In which there’s an amazing cake!
Today was the office “comfort food” potluck. (I brought a casserole.)
There are two birthdays in the office this month; mine is one of them. And Dani, whom I didn’t even know was a baker, brought in this fantastic cake:
Isn’t that thing just freakin’ awesome?!?
In which there’s a vague overview.
The character that’s been living in my head for the last decade is an alien.
The premise is that extraterrestrials have always been here; a ship (which happens to be self-aware and is currently hidden from human satellite surveillance at the bottom of the ocean) crashed on earth during the time of the pharaohs. The beings on it were capable of extreme self-directed genetic mutation. Being bilaterally symmetrical, they made themselves look like humans and have been here the whole entire time, a secret subculture among us.
They have their own government and social hierarchy. They have wealth, access to advanced tech they can use but not produce, and lab-like enclaves around the globe. They live among us, worldwide. There are about five million of them.
They had their own version of the Prime Directive, but they certainly didn’t hesitate to direct the shape of human science. After all, they had a freakin’ supraluminal spaceship and we didn’t even have steam engines yet, let alone anything that would help them get their boat back into space, so one could argue that they had to help where they could.
Some of our greatest scientists? Are them. Reinventing the wheel.
Languages around the world contain words we’ve learned from them. Insert a lot of sci-fi genre jokes… Roddenberry would have known one of them, for instance, and many Star Trek words and concepts would actually be out of their culture. They’d be the source of Heinlein’s “grok,” as they’d eat portions of their dead in order to avoid genetic flaws.
Human behavior that makes little sense would have been learned from them. They mate for life. When one of the pair dies, the other dies as well, so it turns out that they actually introduced humans to life-long commitments because they have a biological drive to pair up even though we don’t.
They’re dual-gendered like humans, but for reasons unknown to them they quit having daughters a generation after arriving and have been breeding with us for thousands of years. They breed true because they have incomprehensibly long, complex DNA. I have no idea how to explain that, but humor me here.
They’re called T’Kaa (though it would probably be better if I chose a well-known alien race name out of sci-fi cannon). They even go into kemmer (nod to LeGuin), a hormonal/sexual state during which they achieve, say, adolescence, or mate-bonding, or conception.
The character in my head is one of these aliens. His family has been breeding for beauty and intelligence for well over five thousand years; he is an omnibus prodigy and has multiple unrelated PhDs by the time he’s a teenager, including one in music performance of classical guitar. In his early twenties he blossoms into a phenomenon that even his own species hasn’t seen in three thousand years: massive strings of dormant DNA activate and he becomes a walking miracle… or menace, depending on how you look at him.
He can manufacture anything he wants in his own body and secrete it any way he likes; he can compel all members of his own species at will, and humans too (only with less subtlety), by simply sweating or breathing. He could, if he wished, manufacture a plague and exhale it into the world, wiping the face of the earth of all life. He can heal his own body of any illness or injury. He’s a genius. He’s insanely rich. He’s terrifyingly powerful.
He’s also a pop star, who basically keeps himself famous by filling concert halls with excellent pheromones. Everybody loves him. His orgies are legendary.
He’s called a sh’corne, which is a type of creature that only emerges when there’s a great need for one. Past bearers of the title have stopped plagues, healed millions, and changed the course of T’kaa history.
He has authority among his own kind by virtue of his House (although he’s House Mondavi, not Atreides), what he is genetically, and their own biological imperative to obey him because of both, but most of them think he’s fairly ridiculous. No one knows why a sh’corne has manifested since there doesn’t seem to be a particular threat against the T’kaa.
Then it turns out that the ship – repository and Archive of all things known to both species – needs to be moved; seismic activity indicates that she’s about to fall into a terminally deep fissure in the bottom of the ocean.
So a flurry of activity among the T’Kaa occurs and the upshot is that our hero, the pop icon Jake Mondavi, goes on TV amd says, “Hey, I know y’all think I’m a rock star, which I am, but it turns out I’m also not human. Here’s the documentation of my weird physiology etc etc etc. Oh, and we need help from several earth governments to move our mothership before she falls into a freakin’ chasm where we can’t get to her ever again.”
And hilarity ensues as humanity realizes that it’s been manipulated by aliens for all of recorded history, and that a bunch of us are actually them.
In which I ramble.
Money
Since I’m going to New York, I need money. Which is why I agreed to work on Sunday.
It was quiet. Very quiet. And after the other guy left, it verged on creepy… being all alone in the Drumheller building made me glad I had Bindu with me. I watched two feature-length films and three episodes of Red Dwarf, season one, and took fewer than ten calls all day long. And got paid overtime for it!
All of which is another way of saying that while you may think that today is Tuesday, it’s actually Wednesday for me.
Music
I’m hoarding gig money, too. The band still owes me $200 for gigs paid by check (who DOES that? pays a band with a fucking check?!) and I’ll probably make another bill this Friday (if I’m lucky. We don’t have a guarantee for the Friday gig; if the upcoming Marquee article doesn’t drive traffic to the venue I’ll be walking outta Merchants with maybe fifty bucks).
Reading
I’m reading three books simultaneously. None of them are really doing anything for me.
I discussed this vague dissatisfaction with G’ma and she says that years of reading heavily will make it hard for you to be charmed; you’ve read it all before. The three books that I’m reading are all good, they’re just not giving me that excited rush I have come to miss… maybe this is the period of malaise that will cause me to start actually writing. I’ve noticed myself lately reading about writing, and maybe it’s a sign.
I do happen to have an entire cast of characters in my head… it’s just that the main character, the alien? Would require WAY TOO MUCH RESEARCH to ever write convincingly. And is there any serious science about pheromones in humans? Yeah, my point exactly. Way too much research.
Eh. I’ll find something good to read sooner or later. I hope.
Human Gender
In other news, these are the Wikipedia articles I read today: eunuch, hijra, Brihannala, third sex, GID, proprioception, pomosexuality, and vestibular caloric stimulation.
I looked up eunuch to verify the spelling, then read the article by accident. Which led to reading about Hijiras, and then discovering that Arjuna spent some time as a transgendered male in the Mahabharat, which I totally did not know. I re-read the third sex article ’cause I haven’t done so in awhile, then arced off into the biological-vs-psychological arguments about various gender identifications and ended up at GID and pomo.
VCS was something I just didn’t know about. I mean, who knew that pouring water into the ears was a test for brain stem death? Certainly not I.
I fucking love Wikipedia!
In which I’ve seen in the past week both of my parents and all of their siblings and nearly all of their siblings’ spouses and children.
For no particular reason, both of my parents came to town to visit this week. They’ve been divorced for twenty-seven years, so it’s strange that they should both have shown up at the same time. Made my week pretty busy, actually.
My dad rolled into town in his RV with his brother on board, and we all went to see my aunt, their sister, for dinner. There was a large feast at my house with my mom and all of her siblings. My dad took me out to lunch on Tuesday and out to dinner last night. There was ice cream cake at the house for G’ma’s birthday. Suffice it to say, the diet suffered this week.
Hanging out with family is informative. I know from having looked at a bunch of my female relatives exactly where my tits are going to be in twenty years. I have learned that my dad and I are extroverts and my mother and brother are introverts. I listened to the Hall women tell me most emphatically that I’m not pudgy. I rediscovered that Morgans will drink until the bar closes.
Pretty cool, really, to be back around family. In the 15 years I spent in the Midwest, I saw my mom twice and my dad maybe five times, and the rest of my family only once: the weekend I got married. I didn’t really have anyone around to bug me about birthdays, holidays, family events, grave sites, and the like.
I was an island. I liked it.
But I also like being back in the middle of my family again. Walla Walla is where my parents are from; this is where my relatives come to come home.
Of course, this relative-fest in the middle of September probably means that no one will be around for the holidays, but that’s okay. G’ma and I will eat cookies and drink mugs of tea without them.
In which your intrepid narrator will be Out Of The Office.
I’ve been telling everyone I’m going to New York for about four years. This year, I SWORE I’d get there NO MATTER WHAT… but then I changed jobs and thought, well, the job change was all for the good, but I bet I won’t be getting any vacation time this fall, damn it.
But! Since there’s no hurt in asking, I asked the new job if I could take a week off already even though I’m brand new, and they, awesomely, said yes!
I’m so excited. I can’t wait to see Deboka, and Jake, and Derby, and Barbara, and hopefully VUBOQ too, and maybe meet some online friends IRL for the first time! YAY!
In which this is a very special OMG SO MUCH FAMILY edition.
Friday after work I jogged home and took a 3-minute shower. The boys picked me up in the band van at 6:30 and we drove to an RV park in Wallula to play the opening night of a biker rally.
When we arrived, there was no one there but the band, the sound guy, and the dozen employees of the rally.
We set up. Darkness fell. The only lights on the whole property were the two on the bandstand. A biker chick took her top off on stage, and a biker dude ran around with a giant latex cock hanging out of his fly. By the end of our last set, there were probably 80 people there.
I heard there were about 800 people the next night. Sigh.
Saturday, MY WHOLE ENTIRE FREAKING FAMILY SHOWED UP IN TOWN OMGWTFBBQ. Moms, dads, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, oh my! After dinner with the maternal side, my brother and I went out with our uncle Dangerous Dan (our dad’s brother) and painted the town about fifty shades of red. There are no pictures yet because my cell phone was dead and the other pictures are on digital cameras at home.
Sunday I was pretty useless and laid around nursing a hangover when I wasn’t chatting with my mom or my aunt at the house.
Today I’m sitting at work talking on the phone and doing my job, but am mostly waiting for PAY DAY. Gonna buy a plane ticket to NEW YORK CITY tomorrow, oh yes I am.
New York! I’m comin’ to visit you!
In which I’m a little worried about my instrument.
I’m playing the Rally In The Valley – a biker rally, natch – tomorrow night. Outside. At night. It will most likely be both damp and chilly: not good conditions for a weak voice.
Then I’m supposed to play a chichi benefit gig on Saturday afternoon in the Tri-cities.
Both of which are awesome, of course, except for the fact that my instrument did not respond well to being used during band practice last night. I sang for less than an hour, and not even in full voice, and today woke up sounding like a bullfrog.
I have enough voice to talk on the phone at work, but I (a) don’t think I’m going to make it all the way through the gig tomorrow night and (b) will probably be utterly voiceless on Saturday.
This is bad because I want to do a good job at these gigs and I want the money.
I haven’t had a voice-related problem not concurrent with an upper respitory infection in twenty years, but I have been through it. The only cure is time and liquids and rest; and if I don’t do those things the instrument will just drop out completely and there’s nothing I can do about it. With gigs to do, the whole thing is just bummin’ me out.
In other news, my dad is arriving in town on Friday, and my mom is arriving on Saturday and they’re both going to expect to be able to hang out with me. (They divorced when I was 13 so it’s pretty amusing that they’re both showing up the same week; I haven’t seen either of them in a few years.)
Query: is it possible for your parents to give you laryngitis remotely?
In which this is what I did with myself on my three-day weekend.
Thursday I went out and, inexplicably, got drunk after band practice. I think the sober dude who was driving me around – to three different bars – might have been hoping I’d get drunk enough to lay him, but I’m old and crafty so his plan (if it fact there even was one) failed! Hah hah!
Friday SUCKED. Talk about a monster headache. Whoo boy. Ouch.
Friday night, I played the Pepsi stage at the Walla Walla county fair with the boys. The gig was meh (we had to compete with the sounds coming from the rodeo, which was about TWELVE FEET AWAY), but there was a consolation and it was falafel (cue angelic choir):
That’s the first falafel and hummus I’ve eaten that I didn’t have to make myself in two years! It was freakin’ delicious!
Saturday, I went and saw my stylist Jolene and she colored my hair. It is now this awesome color… er, these awesome colors:
Since I had a gig at one that afternoon and my coloring went long, I didn’t get a trim. I’m going after work tonight for that.
The gig was playing by the pool at Basel Cellars for stomp (basically, drunk people walking on grapes for no good reason). This was the view from my mic:
We played stomp there last year too. Although the hors d’oeuvres are yummy, playing on the opposite side of the pool from the party is bit like being aural wallpaper.
Saturday night, I went with my drummer to Wildhorse casino and saw an R&B act, and then we hung out with the band – a really smokin’ rhythm section – until the wee hours of the morning. There was a lot of really cool discussion about music, family, poverty, the music business, and personal anecdotes. I had a blast.
I woke up the next day with laryngitis.
Sunday and Monday I read The Magicians. It fucking rocked. So much that I even went to the author’s website and sent him a message telling him so. I’ve been having such crap luck with novels lately that I felt he needed to know that I hadn’t devoured a novel with such one-pointed devotion in a long time, and that I thanked him from the bottom of my reader’s heart to have had a taste of that again. The main character is hard to like (because he’s wholly and unsalvageably emotionally stunted) but it was still a really great story and a wonderful read.
I spent most of Sunday and Monday in silence, so the voice is nearly healed. I’d never really considered before that I make all of my money with my voice; if I were suddenly struck permanently mute I’d have to change jobs and hobbies altogether… how freaky is THAT?
In which I post about my life on Facebook, because the Internet is self-reflective like that.
I don’t know if it’s The CurseTM coming or I’ve just used up the day’s compassion for sloppy thinking, but when I logged into Facebook and saw the utterly meaningless meme traveling through it, I got a little worked up.
Many people are posting this as their status: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.”
So, being me, I posted this: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care (unless they spent all their money on stupid shit and actually deserve to die), and no one should go broke because they get sick (unless it’s their own fault because they ate at McDonald’s three times a day for 27 years).”
Heh. Pretty clever, huh?
Apparently not. My friend Jake asked, “So… You don’t think we need health care reform? How disappointing, Mush! Who are you?”
Well, when your friend asks you who you are, you gotta answer! And this is what I said:
“Of course I want health care reform. But it ain’t just gonna suddenly be free awesome health care for everybody, now is it? I know from reading my Vonnegut that people are NOT all equal, and pretending that we are is idiotic because it leads to handicapping and I will be damned before I’ll accept handicapping to make me as dumb as the chick I just got off the phone with!
“In some schools, they don’t let sports teams win because they don’t want the losers to feel bad. This is what happens when we try to homogenize and make everyone equal. We’re not equal. Some are much better at living, much better at liberty, and much better at pursuing happiness. Others are stupid, or lazy, or ignorant, or entitled, or just plain nasty.
“We are not all equal. We are entitled to equal opportunity under our country’s constitution, but we are not inherently equal in value or talent.
“Some people are deliberately more expensive, health care-wise, than others: smokers like myself, addicts, and the grossly obese, just to name a few. Do you want to pay for that?
“Right now we have a country full of obese, addicted, and old people. Do you want to pay for that? Do I? Hell, I’m poor enough I can’t pay for my own healthcare; how can I afford to pay for that family down the street, who, because of their choice to eat nothing but fast food, will all have diabetes and heart disease by the time they’re 35? Those conditions are both expensive to treat and avoidable.
“And although I respect the idea that everyone deserves to live, we don’t all deserve it equally. Pretending that every life is equally valuable is absurd: I myself don’t have as much value to my society as a gifted heart surgeon, but I do have more value than a 90-year-old with terminal cancer.
“So while I think that every effort should be made to save every life, I know that the world doesn’t work that way. If it did, we wouldn’t have the word ‘triage.’ In the UK, they say that deaths go up significantly during the last two months of the year because surgeons have quotas to fill and tend to quit doing operations after they’ve achieved them. People who need surgery in March are not inherently more valuable than people who need surgery in November, but they’re a lot less likely to die. Studies show that only one in five people who need surgery to reduce the risk of stroke actually get the surgery in time due to the way the healthcare system works there.
“Over here, if you’ve got the money, you get the surgery in time. So at least a portion of society gets adequate care… it just doesn’t happen to be the portion I’m in.
“There is in my estimation no way to make a perfectly fair system of health care in this world as it is, so today’s “post this as your status” Facebook meme is essentially empty. It doesn’t mean anything other than that we care in a half-assed way – only enough to repeat something toothless when it only takes us 5 seconds to do so.”
Let’s all remember that not too long ago I needed surgery myself, and I had no health insurance. Because of my extreme poverty the hospital gave me their services for free (somewhere around five grand worth) and it took me slightly over two years to pay off the surgeon, the lab, and the anesthesiologist. The only reason I’m not still paying it off is that my rent was only $50 a month during that period. That was LUCK, not worth. I didn’t “deserve” the excellent care just because I draw breath, and as a grown person I certainly hadn’t taken the responsible steps to grow an emergency nest egg or obtain health care insurance on my own. My results were, as I said, simply good luck.
So I’m not being a heartless bitch; I’m just saying, THINK ABOUT THIS, PEOPLE. Our system sucks, yes, but it may be that it sucks less than it could.
Thoughts?
In which I realize something about my generation. We distrust success.
Dear Starbucks,
Back when you were the new guy, we were super into you. We drank your coffee by the gallon. We drove out of our way to stop at your new stores on our way to work.
Then time passed, and you became this giant behemoth with stores on every single goddamned corner in the nation, and we dropped you like you were hot.
You had gone and done the unacceptable: you’d made it. You’d quit being our little local NW business-that-could, and become everybody’s damned coffee shop. You slut!
Now we avoid you because you’re no longer exclusive and hip and we go to local coffee shops instead. We talk shit about you whenever we see your green logo on a quaint downtown Main Street USA because your coffee ain’t like it used to be, back in the day when our love was new.
Well, being that all these truths are self-evident, I just wanted to let you know that I have a friend who recently started working for you and she’s changed my attitude. She overflows with enthusiasm when she talks about your corporate culture and your desire to give back with your ethical sourcing, environmental stewardship, and community involvement.
It occurs to me that you’re actually big enough to make a difference, if you really want to. The fact that you’ve over-saturated your market is our fault as much as yours: we threw money at you for twenty years. What were you supposed to do? Ignore it?
Keep up the good work. Be a good behemoth. I’m proud of you.
Warm regards,
Mush
I shopped at Walmarts because I was young and poor and they were cheap. Then they took over the world and now I loathe and hate Walmart. Same for Starbucks, Body Shop, and even Amazon.
Some of these businesses still get my money because they’re either really good at what they do or they’re the most convenient, but I no longer feel any kind of real emotional loyalty to them, like I did when they were little and new.
As soon as a business reaches a certain level of success, I quit trusting it.
Remember when Amazon deleted books off of people’s Kindles without warning, how outraged we were? Remember when they re-indexed their database and removed GBLT material from easy view, how offended we were? If a small company had made such a blunder, we would have accepted an apology with a grin. “Shit happens,” we’d have said, and kept supporting them. But when a big company does something like that we suddenly all put our conspiracy hats on.
Well, sometimes. Other times we just ignore it and keep shopping there. We know, for instance, that Walmart is a community-killer, but we keep shopping there because we’re brainwashed to think that it’s both cheaper and more convenient (which it isn’t if a store has been open for more than four years). We know, for instance, that Blockbuster censors the films they carry1, but we keep going there too.
We just don’t like it.
What size does a company have to be to earn our disdain? Why is huge success a target of such dislike? Where did I even get this attitude? If I inventory my opinons, I really do loathe big businesses, even if they’re big because I selected them and gave them money for years. Why do I like underdogs? Where did this attitude actually come from?
—
1 Googling this assertion these days comes up with a bunch of carefully-worded spin most likely seeded by Blockbuster itself saying that Blockbuster doesn’t censor films. Well of course they don’t literally censor films, they’re a rental place and not editors. But they do refuse to carry titles until the studios or distributors censor them to the organization’s Christian preferences (for this reason, I have never been a Blockbuster patron) and they got away with it because they were the largest rental channel in the nation for so long and had the clout to make such demands. Now they’re seedy little brick-and-mortars where they still exist at all, so I really don’t care if they demand censored films.
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4 random books from my Library!
