback, the kind of flashback they have in movies. I was transported back fifteen years or so.
My kids were about six, and the best friend I had in Springfield was a guy named Jim Clark, who a woman named "Scary Mary" had introduced me to. Jim and I and a couple of other friends were at my house smoking pot and drinking beer and laughing and listening to music, and it was a week night and I had to work the next day. Evil-X told me she'd drive them home, a few blocks away, and when she got home she was going to fuck my brains out.
Anticipating, I couldn't sleep. Twenty minutes later I had a really bad feeling; she should have been back. I got dressed and started walking, and walked up to my car, to find Jim and X making out, liplocked, with his hand up her blouse.
I should have divorced her then and saved myself a lot of pain in the then future, now past.
I bookmarked Kingdom, shut off the music and rolled up the windows and went inside and put Lord Of The Rings on - I have the "extended version" and have been watching it all week. I wasn't sobbing or wailing, but I couldn't keep the tears from streaming down my face. I was really rattled. Oddly and coincidentally I had dreamed of X as a young woman the night before, which made it worse.
Patty came home from work and asked me what was wrong, and I told her. "Remember when you were six and your mom and me almost got divorced?" She did. I told her about the book and how lonely and depressed I was. "You forgot to take your vitamins, didn't you?"
My daughter knows me pretty well. Without my generic "Centrum Geezer" vitamins I fall apart, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
"When's your friend Chrissey going to give me that hair cut?" I asked.
I found that Patty is afraid that Chrissey and I will hit it off. She's afraid that her twenty six year old friend will become lovers with her old dad! I reasurred her, her friend is way too young.
At least there's one thing I don't have in that much in common with Jules.
Damn it, Doctorow! OK, back to the book.
Speaking of books, I have the two volume Paxil Diaries ready for publication, but I have no idea how to get a book published. So I guess when I return Magic Kingdom I'll check out Doctorow's The Complete Idiot's guide to Publishing. Sounds perfect....
Offline (Score:2)
I posted this journal and went back to look at replies to the last entry, but was unable to answer any of you because the comments section has timed out. Sorry! Thanks to you folks for the kind words. I think I'll check out that lulu.com AC mentioned.
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I read "Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom" a couple months ago, just after devouring "Little Brother" and "Eastern Standard Tribe" and I liked it a lot, Cory is probably my favorite alive (since Sir Arthur C Clarke died) science fiction writer.
Now, that last sentence sounded a little creepy.
Good luck on the book! I'll surely buy it, even if I have to pay double for it transportation and taxes (sometimes I think my country hates to import books).
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I'd put your sig on the cover of my book, but the late Mr. Adams would sue me.
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I'd put your sig on the cover of my book, but the late Mr. Adams would sue me.
Somehow, I don't think he would mind, or you can quote Sir Arthur C Clarke quoting Douglas Adams:
The best advice [to humankind] [...] was given by Douglas Adams: "Don't panic."
Or you can quote ME quoting Sir Arthur C Clarke quoting Douglas Adams.
I wont sue you, I promise.