Big Book Love

I’ve always been fascinated by books, in particular big ones. I don’t know exactly what it is about them. Maybe I look at books like Atlas Shrugged or Moby-Dick the same way an athletic person looks at an upcoming marathon; it’s a challenge, all that everyday effort being concentrated in one place. I think the first book I ever read strictly for its size was Stephen King’s It back in the summer of ‘86. It was my first 1000-pager, and it really felt like climbing a mountain – a lot of fun, and its length added to the sense of involvement I had with all the characters.

From there, I moved on to other longish books – the two I mentioned above, along with L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, King’s The Stand, The Lord of the Rings (which was really intended to be just one big book before the publishers chopped it up and named the pieces themselves)... and I still have copies of Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Joyce’s Ulysses sitting on my shelf at home, ready for the next time I’m in this frame of mind. In all cases, the main reason I got into these books was because they were BIG, not because I heard good things about them or they had anything else in particular to offer. The fact that some of them are considered “classics” just legitimized my wanting to read them.

Another part of it, though, is that I marvel at people who really have that much to say, that they would sit down day after day and just keep weaving the same tale. I’m not the kind of person who is able to just talk and talk without having some sort of real content to it, and I’ve never had that kind of stamina in terms of writing either… Even in my writing projects that have made it past short story length, I’ve had to drape my story across an already-existing frame to give it the sense of structure I need. For “28 IF” it was the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, for “Tints of Dread” (which I still haven’t finished) it’s Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, and for my still-unfinished novel “Nadir”, it’s Dante’s Inferno.

Even stories about such mammoth tomes really intrigue me … Spalding Gray did a monologue in the early ‘90’s called “Monster in a Box”, which concerned his process of writing an incredibly long novel that he eventually scrapped. But the way he would talk about the “monster” was fascinating, the myriad story lines and how it started to take over its life because of its sheer size and psychological weight.

Then a few years ago I heard about Henry Darger. He had a troubled childhood – if I remember right, he had some mild form of mental illness -- who ended up working as a reclusive janitor in the very sanitarium he had spent a lot of time in as a child. He seemed like a quiet, unassuming loner until he passed away in the 1970’s… and when his apartment was unlocked, his employers found a secret project he had been working on for over 30 years. It was a novel called “The Story of the Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal”, a 15,000-page fantasy novel about a fictionalized Civil-War-type conflict between armies of children and child slavers, that takes place in a world he had completely devised on his own. Not only that, but there were also hundreds of panoramic watercolor paintings that he had done, illustrating the many fantastical battles. The estimated length of this work is over 9 million words (for comparison, all seven Harry Potter books added together are just over 1 million). There’s a great documentary film about Darger and his work called “In the Realms of the Unreal”. That just blows my mind, the sheer power of imagination that must have involved.

And then there’s Charles Crumb, brother of famous underground comic artist Robert Crumb (the guy who came up with the “Keep on Truckin’” logo in the ‘60s). It was actually Charles who became obsessively fascinated with comics as a kid, and got his younger brother to take it up. Charles drew many comics of his own, but eventually gave it up. Well, not exactly gave it up… in the documentary film “Crumb” (directed by Terry Zwigoff) you can see Robert thumbing through some of his brother’s later work, and it’s bizarrely fascinating. Charles’ obsession seemed to center on the story of Treasure Island, more specifically on the Disney film version that the Crumb kids all saw when they were young. Charles would write volumes and volumes of comics about Long John Silver and his young apprentice, but after a while his focus seemed to change… there’s a scene in “Crumb” when Robert flips through a particular comic, and as the pages go by, you can actually see Charles’ obsession running away from him… the figures in the comic panels get smaller and smaller, the text starting to take up more and more of the pages. After a while, the words take over entirely, small, crabbed writing filling the whole page, and even further along Charles stops using words altogether, with page after page full of squiggles that look like words until you examine them closely.

Crumb and Darger seem like flip sides of the strange obsession that writing can cause… where Darger, over the course of decades, was able to construct something huge and weird and impressive, Crumb’s own writing devolved until it wasn’t writing at all, just barely-organized scrawls across a page. Sadly, but not too surprisingly, he committed suicide in the mid-90’s.

I’m also really intrigued by the film Se7en… in the scene where Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt find the apartment belonging to Kevin Spacey’s serial killer character, they find bookshelves filled with those standard black-and-white composition books, each one of them filled with tiny writing, the meticulously set-down thoughts of a madman raging at a world he only imagines that he understands. This movie really got under my skin the first time I watched it, but that scene in particular… I think it’s because insanity that focused, that precise and clear in its own self-analysis, is more frightening that any random act of violence. At least, it is to me.

(That scene, in fact, inspired a story of my own, called “Outside My Window”, in which a man on death row writes obsessively, and it’s not until it’s too late that you realize he has somehow become capable of bending the physical world to his will through the process of telling his own story.)

When you think about it, there’s nothing particularly challenging about a long book… it just takes longer, that’s all. But I can’t help but feel a big sense of accomplishment when I finish one. Maybe it’s the knowledge that not many people have attempted to read such a long book, and even less have finished it. I think it’s just a way of taking my bookish leanings and making them seem like more of an achievement than they really are. It the same reason why have a list of every book I’ve ever read, every movie I’ve ever seen… it takes something that I do for fun and would do anyway, and turns it into some sort of accomplishment.

It’s a good thing I’m not more of a loner than I already am, or I get the feeling I’d be chasing this ideal to its end, trying to find the subject(s) that would allow me to write, and write, and write… still, I love hearing about these writers who, for better or worse, have dedicated themselves so single-mindedly to their art. But I’m also glad I have family and friends to keep me grounded, to prevent me from running off too far into my own fantasy lands…

Weird on Top

In the next few weeks, there may a breakthrough in physics unlike anything seen in the last hundred years. Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are closing in on the elusive Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that gives atoms their mass. If this particle actually is proven to exist, it will change much of the way we think about matter, the Universe, and, well, everything.

On this occasion, I thought I’d take a stab at writing down an explanation for one of the weirdest (proven!) scientific theories I know. It concerns the rules that we understand about the Universe on the smallest scales we know of. These rules are collectively called “quantum mechanics”.

So what’s so important about quantum mechanics in the first place? Well, we humans have figured out the physics how things work on big scales.. and by that I mean things atom-sized and larger. We understand most things about how gravity and electromagnetism works, and use that information to create all the cool, useful tools we have today. For example, did you know that GPS satellites have to take into account how the mass of the Earth distorts space-time when they’re figuring out the best way to get you to the mall?

So we’ve pretty much squared away how things work on a macroscopic level. However, when you start looking at things on smaller and smaller scale, the less sense they make. Then things quit making much sense It appears that empty space itself is full of random pairs of tiny particles that spring into existence out of nowhere, then collide and return to nothingness again. It’s a kind of “quantum foam” that forms the very fabric of the universe. And because the particles appear only to disappear again mere billionths of a second later, no energy is gained or lost. We kind of understand how this all works, and in fact about a third of our tech gadgets use some aspect of this odd, counterintuitive side of the Universe to make them work.

But it gets weirder than that. Say you have a flashlight that only emits one photon at a time. If you shine it at a window, does the photon bounce back at you or pass right through? The answer is… *it depends on whether you’re watching or not*. This is where things get seriously crazy. Until you check, the photon actually does both. It passes through *and* it gets reflected. And until someone looks, it stays merely a probability (say, 50% refraction/50% reflection). But when someone looks, or checks on it in some more subtle, indirect way, it finally decides where it is -- inside the house or out -- and retroactively makes it appear that it had been that way all along.

Now, you might be thinking the same thing I did when I heard about this: WHAT THE HELL?!?! Up until I started looking into this, the way I believed the Universe worked was very linear. Allowing for some distortion, time moved forward. But if we accept what the evidence is telling us, it requires time to be rewritten as things move along. Either that or… and this seems to be the solution that seems most elegant to me… multiple universes.

This is an idea that I had been turning over in my mind for a long time, just from reading lts of sci-fi, but never really had any context to put it in. The idea is that both results exist, and when you check to see how it turned out, you push the Universe along a particular path. The fact that other people who check will see the same thing proves that everyone is moving along the same path. But the truly mind-blowing thing is that this is happening millions of times, every second of every day. (It also brings up the thought of who actually can push the Universe along a path by observation – if a cat looks, is that enough? How about an amoeba? Is sentience required? Or any kind of consciousness at all?)

This theory is something Brian Greene talks about in his book The Hidden Reality. I haven’t read it yet, but I have heard interviews with him, discussing the theories involved in it. Apparently this idea of multiple possible universes meshes nicely with “string theory”, which basically says that all particles are made of unfathomably small loops of some unknown cosmic material, and when they vibrate at different frequencies, they become a photon, or an electron, or any of the other particles we know about. The geometry of the strings apparently explains how our universe can exist alongside others almost like it, and how they can split off from each other.

But one of the great things about this theory is that it’s somewhat testable, which has been the problem with string theory up until now. One of the many things they’ll be doing with the Large Hadron Collider in Europe is smashing particles together and seeing how much energy they get out of it. If what comes out is less than what they put in, they’ll know that in high-pressure and high-temperature situations, it’s possible for energy to get knocked out of our Universe and into a nearby one.

So, as usual, the Universe (or the Multiverse, as some people are now calling it, considering there might be many slightly different ones right alongside ours) turns out to be more complicated and bewildering the closer you look at it. Barry Gifford wrote it and David Lynch used it as the main idea of one of his movies: “The whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.” And it just keeps getting weirder.

Warning: Old Man’s Ear Hair Freely Discussed Here

A few weeks ago, Amy and I took a rare night out to go to a play that a good friend of ours was in. Standing in line outside the theater, waiting for the house to open, we ended up standing behind some season ticket holders, all of which were older folks, divided mostly into couples. One gentlemen was by himself, though, and even if he had been in a crowd, his status would have been evident by one aspect: his ear hair.

I’m aware of the ridiculous things that happen to men as they grow older, and I’m certainly not looking forward to any of them. I could go down the list, but ear hair is the worst, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because, unless someone feels comfortable enough to tell you that it can been seen by the entire general public, there’s no way you could ever be aware of it on your own. Seriously, I’ve tried to see my own in the mirror. There’s just no angle or configuration of multiple reflective surfaces you can pull which affords both the right sight lines and the correct lighting to see if there’s anything there, much less guide your hands toward removing it. All you can really do is stick an electric trimmer in the vicinity every week or so and hope for the best.

And that’s clearly all the solitary guy waiting in line could do. He might not even have known to do that much; he had a disturbing “blossoming” situation going on, so much so that I was surprised he could hear anything. All I could think was that there’s no one looking out for this guy. He’s got to figure this out all by himself. It was kind of depressing, even after someone came to stand in line with him. It was an older woman about his age, maybe a good friend, but it clearly wasn’t his wife. If it were, my guess is that would have taken better care of him.

Maybe that’s the lesson that ear hair has to teach us (and I can’t believe that I actually just wrote that sentence). The lesson is that we need someone that close to us, who can tell us when things aren’t right. Not only do we need to be told sometimes, but someone has to be willing to take tweezers in hand and right the wrongs, ones that we not only aren’t aware of, but are in blind spots we *can’t* be aware of. It’s a special brand of intimacy, and I’m very thankful to report that I have it in my life. I know beyond a doubt that I’d just be another guy with ridiculous ears if I didn’t.

Taking Control

The strength of humans is our ability to see patterns. Not only can we recognize them, we feel compelled to find them, to discover the reasons behind the reasons that every facet of life works the way it does. We even see patterns when they’re not really there. In some cases we’ve been extraordinarily successful. We understand enough about the natural world to harness electricity to light up and connect the world, and we use the properties of gravity to build enormous structures that stagger the imagination. We even manipulate the very atoms that surround us to make our world safer, more pleasant to look at, easier for us to live in.

But what we don’t really understand is ourselves. We’ve spent more time examining “the human condition” than probably any other subject. People, as a whole, are so flawed and seemingly unpredictable, that we want to know why it is that we do everything we do. There have got to be rules, we think, shouldn’t there? And I think I’ve stumbled upon something that might lead us in the right direction.

The idea started to coalesce after my daughter was born. As a baby, at first she couldn’t do much. Everything she did, everywhere she went, was dictated by her parents. Once she started being able to move around and grab things, I noticed that she would often try for the biggest object she could reach for, regardless of what it was. And if she could get it to make some kind of noise, so much the better. I realized that the object itself was largely irrelevant. What she wanted was the effect: the noise, the change she could create in her environment.

She wanted to have control over something, because she didn’t have control over anything else. And the thing is, I don’t believe that changes as we get older.

In this light, life appears to be mostly about levels of control: what we control in our lives, what we feel comfortable in allowing others to control for us, and what we choose not to exercise control over at all. One of the biggest paradoxes of life is why people do things that are physically and emotionally dangerous. Many people go out of their way, and against all logic, to put themselves in horrible situations that they have been in before. And this idea, the one of control, explains it. A person who jumps out of an airplane does so only when they’re convinced they have control over how fast – or slow --they hit the ground. A person who was abused as a child is more likely to be an adult abuser themselves, because it’s the only way (at least in their minds) to take back the power – the control – that they lost. They might not even be consciously aware of why they’re doing it.

Hoarders? They have a heightened level of need for control, and look to do it by hanging onto every possession, no matter how trivial. Gossips? They want to control information, and maybe the opinions of others while they’re at it. People-pleasers? They seek to influence how people think, in particular about them. And, as always, the pendulum swings the other way too. Substance addicts are all about losing control, not being responsible for a while. It’s a very seductive level of existence. After all, more people than not use some kind of mind-altering substance to “unwind” or “blow off steam” on a regular basis. Not to mention that there are plenty of high-power executives who have such responsibility in their professional lives that they will gladly pay someone to take all semblance of control away from them during their off hours.

Then there’s the third option: deciding not to attempt to assign control at all. I’ve been told repeatedly by my wife, family, and friends that I have the ability to recognize things that I have no control over, and not give them a second thought. They seem to think that this is a good trait to have, since it decreases my overall level of stress. I tend not to fret over politics, overseas strife, and “the future” in general. I’d agree with them, it if weren’t for the assumption that goes along with this… that I’m a good judge of what things I can affect, and what I can’t. I’m sure that there are whole rafts of things that never cross my mind because I can’t imagine that anything I do will change them, and I doubt there are any people who have changed the course of history who thought that way.

Of course, what I’m describing are extremes, but don’t all of us have this attribute, even if it’s in smaller degrees? It’s only a problem when one particular need for control – or need for the lack of control – becomes the main motivation behind most of your daily actions. That’s when your ability to function in society becomes impaired.

Help me figure out if this theory holds water. Take a moment to think about all the things you feel you must do during the day, and the things you’re perfectly comfortable with letting someone else do. Somewhere along the line, you’ve decided that some issues need your direct control, and others can be left to someone else, or be ignored altogether. Are there any obvious holes in this?

Lordy Lordy

I wanted to write some big, important entry for my fortieth birthday. It’s a milestone among milestones, the point where you can’t even kid yourself that you’re probably the youngest person in any given room. This is where I used to think that people went from being regular adults to being “older”. But now that I’m standing on its doorstep, I’m more aware than ever that what’s ahead for me is a part of a continuum, and not a sudden change at all. It reminds me of something my grandmother once said: “Every age has its wonders”.

You see, this isn’t a pivotal birthday in terms of numbers. I’m actually moving into a new chapter of my life. I’m now four weeks into unemployment, after the closing of the company that I’d worked for since my twenties. It’s a true clearing of the decks, a mandatory reboot. I’ve never been a person who believes that they’re defined just by what they do for a living, but I realize that I now have a chance to find something else that I’m good at, something that will tap some kind of inner potential I was never aware of. Whatever it is, I hope I find it soon, because unemployment checks by themselves ain’t gonna cut it.

As much as I mourn the job that was lost, I realize that I’m an extremely lucky guy. I’ve got an amazing support system in a wife who is unfailingly loving, understanding, and stronger than she gives herself credit for. Our relationship is the strongest it’s ever been, and just knowing she’s here makes me feel weirdly invincible. And my daughter is a wonder… every day there’s something she says or a question she asks (among the roughly 4000 she’s asked many times before) that completely catches me off guard, and makes me marvel at how the pieces necessary to form that thought must have come together in such a tiny little brain. They are the beacons, and loves, of my life.

But my good fortune doesn’t just stop there. Surrounding the three of us, we have a network of parents, siblings, relatives, and friends across the nation that care about us and are pulling for us. It’s almost ridiculous (in the best way possible, of course), the amount of love and support that my extended family has among them. That’s not to say that I don’t have moments of weakness. There are times when I feel a tug of despair about my job situation, and yes, there are times when I feel that I’ve lost my rudder, and I can’t say that nightmare scenarios of the worst possible things that could happen never pop into my head. But when I look at my family, both those in my house and out, I know it’s going to be all right.

The more I think about it, shouldn’t we all be forced to go through something like this every decade or so? To shake up everything that’s set and established (at least mentally), so you can take stock, jettison everything that isn’t making you happy and remind you of everything that already does? In doing so, I’m finding myself having free space for new opportunities and experiences to present themselves. I’m sure that the reason people don’t take more chances -- why they can get stuck in ruts that last their entire lives -- is because they don’t see how they can fit anything else into the existing structure of their lives, which is full of things they hold onto because of habit, or for a feeling of security.

So what becomes of the people who don’t give themselves the chance to reinvent themselves, or don’t take it when it comes? They’re the people who do the same thing every day until they retire, and then quietly pass away a few weeks later. They’ve turned what they do every day into who they are, and that’s the biggest danger of all. Because none of us are summarized by our jobs, or even our hobbies. We are what we love, whether anyone but us knows what that is or not. Everything else is incidental.

What I love is writing. I’ve always known that, but I’ve never been able to figure out a way to make it more a part of my life (ie. getting paid to do it). And my discipline has been lax. There was a period of time when I sat down every day and produced something, and I got a novel out of it. That’s the place I want to get back to, and now that I’m home all the time, I have more of a chance to work the creative muscles, get them back into shape, into a routine that maybe I can maintain once I get a new job.

So that’s my goal. Besides that and finding a new job, I have one other: to enjoy the extra time I get to spend time at home with the two women who make me want to make all the other parts of my life work the best way I can. They’re the ones who impel me to do everything else on the days I don’t feel like even doing it for myself.

So I’ve really been given my fortieth birthday present early. I’ve been handed the chance to take a look at every facet of my life and strip it down to the essentials so it can grow again. I’m convinced that if I do this, I’ll find the wonders of this new age that my grandmother talked about.

Borders: The Aftermath

During the last week of my employment by Borders, I took what I knew would be my final walk through the old Merchandising area on the first floor. The place grew more barren every time I went down there, which I did every now and then, just to see what had changed. I had been located there myself until the company announced that it was closing, and everyone who wasn’t in the initial round of layoffs got moved to higher floors so the liquidators could have a staging area to sell off everything that wasn’t nailed down.

By that last trip through, most of the cubicles had been taken apart, separated into their constituent parts, and placed on pallets to be shrinkwrapped and shipped off to whoever had bought them. I know that the cubicle is a universal symbol for the soul-crushing office job, and there certainly have been plenty of times when I’ve thought that very thing while occupying one, but there’s something sad about seeing them dismantled and moved out, too. The reason for that might be what gets left behind. Because while there were wide, exposed open areas of carpet, the telltale signs of previous habitation were there… every pen that had been dropped behind a filing cabinet and forgotten about was now brought to light again, along with a vague grid of worn spots where thirteen years of wheeled office chairs had rolled and spun in tiny little areas between shelves – and piles -- of books. The place was full of reminders like this, and would be apparent even if I hadn’t been there for all of those thirteen years the building was home to Borders Group.

There were even more touching reminders of what once was lined along the walls of the main hallway. It used to be standard practice for artists who visited the main office to sign a three-foot-by-three-foot placard with their most recent album art on it. Most of them have “Thanks for the support, Borders!” or something like that scrawled across them. Our office was, for many artists just starting out, a major step in their road to achieving their dreams of stardom. And now all those good wishes and gratitude had been pulled down from the walls and stacked for easy viewing. The opportunity afforded to these men and women, not only in our home office and our 400 stores nationwide, is now available for purchase at $100 a square yard.

As I walked out of the building for the last time, as one of the small group kept on to maintain the business through the process of the intellectual property sale (including our website), I resisted the temptation to throw my fist in the air a la Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club. It might have been the weight of the last box of accumulated stuff that I was carting home. But I did want to do *something*. I wanted to write a sort of tribute, a way to tell a little of the strangeness that occurs when a previous Fortune 500 company finally teeters and falls. Of course, I can only give such a story from my own perspective, but since I was able to hold on longer at the corporate office than most people did, maybe there’s some extra value to it.

Borders was supposed to be forever. My family moved to Ann Arbor in early 1985, and my mother got a job at what was then the Book Inventory Systems warehouse two months later. That business was part of the beginning of the Borders empire, and in 1994 I started my own tenure with the company. My wife followed in 2005, working there for over a year and a half. And now, 26 later, a new period of time is starting where Borders is not part of our lives.

Borders’s homegrown origins destined it to always be the scrappy underdog to larger competitors, and in ways benefitted from that position. The fact that we weren’t the biggest or most business-savvy made us the “serious” bookseller, one that focused on the books instead of the bottom line. Our customers perceived that we became who we were through sheer passion and grit. Even if that wasn’t entirely true, it gave us an extra air of legitimacy. This same company personality trait ultimately caused our downfall. We were late to the game in important areas (online retail being the most prominent example), and were quick to rush into others that we just weren’t ready to handle (international expansion!). In the end, we were too many smaller companies and computer systems strapped together in haste, and no significant change could be made without it adversely affecting the way hundreds of other bits worked.

We were too small, too locally-based, to get as big as we were. And once we did, the CEO shuffle began. A company that large – scratch that, because now we were a *corporation* -- needed a worldly CEO, a real business leader, and we had plenty of those. It’s just that none of them until Mike Edwards (our last), knew how to sell books. In fact, it’s quite clear that some of them didn’t realize there was a difference between books and any other product – one in particular all but announced his ignorance of pop culture by referencing someone named “Britley Spears” three times during an all-hands meeting. But by the time Mr. Edwards came around, there was too much damage control to be done to afford him time to get us back to our core goal, which was to pass on the love of books, one customer and one transaction at a time.

Part of the problem was industry-wide blindness, as well. The proliferation of the Internet in the late ‘90s caused a dip in sales of books that contained information that could be more easily obtained, and be more up to date, on the Internet itself. So what was the first to go? Computer books and travel guides. It was a slow decline, but eventually even sales general non-fiction titles, as well as the high-end university press stuff and textbooks, which had been our high-margin bread and butter, dropped away. I don’t think it’s going to stop there, either. I don’t see physical books containing anything other than fiction within the next ten years. You can look up what you need for free, instead of paying $12 for a paperback written last year that might not have anything else to offer. And even when it comes to novels, folks are crossing over in droves when they realize that ebooks are a faster and ultimately cheaper way to read for fun. I think the collapse of the big bookstore is inevitable, and believe Mike Edwards when he said that Barnes and Noble will be facing a similar situation to ours sooner rather than later.

Okay, so the upper management for the most part was a mess. So what did we do right, down at the personal level? Well, we were able to feed the fire of passionate readers (yes, I know it’s a bad metaphor, but I can’t think of one more apt). We were one of those rare companies that the customer felt was “on their side”, not only providing them with what they wanted, but validating them because we loved it too. And all business operations aside, the people who decided what books to put where, how to arrange and display them, and those that were out on the floor selling them, hardly ever did so without a strong opinion about the product they were working with, good or bad. They knew their stuff, they knew the industry, and lived for it.

What I take heart in, now that Borders is over, is the knowledge that the people who worked there, along with their collective love of the printed word, have been dispersed into the general population. Those good people aren’t going to stop wanting to put the books/music/movies they love into the hands of everyone around them. If you’re lucky enough to have one of them in your circle of friends, you can rest easy in the knowledge that you’re going to have at least one person you can count on to not let a great -- maybe obscure -- work that just might become your favorite pass by unnoticed. In a world of constant information barrage, when you just have to accept that you’re not going to be able to sample 90% of pop culture because it just goes flying by so fast, that’s the most valuable commodity you can have.

The Matrix Trilogy – Mumbo Jumbo Gumbo

I want to love The Matrix. I really do. But on my first viewing of it as a trilogy (My fifth time watching the original, third time for Reloaded, and second for Revolutions, for those of you keeping score), I’ve decided that I just can’t do it. At one point I became acutely aware that I was reaching my maximum tolerance for philosophical doublespeak… and then I realized that I had a whole other movie to go.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that if you’re reading this, you know the story. Well, let me try and encapsulate it in a few sentences: A computer hacker named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) learns that the real world is really an illusion, a virtual reality fed into our brains by a massively intelligent computer that has taken over the world, turned humans into living batteries to power itself, and has created a fake world for our minds to live in so that we continue to survive and produce said power without knowing anything’s wrong. A small group of human rebels “unplugs” the hacker, and he tries to lead them to victory in a war against the machines, hopping back and forth between the blasted wasteland of reality and the “normal-world” illusion of the Matrix, where – if you know that it’s all fake – the laws of time and space can be bent to produce some spectacular action set pieces. How’s that?

The first film, as a stand-alone, holds up just fine. The prospect that the real world is only what a computer is telling our senses really cranks up the turn-of-the-millennium conspiracy paranoia. It ends with the main character Neo (Keanu Reeves) realizing that is some sort of Messiah, and has more control over the machines than any other person in the world. In effect, it’s a superhero origin story. The idea, it seemed, was that we all could be living in a Matrix right now, and maybe if we simply allow our minds to accept the impossible, we can actually change the world.

But in the second and third films, we learn that’s not really the case. Things start happening that couldn’t happen in the real world, not without people noticing. People start flying, others get randomly taken over by agents of the central computer that runs the world, gigantic fight scenes take place in broad daylight in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of witnesses. By the end of the third film, everyone in the world has been possessed by a man who is technically a computer virus. Okay, so this is some other world, not ours. The empowering idea that we have more control over our world than we think has been effectively snatched away. I suppose it’s something like how people felt when we learned that a Jedi gets his ability to channel The Force through some kind of cellular symbiote called midichlorians. Suddenly, this idea that we can mentally affect the physical world isn’t the product of the right focus and training. People don’t like it when their superpowers are promised, then suddenly pulled back out of their reach. The Jedi thing I’ve somehow been able to forgive, but the Matrix’s back-pedal seems somehow more underhanded to me.

On top of that… In between all the wire-fu and bullet-time special effects, the whole subtext of the movie is put forth in lines that go by so fast you’re still thinking about what was just said when you realize you’ve missed five other things. Outside of the first film, there’s not a lot of overlap between the action and the words that explain what’s actually going on. You’re sometimes forced to endure interminable stretches of dialogue that are full of lines like this:

Neo: I have come here to ask some questions.
Oracle: I know.
Neo: What are those questions?
Oracle: The questions you wish answered are irrelevant.
Neo: If that’s true, then why am I here?
Oracle: That’s the question you should be asking.
Neo: Okay, why I am I here?
Oracle: That question is also irrelevant. The bigger question is, why did I want you to come here?
Neo: I came here of my own choice.
Oracle: So you say. But what about the choices you made earlier? You decided to come because of a series of choices you made in the past, which began long before you knew who I was.
Neo: I’m going to go punch many things very fast now.

Scenes like this seem rigged with what video game designers call “replay value”, which they use to describe elements that make you want to undergo the experience again. It’s stuff you will either miss or not fully understand the first time around.

Another thing that bugs me is the fighting. And there’s a lot of it. With a catalogue of kung-fu styles available for direct download into the human’s brains, the weapon of choice in the Matrix is their fists. But most of it seems oddly slow and bloodless. Maybe it’s in the editing… the Wachowksi brothers (who wrote and directed all three films) clearly took pride in extended takes of sequences of karate moves, but the result is that it looks like most of the punches weren’t designed to land, or wouldn’t cause any damage if they did. A lot of it looks like choreography. And I can understand that… as much as they may have trained for the films, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Hugo Weaving aren’t primarily physical actors.

There’s also no real understanding of the film’s main antagonist, Agent Smith. He starts as a computer “agent”, a program that is intent on finding the human resistance inside the Matrix and wiping them out. He hates mankind with a passion, and has a famous monologue proving the theory that humans are, technically, a virus. However, once Neo “destroys” him he goes renegade, and eventually becomes a virus himself (why?), taking over every human presence in the Matrix. While it’s clearly established that he is a computer program, he’s inexplicably found a way to take over at least one human in the real world. Both those things don’t make a lot of sense to me, and kind of feel like acts of convenience, especially when there’s no explanation given. And there’s also no solution put forth about why he immediately self-destructs after assimilating Neo at the end of the trilogy. I think it’s a mistake for a film that has been building up to a final confrontation between two characters end so ambiguously.

In the end, it’s mostly the philosophy of the trilogy that I find hardest to plug into (like I said, the original takes its stand and sticks to it. However, since it’s widely held that the Wachowskis conceived of the entire trilogy as one piece, I’m not sure how that works.). To me, it seems kind of disingenuous for a movie to put forth a philosophy that is so heavily rooted in the idea of fate, and yet trumps it with the importance of personal choice at the same time. It’s like they’re purposefully throwing so many motifs and methods of faith at you that, no matter what your spiritual persuasion, you’ll find something that matches up with yours. Like the Matrix itself, it somehow smacks of self-conscious design.

9/12/01: Ten Years Later

There’s been a quote floating around the last few days… “It’s not what happened on 9/11 that defines America, but what happened on 9/12.” The meaning here is that it’s not the tragedy itself that should be memorialized, but the way we as a people reacted to that tragedy. If that’s true, I think we’ve created a legacy of embarrassment to pass down to our children.

Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of good that people did those first few days. Professionals and civilians alike diving into the rescue effort, others across the country donating time and money, the whole country rallying behind the government, confident that any steps they would take would make us safe from further attacks and avenge what had been done to us. One of the things that actually gave me hope on that day – when we still didn’t know whether there were more attacks on the way – was the fact that I went to the local Red Cross blood donation center, only to be turned away because so many others had shown up, unable to think of anything else they could do.

Unfortunately, that sense of rallying together, the days when every American was a friend and we were all on the same side, lasted only a few days. In our search for answers to the question “Why would anyone do this?”, we began looking for people to blame.

The government needed someone to hate too, and something to do. But how do you go about attacking an enemy that isn’t a particular country or a particular race, but is only people with a certain belief system? Given a carte blanche by the people, with the only edict being “Do what you have to – don’t let this happen to us again”, the government chose to blame a country that had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. Iraq, they announced, was not only funding the Taliban, but building weapons of mass destruction. It’s easy to see why the ruse worked… the thing we were most afraid of was a replay of what had already happened, maybe a similar attack on an even more monumental scale. I’ll admit, when I saw the satellite photos and was told what our intelligence purported to be was true, I believed it and supported the decision to invade Iraq. What I didn’t know – what none of us knew – was that the ones we trusted with our military’s course of action either flat out lied, or merely saw what it wanted to see. There were no weapons, but at least there was a dictatorial regime that we hadn’t been quite able to root out ten years previous (on the watch of our current president’s father, no less). Not only that, it gave us a focus to our hate. Saddam Hussein was the culprit, and had to be deposed.

The paranoia didn’t stop there, of course. Because that’s not how paranoia works. It’s a virus that occupies an area and then expands, finding something new to fixate on. The easiest targets were Muslims, simply because they were the same religion as the man who perpetrated the attacks. And even that wasn’t true – anyone familiar with Islam will tell you that what Osama bin Laden practiced can hardly be called Islam at all. It’s ridiculous, like blaming all Christianity for Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma. But Muslims has factors working against them… they’re recognizable for their manner of dress, and they’re a minority in America that no one paid much attention to. And why? Because they hadn’t done anything to merit negative attention. But thanks to the government and media reportage, all of a sudden people everywhere in the country thought that Islam routinely preached hatred and violence against America as one of its basic tenets. The racial profiling and bigotry persists even today.

Next came the people who criticized the government’s actions. Even the slightest hint that you disagreed with how the United States was handling the decision could garner death threats – look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks. That door swung both ways too… people with extreme right-wing ideas and evangelical Christians with their rhetoric about the “end times” suddenly were gaining credibility and followers. (But really, why does a terrorist attack in America herald Armageddon any more than all the other daily atrocities in the world?) It’s something we’re seeing now more than we did even in the midst of all the “national security” fervor, and it makes me worry that something so far away from real-world facts is actually being taken somewhat seriously.

So we have a lot to answer for, this generation that lived through 9/11. I wish I could say that I was always above it, but I can’t truthfully do that. I’m reminded of the time in late 2001 when there was a series of photographs being passed around via email, in which a Middle Eastern man sets fire to an American flag, but then drops it, and accidentally sets his own clothes alight. This was being virally sent around *as* *comedy*. And I passed it on, just like almost everyone else.

Recently I heard a point made on the radio, and restating it is the best I can do at ending this with any kind of silver lining. The question posed was this: Would the people’s revolutions in Egypt and Libya have occurred, if they hadn’t been shown that their dictatorial leaders weren’t entirely unassailable? I suppose if they had happened in 2005 instead of 2011, I’d be more inclined to say yes.

My Dad’s Journal

My mother has been cleaning out a lot of old papers lately. There’s actually a lot of stuff there I wanted to see… she kept her old day planners from the eighties and nineties, and there’s info about the day-to-day activities of my childhood in there I wouldn’t have otherwise. But the most interesting thing I’ve found so far is a journal my father kept as a class assignment his freshman year of college. This was back in the fall of 1960…

Of course, I had to flip to the back page and see what kind of grade he got even before I read anything else, and of course it was an A. Underneath it, the professor’s comment was (I’m paraphrasing) “Very elegantly, and sometimes beautifully written, but not much personal insight. I still don’t feel I know much about you after reading it.” And to some degree that’s true. That reluctance to expose one’s feelings is a trait that I’ve inherited from my dad, and have been actively trying to fight against most of my life. I like to think I’ve risen above it to some degree.

My mother has her own thoughts about where this comes from… she once told me the story about how, after high school graduation, my father and two of his friends exercised some of their teenage freedom and took a cross-country drive. They drove all the way from Ohio to California – no mean feat back when the national highway system was practically brand-new – and came back about three weeks later. But when he came back, no one in his family asked him how he was, or had any questions about his trip – what he saw, what he felt about it. He felt as if he had achieved something and had stories to tell, and no one was interested. My mother said that from that point, he was so disappointed that really putting forth the effort to communicate wasn’t worth it. Or maybe it just exacerbated his usual tendencies. His college journal would have been written that very fall, mere months after that event.

In addition to this, as my father has gotten older and his multiple sclerosis has taken deeper hold, he’s had a whole other wall that has been erected around his psyche. This time, it’s part of his disease… one of the traits MS has in common with Alzheimer’s is the creation of “plaques” in the brain, which are small areas that have essentially hardened and aren’t usable anymore. Recently, this has been a little more evident in my dad… my wife says that once when she was visiting my parents she found him staring into the upper corner of a room until he was called out of it. Once he phoned me saying he wasn’t able to use the TV remote, and no amount of my talking him through it could get any results. From his comments and the sounds I heard, I think he might have been holding the other phone extension instead of the remote.

Being so familiar with what my dad is like today, I felt compelled to sit down and read about he was like back fifty years ago, when he was 18. My first impression of the journal was its physical appearance -- his handwriting is so tiny and neat. He wrote in cursive, so cleanly and uniformly that it almost looks like a printed font. It’s a mile away from today, when his hands are too numb to hold a pen for any length of time, the letters huge and scrawled. Even when I was small, his handwriting was already larger and shakier than it was in college. And his choice of words are slightly flowery, just the way I remember him speaking when I was little.

The content of the entries themselves aren’t too remarkable for the most part – it really does seem like what a teenager would write about to make an English professor take note: evocative phrases about the weather, stuff he did over the weekend, etc. But I can also see a few places where glimpses of his opinions do shine through. In one entry, he talks about how he never thought rock and roll would last so long (about five years at that point, I figure). He wasn’t (and never became) a fan of popular music, and hearing him call what was then modern music “artless” and full of “gimmicks” is kind of entertaining. In another, he talks about the inept tiling work on some columns in his dorm, and he puzzles over what the uneven green triangles and squares are supposed to evoke. At the end, he says that every time he walks by he’s tempted to take a chisel and tear them all off himself, so that he can do the job correctly. It reminded me that my dad was a pretty handy guy in his day – he could build theater sets, upholster furniture, and during at least one summer when I was little he spent his days painting apartments. There’s one really well-written entry where he is frustrated because some mold has grown on a piece of his mother’s pumpkin pie he had been saving. But when he takes out a magnifying glass and really takes a look at the mold, he comes to appreciate how beautiful the tiny white forest and greenish patches really are.

He does talk about his family a little too… he spends one entry marveling at his mother’s generosity and kindness. Just before this particular entry was written, he explains, one of his uncles was struck almost entirely deaf, for no apparent reason. With his wife and five kids to look after, it sounds like my grandmother helped them out, especially in terms of keeping everyone fed. He talks about how he hopes that one day he’ll be as well thought of by others as she is by members of her family. He also weighs in on JFK’s presidential election right after it happens, and while he clearly dislikes all the Nixon supporters who say that the new president is going to literally lead to the destruction of the world, he talks about feeling somewhat removed from government politics in general, and how little it appears to affect his everyday life.

I think my father, as he is today, is even more disassociated from the outside world than he was back then. Partly that’s due to his introverted inclinations, which were apparently forming even back then, and it’s partly due to his illness. Now, it seems to extend to a disassociation with himself. He just seems to go through his day, not thinking about why does the things he does, or why he feels the way he feels (if he feels anything, that is, since he doesn’t share that with the rest of us). I’ve learned to accept him as he is, but the journal entries his college professor saw as “impersonal” back then are, by comparison, some of the deepest insights into my dad that I’ve seen since I was young.

Star Wars: Things Pondered on the Way Down a Reactor Shaft

Okay, now that I’m falling to my death, I can admit it; I lost focus. I was so intent on killing that Skywalker punk that I completely left my back open. Curse that Vader! Who would have thought that the little kid I first met on Naboo would one day be the best apprentice a Sith Master could have hoped for, much less that he would turn on me just as I was about to cement my victory against the Rebellion? All because his son wouldn’t give up on the idea that, somewhere deep in the metallic soul I worked so hard to forge, there was still a little bit of Anakin left. Luke is just as much a fool as Qui-Gon, who had such empathy for the most ridiculous, insignificant creatures. But then again, he turned out to be right in the end, didn’t he?

All those years of work, undone because I underestimated the sentimentality a father always has for his son… not that I would know first-hand about any of that (at least, not in a way I’m ever going to admit to anyone). I never had the time for a conventional family, simply because I was setting my sights higher. You see, I wanted the entire Galaxy to be my children. I wanted to be the stern Godhead that everyone needed, but no one else was stepping up to become. And like all good fathers, I would keep my children in line with an iron fist. But some kids just won’t respect you because they’re told to, so the only way to get through to them is by a show of force... so to speak.

Forty years I was working on this plan… and I was so close to completing it! If I remember the Death Star blueprints correctly, this is quite a deep shaft, so I guess I have a little time left to marvel at my own cunning. People seem to forget that I, almost singlehandedly, overturned an entire Galactic government! The easiest part was becoming Chancellor. Valorum was easy enough to unseat… it just took some intricate and well-placed deals with the Trade Federation and the banking clans (which in themselves took years to weave) before I could get enough systems to lose faith in him, and then I swooped in to take over. How they all trusted me!

The Jedi were a much bigger problem. I always knew they would be the biggest obstacle. An independent police force, with thousands of years of history and respect. How would one even attempt to discredit and depose them? Well, it became clear very early on that the only way to do it was to get rid of every last one! That would have to be the penultimate step toward my goal… but I also realized that it would take a significant portion of an army even to assassinate one Jedi. My mind went into action, moving on to the next rational step… it would have to happen all at once, so that none of them had any warning. Not only that, but it would have to be done by the most massive galactic army ever assembled! I would have to spread them out, and then literally stab them all in the back simultaneously.

So I had established that I needed a massive supply of trained manpower. But what could I possibly do to justify such an action? Could I push the Jedi into a position where the galaxy would turn against them on its own? Unfortunately, the answer was no. I couldn’t come up with a single idea that seemed even remotely plausible. Ah, but then… How well I remember the moment when the idea clicked and fell into place! I was brooding over this plan that seemed like it was never going to get off the ground, and then a question suddenly occurred to me: What if, instead of being the targets, the Jedi were the *leaders* of this army I was cooking up? That would at least put them in close proximity to the weapons that would slay them. And if I played it correctly, I could even weaken their psyches before I dealt the death blow.

You see, up until that point, the Jedi had ruled through wisdom, fairness, and benevolence (ick). By definition, they’re not warriors. But I could force them to become so! I’d put them in charge of my yet-to-be-determined army; turn them from teachers into fighters. And if this war I was whipping up actually encompassed the entire galaxy, they’d be thinned out, separated. Who knows? My “noble cause” could even require their presence in such great numbers that they would be forced to elevate their younger members to the level of generals, so that war would become all they knew as full-fledged Jedi. I would turn the order against the very things it stood for!

Still, I wasn't going to underestimate them. Doing all these things would only weaken them, but I wasn't kidding myself about how many soldiers it would take to deal the final blow. There was only two words I could think of that could carry out such a synchronized mutiny: droid army! They can't be bargained or reasoned with, and won't think twice before shooting someone in the back. But Jedi would never lead a droid army against any living beings, no matter how evil they were.

Living beings, yes, but what if it were another droid army? A good idea, but I had to take a moment to assess. I still didn't have a "noble cause", and now I needed not one, but two massive droid armies. I have admit, this is where I almost gave up. Anyone else would have. But did I stop when my plan suddenly required a doubling of effort? No! Hey, I've taken over a galaxy and coordinated the building of two Death Stars. I'm nothing if not a great project manager.

I couldn’t just create two droid armies fighting against each other. That would be ridiculous. Who would care? That's when I realized that what I needed was the human element. I needed clones. Lots of clones to support the Jedi side of the battle. It was a necessary ten-year delay in my plot, but it couldn't have been done any other way. They were real live beings, but could be sneakily programmed, loyal until I was ready to strike. My plan kept getting more and more complicated, but more and more insidious as well (sorry for the pun, but I’m about to die, so what the hell).

The Jedi fell for that like a bag of spanners... all I had to do was place the clone order under a false name, drop a few hints, and lead that idiot Kenobi right into "discovering" the clone army, just in time to use them against the encroaching droids! Did he really not realize how convenient the timing of that was?

Then pieces just fell into place. All I had to do was introduce a few Separatist plants -- every one under my thumb, of course -- in control of a droid army, and I had a fully prefabricated war. I let the scenario play out as long as necessary, and then excuted Order 66.

And what fun it was to hear the reports of the Jedi falling everywhere! I wish I could have been everywhere at once, when the clones suddenly turned around and opened fire on their former masters. I tried so hard to pretend to be horrified, devastated. But inside I was turning cartwheels. In a matter of minutes, my decree had effectively flipped how the galaxy worked… clone armies became stormtroopers, the separatists were suddenly a negligible alliance of rebels, Republic became Empire. The benevolent Chancellor was suddenly an Emperor to be feared and heeded!

And do you see how cleverly I planned it? My enemy, the Jedi, had already expertly removed every tie I had back to the Separatists, and all other Dark Side practitioners – Dooku, Grievous, Maul. By the time the Jedi Scourge was over, only he and I stood on the dark side, and Kenobi and Yoda on the other (if only I had known that at the time!) And that was how it stayed for almost twenty years, just long enough for that cursed young Skywalker kid to grow up and learn about his past.

Which brings me to where I am now. I’m not going to answer the question of whether I created Anakin myself out of pure midchlorians the way Darth Plagueis theorized, but I will say that I never guessed he would have killed me when I tried to destroy his son. At least I know I pumped him full of enough lightning that there’s no way he can survive -– I’d rather leave one last good Jedi alive than to run the risk of Anakin turning back...

And here's where the Force exerts its glorious, beautifully symmetrical nature again. By effectively killing Vader in my last moments, I am ultimately the one balancing the Force, the one the ancient prophecy told about! Because I have one final surprise waiting for the young Luke out there. He will soon find out that there are two Jedi left -- one light, one dark -- himself and Mara, my Hand, who even now waits nearby, ready to pounce.

Things Lily Loves

I’m becoming more and more aware of how things that I take for granted every day of Lily’s early childhood might start slipping away. I’m starting to notice things in the background of pictures of her babyhood that make me think, “Oh yeah! We used to do that all the time!” Things that were common back then, but we’ve moved on from. It’s surprising how few of those things there are when you don’t have kids. But now everything, from a day’s overall schedule to specific mealtime rituals, morphs over the course of months until it’s entirely different. I want to set some of these things down, so that maybe I’ll be able to hold onto them when this phase of her life has turned into something else.

So here is a short list of things that Lily loves…

Dancing in the Morning – We have this CD of horrible cover versions of kid-friendly rock songs (“Walking on Sunshine”, “We Are Family”, “Build Me Up Buttercup”, etc.) that she loves to dance to first thing in the morning. More accurately, she likes *me* to dance to them while she throws herself over my shoulder. We always do it in the bathroom, and sometimes she dances too, but more often she just looks at herself in the mirror while I sway back and forth. I like it too… she’s still sleepy and warm, and I know it’s something I’m going to look back on fondly once she’s outgrown it.

Strawberry Shortcake – This is the first non-educational TV show she’s fallen in love with. She loves the books, the figurines, the DVDs, everything about it. The franchise has gone through some changes in the past few years (S-Short and her friends now look like they’re dressed for prep school and have long, straightened hair), but that doesn’t seem to confuse her at all.

“Girl Stickers” – Melissa and Doug has a line of sticker books, and Lily’s favorite is the one full of dress-up stickers. Each of the 10 sheets you get in one pack has 8 stickers of undressed girl figures, and then enough shirts, pants, dresses, shoes, gloves, hair bows, tiaras, etc. to outfit them all. She would do these *all* *the* *time* if we were to let her, but they’re kind of expensive so we have to limit her to one sheet a day. She’s amazingly accurate with putting the clothes on correctly, and matching ensembles by color, even though they’re not laid out that way on the sheet.

Megabloks – We have 2 big bags of about 80 big building blocks that Lily likes to build with me. When she was smaller, she wanted to build “showcases”, which meant a single tower that would be as big and as tall as we could make it. Now she likes me to make little sections of wall that she can arrange into stores with aisles and escalators, tunnels, etc. One of her favorite arrangements is to make a restaurant, which means an area inside which we’ll put little square blocks for tables, and little rectangular blocks for seats. Then she’ll get a bunch of her Fisher Price Little People and seat them all. Occasionally she’ll ask me to build characters from one of her favorite TV shows (Team Umizoomi or Yo Gabba Gabba), and I’ve kind of figured out how to make crude representations of them – making them the correct color seems to be the most important thing.

Reading – Often the first thing Lily will do when I come home is to bring me a book and ask if she can read it to me (which means if I can read it to her). She has a pretty good number of several series (Curious George and Mr. Putter & Tabby come to mind), but she also loves the Little Einsteins Picture Dictionary, and knows a whole lot of words thanks to it. She’s going through a little bit of a phase of looking at catalogs – American Girl, Oriental Trading Company, Fisher Price, Party Outfitters, etc. I dread the day when she figures out that everything in those is purchasable.

Singing/Dancing competition shows – Ever since she was born, Lily’s been interested in American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, etc. Right now we’re watching The Voice. I think the main draw is the fact that they’re live shows with audiences, and have lots of music and colors. Plus, they’re the only shows that we tend to watch while they’re actually airing, so it’s a good time in the evening to play on the living room floor and watch.

Outer Space – Lily loves things that deal with space. She can recognize some of the more obvious planets (Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars) and can even tell you if they’re hot or cold. We bought her some little plastic glow-in-the-dark planets and hung them from a mobile in her room. The mobile’s been there since before she was born, and is designed to clip photos to, but we never got around to printing any out to use for it. Amy’s mom got the idea to clip the planets to it, and voila! Instant model of the solar system. Also, Lily’s nightlight is a ladybug with a hard carapace that has little star-shaped holes in it. When you turn it on, an LED light inside projects constellations on the walls and ceiling in one of three colors.

Jigsaw Puzzles - A few weekends ago when we were at my parents' house, Lily and I started working on a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle. She’s gotten really good at the 10-20 piece floor puzzles we have both at home and at their place, and she wanted to try a different one. We didn’t get very far, of course, but she liked running her hands through all the pieces. While we were all seated around the table for dinner, I said to her, “If you stay as interested in outer space and jigsaw puzzles as you are now, we’re going to get along just fine.”

My Top Five Artists

I thought today I’d take a little time to honor some important artists… ones that have influenced me strongly in some way. Men who I’d like to have dinner with, whose talent I’d like to have, whose paths I’d like to follow. Thanks for showing the way, gentlemen, even if I fail in following your precedents as closely as I’d like…

1. Clive Barker – Clive is the artist all artists should want to be like. He’s done it all, and every step of the way he’s had a devoted following who has backed him and bought into his twisted/true visions. The appeal of his art stretches across all strata of people: men, women, young, old, white, black, straight, gay… and from what I’ve seen the three times I’ve met him in person, he’s a gracious man who takes nothing for granted and gets out there and talks to people because he genuinely wants to hear what they have to say, and find out how his work has drawn them all together.

Clive started as a playwright in his native Liverpool, England, and his friends in the theater troupe they created (“Dog Company”) have stuck with him until the present. He wrote short stories between plays, and got noticed by the publishing community, ushering the gothic horror story garishly into 80s with The Books of Blood. Then he moved to Los Angeles and started making movies as well, getting the Hellraiser and Candyman franchises on their way – although he would disown then when they fell prey to that other unfortunate byproduct of the 80’s… the horror movie sequel machine.

Instead, Clive started working on novels… huge, sprawling masterworks of imagination like Weaveworld, Imajica and the two books (so far) of The Art. Something I like about the tales of people like Lovecraft and Stephen King is how there are themes, places and characters that overlap, but I also admire how Clive can create entirely separate, whole universes with completely different mythologies. He seems to have no limit to his imagination; he renewed a multimillion dollar publishing contract just by giving the *titles* of his next four books, for crying out loud.

Right now he’s working on one of the most ambitious projects of his life, The Abarat Quartet (which I now hear has expanded into five books), in which a girl named Candy Quackenbush finds herself traveling through a mystical world, and each book is illustrated with hundreds of original paintings Clive created as he found his way into the story. Amazing. Clive lives and breathes art, and can only hope that someday I’ll have a life that will afford me the same luxury.

2. Carl Sagan – Carl was the ultimate scientist, a man who was open to all possibilities -– as long as it was scientifically provable -– and brought ideas to the masses in a personal, organic fashion and valued the need for science to be presented in plain English. People who had never taken a science course in their lives could listen to Carl (for example, on his many appearances on The Tonight Show) and understand what he was trying to explain. That’s the rarest talent for a scientist, who necessarily lose themselves in the tiny details of one particular field. Carl loved it all, and while he was sometimes criticized as a dilettante, that encompassing love translated into the way he spoke to people.

His passion for science reached me when I was only 8 years old, when he starred in his PBS series Cosmos. I remember watching it on 13 consecutive Sunday nights in the summer of 1980, completely enraptured in the thoughts and ideas he put forward about astronomy, math, history, biology, physics, time travel, space travel… all of it rooted in real theory. Carl showed me that the Universe is an infinitely beautiful, infinitely delicate balancing act between order and chaos, and we have a privileged vantage point because we get to see and understand so much of it.

Carl also gave me an important credo I still live by -– “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. My mind is open enough that I would *love* to believe in alien life and paranormal phenomena, and I absolutely will if it can be proven. In a world where we can create everyday wonders by manipulating atoms and energy, there shouldn’t be anything we can’t potrentially examine and understand.

While there are wonders out there that we can’t possibly understand, he believed that we *will*, one day. I can’t think of a better tribute to him than the fact that I believe it too.

3. Stephen King – In 1985, I read the opening novella of King’s story collection Skeleton Crew. It was called “The Mist”, and affected me like nothing I had ever read before. By the time I finished reading it, I was horrified and sad, thoroughly creeped out and completely unable to stop reading. And I’m still going, over twenty years and tens of thousands of pages later.

What makes King’s style so readable to me? No one can get inside a character’s head the way Steve can. His characters are so *real*… their voices are like ours, full of their own internal shorthand thoughts, the little in-jokes we have with ourselves, and it makes it that much more resonant when those characters run smack into The Unknown. And they do… whether it’s a huge mass of tentacles out in the mist, or a shape-shifting creature that lives in the sewers and takes the forms of your worst fears, or a particularly vicious ghost that dwells in forgotten hotel room.

And then there are the tantalizing crossovers… most of them revolve around his epic seven-book (soon to be eight-book) series The Dark Tower, which is a cross between Spaghetti Westerns and modern fantasy, where Roland, the last of a line of knight-like “gunslingers”, undergoes a mythic quest across times and worlds to save the Dark Tower (which is really the linchpin of all creation) from being destroyed by The Crimson King, an act which would not only result in the collapse of Roland’s universe, but the collapse of all possible Universes, including worlds where many of King’s other books have taken place. There are at least 3 other novels of his that are basically Dark Tower books, only not in name, and the main villain turns up in other guises in even more. It’s all one big Universe, and all things are connected. That’s yet another way that King’s literature is like life.

4. Orson Welles – The first thing I remember seeing Orson do was a narrating job for a TV special about the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb back in the ‘70s. I just remember being amazed by this imposing guy with a cool salt-and-pepper beard wandering around a museum exhibit and talking about the pharaoh’s treasures in a deep, ominous voice. I didn’t know that what I was watching was the sad, lackluster end of a artistic career that started out as one of the most promising anyone had seen before or since.

When I first knew him, Orson was a narrator of TV specials and commercials, and a frequent guest on the Tonight Show who could do a magic tricks and weave tales of old Hollywood better than anyone else could. From there, I started learning more about him, about how he started out as a wunderkind of the theater, working with John Houseman to produce amazing Broadway spectacles such as the “voodoo Macbeth”, done with an entirely black cast from Harlem. He moved into radio, not only being the star of many classic shows like “The Shadow”, but creating his own Mercury Theater Playhouse that brought stories of classic literature to radio life (the most famous, of course, being his fake-documentary version of War of the Worlds that frightened a nation one Halloween). Then he went straight into film, and co-wrote, directed and starred in Citizen Kane, one of the most enduring and technically dazzling debut films ever made.

Everything he touched, it seemed, turned to gold. He could do no wrong… and then it all fell apart, almost as quickly as it began. His films, although still amazing, never had the popularity they deserved, and he didn’t help the situation by wandering off to other projects before seeing the previous one through, and as a result we are left with half-baked “studio cuts” of could-have-been classics like The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, and Mr. Arkadin. He finally ended up as I saw him in my childhood, overweight and tired, frustrated at how he had to take bottom-of-the-barrel roles to pay his bills and finance the occasional film that he could scrape together.

I think I identify with folks who have more than a few choices of things they can focus their talent – it’s hard to stick to one thing when your creativity is pulling you in several directions at once. Orson seems to be a living cautionary tale about this very thing, what can happen to you if you don’t settle down and choose a path. I also admire the way he dove into everything he did… he lived his life large before that phrase was even coined. He burned through fortunes, ate huge meals, married movie stars like Rita Hayworth, and really *lived*. Unfortunately, for all his accomplishment, his life ended up as a mostly-failed experiment, less than everything he could have been.

I think it’s just as valuable as lesson to learn from than those who succeeded.

5. David Lynch – You’d never know what David Lynch’s art is like from looking at him. He’s an Eagle Scout from Missoula, Montana, whose biggest vice is coffee and cigarettes, and who always fastens the buttons on his shirts all the way up to the top. You’d never know the stories that come from the depths of his mind just by looking at him. But the contents of that mind are summed up in the first minute of Blue Velvet, where a man watering his front yard suddenly has a stroke and falls over onto his perfectly manicured suburban lawn. The camera draws in close to him, then drifts underground near where he lies. There are countless ants there in terrible close-up, their feet and mandibles clicking, the sound growing deafening as things get darker and darker…

Lynch’s entire career has been built around this notion, that there is darkness and madness beneath the normal life that we try to lead. So many of his films and TV projects (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive) deal with the peeling back of normal life to expose what’s really going on behind the scenes, and it’s never a pretty picture.

I’ve always been the kind of person who loves the idea of huge, overarching plots where everything means something, and Lynch’s is the closest I’ve ever come to seeing exactly that. Granted, it doesn’t always work out that way, but the beauty of a Lynch film is that you *feel* that everything is following some sort of dream-logic, even as the most bizarre things are happening.

What Lynch has shown me is that you don’t have to be a rebellious nihilist to tell stories that are full of sex, violence, and madness. David doesn’t even *swear* as far as I know, but he created Frank Booth, the most venomous, foulmouthed character to come out of 80’s cinema. And he also is a fascinating example of how you should follow your creative instinct, no matter where it leads. He’s notoriously vague about what his films *mean* -- he has never done a DVD commentary, and doesn’t even like his films to be split into “chapters” because he thinks movies are spells that you should experience all the way through in one sitting -– and to tell the truth, I don’t even know if *he’s* aware of he’s doing. A typical quote about how he makes a movie is something like: “A film is all about mood, and you just try to maintain that mood.” Still, he follows his muse faithfully, and never questions it, and I truly admire that.

SYZYGY - 17

INT. RAVEN’S MAZE

At first it looks as if Raven has stepped into a forest. Trees stretch off in infinite rows in all directions, their branches and leaves forming the low canopy of the ceiling. She steps straight ahead cautiously, until her outstretched hand comes into contact with glass, slightly distorting the view in front of her. It now becomes apparent that the trees cover the junctions between the mirrors, so it is almost impossible to tell where they are.

Raven turns right, finds that way blocked, too. She turns to the left and finds the true passage.

INT. JAKE’S MAZE

Somewhere else in the maze, Jake stands over his wife. He has covered her mouth with tape, and is binding her wrists and ankles behind her, so she is kneeling on the floor. His head snaps up to the sound of cautious footsteps on the wooden floor.

JAKE

I can hear you, Raven!

No response.

JAKE

I assume you found my gun. The only

thing that I ask is that you leave

yours, as well. I would like to hear

it, please.

No response. A few more footsteps.

JAKE

I should let you know that I have

planted several explosive devices

in this maze.

A pause. The sound of a gun being dropped on the floor.

JAKE

Good.

INT. RAVEN’S MAZE

Raven silently picks up her gun and sticks it into her belt in back. She continues feeling her way through the maze, which still looks empty in all directions.

INT. JAKE’S MAZE

Jake is leaving Kara behind him, moving toward the center of the maze stealthily.

JAKE

It’s getting lighter, isn’t it,

Raven? I think I’ll give you until

sunrise to solve the maze. When the

sun appears, that’s it. It’s all

over. I’ll be forced to make some

light of my own, and I think you

can guess what that means.

INT. RAVEN’S MAZE

Raven bumps into another mirror, then breaks her silence.

RAVEN

You’ve got to give me more time!

JAKE

(far away)

I’ve given you plenty of time. When

the night is gone, so are both of

you!

RAVEN

God dammit! Come out here! Fight

me like a man!

JAKE

(far away)

Always underestimating, aren’t you?

First we have things to discuss, a

debt to repay. Did you ever think

that maybe Kara isn’t the whole reason

I followed you all these miles?

RAVEN

Okay. I give up. What was the reason?

JAKE

(far away)

It was you. I look at you, and I

see the second-best servant of chaos

there is.

She stops. Jake is standing twenty feet in front of her. Something catches her eye. She turns to the left, and he’s there too. She turns right, and he’s also there. She keeps turning her head from one to the other, trying to discern which is real.

JAKE

Have you ever thought about what it

would be like to feel as fearless

as when you carried out those first

missions for Big Ed? When you felt

like nothing could hurt you? And it

never did. Until you clouded your

actions with your feelings for my

little carousel pony out there. I

want you, Raven. I want you to work

with me. People have made this world

too ordered. I am the Cleanser, the

one to scrape the world clean and

prepare it for the next order. And

I want you to help me.

Raven draws her gun. She points it at one of the Jakes, then the others. He laughs a little.

JAKE

I see we know each other too well.

Always the liars, aren’t we? It’s

something I’ve come to love about

you.

RAVEN

I just know better than to trust

a sick fuck like you, that’s all.

Jake draws his gun too. All three barrels simultaneously point at her.

JAKE

Well played.

RAVEN

So why did you bring me in here?

We could have handled this outside.

JAKE

Do you like the park? One of my old

victory grounds that I had imported

especially for you. New England, 1929.

A bolt came loose on the Ferris

wheel, sending twenty-four people

crashing down into the crowd that

was waiting to get on the carousel.

The sheer madness of it! You would

have enjoyed it.

RAVEN

Who the hell are you?

JAKE

Who do you think I am?

RAVEN

Jake Brennan.

JAKE

What? Oh, Raven, you disappoint me.

I though you all people would under-

stand. What if I told you that the

devil doesn’t exist? Would you believe

me?

Raven is silent.

JAKE

Or how about God? You still believe

in God, don’t you, Raven?

Still no answer. Just the pointing gun.

JAKE

Hedging your bets. That’s very

human of you. But well played. The

answer is that neither of them are

real. We all know the basic elements

of the universe. Chaos and order.

And the two of us were doing fine,

weren’t we? Always in balance, always

in check. But then you had to go and

multiply. Until there were millions

of you running around, creating your

societies and languages and technol-

ogies… Well, I’m sick of it! It’s my

turn now!

RAVEN

All I know is that you’re trying to

kill a woman and I’m trying to stop

you.

JAKE

Because she’s yours, right?

RAVEN

Not any more.

JAKE

So noble… Go ahead. Take the shot.

One in three.

Raven swings her gun to the Jake in front of her and fires. The figure disappears as the mirror shatters. The remaining Jake’s fire, and a puff of blood explodes from Raven’s right shin. She cries out and falls, landing on her back. She fires a shot at the figure on the left, shattering another mirror. She throws her hands above her head and tilts her head back to fire at the remaining Jake, but he’s disappeared into the darkness.

RAVEN

Shit.

INT. TOM’S MAZE

Tom creeps along in the near-dark, knife held out in front of him. He calls out.

TOM

Raven?

RAVEN

(far away, in pain)

Tom, get out of here!

TOM

Raven, are you okay?

RAVEN

I’m all right. Just get the hell out!

Tom presses on. He turns a corner and finds Kara bound on the floor in front of him. He hastily cuts the tape. She stands and he carefully pulls the tape off her mouth. She winces, then turns away from him as he starts cutting the tape at her wrists.

KARA

(whispering)

He’s got bombs with him. He planted

them somewhere back there.

TOM

(whispering)

Just get out. I’m going after Raven.

KARA

I’m sorry for all this, Tom. I’ll

be waiting.

Tom hugs her, then turns and rushes further into the maze. She watches him go, then slowly starts retracing her steps toward the exit.

INT. JAKE’S MAZE

Jake is down on his haunches, opening his knapsack and taking out a remote control device. He watches himself in the mirror as he does this.

JAKE

Raven?

INT. RAVEN’S MAZE

Limping nearby, she hears him. She’s leaning against a mirror, propped up against her own reflection.

JAKE

(teasing)

It’s getting light out there…

RAVEN

Fuck you! If you’re going to blow

the place, then do it!

JAKE

Last chance, Raven. It would be so

beautiful, you and I, together, killing

and maiming as we tear through this

world… of course, I’ll do it without

you if I have to.

EXT. AMUSEMENT PARK - DAWN

Kara sits behind the wheel of Raven’s car. Eyeball stands just outside the window.

EYEBALL

Are you sure you want to do this?

KARA

Stop talking, or I’ll lose my nerve.

If he sees the light, he’ll kill them

all.

She floors the accelerator, points the car straight for the entryway to the maze. For a moment, the carousel, the car, and the maze door are all in an EXACT LINE.

INT. RAVEN’S MAZE

All of a sudden, Raven hears the sound of a car, followed by the splintering of wood and crash of glass. The light that has been growing from the front door of the maze goes out as it collapses. Raven starts laughing and cheering loudly.

EXT. MIRROR MAZE - DAWN

Eyeball throws a few beams aside to help Kara, shaken but uninjured, climb out the window the car, the front half of which is buried in debris.

INT. JAKE’S MAZE

JAKE

Very clever. But I’m afraid the

deal still stands. It’s apparent

that you refuse to acknowledge your

true calling, so I’ll be leaving

you now. Goodbye, Miss Airheart…

I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again!

He turns to grab the detonator from his pack, but Tom is standing there, ready to attack with the knife. Jake raises his gun.

TOM

You’re not going anywhere.

JAKE

You’ve come back to save the woman

you’ve betrayed?

TOM

I didn’t betray anyone. I saved an

innocent life.

JAKE

No one is innocent.

RAVEN

Don’t listen to him, Tom! You don’t

have to be forgiven for anything.

She’s standing about ten feet away, behind Jake, aiming her gun at him.

TOM

Then that’s all I need to hear.

JAKE

You fire, I fire, Raven. We all fire.

Simple.

RAVEN

Why don’t you just hit the button

and end it now?

JAKE

I brought you here to see you suffer,

and I will see you suffer.

Jake fires at Tom, who manages to jump out of the way just in time. Jake shoots his own reflection. As Tom dives, Raven takes a shot at Jake, hitting him in the shoulder. He drops the bomb remote, then turns to fire at Raven. The two nearly empty their guns at each other, the mirrors behind and to the sides of them cracking and falling apart, to expose other mirrors…

They both slump to the floor. Tom, who has managed to stay out of the way, steps into the horrible silence and sees the two bodies, Jake face down, Raven leaning back against one of the trees. He moves forward, glass crunching under his shoes, and realizes that the faint, rhythmic whistling he’s hearing is actually Raven’s breathing, wind from a hole punched in one of her lungs. He rushes over to her, kneels in the glass.

TOM

Oh God… Raven? Can you hear me?

She nods slightly, blood running from her mouth.

RAVEN

(faintly)

Got him.

TOM

Yeah. You got him.

She smiles weakly.

TOM

Raven, I’ve got to get you some

help, baby. You… you don’t look

too good.

RAVEN

Am I going to be all right?

TOM

I’m going to send Kara and the Kid

for help, and then I swear to God,

I’ll come right back and wait with

you—

RAVEN

No… I mean, will I be okay?… Did I

save more than I destroyed?

TOM

Baby, I don’t know what you…

She starts to fade. He grabs her shoulders, pulls her upright.

TOM

Yes! Yes you did. Um…

He glances at Jake’s body.

TOM

Jake, or whatever he was, would

have just kept on killing, right?

We weren’t going to be the last. So

you saved a lot of people, Raven.

A lot.

RAVEN

Yes… thank you, Tom.

TOM

Please, baby, will you hold on

until I get back? Can you do that?

She nods, smiles.

RAVEN

Hurry back, okay? I’m cold…

TOM

Okay. I love you.

He kisses her lightly, some of the blood staining his lips.

RAVEN

I love you too, Tom. Hurry.

He runs off. She closes her eyes.

She hears a noise. She looks over at Jake, finds that he is slowly rolling over, crunching the broken glass under him. Raven painfully raises her gun, still in her hand, and pulls the trigger. It clicks: empty.

She puts it down, watches as Jake finds his gun and starts working with it weakly. He’s loading one more bullet from his pocket into the chamber. His hands are wet with his blood, but manages to complete the task. He sits up and points it at Raven.

JAKE

Come to me…

She looks at him blankly, then lifts her hand. The bomb remote is in it. Jake pauses, utter rage overcoming his features. Raven in a final act of defiance, leans over to her own reflection in the mirror next to her. She looks deeply into her own eyes, and slowly kisses her reflection. Jake howls inhumanly, starts to pull the trigger. Raven pushes the remote button and all is lost in a tremendous explosion. The infinite forest is swallowed by and infinite fire, enveloping it like a flash flood.

EXT. MIRROR MAZE - DAWN

Fire blasts out of the front door of the Maze, knocking down Tom, who is standing nearby with Eyeball and Kara. The hot wind flattens them as the structure collapses. Then everything goes silent.

Tom gets to his knees and sees all that is left: burning piles of wood floating on pools of glowing molten glass. He stares into the crater numbly as Kara and Eyeball come up behind him. Kara puts her hand on his shoulder.

TOM

No… no, this isn’t right…

She rubs his shoulder as he starts to cry.

KARA

I never even got to see what she

looked like.

EYEBALL

(softly)

She was beautiful.

They stare into the fire, which is already beginning to dim.

EXT. KARA’S CAR - MORNING

The three of them walk toward the car slowly. They stand still for a few seconds, watching the first light at the horizon fill the sky.

TOM

She asked me about her soul.

EYEBALL

Hm?

TOM

If she saved more than she destroyed,

something like that. I told her she

did.

Eyeball smiles a little.

EYEBALL

I think you were right.

TOM

Why did she ask me that?

Eyeball sits up on the hood of the car, lies back against the windshield.

EYEBALL

Come on, I’ll tell you.

KARA

What are you doing?

EYEBALL

Looking at the stars. I think there

might be a new one out this morning.

They join him, lying back on the hood. Up in the sky, there are still many stars out, fading as the sun wipes them away, although it’s impossible to tell if the sky is fuller than it was before.

FADE OUT

ROLL CREDITS

THE END

SYZYGY - 16

EXT. AMUSEMENT PARK - PRE-DAWN

Tom watches them disappear into the building. He keeps rocking back and forth, trying to work his hands free, but finally slumps forward, defeated.

INT. RAVEN’S CAR - PRE-DAWN

Eyeball is still driving. Raven is awake and holding the locator, watching it intently. The readout changes from 0.2 to 0.3.

RAVEN

Yeah, you’re right. It was that dirt

road.

EXT. RAVEN’S CAR - PRE-DAWN

Eyeball pulls over onto the should, then hangs a U-turn, heading up the dirt road they just passed. After a few moments they see Kara’s car.

INT. RAVEN’S CAR - PRE-DAWN

EYEBALL

Did they ditch it? Maybe they went

into the hills on foot.

RAVEN

They would have done that days ago

if they were still running. They

know we’re catching up.

They coast up to the top of the hill, passing under the TOPHETH sign. The amusement park spreads out before them.

EYEBALL

Wow.

The car pushes slowly through the high grass toward the carousel.

RAVEN

This shouldn’t be here. It’s not

right. Like an old battlefield.

EXT. CAROUSEL - PRE-DAWN

Tom is watching the car get closer, closes his eyes as it stops about thirty feet away.

TOM

Please, please, please…

The doors open. Raven gets out. She starts striding toward Tom through the long grass. Eyeball trails her. Tom just stares. She hops up onto the carousel, comes right over to him, and he tries to get as far away as possible, almost falling off the horse. She stops right next to him.

RAVEN

Explain.

TOM

(all at once)

I knew her in high school. I knew

you were going to kill her no matter

what I did, so I bolted. I’m sorry.

Raven thinks this over, then lunges. She throws her arms around him.

RAVEN

I’m sorry, Tom. I’ve been away for

so long. Please forgive me.

TOM

(stunned)

It… it’s okay…

She pulls back. Tom is genuinely astonished and confused.

TOM

So, you’re not going to kill her?

RAVEN

No. I’m already free. Kiss.

She surprises him with a deep, passionate kiss unlike any he’s had for a long time. When they finish, Tom looks into her eyes.

TOM

It’s really you. You’re back.

RAVEN

I was never really gone. Just lost.

They kiss again, and then she starts cutting the tape around his wrists.

TOM

(over her shoulder)

How are you, Mr. Eyeball Kid?

EYEBALL

Not too bad, considering I’m wanted

for murder.

The tape snaps and Tom hops down off the horse, rubbing his wrists.

TOM

Jake’s here.

RAVEN

I know. How did I know that?

TOM

He’s got Kara. He took her in there.

He points toward the “Mystifying Mirror Maze”, now starting to turn orange in the pre-dawn light. Raven draws her gun.

RAVEN

Let’s go.

They walk toward the maze, following the trail left by Jake and Kara in the tall grass. They walk side by side, Raven between and slightly ahead of the two men.

EXT. MIRROR MAZE - PRE-DAWN

The three of them walk up the steps leading to the entrance platform.

RAVEN

Looks like Big Ed’s going to get

that showdown after all.

EYEBALL

And we’ve only got one gun.

RAVEN

Kid… I just want to thank you for…

whatever it was you did for me.

Bringing me back from the dead, I

guess.

She kisses him on the cheek.

EYEBALL

Sure. Anytime.

Raven turns to her husband, hands him her knife.

RAVEN

Ready?

He nods. She draws her gun.

RAVEN

I’ll take the front, you take the

exit, okay?

TOM

Sure. You know, I’d almost forgotten
what a good kisser you are.

RAVEN

Well, I guess I’ll just have to keep

reminding you.

Tom smiles at her and takes off toward the exit.

RAVEN

(to Eyeball)

I’d ask you to come along, but we’re

out of guns. And you’ve done so much

already.

EYEBALL

It’s okay. I’ll keep watch out here.

RAVEN

I guess you should leave this to the

professional.

EYEBALL

If you need me…

Raven gives him a thumbs-up. He returns it, and she steps up to the archway. The sun will be rising very soon. She sees something just inside the entryway. It’s Jake’s gun. She checks the chamber, finds it empty, and tosses it to Eyeball. She steps inside.