This Video Should Make You Weep

Does Donald Trump treat women poorly?  Depends on who you ask.

What I find far more repellent and far more urgent a crisis is the suffering inflicted by egg-consuming, dairy-loving, meat-eating people.  

That thoughtlessly cruel behavior is non-partisan and inflicts a greater horror upon this planet than either Presidential candidate could ever summon.  

Exit The Skin Palace / Chapter 9

Exit The Skin Palace / Chapter 8

He's dead, Jim

First, excitement at blowing dust off a relic, but before long, a cold, harsh reality settles in.  It's always a tragedy when a 2nd novel reads like it's a 1st novel.  

For all the good stuff in The Colonists, there is too much dreck. The story is full of incidents and sitcom-like happy coincidence. There's no plot.  The bikini barista obsessed with peak oil turns into a brochure for the issue.  Peak oil talking points sound like talking points rather than dialogue.

I might pick choice pieces off the corpse and put them somewhere else.  I might go crazy and rewrite most of it and try and put it in some kind of working order.  But probably not. In consideration of near-50 chapters and 100,000+ words only bare bits hold up under the cruel light of objectivity:  

Every chain died a death.  Sears was dying.  When he was a kid, he could remember getting Christmas catalogues.  Poring over the toy section.  Not only Sears, but JCPenney’s and Montgomery Ward.  He wasn’t sure if either one of those other chains still operated.  Trina said when the price of fuel hit a certain point the business model Walmart followed would fall apart.  If importing the cheap plastic shit cost more than what the retail side was pouring in, the plug would be pulled.  Someday it would happen.  

He tried to imagine the parking lot, desolate, cracked, weeds burst up through the black asphalt.  A dark dust coating the insides of the mammoth store space.  The shelves emptied, maybe no shelves at all, or the shelving units still in place, sticking out like vertebrae within the torso of a long extinct beast which finally couldn’t keep pace with change.  The cash registers, the emptied tills, the weekly entertainment rags still on display, but soiled, tales of plastic surgeries and weird sex and the weight loss tips, common concerns belonging to another era, another species almost.  And all the mess inside, remnants of the ramble of humanity trying to stock up, store up quickly given the slow motion calamity finally broke into the consciousness, no longer a 'what if?' scenario brushed to the side by the three engines of deceit - the media, the government, and wanton consumer need. 

It was hard to pinpoint when the worst times would be.  The actual starving and murdering and dying or the recovery over the course of hundreds of years, the new normal unlike anything most could conceive.  Trina had said that as calamity came down, people had a switch they flipped that allowed them to deny the very basic facts looming ahead of them.

Stan had done that.  Losing the job.  Heather halting the marriage not even a year in. A sliver of self admitted something unpleasant was occurring.  A fattier portion of self denied reality, petitioned like a motherfucker for fabrication.  At the last moment, his job would continue.  Heather would hit the big green go-button and they’d keep on the path to wedded bliss.  And at some point, that ignorant, self-blinding sort of self vanished, popped like a balloon, and reality settled in with that distinct dry sandpaper touch. 

Exit The Skin Palace / Chapter 7

The Colonists

Out of sheer insanity, I'm going back through The Colonists, the first "adult" novel I finished.  Posting the Sarah Palin pegging bit the other day put the manuscript back on my radar. Also, I'm sick of peddling pedestrian sketches.  My poor ghost story characters are underserved by my not-so-pulse-pounding pencils (he sobbed and moaned). So far, The Colonists isn't all that bad.  It's no great shakes, but I'm not wincing looking at scribble from 2012. Here's a wee bit from Chapter 9, our hero - Stan Kenmore - interacting with Mercy, one of the Cowgirls Coffee baristas:




Near the end of the day, Mercy walked past Stan, headed towards Plumbing Penguin.  Wearing the knee-high boots with what looked like bulbous dragon eyes and a heel design like the tops of dragon teeth.  It seemed each of her steps might leave a glowing, molten imprint in its wake.  The underside of her behind squooshed out from the silvered, skin flush shorts.  She pursued the incline toward the plumbing store in careful steps like she was climbing up an ice covered hillside in snow boots, all sorts of fractures evident in the thin ice.  He wondered if she smiled for the Plumbing Penguin people.  Salli said she’d seen Mercy be really nice, but it was usually to people she didn’t know all that well.  Once she knew you, and knew what to expect in terms of disappointment, then the growling version of Mercy was unleashed. 

Stan didn’t see her clamber down the decline, but turned toward her when the steps on gravel were near.  

Walking back towards the booth, her hands were up messing with the knot keeping her hair up in back. 

“You look like you ought to be in a rock band,” said Stan. 

She shook her head, the hair coming loose.

"Fuck, motherfucker," she said.  "I am a rock band."

Exit The Skin Palace (Chapter 6)