wildcat

[More noir crap.]

Candy Napoleon would gasp for breath, would stumble, would clutch his knees and dry heave from the running if he were built that way. He's not. He should be old, grizzled, half-dead from alcohol poisoning, but he's not. He's running, and he feels fine, even with the rebreather jammed into his pie-hole like an old boxer's mouthguard. His ears might fall off from space-leprosy, but Candy Napoleon could keep running until his heart eventually burst, followed by sympathetic brain-bursting. Which isn't really a deterrent anymore.

The perp's a little monster called Johnny Go-Cart, caught dealing crystal math to preschoolers. The result, synthetic autism, is creepier than real autism and always badly acted. Go-Cart also screws ferrets, or at least, that's what it says in neon felt-tip on a bathroom stall back at the station. Portions of Go-Cart's face are translucent. One of those boring, vending-machine modifications that cost less than a buck.

Napoleon leaps off the slidewalk and down onto a lower concourse, kicking up to full speed within six seconds of touchdown. Go-Cart's about five metres ahead, chugging and screaming obscenities only invented last week in the Curse Factories of Jupiter.

Napoleon aims his parse-gun. He aims his parse-gun while still at full tilt, eyes squinting through the ash-mist; he can do things like that. Lots of people can do things like that. Go-Cart dodges around bystanders, shuffling along under the influence of their various prescriptions. Napoleon dodges in perfect sync with Go-Cart, ballet-shuddering past Electric Nuns and holograms with baby-strollers.

He gets the shot again. Fires packets of streaming language into Go-Cart's spine. One sharpened epic poem and the bastard goes down, consciousness disconnected and fluttering in the haze while the body keeps running. The body will probably make it another mile before collapsing off the slidewalk and into a pit.

Napoleon halts beside the phantom, the after-image, shrieking noiselessly like a space-walker wigging out in the void. Napoleon is going to have to slow down soon, of course; can't keep running at full speed when he hits the second trimester. Doctor's orders. But until then he can pull in some bucks this way. He pulls out a spirit-bottle and licks his lips. "You're not going nowhere, Johnny Go-Cart."

Once upon a time, a young man's eyeballs became moths and fled their sockets. After his wicked stepmother threatened to lock him in the cupboard, the young man moved to California to become a DJ.

A woman with a slight under-bite fed whole peanuts to crows in front of Saint Ann's Academy; in return, the crows told her that her unborn child would grow up to become a dental hygienist. She smiled with her lips shut.

Madonna has begun to remind me of Elizabeth Bathory.

There was once a girl in Newfoundland who grew orchids instead of pubic hair. They smelled so sweet! She'd finger herself for hours, nostrils absently flaring.

Captain Hook's brief career in prostitution ended with unforeseen consequences.

The god Osiris was sliced into pieces by his brother Set and scattered throughout the land. Spurned lovers can be like that. His sister, Isis, put Osiris back together and they got married. Family reunions were awkward.

They had me at "Charles Darwin," and it looks beautiful.

1. Confront the alluring mesmerism of the Asteroid Witch! I'm very much in the mood to write some retro-futurist space opera.

2. Been asked to write a piece on Morrison & Quitely's All-Star Superman comic.

3. Still sick. Stuck at home for the next three days with the intention of healing myself. I expect to be blanked out on over-the-counter medication for most of it, I suspect.

Been there for a month and he was still startled by things. Waking up to a clock-radio with blue-glowing numbers instead of red or green. When the traffic light turns purple, you go, god damn you. A month living on a parallel Earth. It's not like he didn't try to go home -- but the local Professor Cyril was an alcoholic poet who worked for Pottery Barn and didn't really do quantum. "I wrote a poem about Schroedinger's Porpoise once, if that's any help." It wasn't.

Lots of things were the same. Tequila, for example. Or the dumb-ass running the States. Other things were not the same. People wore togas in the street. People paid hundreds of dollars for bedsheets to wear to the office.

He'd expected big things, like maybe Vietnam conquering France. He didn't expect the purple traffic lights or that ice cream was sucked from waffle boats instead of cones.

I spent approximately twenty minutes this evening thinking that I'd either lent Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man to somebody without remembering who or when, or alien thieves in five-dimensional squishsuits slipped out from behind the fridge at some point and stole it.

Then I found it, and added it to the latest pile of books I'm investigating. This is what I do: I pile things in significant places for the purposes of research, or to direct my irritation against, or whatever. Basically I got to thinking about weird short stories and wanting to write one (no, wait, all my short stories are weird), thought about Cory Doctorow's science fiction stories using famous titles, thought about Bradbury, there you go. There's also a copy of Robin Skelton's Hanky-Panky in there, and Vonnegut's Bluebeard, which is a novel and not short stories, but he wrote in an organic, episodic format and there was all kind of weird shit ideas in his stuff and.

I end too many sentences with conjunctions.

What was my point? Oh, right, I should probably organize my bookshelves at some point before I die, and maybe I should get more shelves so that I don't have all these knee-high piles of books on the floor. I'm starting to feel like Edward Gorey, and I can never find anything.

My father's bought a house in William's Lake and will be moving there over the summer. Moving back there, because we lived there until about 1986 before heading off to "scenic" Prince George. This probably means I'll be heading up there at some point to see the place, for good or ill. It has a lot of hills. William's Lake is hilly territory, and I'll probably end up at a rodeo, which will probably require me to get drunk, because it's a rodeo and that will require self-defense mechanisms. It's either booze or I walk around having flashbacks to Billy Crystal in City Slickers and Jack Palance. Jack Palance scares the crap out of me. The only thing creepier than Jack Palance is Jack Nicholson doing an impression of Jack Palance.

My father is moving in with a woman when he moves to William's Lake. As is traditional with Rawluk men, I found out he was officially with this woman at the same time he told me they were moving in together. More or less like how I happened to mention to my parents, back when I was nineteen, that the friend who was coming to dinner in a half-hour had been dating me for four months by that point. I think my mother nearly had an aneurysm. We do that. We're really terrible with dropping those sorts of bombs. I'd figured out months ago, sure, that my father was probably seeing the woman, but he'd only ever referred to her as a friend.



Getting two stories published in a small-press run of hand-bound books being put together by a librarian friend of mine. Most of the stories will be hers, but she's got a couple people contributing one or two. Both of mine are in different ways scandalous, and she's had to consult with me over the use of racist terminology in one of them. She understood the need for it to establish the setting and atmosphere of the story, but the first sentence had to be restructured so that it wasn't the first word, which is fine. I like that particular story a lot. It doesn't make me want to vomit or stare soundlessly at the ass of a closed door from the depths of a closet where nobody can find me, which is kind of the same thing as liking it.

The other one is plain smut, but it's smut that I wrote so it's basically hopeless, existential smut about an inability to connect in any meaningful way with the people around you, and there's no actual, direct sex in it (well...). And it's smut that's sort of preoccupied with the rocket science of Wernher von Braun, of all people. I should never direct a porn film, because it'd probably end up looking like a bad remake of Alien.



As I have every intention of getting over this damned cold, I'm looking forward to heading over to Vancouver on Sunday to spend a few days going to the art gallery, hanging out with Michael, seeing Matthew for the first time since before he left for France (finally!), head out to look at UBC a bit, and generally unwind. Four days off in a row that involves using no vacation time is not something to be taken lightly. I will of course demand martini bars and listless afternoons in coffee shops where scripts are spoken of, men debased with words, and hypothetical novels bandied about like other people talk about perfume.

It hadn't actually occurred to me that Third is Portishead's first new album in ten years. And Christian called it the epitome of Portishead, essentially and platonically Portishead. But now I'm thinking about it, listening to it. Someone mentioned the Silver Apples, there being a Silver Apples vibe there in the speed (or lack of same) in the rhythms. The jazz certainly isn't there in the same way. Well, in some of the tracks. "Plastic" could have been on the second album. "Nylon Smile" on the first. Many of the tracks are way more spare now.

I want my voice back. I sound like a toad right now, while the cold hangs on with nasty little claws that fit into the folds of my esophagus, dig in, you know.



The fourteenth issue of Matt Fraction's CASANOVA is out today. Final chapter of the "Gula" arc. It comes with its own soundtrack listing, so I cued up a playlist of the songs I could find. It does not end cleanly, "openly" is an understatement, there's plenty of salt in the wounds, so there had better be a new arc starting in a few months rather than just the series ending outright. Masks are pulled off in unexpected ways -- there's no way I could have predicted even a moment of this thing -- with bandages wrapped on top of bandages. I've enjoyed Fabio Moon's artwork less than his brother, Gabriel Ba, from the first arc. But Moon is still strong and really hit his stride with this one.

I mean, people find out their entire lives are a lie, only the audience already knew that and you can start to forget that the characters don't, really, right? And then it hits them and it's awkward, like a cocktail party and "Oh, you mean you didn't know? I'm so sorry."

There's absolutely fucked gender stuff going on in this series and because of this last issue, I have to go back and reread the entire thing to figure out what they all are. It's been awkward, the entire way through, lots of uncomfortable moments well executed, all that superspy sexuality left to ripen and overripen on the vine, plump and fragile, bruised under your fingers...

Reading a book of post-Cyberpunk fiction called Rewired 2, in which a link was drawn between pre-WW2 screwball comedies and postwar Film Noir. I hadn't ever seen the connection before, but it's something I'm caught on thinking about.

Also got myself a Technorati Profile.

As you were.

Raspberry-scented levitation gases billowed amorously from the ship's vents, while the Lady Evelyn Hamilton 77 fussed absently with her neoprene stockings. The walkway's fake wood creaked appropriately. She hated summering in the sky—there were still unmodified birds flying about, doing their business on everything, and Lady Evelyn had to function without a very dry martini, because of Zeppelin City's draconian prohibition. Three months without gin? The very thought! She reached up to pull at her pink hair's tight curls, getting a headache from the altitude. Mustn't have complain, though. It was not in her nature to complain. It did her darling Bertrand so much good to be up there in the low pressure, something about the levitation gas and its dreamy, dreamy effects...

She relaxed her hands, satisfied that her head would not explode. They'd chosen a ship moored at the outskirts of Zeppelin City to give them both some quiet time—as much as she disliked the place, this was to be a vacation for her as well, a safehaven from Oceanic society and its gossip. The altercation with Providence Glassworth 13—a 13, of all people!—ensured that Lady Evelyn needed some time to herself. Away from the casual cocktail party gossip of Zeppelin City's other inhabitants, the curious and wane things that they were.

Which left her alone, discounting the staff, with Bertrand. He was strapped to the ship's gasbag with cultivated hemp rope, upside-down, and she could make out his chest rising and falling. Breathing deeply, and giggling from whatever hallucination currently gripped him. Bertrand was naked, of course, hardly surprising—her husband had his particular preferences, pedestrian as they were. Public nudity? The very thought bored her so, but Bertrand adored the sensations. Lady Evelyn always kept their cabinets stocked with amplification drugs and simply nodded and smiled when he wanted to spend weeks and weeks without a proper onion blossom or octopus-skin knickers. It was her duty, after all.

© Ben Rawluk, 2008, all rights reserved.

The characters are a little cliché for me, sure, but this is more about the setting! I didn't expect Zeppelin City at all. And cloned aristocracy, of course.

I haven't even read all the awesome yet, but...

1. I get the distinct impression that Superman has unionized the Fortress of Solitude's robot labour pool. With a great benefits package.

2. "Well. Jetpack Hitler. Reality has finally jumped the shark." -- Ryan Choi, written by Gail Simone. All-New Atom book 3.

3. The first issue of Final Crisis starts off with mankind's "discovery" of fire, a great Prometheus riff, and includes the crime scene of a deicide.

4. Jack Kirby's OMAC collected, finally! Welcome to the World yet to come!

5. Machine Man being knocked around by the Incredible Hulk and hallucinating space gods.

There's other good stuff as well, and today has been a really great day off.

The spasms weren't getting any better. They weren't naturally occurring, per se, but the result of the sheer OH SHIT of finding himself implanted into an entire plastic body, some parts wobbly and other parts rigid. He was going to have to calm down, because there was no easy way to inject something that might cut off the movement. His stomach wasn't really a stomach, just a nutrient tank that had to be filled once every two weeks. He was going to have to calm down. Acute plastic shock -- one of those things, waking up in the morning with plastic eyes that fluttered up like a doll's, a tongue that tasted nothing (except the merest hint of texture).