FAST FICTION #2: THE ADMISSION

I'm going to tell him. Right now. He's sitting across from me, eating his lunch, and when the second hand of the clock on the wall behind him sweeps back around to the twelve, my mouth is going to open and I'm going to tell him. Doesn't matter if he's in the middle of talking about this backyard-deck project that he can't seem to stop going on and on about, or if he's taken so big a bite that I'm sure he's going to choke on it when he hears what I have to say. The time will come, and I will speak the truth. Finally.

So where's the truth? The second hand's back to the one, the two... and yet I just let him yammer on as if his life's not about to change any second now. Why even wait for the twelve to come around again? He must be able to see the sheen of sweat on my forehead. I know it's sitting there, making me light up like a neon sign in the ugly track lighting that this restaurant insists on using to light every single corner. Didn't dining establishments used to have moody lighting, shadows and all that? Now they're just trying to light up every plate on every table, because the chef is the star now, every one of them is jockeying to be the Next Food Network Star. Each dish that goes out is some sort of audition, and they'll be damned if you don't notice that they're artists.

God, he's still talking. I think he's moved on to the elaborate set of criteria he used when choosing what kind of wood he bought for this deck that he's probably not going to bother building when I finally open my damn mouth and say what I came here to say. No reason to build a deck on a house you don't even live in anymore, right? And even if he keeps the house, I know he's building this with some idyllic suburban fantasy in his head, some four-color dream of backyard barbecues with the family, friends and relatives basking in the sun... I'm about to drive a stake through the heart of all that. Doesn't he deserve that, though? Shouldn't he know that there's this whole other world going on right under his nose?

I've known him for a dozen years, and I've never really been further from behind his friend than I am right now. Because I know what his wife has been doing. I honestly wish I didn't, but I do. And frankly, I don't know how he doesn't know. It's not like it's been subtle, or unclear. Maybe that will make it easier. Maybe he does know, and just doesn't care. I can't imagine that he's so clueless that he hasn't noticed the signs. The way she lights up when the other man comes in the room, regardless of whether her husband is there or not, the way she's been riding around town with her convertible top down, her hair whipping around wildly, even on that day last week when it was almost cold enough to snow. She's riding high on new love, and he's got his head buried so far in his deck blueprints that he can't see it.

There goes another twelve. I'm still not saying anything. Maybe he really is that clueless. After all, he hasn't noticed that I haven't said anything, and have let him rattle on for the last ten minutes. I haven't even taken a bite of this bacon cheeseburger that I don't have the stomach for, and he's plowed through almost all of that salad while expounding the virtues of various wood sealants. She's waiting for me to call when it's done.

I'm assuming that I'll be in some kind of condition to speak after I've told him. Would he beat me down, right here in this immaculately well-lit restaurant? I'm betting not. He's not that kind of a guy. He'll probably even finish his meal before getting up, driving back to the office, and never speaking to me on a non-professional level again. He'll leave me with the check, which will be as aggressive as he'll get. That's why I brought him here to eat in the first place, isn't it? For that extra layer of insurance against my face being permanently rearranged. But even if I hadn't, he wouldn't do that to me.

He doesn't deserve this. He deserves to be happy, to live in a world where decks can be planned, bought, and assembled to completion without the nagging worry in the back of his mind that his wife is being unfaithful. But what was it that my dad said, right before he left for good? "The heart wants what it wants." Yeah, and most of the time the heart is a selfish asshole. That's what the brain is for, to give the heart a good throttling every time it gets out of line. How is what I'm doing to him any different than what my dad did to me?

Because I'm not ceding responsibility like he did, that's why. All that crap about what the heart wants is just passing the buck, pointing at some internal organ and saying, "I had nothing to do with this, really. It's all his fault." Then you can move in with your girlfriend and her kid (who was actually older than I was!) and start over. Reset button.

So am I really going to do this? We've fallen into some sort of uncomfortable silence. I think he's realized that I'm not eating, talking or listening. And I haven't been. So now would be the perfect time. Look, if it wasn't me, his wife would be cheating on him with some other idiot, someone who he didn't even know. She was looking for a way out, and I couldn't help the fact that I'd always wanted her from afar. It was just a mutually advantageous situation. It could be worse... she could have broken my heart too, by picking some random other guy. And I think she and I really have a shot, to have the happiness that she was never going to find with him. That's what I should tell him, that it's actually better for me to be the one to do this to him than some unknown quantity that he can never understand.

The twelve came and went, and I actually started talking right after the five. I wasn't even aware that I had started until the words were coming out of my mouth. I did it right; I didn't sugar-coat it, didn't appeal to his higher nature to "chin up, old boy" and all that. And it wasn't as bad as I thought. Clearly he'd been thinking that something was up for a while now, and this just solidified something that had been wobbling uneasily in his mind. That it was me was the only thing that he seemed truly surprised about.

What I didn't count on was how good I felt once I started telling him. As I started telling him how it all started, it really felt like I was weaving the beginning of a great love story, not just hacking through the ending of one. What she and I have is something greater, something that he could never be a part of, and if he really loves her, he'll come to see that holding her back from that love would only end up hurting himself in the end.

Speaking of hurting, once the adrenaline burns off I'm going to need to be in the close company of several doctors. But now, lying curled up on the floor of this restaurant while blood from my nose soaks into my hair and I can feel my ribs loose and shifting inside my shirt, I actually feel happy.

FAST FICTION #1: PIGGY

He stared at the pig for a very long time. He felt almost as if he couldn’t move until he made a decision, as if the pig would know his intention, and would bolt out of his bedroom if his thoughts were unclear in any way. It stared right back at him, seeming to mock him with its beady but kind black eyes.

The pig was spotted and blue, and had been given to him on his fourth birthday, two years before the day that he now sat on his bed across from the dresser where it had stood, smiling at him day at night, for all the intervening seasons. That smile was what kept him affixed to his bed, made him unable to cross the room and pick it up. The pig knew, somehow. *The pig knew*.

It knew that he was just a small moral decision away from picking it up and smashing it to bits. Its little ceramic life was about to be snuffed out, and still it smiled at him. Why couldn’t his parents have bought him one with a removable bottom? Why did he have to destroy it in order to get at the money inside? After a long time, after the parallelogram of sun had swung a perceivable amount across his bedroom wall, he realized that it was probably his parents’ way of getting him to make this very decision. To determine whether the thing he wanted the money for was really worth annihilating his benign little pig friend.

And was it, really? Was the amount needed even in there? It had been so long since he had started tossing his grandpa’s spare change into the bank that he had no idea how much it contained. It had been heavy on the rare occasions he had picked it up, cupping it like a dinosaur egg in his palm. It was so loaded down it felt solid, like a hand grenade – or at least what he imagined a hand grenade would feel like. Would it explode like a hand grenade when he dropped it?

He supposed he should think about how he was going to do it, if he was going to do it at all. It seemed unfair to drop it, like a betrayal to the little pig that had shared his room with him for so long. He supposed he should use a hammer. He at least owed it the dignity of looking into the little painted dots of its eyes as he dealt the final blow...

He almost laughed at himself. Final blow? Dignity? Was he really thinking that he owed this unfeeling little hollow rock anything, that it would actually expect some sort of compassion from him? After all, even it wasn’t an inanimate object, it had been *made* this way, with only one possible ending in place. The only way to get out what you put in was to smash it. That was its purpose.

So why was he still sitting on his bed? What was stopping him? The pig wasn’t going to answer.

Pen's Envy

I recently took a creative writing workshop via my local Rec & Ed department, and since it ended, I've been thinking a lot about where I want my writing to go in the near future. As you may have noticed, I've started promoting my writing in social media (Facebook and Twitter, basically), which is something I never did before. It's not part of my nature, actually, to want to call attention to myself, but in talking with my teacher, I started to wonder whether that tendency was becoming detrimental to getting my writing out there. So here I am, announcing to my friends and family every time I have something new. It's strange for me.

I suppose my freshest round of reluctance goes back to my time at Borders. I worked on the .com part of the business, and I was the go-to guy when a self-publishing author wanted to know how to get their book listed on our site. Some of them were legit, but I fielded enough calls from people who were either deluded in -- or oblivious to -- their obvious lack of talent that they were clearly banking on their ability to cram it down everybody's throat. One fellow who was having trouble with the process all but accused me of being part of a conspiracy to keep his book off the shelves. I all but told him it was merely that his book sucked.

At the last session of the writing workshop, I was the only student that showed up (I guess that's the danger of holding this kind of class in the early summer), but it gave me and my instructor the chance to sit and just talk about writing for two hours. She's a published author, and has been in the game for a while, so she had a lot of good advice to give. I took the class as a way to kick myself in the ass, to remind myself that I actually have a legitimate talent for writing, and in that sense it was a total success. I found myself voicing insights about my fellow classmates' writing -- and my own -- that showed me that I really do think in terms of storytelling and focus and detail and actually seem to know what I'm talking about. I even wrote some spontaneous pieces in class that I'm proud enough of that I'm going to post some of them here soon. Like I told my instructor, it's sometimes too easy to feel like I'm a writer only in my head, to make it just another one of the stories that I tell myself to amuse my own mind from time to time, and it's another thing entirely to drag it out into the real world and acknowledge that it's part of my waking life.

Another aspect I've been thinking about is that I have friends from high school that are successfully making a living at writing. I'm sandwiched right in between them year-wise, one graduating before and one after me. One has been a successful TV and comic-book writer in LA for over ten years, and the other is a well-reviewed author of a short-story collection and a large historical novel. (And outside that circle, there was another alumnus of my high school who now is a Hollywood writer so big that they use his name in trailers. Trailers!) I keep looking to them, and reminding myself that there is still opportunity out there. Before that last brainstorming session with my instructor, I was almost convinced that the prospects for an unproven author were dwindling, but now I'm realizing that they've actually expanded, just in unconventional ways.

The thing that bothers me about the proliferation of outlets for writing is the signal-to-noise ratio. When every thought that anyone writes down is equally available to everyone, how will a worthwhile author cut through all the clutter? Of course, when I worked for the book industry, I placed my faith in the publishers... they put their money where their mouth was and spent money printing and promoting only the stuff that people would actually want to spend money for, and some of the time that was something other than the legal-thriller/romance of the week. But now that publishers have had to downsize and restructure like everyone else, I'm starting to think that maybe the court of public opinion isn't as bad a proving ground as I once thought it was.

I’m not immune to chasing that elusive audience, either… I even tried to change my style to be more “marketable” once. When I started seeing all these paranormal romances come out (culminating in hits like Sookie Stackhouse and the Twilight novels), I made a conscious effort to write one, but what I ended up with is “Nadir”, a novel-in-progress which is essentially a love story between a demon and a human working their way through the different levels of Hell. It’s far from the dashed-off pulp masterpiece I was hoping for, but I wouldn’t trade it for one now. I like the idea too much, and the thought that I’m actually going to find out how it all ends is exciting.

Of course, there's always going to be Fifty Shades of Something that everyone is going to be grabbing at wildly, and may or may not stand the test of time, but what this sea change in book publishing has really done is to level the playing field for everyone, to lower whatever stigma still exists around any particular genre and really show our tastes as a society for what they really are. And isn’t that the ideal? To be free of the constraints of what we *should* be reading and figure out what it is that we *want* to read? How many more people would become readers if that were the case?

All this is my way of talking myself into publishing my own e-book. Years ago, Borders ran an internal contest, and employees could submit entries that would be considered for printing and promoting by the company. I submitted a short story collection. I took the process very seriously, the selection of my best stories as well as the order they should appear in. The file is still sitting on my computer, ready to launch. My writing instructor said that I definitely should pull the trigger and send it out into the world with a price point of my choosing. Who knows? I see dozens of interesting titles that I would never have heard of in while scrolling through the Kindle bookstore, and sometimes a dollar or two sounds like a fair price to try something sight unseen...

In the end, I guess I just have to allow my writing find its own way. I can accept that I’m never going to bully it into making money for me. Let the notice of others come as it will (and I have to stress that the only reason I would want to make money off my work is so that I’d be able to spend more time writing). First and foremost, I have to follow my muse. I think that’s my primary responsibility here. As it should be for everyone.

Happy Nineteen

This past month contained my and Amy's 19th wedding anniversary. Can you believe that? It was 1994 when we and a bunch of friends and family trudged out to the sweltering woods outside of Three Rivers, Michigan, and tied the knot at a little Latvian cultural day camp called Garazers (which our invitation designer insisted on pronouncing “Gazzazaps”). And now, almost two decades later, we celebrated by dropping off our daughter at her grandparents' house, hitting a Chinese buffet, and then going home to read for an hour in utter and complete silence. It was awesome.

But while we were scarfing down sushi, we did take a little time to talk and reflect, and one of the things we discussed was how we’ve managed to last so long. Not that we're particularly surprised by it, but more that in the world around us, it seems like less and less marriages do. Not many first marriages, anyway. And high school sweethearts, as we happen to be, are even rarer. So what did we do right? And I have to preface this by stating that we in no way consider ourselves "gooder at marriaging" than anybody else, or that we're just "more in love" than other couples. We just noticed that we’ve had a few factors in our life together that have conspired to get us to this point. I'll enumerate them now...

First of all, we were friends first. As clichéd as that sounds, I think that really is the most reliable way to form a lasting relationship. Like I mentioned, it was in high school. She thought I was nerdy and cute, I thought she was funny and pretty and was clearly a great friend to have. And even though it took a little over six years from the day we met to the day that would later necessitate celebrating a nineteen-year anniversary, we spent the first three and a half years of that courtship setting up a great friendship. That hasn't changed, as it does with all the best friendships. We still say things that the other finds funny and surprising and supportive on a daily basis. If you've got a friend like that, you’d better hang on to them.

Next -- and this reason is central enough that it affects the rest of the reasons -- we couldn't get pregnant, and it took over ten years of work and sacrifice to actually get it to happen. As terrible as it was at the time, it gave us plenty of time to figure out who we were -- not just as a couple but as individuals -- before we started introducing brand new little people into the mix. We went through a whole lot of stuff in those thirteen years; illness, bankruptcy, infertility ... now I can see that it all made us stronger, that each little victory was adding another brick to the foundation of the team we've become. If we had also been dealing with young children at the time, it would have been immeasurably harder.

When you become a half of a couple, there's less room to give priority to your own wants and needs. There's another person to consider in every decision you make, major to minor. And then, when a child comes along, your own ego and selfishness has to be pushed even further into the backseat. If your relationship up front isn't solid, the chances that you'll be able to continue to live with each other goes down. Maybe (hopefully) not by much, but it does go down.

Another major decision that we made before little folks became a factor was our careers. I had been working at Borders since shortly after we got married, and by the time the century changed, I knew that it was where I wanted to stay as long as I possibly could. And after going through several jobs, Amy decided that what she really wanted to be was a stay-at-home mom. It was really her dedication and refusal to give up -- combined with my improved health insurance when I successfully lobbied to get back into Borders after being outsourced -- that made it possible for us to jump through the necessary medical hoops to make our dreams of parenthood come true.

Lastly, and maybe even most importantly, is the fact that we have differing opinions on a lot of things, and we don't necessarily feel the need to convert the other person. It's something that I attribute to our first getting to know each other when we were still teenagers. When you go through your late teens and early twenties, you suddenly find yourself in successively larger worlds, moving from high school to college to career to full-scale independence. You change a lot in those years, mentally speaking, and your worldview and how you see your place in the Universe really gets solidified during that time. We went through that side by side, and eventually came out with differing ideas about things. For example, Amy's a Creationist, and I'm a believer in evolution. Every now and again this becomes something we discuss, but for the most part it doesn't come up, and because of that it demonstrates to us, I think, how unnecessary it is for people with such different beliefs and ideas to hold animosity for the other. The journey toward your own personal truth is a slow, gradual realization, and having someone by your side who is going through that same journey, no matter where it leads, is something that's supremely valuable.

There. I think I've managed to sound sufficiently smug and superior for one entry. Seriously, I don't think that we have all the answers, in fact I know we don't. We're just two people who lucked into meeting someone we're incredibly compatible with, fell in love, and had faith in that and stuck with it even when things got rough, even really really rough. Outside the world of romantic fairy tales, that's the true heart of a couple's relationship: the dedication and work that it takes, the self-sacrifice and faith in the other person. I guess that's the takeaway here.

To wrap up, let me re-dedicate this site to my wife, Amy, who has stuck by me (and been stuck to by me) for the last nineteen years. We've got a long way to go, and I'm glad she'll be the one to make the journey with me.

The Existential Horror of Temple Run 2

The tablet game that I've spent the most time playing in the last few months is Temple Run 2. For those of you who haven't had the sheer adrenaline rush of playing it, here's a brief explanation of the game, which at first does little to belie the soul-crushing implications of the game itself:

Temple Run 2 (as in the original Temple Run game, just with better graphics and more bells and whistles) takes its cue from the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford gets chased by a giant rolling boulder after stealing a golden idol from an ancient Peruvian temple, thereby setting off all the ancient traps and obstacles -- that are all somehow still in working order – meant to prevent him from leaving with it.

In the game, you play another intrepid explorer (one of several you can unlock after achieving high scores of one kind or another) who has stolen a golden idol and now has to run... the difference here is that you're running down a series of vertiginous bridges above a misty mountain valley below, turning, jumping, ducking, and leaning to avoid fires, spinning spike wheels and crumbling sections of bridge. The point is to run as far as you can, picking up as many coins that are lying around as you can -- they help you unlock special powers and buy new characters.

The big change from the Raiders scenario here is that, instead of a giant boulder, you're being pursued by a twelve-foot galloping monkey demon who is inexplicably wearing a skull mask (at least, I really really hope it's a mask). As if you didn't have to worry about plummeting to your death or slamming into trees and low overpasses, when you stumble over too many obstacles the monkey catches up with you and slams you on the ground. In any event, it's game over.

You see all this from a vantage point above and behind your running explorer, so you don't actually see the galloping monkey demon for most of the game. Only when you hit one of those stumbling obstacles do you actually see its hairy back and grasping arms, coming up behind you. That's when you know that you had better not even so much as misstep again, or you're going to get bodyslammed into oblivion.

It's an intense, fun, and patently simple game, but something happened a few weeks into playing it that changed my thoughts on exactly what's going on in this game, and the implications, frankly, were chilling. It all started when I had to pause the game to attend to something my four-year-old was doing. I had just gotten to a place in the game where the bridge falls away entirely, and my character had to jump on a rope and zipline down to where the bridge picked up again. This is the only time when you change perspective, because the "camera" briefly swings below the character as they slide down the rope.

My pause came just as the angle was changing, and when it stopped I was surprised to see some strange artifacts on the screen. Near the top, I could see four downward pointing arrows, gray and stony-looking, and near the bottom of the screen was a reddish, snaky looking thing that had a small fork at the end. It took me maybe ten seconds to realize what I was looking at... and my blood ran cold.

I was looking out from the inside of the monkey demon's mouth. I had just happened to pause as the swinging "camera" was poised between his upper teeth and tongue. Then I thought about it a little more... I had been doing well. I hadn't stumbled at all during the game so far. I hadn't even seen the monkey demon since the brief prelude to my run where I saw it racing out of the temple to follow me.

So here's how it breaks down, folks. The people who programmed this game could have just set it up so the back of the monkey demon appears when you make that first stumble. But they didn't do that. They set it up so that the monkey demon *is* *always* *there*, *whether* *you* *see* *it* *or* *not*. It is not even onscreen, but it's always invisibly snapping at your heels, ready to leap forward into view the moment you screw up. And even worse, they took the time to give it huge, sharp teeth and a forked tongue, *even* *though* *you* *never* *see* *the* *damned* *thing* *from* *the* *front*, except in that initial glimpse.

That's the moment that it stopped being a game for me. I'm not saying I stopped playing it, but the way I played it changed. It became more of a personal mission to do better, run faster, to stay even farther ahead of that dark, loping thing, even though I now know I can't run fast or far enough to keep it more than two steps behind me. Sometimes it feels like it's the most apt metaphor for life I can think of.

What Raiders Taught Me

A few months ago I wrote a blog called "The Collected Works", in which I mused about the size of the body of work I've written over the course of my lifetime. I knew at the time I wrote it that I had, in my basement, several filing cabinets and boxes in which I had many handwritten projects that never saw the light of day, either because they were unfinished, or had been written in my childhood and were ridiculous. But what I decided to do after I wrote that piece was to go through and digitize whatever I could still decipher of my chicken scratchings (winner of the 1989 Rosetta Stone award for questionable handwriting in my senior year of high school, thank you very much), just so I could have some record of it existing in the first place, for good or ill.

What I found as I started to go through and collate the contents of those file drawers was startling. I found several aborted short pieces, and a full screenplay, that were excessively violent and at times just mean-spirited. My style suddenly swung from swordplay and Dungeons & Dragons-variety derring-do to spies, devil worshipers, and more deadly gunplay than any Sam Peckinpah film. It seems that I was always eager to set up simple kill-or-be-killed conflicts, mostly with one person against incredible odds, and require them to slug or blast their way out, with no quarter given.

I'm still in the process of going through all these old stories, but early in the process I started to see a pattern developing, a clear tipping point when my work turned more violent and turned into a series of action set-pieces. It became clear during my attempts to place these writings on a timeline; the most reliable method turned out to be following my progress through my preferred writing process: from longhand block writing to cursive, back to print, then to manual typewriter, followed by electric typewriter. Adding in any recollections I have of where my family lived when I originally wrote them, I found I could usually place a piece somewhere within a year of when it was written. And that sea change came somewhere around 1981, when I was nine years old. So what caused it?

A little background: growing up, I was in what most people would term a "progressive" household. At the dawn of the Seventies, I had a mother who worked, a father who changed diapers, and a strict no-gun toy policy. All of these things, I probably don't need to point out, were turnarounds from the way houses had been run in the Fifties and Sixties. Not that my parents were hippies in any sense of the word, but they took the lessons of that decade to heart and raised my brother and me in a kid-friendly, stable household, with emotional support and a sense of safety.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve realized that my early works fall into two clear camps: pre-Raiders of the Lost Ark and post-Raiders of the Lost Ark. That film, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas's homage to old-time movie serials, was Harrison Ford’s first turn as archaeological explorer Indiana Jones, and came out over thirty years ago, right at the beginning of summer 1981. I remember that I saw it twice in the theater that summer, accompanied by my Dad, who fell asleep midway through both times.

Up until that summer, the most action I had experienced on screen was three years before, when I saw Star Wars for the first time (I didn't catch it until the 1978 summer re-release, so there's no need to call the sci-fi math police, folks). Raiders was a different kind of animal, though. Seeing an alpha male blow his problems away with a pistol that sounded like a cannon, while repeatedly saving a woman who was simultaneously helpless and able to drink a giant Sherpa under the table, must have been more of a revelation to me than Star Wars.

I have to say, this shocks me more than a little bit. And it's taken me all this time to realize how that movie had held such a strong hold on my childhood psyche. I’ve rewatched the film a few times in the last decade, and every time I watch it as an adult, it kind of washes over me without having any effect. I know all the individual shots, I know so perfectly how it's going to go that there's no excitement or suspense. I took this for granted until now, thinking that it was just one of those movies that was so overplayed on HBO back in the day that I just sort of absorbed it. But maybe the fact that it’s been so long since the film had any emotional impact on me is evidence that it’s part of my DNA now.

This recent evidence has now proven that I was hypnotized by this movie specifically, and action movies in general, so much so that it stuck me in a creative rut for the next five years. Looking at my creative output during that time, it’s astonishing how clear my M.O. became: Take someone with no experience or background, and throw them into a life-threatening situation where they have to use violence to escape.

Of course, once I figured this out, I had to go further and figure out exactly why I gravitated toward those kind of stories. Here's the best I can come up with, and it matches up with something else I know about myself. It goes back to the choices my parents made bringing me up. Like I said, there was a no-gun policy in our house, toy or otherwise. And while I don't argue that my parents should have been more active in teaching my brother and me about violence, I think that might be the reason.

My parents were always clear with us that violence was not the answer to problems, and while they let us watch pretty much any TV shows we were interested in, they didn't let us watch old Popeye cartoons for that very reason. Growing up in that environment, I didn't end up having a real frame of reference for the consequences of violence. So when Raiders of the Lost Ark exposed me to it on a level I had never seen before, I don't think I knew how to process it correctly. It's strange; in being somewhat sheltered from violence, I also took a while to really learn the value of life. The pendulum ended up swinging the other way in my later childhood and early adolescence, when I began almost hyper-aware of onscreen violence, and even the dispatching of the most despicable/expendable evildoer would cause me to sympathize with their untimely end.

For a while I actively stayed away from violent material, but eventually the balance righted itself. And don't think that I'm calling out Spielberg and Lucas for making Raiders -- it's solid entertainment and delivers exactly what they set out to accomplish. I just wish I hadn’t taken it so much to heart, and thought it was the only way to tell a story. Still, if it hadn't been that film, another would have taught me the real price of violence, even if it did take me some time to work out. I suppose there are all sorts of issues that people just have to work out in their own time, and this is one that I'm still unearthing from my past.

Shining Inconsistencies

Being such a big Stephen King fan, you'd probably be surprised to know that The Shining was one of his books that I never got around to reading until recently (I still haven’t gotten to The Dead Zone yet either). While I knew Stanley Kubrick’s movie version was quite different from the book, I was surprised about how *really* different it turned out to be. And I can understand why... virtually all the conflict in the book is inside the character's heads. You get an even-handed view of what's going on from the vantage points of all four of the main characters, and there's virtually no way to translate that to the screen. I get what Kubrick was doing… he had to make someone the “bad guy”, because in the book it’s really the hotel itself and how it messes with people’s heads.

But what really bugged me most about it was this... remember that episode of Friends where Joey is reading The Shining and has to keep it in the freezer because it's so scary? Well, when he discusses it with the other characters, most of the things he talks about are references to the movie, not the book! For example:

- "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" is a phrase that Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson’s character) types obsessively in the movie... in the book Jack actually finishes a play, although he doesn't like the way it turns out.

- Joey mentions the two creepy girls/ghosts in the hallway... in the book, although it's mentioned that two little girls were previously killed in the hotel, they never actually show up.

- Joey also ineptly tries to keep his discussion spoiler-free and mentions when the father goes after the mother and kid with a "blank" but they get away at the last minute... he could mean "axe" like in the movie, or "oversize croquet mallet" like in the book, but what he doesn't mention is the big explosion that happens at the end of the book... the movie ending is much more low-key.

- He does get the dead woman in room 217 correct, but that's one of the few things that's in both the book and the movie. (Except that in the movie, the room number was changed to 237 because the hotel in which the movie was filmed actually had a room 217 and they didn’t want customers to freak out about that.)

I guess I’m just surprised about how the TV writers who created the episode managed to choose the movie version over the book for *every* plot specific detail that they mentioned. If it was just an oversight, it was a stunningly consistent one.

Okay, nerd rant over. You may all resume your lives.