But I’m in the home stretch now and I can smell blood in the water. So I do a whole bunch of stuff that shouldn’t matter or do anything at all, like go into AOL’s Expert Install program and confirm that, indeed, the new modem is in there, and then go through the motions of installing another modem, and after that, AOL admitted the modem existed and I got online. And if you’re reading this, that means I’ve done it twice, so, hopefully, this will work from now on, or, at least, until some morning I get up and find that my modem has mysteriously gone to join the choir invisible on me once again, at which point I will become a fanatically zealous Luddite and begin to walk the Earth like Caine in KUNG FU, battering all extant examples of electronic technology into rubble using a ball and chain composed of a toaster swung by its electrical cord.

KILLQUEST: Endgame

I’m pretty sure everyone is over Killquest. Paul’s got this new Star Wars game that he’s playing pretty much in all his spare time, and now Pat’s bought it too. Even before that, though, I think people just ran Killquest into the ground. For the last week, while I’ve been offline, people have pretty much played every night. A whole lot of pop culture icons and celebrities killed a whole lot of other pop culture icons and celebrities… just off the top of my head, I can recall Homer Simpson and Moe Sizlak gunning down Arnold Schwarzenegger and John J. Rambo, while Charlie’s Angels (the originals, Sabrina, Jill and Kelly) turned the Blues Brothers into decomposing goo. Dr. Peter Elliott and Amy the talking ape, from the movie CONGO, both perished when Amy dropped a grenade she was trying to throw (stupid monkey), and the various characters from JURASSIC PARK all got stomped in that game, too, but I can’t remember by who… it was just a bad night for Crichton concepts. Oddjob and Jaws, from various Bond films, both bought it fairly early on, falling to H.I. McDunnough and the Snoakes Brothers from RAISING ARIZONA. And the list goes on.

Killquest ran through two sets of rules, and this last weekend I completed modifications to the theta version… but as things stand now, I doubt anyone is going to play under them. The new rules won’t be popular (characters were much too powerful under the previous systems; players hate it when new rules making their characters less powerful take effect), but, basically, I think people have just moved on and want to do other stuff… like this Star Wars computer game everyone is into now. (It looks pretty boring to me, but I’ve never gotten into the X-box or Game-Cube stuff that Paul and his friends like… I suspect I’d spend even more time in front of my TV and waste even more money if I did).

Seven days of my life I’ll never get back

I’d like to tell you that during the past week or so I’ve been offline I’ve done all this really exciting stuff, or at least, something even remotely interesting. I’d like to tell you that Patrick Nielsen Hayden demonstrated enormous depth of character by actually reading some of my novels and, realizing that while I really don’t write very well, I do, nonetheless, write at least as well as Dean R. Koontz, and my stuff would be at least half that popular, he offered to buy at least one of them. I’d also like to tell you that I met this nice girl and we’ve gone out a few times and seem to be hitting it off. Hell, I’d like to tell you that at some point some attractive chick actually noticed me even a tiny bit beyond, you know, the minimum attention required to take my order at Burger King or put my groceries in filmy white plastic bags at the Kash n’ Karry or Sav A Lot. But, alas, if I told you any of that I’d be lying through my fat little teeth, because I still have no life, and good looking women still pay exactly as much attention to me as you’d expect good looking women to pay to a fat 41 year old loser with bad teeth, no job, and a Heinlein paperback perpetually tucked into the back pocket of his jeans.

No, mostly I played Killquest (sometimes successfully) and worked on rules mods and wondered where the fuck this mythical box of comics that Demolition supposedly mailed to me two weeks ago has gotten to, and watched a bunch of movies on videotape or DVD or even in the theater (well, one) and finished one book Melanie loaned me and started another. And my mom came into town this weekend with her current husband Carl and they stopped over and we went for barbecue to some place called Woody’s in Plant City on Sunday. My mom claims that Woody’s is the best barbecue she’s ever had, but, well, it just seemed like the same barbecue I’ve had at every other barbecue place I’ve ever gone to. Which is good, mind you; I love barbecue. But there didn’t seem to be anything special about Woody’s in terms of either food or atmosphere; I sure wouldn’t have driven for forty minutes to get there, had I been there before, with a Sonny’s right down the road.

However, going out for dinner was a high point of my recent life, as was seeing my mom again, whom about half of you know is a very cool person, and the other half of you will just have to take my word for it.

We also took along to the barbecue place my grandmother, who is, frankly, a self centered old bitch I don’t like much, and Carl’s mom, who seems pleasant enough, and Carl’s sister Paula, who is a complete and total babe, even if she is about ten years older than I am. Other than eating baby back ribs, which I always enjoy, the highpoint of the trip for me was realizing that despite my mom’s assurances otherwise, my grandmother’s recent divorce has not really fundamentally changed her at all. Oh, she’s more outgoing now that she’s gotten out from under the thumb of that domineering idiot she used to be married to (her third husband, god love her), but outgoing doesn’t work well with my grandmother, who has a brilliant natural talent for taking any topic in the world and making it all about her. She did this endlessly during dinner, and I was polite and cordial because mom likes me to be, but it was often rather a strain on my near non-existent diplomatic faculties.

I was especially charmed when grams told this long rambling anecdote about some people at the church she goes to who were praying for the woman in the couple to regain the strength to play the organ again. After months of no joy from Jesus, these folks decided that perhaps they should be praying for the grace to accept their new physical limitations instead of, you know, something that would actually make their lives BETTER, because, you know, God ain’t in the ‘making your life better’ business, although I note that S/He/It does seem to keep ‘grace to accept your miserable mortal existence’ completely stocked at all times, and on back order, for that matter.

Anyway, my own admittedly cynical observations aside, Grams told this anecdote and then, naturally, used it as an opportunity to describe how she had stood up and told this couple that she had had to do that, yes indeed, she’d used to do all these wonderful things for the church; drive the little kiddies around and cook for the homeless and deliver sandals to starving urchins in Guatemala and change the course of mighty rivers with her bare hands and I don’t know what all, but, you know, now that she was getting on in years, well, she’d had to pray to God to have the grace to accept that she couldn’t be such a superwoman any more, hard though it was for her. And that’s my gramma… no matter what you’re talking about, somehow, it’s all about her. Or, if it’s not, you shouldn’t be talking about it, and you won’t be, either, once she’s managed to wedge four or five words into the conversation.

Some dogs should go to hell

After nearly a week and a half of being stymied by a two collar arrangement Chewie could not get out of, we find ourselves unable to put him outside once again, because the second collar broke while Paul was walking the goddam mutt last night, and he’ll slip out of just one collar easily if we put him outside on his leash.

Paul vows he’s getting a choke collar for Chewie next, but that will require a trip to Wal-Mart, and I don’t think that’s going to happen soon, because I’m pretty sure the wires on Paul’s X-Box won’t reach that far.

ARR arr arr!

Well, enough of that, let’s do movie stuff.

The very day my modem stopped working, Paul and I went over and saw Pirates of the Caribbean at the Zephyr Six. It is a very very loud movie. This was unfortunate, because sensory overloads these days seem to stimulate a pinpoint migraine in my upper right temple, just below the center of my hairline, that feels kind of like someone has rammed a dull knitting needle into my skull right there and then left it there, and it’s made out of some kind of metal that is just a few degrees below room temperature. So I admit, I didn’t enjoy the movie as much as I probably could have. However, even with that, I have to say that while it’s exciting and fun, there seemed to me to be an excessive amount of people swinging around on ropes and clashing swords and things blowing up and various crews of people stealing each other’s ships. I mean, apparently Disney felt that if some of this was good, an enormous frigging amount of it was brilliant, and they just packed that movie to the gunwales with more piratical action and sail powered naval battles than any sane person would even want to think about shaking a stick at. I suppose it was all very thrilling, but I honestly could have done with maybe twenty or thirty minutes less swashbuckling.

Beyond that, I was disappointed in how the ‘Curse of the Black Pearl’ actually worked. I’d been hoping these undead skeleton pirate guys were hundreds of years old, and the curse was a a sort of Flying Dutchman deal, where they were forced to haunt the high seas forever, with the additional grisly little detail that while they couldn’t die, their bodies continued to age and decay. However, it turns out that the pirates of the Black Pearl had only been under the curse for ten years or so; as soon as you snatch a piece of the evil Aztec gold, you turn into one of these walking skeletons whose true form only shows in moonlight. That seemed rather overly convenient to the plot to me.

My only other note is that the actress in the movie, Kyra something, looks a great deal like Brooke Shields circa Blue Lagoon, and, well, that’s certainly not a bad thing. She also became increasingly more attractive with each passing frame of the movie; at the start she was just, you know, really very pretty, but by the end of the film, she was Denise Richards-level hot. Hopefully, whatever she does next will be R rated.

Talk hard. Eat spinach. Buy bonds.

Every once in a while a movie comes along that just terrifies and horrifies me. Not so much the movie itself, but the way it seems to be regarded by a great many people. And it’s not just immoral slaughterfests like The Matrix, in which the all powerful hero chooses to use his vast and unlimited ability to manipulate reality in the most brainlessly violent and gruesomely bloody manner imaginable. Sometimes it’s just these unbelievably shallow, moronic, pandering little pieces of toxically dishonest button pushing horse shit being adopted as some kind of generational touchstone by large groups of people that I find absolutely appalling.

Give you an example. A while ago I found this blog that was, apparently, very popular. Its author was quick to inform me, in the longest email she ever sent me, that the blog had won a ton of awards in the past and been nominated for even more at that time. (Most of the email consisted of her listing all these various awards and award nominations and the places they had been posted.) The woman doing the blog seemed pleasant and intelligent, and while she posted a lot of pictures of herself, many of them in little or no clothing, and often doing very sexually suggestive things, well, she was reasonably good looking for a chunky chick and I don’t look on stuff like that as a negative by any means.

Eventually, of course, she revealed herself as a deranged psychotic, but prior to that, I’d started to get an inkling that maybe she really wasn’t such hot shit anyway when I read this article she’d written, on her husband’s blog (her husband is much, much more boring than she is, so she does a lot of writing for his blog) about the wonderfulness of The Breakfast Club.

Now, I know a few people who really like The Breakfast Club and I guess that’s okay. I like the Lost In Space movie, although I make no pretense of thinking it’s even remotely a good film. However, prior to reading this blog article, I had never realized that there are people out there who not only enjoy The Breakfast Club, despite the fact that it’s a really really rotten movie full of obnoxious characters and ridiculous situations and completely absurdly stupid events that bear absolutely no resemblance to anything that ever happened to any real person in any real high school in the history of the universe, but who pretty much worship the film, and regard it as some sort of sacred cinematic totem object, and an utterly realistic and valid video ‘snapshot’ of their entire high school experience.

Yes, to these people, apparently, The Breakfast Club is meaningful and powerful. It speaks to them. They think they knew people like the characters in that movie; in many cases, they think they themselves were very similar to the characters in that movie. I myself personally believe that if you were to ever actually in real life meet anyone who in any way even remotely resembled any of the characters in that movie, you would either immediately throttle them to death or simply run screaming for your life, and I also personally very much feel that anyone who in any way recognizes any aspect of themselves in the characters in that movie should most likely be forced into an Arabian oubliette at the earliest opportunity, the entrance to which should then immediately be walled up and forgotten. But I suppose I digress.

See, I’m not really talking about The Breakfast Club here. What I am talking about is yet another film that seems to have been adopted as some sort of weird generational anthem by many, including my brother Paul, and that I thought was just plain goddam obnoxiously stupid when I saw it for the first time in the theater ten years or so ago, and that I recently watched Paul’s DVD of, in hopes I’d find out I’d been wrong and it was really this wonderful thing that so many people seem to think it is.

However, unfortunately, Pump Up The Volume remains a brain dead idiotic piece of digital drivel no matter how much I wish it didn’t, and that’s just how that goes.

If you haven’t seen Pump Up The Volume, rejoice in your good fortune. Christian Slater plays a lonely, alienated young high school geek, who, in the evenings, uses an illegal ham radio rig to become an unlicensed pirate DJ/shock jock called Happy Harry Hardon. All the local high school kids who ignore Our Hero in school during the day are slavering, zombified Harry Hardon fans, who all sit glued to their dials every night at ten listening to this paragon of Socratic discourse throw out such brilliant philosophical nuggets as ‘truth is a virus’ and ‘steal the air’. Harry’s fans can all relate to Harry’s bitterness, his loneliness, his pain and his perpetual horniness. They adore him for his sheer, raw, shameless honesty and they all embrace his cogent, stunning insights, like ‘has it ever occurred to anyone that our country is completely fucked up? And our school system is also completely fucked up?’

Of course, Harry never gives any details on just how the country is fucked up, or exactly what is wrong with the school system, nor does he really need to, since these pithy bits of cogent social commentary are tossed out in between deliciously brilliant segments of high and airy badinage like Harry pretending to be jerking off constantly over the air, or Harry playing electronically generated flatulence noises, or Harry spinning banned singles off not very obscure hip hop albums that are cool because they use swear words.

Yes, indeed… banal and brainless cultural criticism, simulated masturbation and fart noises, and as much repetition of ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ as a creatively bankrupt writer/director can manage to cram into the soundtrack, are pretty much the entirety of Harry’s act, and his local fellow schoolmates, as well as the very few ‘cool’ adults portrayed in the film, gulp the shit down by the quart bottle.

It’s also worth noting that Harry has absolutely nothing positive to offer; he insults everything and praises nothing; he demands that somebody do something, but hasn’t the vaguest clue, at any point, exactly what anyone should do.

It’s also worth noting that every character in the movie is entirely one dimensional, as are the social issues and conflicts the movie half assedly ‘explores’. The only real problems Harry’s local high school seems to have is that the principle and vice principle are both conformist, opportunistic, kid hating fascists of the most flatly, nakedly evil sort. They prowl the film’s frames constantly, seeking out and destroying anything that kids might remotely find enjoyable, and worse, they scheme to expel all the ‘troublemakers’ who might bring down the school’s grade point average, while continuing to carry those same expelled bad apples on the rolls to get Federal funding.

And while these are the worst of the adults, there are, really, no ‘good’ adults at all. The best adults we see are clueless; grownups, we are shown over and over again, can never really be cool. Only kids can be cool, and in fact, if this movie has a message, it’s that kids ARE cool, simply because they’re kids, and adults ARE clueless and stupid and pointless and worthless, simply because they’re adults. The fact that Harry offers nothing of any real value is never noted at any point in the movie, because, well, there’s nothing in the movie to contrast Harry’s non-message with. The film has nothing of value to offer. It’s all just empty nonsense and meaningless verbal posturing.

I will admit that when I first saw this movie, I thought Samantha Mathis was kind of homely. Watching it again, I admit that Mathis’ attractiveness is certainly non-conventional, however, she definitely has a sexual charisma I hadn’t really picked up on before. She rarely looks anything remotely like as young as her character is supposed to be, but still, she’s an attractive woman, simply not in a way that’s likely to get her a part on a WB teen show any time soon.

Running from the gun

However, it’s not all bad. In the last week, I’ve also watched Run Lola Run, an obscure little German art/action film I’d heard a great deal about, and that I’m aware has been very visually influential over the past three years or so, but had never managed to see prior to this. Paul had a tape of it on his shelves, and despite the fact that Hartmut had told me long ago this wasn’t really worth watching, and Paul noted that he’d never been able to finish watching it, I tossed it in the VCR, and was surprised by how well made a film it was, and how much I enjoyed it.

The central conceit of the film isn’t, I suppose, really all that startling: the main character, Lola, has a really really bad day, and at the end of each sequence, she somehow manages, apparently through sheer force of will, to go back to the beginning and do it all over again, varying her actions each time until she finally manages to prevent a tragic ending and resolve the difficulties in a manner she finds satisfactory.

This idea is pretty obviously taken from video games, where whenever things go suddenly bad and your viewpoint character/icon dies, you just go back to the last place you saved your game and try again until you manage to get things right. However, prior to this movie, this basic idea had never been done in action films before, and I found the concept, and the movie itself, charming. It wasn’t simply about Lola doing things differently each time, but we also got to see how Lola’s most minor actions profoundly impacted the lives of various people around her during the twenty minutes she keeps doing over and over again, and as Lola kept trying, we also got a wider and wider view of exactly where each of the minor characters interacting in this ongoing drama was doing, and where they had been, and where they were going, as Lola literally ran through their lives. Simple things, like Lola arriving to see her father a few minutes later or earlier, had a profound impact on her life and his (and, fascinatingly, none of Lola’s different actions had the slightest impact on her mother, who carried on with her life exactly the same way regardless of what Lola did or didn’t do).

The idea behind the movie seems to be the rather Capra-esque one that each person touches every other person they encounter in ways that can be either meaningless or significant, and the most minor deviations can make unbelievably profound differences. There also seems to be an element of anti-determinism in the movie; the underlying notion seems to be that we can re-shape our destinies and make our lives better than nature intended them to be by sheer force of will.

I’ve read a few reviews that commented on Lola’s superhuman ability to shatter glass with her scream, stating that this particular detail made the whole movie seem too absurd and fantastic for them to accept. I found this to be very nearly a necessary and essential element of the movie, as it established (at least, to me) that Lola was an extraordinary person, whose outrage at the unfairness of fate manifested itself in a very visceral manner. This doesn’t really explain how it is that Lola manages to jump back in time and do things over so many times until she finally finds an outcome she can accept, but it does at least establish that this isn’t something that just anyone can do… only Lola, or someone else with the same indomitable will to live, and to keep those she loves alive and safe from harm, could accomplish these seemingly impossible feats.

I am not impressed

I finished the first book Mel loaned me, The Uncanny, by someone whose name I can’t remember right now (I gave her the book back, so I can’t just look and see). It was actually pretty enjoyable… fun characters, a reasonably interesting plot, and an intricate story full of a lot of enjoyable Illuminati-style stuff, with a splendidly wicked villain trying to get hold of the formula for a mystical immortality serum that is hidden away in some obscure historical paintings, while a small group of eccentric protagonists does their best to stop him.

However, the second book she pressed on me, an anthology by Dean R. Koontz, has so far… well, let’s just say, I’ve been sneering at Koontz and those who read his bilge for years now without ever really reading anything of his at all, and now that I’ve read the first novella in this collection (“Strange Highways” is the name of the anthology and the novella both), and I’m pleased to find out that apparently I was right all along.

I can see how Koontz is so popular. He does have a real flair for the dramatic, as well as for tapping into very common, wish fulfillment style fantasies and he pushes all the right emotional buttons. His prose is horribly purple but generally quite clear, and while the irrepressible rumbling avalanche of his narrative is frequently disfigured by horrible textual blotches like “The winged creature might have been a dark angel seeking shelter in some sacred bower”, that’s not the sort of literary hideousness that the average reader is going to notice.

Leaving aside a prose style very nearly as subtle and witty as any three of the seven plagues of Israel, I have to say that as a plotter Mr. Koontz would make a wonderful siege engine. In “Strange Highway”, for example, we are first introduced to a protagonist who is a weary, beaten, bitter fellow in his forties, a man who once had much promise as a writer (ooh, a writer who writes about heroes who want to be writers, now, that’s original) but who has seen his beloved older brother succeed wildly while he himself has never done anything but fail. As the story goes on, we see this miserable, wretched failure, this hollow, paltry excuse for a man, apparently given yet another opportunity by divine, smiling providence to set his life to rights, by going back in time twenty years and undoing a rash, thoughtless, senseless decision that was, apparently, the crux and turning point of not only his own life, but many other lives, as well.

At first, it seems that our hero must simply, quite literally, travel ‘the road not taken’, driving his car up a road that long ago ceased to exist, a road that, twenty years before, he had intended to take, but then hadn’t, with results that had wound up inevitably destroying his hope and his life. As our hero heads up this road, however, he meets a girl whose car has broken down beside the road… a girl that, in his previous history, he of course never encountered, and who, it turns out, without his intervention, died a gruesome and horrible death. Now, however, he has a chance to undo all that, and simply by taking this road, he’s altered this girl’s future and his own.

In and of itself, that might be a nice story… middle aged loser gets an unexpected chance to make a different choice, saves someone’s life, and winds up with a much happier life because of it. And if this was just an Alan Brennert short story or novella, well, that would pretty much be the long and short of it… we might then watch the courtship develop between our rejuvenated hero and his newly discovered amour, and perhaps there might be some mystical price to be paid somewhere down the line for this apparent divine intervention, but, nonetheless, the focus would be on the characters themselves, and thinks would remain at least somewhat credible.

However, this is a Dean R. Koontz short story, so… well. First, it turns out there is this horrible serial killer who was going to rape, torture, and kill the poor girl, and who, in the hero’s original past, did that, because the hero didn’t drive up that road and stop him. But that’s not melodramatic enough for Koontz, oh no. Having the hero and his new main squeeze have to triumph over an evil serial killer… well, that’s Movie of the Week stuff, but still, it’s something in the ballpark of realism; after all, there are serial killers, and it’s reasonable that someone might, simply by deciding to travel one road or another, actually save or doom someone else to a grisly death at the hands of one, without ever knowing it.

However, Koontz’s serial killer is no mere serial killer. In real life, if a serial killer doesn’t get to kill one particular victim, well, they tend to shrug, keep driving, and pick out another one. Serial killings are generally random and opportunistic. But this serial killer is different. He’s demonically demented; he’s picked out very specific victims and has a very specific plan; he wants to create some blasphemous tableau with the bodies of 12 murder victims desecrating an old church in some weird parody of the Last Supper, so he needs this particular victim, and nobody is going to get in his way. Koontz’s hero and heroine must not only escape this serial killer, they have to confront and defeat him.

And if that isn’t melodramatic enough, well, this whole drama is being played out in a mostly abandoned mining town in the Pennsylvania mountains, which has this subterranean coal fire raging underneath it that at any moment may cause random areas of the town to collapse into the roaring, hellish flames below. And in addition to that, well, it turns out that this serial killer happens to be the hero’s beloved older brother, and his beloved older brother just happens to have made a deal with the devil himself and is now demonically possessed and a supernaturally powerful force of evil, and this whole thing isn’t just a chance for the hero to somehow redeem himself by changing this one crucial moment in his life, no, it’s all about the hero re-embracing his childhood faith in God.

Yes, God Himself turned back time so this beaten, bitter, shell of a man could undo one random, horribly consequential decision, find his religious faith once more, marry a babe, and write a lot of sappy bestsellers… and, oh yeah, stop a demonically possessed serial killer who just happens to be his beloved older brother, too.

Leaving aside the notion that God is, apparently, happy to make these arrangements for the heroes of Dean R. Koontz novellas, while, presumably, letting various thousands or millions of other crippled, maimed, or dying unfortunates throughout the world just meander along through their miserable lives entirely on their own without any divine attention at all, I have to say, I have never in my life seen such a concatenation of completely ridiculous melodramatic conceits and absurd plot devices strung together in one narrative stream since… well, since the last time I read anything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Most of this story, for example, would never work if the hero realized that the serial killer was his brother, or if the hero even knew that there had been all these horrible killings on that pivotal night so long ago. However, other elements of the story require the hero to know his brother is the serial killer, and in fact, to have known all along. So Koontz’ protagonist has the most shamelessly convenient form of traumatic amnesia imaginable… he can’t remember a damn thing until the plot requires him to, at which point, he recollects exactly as much as is necessary to further the plot and never so much as to derail it.

I shouldn’t even bother to detail the climax of the story, in which the hero keeps screwing up and getting killed by his brother the demented demonically powered Satan worshipping serial killer, and then God keeps throwing him back in time so he can do it all over again and get it right this time. This is an interestingly melodramatic effect, I suppose, if one is an absolute moron (which, it seems, many if not all of Koontz’ avid readers must be), but, to me, it simply underscored something that is generally true in all fiction like this, but that even vestigially competent writers are usually at some pains to try to keep their readers from realizing… namely, the hero is going to win in the end.

Another writer than Koontz… I’m tempted to say a better writer, because one presumes nearly any other writer would have to be… would try to inject some suspense into the narrative at this point, and perhaps make the reader think this might be one of those depressing Stephen King type stories where the good guy loses and the bad guy wins in the end, but oh no… Koontz has to be sure that we are all grindingly aware that no matter how long it takes, God is going to keep throwing this guy mulligans until he finally manages to get it right and beat the bad guy.

Which, I have to say, really seems like a cheap way for the Big Guy to win. I mean, if God is just going to hit the reset button every time Satan manages to win a set, I’d eventually think Satan would just give up.

I haven’t even mentioned the heroine of the story, who always knows exactly what the story needs someone to know about good vs. evil and God and Satan and demonic possession and supernatural workings at any given time, regardless of how absolutely ridiculous it is for a 17 year old girl to have all this in depth mystical and religious knowledge. But, well, apparently Dean R. Koontz isn’t at all shy about supplying himself with whatever completely ridiculous plot devices he needs at any given time, so that one shouldn’t surprise anyone, either.

It’s possible this may be the worst thing Koontz has ever written, and all his other stuff is brilliant and superlative compared to this. I don’t know. I’ll try to get through some of the other stuff in the anthology and let you know.

I will admit, Koontz’s afterword seems to be reasonably well written and is even funny in spots, although his wit is rather labored and heavy handed most of the time. But the fact that someone can write a conversational, informal essay in a reasonably entertaining fashion doesn’t mean they can also write structured fiction that’s worth a good goddam, and if “Strange Highways” is any indication, Koontz really can’t.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.