Bahr's House of Exuberance

The Unexpected End of a Weblog

2011-07-05T11:13:00.000-07:00

Well, crap. I guess this may finally spell the end of my happenin' blog here on Google Blogger.

Oh, not due to lack of interest. In fact, I have enjoyed maintaining this blog in an "infrequent" status and having it serve as something of an archive of my own creative projects for the furious or curious.

No, the problem is that I recently moved to IMAP-based mail, after getting a smartphone that supported it (an iPhone), and since Windows Live Hotmail supports only POP and not IMAP, I have migrated to a GMail address. I have been going through the usual process of updating all my web accounts with my GMail address, and discovered that Google will not permit a GMail address to be associated with this account.

How strange is that?

This blog predates Google's changeover from Blogger Beta to just Blogger, and as a result it has been semi-crippleware for some time -- a number of functional upgrades that work just fine on my other blog (that I maintain for my non-fiction pen name, which DOES use a GMail address exclusively) are not available on this one. It looks like Google is just not letting anyone cross that threshold, or perhaps just not anyone who has already associated their Google account with a Windows Live Hotmail email address; I have no idea. They just want the Beta blogs gone, or something.

Whatever Google's reasoning, the whole blog situation just crossed the line from "no worries" to being "more bother than it's worth." My connected YouTube account with my band videos is easily enough rebuilt with a fresh account linked to both my GMail AND Google Plus. I don't want to leave legacy web logins out there that are associated with my old email address -- that's just begging for security issues down the road. Even worse, in order to log in to this blog at all, I have to log out of everything Google, which is a bother.

Thus, it appears it's time to wrap this up once and for all. I will leave these pages static until I have had time to archive the blog's complete contents (or as much of those contents as I care about), and then I'll be deleting it at long last. The final cog in the engine will probably be when Google Plus gets out of beta, because there's a fair chance I can just export the blog contents to that, and I'm willing to hold off just long enough to find out.

At some point, I may migrate over to WordPress. We'll see just how necessary or relevant that becomes. If I don't have a project underway that benefits from it, I won't have anything prodding me to get on with it... and as busy as I have been lately, anything unprodded is very likely to be left unaddressed. Priorities are priorities.

For the few who will read this before it goes away:

Late this November, my third child and first son is due! The name is as-yet undecided, but I'm super-excited about it. I love my daughters dearly, but there are some experiences that are meant for a father and son to share, and now I get to have those.
Congratulations to various of my friends: Jay and Katie on their wedding, Pat and Suzanne on the arrival of their second son, Ben and Kristin on their upcoming wedding, Jer and Melodi on their upcoming wedding, and new jobs for Jay, Brent, Mike G., and hopefully soon Aaron.
Here's hoping for the Cardinals to put together a good season in 2011 and reclaim the NFC West throne!

Thanks, all!
-Mike

Rush: Theme in Writing and Composition

2011-06-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

Greetings all!

Next week, I will be attending the Phoenix performance for the 2011 leg of Rush's "Time Machine" tour. I have been a Rush fan since grade school, so I consider any occasion to nerd out and listen to the virtuosity of Lee, Lifeson, and Peart to be cause for celebration.

Though time has been kind to Rush in a commercial sense, the band was never truly mainstream, and part of that is a simple consequence of genre. Progressive rock music is less accessible to the casual listener than simpler forms of pop music. Simplicity is not necessarily a defect; certainly the beautiful and elegant utility of Apple products vindicates simplicity qua concept. Conversely, complexity for its own sake is not necessarily appealing even to a dedicated listener; one need only look at the impressive but compositionally marginal work of DragonForce to understand that. However, with complexity there is room for more meaning, should a band find a direct enough voice with which to express it. Rush are masters of filling this room with consistent and unifying themes throughout their albums.

As veterans of the "prog '70s," Rush is known for lengthy, epic songs as much as for having that "classic rock feel." And yet by some astonishing turn of fate, Rush has never produced a concept album! I know it sounds impossible, but it's true: 2112 only filled one side of the record; Hemispheres likewise; Jacob's Ladder but half of that. Perhaps it is because of Rush's consistent strong thematic approach to albums that their lack, thus far, of a concept album has largely gone unnoticed. That will finally change with Rush's forthcoming album, "Clockwork Angels."

Two tracks from Clockwork Angels were released as an EP last year: "Caravan" and "BU2B" (Brought Up to Believe). Both are excellent and explore new ground while bearing the trappings of Rush's authentic voice and sound. Beyond those, however, nobody knows quite what Clockwork Angels is going to sound like or precisely what story it will tell, or whether it will turn out in time to be counted among the best progressive rock concept albums.

Since theme is an important aspect of writing and composition alike, I figured that revisiting Rush's album themes would be a useful exercise. They are:

Rush - no theme (or: It's Our First Album)
Fly By Night - Experience
Caress of Steel - Life
2112 - Volition
A Farewell to Kings - Progress
Hemispheres - Balance
Permanent Waves - Force
Moving Pictures - Perspective
Signals - Interaction
Grace Under Pressure - Conflict
Power Windows - Motivation
Hold Your Fire - Time/Instinct*
Presto - Expectations
Roll the Bones - Risk
Counterparts - Duality
Test For Echo - Socialization
Vapor Trails - Persistence
Snakes and Arrows - Belief
Clockwork Angels - to be discovered...

None of the above is my interpretation; the members of Rush have identified the themes of their work explicitly in interviews and in books like the circa-1988 band biography Visions by Bill Banasciewicz.

In retrospect, like the answer to a riddle, once you know the answer, it seems obvious and you wonder how you didn't recognize it without being told. What do you think about the themes? Is there an album where you don't think the theme held up cohesively throughout? Or is there an album where it is so pervasive that there is something of a narrowing effect taking away from the scope of the work? (I'm looking at you, Roll the Bones.)

Whichever way you interpret it, I don't think there can be any denying that Rush's themes are at the very least identifiable and distinct. Contrast that with pop music, most of which conveys only the general theme, "Hey, baby, I want to get into your pants." That is certainly a laudable purpose, but one would think after a while that the subject of sex is getting adequate artistic coverage, and that there are perhaps other topics worth examining. You know, for a little while. And then we can go back to sex.

*Peart specified that Hold Your Fire was a dual-themed album.

Five Haiku for My Daughters

2011-03-16T16:32:00.000-07:00

Five Haiku for My Daughters
by Michael Bahr, 2011

Spring is in the air
Endless wells of energy
Let's go to the zoo!

Early season's lunch
Sweet banana chocolate pie
Smear it on my face!

Shining sun above
Dora roams the grassy field
"Swiper, no swiping!"

Sunrise comes so soon
Waking up before the dawn
Surely Mom won't mind.

Seasons come and go
Mommy loves and Daddy smiles
Future, here we come!

At Some Point Preparation Must End

2011-02-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much to write these last two months due to being busy with one thing or another (or one of six or seven other things). That's a positive problem, as I see it.

I have a non-fiction book wrapping up this week. Following that I have another one on deck that's much smaller in scope and should only take forty or fifty hours to write, which means evening and weekend work spread out over a few months if I want to take my time with it, and I do. Other than spending some time doin' the taxes and finding a way to fit some actual "free" weekends in there somewhere, that's the story of the first half of my 2011, at least as it projects out from here.

Once the second nonfic is done, I'm actually going to take a hard left. We'll see how this works. I have decided it is time to finish Space Dudes (working title). I've been writing (and rewriting, and then scrapping, and restarting, and writing again, and rewriting again) that book since 1999. Twelve years is enough. By this time, even Tolkien had finished his worldbuilding. By this time, Rand had gone from Anthem to The Fountainhead and was halfway to Atlas shrugging. Come hell or high water, Space Dudes needs to be finished. I don't know whether it's going to take half a year or two years or five more years or what. But I need to do it, and it will be published (or rejected) under my real name, not my nonfiction pen name.

I've been studying the craft of fiction in greater depth in these past two years than in the first 34 years of my life and certainly since the first 17 years of the start of my writing "career" at 19 (see links at left). I think I finally understand enough to roll with it, though of course I am always seeking to learn more every day. And I think I've finally "broken" my story for Space Dudes. "Breaking" a story is the writer's term for finally grasping/determining/asserting the essential structure of the narrative that will carry the story from It Was A Dark And Stormy Night to And They Lived Happily Ever After. And in terms of the craft, I have arrived. I finally appreciate conflict as the glorious tool it is, and I have finally (I hope) overcome my fear of probing into the uncomfortable, the forbidden, and the unsociable in order to reveal the truth those conventions are used to evade. I've never been sharper at exploiting tropes. I'm obnoxious enough to stomp on the boundaries, but humble enough to know I'm better off leaving those boundaries intact and relishing the way they force my creative focus.

Nothing left to do but get on with it.

Mike's Top Ten Experiences of 2010

2010-12-31T19:13:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

I liked this format last year... I figured it made sense to use it again! Enjoy this revery of a year now past.

There were no new babies born this year -- to Steph, at least -- and we neither moved nor reached any particular career milestones. The year 2010, then, was all about the direct experiences. And of those we had plenty. In chronological order again, since why organize when you can just look it up:

1. January was fantastic. Steph and I reached three years married, and celebrated by spending a weekend in Vegas that was paid for by our poker table opponents. Allie reached two years alive and breathing, though little has changed with her since then. My friends the Daltons welcomed their third child, Aitana. Finally, the Cardinals beat the Packers 51-45 in overtime to end one of the wildest Wild Card games in NFL history. I still watch YouTube clips of Karlos Dansby's fumble recovery in overtime that won it. (For now, it's available here; that link may die because they keep pulling down the videos due to copyright claims -- but if you go to YouTube and search for it, you'll find it.) I don't think I'll ever get tired of hearing Joe Buck's horrible call of the play: "Extra man on the blitz, Rodgers gets a hand to the face, the BALL is OUT, the Arizona Cardinals win it!" In fact, every time the Cardinals got pounded in 2010 by some cream-puff team they would have shredded if Warner hadn't retired, I watched that Dansby play again and found my happy place.

2. Finally bought the dorkmobile. Yep, minivan time. After all was said and done, no vehicle has even close to the same utility when transporting multiple infants and/or toddlers. I picked up a deal in February on a 2005 Honda Odyssey, and it has served us well enough that ten months later it is our only vehicle. Not bad for someone else's castoff. I figure once the girls get toward ages five to eight or so, I can convert us back to normal cars or trucks. I'm still on the lookout for a cheap commuting appliance, and offers like the $99 Civic lease definitely have my attention. We'll see. In another positive note, I managed to improve my sleep disorder situation considerably.

3. In April, Steph and I took Evey to Dallas to see Steph's brother James get married to his college sweetheart, Danielle. I discovered that in parts of Texas, it just rains 24/7. I suppose there must be little demand for underground sprinkler systems in that region. The entire trip was enjoyable, and both Steph's family and Danielle's family are excellent people, which is consolation that I missed Ray Powers's 40th birthday party in Vegas that weekend. Almost.

4. The end of the band thing... or is it? Aaron, Johan, and I put together "Premium Blend," a cover band project with all the potential in the world but no established lead singer and logistical difficulties galore. The experience was so frustrating I put aside all musical attentions for the rest of the year... until December, when my muse was rekindled by the arrival of my new Ovation acoustic guitar to replace the precious axe I lost when our home was robbed in 2009. To play my new guitar is to experience musical joy. It is that simple. Now I'm not sure what the outlook is. Johan and I have the skill and discipline to perform at a high level. Aaron and I have the trust and dedication to put together a robust project. We may need to move a few people around on instruments, but I'm convinced we can forge a functional project out of this. The entire experience prompted me to sort through my old band memorabilia, a process still underway as of this writing -- I have posted some of my past tourography here on this blog and I have a bevy of video that's headed toward YouTube and that will be shared here also.

5. By mid-year, we discovered that child care was so expensive that we were losing money by having Steph work instead of taking care of the girls. The flip side of that equation was that we did not yet have the luxury of living on my salary alone (though with ramen and oatmeal, we might be able to scratch things out at that level). The solution? Steph came through with flying colors by doing day care for a couple of her friends on the side. It's a lot of work for the small amount of money it earns, but the main benefit is the cost it defrays -- the cost of day care for Allie and Evey! So, in a way, Steph makes more now than when she was working. We just don't see the gross revenue from that. Only the "net." How strange is that, though? Having to quit your job to save money? The math doesn't lie, but that still just seems wrong.

6. Year of the Barbecue! We kicked off the late spring with some grillin' gatherings at my place, then had Aaron and Dalton and their families over for the 4th of July, and then four monthly NFL Football Sundays at my place with an assortment of friends and acquaintances. I got passing decent at cooking steaks, I pretty much completely mastered rolled meat (dogs, sausages, brats), and with the help of some friends I got to grill up everything from teriyaki chicken strips to filet mignon. We have some elk steaks in the freezer... guess what's next on the agenda? I finally outgrew the ol' charcoal griller, too. For some future year, perhaps 2011 but perhaps later, I'll need a larger gas grill with the various accoutrements.

7. 2010 was a particularly good year for me at the poker tables. There were times I attended the quarterly Stenger Tournament and donated to the cause, and certainly there were pickup games in which I earned nothing, but most of the games I sat this year ended up as significant wins. Steph and I turned a few hundred dollars into around a grand in Vegas in January, I split the overall win twice at Stenger's and once at Ray's, and I did well in ad-hoc games. In particular, my Omaha hi-lo game improved, mainly due to two pieces of advice I heeded: First, I tried to avoid playing into all-in situations. There's no need to risk an entire tournament on most hands, even if they feel really strong. Second, when playing Omaha in particular, I tried to play for the entire pot. This meant I mucked hands that did not look likely to be able to play both high and nut-low, unless I had a blowout hand for potential no-low boards (something like 9s 9h 10s 10h, for example). The results speak for themselves.

8. October brought with it the publication of my most successful nonfiction book yet. Again, no discussion of it here as it is under a different pen name and "brand," but it's not exactly a big secret. I am not exactly rolling in the Benjamins or anything, but it really helped us compensate for the time Steph had to spend out of work before starting day care.

9. Steph and her College Republican friends were thrilled with the outcome of the midterm elections in early November. As an Objectivist, I did not have quite as much to celebrate, but anything that contributes to gridlock in the context of a Leviathan state is a victory for liberty on some level. This time period added one great chestnut to my year, though, and a review here on this blog is definitely in the cards: The Wheel of Time, Book 13: "The Towers of Midnight," by Brandon Sanderson, brought the decades-spanning epic to the doorstep of its grand finale, and was Sealed Awesome In A Can the entire way through. My rankings for the books in the series, now, from best to worst, go: 4, 13, 5, 12, 1, 6, 2, 3, 9, 11, 7, 8, 10.

10. The holidays this year were a nonstop crush, not the least of which was because I was slammed with high-profile projectry at work and ended up sick during my brief winter vacation at home. The girls absolutely loved it, though -- so much so that they were "Christmased Out" after the toys and gifts kept on coming -- and that put a smile on my face! Just before Thanksgiving, I finished my first run through the P90X fitness "lean" program. Things went well -- my muscle mass increased and my sleep patterns improved further -- and I am excited to start again in January. Also awesome during this time period was TRON Legacy. I don't care what the reviews say: it was an excellent sequel to the original, and in the context of the original it not only made sense but was great fun. And it looked outstanding.

May your 2011 be happy and prosperous!

Tell Me a Story

2010-03-31T15:50:00.000-07:00

When learning the craft of writing, which is really the craft of storytelling in the medium of the written word more so than mastery of the written word by itself, one begins to see the seams and joints in other works. One begins to recognize bad writing where one originally thought a given piece of writing to be good. It is frustrating because once the eyes are opened to bad writing, it seems to be everywhere. The good news is that the really good writing generally stands up.

For example, when Steph and I are watching an episode of a favorite TV show, we will (both of us, now) catcall the plot developments before they happen, and predict the resolution before it arrives. We are rarely off base by much, if at all. This can happen for good writing or bad, of course, but when it's bad, it is a disappointment because we know it could have been done better. I am not simply talking about creative tropes here. David Eddings wrote nothing but tropes, and his writing was great.

The problem comes when a story is doing a bad job cutting through the useless gunk and getting to the business of telling us what happens to the protagonist and what he or she is going to do about it, and thus the story lacks drama. We as an audience have to know what the protagonist wants to achieve, who stands in the way, and why it has to happen now. Writers refer to these things as the Goal, the Nemesis, and the Ticking Clock. A good story keeps raising the stakes until the protagonist realizes how he must transform to meet his goal and defeat his nemesis, all before the ticking clock runs out. The action in the story related to those three things is known as Drama. And so few stories dramatize well! David Mamet correctly noted that any scene that has two characters talking about what a third character is doing is a crock of shit. I blush at how much of my own past writing is essentially that. If the characters are talking, exchanging information, then they aren't doing dramatic things. People won't read or watch for information nearly as readily as they will read or watch good drama.

Think about a story like that in the film The Empire Strikes Back. Luke's goal is to save his friends. To do so he must defeat Vader. And if he waits too long, his friends will (he believes) die on the torture rack in the Cloud City Security Tower. Goal, nemesis, ticking clock. Luke's moment of transformation comes when he lets go of the railing and falls into the shaft to the weather vane, rather than giving in to Vader's tempting offer to rule the galaxy father and son. Luke had to make a decision that he was going to "do, or do not," as Yoda had taught him, since his "try" to defeat Vader had gone so terribly off the rails. Luke decided he was going to believe in his ability to use the Force for good. He rejected the quick, easy, seductive path, and instead survived to fight back another day.

Tellingly, there isn't a moment in Empire in which we don't know damned good and well who the protagonist is and why he matters. Luke is both the first and last person to do anything on-screen. The villain is Luke's direct nemesis, Darth Vader, and Luke and Vader are both alike and opposite. While Han, Leia, Chewie, Lando, Artoo, and Threepio all have minor story arcs involving some modicum of choice, mostly they just react. Luke's arc of choice encompasses the entire duration of the film, from his tentative efforts to retrieve Anakin's Lightsaber in the Wampa Cave, to his choice to go train under Yoda, to his choice to abandon his training prematurely, and finally to his transformation. And throughout the movie, characters rarely talk about doing things -- they just act! Very effective dramatization. Empire is not the most fully-realized, conceptually brilliant, or consistent science fiction story ever, but as SF stories go, it is among the most dramatic in the genre, and is possibly the best story of them all.

Looking Before Leaping

2010-03-29T11:17:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks, I went through an unpleasant dispute with a long-time friend. The dispute culminated last weekend with my friend erupting in anger toward me and writing a vicious, hate-filled email telling me he wanted nothing more to do with me. I wanted so badly to reply in anger. I wanted to show him "what for." I had a response for every insult he hurled, every fact in my favor he was ignoring, and every juvenile behavioral affectation he was displaying. And just as I was about to spew forth with the mighty fusillade of my reply...

I stopped, and was silent.

It took a long time and a great deal of life experience to reach the point at which I had the presence of mind to forestall an angry reply to that old friend. In that instant, I saw myself so many times in the past as I lashed out, forced through, blasted all around me, and regretted it later. I saw all the people who wanted to help me and were hurt by proximity to my reckless spite. I saw all the people who were just trying to do their jobs, unable to cut me a break because I left them nowhere to go but over my ruin. I saw all the people I hated, old enemies from grammar school, high school, and afterwards. I saw the men (and women) who thwarted me in one way or another, for whom I swore I would never brake if I saw them crossing the street, and I remembered that after my histrionics, they got to walk away clean, justifiably believing that they were the better person.

I still know their names. Perham. Frimmel. Bauerlein. Saager. There are more, of course. I don't necessarily forgive them for what they did to me, but in the moment of our parting, I was the one who was more out-of-line. And as time went by, I learned a wider perspective. Perhaps Perham had a bad home life about which I knew nothing. Frimmel's aggression, in retrospect, was an obvious mask for his insecurity and low self-esteem. Bauerlein and Saager had their own business/career interests as their prerogatives. In each case, had I then the broadness of mind that I have now, I could have divorced myself from the situation and walked away in peace, leaving my "enemies" to their own concerns.

My long-time friend, the man who hates me now, has had his entire life turned upside down over the past year, and the frustration has to be wearing on his last nerve. He is doing his damnedest to draw me into the fray, baiting me at every turn to open fire, while simultaneously and contradictorily telling me to go away. And despite it all, I cannot hate this man. Too clearly I see the source of his anguish. Too clearly I recognize the same myopia in him that I possessed when faced with similar difficulties in my own life. And far, far too clearly I see the chronic lack of self-esteem that has undermined my friend all his life. To this day he is utterly terrified of the notion that somebody might get the better of him, in any context, under any circumstances. I have seen him over and over again fleeing when his self-crafted illusion of control and superiority was threatened. A tiny, fragmentary demon left over from junior high school torments him to this day. Figuratively speaking, of course, as there are no such things as demons.

This man believes he stands now on the precipice of getting me to erupt at him, making his every vile insult a fulfilled prophecy. He would be able to walk away with a complete and immutable victory, and for the rest of his life he could rationalize away any behavior, no matter how reprehensible, with the notion that at least he is a better man than Mike.

What he does not understand is that he is Mike.

He is the Mike-that-was. The Mike that still is, and can easily be again, if I ever fail to catch myself leaping before I look, lashing out before I think.

As his true friend, I want him not to descend to those depths. I cannot stop him; he has his free will and sufficient resources to force the issue. But I refuse to help speed his way down.

I chose to stand and take his beating. I replied telling him I did not hate him, and would not engage with him. I told him to take a year or two to cool off, and if he had a change of perspective by then, to look me up. I told him I would not seek him out.

None of this makes me a "better man" than him. To seek that distinction is juvenile anyway; a real man measures himself only against his own actions. What I have done is deprive him of the clean, easy getaway that he sought, and now he will have to choose between evading his knowledge of how he behaved toward me, or facing up to it. Unlike the adolescent wraith that haunts him, the new demon I have given him is much easier to defeat -- all he has to do is look at it, recognize it for what it is, and accept the truth. Perhaps in banishing one of the two specters, he will find the inner strength to banish the other.

When I Write; When I Don't Write

2010-03-22T14:49:00.001-07:00

To be successful as a writer, one must write. This is the one unchanging truism that is repeated by every successful writer when asked what it took to "make it." The answer is couched many different ways, but at the end of the day it sums up to: write. Write more and more. Write at every opportunity. Through trial and error repeated ad infinitum, a writer polishes his or her craft.

It is easy for a writer to comment on a message board, comment on Facebook, or write a blog entry. It is not so easy for a writer to write a novel or a screenplay or a non-fiction book. The difference, of course, is one of scope: the deeper, more extensive projects require an order of magnitude more time.

More precisely, and more critical to the issue of when a writer can write, the deeper projects require time available in uninterrupted spans. It is simply impossible in a short time period to get warmed up, get the requisite info "loaded into RAM" mentally, apply the chops, and lay down text. It is much the same when editing, where the real heavy lifting of writing is done and which most successful writers suggest should only be started once the first draft of the main body of a text is complete.

Paul Graham explains the timespan issue in his essay Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, and though Graham is referring mainly to coding, his observations hold absolutely true for writing as well.

Knowing this, I sometimes worry that I will never really become successful writing under my own ticket unless I am doing it full-time. This also fulfills Portnoy's Principle that success in a creative or artistic endeavor usually requires a combination of adversity and absolute commitment. Essentially, you don't win the campaign unless you're willing to cross the Rubicon.

As it stands, I am not in a position to quit my job. On balance, my job is a good one, and I am afforded time throughout the day to do small amounts of writing, such as on my blog. If I end up having to go back to commuting via bus, I will also have another hour or so in the morning and evening to write while mobile. But the bottom line is that I am not writing full-time, so my major writing projects have lagged.

The weekends, once a bonanza of available time, saw me diminishing in productivity as my sleep apnea worsened. Then, we had Evey and doubled the child-monitoring workload at a time when Allie was still not old enough to play without direct supervision. Then the economy tanked and our costs for child care and such skyrocketed, leaving us even after cutbacks in a position in which I have to do eBay work in order to make good. As Graham explains, any interruption is likely to destroy an entire afternoon's work for a Maker. These last few months, I have been interrupted a minimum of three different ways. I didn't stand a chance.

There is reason to hope. CPAP therapy is going well, so I am more awake and more primed for creativity for longer periods. We are making family arrangements for child care that should start in a few months, and that will allow me to bail once again from eBay. Finally, Steph has been taking the girls on outings, leaving me with precious tranquility. We're not quite there yet, but I am confident that when the day comes that I can sit down at my computer, close the door, and not notice the passage of time until the hunger pangs come, that will be a day I make headway toward success.

Until then, I'll squeeze in a few paragraphs here or there where I can. Fortunately, I have that luxury.

Some General Observations

2010-03-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is taken from an old Cult of the Dead Cow textfile (content NSFW) that was just about the most entertaining slice-of-life I had ever read up to that point. It's funny how some of the most out-of-the-way things can influence the way a person thinks and lives, if they arrive right at an impressionable time. Most of what The Nightstalker observed, especially about "adult situations," was largely inapplicable to me as a socially inept 17-year-old nerd, but one item stood out:

One of the benefits of living in this backwater town is that both the supermarket and the beer 'n' wine store stash their empty milk crates outside where they are easy to get to. Needless to say, I do not lack for bookshelves and storage modules these days.

I don't remember ever consciously taking this as a lesson, but I observe that I currently possess two milk crates that have stayed with me through close to two decades of residential moves, and I could not confidently answer for the origin of either crate if I were asked. It is possible I came by them legitimately, but I doubt it. If I had to hazard a guess, I would suspect that I imitated The Nightstalker in a misguided attempt at appearing "cool" or "hardcore," and stole them from some place or another, sometime back in that 1991-1993 time period that was the moral nadir of my life. I would not countenance such pilferage today, because it conflicts rather violently with my belief that an individual's right to property, like the rights to life and liberty, should be inviolable. Meanwhile, the crates are real, and there they sit. I committed a wrong, and there are no excuses. Amends for my actions are due and payable. I hope I may yet figure out to whom.

Twice in recent days, I have had "engineering disputes" with friends that fell distinctly to the unpleasant side of even. Neither of them was related, nor were their subject matter, but each left me with a sour aftertaste. In each case, there was behavior by the other party that I was not comfortable letting slide. Instead, I called the other party to account, and the dust-ups worsened. I don't think I was necessarily wrong to hold my ground. One of the lessons I have learned the hard way in life is that a person has to hold to principles, even if the consequences are unpleasant. Failure to do so just sets things up to get worse later. Still, principles might serve me well, but you sure can't have fun hanging out with them.

I have repurposed this blog away from political issues, so I will not dissert on the health care bill and its impending "passage." I think various parties linked in my blogroll are saying what needs to be said. It will not be enough.

Recent research for one of my publications brought me to learn of a practice called "salami slicing," a consequence of the emergence of the concept of the Least Publishable Unit. Though my writing has been commercial, rather than scholarly, I immediately grokked the concept and its associated practice. An ebook scheme I implemented to distribute content under one of my pen names worked passably well at first, but in the end I found that the market prefers, at least in literary publishing, cohesive and wholly-contained content. The arrival of ebooks on the publishing scene, especially with the attractive array of gadgetry available for their portable consumption (from iPad to Kindle to smartphones) suggests a vast emergence of Least Publishable Units as the mainstay of digital inventory, but my skepticism is growing. I tend to believe digital publishing is diverging such that anything not substantial enough to publish as a "thick" standalone media module (novel, feature film, etc) is likely to show up as web content monetized through advertising. I see the anthology as a potential casualty of all this, and there are positive and negative implications for a writer like me who already creates short stories and flash fiction.

Stephanie and I face upcoming pay cuts as state employees, along with enforced furloughs that may or may not occur on fortuitous dates. We continue to struggle to solve "the child care cost situation," a financial bind that has defined our year 2010 so far and will continue to press upon us for at least another month or two before potential solutions can be put into play. Down the road, there are benefits we are likely to enjoy from having had two daughters in a period of less than two years, but the costs of having done so are quite front-loaded. If I were in my late twenties now, I think Steph and I would have taken steps to slow down the growth of the family Bahr. As it is, though, I am about to be 36. I'm starting to be a grumpy old man like the review narrator at RedLetterMedia. Evey is going to graduate high school when I am 54 years old. What good is having an empty nest if you're too old and decrepit to do anything about it? Steph and I are not making (or at least publically discussing) any decisions for sure, but the possibility does exist that the family is now complete, and/or that there will only be perhaps one more addition to it before I consider certain medical options. The realities of time and money are like nature: to be commanded, they must first be obeyed.

The Tao of Time Off

2010-03-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

In government positions such as mine, there is no such thing as "severance pay." As a political appointee, I serve at the pleasure of the governor. I can thus be summarily dismissed without warning. In order to attract some degree of competent talent for positions such as mine without having to offer severance pay, the state instead offers a hugely competitive vacation ("annual leave") accrual schedule, 173.6 hours per year, and allows the carryover of 320 hours per year. That's eight weeks of pay, more than enough to compare apples-to-apples with a typical severance package for comparable positions in the private sector.

Of course, most employees aren't ascetic enough to go two full years taking a total of only three days' vacation to stockpile 320 hours, so it usually takes around four years for most employees to reach that threshold. The private-sector standard is around two weeks of vacation per year, so that is what I've been taking. And, right on schedule, heading into my fourth year next week I will have about 240 hours in the tank. Not bad considering I have taken two paternity leaves, a week off every Christmas, and assorted other days off for personal purposes. If I were laid off today, I would get six weeks' pay in vacation payout. My boss has been with the state five years and is "full" -- he is taking off for his kids' "spring break" simply because he can. He enjoys 21.6 days off per year and still maintains a full payoff cushion.

Sick time does not count and is recorded separately: people at my pay grade get 80 sick hours per year, 40 of which can be used for self or a family member. This is convenient because my daughters frequently succumb to whatever plague is festering in the petri dish of day care at any given moment. The private-sector norm has increasingly been to combine sick and vacation days into "personal days," and this makes sense for various reasons. If a state employee quits or is terminated, they do not get paid out for sick balances unless they have stockpiled a high number of hours, and at each threshold the percentage of the payout is a bit higher (but never exceeds 50%). And none of this counts retirement matching funds or any of that. This policy helps to discourage the issue of the "iron worker" who never takes a sick day but comes in and works through every ailment, spreading germs and sending co-workers home with illnesses while hacking up a crescendo to distract whichever hardy souls avoid catching sick. By far the best value of a state sick day is to take it when you or your family member is actually sick. Any policy that rewards a person for using a tool for its intended purpose is fundamentally sound.

Steph and I have long wanted to compete in The Amazing Race or Survivor or something along those lines, so it would be great if we ever built up enough spare leave time to go on such an adventure. In the private sector, it would be very difficult to do so at the lower vacation accrual rate. It would force us to take a hit against our severance "cushions," but it would be worth it for the experience. Like a swine beholding pearls, I didn't really have the awareness level to appreciate some of the adventures and experiences I have had in life, mainly because I was either chronically short of money or in poor health, or both. Even if I took two weeks off to do nothing but camp in the wilderness, I think it would be something I can appreciate much more these days than I could before. But I can't do it yet -- not if I want to keep building up that safety net. I like that it's my choice one way or the other, though.

I guess all I have to do is have one of my stories optioned for a screenplay and pocket six figures, then take whatever time off I want.

Conquering Obstructive Sleep Apnea

2010-03-15T11:47:00.001-07:00

I just had the best night of sleep I have ever had. At least for as long as I can remember, so basically since childhood. For the first time in my adult life, I woke up feeling absolutely fantastic, brimming over with energy and relishing the briskness of the morning.

The reason for this breakthrough is that after tangling with the medical bureaucracy on and off since 2007, I finally secured last Thursday a specialized prescription for a heated, humidified CPAP with c-flex and data recording. I managed to lay hands on the machine Friday, and used it half of Friday night (I was getting over a sinus infection) and then for the entire night last night.

I know that's a lot of jargon to most people, so I'll explain. Dealing with this situation, I was frequently starved for good information, so now that I have secured it, I want to spread it around and spare others the same frustration.

I have a condition called obstructive sleep apnea. What this means is that I stop breathing while I am asleep, which forces me to wake up in a gasping, sweating panic.  I weigh 265 pounds; at 72 inches of height, I am supposed to be in the 200-205 range. The buildup of fat in my body added to the soft tissue in an already genetically narrow airway in the back of my throat. When I fall asleep and my muscles competely relax, the soft tissue back there occludes the airway. When sleeping supine (on my back), the occlusion is total, and I wake up after a few seconds, struggling to breathe. I can sleep on my sides or stomach and the occlusion is only partial. The result is loud, earth-rending snoring, but I can at least breathe somewhat. Even then, I receive too little airflow, resulting in hypoxia. The effect of the hypoxia is that I wake up every day feeling like I am severely hung over, even though I probably drink alcohol only twice or three times a year.

An even more serious effect of the apnea is that constantly waking due to breathing stoppages makes it almost impossible to achieve REM sleep. A lack of REM sleep gradually erodes mental acuity, memory retention, ability to focus, and general alertness/awareness. REM sleep is also the phase of sleep during which the body burns the most calories. According to the sleep studies I had to undergo, I have been getting less than 30 minutes of REM sleep per night, and none at all during some nights, for the past 20 years. I will touch upon the consequences of this later.

There are two major treatment paths for obstructive sleep apnea, and both are meant to return the sufferer to productive sleep so that the sufferer can return to an ideal body weight and (optimally) have no excess soft tissue occluding the airway. The two paths are surgery and CPAP.

Surgery to simply cut away some of the soft tissue in my airway would have been a serious step but would have been guaranteed to work, at least in the short term. The problem was that I would not have lost any other weight, and so it was likely I would simply build up more soft tissue and be back to square one within a few years. The surgery is most effective on people who are already at their ideal body weight, because they are likely to maintain healthy bodies with clear airways and minimal soft tissue.

CPAP, or continuous positive airway pressure, is a nonsurgical, noninvasive therapy for apnea that has a proven track record of success -- when the patient can tolerate the therapy. A CPAP machine generates a stream of air that is forced into the patient's airway via a facemask or nose mask. The continuous pressure maintains airflow through the patient's throat, preventing the soft tissue from closing up the channel. If the patient is able to breathe and sleep normally, eventually his or her health improves and weight loss follows, reducing the soft tissue in the airway.  Even if weight loss is slow or a patient has a genetically narrow airway like I do, a patient can safely use CPAP for basically any amount of time. Unfortunately, many patients cannot tolerate the CPAP, as was the case for me at first. If I had known then what I know now, things might have gone much better.

I wasted literally years seeking treatment for "not being able to sleep," and followed many red herrings and found many dead ends, on the advice of doctors no less. First it was stress -- but my stressors went away and the problem persisted. Then it was caffeine intake -- but I abstained from caffeine and the problem persisted. Then it was suspected somnambulance -- nope. At last one doc had the prescience to think to treat the snoring problem rather than the sleep problem, and that set us on the right path... eventually. Anti-snoring masks and straps did not help, and in fact made things much, much worse. (Stopping breathing AND having my mouth held shut? Where do I sign up!) Dieting, even aided by phentermine and such, brought short-term gains, but I could never keep the weight off because I could never maintain the necessary activity level. Finally, in late 2008, I was referred to a sleep study.

The sleep study was possibly the most frustrating experience to that point. I was ready to give up and consider more radical solutions -- stomach lap-banding and what have you -- to force drastic weight loss and hopefully make some headway against the snoring. At my first sleep study, I did not fall asleep at all. The monitoring apparatus was just that disturbing and uncomfortable. I forced myself to do it again, and they confirmed for the first time that there were breathing stoppages -- but that was it. They tested no further. The doctor prescribed CPAP, and my insurance rented me a machine.

The next few nights, I tried to use the CPAP therapy and found it absolutely intolerable. The air blasted into my sinuses, drying out my eyes and ears. I gasped to talk and couldn't get comfortable in the mask. Worst of all, the machine they gave me had no "ramp" and a poorly implemented auto-adjust, a feature since removed from most high-end CPAP machines, as I would discover. For all that discomfort, I never made it through a complete night of therapy.

At that point, I gave up. I returned the CPAP and resolved to find some other solution, possibly even the surgery and I'd just take my chances on a relapse. Life happened, and I became overwhelmed by other concerns. (And they were worse than they otherwise would have been, thanks to my constant physical and mental fatigue.) During an astoundingly busy 2009, I decided I was going to find some way to tolerate that CPAP, whatever it took.

So I did my internet research. I learned that there were heated, humidified CPAP machines out there that were much easier to tolerate, and that all masks were interoperable so I could shop around until I found one that was comfortable. I also learned that some CPAP machines "ramp" to make it easier to fall asleep -- they start at a lower pressure and gradually increase it as you drift off. I even learned of a "c-flex" feature where the CPAP drops the pressure when you breathe out and resumes the pressure when you breathe in. That was huge! One of the worst parts of my original CPAP experience was how difficult it was to breathe out (expire). Because the pressure was so high, I wound up instinctively breathing out through my mouth instead, and as soon as you open your mouth, the CPAP seal is broken and your sinuses are flooded with pressured air, a painful and unpleasant experience.

I figured I could just ask for one of the better CPAPs, so I called the rental company. No dice, they said -- my prescription had expired. Oh well. Could I just buy one, then? On the internet I saw many vendors who had them for sale outright. Nope. It turns out a CPAP is a Class II Medical Device. Even the internet vendors needed to see an Rx. So I went to ask my doctor for one, and found out he had left the state and was practicing elsewhere. Arrrrrgh!

The rest of the story is simple, except that it took six months instead of six minutes because of that stupid prescription status. I got a new doctor and had another sleep study. At the sleep center, they fitted the better CPAP right then and there, and I felt like a million bucks when I woke up after less than four hours of therapy. A solution was within my grasp! After trying and failing to arrange another rental scenario, I decided to just buy a CPAP, and got my new doctor to write out a prescription so beautiful it makes my eyes tear up just to read it: "CPAP 8cm w/heated humidifier, c-flex, DR, fit mask for comfort."

Here is what that script meant. The eight centimeters was the basic pressure setting. Due to the prescription nature of the machine, the vendor sets the pressure internally in advance. The heated humidifier was a must, sparing my sinuses from the beating they took from the "cold/dry" CPAP I had used before. C-flex was the nice feature that drops pressure on expiration. DR is for data recording -- the CPAP monitors its own pressure status and logs it, so I won't have to do a sleep study again. I can just bring in the memory card to my doctor. Finally, "fit mask for comfort" meant I could have any mask I wanted. I wasn't taking any chances on a rental. I plunked down $700 for a CPAP and mask at a local medical supplies retailer. I'll try to get insurance reimbursed later -- for now, I wanted to get going. Think about how adamant you get when you're weary and want to sleep and someone is keeping you up for some inane reason. Now multiply that by 20 years and you'll have some notion of how accommodating of delays I was feeling.

I had been recovering from ear/sinus infections, so I knew my sinuses would have a hard time acclimating, and thus I only used the CPAP for part of the night Friday and Saturday -- and I still felt great in the mornings. But last night, I was free and clear to sleep the duration with the therapy in place. I lay down on my back, neck straight and even on the pillow, mask in place, pressure set, with six hours of quiet approaching... and it was bliss. I never moved. I woke up at 5:45, which is apparently a time in the morning now as well as in the afternoon (nobody informed me) and had time to play with Evey, check some computer tasks, and stretch out a bit before hitting the shower and heading in to work... almost half an hour earlier than usual.

It is far too soon to know how successful this therapy will be or what my long-term outlook is, but I have to think my focus, energy level, and therefore my productivity is about to go through the roof. And that's what brings me to regret all the wasted time and effort for 20 years that this damned condition has cost me.

First, my severe weight gain.  Like I said, I have felt fatigued every day, similar to what you might feel if you had serious jet lag. Toward the end of the day, my body finally finds some chemical balance, and this is probably why I have been productive as a night owl for some years now.  Now ask yourself how much exercise you would get if you felt like that all the time. It becomes clear why I have continued to gain weight, amplifying the underlying problem in a vicious cycle. I might have been healthy and happy years ago if I could have bought a fully-loaded CPAP like the one I have now right off the shelf.

The mental fatigue is by far the more troubling aspect, and I can only begin to guess at what sort of long-term damage I have done to my brain from 20+ years of hypoxia. When I was a child, I was considered a prodigy and was expected to have a huge future at the cutting edge. By the time I was 17, I had my nomination to West Point in hand and was merely waiting for the great adventure to begin. Even when my eyesight kept me out of there at 18, I was accepted in the blink of an eye by the ASU Honors College, and I figured I would just have to charge through the ASU engineering program on my way to my ultimate destiny. But by the time I was 20, I had failed out of the Honors College and was soon to drop out of community college as well. Somehow, I had gained a bunch of weight and gotten scatterheaded, unmotivated, and lazy. Now, I don't doubt that some of that was authentic indecision/angst/sloth, but those factors alone cannot explain how I fell off the rails so abruptly. Worse yet, I struggled to move forward in classes at which I had once excelled, such as mathematics and the hard sciences. I just couldn't focus, and I had never had to develop much in the way of academic discipline, so I had no work ethic to fall back on.

I have since learned that this is not an uncommon story for apnea sufferers. Indeed, I had to have a work ethic beaten into me by life experiences, and once I had the study discipline as a fallback position, I was able to finish law school and pass the bar exam.  I once hated math and science out of regret at my failure to cut the mustard at those disciplines, and now I am rediscovering my love of those things -- my writing is heavily focused in the science fiction genre, and even my whiteboard at work currently features a gallery of fractals. But the worst thing is that I hated myself, thinking I was just a lazy person, never realizing there was a medical problem underneath it all. Now that I know the truth, I think the sky is the limit. I think I will be able to make up huge chunks of lost ground in a very short time. I just wish so much had not gone to waste in the meanwhile.

In fact, writing this post has me thinking that there might be some meaningful writing to be done on the topic of obstructive sleep apnea itself, and that I might be a good candidate to be doing it. I will consider this in the days and weeks ahead.

If anyone has any questions whatsoever about apnea, CPAP, or whatever, the comments thread is open and I will try to give helpful answers.

A Shift In Focus

2010-03-08T11:19:00.001-07:00

Last week, I posted regarding the apparent functional failure of this blog. As there have been no comments or feedback at all, I must assume that my Xanatos Gambit has succeeded. My gambit was born from the realization that a lack of participation would prove either postulate from my previous post: that I am failing to use this blog in a productive manner and thus a change is warranted, or that I am failing to make this blog interesting in the slightest and thus a change is warranted. Either way, a change is warranted. (A flurry of comments indicating that things were Fine The Way They Were was the outcome that would have defeated my Xanatos Gambit.)

For reasons too varied to concisely address here, I think the fundamental problem is that my political and philosophical posts have no audience here. There are others writing the same kinds of material more regularly and in greater depth -- why not just read their blogs? I can't think of a reason why not.

Meanwhile, I have my own creative projects, from writing to video to music to literary analysis. These endeavors are truly mine, and I can think of no more appropriate outlet for such creative content than my very own House of Exuberance.

This blog will also serve as the repository of my various milestone markers and memorials, and anything I would ordinarily locate on Facebook but that deserves to be featured in a medium with more longevity. My daily personal minutiae will be confined to Facebook, and will strut and fret its hour upon that stage, and then be heard no more.

Writing: The Career With a 20-Year Internship

2010-02-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder if there is some pathological contrariness in my brain that sways me to a difficult path where easier or less risky options exist. Certainly, everyone can think of a person in their life, whether friend, co-worker, or family member, who thrives on melodrama and enjoys the attention that comes with living a life of one sordid tragedy after another. It is exasperating, because you know if that person would just put down the idiot ball and confront his or her problems rationally, many would likely be solved. I never wanted to be that person, but in finding my calling as a writer -- no, that's deterministic language -- in realizing that writing is my passion and the highest creative goal I will pursue in my life, I fear that I may have doomed myself and my family to a needless purgatory. They don't deserve that, so I am left frustrated, grasping for an answer and wondering if it wouldn't be better to just hang up my keyboard and go be a truck driver or something.

My internships during law school lasted the length of a semester. A physician's internship and residency last a few years at most. In academics and the sciences, a person who has completed a graduate degree is, at that moment at least, essentially as close to the cutting edge of that discipline as its most celebrated researchers and theorists. A writer needs more time to master the craft. While a journalism graduate right out of college can and does often find work writing in the media, to craft the kind of quality content that will lead to a genuine literary career, decades of work may be necessary. (Most writers will not rise suddenly from poverty to lucre like Joanne Rowling.) Economically speaking, spending half a working lifetime learning a craft seems like a pretty lousy idea!

The situation is even further skewed toward a lengthy apprenticeship in the fantasy and science fiction genres: nearly every major figure in the field published his or her seminal work later in life, often after retiring from (or prompting retirement from) an existing, unrelated career. Terry Goodkind was a carpenter and wildlife artist before writing Wizard's First Rule. Dr. Michael Crichton was a physician before hitting it big with The Andromeda Strain. David Eddings, James Rigney (Robert Jordan), and Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.) were all retired from the U.S. military, and J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor and retired British serviceman. A few notable names such as Frank Herbert and Robert Heinlein actually were journalists before finding enough success to proceed on their own tickets, while Ayn Rand was similarly a screenwriter and playwright selling smaller work to studios before breaking through with The Fountainhead, but the writer-all-along story is the exception here. There is very little parallel in the fantasy or science fiction writing world with the doctor or attorney who grinds through half a decade of schooling and credentialing, grinds through six to ten years of heavy practice, has his or her first heart attack, and then settles back into a professional armchair to enjoy shortened golden years finally free of debt.

And the baffling thing is that people still want to be writers! Worse, they seem to think they will duplicate Rowling's feat instead of toiling in obscurity for decades as Herbert, Rigney, or Rand did. Writer Dani Shapiro, a professor of fine arts in California, cannily observed this seeming perversity in an article from yesterday's Los Angeles Times, noting:

[MFA grads] do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn't reward persistence, that doesn't see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn't trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: "So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?"

The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry -- always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media -- has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.

Shapiro is either wrong for the right reasons or right because of what's wrong; take your pick. Those successful authors I named from the fantasy and science fiction genres did write "in the cold" for 10 years or however long, but they eventually succeeded on the strength of their content. All the others who pushed and prodded their way onto the mainstream shelves with an eye toward publishing and "the market" ended up as industry roadkill just as Shapiro observed they would.

"Trust in the process," Shapiro taught the new generation of writers, but they never grasped her lesson. And she wasn't the only one. Hiroshi Yamauchi, CEO Emeritus of Nintendo Co Ltd., uttered a mantra meaning much the same thing thirty years ago: "Content is everything. We will put all our efforts into producing great content. Then we will have something we can sell." Yamauchi was right, and in under three years Nintendo singlehandedly brought the American video game industry back from the grave of its 1983 industry crash. Frank Herbert himself recognized the primacy of content when Dune became a blockbuster hit:

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg.

Yamauchi and Herbert would laugh in the face of the person who expects there to be room in the market for his or her "crappy novel," to borrow from Shapiro's anecdote. Why waste an instant pushing subpar material when effort, practice, and dedication can make possible an "excellent" novel instead? Sure, Stephanie Meyer is raking in millions of dollars with pulp trash about sparkly vampires, but she is the exception that proves the rule. Most subpar books that aren't cheap fad exploits are rejected by publishers, and of the few that see print, most languish on discount shelves until the market mercifully dismisses them. Who would you rather be: William Hung or Garth Brooks?

Producing an excellent novel, of course, means mastering creative tropes, mastering characterization, mastering plot and pacing, and sharpening technical writing skills to produce compact, vivid prose. It means having a broad imagination and enough patience and discipline to craft the entirety of a story and see it through to completion. It means spending so much time developing these skills that an entire secondary career can come and go in the meantime. Chuck Jones, the artist who brought you Bugs Bunny, once joked that every artist has 20,000 awful pictures in them -- best to get them out of the way early and get on to the good stuff. What Jones meant, of course, was that through constant devotion to the craft, the artist's pictures improve to the point that he or she probably will be producing good material well before closing in on 20,000. By immersing himself or herself in the craft, the artist accomplishes true and measurable improvement, and eventually reaches the point that his or her content is so good that sales seek the artist and not the other way around.

Jones' truism could be adapted for writing by saying that every author has at least three dozen novels in them that are absolute trash -- might as well get them written and over with and move on to the good material! That is the position I am in now. The few publications of mine that you see linked at the upper left of this blog are just a tiny fraction of what I have written, and are generally the best of it that I have managed to complete. These, still, are not written at the capability level I know I can one day reach! I also have a torrent of crud that I won't be publishing anytime soon or perhaps ever, and I have quite a few tasty morsels that are better but that I haven't managed to finish yet, so there is still more work to do. I have been writing since 1992, and I have been writing with a serious notion of mastering the craft since 1999. I expect it may take another decade before my writing is finally good enough to produce content that pays a livelihood all by itself. And that's if things go well.

Is it fair to subject Steph, Allie, and Evey to such a waiting cycle? Is it fair to put my daughters into a position where they may not be able to attend the best college that accepts them because the money simply isn't there? Is it fair that my wife has to spend time working for middling wages instead of raising my daughters and having dominion over my household, as she will tell you she'd greatly prefer? No, it really isn't fair, and that's why I still grind out a commute to produce documents for the government for a salary that serves as the Bahr family lifeblood. One day I will either set it aside or actually reach retirement, and from then on it's going to be writing until the day they nail my coffin shut, as Robert Jordan famously quipped. It would be so much easier if I were content to punch the clock every day until I walked away with a gold watch, and spend every night in front of a television set being told what to think. It would be easier -- but that would deprive me of creative experiences I am unwilling to forego. I guess all those other career opportunities will just have to wait for the resume of someone else.

Will MegaCorp Own Your Grandchildren?

2010-02-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

It is understandable that you might laugh at such a question, given that the question of "ownership" of a human being in the United States became terminally moot right around 1865 -- or so we thought.

Anyway, you've seen Gattaca, right? Without spoiling anything about that particular cinematic science fiction masterpiece, the setting is a near future in which embryos can be genetically engineered to produce children who are strong, intelligent, and free of hereditary diseases or disadvantages. Within a short time, the engineered children, "Valids," become society's elite, and create a glass ceiling that is all but impossible for normally-born children, "In-Valids," to break. Only Valids are professionals; all In-Valids are menial laborers.

The genetic engineers in Gattaca, the "Eighth Day Center," have tremendous power in that society. The film presented their work as selective and not directly creative -- they did not actually make embryos, but selected from among the billions of sperm donated by the father and the eggs of the mother to find the few optimal matches. As the Eighth Day doctor says, "These babies are still you, just the best of you." Without a doubt, Eighth Day would have a patent on the filtration process, but they create no new material and thus could never have an interest in the subsequent issue (unless by some contrivance of contract).

The ominous questions arise when Megacorp figures out (or buys from some inventor or university research department) a process to actually engineer an embryo -- most probably taking an existing filtered one like in Gattaca and grafting on additional code. Some possibilities:

Enhanced physical strength, for many obvious applications.
Enhanced eyesight, possibly crossing into areas off the normal human spectrum such as ultraviolet or infrared. Your child could see in the dark, and would probably make an amazing soldier -- or assassin.
Slowed aging, using genetic code to create the antithesis of progeria. Combine with "enhanced beauty" for an attractive movie star that could be "in his/her prime" for decades.
Additional body parts. Gattaca hinted briefly at this with a 12-fingered pianist. I won't explore this too deeply here in order to keep this speculative and not squicky.
Bloodstream or dermal augmentation, granting high resistance to heat or cold (but probably not both, due to the limitations of physics). Uninhabitable wastelands in Siberia, Greenland, Nunavut, and Antarctica could suddenly become the trendy exclusive neighborhoods for the rich -- no need to worry about the "riff-raff" moving in, because they can't tolerate or even survive the climate!
Enhanced intelligence -- the sky is the limit.

Ah, but even a genetically enhanced human with created code in DNA wouldn't necessarily be owned by MegaCorp, you might argue. Well, first let's look at the genetic code itself. Current common law suggests that MegaCorp would have the right to patent their code and protect it accordingly. In the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), the Supreme Court held that living, genetically engineered material is patentable subject matter. The modified organism, due to human intervention, was not a product of nature and fell within the definition of "manufacture." This was at issue because laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not protectible as intellectual property. To be patentable, one must develop a machine, composition of matter, or manufacture. In nature, there is no "invention" -- only "discovery."

OK, "So what?" you might ask. "So MegaCorp has the patent on how they engineered my grandson's embryo. I wasn't planning to go into the fertility business, so what do I care? Their competitors can develop their own processes if they want in on that action."

The problem comes with adverse conditions. Specifically, the problem exists because adverse conditions give MegaCorp a back door through which to introduce revenue mechanisms to the extreme detriment of consumers -- who might not have any choice in the matter.

Andrew Carnegie's "secret of wealth," paraphrasing from Napoleon Hill's classic self-help book Think and Grow Rich, is to make something that everybody wants, that nobody can make themselves, and that gets used up and must be replenished.

Imagine, then, if the genetic code of the engineered children came with a built-in trigger: every ten years, the enhancements naturally decay until the individual is left no better than a "normal" human being. That is, unless a person purchases from MegaCorp an individually-customized genetic code "patching" pill that halts the genetic decay for ten years. MegaCorp could charge anything they wanted for that pill... $10K, $100K, $500K... and "Valids" would pay it. (In the world of Gattaca, Valids had extremely high-paying jobs. It stands to reason that if this societal construct came about in real life, banks would probably be willing to lend $500K for a booster pill knowing that the Valid debtor would be able to retain a seven- or eight-figure job. For example, virtually all professional athletes would be Valids.)

Oh, and it gets better: MegaCorp could engineer the booster pill to contain their patented and copyrighted genetic code, and it would be illegal for anyone to attempt to create a work-around, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. It would not be illegal for someone to reverse-engineer a booster pill or someone's genetic code "in the wild," but the realities of economy of scale and the fact that the reverse-engineering could not make use of any patented or copyrighted code make it likely that creating such a substitute would cost more than just buying the booster pill normally.

Importantly, MegaCorp is not visiting any specific harm on its client or "creation" -- they are simply imposing a time limit on their product or service, as it were. Once the time is up, the client is no worse off than if they had never utilized MegaCorp's genetic enhancements. But in the context of a society that could very quickly be polarized by "genoism" into a world of Valids and In-Valids, MegaCorp would be the gatekeepers to health and prosperity.

While the parallels to drug addiction are fairly obvious, this concept, taken to the Nth degree, more closely parallels the modern conveniences of refrigeration, air conditioning, and easy access to personal motor vehicles. Sure, we can survive without any of those things, but does anybody really want to? And so we pay. We pay loans and interest (usually) to own houses and cars. We pay cash for appliances. We pay for upkeep and repair. And to some degree we're already experiencing the MegaCorp scenario with "disposable" cars -- vehicles engineered to work well for a few short years and then be replaced. Anecdata in point: Steph's Mitsubishi Mirage is on its last legs despite being two years newer than my 1999 Honda Accord, which still runs beautifully. Your Money or Your Life, indeed.

So your granddaughter, a physical and intellectual specimen the likes of which would have been one-in-a-million naturally, learns upon finishing graduate school at 19 that she is going to be doomed to a lifetime of janitorial work or prostitution unless she mortgages herself every decade to pay MegaCorp an exhorbitant retainer to maintain her Validity. MegaCorp dominates the economy, because they have made a product that everybody wants, that nobody can make themselves, and that gets used up and must be replenished. Nothing MegaCorp has done is technically illegal -- man is mortal, and no mere product or service will reverse the chains of time and decay -- and yet the state of society creates an adverse landscape in which your granddaughter is an irrevocably indentured servant. And so is everybody else of her generation and those that follow.

In fact, the only way to make this scenario any more frightening would be to substitute "MegaCorp" with "the Government."

Perhaps I should cash in on this dire prophecy while I still can. After all, it seems like there may exist here the raw materials for a classic science fiction story. We may hope that it never comes to pass, like Anthem, 1984, or The Handmaid's Tale, instead of growing more plausible by the year, like Atlas Shrugged, Brave New World, or Neuromancer.

Escapism, Then and Now

2010-01-13T10:27:00.004-07:00

Steph and I are headed to Las Vegas this weekend to celebrate our third wedding anniversary. Naturally, Allie and I got sick, we have a million things to do around the house, and I'm grinding through an unusually busy time at work. Saturday can't get here soon enough, and Steph and I will indulge in two days of paired aces, buffet dinners, and the whimsy of shiny, colorful lights everywhere.

We know, of course, that Las Vegas is the epitome of artifice. Without the Hoover Dam, it would be physically impossible to support such a desert oasis without mandating the use of stillsuits. The casinos have no clocks and no windows, because while a tourist is spending time in Vegas, the party never ends. Well, not until the tourist's wallet runs bare, anyway. Steph and I know and recognize these things, and we aren't looking for health, meaning, or intellectual development while on this trip. We are going to blissfully evade reality for a weekend. When we return, we will thank my parents for watching our daughters for the duration.

It occurred to me while contemplating our Las Vegas trip and watching the Cardinals' harrowing 51-45 victory over the Packers in Sunday's wild card game that escapism has shifted in meaning over the last few decades. During one of the game's commercial breaks, the network showed a commercial for Tooth Fairy, an upcoming box-office turd starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as a skeptical hockey player whose nickname is derived from his habit of knocking out the teeth of opposing players. He tells his daughter that there is actually no such thing as the tooth fairy, but for his sin of skepticism, he is transformed by some mysterious intervention into a life-sized tooth fairy, tutu and all. The trailer goes on to spoil that there is an underground secret society of tooth fairies spreading their magical pixie dust or whatever all over the world; essentially, a Men in Black for kindergarteners. And I couldn't help but realize as I watch that commercial that Tooth Fairy would never have flown back when I was young.

When I was growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, society's eyes were fixed on the stars. For escapism in that era, we had not only the original Star Wars trilogy, but the first several Star Trek movies, lesser works such as The Black Hole, The Last Starfighter, and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, and cartoons such as Transformers and Voltron. Video games ruled the universe until the crash of 1983, and the fundamental video game scenario had player piloting a spaceship and blasting enemies of some sort ad infinitum -- Asteroids, Space Invaders, Galaga, Tempest, Scramble, and so on. Girls had mostly pony-related toys and Barbie dolls, true -- but that's because the boys' side of the equation was so mainstream it included everybody. There was no more glittering escapist dream than the thought that we were luminous beings, as Yoda said, not this "crude matter," and would soon leave our Earthly chains behind and ascend to the great unknown. It was the classic adventure/exploring motif dialed Up To Eleven. Adventure is Out There!

Fast forward to today, and escapism wears a different face: technology and the brilliant future have been cast aside in favor of magical lands of make-believe. The best of these make use of the Magic A Is Magic A trope; the worst turn instead to And Man Grew Proud, All Myths Are True, and Clap Your Hands If You Believe.

The clear champions of the fantasy escapism era are the Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings. Remember, Rings was not popular in the mainstream in the 1980s -- this was before the ascendancy of nerddom as "cool." In both stories, Magic A Is Magic A. That is to say, the magical effects are part of a consistent system of magic where doing something a specific way produces a specific result. When Magic A is Magic A, the story is more plausible and better suspends disbelief, because the magic is really just a thinly-veiled metaphor for technology. The story is left free to develop plot and character without the reader or viewer wondering whether Gandalf is going to "go blind if he keeps doing that." In the end, Harry Potter is the hero, not Expelliarmus. The latter was merely a tool.

Unfortunately, such excellent fantasy escapism is outnumbered by a deluge of lesser works in which the other tropes are used. Without seeing Tooth Fairy (and I'm not likely to do so), I can't say whether it uses All Myths Are True or Clap Your Hands If You Believe, but its director's previous films, the Santa Clause trilogy, suggest the former. Magic is not a stand-in for technology, but for divine, capricious anvil-dropping morality. The protagonist in both is forced to don the mantle of the titular mythical character as punishment for the grievous sin of being rational and intelligent enough to know the myth is make-believe. How dare he! The Polar Express (2004 adaptation) is an example of the latter trope: only those who believe in Santa can hear the Christmas bells. This sort of story is probably pretty harmless for young children, who were the original intended audience of fairy tales in the first place -- part of growing up is learning the difference between fiction and real life.

There are people, however, who choose to continue to believe deep down that maybe fairy tales are secretly real -- or who wish they could be. These make up the target audience for execrable works such as the Final Destination films, in which a mystical vision prompts the protagonist to avoid dying in some squicky fashion, thus "ruining Death's design." And Man Grew Proud, audaciously insisting upon continuing to live, angering a pseudo-anthropomorphized Death who does not take such insults lightly. The protagonist is doomed to spend the remainder of the movie scrambling to escape a series of deadly contrivances. If only he would just give up and die like he was supposed to, Death would be appeased and the ordeal would end! Once again, magic is a stand-in for divine will or caprice. As with the fairy tales, this makes the characters tools of the magic, marionettes on strings, rather than making magic a tool for the characters to use as they Go Forth and Commit Great Plot. Mature readers/viewers have little tolerance for a story in which the writer has prevented the protagonist from protagonizing!

The meaning of escapism was once, not so long ago, a celebration of an eventual ascendance above the dreary present day. Faced with a cold war, economic variance, and an increasingly toxic political culture, escapists of that time turned to romantic, hopeful notions of what might happen if we humans ever harnessed the best within us. Two decades later, faced with a cold war, economic variance, and an increasingly toxic political culture, escapists turn to pure absurdity as an intellectual analgesic, and a diminishing minority of works display any recognition of the romantic, heroic ideals that sustained the previous era. It is comforting to realize that the most successful fantasy is of the latter type, but what changed in the interim that wrought such upheaval of the rest of the landscape? Whoever finds the answer to that question will be the one who leads the way forward into Whatever Comes Next.

The Play's the Thing: Creative Tropes Revisited

2010-01-08T15:57:00.001-07:00

Tropes, the creative tools that are used to tell stories that readers and viewers will recognize and understand, are hardly limited to modern-day examples like the one I explored in Wednesday's essay. Indeed, some tropes are Older Than Television, Older Than Radio, or even Older Than Steam. A trope such as "sibling rivalry" can be classified as Older Than Dirt, thanks to the myth of Cain and Abel. Centuries ago, the greatest playwright known to history used tropes while penning his stories just as modern-day authors use tropes while tappping at the keyboards of their Macbooks.

Part of what made William Shakespeare's plays timeless is that the Bard wove compatible tropes together in beautifully seamless combinations theretofore unseen. The resulting tapestry created rich, interesting stories with characters from every level of the complexity scale. One affirmation of the versatility and accessibility of Shakespeare's stories is the success of modern works that are recognizably adaptations of the Bard's plays.

A few of the better-known examples:

10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew)
Forbidden Planet (The Tempest)
Get Over It (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
The Lion King (Hamlet)
She's the Man (Twelfth Night)
Strange Brew (Hamlet)
West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet)

Each of those works reimagined one of Shakespeare's original stories in a new setting and era with genre-appropriate characters and social conventions. This is possible because of the power of creative tropes as tools: the trope is an abstract, and the range of concretes that can be used to express that abstract is limited only by an author's imagination. Even the Bard's complex combination of creative tropes can still be adapted whole cloth (to stretch the "tapestry" metaphor) into an entirely new expression.

As a consummate game player, naturally, I have figured out a way to make a game out of this.

I am going to perform a writing exercise in this article recasting a work of Shakespeare in the present day. I will present an excerpt from the opening scene. It is your job to guess which work I am adapting, and put your answer in the comments section. First person to get it right gets bragging rights and a cold drink on me next time we meet. Every work of Shakespeare, including those used in the examples above, is potentially in play.

Go North from 174th Street (excerpt)
by Michael Bahr, 2010

The thump-thump of a bouncing basketball punctuated the white noise of late Friday afternoon in the upper Bronx. Four men sweated and struggled, two against the other two, while dozens of others watched and waited their turns. Two of the ebony-skinned men would walk away from the contest twenty dollars richer. Men had come to blows on that court for smaller stakes.

A newcomer arrived. Derrick Wilshire thundered along the side of the court, his white sneakers matching the white teeth in his smile. The newcomer shouted to his companion, a taller man queued up to play.

"Hey yo, T-Bone! She called me back!"

The taller man shook his head. "Man, D, you got to be the luckiest brother on this block. I bet if any other guy here's high-school sweetheart won the lottery, she wouldn't give a brother the time of day."

Derrick grinned and shrugged. "Brother, I told you, that chick loves me! Lisa played her v-card with me back when she was 16, man. She told me come right on out and see her!"

T-Bone raised an eyebrow. "So what you still doin' here, D? If I had a millionaire girlfriend, I wouldn't be wasting my time playing basketball."

Other men watching the basketball game chimed in their agreement with T-Bone. "You damn right." "Sho'nuff." "You know it, brother."

Derrick took a deep breath. "That's the thing, T-Bone. I'm ready to go right now, but she's at her new place up in Nanuet. I ain't got no money to get up there."

The taller man snorted. "What money? Who gives a flip about money? Your girlfriend rich, dawg! Tell her send you a couple hundred for a limo!"

"That's the thing, T-Bone. My sister heard from her friend Stacey, she's tight with Lisa, and Stacey said Lisa is calling up all her old boyfriends and she's gonna pick one and kick the rest to the curb! I can't ask for no money or else I look like that's all I want, instead of wantin' the chick! And if I don't get up there before some other brother work his way into her bed, I blown my big chance!"

"So you out of luck, then," shrugged T-Bone.

"No, man, T, I need your help, man. You got to spot me $500 so I can rent a nice car and go up there and spend the weekend. After I get with Lisa, you know I can totally pay it back."

T-Bone laughed out loud. "Five hundred dollars! You crazy, dawg! What makes you think I got that kind of money! Get out of here, D. Jump the subway or something. I'm sure you'll find some way to get up to Nanuet."

Derrick tugged on T-Bone's shirt. "Look, man, can we talk for a minute?"

T-Bone looked back at the game in progress. The score was tied at eight; it would end soon.

"I better not miss my turn, D."

The two men stepped aside from the line of basketball players and strolled to the corner of the playground. They spoke in hushed voices.

"Look, T-Bone, you know I wouldn't ask you if this wasn't important. Can't you cut me a little action off your... business... just for the weekend? Back when you got picked up that time, didn't I spend my whole welfare check bailing you out?"

T-Bone blinked and exhaled. "Yeah, D, you did. I guess I owe you one. Business ain't been so great lately, though. The cops are gettin' a lot more aggressive. I don't know I can be sure about sparin' half a grand. I got rent to pay. Child support. A brother like me get picked up for driving while black, you know if I ain't current on my child support they'll throw me in the lock-up fast as that."

Derrick grasped at emptiness, gritting his teeth. "Aw, man. You were my best hope, T. My mom and sister ain't got no money or I'd already be gone. Ain't no one out there we can hit up for the funds?"

A glint of gold flashed in T-Bone's eye from one of the men at the side of the court. The players exchanged money; the game was over, and T-Bone had lost his place in line for the next game.

"Gold. That's it, D."

"What's it, T-Bone?"

"You got a suit and a tie, man?"

"One of my dad's should fit. He's still at Riker's. He ain't gonna be needing it."

T-Bone nodded, his eyes focusing on the glint of the player's gold chain. "Go put it on and meet me back here in half an hour. I can't get you half a grand, but I know a guy I can press for a favor. I can get him to lend me his Humvee for the weekend, and then I'll lend it to you."

Derrick's face burst to life. "Really? Oh, man, T-Bone, that would be perfect! Lisa would think I had it goin' on! She'd know I was there for her and not just the money, y'know?"

T-Bone held up his palms. "Calm down, D, calm down. All right. We're gonna do this. Half an hour. We're gonna go see a gold dealer named Hanoosh. He's a few blocks down, in Little Dubai. This guy is serious, so no joking around and no brother-talk. You call me Timothy, and you call him Mr. Hanoosh. Do not forget the 'Mister'. He did my grill and he still owes me a few more caps, so if we play our cards right, you'll be driving his Hummer out of town by sunset."

-
And there you have it, folks. What Shakespearean play am I adapting? The game begins... Now!

Creative Tropes in James Cameron's "Avatar"

2010-01-06T15:12:00.004-07:00

[Spoiler alert: This essay contains spoilers for the movies Avatar, Lawrence of Arabia, Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, and The Empire Strikes Back, as well as the novel and movie Dune and the five-book fictional epic The Belgariad.]

James Cameron's Avatar has, as of this writing, grossed over $1 billion worldwide, and has clearly set a new bar for science-fiction special effects and cinematography. Cameron has proven himself in the past to be a master of delivering believable military sci-fi even when incorporating obvious fantasy elements -- see Aliens and Terminator 2, for example. Cameron wrote and directed Avatar. It is now very clear that direction is Cameron's true strength, because Avatar's story fails on multiple levels despite using rich, versatile tropes. In this essay, I will illustrate in greater detail some of Cameron's creative trope failures in Avatar and provide examples of the same tropes executed better in other works.

Tropes are not bad things to have in a story. To the contrary, tropes are tools for the crafting of stories, and the quality of a creative work often depends on the author's skill in using tropes to build an engaging plot and vivid narrative. A trope is a well-defined concrete or combination of concretes that can be used to convey a complex abstract idea because a reader is likely to recognize the concrete and draw the "right" conclusion about its abstract meaning in the story.  For example, there is a trope called "Kicking the Dog." If a reader must learn that a character is evil, the writer can convey that understanding by showing that character kicking a dog. Only evil people kick dogs, therefore that character must be evil. It takes seconds and requires no dialogue, making it an effective and efficient trope.

The power of tropes as tools is that a writer using them to convey abstracts using those simple concretes is able to make an entire story "connect" with the reader on a familiar and emotional level even on a first reading or viewing. For example, the Boy Hero is a trope, and so is his adversary, the Dark Lord. Entire forests have fallen to produce pulp of the worst sort imaginable to tell stories of Boy Heroes opposing Dark Lords. The creative works that used the two tropes well, however, have been very successful. Luke Skywalker opposes Darth Vader. Frodo Baggins opposes Sauron. Harry Potter opposes Voldemort. Belgarion opposes Torak.  Good execution sets those works apart from the slush pile. This good execution comes from clear, flavorful prose, well-realized sympathetic characters, well-developed settings, and the adept use of supporting tropes such as the Quest, the Talisman, the Wise Old Mentor, having the Boy Hero fight some Minibosses, and finally having the Boy Hero's Five-Man Band infiltrate the Dark Lord's Evil Hideout and destroy the Dark Lord once and for all. (There are even humorous tropes to explain why the Evil Hideout sometimes collapses when the Dark Lord dies: apparently, the Dark Lord was a "Load-Bearing Villain.") Because the tropes are well-executed, we as readers care about Harry Potter surviving Voldemort's machinations. We feel the despair when Luke Skywalker learns that Darth Vader is his father. We exult in Belgarion's Flash of Insight that leads to his victory over Torak. In essence, well-executed tropes make a story enjoyable.

Avatar uses some of the most versatile tropes in existence to tell its story. The overall plot is an omnibus trope called the "Mighty Whitey" story.  In that trope, an everyman hero (which is itself a trope) from a civilized society journeys to the frontier (also a trope) and encounters peace-loving natives (another trope), wins them over by his bravery and good-heartedness, and eventually becomes their leader. Often, the hero marries the chief's daughter (another trope), who comes to love the hero despite being promised in an arranged marriage (another trope) to another man in the tribe, typically the tribal tough-guy (another trope). The antagonists are usually imperialist/colonialist exploiters (another trope), the society from which the hero hails. The natives reject imperialist technology, instead adhering to timeworn customs and traditions (another trope).

In Avatar, our everyman hero is Jake Sully, a disabled ex-marine. The frontier is Pandora, a moon orbiting a planet five light-years from Earth. (Obviously in the Centauri system. That would have been nice for them to mention at some point, considering an Earth-like planet could plausibly exist there in reality.) Jake works for RDA, a mining company that has built a base on Pandora to mine "unobtainium," a room-temperature superconductive mineral native to that moon. The native blue-skinned alien Na'vi live in a village situated atop "the largest unobtainium deposit for 20 clicks in any direction." Jake's science group operates artificially-grown Na'vi bodies called "avatars" by a wireless mind connection otherwise similar to what we saw in The Matrix and Surrogates. This allows the scientists to walk among the Na'vi as though they were the same species. It is up to the science team to talk the Na'vi into moving away from the mining site; if they fail, the mining company plans to destroy the Na'vi.

On a mission to the dangerous Pandoran jungle, Jake encounters Neytiri, the Na'vi chief's daughter. Neytiri knows Jake is not a true Na'vi but an avatar driver from among the Sky People (the humans). She berates Jake for his ignorance of how to live in harmony with nature, but is secretly impressed that he faced the perils of the wilderness without fear. The other avatar drivers are scientists, so the Na'vi tolerated them but never accepted them into Na'vi culture; since Jake is a warrior, the Na'vi embrace him as a brother.  Neytiri falls in love with Jake and marries him, casting aside her former betrothed, Tsu'tey. Now that Jake is "in" with the natives, mining company security chief Colonel Quaritch promises Jake an expensive spinal restoration if Jake delivers enough recon intel on the Na'vi village Home Tree to ensure that the mining company's attack will succeed. Jake complies, and the attack works -- the Na'vi are forced to retreat to their ancestral home valley beyond the Floating Mountains, and they reject Jake for betraying them.

For no explained reason, that isn't good enough for the mining company, and Colonel Quaritch launches another attack to wipe out the Na'vi once and for all. Jake's science group splits from the mining company and sets up shop near the Na'vi hideaway, and Jake subdues a Pandoran dragon, fulfilling an ancient prophecy and regaining the trust of the Na'vi people. Jake learns that the Na'vi religion actually works (it is based on a series of bioneural bonds between sentient organisms everywhere on the moon) and uses it to rally the very wilderness to fight for the Na'vi. Among the floating mountains, the Na'vi and the Sky People do battle, and the Earthicans are soundly defeated by the combined natural might of Pandora. The Na'vi permit the science group to stay, but expel the miners. Jake becomes the Na'vi chief. And... curtain.

The tropes used in Avatar should immediately evoke parallels to their usage in other (and often better) stories. Lawrence of Arabia, Dune, Dances With Wolves, Disney's Pocahontas, and The Ghost and the Darkness are all examples of essentially the same story told better. A closer look at the tropes in play and how each story executed them makes this clear.

First, the use of "unobtainium" as the name for the superconducting mineral is particularly grating. Unobtainium is the name of the trope! In a story, Unobtainium is whatever rare or valuable substance is needed to make the story world's Applied Phlebotinum (advanced technology, magic, faster-than-light space travel, whatever) work. The archetypical example of the Unobtainium trope executed perfectly is the "spice" from the novel Dune. In Dune, the spice is necessary for faster-than-light space travel, giving rise to the in-world saying "He who controls the spice controls the universe." The entire Dune plot is concerned with which faction will win control of the planet Arrakis, the only known source of spice. For Avatar to actually use the word "unobtainium" to name the story's Unobtainium is as though a writer named the Dark Lord something like "Darkus Lordius." It is as though Cameron's writing staff, adapting his broad ideas into the final screenplay, did as many writers do and used "unobtainium" as a placeholder on paper for an actual flavorful name to be invented later, but Cameron never got around to naming it and the editors didn't notice. Leaving it as "unobtainium" would have been fine in a comedy or deconstructive/irreverent story, but Avatar is a "serious" story.

Second, Cameron fumbles the Evil Imperialist/Colonialist Horde trope. Back in the days of the Virginia Company, sure, with the limitations on oceanic travel, it might make sense for a private corporation to be the first to encounter and make political overtures to a native population. But 150 years in the future, it strains credibility to suggest that there would not be any governmental presence handling the diplomatic side of the equation and ensuring that the mercenaries under Colonel Quaritch do not simply commit genocide and have done with it. At a bare minimum, public officials would entreat with a sentient alien species as a means of assessing the degree of likelihood that the aliens will attack Earth! Maybe there is some reason the mining company is operating free of restraint -- perhaps the Earth is embroiled in civil war, or has an imperialist regime in power, or perhaps the Pandora mining is a criminal enterprise and Earth is looking the other way because it needs unobtainium so badly (at $20 million per kilogram) -- but we do not know, because the story never says one way or the other. Even if the story won't feature these things as central plot elements, proper worldbuilding demands that they be answered one way or the other, and when they are, it becomes trivial to include enough fine detail in the story that an observant reader/viewer can deduce the big picture.

Third, Cameron bungles the General Ripper trope. Colonel Quaritch, an evil and bloodthirsty villain, moves forward with his attack on the Na'vi village, destroys it, and then moves on to further attacks against the Na'vi even though the unobtainium deposit is free for the taking now and the Na'vi have moved like the mining company wanted them to do! War is much more expensive than mining -- no rational corporate decision-maker would have approved the attack on the Na'vi ancestral valley now that the critical deposit of unobtainium was available to be mined. So who was supervising Quaritch anyway? Not the corporation, and clearly not a government. One individual seizes unchecked power, endangering a trillion-dollar enterprise, and everyone just goes along with it? Even hardcore trained soldiers know that they are oath-bound to refuse an illegal order, yet only one of hundreds does so. Gregg Easterbrook cannily observed, in explaining Cameron's fumble of this trope, "I find the colonel with absolute authority a lot more unrealistic than the floating mountains."

Speaking of which, fourth, Cameron bungles his worldbuilding even as he "gets the science right." If unobtainium is a room-temperature superconductor, then it actually does make sense that mountains veined with the mineral and located in a region of magnetic turbulence could float.  So why did Cameron not just have the mining company mine unobtainium from the floating mountains, where no Na'vi live?  Because then there would be no plot, of course. A viewer is meant to infer that the mountains are too far from the base, because the original deposit the mining company wanted was the only one "for 20 clicks in any direction." The mining company can travel five light-years and spend trillions of dollars but won't send a drill more than 20 clicks away to get what they came for? Unopposed, and in staggering quantity? Those floating mountains would be worth more than the cash value of all other human wealth combined. The mining company should have been more than happy to pull up stakes and go gorge on low-hanging fruit.

And speaking of wealth, fifth, Cameron's corporation badly carries the Idiot Ball by fighting for access to a deposit of unobtaininum while ignoring their own science team's discovery of the workings of Pandora's bioneural technology, a prize likely to be worth orders of magnitude more, in the long run, than the rocks! Even the most fungible ore is only a raw material resource, while applied technology is an end product of resources, design, and labor. Commercially speaking, it isn't even close. That bioneural technology would have changed the human condition forever. The script fails to explain in layperson's terms why this is important, instead giving Sigourney Weaver's scientist a few throwaway lines about the bioneural data transmission capability of the ecosystem. The viewer is left watching scenes of the Na'vi praying to "Eywa" without understanding the impact of those scenes until much later, if ever, when the viewer realizes (or reads in an essay like this one) that Eywa was a real biological being who communicated through the bioneural network with most of the plants and animals in the area of the Na'vi homeland. The story instead suggests that there is divine magic in play, instantly breaking suspension of disbelief for even moderately skeptical viewers, and leaving the viewers identifying the wrong Idiot Ball carriers.

Sixth, why did Cameron even include Tsu'tey in the film, if not to blindly conform to the arranged marriage / tribal tough-guy trope? There is virtually no plot interaction between Tsu'tey and Neytiri and Jake -- Tsu'tey is merely there to show Na'vi looking badass and riding their hexahorses and soulbirds. When Neytiri marries Jake, Tsu'tey isn't happy about it, but there is no real plot consequence to Tsu'tey. He ends up dying in battle the same as if Jake had never shown up. This is a clear trope fumble. Dances With Wolves is the perfect execution of the tribal tough-guy side of the trope, because Wind In His Hair would never have rescued Lt. Dunbar from the brig if Dunbar had not earned Wind In His Hair's respect as a Sioux and a warrior. Wind In His Hair is hostile to Dunbar at their first encounter, but ends the story shouting to the mountaintops that Dances With Wolves (Dunbar) is his friend, and will always be his friend.   Pocahontas did well addressing both aspects of this trope on a simpler level: the jilted Kocuom's jealousy at losing his betrothed to John Smith was the impetus for Kocuom's anger during the final confrontation. What could have been a stare-down became real peril, and Kocuom made the danger credible. Further, the English settlers did not fully respect the natives until they recognized Kocuom as the tribal analogue of Smith.

Seventh, why was Neytiri the chief's daughter? She could have been any Na'vi tribeswoman and the plot would have changed little. Cameron made her the chief's daughter because the trope said so, but he failed to understand the storytelling purpose of the trope. Throughout human history before the Enlightenment era, an individual's rank in society had a tremendous impact on what the person was able to do or say in virtually any social situation, and whether that person's role would be credible at all. Where mating and social relationships were concerned, the ranks of the individuals involved resonated with one another, accruing those individuals prestige or reducing them in shame, as applicable. This trope was used perfectly in Dune, when Paul Atreides chose as his lover Chani, who was daughter of Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist and "Father of the Fremen." Paul is the scion of House Atreides, and the standing of the House among the other Houses of the Landsraad depended on his marriage. Paul enters into a political marriage with Imperial Princess Irulan, highest-ranking woman among the Landsraad, accruing House Atreides much prestige. Thus, in order for Paul's love story with Chani to matter, Frank Herbert knew he would have to make Paul's Fremen lover somehow outrank Irulan in some non-overt but relevant way.  Though Chani's rank means nothing to the Landsraad, it means everything where Paul and the Fremen are concerned, leading to the novel's brilliant final passage. In Avatar, Jake Sully's conquest of the dragon, a feat accomplished only five times in Navi history, was what made him the Na'vi leader. Earlier, when Jake first tried to warn the Na'vi village of the impending attack, they barely acknowledged him despite his having mated with the chief's daughter a short time before! Marrying the princess doesn't cut it anymore with the Na'vi; one has to fulfill a historic prophecy to earn their regard. Tough room!

In fact, eighth, those demanding Na'vi are depicted as peace-loving natives in harmony with nature. This particular trope shows up everywhere in fiction lately, especially with the ascendancy of environmentalism*. Reality disagrees: most civilizations at the tribal stage throughout history have been violent, despotic, warlike, intolerant savages. For every Sioux or Navajo that are sedate enough to entreat, colonists encounter a dozen Apache, Comanche, Zulu, Maori, or Aztec tribes full of skilled, agile warriors more than happy to slay the newcomers and, in some cases, dine on the remainder. The environmental aspect is even more laughable, as indigenous tribes' impact on their environment has historically been extensive despite not including iconic talismen of modern pollution such as diesel fuel and nuclear waste barrels. Animal excrement, skinning/slaughtering offal, and fire often despoiled the land around a tribe's encampment, while human filth and overfishing despoiled nearby waterways. Tribal camps moved constantly because the buildup of detritus served as a breeding ground for disease. None of this happens in Avatar. The Na'vi live in literal harmony with the surrounding nature, communicating bioneurally with it via the bonding receptors. The great Na'vi stone structures at their ancestral homeland exist with minimal impact upon the countryside, while the Earthicans strip-mine everything they can reach down to the dirt. Cameron's failure to Do The Research takes a world where he Got The Science Right and ruins it with a bunch of environmentalist make-believe.

Ninth, the name of the trope is sufficiently explanatory: What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome? I will quote Easterbrook once again:

What does "Avatar" build up to? Watching the invading soldiers -- most of whom happen to be former American military personnel -- die is the big cathartic ending of the flick. Extended sequences show Americans being graphically slaughtered in the natives' counterattack. The deaths of aliens are depicted as heartbreaking tragedies, while the deaths of American security forces are depicted as a whooping good time [...] Films that criticize the military for its faults are one thing: When did watching depictions of U.S. soldiers dying become a form of fun?

As Easterbrook correctly notes, it is definitely Not Awesome.

In fairness, Avatar gets some things very, very right. As mentioned above, the floating mountains are scientifically plausible, and Pandora's location is reasonable conjecture and not mere fantasy. The special double-rotary-winged craft flown by the Earthicans, as well as most of the military hardware featured, are realistic and well-imagined. Cameron was already known for eschewing such fantasy tropes as death rays, laser blasters, and lightsabers, relying instead on good old-fashioned bullets. Similarly, Avatar's characters travel to Pandora in stasis in a journey that spans five years, a plausible development used in place of Applied-Phlebotinum-enabled faster-than-light travel, warping, "folding," or similar devices. The actual "avatar" technology is entirely near-fetched. The "USB organ" is a bit off-putting, but it is not pure fantasy magic -- the viewer is shown it in a way that plays off known understanding of the brain-stem and the outer limits of conceptual biology.

Even small details are, at times, excellent: When Jake first lands with the science team to serve as their bodyguard, he sweeps the perimeter with rifle in hand, and his finger is not on the trigger but on the side of the trigger guard. This is precisely what is taught by firearms instructors as the correct way to carry a firearm. Putting one's finger on the trigger while walking around is a good way to risk accidentally firing unintended shots. It is clear, then, that Cameron has the capability of getting even small details right. This supports the disappointing hypothesis that when Cameron fails, he fails due to incompetence, not apathy.

Avatar is planted thick with tropes, and an attentive viewer will notice many more than this essay addressed. Cameron evokes viewer familiarity and emotion through effective direction, but more often his literary tropes weigh down the story enough to leave a savvy viewer disappointed. If Cameron had simply directed the film and a competent screenwriter had provided the nuts and bolts, Avatar might have been the defining movie of a generation. Instead, it is merely a new high-water mark for special effects and concepting, forever limited in its reach by a mediocre narrative.

*As a child of the scientific age and a person who understands research methods, I believe the data show that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) probably is happening. However, I oppose the unprecedented power-grabbing and regulatory intrusion into the personal lives of individuals that is being perpetrated right now by the government using AGW as the excuse du jour. The private sector always adapts, and the scientific community will find a way to work in accord, though this may not happen in earnest until the eleventh hour.

Mike's Top Ten Experiences of 2009

2009-12-31T15:50:00.001-07:00

Well, it's about time to wrap this year up. I'm going to look back on my defining experiences of 2009, this time in chronological order because a ranking attempt would be folly. Then, I will look forward to 2010 and toast the new year!

There were a few negative experiences I think I can dispose of straightaway:

* Our house was robbed in August. The experience taught us some valuable lessons, but I would gladly trade those for the bliss that comes when one does not shoot awake at night at every little noise.

* I survived a bout with pseudomembranous colitis in September. I would be more than happy if I never experienced such a thing again.

* Some friends of mine were forced to endure a terrible ordeal due to the ineptitude, malice, and overreach of Arizona Child Protective Services.

* I finally ran into a time crunch that even good organization was powerless to overcome, and had to bid farewell to some enjoyable hobbies and interests in order to make the most of the rest.

* Finally, my right to free speech was raped, beaten, and buried by the FTC in December.

Still, notwithstanding the setbacks, I choose to focus on the positives of 2009:

1. Book #2 Sees Print

I still can't/shouldn't/won't discuss my non-fiction here on this blog because of author branding, but January 8th saw the release of my second book under my NF pseudonym, and it would end up being the best-reviewed book of my career thus far. That is because it actually garnered one published review, and the review was positive. Gotta love a lifetime batting average of 1.000 based on one plate appearance.

2. Las Vegas Nuptials

MLK Weekend 2009 was a huge hit, with Steph and I joining Jeff and Roxy Mink for a weekend in Sin City for their wedding at the Bellagio. Jeff, Jay, Mark, Fred, and I reveled in a drunken frenzy the night before the wedding, bacheloring the way only Vegas makes possible. Meanwhile, Steph took the Benjamin I gave her, the money I hoped she would make last at least the duration of the evening, and had a huge night at the card tables. The wedding itself was broadcast live via webcam, and the reception set the Bellagio's house record for aggregate alcohol consumption by volume at a wedding event. Steph and I got to enjoy a brisk, bright, scenic drive through northern Arizona while we were at it, and we returned just in time to watch the Cardinals finish beating the Eagles to earn a berth in Super Bowl XLIII.

3. Two Years Strong

January 27th marked our second wedding anniversary, and my parents gave us the cherished gift of watching Allie for a while so we could enjoy a quiet dinner together.

4. Texas and Oklahoma

I think my post on this blog just about sums it up! Come to think of it, 2009 was the most I had traveled in a year since the last season I actively worked as a DCI Level 3 tournament judge, 2001-2002.

5. Workplace Upheaval

As detailed in this post, among others since purged. The upshot was that the governor declared a rulemaking moratorium in January, which was continued by the legislature later in the year and won't expire until well into 2010, if then. Most of the attorneys bailed on my office and sought greener pastures, which ended up working out just fine for me when the grim hand of layoffs never approached my division. Then, in May, my boss retired! She was a good person and helped guide my early career a great deal, but her political ambitions were at cross-purposes to my workaday approach to simple, efficient productivity. Despite my workload actually growing in the wake of all the departures, I am actually less stressed now, because the remaining work is more in line with what I want to do as a writer, and my old boss's empire-building is no longer creating added workload.

6. Summer Nights

Despite a chronic lack of time on my part, this summer was one in which I actually got to see a great many of my friends and friends-of-friends and had fun doing it. Aaron hosted his martial arts crew at his place for a few grillin' dinners. Las Casas de Stenger y de Powers were the sites of fun poker games, UFC fights, and general merriment. My friends Vince, Wade, and John, along with their significant others, joined Steph and me for couples' nights out. Financial advisor Suze Orman wisely said "People first, money second, things third (if at all)." I am happy that 2009 was a year in which I had the capability to put people first and really savor the experiences.

7. Revels with the Crew

In addition to all the fun I reference in the previous entry, Steph and I enjoyed an over-the-top night of drunken fun at Dangerous Dan Voigt's birthday party at the Kobe teppan grill. Jay, Steve, and a few more of the crew were in attendance as we toasted to Dan's ever-encroaching senility. Later in the year, we all joined one another here at home base to celebrate Steph's 27th birthday, and there was football and grilled steak and gameplay for all to enjoy.

8. Evelyn!

The clear #1 event if I had actually attempted qualitative ranking. Evey has so far been the calm before her older sister Allie's unending storm.

9. Christmas with the Girls

I reached this topic here on the blog as well. Christmas was exactly as I had hoped... though Evey didn't participate much except to make lots of people gush over her cuteness, Allie ran around for three straight days like she was trying to avoid incoming fire. I truly can't wait until Christmases with both girls (and perhaps future children) old enough to fully take part. Finally, and definitely not least, Steph and I were overwhelmed by the generosity of our families. Truly unexpected and most welcomed. We are very grateful.

10. Three Days of Indulgence

My friend Jason (RJ) Harris has been doing law school, National Guard, and campaigning for Congress nonstop for most of the year, and he finally got a respite for the holidays with school out, no military shifts, and a campaign hiatus. Wade let me borrow his Humvee truck, and I picked up Jason at the airport with a nice slowroll, suggesting that I had bought the truck after selling a screenplay to Paramount. (I told him the real story after enjoying his reaction.) We went to the Cardinals-Rams game, complete with tailgating, and watched our beloved redbirds crush the hard-luck goats 31-10 in a game with four different players scoring touchdowns and three beautiful interceptions by our defense. Far from sated, we headed out with Steph and Christina to Benihana for "dinner and a show." We went and saw Avatar 3D and Sherlock Holmes, the former of which looked better and the latter of which told a far better story. We tooled around town in the truck, visiting game stores (and playing the same slowroll about my screenplay) and meeting with friends and such. Jason's final night had us joining Jay and Katie for some MNF and pizza, and then it was all over. But what a vacation!

And now, 2009 is dead. Long live 2010!

I am looking forward to seeing my girls grow up just a little more. By the end of next year, Allie will probably be talking in complete sentences, among other things.

I will probably get a minivan at some point. With Steph and I commuting together, we have a rare chance to continue consolidating our assets and turning that into hard savings.

After spending most of 2009 not publishing new material, I expect 2010 to be a veritable outpouring of content. With no more eBay work on the horizon, time is a little kinder to me, and perhaps I will find more opportunities to develop material.

Mostly, I just hope all of you whose lives have intersected with mine are healthy, prosperous, and happy. May your goals be within reach and your strides be firm and straight.

Cheers to 2010, the year we make contact!

Situational Comedy As It Should Be

2009-12-16T16:10:00.000-07:00

[This is a spoiler-free article.]

Steph and I picked up the blu-ray of The Hangover, released yesterday, and enjoyed a little mommy-daddy movie night with the bawdy and hilarious film. The story of four men who storm Las Vegas over a weekend to enjoy a bachelor party and wake up with no memory of what happened is truly a worthwhile watch, and is probably the second best movie of 2009 after Pixar's Up. There are a great many f-bombs, sexual dialogue, and brief breast nudity in The Hangover, so it is certainly not a movie you would want to freely show the young'uns, but mature (relatively speaking) teenagers can probably handle it. If you haven't yet seen, I strongly recommend.

The typical Hollywood comedy delivers its laughs by having the characters tell jokes or zing one-liners at each other and/or by employing slapstick or bathroom humor. This is forced and more like the performance of a skit or stand-up routine. The audience can laugh at it the first time around, but the comedic impact diminishes after that. (In some cases, it diminishes a great deal after that.) It is no accident that many actors in that kind of movie are former comedians. They are simply doing what they know. Hollywood has figured out how to execute such films and make them profitable, and there is certainly nothing wrong with enjoying a chuckle or two at American Pie or Deuce Bigalow. But those never become truly timeless movies that can be watched again and again. After a few slices of Pie... you're basically full.

Part of what made The Hangover great, aside from excellent casting and pacing, is that it followed the comedic principle that the context has to create the premises for the humor. This kind of comedy is in evidence also in film such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Big Lebowski. None of the characters "tell jokes" or "zing one-liners" at one another, and physical comedy is generally developed instead of being slapstick. The comedy is delivered by the characters' actions and reactions to the context of the story developing around them. Usually, this is accomplished by writing a character to have certain attributes and history, and then straining at the edges of that characterization and testing the limits of what the character might do if he were pushed just a bit too far.

For example, it's audacious, cringeworthy, and brilliantly funny to watch Ed Helms' cuckolded dentist Stu in The Hangover desperately trying to convince his friends that his girlfriend's illicit affair with a bartender was nothing to be concerned about. (Not a spoiler; this happens during exposition.) Watching, we laugh at Stu's explicit take on the physical implications of the act, cringe at how pathetic and wussy Stu's rationalization makes him seem, and feel a twinge of pity for Stu as we begin to understand his underlying naivete and good-heartedness. At no time did Helms crack a joke -- all we viewers needed to laugh was to see in context Stu's completely believable dialogue with his buddies Doug and Phil. Royal's audacious hospital set-up in Tenenbaums and the Dude's pining to the policemen for his Creedence tapes in Lebowski are perfect examples of this kind of comedy.

With a sufficiently well-developed context and plotline, a comedy like The Hangover has the freedom to engage in absurdist humor without having it fall flat or look forced. When Our Heroes wake up after the party (again, not a spoiler; this happens during exposition) and see their hotel room in shambles, there are some "unexpected guests" that are completely over-the-top, but since the movie earns it by expositing realistically and confining the comedy to action/reaction and not jokes, the "unexpected guests" are funny to the point of sideache. The punchlines later in the film when their presence is explained gain additional impact and reach almost legendary status -- and that is how a "classic scene" is born. Our Heroes return at one point to their hotel room to hear Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight playing over the room's sound system, and a Crowning Moment of Awesome ensues. Tenenbaums and Lebowski earned and cashed in on absurdist scenes as well, from Walter Sobchak's amazing "This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!" scene (citing the television-edited dialogue), to the scene in which Royal takes his grandsons Ari and Uzi out for a night on the town.

Despite the clear effectiveness of following the contextual, situational comedic method, writing for actual so-called "situation comedies" or "sitcoms" remains generally of the jokes-and-one-liners variety. In some respects, this is an artifact of the necessity of fitting a plot into a 21-minute skit with two intermissions breaking continuity. However, it is telling that some of the most successful sitcoms of the modern day were the ones that took the time and effort to develop context and deliver comedy from action and reaction instead. Great examples of this are Seinfeld, Friends, and That '70s Show, and it is no accident that all three cashed in on contextual development with brilliant absurdist turns. Cue Joey's matter-of-fact explanation that he did, in fact, mean that something was "a moo point," not "a moot point": "You know, it's like a cow's opinion. It doesn't matter. It's moo." Or perhaps Red Forman rescinding half of Eric's punishment when he learns that Eric sneaked out on the town in his Corvette "in order to impress... this... girl." In full absurdist regalia, we have the hilarious "Reefer Madness" spoof that started That '70s Show's third season and the early concession of Seinfeld's Kramer from the wager to see who could be Master of (his or her) Domain. If you know anything about the characters, you can appreciate why those scenes were funny... but neither is ever as funny in the abstract as it is when you see it delivered while watching the entire episode.

Come to think of it, I hypothesize that the reason The Simpsons has never been as good in recent seasons as it was in seasons three through eight is because the writers largely abandoned contextual humor for, yep, jokes and zingers and farts and Homer getting beaten up a different contrived way every other week.

I have my doubts that any of this will change in practice anytime soon -- it takes more time and better writing skills to deliver contextual comedy, and Hollywood already knows how to profit just fine off the other, cheaper, faster kind. Still, if we as consumers understand the difference, we will be in a better position to gauge from the promotional material whether a comedy movie or TV show is worth our time and money, and perhaps will experience more "hits" and fewer "misses" in the future.

Michael Bahr's Disclosures Unjustly Compelled by the FTC

2009-12-01T09:29:00.098-07:00

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has imposed new rules pertaining to bloggers (and others) that took effect December 1, 2009. This post contains my disclosures as compelled by the rules.

As blogger Ari Armstrong ably explains in this blog post,

[T]he FTC has no legitimate authority to issue such rules, which defy the First Amendment and constitute censorship and the chilling of free speech. The rules are extremely broad, ranging from free review copies of books to Twitter posts. The rules are arbitrary and ambiguous, such that their precise requirements and penalties cannot be determined in advance. The rules thus open the door to political abuses. The rules are discriminatory in that they subject bloggers to different standards than print journalists.

Even though it is inherently impossible to confidently comply with the FTC's ambiguous rules, this document represents my best attempt to comply. I wish to stress that I believe the FTC's rules are illegitimate and a violation of rights, and that the FTC should be abolished and its rules rescinded.

That said, I have neither the time nor the budget to face the onslaught of our government's ability to nakedly assert power under these unjust rules, and thus I make the following disclosures:

1. I am a political appointee for the Arizona state government, working as a legal analyst, which means most of the time I develop and draft laws and regulations. I will not be too specific here because I do not want anything I say or write to be construed as being under color of my official position. My writing is my sole and individual opinion and does not represent the position or opinion of the State of Arizona in any way.

2. My wife Stephanie is an employee of the Arizona state government. Nothing I say represents her opinion or that of her office either. For anything she ever says, the same applies as though I said it. This should all be obvious, but the FTC demands that I spell these things out for you, as though you were a child incapable of figuring it out for yourself.

3. I am honored to count myself a close friend of Richard Jason (RJ) Harris since 1998, and I have been an outspoken supporter, both verbally and financially, of his candidacy for the 2010 U.S. Congressional seat for Oklahoma's 4th district. It is possible that I may serve on RJ's congressional staff if he is elected, given that I will bring to the table four years' experience and professional expertise in the development and drafting of laws and regulations, which are activities Congressmen dabble in from time to time (or so I've heard). Even if RJ is not elected or if he does win but I never serve on his staff, you may expect that I will have good things to say about him and/or his political positions. Accordingly, for future reference, the FTC would like you to know that I am an evil, fraudulent, paid astroturfer seeking a plush cronyist appointment and not just an experienced legal analyst who supports his long-time friend's political aspirations and already agreed with virtually all of his friend's political positions anyway.

4. I was awarded a Bartels Scholarship while a law student at Arizona State University. This public interest law scholarship, for which I am very grateful to Professor Bartels and the scholarship committee, was enough to pay for my books for my final two semesters of law school. This was very welcome assistance as the expense of law school had me pretty far down to the cloth during that time. You can expect that I may have good things to say about Professor Bartels, his projects (such as the Innocence Project), the ASU College of Law, and related entities or endeavors. Of course, there is a strong chance I would have spoken or written positively about those entities regardless, but the FTC doesn't give a lick about things like "respect" or "admiration" or "Sun Devil pride" -- to them, I am merely a paid shill, and must identify myself as such.

5. Amazon (and the Amazon affiliate program, such as Createspace.com) sells copies of my books, including books I have written under a pen name and do not wish to reveal for market reasons. (The necessary proofs are easily established in the event of litigation). I may have in the past, and may in the future, link to Amazon to promote my books or to promote books that I have read and wish to endorse. At the time of this writing, no other author has provided me with any remuneration for reviewing or endorsing any books. I do make money when my own books are sold to consumers, as you might imagine. I may at some point be an Amazon affiliate myself and earn money through links to book sales offers. Accordingly, the FTC would like you to know I am not only a paid shill but a dirty, evil capitalist.

6. I am an outspoken Objectivist and support Objectivist organizations and causes. At the time of this writing, no Objectivist author, organization, or cause has provided me with any remuneration for any reason, including whatever I may have written about them or may write about them in the future. The FTC would rather those organizations not exist at all, so you can imagine how they view my support of same.

7. Finally, my parents adopted me in 1974 with the help of Catholic Adoption Services, and this event basically defined the remainder of my life. (It's difficult to put into words how important that assistance really was without sounding glib.) I have since been a strong supporter of various adoption charities both verbally and financially. While I advocate private voluntary charity as the best means to support such charities, my advocacy can at times take on a political tenor. For future reference, the FTC would like you to know that any time I speak or write on adoption issues, I am a filthy paid astroturfing shill and not just a grateful adoptee who hopes to improve the lives of orphaned and disadvantaged children around the world.

I will conclude by borrowing once again from Ari Armstrong, his words expressing my sentiments exactly:

As should be obvious, the creation of this document, as well as the continuous need to attempt to comply with the FTC's ambiguous rules, is a complete waste of my time. I resent the FTC for forcing me to direct my valuable time away from essential projects to note distant, minor, or already-publicized financial connections to things I may on occasion speak well of.

I don't need the FTC to tell me when and how to note financial connections. Moreover, the FTC's presumption that my views are influenced by financial connections is ludicrous and insulting; the fact is that my financial connections are either unrelated to my views or a distant by-product of my views.

I also resent the FTC for forcing me to comply with ambiguous rules that may give my political opponents opportunities to lodge bogus complaints against me over alleged technical violations of the FTC's rules, threatening to waste yet more of my time.

I do not expect that the FTC's rules will be ambitiously enforced in the short-term. Many bad laws (and authorized rules) have no noticeable impact when they are first implemented. Often such laws and rules remain on the books for years before bureaucrats and prosecutors take advantage of them to actively violate people's rights. That does not make their existence more comforting.

Again I wish to stress that the FTC's rules are in blatant violation of the First Amendment, they constitute censorship, and for this the FTC richly deserves to be abolished.

Damned right, brother.

The Holiday Sense of Wonder

2009-11-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

Thanksgiving day brings with it an annual visit to Steph's parents' house for our family and about five or six dozen other people. I was told it used to be only thirty or forty; there are now at least 25 children that attend, in addition to some number of adults. Two of the children that attended this time around were our very own Allie and Evey. Evey mostly slept, passed around like a sacred totem from grandmother to aunt to cousin to mother and back again. Allie... well, Allie went hog wild. The kids got to enjoy climbing on a jungle gym, pony rides, playing Beatles Rock Band, badminton, ping-pong, and just running around burning k-cals like little hummingbirds. And I began to remember for the first time in decades just how incredible the holidays really are for children. As they should be. And Christmas is just around the corner.

I vaguely remember the entire holiday season in my youth being one gigantic run-up, like a party on the verge of breaking out for an entire month. It was impossible not to get caught up in the anticipation. There were colorful, shiny lights everywhere; every toy and gadget and gizmo a person could want to examine was on display at the stores; and special events were taking place at arcades, roller rinks, bowling alleys, and laser tag arenas. The temperature turned cold, but never freezing, here in the Phoenix area; it made for bright, pleasant days and chilly, wintry nights. There was plenty of candy to be had no matter whose house we visited, and there was plenty of time to play because school was out.

I remember my friend Dalton would have Christmas a few days early, because his father was an airline pilot and would inevitably have to work through the holiday itself. There would be a barbecue, football games, early presents (meaning toys and gizmos, of course), and usually trips to cool places we would never have thought to go. I remember Thanksgivings at my parents' cabin with a few other families in the mix, and going out to play in the snow (or the autumn woods, if it was a warm year) with my sister and/or my friends Jeff and Tom. One year, I was horribly ill -- I think I was 13 or 14 years old -- but I managed to play through and complete several Nintendo games, so even a sick New Year's turned into what was, for a teenaged nerd like I was at the time, a pretty decent experience. (I believe Philip J. Fry said it best: "Well, I spent all of ninth grade playing video games, except for that week when my eyes started to bleed, and in my opinion...")

Once I grew into adulthood, the shine quickly faded from the holiday apple. I had a few good years early on with the family, but then I made the mistake of getting "married" at 22 and having to shuffle between visiting my family and visiting hers -- truly an excruciating experience. Things went south for me financially, and I ended up more concerned with getting work done and the fact that I couldn't do any mailing or other business during the days when everything was closed. After I was divorced in 2001, I spent the next few years having things go generally well, but the fun was definitely "over" -- the bottom line was that I had a household to maintain, even just a household of one. And since it was more economical for me at the time to eat out for virtually every meal, holidays became an adventure of wondering what would be open so I could get some chow. Dalton, Beach, and I filmed one of our "funny videos" on Christmas in 2001 or 2002, showing us visiting restaurant after restaurant with no success, and finally managing to grab a meal at Gameworks. I met Stephanie in 2005 and things improved, but for a few years my main concerns during holiday season were law school finals and eBay work.

This year, I was able to arrange for all those distractions to be set aside, because I was determined to make sure I enjoyed the time I had with the family. Even though it's a challenge keeping up with "Tornado Allie," I knew she would be on cloud nine and I determined not to miss it. Steph's family is an order of magnitude better to spend time with than that of my ex, and instead of having us shuffle between houses, my parents and such were simply invited right into the fold and joined the fun. And for a shining afternoon, I was able to smile and just live in the moment. It's still going on, after a fashion; the rest of the Thanksgiving weekend is going to be full of visits with friends and recreational time with my folks and the girls. So, even though the child-scale enjoyment of the holidays is probably gone beyond my reach, the festivities still have the power to stimulate my sense of wonder... and, being a science fiction writer, my sense of wonder is something I am happy to see nourished and sustained.

The Future According to 1989: Photon

2009-11-16T11:56:00.002-07:00

I had a great weekend, and it brought with it a flashback some twenty years to a tantalizing glimpse into the future.

Saturday afternoon, I joined Steph and the family to celebrate her youngest brother's 13th birthday party. The party took place at Laser Quest, a laser tag arena in Mesa that has survived economic slowdowns to remain solvent for about 14 years now. This is good by comparison to any entertainment retailer, but fantastic by the metrics of the laser tag industry, where earnest startups are often crushed under the weight of square footage rent and the debt from their own elaborate, expensive buildouts. Back in the mid-1990s, I was a frequent customer of Laser Quest. In 1997, I was banned from the premises when my group of friends was drawn into a huge melee with several other groups. Alas, we were all young hotheads, and nobody had the presence of mind to sort things out with management and explain that we hadn't come looking for trouble. Saturday was the first time I visited Laser Quest since. (Management saw no reason to enforce my ban at this late date, apparently.)

I was happy to see that Laser Quest was mostly just as I remembered it. Players wore a simple shoulder harness and holster with targets on the front, back, and sides. Upon the marshal's signal, we dispersed into a blacklit maze to the techno-pop strains of Genesis' Abacab and the swishes of whirling spotlights. After a 30-second countdown, the game began, and it was shoot-or-be-shot. The arena's lower level is generally just a killing ground -- the open areas are target practice from above, while the labryinth features too many blind corners. The arena sports a faux second story made up of three "upstairs islands" that are not connected. Two of them are death traps full of dead ends and exposed bypasses. The middle island, though, I remembered to have plenty of cover and an actual continuous circle of corridors. One could keep moving throughout the entire game without backtracking, and would have plenty of shot opportunities and little exposure. That is where I stayed.

The game lasts only ten minutes, but I felt like I was gasping in exhaustion for at least thirty -- the combination of constant dashing and ducking was an aerobic punch to my out-of-shape guts. My strategic location saved my hide, because I had plenty of safe spots to stop and recuperate, however briefly. It was all I could do to remind myself to keep moving when opposing players were caught in the exposed walkways around the other two islands, cattle to the slaughter of my shots. A few other players lurked in my habitat, but we each seemed to decide on our own that hunting one another was a waste of time when our position afforded us such a target-rich external environment. In the end, I scored third place out of 25 players. Not bad for an old fogey of 35 against a bunch of mostly speedy, sugar-fueled 12- and 13-year olds. The top scorer was Steph's stepfather, no less, a triathlon runner of 50+ years of age! Youthful exuberance loses out to veteran strategy this time around!

My enjoyment of that Laser Quest game immediately hearkened memories of the granddaddy of them all, the most fun I think I have ever had in a commercial establishment that allows minors on the premises: Photon.

The Photon arena, circa 1989

That photo is accurate. Photon opened a franchise location in Tempe just north of the river bottom back when I was in high school, and without experiencing it firsthand it may be hard for a reader to understand just how incredible it really was. In fact, while researching Photon for this blog post, I expected it to have been beautified by nostalgic memory, but every photo I have found looks just as great as I remembered it, and not at all campy or cheesy. Oh, sure, the "look" of science fiction at the time was very Star Trek: the Next Generation, very clean and metallic with lots of open space. But that is no better or worse than the "gritty alley" Cyberpunk future or the bipolar westernized frontier/Alliance Firefly future or any of the other archetypes that have emerged since then. It is simply different. In a way, it defines the age, like the Art Deco science fiction of the Golden Age or the newer examples I just cited.

The critical thing is that it worked. Suspension of disbelief for a teenager walking into Photon was nearly total. The entire experience was immersive, from the helmet-vest bodysuits to the "Space Cafe"-styled food court to the arcade full of the very latest video games. The arena itself featured two full stories (in Tempe, anyway; other locations reportedly had more) and each team had a genuine "base" to defend. Hits against one's own base counted against that player's score, and the base sensors would be lit at intervals and be vulnerable during those windows of time. The buildout must have been staggeringly expensive -- one could probably build five Laser Quests for the same price -- but boy, did it deliver.

Photon (the company) closed without debt and sold off its component parts -- perhaps they thought they had already struck the fad while the iron was hot, and that there would be no lasting demand. The Tempe location went away with it, though other Photon locations remained open for years since, presumably independently. (Apparently one of the last few was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.) There wasn't much in the initial years that followed; one local startup, Tracer, opened in Mesa with a small arena, low square footage, a cheap buildout, and bargain-basement equipment -- can you say "flashlight sensors?" -- but those small-time operators kept the concept alive and the playing public interested long enough for companies like Laser Quest to refine the business model and make it viable.

Tellingly, though the modern laser tag companies have begun to build larger arenas with more stories and increasingly elaborate bases, none of them has ever been able to generate the amazing futuristic aesthetic of Photon. Today's arenas are absolutely now, a dark, intense, "realistic" future that we live in every day. Photon, by contrast, was a window to a more vast and grandiose future, an ambitious look at a brighter and more distant tomorrow brought palpably close. Perhaps Photon's immersive future experience really is just too expensive to fabricate for buildout these days. It was, nevertheless, awesome.

The Toddler Manifesto

2009-11-09T13:18:00.013-07:00

As translated from the spoken Toddlerese of my eldest daughter Alexandra. For best results, read in ballad meter.

The Toddler Manifesto
by Michael Bahr

For I, Intrepid Toddler Girl,
Exploring all before me,
Shall stomp and flirt and bat my eyes
And make adults adore me.

I eat and drink and run and play
My folks will surely mention;
And all they need to give me is
Unlimited attention.

Upon my entrance to a room
I'll find where danger lurks,
I'll grab the cords and power strips
And learn how current works.

Or else I'll locate sticky things
And smear them on my face;
Or fragile objects I will sling
Across the empty space.

My words I'll choose for best effect
And babble every other;
A useful trick it is, to train
My father and my mother.

I understand the things they say
But still put up a fight;
I'll run full-speed at red-line 'til
It's time to say "Night-night!"

Review: "The Gathering Storm" by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

2009-11-05T14:46:00.004-07:00

[This is a spoiler-free review. While I will mention plot threads that appear in the book, I will not describe how any of them progress or resolve. I do, however, make a few oblique references to earlier books in the series that could be construed as spoilers. The previous book in the Wheel of Time series came out four years ago, so the statute of limitations has passed on that. If you are reading through the series for the first time, don't read this post.]

The second post in this blog's archives, from back in 2005, is a review of Robert Jordan's "Knife of Dreams," the 11th book in the epic fantasy saga The Wheel of Time. After trudging through about four books worth of slow plot grind, the story burst back to life with intrigue, death, and oh-so-beautiful plot resolution... or so it seemed. Knife, however solid, possessed nowhere near the density of Concentrated Awesome that the fourth through sixth books in the series had. But it was such a stark improvement over books seven through (ugh) ten that I was determined to laud it accordingly. I had a brand-new blog at the time, and it made an ideal podium.

Then, in 2007, after a courageous fight with cardiac amylidosis, Robert Jordan (James O. Rigney) passed away, leaving his magnum opus incomplete. TVTropes refers to this as "Author Existence Failure." While condolent toward the storyteller's family, fans were left to genuinely wonder if the final book of the series would ever be completed.

As it turns out, we need not have worried. Jordan's widow, Harriet McDougal, found a young up-and-coming fantasy author named Brandon Sanderson and charged him with finishing the epic story based on Jordan's notes, tapes, charts, and a few hundred pages' worth of completed text. Sanderson's commission was the gig of a lifetime, and I am downright verdant with envy at seeing him tackle this incredible task.

Per Sanderson, Jordan had completed most of the end of the Last Battle and sketched in arc-completion and epilogue frameworks for the major characters. That is, the major major characters -- Wheel features, as of the end of the new book, over 1900 named characters. Pink Floyd was right, of course: a walk-on part in a war is better than a lead role in a cage. But in the case of Wheel, things were and remain all but unmanageable at that scale. Jordan mercifully killed off a fair number of the cast in the previous book, including various Aes Sedai coattail-riders, some Whitecloaks, some Seanchan, et cetera. That still left a huge menagerie for Sanderson to manage and marshal toward plot arc resolution, and in many cases all he had were notes of Jordan's to the effect that "character X turned out to be a Darkfriend all along" or what have you. To be clear: Sanderson's task was monumental. So monumental, in fact, that the original "final book" he was commissioned to write turned into a final trilogy of books. The Gathering Storm is the first of the three, and will be followed in about a year by Towers of Midnight and finally A Memory of Light.

Did Sanderson succeed? This should in no way be taken as speaking ill of the departed, but my answer is: Yes; in fact, possibly to a greater degree than Jordan himself could have done.

I can hear the fanboy public gnashing teeth already. "How can it be better than Jordan would have done? That's impossible! It's Jordan's story!" Indeed it is. Jordan had already conceived the vital details driving the plot and had already created vibrant, exciting characters. (Too damned many of them, in fact). But it was clear that Jordan was too much a product of his serial-romance-novel roots. This series should have ended books ago, and a few entire arcs in the middle books should really never have happened. Brandon Sanderson's handling of The Gathering Storm is tight, efficient, vivid, and exciting all at once. It wastes little and accomplishes much. In short, Sanderson's execution surpassed Jordan's.

Mark Rosewater teaches a bit of screenwriting/playwriting wisdom that goes: "No scene is worth a line; no show is worth a scene." That is to say, no matter how enamored an author may be of a compositional element, if it does not completely serve the story, it needs to be cut. This lesson can be expanded beyond lines and scenes to entire plot threads. If a plot thread does not serve the primary story to a greater degree than the space it takes up in the text, it needs to go. Just playing to a draw isn't good enough, either -- every plot thread more than necessary creates distraction and dilutes focus, so that serves as a rake above which a surplus plot line must deliver.

An example of a plot thread subarc that delivered above and beyond its cost to the main narrative would be in Lord of the Rings when Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli depart the Rohirrim camp to travel the Dimhault Road and confront the Army of the Dead. How well did this thread deliver? Look at what it accomplished. The thread:

Provided the Good Guys a source of martial strength that they used to rally to win the Battle of Minas Tirith;
Developed Aragorn's credentials as returning King of Gondor, as the Dead are among the first to recognize Aragorn's authority to command and to enforce oaths;
Furthered the character-role shifts of Aragorn from Lancer to Hero and Legolas from Pretty One to Lancer;
Forced Gimli to face his fears, realizing that his cowardice was not of death or defeat but of failing to live up to the deeds of his ancestors; and
Removed three of the Fellowship from the larger plot thread at a pivotal time so that the plot arcs of several second-tier characters could develop and resolve on the main stage.

That is staggering, beautiful efficiency of narrative there by the master, Tolkien. And, to Jordan's credit, Wheel contains plot subarcs that are well-conceived and add great depth and flavor to the narrative, even if not as tightly as Tolkien's did. Unfortunately, to Jordan's detriment, there were all too many plot threads that subtracted from the narrative just as an ill-conceived line can kill a scene, or an ill-conceived scene can kill a show.

The worst offender Jordan included in Wheel is the Faile/Shaido plot arc. It could be excised from the books and what incremental character development that occurred in it could be dispersed along other events involving those characters, and the series would be both shorter and better off for it. In fact, one of Sanderson's first cleanup tasks in book 12 is to resolve the few remaining bits of that arc. A subarc that straddled that thread was the Morgase/Maighdin story, and the same is true. Maighdin should simply have been killed. It would have added depth to Tallanvor and Basel Gill as they grapple internally with whether to transfer their loyalties to Elayne Trakand, and it would have added greater gravity to Elayne's grieving for her mother without the distraction of the unneeded dramatic irony that the reader knows Maighdin is alive and Elayne does not. Another example was a new subarc Jordan added in book 11: Rodel Ituralde and the guerrilla-style Domani homeland defense. Sanderson resolves it completely in book 12, and it becomes clear that it wasn't really necessary at all. Ituralde, for all his badassitude, gave nothing to the story that Davram Bashere and the Borderland generals were not already capable of providing. Yet a fourth example, especially pernicious because the events of book 12 (as plotted by Jordan, not as written by Sanderson) mooted it entirely, was the subarc involving the Atha'an Miere. Yup, all that Sea Folk scheming and bargaining ends up amounting to bupkus -- and that's what Jordan meant to have happen all along.

Faced with such a tangle of plot events yearning to resolve and breathe free, Sanderson took up the mantle of Storm by breaking out of Jordan's overly-dispersed concurrent narrative structures and returning to the plotting format that writers have used to great effect for centuries. Sanderson concentrates on a few major plot arcs, highlights conflict, forces characters to make value decisions, and resolves those plot arcs to the degree that this stage of the series plot allowed. He takes time on the side to tie up a number of loose ends, and none of them end up reading in a particularly abrupt manner -- it was clear that some parts of the narrative had withered on the vine and were best disposed of. In one particular instance, a mid-major character from earlier books who had been seen less and less lately was consolidated from a subarc into one of the main arcs so excellently that there occurred a trifecta of Crowning Moment of Awesome, Tearjerker Death, and Reckoning That Followed. Two villain subarcs rejoined the major arcs, and two more prominent antagonists are Dead And Not Coming Back, something that happened all too infrequently since around book five.

The primary plotlines in Storm follow Rand al'Thor and Egwene al'Vere. Rand struggles to get the necessary military assets in place for the onset of the Last Battle while clinging to what remains of his fragile sanity and emotional state. Since Rand is the Main Hero, his plot did not resolve entirely, but came to a satisfying stopping point with a healthy chunk of his conflict resolved and the remaining conflict cleanly distinguished for future development. The most chokingly-intense and "OMFG!" chapter in the book involves Rand doing something we never, not in a million years, could have predicted he would do. A very, very intense twist. Egwene's major plot, easily the more consistent backbone of the book, is just about resolved by story's end -- but there are some twists along the way that take her where the fan community probably didn't quite expect her to go.

Matrim Cauthon does appear and stars in a deliciously creepy interlude, one of the best-written scenes in the series, but his Huge Plot Climax seems primed instead to occur in book 13. Perrin Aybara was a major figure in book 11 and doesn't do too much in Storm, but Perrin's chapters do well to marshal some necessary assets to their places for the grand finale. Nynaeve al'Meara gets screen time in two different subarcs and flourishes in both. Aviendha has a single subarc, and a well-executed one -- it appeared to be cleanup work, as it could have occurred books ago, but it was satisfying nonetheless. Tuon still has considerable mileage left ahead of her, despite the deceptive chapter title "The Death of Tuon." I was upset at first at the apparent "Return of the King"-esque title spoiler, but upon reading the chapter, I realized that the meaning of that phrase had already been hinted at by Jordan, and it was not what it seemed at first glance -- a delightful misdirect. Tuon's subarc touches both of the primary plot arcs to great (and very different) effect. And, for the first time since... the series began, Gawyn Trakand gets to be a mid-major instead of a throwaway character. Among the minor characters, there are literally scores of deaths, at least one Tearjerker Wedding Proposal, and no small amount of derring-do.

Lan Mandragoran and Elayne Trakand each play the part of Sir Not Appearing In This Book, reprising Perrin's command performance from book 5 and Mat's brilliant delivery in book 8. Among the bad guys, the biggest no-shows were Mazrim Taim, Padan Fain, and Mesaana. There is vague, ominous foreshadowing at the end of both Knife and Storm that big doin's are a-transpirin' at the Black Tower, but there have still been no chapter-length scenes filmed on location since, what, book 9? One surmises the Black Tower is one of the "Towers of Midnight" that book 13's title promises we'll see. What other Towers could there be? Conceivably all could appear in book 13, as all have unresolved plot hooks that are ripe or close enough: the White Tower, the Tower of Ghenjei, and the Tower of Ravens. We don't, alas, learn anything more about What Happened to Asmodean.

I deliberately waited the better part of the week after finishing The Gathering Storm to write this review, because I wanted the shine to have worn off the apple before I charged in and declared it a triumph or a disaster. Despite the wait, I am still convinced, as I was upon closing the back cover, that this book stands up alongside The Shadow Rising and The Fires of Heaven, and I am absolutely stunned at the professional craftsmanship displayed by Brandon Sanderson. My best fiction work is still deeply in development and well short of publication, but even at this early stage in my career, I can see the seams and joints in Sanderson's prose and clearly perceive the adept work that he put into fastening and polishing them. I will most certainly be looking further into that gentleman's back catalog, and not just because he's the only science-fiction writer I know besides myself who plays Magic: the Gathering. Robert Jordan will be a sentimental favorite of fantasy fans forever, but Sanderson is tomorrow's fantasy flagbearer: the John Petrucci to Jordan's Jimmy Page.

After what will be 21 years and 15 books (including a prequel), the most expansive, epic fantasy saga of my generation will finally end. Two years on the calendar and two more tomes on deck. I'm even more excited about this series than when I made that second blog post all those months and years ago... and that makes The Gathering Storm a success by my reckoning.

The Time for the Pac-12 Has Come

2009-10-26T10:37:00.006-07:00

[After-the-fact edit: As of 2010, the Pac-12 became reality! In my speculative post below, I had not considered the possibility that the Big 12 might be vulnerable to losing schools, but that's what ended up happening, and in the end I think the Pac-12 is much stronger for the addition of Colorado than any WAC school. I view the addition of Utah from the Mountain West as more or less equivalent to having added a WAC school. Sure enough, Fresno State and Hawaii (and also Nevada) left the WAC... but they went to the MWC, along with Boise State, the latter of which I did predict. And I hope you'll observe that the Pac-12 football divisions, southern and northern, are exactly as I predicted, except with the two new schools being Colorado and Utah, not Fresno State and Hawaii. Finally, the Pac-12 Championship Game has been established as I predicted.]

Arizona State University and a certain unnamed southern Arizona school departed the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) in 1978 to join the then-Pacific 8 Conference, or Pac-8, making it into the Pac-10 that we know today as one of the NCAA's premier athletic divisions. After 31 years, it is time for the Pacific Conference to expand once again at the WAC's expense -- but also to the WAC's benefit.

When ASU and UA left the WAC for the Pac-10, it was abundantly clear that the move was necessary. During the decade prior to the move, ASU either won the WAC in football or shared the conference title seven times, losing a combined four conference games during that stretch. UA won once and was ASU's only legitimate spoiler. ASU and UA dominated WAC baseball: ASU won the WAC eight times during that stretch and the NCAA national championship twice, while UA won the WAC the other two times and were national champions once. In basketball, UA dominated the WAC, never finishing worse than 4th in the conference, after the hiring of their first "elite" head coach, Fred "the Fox" Snowden, and made multiple deep NCAA March Madness tournament runs.

A similar level of disparity currently plagues the WAC, courtesy of Boise State, Hawaii, and Fresno State. BSU and Hawaii have won every WAC football title since 2002, and FSU has been the only likely spoiler in most of those years. The three schools combine for six WAC basketball championships or runners-up in the past decade. Hawaii is the all-time WAC baseball conference championship leader, while Fresno State has won every WAC baseball championship since the WAC resumed its conference tournament in 2005. It is abundantly clear now, as it was in the late 1970s, that the WAC is top-heavy and noncompetitive.

The other teams in the WAC, though occasionally seeing the stars align for a magical season here or there, simply cannot compete at that level. Louisiana Tech (which really belongs in some other conference geographically) and Nevada have each won or shared the WAC football title once since the Mountain West split from the WAC in 1999. New Mexico State and Utah State have finished well in the WAC basketball tournament a couple of times, but were a far cry from being March Madness contenders. San Diego State won the WAC in baseball three times, most recently 18 years ago. The two remaining schools, Idaho and San Jose State, have not had much success in any of these areas.

The WAC's status as a non-BCS conference has combined with the competitive disparity to cheat the three schools out of opportunities to compete for national titles -- and cheated the viewing public out of what could have been wonderfully entertaining and competitive games. Boise State has the strongest claim, having run the table in 2006, undefeated, en route to a 2007 Fiesta Bowl win over Oklahoma, but no title. (NCAA national champion Louisiana State had two losses that year.) BSU has subsequently "scheduled up" with home-and-homes against perennial powers such as Pac-10 Oregon. BSU swept the Oregon series and is, as of this writing, ranked #4 nationally in the BCS poll. Unfortunately, no strong teams remain on BSU's schedule, because they are playing out their conference opponents. BSU will almost certainly win out, but if they are not ranked at least #2 by then, BSU will not even be given a chance to play for the national title. Hawaii experienced a similar letdown in 2007, going undefeated in the regular season -- but losing the 2008 Sugar Bowl and their season-opening "power game" against Florida, each after coach June Jones had already announced his departure for a Texas-sized paycheck at SMU. Hawaii still struggles to schedule enough quality opponents due to travel distance issues; for years, Pac-10 schools routinely visited (and trounced) Hawaii simply because the distance was manageable, but now those same schools have shied away in order to avoid potentially costly nonconference losses. Meanwhile, FSU has an ongoing policy of playing "any team, anywhere" -- effectively offering road games to football-factory schools without requiring a home-and-home -- but BCS schools fear to play the Bulldogs and leave FSU in the lurch to schedule strong enough opposition to make a serious BCS bowl run. Within the conference, FSU rarely loses to anyone other than BSU or Hawaii. These three schools have done as much as they can where they are. There is nowhere for them to go but outward and upward.

The Mountain West conference, currently the strongest mid-major, is attempting to lure Boise State (depending on whom you believe). As much as BSU could certainly compete in the Pac-10, it makes more sense for BSU to remain in the intermountain region for its conference games. BSU's schedule strength will increase considerably with annual matchups against TCU, BYU, Utah, and Air Force. If the Mountain West is serious about this, BSU needs to cooperate and get it done. If they haven't actually extended an invitation, they need to do so. Everyone wins in that scenario: BSU gets its stronger schedule, the MWC increases in overall power, and the WAC becomes more balanced and competitive.

That leaves Hawaii and Fresno State. Rather than letting them dominate the WAC for another decade the way ASU and UA did in the 1970s, the Pac-10 needs to become the Pac-12. This accomplishes many things for all parties. Hawaii and FSU get stronger schedules and won't have as many holes to fill every year by begging teams to man up and take the field with them. The most distant Pac-12 teams from Hawaii will be Washington State and a certain unnamed southern Arizona school, and in neither case is the travel as far as for Hawaii's current WAC opponents Louisiana Tech, New Mexico State, or Utah State. It would be a simple matter to place those schools in the other Pac-12 division so that they only play away games at Hawaii every fourth year. The existing Pac-10 teams not only get to add variety to what has become a stagnant and insular annual schedule, but (most importantly) could add a conference championship game between the champions of the two divisions on the first weekend in December each year, and that means big-time revenue. The arrangement also opens up one more game slot per year for Pac-12 teams to schedule home-and-homes against strong schools elsewhere. (Schools would play their five division opponents and half the opposite division each year, alternating home and away as applicable.)

A look at the possible alignment of the Pacific 12 Conference:

Southern Division
UCLA
USC
Fresno State
Hawaii
Arizona State
Arizona

Northern Division
Washington
Washington State
Oregon
Oregon State
California
Stanford

In Year 1 of this arrangement, Hawaii's schedule might run:
FSU, @ASU, UA, @USC, UCLA, @UW, OSU, @CAL.
Year 2 would run:
@FSU, ASU, @UA, USC, @UCLA, WSU, @UO, STAN.
Year 3 would run:
FSU, @ASU, UA, @USC, UCLA, @WSU, UO, @STAN.
Year 4 would run:
@FSU, ASU, @UA, USC, @UCLA, UW, @OSU, CAL.
Then the sequence resets. Every year, every Pac-12 team has a perfect four-home, four-away conference slate. (Current Pac-10 schedules are unbalanced, an inevitable consequence of playing nine conference games every year.) Hawaii's farthest-flung opponents would only travel to Honolulu three combined times every four years: WSU once and UA twice. Travel distance as an obstacle becomes minimized.

Obviously, I am neither a decision-maker nor a stakeholder in this, aside from my twice-over alumnity with Arizona State. Nevertheless, the recent history and competitive results at play here clearly indicate that this is the way to go. The time for the Pac-12 has come.

Welcome, Evelyn!

2009-10-13T19:04:00.003-07:00

Evelyn Christina Bahr
Born 10/10/2009, 12:43pm, 7lb 13oz 21.25in

May the road rise up to meet her.

Sinkholes and Wellsprings

2009-09-22T09:28:00.004-07:00

Only three weeks are left (as far as anyone knows) in Steph's pregnancy, which means it is almost time for us to double our "fun" by adding Evey to the family Bahr and giving Allie the little sister she so sorely needs. This means that, with already-scant free time for Steph and I becoming even rarer and more precious, I have to reevaluate how we invest money and time with an eye toward maximizing the value of our time with each other and our "family time" with the girls. This is an integral part of our ongoing "decluttering" effort, and today's post focuses on evaluating "things" by cost and time investment and seeing how they compare.

First, it helps to set some parameters. I grew up as a classic nerd, so I spent a lot of teenage time playing Dungeons & Dragons. Pen-and-paper role-playing games are a perfect example of an indulgence for people who have plenty of time to waste and a severely limited money supply. Adult indulgences, like tropical vacations, thrill sports, and Vegas weekends, are the opposite, and are perfect for people who have plenty of money to waste and a severely limited time supply. As you might expect, "the truth" for most of us lies somewhere between those extremes. There are differences, however, in the time and money equations for those of us who are single, those of us who are "spoken for" but childless, and those of us with children. Today, I am sharing a look at our time-money value exercise. As you read, see if you agree with whether I have accurately forecast a sinkhole, or its opposite, a wellspring. In the comments, feel free to share your own time-money value analyses.

1. Video games
I enjoy video games tremendously. I grew up with video games, and video games grew up with me. I saved the Princess in castle 8-4; I recovered the Triforce; I outfought both M. Bison and Mike Tyson; I destroyed the Space Pirates; I built a Megalopolis; I defeated the Dragonlord. But these days, playing a "story" video game just isn't happening. The time simply isn't there. When we were robbed in August, in addition to taking our Xbox 360 and Wii, they took an entire shelf of video games I had never found time to complete: Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess; Super Mario Galaxy; Metroid Prime 3; Halo 3; Lego Star Wars Complete; and on and on. We did seem to get good use out of video games that are either "arcade-ish," party/group-oriented, or both. Accordingly, when it came time to rebuy with the insurance money, we chose only to replace the Xbox 360 (partly because it is a Netflix device) and to replace Rock Band 2 and the Xbox Live Arcade titles. As for the rest? Sinkholes.

2. Movies
Here's the thing: unless we go to the movie on our own (with friends, etc, and not with each other), we have to either "use up" a babysitting favor or take the baby with us. Those favors are as good as gold, so we don't like wasting them on a movie unless it's a really, really highly-anticipated flick. Taking the baby to the movie is pointless because you really won't get to watch the movie. You'll be stuck tending the kid. The only way to really enjoy movies once you're a parent is to bring them home. Spending money going to the movies, then, is a sinkhole.

3. Music
I love music and enjoy playing in bands, but the time commitment varies heavily, sometimes crossing the line of unfeasible. With the right band project, it's a wellspring, more than overcoming the cost of equipment and time. With the wrong one, "sinkhole" is an understatement. Unfortunately, it's hard to know which kind of project you're in until you've already invested a lot of time and work, so I think I'm going to be mostly avoiding these for a while.

4. Card games
Magic: the Gathering has been very good to me, serving as a source of income from time to time in addition to being the most fun tabletop game I have encountered. As such, I have been able to play at relatively low cost. The time investment has continued to bother me, however, and with the arrival of Evey, cards might be the latest casualty of the value equation. I already got out of the Star Wars CCG because of lack of time, despite enjoying the local player community. I have passed up chances to buy into other games heavily. Even now, I'm clearing out a Lord of the Rings TCG collection for a friend, and I look at the cards and think, "This seems like it might be really fun! I could buy out this collection and play!" But then I realize it's just a non-starter. I have nobody to play against. (Steph isn't into the TCG hobby.) As it is, I'm lucky to play Magic once a month. I miss playing Netrunner, the best "bluffing" CCG ever made, but it plays best as a sealed-deck game and it's too hard to get product anymore for it. Much as I hate to face the reality of it, card games are in fact becoming sinkholes. Once I finish selling off some collections I'm working on, this will become even more pronounced. I think some small investment in the game can be a wellspring, though, so I am seeking that balance. Something where I have decks built and ready to go, without having too much value sunk into them and thus "money clogging the closet."

5. Computer time
Obviously none of us are going to "quit the internet," least of all me. This will be something I keep my eye on, though. It's probably possible to scale back on sites one surfs and just spend less time overall on it. If were one of those who play World of Warcraft, I think it would be very clearly a sinkhole. I can't figure out what it is that keeps people addicted to that game now that they know it's just an item grind. I mean, isn't that kind of like work?

6. Books
Books are undeniably a wellspring. They don't cost much, and they can sit on a shelf for years and still be perfectly functional when you pull them down to read. I am enjoying a re-read of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series in anticipation of the 12th book, The Gathering Storm, that comes out October 27th. I hadn't read so much as a page of that series in four years, but it's working out fine now. While the reality of having Allie and Evey might reduce the total time and money Steph and I put into books, this is unlikely to be a long-term reduction.

7. Television
Television was once clearly a sinkhole for me. I had no interest in watching the networks' prime-time skits so they could sell advertising time, and if I really wanted to watch a sporting event, well, there's a reason they call 'em "sports bars." This value equation has been entirely flipped on its head. Television has now gone from sinkhole to wellspring for us, all because of the dynamics of taking care of children. A TV can function unattended, and a TV can entertain anyone in the family. Allie loves to watch The Wiggles and Baby Einstein either on DVDs or through the Xbox 360 Netflix instant queue. Steph and I can finally pick and choose interesting shows to queue up on the DVR, in addition to watching movies via Netflix. When you have children, you spend a lot of weekend time at home -- all the better to have the TV showing football games while you clean house or have company over. Accordingly, I used the insurance payout money from the video games we didn't replace, added in some card sales income, and bought two things: a subscription to DirecTV service with the NFL Sunday Ticket, and a new Samsung LED TV. So far, both are delivering an intense and fun experience at an acceptable cost. Even when the football season is over, both will continue to be useful just about every single day. That is what you hope for in a wellspring -- something that more than pulls its weight in the time-money equation.

Not much else has changed. There is no reason to look at a time-money value equation for household goods or sundries, and it goes without saying that the top priority for money needs to be aggressively attacking debt if you have any. But once you get past those steps, you have some decisions to make. You can get more out of your free time, as Steph and I hope we will, by discarding sinkholes and seeking wellsprings.

The Aftermath of Lake Mediterranea

2009-09-18T09:52:00.005-07:00

I happened across this image somewhere on the Interwebs a while back and saved it to my flash drive, intending to write a blog post about it. Well, better late than never.

Indeed, there appears once to have been a time when a person could walk from north Africa to Italy without getting his feet wet. (Granted, the journey would take a while.) I think there is a deep well of setting material for the writer who is willing to do research on Earth's geologic history and craft a story that makes that setting significant. For example, using the map above, I imagine an epic tale involving a teeming city at the lower shore of one of the two halves you see of Lake Mediterrania. The city could be home to heroes and villains, a seat of power and political intrigue, and a thriving hub of commerce. Centuries could pass full of intense battles, heroic quests, strange visitors, mysterious guilds, and dynastic succession. As the ice age ends and the glaciers melt, the city could be swallowed by the sea. It could take on an historic, even legendary aura -- people might tell tales of this city, and boast of the treasures it holds, resting in ruins deep underneath the waves. It might be called... "Atlantis."

Okay, obviously you saw that coming. But what you might not have seen coming is just what becomes possible once you take that kind of story and make it the backstory instead.

Imagine another story. An empire has fallen and its former glory has faded. Great cities lie in ruin, broad fields grow wild and untended, and vast mines echo with emptiness. Pirates roam the coastlines and rivers, barbarian hordes rule the hills and barrens, and the wisdom of recorded history is preserved only by a few cloistered, sectarian groups. The only tantalizing signs of "the world that once was" exist in the form of eroding statues, abandoned bridges, and fragmentary monuments. The nation of Gondor is but a shadow of its former self, and the underground nation of Moria has long since gone silent. The Seat of Seeing in the hills of the Amon Hen sits empty. Mighty statues at the Falls of Rauros guard only untamed wilds. Majestic Ithilien in the forested eastern heights has all but disappeared, its capital city at Minas Ithil turned to a decaying Minas Morgul by the hordes of Mordor.

Of course, you know by now I am speaking of the fictional land of "Middle Earth," the setting for the epic story Lord of the Rings. Notice that I did not make even one mention above of the titular ring, or the Numenoreans, or the ageless Elves; of Saruman's betrayal and the rise of Isengard and the Uruk-Hai, or of the essential Hobbits and their daring quest. The major plot points of the book are driven by characters and action, as they should be. But look at the sense of wonder that the setting communicates all by itself, before any of the action even begins. Tolkien's intricate linguistics formed the basis for the characters' backgrounds and ancestry, but the setting is gave those characters a place to be; it gave those languages a place to live.

J.R.R. Tolkien built a world, and he did so by first setting the stage for how that world became what it was. It was a mammoth undertaking that consumed literally the whole of his life, as his son Christopher Tolkien has continued cataloguing the late master's notes and histories into new publications even today. It took Tolkien almost two decades after The Hobbit to publish Lord of the Rings, and apocryphal stories from the publisher say that Tolkien stopped dozens of times and began rewriting the entire saga from the beginning every time he realized he had not captured the essence of some facet of his story's world. Clearly, a compelling setting is a critical underpinning to a worthwhile story. In essence, if a writer cannot make a setting interesting, that writer has given the reader no reason to care about the fate of that settings' inhabitants. And now, it becomes clear that a compelling setting doesn't exist in an vacuum; a compelling setting requires a sufficiently-realized backstory.

I have a number of fictional works "in the oven," and have for years, and one thing I notice myself doing is going back for substantial revisions (or rewrites) every time I have a breakthrough about an environment through which I can send the characters and propel the story. And inevitably what I discover is that it's not enough to just send the characters to a place where the environment happens to be whatever is necessary to accomplish a plot point. It's not enough to send them on a trope roller-coaster to Vulcan or Hyrule -- or, worse, to such heterogeneous locales as Hoth, Dagobah, or Tatooine. A good story requires more. Not only do I have to send my characters (or birth and raise them, or see them die) in an interesting setting, but I must give that setting its due development to turn it into a place that lives and breathes on its own -- that imbues in the reader a sense of wonder -- so that my hero's journey and struggle against the vile overlord will paint itself in vivid hues across the broad canvas of my readers' imaginations. And this process will probably start with a map of Lake Mediterranea -- and I'll see where I can go from there.

Welcome, Reader! Turn the page, and the tale begins...

The Burgeoning

2009-09-15T14:28:00.007-07:00

This photograph of Tempe, Arizona, courtesy of the ASU library, was taken in 1935 from the south slope of the Tempe Butte, which is better known today as the "A" mountain that cradles Sun Devil Stadium. The photographer is facing almost due south.

The road that starts at the lower left corner of the frame and continues through the middle of the picture is College Avenue. You can see the back of the old Mt. Carmel church right about in the center. Today, it is the "old building" at the ASU Newman Center, and thus is still a Catholic church facility, but that particular building is now only used for weddings and special events. Just after and to the left (southeast) of Mt. Carmel, on the left side of College Avenue, is ASU's Old Main building. (Was it called the "New Main" building at the time of this photo? Inquiring minds want to know.) In 1935, Arizona State University was still called the Arizona State Teachers' College, and its president was Grady Gammage.

The north-south road to the west (right) of College Avenue, traversing the middle of the photo, is Forest Avenue, which is much smaller now and has been converted to a pedestrian mall through most of campus. The east-west road closest to the photographer is Sixth Street, which is not a major arterial today as it does not occur at a square-mile interval with other arterial streets. Seventh Street is barely visible; you can tell there is an intersection with it at Forest, but the angle doesn't allow for much more.

Running between the church and the Old Main is the street now known as University Drive, but at the time it was better known as the Atlantic-Pacific Highway. Yes, it was the "main drag," all two lanes of it -- not that many people had cars then, in the depths of the Depression -- and it ran from Los Angeles to New York City. The highway curved slightly southward and eventually met and followed the SR-87 alignment to Tucson. Pieces of this highway alignment are still visible in Tempe -- that's why Eighth Street is off-kilter and follows the old railroad track line as it slants past the Four Peaks Brewery.

The U.S. Highway 60 had been commissioned but not yet built; by the end of the decade, it would follow Apache Boulevard through Tempe. Apache is visible among the vast, empty lots south of Old Main, after the grassy square on the left side of the photo and where that clump of trees and small buildings meets College Avenue. Straight ahead to the south in the photo, what was then county land consisted of rural properties and empty meadows as far as the eye could see. Tempe ended at Apache Boulevard.

This land is now among the densest in the entire Phoenix metropolitan area. Tempe was the first suburb to be landlocked when every city in the Phoenix area raced to annex developable acreage in the 1980s. Mesa and Scottsdale cut Tempe off to the north and east, Phoenix borders to the west, and Chandler galloped across a two-mile-wide sliver south of Tempe until it closed the square.

My parents moved to Tempe in 1978, and I lived there until 1993, from 1999 to 2001 while I ran the Arizona Gamer's main location, and then again from 2003 to 2007 while I finished my undergraduate and law degrees. The thing that strikes me the most about the area's phenomenal development isn't that my former home, which is smack in the middle of Tempe now, was remote enough in 1935 that its location is not even discernible along the horizon of that photograph. No, the thing I find most striking is that I can imagine a day when my current neighborhood in Chandler, which is twice as far from downtown Phoenix as the area depicted in the photo, will have been so much further eclipsed by growth that it will be considered too dense an area for new development.

Album Review: "Black Clouds & Silver Linings" by Dream Theater

2009-06-25T13:03:00.005-07:00

Fair notice: This review is written by a fan of the band. It's going to be constructively critical but overall very positive. Skip it if that bothers you.

Dream Theater has, to their credit, found the musical equivalent of the late fantasy author David Eddings' path to fan-pleasing stardom: Their songwriting and touring has become the musical equivalent of peddling dope. Dream Theater's latest offering, Black Clouds & Silver Linings, is made up of what has become an excellent par vintage of their particular crop.

Eddings made his literary mark with the Belgariad and Malloreon series, in all a ten-book tale that blended well-established swords-and-sorcery fantasy tropes with humor, folklore, and a lighter tone than most books in the genre. Suitable for all ages, Eddings' books were a hit, and his deeply-developed characters became beloved of his readers to a greater degree than the denizens of his other novels. After fan demand prompted Eddings to write more of the story of Belgarion & Friends, Eddings crafted two prequel books as stories-within-stories. The bookending story continued following the lives of the characters after the BelMal, while the substories were the actual prequel material, ending right at the spot the Belgariad begins. By creating an endless loop of sorts, Eddings enabled his readers to continue to enjoy the full story over and over ad infinitum. He then commented that his readers have been running around in that circle for years since, making his writing "the literary equivalent of peddling dope."

So turned the career of Dream Theater after a near-miss in 1998 during which drummer Mike Portnoy contemplated hanging up his octobans and walking away. Dream Theater, before that turning point, had experienced the sudden and vacuous stardom offered by the MTV-centered pop industry, survived some personnel changes, and struggled for creative control with their label. The suits wanted nothing more than for Dream Theater to shed their progressive leanings and become reliably-profitable arena metal -- after all, they had the arena metal look, and that was all that mattered, right? From 1989 to 1998, the band struggled to maintain a balance between creative productivity, the more mundane facets of music industry work, and interpersonal and family relationship time, all in the face of a merciless calendar that had them on the road for years at a time promoting Images and Words, Awake, and Falling Into Infinity. After the latter tour, the band finally recovered creative control over their work, and on a roughly biannual clip thereafter, have released albums that allow them to publicly and professionally embrace their role as flagbearers of the progressive-metal genre.

Dream Theater's 1999 magnum opus Scenes from a Memory, a CD-length concept album, is as much a reaction to the band's previous musical constrainment as anything else. Most fans consider it their masterpiece, despite the record being close to worthless commercially in mainstream-rock-radio terms. The 2001 interval was covered by Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (technically streeting in 2002, but only barely), a two-disc progressive feast with even longer, even more exploratory prog-metal, including The Glass Prison, the first part of Portnoy's five-album-spanning epic Twelve-Step Saga about alcohol abuse. Sated that their legacy in progressive circles was no longer in question, Dream Theater flipped MTV a mighty bird in 2003 with Train of Thought, a mostly straightforward metal album that brought them back to radio and welcomed in a newer and younger generation of fans hungry for something more substantial than Maroon 5 and Franz Ferdinand. Train contained This Dying Soul, part two of the Twelve-Step Saga.

Dream Theater settled into a comfortable blend of metal and prog by 2005 with Octavarium, their final album on their original label. The album's title track is the very essence of prog, spanning 24 minutes of scintillating virtuosity, and the album opener, The Root of All Evil, covered part three of the Twelve-Step Saga with a flourish. The heaviest track on the album, Panic Attack, drew notice on the Gigantour concert bill, and introduced yet another new wave of fans to the band by appearing in the video game Rock Band 2. Dream Theater signed with a new label and released Systematic Chaos, seizing the momentum that Octavarium had continued from Train of Thought. With so many new fans accepting Dream Theater "as they were," Chaos saw unexpected mainstream success with new music video clips and a Rock Band downloadable-content appearance, this time for lead single Constant Motion. Chaos' contribution to the Twelve-Step Saga, part four: Repentance, was a bit understated, but the song's more mellow dynamic set the stage for the thrilling conclusion to come... and it worked.

Black Clouds & Silver Linings closes the Twelve-Step Saga with part five, The Shattered Fortress, and Fortress is every bit the dope Dream Theater's fans hoped they would peddle. It quotes and reprises every other song in the suite, it runs 12 minutes but does not seem that long, and it practically blasts its way off the page, aggression and emotion at every measure. Fortress suffers somewhat in that it sounds at times like more of a patchwork of the previous songs in the suite than a truly integrative finale, like Dream Theater did with Finally Free, Losing Time, and The Razor's Edge, Rush did with 2112 Grand Finale, and Queensryche did with Eyes of a Stranger. Even in the absence of an integrative finale, a thematic denouement or "epilogue" could have worked as well, like Rush did with The Sphere, Spock's Beard did with Made Alive Again/Wind at My Back, and Schonberg & Boublil did with The Sacred Bird. Still, the gallery-of-reprises style has been used to great effect: Down Once More/Track Down This Murderer, Andrew Lloyd Webber's finale to Phantom of the Opera, is a masterpiece of patchwork conclusion composition. Time will tell whether Fortress, in hindsight, closes the Twelve-Step Saga as brilliantly as Down closed Phantom.

The second-best track on Black Clouds is definitely The Best of Times, a song Portnoy wrote about his recently-departed father. Even in Dream Theater's more somber, emotional moments, such as Take Away My Pain, Goodnight Kiss, Medicate (Awakening), and Vacant, they have never produced music as moving, authentic, and absolutely heart-rending as The Best of Times. It may be difficult for anyone who has not lost a loved one to understand how completely Portnoy hit the nail on the head with this one, but trust me: he did. I don't see Dream Theater topping this one, as far as songs of this style and content are concerned.

It was a pleasure to see Dream Theater returning to a more experimental, eclectic mode of songwriting for the album's opener, A Nightmare to Remember. In a similar fashion, Awake's 6:00 and Infinity's New Millennium stood out from their respective albums and offered a distinctly different flavor of Dream Theater while remaining essentially progressive and true to the band's style. On the other albums, the opening tracks have served other roles, either introducing epic or concept pieces (Regression, In the Presence of Enemies part 1), presenting a piece of the Twelve-Step Saga, or laying down a straightforward opening anthem (Pull Me Under, As I Am). Nightmare is textured, yet percussive; twisted, yet smooth. John Petrucci's nights poring over literature and channeling Walt-freaking-Whitman paid off with a vivid, flavorful bridge: "Hopelessly drifting / bathing in beautiful agony / I am endlessly falling / Lost in this beautiful misery." Nightmare stretches in multiple directions, even giving Portnoy a chance to do some cookie-monster growling at one point, and in most cases, the stretches hit paydirt. This song is no Scarred, but it certainly belongs at the feast.

Wither is the outlier at this point -- unless this song starts to age amazingly well, I will be consigning it to the "meh" bin with Prophets of War, Never Enough, and Just Let Me Breathe. Songs about writer's block just don't work on a very fundamental level, because the audience is interested in the composer's ability, not the composer's inability. Musically, Wither is sound enough, not covering new ground but not laying an egg either. It's a shame to waste such a great song title -- there are only so many simple but evocative verbs out there that work as song titles -- but I suppose there's that to redeem the song, at least. It has the potential to be a single down the road, due to length and accessibility, so it could succeed on that level also.

A Rite of Passage is Black Clouds' radio and video cut, and it was well chosen as such. The song is absolutely accessible, contains a nice instrumental interlude, and is planted thick thematically with the kind of mysticism that stokes the curious minds of most younger prog fans who are still developing as aficionados of music. Your average rational older adult will dismiss everything about the lyrics and just enjoy the instrumental aspects of Passage, and the song stands up capably on that level. This is mainstream metal with a touch of prog, very much in line with what we've heard lately from Muse, Lacuna Coil, and Metallica, and if it had been subtitled "The Dark Eternal Night, part 2," I don't think anyone would have blinked.

The remaining track on Black Clouds, the sprawling, 19-minute epic The Count of Tuscany, is a Petrucci-penned sweepfest with about the thematic depth of Forsaken and all the musical gymnastics of The Dance of Eternity. I'm sure the hardcorest of the hardcore are having a blast with this one, but I'm not sure it stands up compositionally to some of the other tracks on the album or in Dream Theater's wider stable. Oh, fear not: Count will get raves from concertgoers and will add points to Dream Theater's ever-growing well of Prog Cred -- it's not a failure on any level -- but this is no Octavarium or In the Presence of Enemies; it's not even In the Name of God. Count is absolutely the brand of dope that Dream Theater has learned to peddle to their fans, and their fans find that flavor satisfying, so why shouldn't the band do likewise?

Black Clouds & Silver Linings is a genuine accomplishment for Dream Theater, concluding a decade-long suite, reaching new heights in both new and old directions, and serving as a pleasurable listen even in its weaker moments. The album gives fans exactly what they want, and more of it. The future promises a year-plus of touring, half a year of writing, and a new tome of tales in 2011 that are right up the fans' alley, and hey, why shouldn't Dream Theater proceed exactly that way? Capitalism works, after all. But if, instead, they take a chance and it falls flat, at least we'll know full well what their posture was, and we can appreciate why they rolled the dice instead of commencing the scheduled harvest.

Now, if you don't mind, I think I'll find out what's been happening on Faldor's farm...

Today's Chemistry Lesson: Drama Dissolves Music

2009-06-23T09:53:00.003-07:00

Things have been pretty political here lately at the House of Exuberance, so I figured I'd offer a sorbet to clear the palate. Aaron (linked at left) and I recently found a musical project to join, as I'll explain shortly, and it got me thinking about the concepts underlying band chemistry.

As many of you know, I am a musician. I got my first guitar 19 years ago. Back in the mid-1990s, I performed as a bassist and backing vocalist in local cover bands such as Scoobacca and Parallax. A few years ago, I played bass and sang lead for Sonogasm (there's a band name that hasn't aged well) and experienced morsels of local success with SG performing a set mostly made up of my own original songs, a blend of grunge and progressive rock. I was in college during the grunge years, so I cut my adult musical teeth on Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and the Stone Temple Pilots, and that influence integrated with the Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, Rush, Metallica, and Dream Theater that had dominated my formative years.

Unfortunately, having musical ability and even a stable of written material is not enough to get a person on stage even at the local level. Being on stage is what it's all about. Even performing at a dive pub for a handful of disinterested barflies is great fun, and performing in front of a more substantial crowd is an incredible adrenaline rush. I have been associated with several other bands over the years, but only the ones I cited above made it to the stage and stayed at that level. To stay at that level, a band needs a unifying vision that gets buy-in from all members, discipline and a good work ethic from all members, and compatible personalities. It is not entirely unlike a marriage in that a band is only as happy as its unhappiest member.

A wise, experienced musician will bend over backward to get on stage and stay there, because he knows that's where all his practice, devotion, and discipline are rewarded. The problem is that most musicians are neither wise nor experienced. Mostly this is because they are young, but immaturity shows up even in older musicians, eccentric as the musically-inclined often are. This immaturity leads to band drama, and band drama corrodes band chemistry and destroys otherwise promising projects. Pub stages everywhere are mostly filled with two types of bands: talented bands who have not yet imploded, and untalented bands made up of friends who have great chemistry but little potential. A tiny fraction of a fraction are the third type of band, which manages to stay together and move on to bigger things. Given the choice between the two more likely outcomes, I'll take the band full of good buddies with a low success ceiling. At least they're having fun.

I am going to develop this thesis anecdotally, but first, here are some better-known examples of where drama has impeded music. Black Sabbath never had the same "spark" without Ozzy Osbourne. Pink Floyd: Roger Waters. Faith No More: Jim Martin. Queensryche: Chris deGarmo. Evanescence: Ben Moody. And those are just bands that survived losing a member to drama. Most drama implosions lead to disbandment. Soundgarden. Warrant. Drain STH. Galactic Cowboys. Ratt. Even when a band thrives after a chemistry replacement, their fan base is divided -- a contingent insists that the original line-up can never be topped. By far the benchmark example: Van Halen. They were a better band with Sammy Hagar commercially and creatively, but the specter of David Lee Roth will never leave them alone. Dream Theater has emerged as the absolute flagbearer of progressive metal today, but some fans still carry a torch for Kevin Moore. I'm sure there are even some hardliners sitting in a Cleveland pub who will never forgive Rush for losing John Rutsey and replacing him with Neil Peart.

Band drama starts internally when a band member's expectations, reasonable or unreasonable, are not met. In Sonogasm, Jeff (guitar) and I were often frustrated with Chuck (drums) because Chuck struggled with timing, having been out of the musical scene for many years. Chuck and I were frustrated with Jeff because Jeff, while very talented, tends to be undisciplined in his approach to practice, hindering band development. Jeff and Chuck were frustrated with me because I wouldn't stick to a focused musical direction for the band. We had started alt-prog, very Tool-esque, and all was well. Then, as I developed as a composer, I was writing grunge, southern rock, alt-mainstream a la +Live+, and even hybrids of pop and nu-metal. That wasn't what Jeff and Chuck were interested in playing.

The three of us had the talent and dedication to hold Sonogasm together for a while, but eventually the problems reached critical mass. Chuck would whiff badly a few times in a live show. Jeff would show up to practice not having learned a new song element... again. Our portfolio stagnated because I wasn't bringing in enough viable material, and the band couldn't agree on which covers to add to freshen things up. Our internal frustration from having our expectations unmet by our bandmates eventually became a catalyst for clashes with one another, and we wound up putting the band on "indefinite hiatus." That is a euphemism that means the band will probably never re-form, but since nobody had sex with another band member's girlfriend or wife, the members are still at least on speaking terms with one another. The last of Sonogasm's 20-odd performances was by far our best, and perhaps we were able to relax and enjoy it more knowing that we had already decided to move on afterward, and our band problems were no longer a weight on our shoulders. We remain good friends.

Band drama can start externally as well, when circumstances force a change in a band member's ability to fulfill his mates' expectations of him. After Sonogasm broke up, I briefly joined Aaron's band Ekosphere as lead vocalist. Ekosphere had just lost their second female lead vocalist in a row, and the guys were hoping that eliminating the gender issue would lead to better chemistry. There was still drama brewing in that band that might have killed us eventually, or that we might have overcome, but we never got to find out. After a few months of developing the Ekosphere songs that survived the departure of their lyricist and introducing some of my songs that had worked well in Sonogasm, we were ready to gear up and hit the stage. Then, one of the other guys hit financial trouble, and I ran face-first into my 1L law exams. Neither of us could put our full attention on the band, and the project unraveled from there. A sad ending to a band that had, at one point, earned an opening slot in support of an international act (Tears for Fears).

In 1996, Scoobacca was in amazing shape. I played bass for three one-hour sets as the band entertained parties and keggers, looking for a more relaxed atmosphere than we had encountered at our few pub shows. We were college buddies who all loved music, and we were democratic enough that our cover portfolio had extensive input from all members. We even allowed members a plenary veto on any one song, to avoid dragging down our performances with tunes that, for whatever reason, one member hated to play. (My veto, in case you're curious, was Ugly Kid Joe's "I Hate Everything About You." That song is just plain not good.) We hit all the rock and metal subgenres and had something for everyone to enjoy.

Then, Scoobacca threw it all away. Our drummer, Squirmy, left to go be a photographer for Sports Illustrated (can't blame him) and we brought in a sketchy guy who had drumming skill but didn't work well with us personally. We kicked out our vocalist, Mikey, because we didn't think we could make it to the next level with him. In retrospect, this was an unrealistic expectation; Mikey's vocals were above average for a local party band, and he could have developed if we had been more patient. Our vocalist auditions were an agonizing ordeal of wannabes and washups and junkies, none of whom had as much character in total as Mikey had in his little finger. We languished for an entire summer without being able to perform. Band practice became a job, but we weren't getting paid. I quit, and though I didn't realize it, that would turn out to be the killing stroke because I owned most of the band's gear. We were so busy dreaming of fortune and glory that we traded our most solid assets for shit in a shiny wrapper. I am still friends with Johan, the guitarist, though we rarely get together because our lives went in different directions. I never hear from Mikey or Squirmy anymore.

Finally, earlier this year, two guys put together a band project called Flapperwax and found a guitarist and bassist through a Craigslist ad. The bassist, Aaron, worked out great with them, but the chemistry wasn't there with the guitarist, and the drama began. Long story short, they ended up auditioning me and replacing the guitarist with me on lead vocals and second guitar. (Their lead singer was a lead guitarist at heart, so he favored the transition.) My audition was a little rusty, but they liked the band chemistry with me there, and we had a discussion right away about the band's expectations of one another. We are all in our thirties, all working family men who have to prioritize accordingly, and this put us into a compatible state of mind right away. I feel bad for the guitarist who was booted -- I've been booted too, and it's no fun at all -- but band chemistry is just that important. Even though Aaron and I had other band projects floating around in the planning stages, such as a long-term study with Chuck and a movie-theme covers project with Jeff, we knew that joining Flapperwax gave us a rare realistic opportunity to get back on stage -- and stay there -- sometime in the foreseeable future. So far, things are going well. My material is blending decently with theirs, and practices are productive. Here's hoping.

Even without drama, it's difficult to get a band to go anywhere. Aaron and I comprise the all-acoustic "Bumpus Hounds," whose performance of April 2008 is recounted on this blog. It's great fun and Aaron and I have near-perfect chemistry (as is not hard to accomplish when two friends make up the entire band). The problem is that the Hounds have a very low ceiling. Most of the material out there is beyond our ability to perform with only two acoustic guitars and a singer. Though there are venues for acoustic small-band performances, most of them are dead ends and not much better than just jamming at the occasional party, park, or street corner. The desire is there and the chemistry is there, but the Bumpus Hounds aren't likely to go anywhere, because there's not very much they can actually do.

So there you have one man's "musical journey" teaching the resounding lesson that getting a viable project together is rare, and getting it to go anywhere is rarer still, even when there are talented and willing musicians who are interested and ready to go. It still isn't worth it to stay in a band that is infested with drama and isn't fun anymore, but a musician has to have the wisdom and perspective to know when a problem is worth being patient enough to fix, and the maturity to know how to diminish drama rather than catalyzing it. When a band has a hit, more than enough external drama arrives to test the limits of the members' endurance. There is a time limit on this sort of thing. I am 35. I only get to play at being a "rock and roll star" for so much longer -- after that, I will remain a musician, but the settings change to somewhat more staid and conventional opportunities. I intend for music to be a positive creative outlet, and that means the chemistry has to be there. Hopefully, in whatever creative hobby you pursue, you will enjoy that hobby's analogue of good chemistry and the rewards that follow.

Trajectory

2009-01-02T12:01:00.002-07:00

[This is a short story I wrote in late 2008. I submitted it to an "End-of-the-World" science fiction anthology call-for-submissions in January 2009, but the editor rejected it because he wanted tales of physical disaster, not cultural disaster. I submitted it to another CFS for a sociological sci-fi primer, and it was accepted! -- but then the publication was cancelled on account of the depressed economy! Due to the way it played out, I retained my full publication rights, and I have decided to simply release this story for free (or for "promotional purposes," if you like) for everyone to enjoy. As always, feedback (public or private) is welcomed. I have backdated this post to when I submitted the story for publication.]

Trajectory
by Michael Bahr

- Northwestern Colorado, 2079 A.D. -

“My stim pills ain’t scoring, Gavin,” wheezed the 17-year-old boy.

“True that, Austin,” said his 18-year-old companion, gasping breaths as he trudged through freshly fallen snow.

Austin rattled his stim pill pack. “I got maybe eight or nine stim pills left. We’re a day away from the Cheyenne conduit already. We gonna run out of stim pills and starve to death? Will they find our loctags out here?”

Gavin’s brow furrowed, calculating. “I got more stim pills. We ain’t gonna be empty for three days. And you grip perfectly well that they can find your loctag anywhere.”

“But way out here, Gavin? The conduit…”

“Yes, Ace, they can find us,” snapped Gavin. “Even if we get way lost. We won’t starve to death. A search team from the Cheyenne conduit can walk just the same as us. They can find us, you grip me? Now shut up so I can think, man!”

Austin squinted into the whiteness of the forest ahead. “How much farther? My face is mega-cold.”

Gavin blinked into his visor and read the location schematics displayed for his eyes alone.

“Two-K ahead, if the cabin is still standing. This path used to be a road. It’s gonna turn west soon, and then we stay going forward and it ain’t much farther then. Pull up your hoodie, you girl!”

Austin shoved his friend. “Shut your hole, Gavin. My hood don’t cover my face!”

“Ain’t that a shame,” deadpanned Gavin.

Austin tugged at the neckline of his polyweave coveralls. Beneath the polyweave, his body enjoyed warm, dry comfort. Austin bristled at the chill wind against his cheeks, an intrusion upon his contentment that he never had to endure at home.

“C’mon, Gav. Let’s roll on back to the conduit.”

“No dice, Ace,” answered Gavin. “Beat it if you want to, but I gotta find this house. Listen to what the Board of Property told me last week.” Gavin blinked again into his visor and transmitted the message to Austin’s visor.

Austin listened through earbuds on the visor’s frame.

“Gavin Sellers, the Board of Property wishes you a happy-fun-safe 18th birthday. Today, you inherit property from your great-grandfather, Charles Kiffin. This property was held on your behalf by the State and includes land and a house. Your grandmother, Madison Kiffin Sellers, and your father, Tyler Sellers, have each allowed the probate period to elapse without taking possession of the property. Pursuant to State Law, Title 33, Chapter 5, Article 1, the property will revert to possession by the State if you allow the probate period to lapse a third and final time. Coordinates are shown on the attached map. Regards...”

Gavin shrugged. “I don’t grip that ‘probate’ stuff. That must be lawyer talk. I grip ‘forfeit’ when I hear it, though.”

The boys continued their march through deep green pines frosted in bright white.

“But Gavin, what do you care about a house so far away from the Cheyenne conduit you gotta walk for two days just to get there? And who wants some old hut when you got a homepod back in Denver?”

Gavin shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe it’s a dump and I’ll forfeit it like my dad did. The place ain’t got no dataport or we coulda spied it on a livelink. I just don’t wanna forfeit nothing without at least gripping what I’m forfeiting.”

“So just get a homepod,” said Austin.

“I’m 18, remember?” said Gavin. “I don’t get a homepod for free no more, and I gotta even pay for dataport access! Mega-lame! Even a small place that’s free is better than having to work a job to pay for a homepod. In fact, I heard if you got your own place you can stay there as long as you want without inspections.”

“No inspections?” cringed Austin. “What about messes? How you gonna clean messes without an inspector?”

“Dunno,” shrugged Gavin. “Clean it my own self, I suppose. Or maybe not! It sounds funny, but I always kinda wondered what it’d be like if there were no inspections.”

“But Gavin,” pled Austin, “with no inspections, when they gonna bring you any stim pills?”

Gavin nodded, plodding along through the woods.

“Maybe you make your own stim pills.”

“But Gavin,” started Austin, but Gavin cut him off.

“I know, Ace, I know. Only NutriCorp is allowed to make stim pills, and only inspectors are allowed to clean messes. I know. I just wonder, you grip me? I wonder what it was like before NutriCorp and before the inspectors and before the Boards and the Councils and everything else.”

Austin raised his eyebrow. “Well, that’s easy. You’d be hungry and dirty. You’re mega-dumb, Gav.”

A dragonfly buzzed by, hovering near Austin before disappearing into the trees.

“Oh, crunch!” exclaimed Austin.

“What is it? Are you safe?”

“Oh, crunch, Gavin! I ain’t safe! A giant bug almost got me!”

“Don’t move!” said Gavin.

“Is it still out there?” asked Austin.

Gavin peered around from beneath curly brown locks. “Nope. It’s gone.”

A squirrel descended from a tree to the right of the boys’ path and hopped off into the distance.

“An animal!” shrieked Austin.

“We ain’t got no shielding glass!” panicked Gavin. “We gotta run!”

The boys scrambled forward, spraying clumps of snow in every direction as their polyweave-clad legs and archspring-clad feet plunged again and again into the thick drifts.

“Just ahead!” shouted Gavin.

Austin did not answer, instead running forward with his hands covering his face. The two boys stopped short at the same time.

“My visor just went out,” said Austin.

Gavin tapped at his temple and blinked frantically. “My visor has power, but no data.”

Austin squinted into his visor and blinked. “Mine too, I guess. I thought it was out, but the command dock is still showing.”

“We’re too deep in the woods to get signal. If the house had a dataport, we would be on its channel by now.”

Austin whimpered. “How much further, Gav? This day sucks!”

“Man up, Nancy!” sneered Gavin. “Like me. I’m a man, and you will be soon. A man ain’t afraid of empty places. Let’s do this and then head on back to your homepod and play some Tri-Sport Tournament 8.”

“Yeah, man,” nodded Austin, sniffling against the cold.

Gavin removed his visor, blinked, and scanned the area around the boys.

“Crunch, it’s bright!”

Austin did the same and nodded. His close-cropped blond hair clung to his skull, streaked with perspiration, and his nose puffed deep and red.

Gavin smirked. “Last time I checked, it was 11:30. The sun is still high, so let’s hurry before those clouds to the east move in.”

Austin sighed. “I got fatigue. I got mega-fatigue.”

“Drop another stim pill. We walked a lot today. I think stim pills get used up if you’re doing stuff.”

Austin popped a stim pill in his mouth and swallowed it. “I hope you ain’t wrong, Gav.”

The path turned west, as Gavin expected, and the boys continued on a narrower track through the woods. At last, just before sunset, the dark bulk of a building emerged from the mist ahead.

“Mega-blast! You called it, Gavin! Sorry I doubted you, man!”

“Welcome to my property, Ace! Don’t that sound weird? ‘My property?’ Like I’m some kinda rich guy or something. Let us go inside before those clouds get any darker.”

The boys stepped around bushes and scrub and crossed the open yard before the house. Gavin climbed the steps to the front landing and walked into the solid wood of the front door with a brutal SMACK.

“Oh, crunch, Gavin!” gasped Austin. “Are you hurt?”

Gavin shook away dizziness. A red welt grew on his forehead.

“Only a little. What’s the problem with the door?”

Austin stepped forward tentatively, stopping a half-meter from the door, then a decimeter, then a few centimeters, and finally allowing his nose and hands to touch the cracking wood.

“It ain’t opening, Gavin! The door ain’t opening! Oh, man, wait. Is this place not allowed? Maybe the Board of Property gave you the wrong directions.”

Gavin bit his lip and concentrated. “I guess the door ain’t scoring because it’s offline or something. Look at this big bolt on the side. Maybe the door stays locked unless you remove it? We’ll try the windows. They’re old glass-style ones, like at the courthouse back in Denver. They open like cabinets.”

“Wow,” wondered Austin. “This place must be way old, from before we were born. This place was built before static pockets! I bet these old windows get some kinda cold at night!”

The boys found a window on the side of the house that swung open at Gavin’s tug.

“It’s way dark in there,” said Austin.

Gavin shrugged and climbed in. A cloud of dust burst into the air from the floor and sent Gavin into a fit of coughing.

“Gavin! Gavin!” panicked Austin. “Can you breathe? Is it bad air?”

“It’s all good,” croaked the older boy. Gavin waved dust away with his hands. “This place was empty too long, that’s all.”

Austin bit his lip and shifted from foot to foot.

Gavin coughed one last time and turned to the window. “You coming or you just gonna freeze right there?”

Austin’s face clenched with unease. “What if this place is not allowed?”

Gavin shrugged. “How could this place be not allowed if the Board of Property told me to come here?”

“But there is no dataport. What if we do something that’s not allowed? You said it yourself: they can find our loctags. We can still be in violation. No dataport, so we won’t know if anything here is not allowed! We could be in violation and not even know it!” Austin’s whimpering intensified until his voice broke.

Gavin quietly replied, “So let’s just not do anything that’s not allowed.”

Austin shook his head, crying. “But what if we do something that’s not allowed anyway?”

Gavin looked up. “It’s gonna snow, Ace. You can stay right there if you want, but I’m closing this window. I need to air out my polyweave. I’ve had it on since yesterday morning.”

Austin felt flakes of snow on his face. Finally, he snorted, wiped clean his eyes, and pulled himself over the window’s threshold.

Once their eyes adjusted to the darkness inside, the boys’ spirits brightened.

“Wow, Gavin! Your great-grandfather’s house is bigger inside than a homepod! You can’t tell so easy from the outside.”

“True!” Gavin smiled, exploring the cabin from room to room. “I don’t grip that junk,” he said, pointing to a rusted-out stove and doorless refrigerator, “but the rest of the place feels like home. Look, seats! And they’re wood, not plastic!”

Austin sat in a wooden chair. “Feels solid.”

Gavin zipped down his polyweave coveralls and hung them inside out on the back of a chair. He shivered in the chill of the house in only his underclothes.

“You see a climate panel?” asked Gavin, wrinkling his nose from the scent of his unwashed clothing and body.

“Ain’t no panels on the walls at all,” said Austin, “and it’s gotta be less than ten degrees in here. All’s I see on the walls are those tan-yellow rectangles near the doors.”

Gavin crossed the room to one of the rectangles and pushed on the part of it that stuck out slightly from the flat plane. The entire rectangle pivoted on a hinge, and an incandescent bulb mounted in the ceiling blazed to life.

“Score! Crunch, it’s so bright!” exclaimed Austin, shielding his eyes with his hand. “And it comes from a ball instead of a plate. Even the light is weird in this place!”

“I don’t see no panels, but I think this house is still online. Look,” pointed Gavin, gesturing into an open closet at a series of metal tubes and wires, “That’s a geotherm interface, right?”

“A what?” Austin asked.

“Oh yeah,” remembered Gavin, “You ain’t had physics class yet. That’s next year for you. Anyway, years ago, when we ran out of oil, we dug down into the ground to score heat energy.”

“But the ground is cold, Gav. How would you get heat energy out of it?”

Gavin shrugged. “Dunno. I don’t remember. The heat is deep down. I think the energy comes from the heat mixing with cold air from up here. Flux, or somesuch. I gripped it well enough to pass the test, but that’s all.”

“Wow, Gav. So this place is online. Very blast. Still, what does that matter when this place is way far from home?” asked Austin.

Gavin took a deep breath. “It’s ‘cause if you had enough stim pills, you could live in this house and not have to do a job! You could do whatever you wanted to do.”

“But not things that are not allowed. You wouldn’t want any violations,” insisted Austin.

“Oh, no way, Ace,” replied Gavin, but his eyes remained curious.

“Gavin, I got a bio need.” Austin squirmed in place.

“Let’s find the bioroom, then,” agreed Gavin.

The two finally learned to twist the bolts on doors to open them, and passed a closet and two bedrooms before opening a door to a room longer than a closet and with fixtures along its wall.

Gavin broke into a smile. “Recognize that? It don’t look much like the pisser in our homepods, but how could it be anything else?”

Austin pushed his friend aside and addressed the fixture.

Gavin scanned the rest of the bioroom. He pressed the buttons on the sink, but nothing happened. Finally, he twisted one of them and water gushed forth from the sink. The sound of rushing water stirred him to attention.

“Don’t take forever, Ace. I got a bio need too now.”

“Done.” Austin backed away and fooled with the sink, then opened and closed the wooden doors of the sink’s enclosure. “Still nothing, Gav. The bioroom works, but there are no sterile-sticks, no gelsnaps for your hair… no towels, even.”

“I noticed,” nodded the older boy. “People in the old times must have had rank breath and lame hairmakes. If they even cared about appearance at all.”

The boys emerged from their adventures in the bioroom to find the windows covered over in white.

“How long we been in here?” asked Austin.

“I ain’t got the time. My visor ain’t scoring, remember?” replied Gavin.

“It’s still daytime out, but darker,” said Austin.

Gavin twisted the bolt on the front door. The force of wind from outside pushed the door inward, landing a second blow on Gavin’s forehead. A grainy sheet of snow howled into the house, a frozen wave gusting behind it.

“Help me close it!” shouted Gavin.

Austin rushed to his friend’s side, and the two struggled until the door was shut once again.

“What now?” asked Austin.

Gavin breathed heavily. He scanned around the room, bright with the light from the “ball” on the ceiling and smelling deeply of wood. He remembered seeing thread-worn blankets on a shelf in one of the bedrooms.

“Now, we wait. I’m going to bed early. Sleeping in that polyweave bubble last night sucked. There were rocks on the ground under me.”

The next morning, Gavin swung open the side window to find that snow covered the house and enclosed the pair.

“What if the snow ain’t melted and we run out of stim pills?” asked Austin.

“Then we’ll dig out,” said Gavin. “If we don’t run around so much, our stim pills will last longer. Let’s rest today so we’ll only use one stim pill each. And there’s always our loctags, if all else fails.”

By noon, the boys ached with boredom.

“I wanna go home, Gavin.”

“I know, Austin. As soon as we can, we will.”

“Should we dig yet?” asked Austin.

“Listen,” said Gavin.

The boys fell silent and heard the howling drone of the wind. The sound droned on, subtly muted by the snowy shell around the house.

Gavin shook his head. “We gotta wait.”

Austin sniffed and nodded.

The boys found piping leading from the bioroom and from another water faucet in the main room near the mysterious appliances.

“Check out these markings,” said Austin.

Gavin squinted at the piping. “Cistern. I dunno that word.”

“Me either. It’s on pipes, though. Maybe Cistern is the corp that owns the water around here.”
Gavin smiled. “Hey, yeah! We used the bioroom, so we know this house has got water. Mega-smart, Ace. Not bad for a boy.”

Austin whined, “I’m only a year younger than you, Gav! I could hurt you mega-serious!”

“You’ve been workin’ up to that all week, Ace. You want to rumble? You taking your shot at me? If I crack you down, I ain’t in violation. I’m just defending.”

“It wouldn’t matter, because I’d win,” sulked Austin.

Gavin snorted. “Shut your face, Ace. You’re too much of a girl to start a rumble anyway. You couldn’t crack me.”

Austin waved off the subject. “Let’s keep searching this place. I want to find what we have to find to get out.”

Gavin nodded knowingly. “That’s what I thought. All right, then.”

The boys continued their exploration. Strange tools and implements filled the closets of the cabin, and a steel grating against a column of brick offered Gavin no clues to its function.

At last, Gavin shook his head. “I don’t grip it!” he cried to nobody in particular.

Austin returned from his inspection of the blankets in the bedroom closet. “What?”

Gavin’s nostrils flared. “Ain’t no stim pills, but except for that, you could live here! Everything you need to survive is here, and it’s all scoring! But there ain’t no dataport, so you’d have nothing to do and you’d die of boredom! It don’t make any sense!”

It was Austin’s turn to play the calm rejoinder. “So why dontcha just forfeit it, Gav? In a place like this, ain’t nothing to do except things that are not allowed. Good thing there ain’t no girls here, or we might be in violation already!”

“It ain’t that,” insisted Gavin. “If that was it, my father or my grandmother would have taken it and sold it. They refused to take this place at all. Something about my great-grandfather and the house he left behind was so bad they wouldn’t even take it for free.”

Austin trudged to the corner and kicked his foot casually against the wall. “This house sucks. No dataport and no stim pills.”

Gavin ran his hand through his brown curls. “True, Austin. As soon as the storm blows over, we’ll roll out of here.” He donned his polyweave coveralls.

Austin continued kicking at the corner, probing cracks in the wood and paneling, when suddenly his foot broke through the wall entirely.

“Gavin!” gaped the younger boy.

Dust clouded out of the hole in the wall while Austin gingerly removed his foot, avoiding the splinters.

Gavin crossed the room to the corner and squatted down next to Austin, peering into the hole. The two squinted and saw a glint of metal.

“Maybe it’s stim pills!” said Austin. Both boys’ mouths hung wide open in wonder as they pulled a long metal box out of the hidden compartment.

Gavin fumbled with the latches on the side of the box opposite the hinges, and finally the lid came loose. Austin pulled the lid away and set it aside.

“Books,” said Austin.

“Old ones,” nodded Gavin. “The paper is actually printed with ink, not pixeldye. These pages don’t change or update.”

“Mega-lame,” chuckled Austin.

The boys looked over the titles of the books. “Crime and Punishment.” “Paradise Lost.” “Atlas Shrugged.” “The Grapes of Wrath.” “Les Miserables.” “Animal Farm.” “The Satanic Verses.” “The Wealth of Nations.” “The Road to Serfdom.” The spine of the oldest-looking and most careworn book read, “King James Bible.”

“I never heard of these,” said Austin.

“I heard of this one,” said Gavin, pointing at the bible. “This book is not allowed.”

“Oh, yeah,” nodded Austin. “I remember that one too. That one’s been not allowed for a long time. Hey, Gav? What if all these books are not allowed?”

“It is possible,” agreed Gavin.

“Your great-grandfather was in violation!” gasped Austin.

Gavin paused, and then shook his head. “He’s long since dead. If the Council wants to punish him, good luck to them.”

Gavin felt a hand clutch his shoulder. Austin spoke barely above a whisper. “If this place is your property, then you are in violation. And there ain’t no make-up task out of this kind of violation. You gotta leave like your father and grandmother did.”

Gavin shivered despite the protection of his temperature-controlled polyweave.

“Please?” begged Austin. “For me? Let’s just leave. Let’s go home before we do something that is not allowed and we get stuck in violation.”

Gavin shook his head. “Can’t get through the storm.”

Austin sniffled, tears welling in his eyes. “Then can you just put the box back in the wall and forget about it?”

Gavin beheld the box, focusing on its contents with an intensity that belied his usual uncaring merriment.

“Good idea, Ace.”

The boys crawled over every inch of the interior of the house. They found more blankets, more strange tools and implements, and even a lever that would have opened the fireplace flue if they had known what that was. Instead, the fireplace remained shut, a book of matches sat untouched in plain sight on the mantel, and the two boys made a mighty mess that no inspector would ever see.

Dawn broke over the Colorado woods on the morning of the third day since the boys found the cabin, and the rays of light coming in the window woke Austin with a start.

“About time,” Austin said aloud to himself. “Mise well get going so I can check my messages before the day is out.”

Austin left the bedroom and emerged into the main living area, and froze suddenly in terror.

On the floor of the main room, with the open box and open books strewn about the floor, sat Gavin.

“What are you doing?” squealed Austin. “You are in violation!”

Gavin looked up from his book and caught Austin’s gaze with somber eyes.

“‘If I were told, love thy neighbor, what came of it? ... It came to tearing my coat in half to share with my neighbor and we both were left half naked ... Science now tells us, love yourself before all men, for everything in the world rests on self-interest.’“

Austin panted in panic. “Is... is that from the book?”

Gavin nodded. “I’m not sure I grip it, but somehow I know it’s right. I know it’s true. And not a ‘feeling’ kind of true, but a ‘thinking’ kind of true, like really gripping it tight.”

Austin shook his head. “I don’t grip it.”

Gavin turned to another open book. “In some places of poverty, one half the children born die before they are four years of age; in many places before they are seven; and in almost all places before they are nine or ten.”

“But what does that mean, Gavin? Why are the children dying? Does the book say? What’s a ‘poverty?’ Is it another country?”

Gavin shrugged, turning to another book. “‘The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.’“

Austin’s head swam. “This is not good. This is not allowed! Listen to those words, Gavin! ‘The denial of all morals.’ I don’t grip what that book means, but you can’t deny morals or you’ll be in violation.”

Gavin held up his hand. “Relax, Ace. I’m not denying anything. I’m just reading.”

Austin trembled visibly, bracing himself against the silent oven. “But Gavin, these books teach you violations! They are not allowed!”

Gavin shook his head violently and rolled his eyes. “No. They ain’t teaching violations at all! They can’t be, because these books don’t even agree with one another! That means if one of ‘em was teaching violations, the others couldn’t all be.”

Austin wiped his nose and struggled for words. “But it’s all so horrible!”

Gavin nodded gently. “Yes, a lot of it is. Listen to this one. I don’t even grip half of it, but there’s no mistaking the general idea. Listen:
‘In the day thou eat’st, thou diest;
Death is the penalty imposed, beware,
And govern well thy appetite, lest Sin
Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death.’“

“Stop!” pled Austin.

“But it’s not all bad, Ace,” said Gavin. “Some of it is beautiful. So beautiful I have no words to describe it but to repeat the words themselves.” He picked up another book. “This page was marked, and someone underlined this part: ‘For God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.’“

“Violations!” choked Austin. “You can’t say that! Old stuff about ‘God’ is definitely not allowed! That book is the most not-allowed book of them all!”

“Why not?” demanded Gavin.

“Well... because! You remember what they said in Social Studies. The followers of God tried to force everyone to live by the rules in that book!” Austin pointed at the King James Bible. “They tried to control America, so now God is not allowed!”

“But the book don’t say anything about that, Austin! All I keep seeing about God and this Jesus guy is ‘love one another’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ and ‘forgive your brother seventy times seven times.’ Does that sound like ‘forcing’ people to do bad things? Does that sound like trying to ‘control’ anybody?”

Austin grappled with the concepts. “But what if someone didn’t want to follow those rules? What did the followers of God do then?”

“No idea. But, wait a minute!” Gavin held up a finger and whirled to another book. “This other book says differently: ‘For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.’ If the followers of God had really tried to control America, how would a book like this one exist?”

Austin’s mouth opened and closed, but no words came out. Finally, he shook his head and shrugged.

“Yeah, now you’re gripping my issue, Ace,” said Gavin, “the thing that’s got me pissed. I’m getting more than a little upset that I’m about to go on to college and I can’t grip every third word in books written over a century ago by people with less education than I have. Why do they know all this, but we can’t? Anyway, I grip ‘your life belongs to you’ well enough, and if that’s the truth, why is knowing the truth not allowed? And if that ain’t the truth, then why should anyone care whether we read it? Something isn’t scoring here, and I think these books might have the answers!”

“Just leave them!” urged Austin. “The storm is over. Put the books back into the box and put it into the wall and let’s forget we were ever here! What do you care about books and writings when we could be back at the homepod playing Tri-Sport Tournament 8?”

Gavin slammed the cover of his book shut. “What’s your problem, Austin? Don’t you grip what’s going on here? This is something very important! You may not care about it, but I do, and I ain’t gonna let this drop until I find out the answer!”

“Oh, yes you will, Gavin! You better drop this or else I’ll inform! You’re in violation!”

“So that’s how it is?” growled Gavin. “You’re going to inform on your best friend? Yesterday you wanted to rumble, and now this?” Gavin shook his head sadly. “All right, I guess. If that’s the way you want it.”

Austin turned to leave, but then stopped himself. “Wait a minute. What do you mean, ‘if that’s the way I want it?’“

Gavin shrugged and brushed dust from his hands. “If you inform on me, I’ll have to inform on you. You’re in more violation than I am. Fair is fair, Ace.”

“I ain’t in violation!” snapped Austin. “I ain’t the one doing things that are not allowed!”

“Aren’t you?” asked Gavin. “Who found the hole in the wall? You did. Who helped me pull the box out of the wall? You did. Who opened the lid? You did. I could never have read any books if you hadn’t done all that. That means if I’m in violation, it’s because you were in violation first!”

Austin’s face darkened. Tears of rage welled up in the corners of his eyes.

Gavin smiled, “You know it’s true, too, Ace, so you can’t deny it or you’ll fail the truth screening. You know that if you hadn’t kicked through that wall, none of this would have ever happened.”

Austin’s jaw clenched, his breathing became shallow, and his face and ears reddened.

“Sorry, Ace,” continued Gavin, looking out the window into the beauty of the pine forest, oblivious to Austin’s mask of fury. “I guess you’re just gonna have to help me bring these books back home and hide them, and you better never tell--”

Austin threw himself upon the older boy, slamming him to the ground. The two scuffled and fought, damaging nearby books with their wild kicking and thrashing.

Gavin landed fierce blows on Austin’s cheeks and shoulders, but Austin slowly and steadily wrested his hands toward Gavin’s neck. The older boy struck again and again, drawing blood from Austin’s face and arms, but Austin held clenched his jaw and tightened his grip around Gavin’s throat.

Finally, Gavin’s gasps for air choked off into silence, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Beneath Austin’s adrenaline-fueled grip, Gavin’s body became still.

Austin released his grip and fell back in shock. His arms trembled and his breath came in panting quickness. He half-crawled, half-staggered away from Gavin’s body, and finally sprawled on the floor, a book wedged under his back, drained of his burst of energy.

Later, after hours Austin could not measure, the younger boy sat up wearily and dropped a stim pill into his mouth. He refused to look toward the other side of the room. Toward Gavin’s body. Toward his best friend’s dead, murdered body.

Breath came quicker and quicker. Austin let fury well within him until crimson blotches stained his face. He lashed out at the other half of the house.

“Oh, crunch! You just had to do it, didn’t you!” Austin accused, still facing away from the body.
“You couldn’t just leave. I will not be in violation! I will not be taken away!”

Austin’s eyes widened and his face drained of color. “But... no!” he insisted. “It ain’t my fault! You made me do it! I ain’t in violation! You threatened me, Gavin! It’s your fault, not mine! But I threatened to rumble yesterday! Now this, and I… Oh, crunch! Oh, mega-mega-crunch!”

But Gavin did not answer.

The whine of the breeze through the pines echoed in the silence around the house, filling the building with a sound like breaking waves.

Austin gulped, his breaths coming faster and deeper. “That’s it!” he sniffed. “I’ll just tell them that you found the books, and that you attacked me when I said I would inform on you. Once they see the books, they’ll have to believe it!”

The younger boy blinked hard, tears flowing, and whimpered plaintively. “Oh, it’s no good! I’ll never pass a truth screening! I’ll be taken away! I never wanted any of this! I shouldn’t have even come here! I hate you, Gavin! I hate you so much!”

Austin turned toward the body and saw the betrayal frozen on Gavin’s face. A shock wave convulsed his body, and he retched, with nothing to empty from his stomach after subsisting on a diet of stim pills. Over and over again Austin retched, sending streams of spittle down the front of his chin and chest, until his knees gave out and he collapsed in a heap.

A ghastly whine built up in Austin’s lungs, building to a vile requiem of wailing guilt. Gazing up at the garish brightness of the incandescent bulb, Austin suddenly screamed at the top of his lungs. He screamed louder and louder, his eyes bleary with tears. Again and again he cried out in anguish, and then again even more, assailing the night through his hoarsening throat.

When Austin’s cries finally died out in a splutter of coughing and heaving, he stared up at the bulb in the throes of an uncontrollable tremor. After what seemed to him an eternity, Austin’s shaking died down, and with gulps and gasps his breathing slowed. Dizzy, exhausted, and numb, Austin finally fell asleep.

When Austin woke, it was dusk. The younger boy staggered to the rectangular toggle on the wall and activated the ball of light on the ceiling. He dragged himself to the scattered books around Gavin’s body and slumped to the floor.

“I’m sorry, Gavin. I’m so sorry.” Austin sobbed and sniffed, but he had no tears left to cry. His cheeks and eyelids festered with redness, raw from rubbing.

Austin took a book from the floor and turned it to the first page. His progress was slow, but the house was two days away from the Cheyenne conduit. They had to know that Gavin’s loctag was offline, now. They had to have known for hours. They could be a day away now.

Austin turned another page and struggled to put meaning to words that he had never been taught to know. A day away, Austin reminded himself. He had that much time, at least.

Assorted Thoughts on Ending 2008

2008-12-29T18:39:00.006-07:00

Perhaps the only reason 2008 did not have the greatest impact on my life of any year yet is because 2007 was practically scorched-earth by comparison.

In 2007, I got married, began my career (including learning the hard way what it means when politics control one's job), ran into significant difficulties with licensing, finished out what was left of a lucrative side gig, transitioned from a postgraduate-academic lifestyle to a suburban-salaryman lifestyle, and experienced eight-plus months of "the baby is on her way" vicariously via and alongside Steph.

In 2008, I became a father, a published author, and a property owner. Three watershed events instead of the unending turbulence of the year before. I am far from the first to reach those milestones, of course, and I expect no particular acknowledgment from the world at large, but the seismic shift in my mindset that accompanied those events has been significant and profound, and I am better for it.

In any event, this was a productive year, a healthy year, and a year in which I left the world better off than I found it and left myself better off than I began it. It's as much as I could have hoped for back at the starting bell.

Christmas this year will stand among my better memories of the holiday since my own childhood because Ali enjoyed it so much. Steph and I already have the material things we need -- far too many of them overall, in fact -- so we bought for each other a new living room set and asked our families to direct their gift-buying generosity toward Ali instead of us. Our 11-month-old daughter, meanwhile, got to enjoy her very first Christmas with lights, ornaments, singing, shiny ribbons, ringing bells, and more toys than I can ever remember seeing under the tree. Our folks did give us gifts in the end, despite our protestations, and we are humbled and grateful.

I advanced more in my understanding of Objectivism in 2008 than in any prior year, and I do not count it as a coincidence that I enjoyed generally good results in productivity throughout. Correlation may not be causation, but a positive mindset and a clear, rational moral philosophy go a long way toward channeling worthwhile thought into worthwhile action. I also found that it became easier to identify my enemies and to recognize their true nature for what it was. One example that I found just today is these idiots. They are my polar opposite in virtually every respect. Where I exalt human life, they subordinate human life to the brute and the inanimate. Where I will exploit the Earth or die, they would rather die and apologize to the unhearing, unthinking, uncaring Earth for the exploits of people like me. They claim suicide is inconsistent with their mindset, but their mindset is, in fact, already suicide -- just on a longer timeline. It is difficult to find words adequate to convey my revulsion at encountering the absolute negation of value that VHEMT represents. Fortunately, as long as I follow my values and they follow theirs, things should work out the way they ought.

Happy new year, everybody, and may you be healthy and prosperous in 2009!

Foreshocks

2008-06-01T10:01:00.002-07:00

[This is a flash fiction I penned in 2008. This story requires a full rewrite, because there is no clear protagonist, there is no ticking clock, and the central conflict of the story is only tangentially related to the characters. It tells, rather than showing. It is a perfect example of David Mamet's "crock of shit" talking-heads scene writing and is entirely bereft of drama as a result. Essentially, nobody would want to read this. Perhaps you may enjoy it as a cautionary example of what can happen when you have a plot-theme but no conflict development to back it up.]

Foreshocks
by Michael Bahr

"I raise you $50," said Roger. The mustachioed physician slid five yellow chips toward the pot.

"Always have to push me around with your big stack, eh, Rog?" smirked Bill.

Roger shrugged. "If you're holding the jack you're representing, why, you've got nothing to worry about, now do you?"

Bill pushed bifocals up the bridge of his nose and studied the pot, counting and calculating the same as he did when he prepared Doc Roger's income tax return.

"The pot odds are terrible here," frowned Bill. "I don't think my tens are good. Your queens take it." Bill mucked his ace-ten.

Roger smiled into chubby jowls and turned over a pair of jacks. "Odds you caught one of the last two were pretty safe for me."

"Queen-high straight," declared Mark, who had dealt the hand.

"Good read!" nodded Charlie. "The turn was everything. I can't believe Roger called that flop bet."

"It's low-limit anyhow," shrugged Bill.

Charlie's eyebrows shot up. "Hey, fifty bucks ain't no penny-ante, Billy. Fifty bucks will buy a day's groceries for a family of four. Five, if you’re a Hoffer who don't care much about feeding the kids."

The four men laughed. Mark's walkie-talkie squawked, but the gaunt patrolman ignored it.

"More trouble in Hoffman?" asked Bill.

"Same as it ever is," shrugged Mark. "Hoffer kids running around in the woods east of town. Freddie and Ray can handle it."

Roger took the deck and riffled the cards. "You know, I can't help but notice that most of the problems here in Juniper these days tend to involve the word 'Hoffer' at some point."

Bill shook his head. "I've said it time and again: the Juniper valley ain't got room for a whole city's worth of people. If it ain't the Hoffers, it's the yuppies up in Palm Vista."

Charlie sipped his beer. "At least the yuppies pay for their food with money. I can't remember the last time a Hoffer didn't pull out a benefit card at my till. They look at me like I ought to be grateful, as if I couldn't sell that same bag of liquor and TV dinners otherwise."

"What's your recovery on those?" asked Bill.

Charlie waved his palm back and forth. "Eighty-five, ninety percent, not counting the wait time."

"I didn't think Valley Grocery had much room in the margins for that," said Roger, dealing out two cards to each man.

"I don't. Hoffers are a push. I keep the doors open off Juniper folk and the occasional Palm Vista commuter."

Mark smiled to see a suited queen-king, and called into the flop in third position. "I guess it's the 'broken window' theory. Not for the Hoffers, I wouldn't need four more officers, and I couldn't take a night off to come down here and play cards once in a while."

Roger mucked his four-eight on the button. "Blinds option? No? All right. Anyway, yeah, I have to have two more girls at the desk to process all the medical benefits for my Hoffer patients. So at least there are more jobs. Medical benefits won’t pay off at anywhere near full invoice, either, because you’re supposed to be beggin’ to thank them for the added volume. So I lose money on the bill and I lose money processing the bill. Cuts into the ol' retirement fund a bit, I'll say, but I've got more than I'll ever get around to using."

The flop landed ace-three-nine.

"Check," called Charlie.

"Check's fine," said Bill.

"No aces in the blinds, eh?" mused Mark. "Ten bucks to go." He snapped a yellow chip from his stack to the table.

Charlie mucked. "Small-blind special. Hey, though. The Hoffers might not bother all you working professionals with your stock portfolios, but Main Street proprietors like me are taking it in the face. It ain't right, and I say it ain't right that they bleed you either, even if you've got reserves to spare."

Bill brought two yellow chips and a green chip. "I raise you to $25."

Mark chuckled and folded his cards in a grandiose motion. "Check-raising a police officer, eh, Bill? I may have to book you for robbery, you know!"

Bill smirked. "Did your king just lose to my rags?"

Mark shrugged. "Show the cards or it didn't happen."

Bill slow-rolled turning over his cards, then pitched them into the muck. "I suppose I might have had an ace in there somewhere."

Roger belly-laughed. "I'll bet you did. Here you go, Chuckles. Shuffle up and deal."

Charlie riffled the deck. "Can someone hold the screen door for my wife?"

Bill crossed the room to admit Elizabeth. Charlie's wife smiled and deposited a plate of sandwiches on a side table.

"You having fun, boys?"

"We sure are, Beth," said Mark.

"Thanks so much for the food!" said Roger.

Elizabeth kissed Charlie. "Well, thanks so much for the company, fellas! Honey, the girls and I are going across the street to drop in on Mrs. Colvin. We'll be back in a little while."

Charlie smiled. "Tell her 'get well' from us."

"Will do."

Roger sipped his beer. "All right, then, let's deal. Night's getting on."

"Keep your pants on, Doc," said Charlie.

Bill blew his nose and sat back down. "Actually, Mark, you mentioned the 'broken window theory.' You know it's a fallacy, right?"

Mark's eyebrows raised. "I did not know that."

"Yeah, the business generated by destruction isn't actually a net benefit, because the original owners of the damaged goods have to spend that money just to return to par, instead of redirecting those same funds toward other goods. The money I spent cleaning the Hoffer graffiti off my office door could have gone toward a new set of dishes. Instead, the dish manufacturer loses a sale."

"Never thought of it that way," mused Mark.

"Makes sense, though," said Charlie.

Roger mucked his hand. "You're an attorney, Bill! You can't tell me you don't have enough money to just buy the dishes anyway."

Charlie called his ace-jack on the button. "That's just it, Doc. Bill shouldn't have to pay twice. Sure he can afford it, but it isn't right. Same as all the extra expense you spend to treat the Hoffers."

Roger shrugged. "I'm the only general practitioner in the Valley. Where else will any of them get treatment?"

Bill called his small blind on a pair of sevens. "I'd hate to drive to County. Sixty miles up the freeway is a real hike."

"What do you care?" asked Mark, shipping a three-five off-suit away. "They all have fuel benefit cards just like they have food benefit cards. Let County take care of them. Shut your practice except to private insurance or cash-and-carry."

Roger blinked. "They'd be fine, wouldn't they? A bit of inconvenience, but they can get care. I've been stressing over this for months, and I never realized they had the fuel cards all along. Those Hoffers 'been runnin' a hustle on me!"

"Parasites are what parasites are," said Mark.

"True," agreed Bill. "We can't blame old Art Stockton for selling his acreage. He had no way of knowing the government would turn the Hoffman side of the Juniper River into project housing. I know Art. If he had any inkling, he would never have sold the farm."

Charlie dealt a flop of ace-seven-nine.

Roger ruminated for a minute, then fired in four green chips. "Twenty to go."

Bill called silently and took a bite of his sandwich.

"Say, Bill," said Roger. "What if we did something about the Hoffers?"

"Like what?" asked Charlie.

Roger looked at each man at the table. "Not just us. Maybe us for now, but then all of Juniper's small businesses. What if we stopped doing business on anything that makes us lose money to red tape? What if we denied the government's unfunded mandates?"

Mark swallowed his sandwich. "Not sure I follow. My department runs pretty lean as it is."

"Your part would be enforcement," said Roger. "But I could stop accepting government medical benefits. If I don't take their money, I'm not obligated to serve their people. Bill could quit taking cases for the public defender's office. Charlie could stop accepting food benefit cards."

Charlie dealt the turn card, another ace.

Bill held up his palm. "Wait a minute, there. I have no choice in the matter. I have to do pro bono work to keep my law license. Taking cases for the PD lets me get it out of the way early every year. There are always plenty of clients."

"It's true," said Mark. "I have two Hoffers locked up at the station right now for public drunkenness. You'd think they would be at home, watching their kids, but who are we to judge, right?"

"That's what I mean," said Roger. "I'm kind of peeved now that I realize how I've been had. I always thought I was a good doctor and provider because I went into general practice instead of grinding out a fortune in cardiology in San Francisco or somewhere. But no matter what I did, it was never enough. I worked hard and saved and built a nest egg, and because I could 'afford it,' I was always the one who had to 'help out' when the community asked for it. I'm not sure I want to do it anymore. And as for you, Bill, couldn't you do your pro bono for St. Christopher's Church instead of the municipal court?"

Bill nodded slowly. "I could do that."

Roger smiled. "That's what I mean. Oh, by the way, fifty to go."

Bill called.

Charlie turned up the river card, a red four. "That's all well and good for you high-rollers, but what about the little guys? I can't just close my store. Wouldn't I get shut down in about ten seconds if I kicked the Hoffers out? I know my sign says 'I reserve the right to refuse service at any time,' but that sign would be cold comfort if I had to fight it out in court."

Mark sipped a cola. "He's right, guys. I'd have to cite and arrest him for 'discriminatory business practices.' You know how the law is these days."

"That's a puzzler, I'll admit," said Roger.

Bill pushed his entire stack into the middle. "The bet is $425."

Roger's eyes opened wide. "I have you covered. Call! Call!"

Charlie made circular motions with his fingers. "Turn 'em over, boys."

Roger flipped up his ace. "I have a set of ones."

Bill nodded. "I only have a pair of those, but they're riding a boat made of three sevens."

The doctor pounded the table. "Incredible!"

Bill swept almost $1000 in chips to his stack.

Mark counted his chips. "I'm under $300. I think that breaks the table."

Charlie shrugged. "Want to start it over at $200 each and play a knock-out sit-and-go?"

Bill pushed his glasses up again and held up his palm. "Just a minute. I think I have it. Charlie: Are there items you can't sell in order to have certification to accept food benefit cards?"

"Well, sure," said Charlie. "Vehicles, fuel, firearms, pesticides and poisons, wholesale durables, you get the idea."

Roger interrupted, "Good thinking, Bill! All Charlie has to do is sell guns and he can't accept the benefit cards!"

Charlie frowned. "I don't have the spare cash to buy inventory, and I don't have a dealer's license in any case."

Mark finished his cola. "The license is easily enough done. We do that through the Department. Come on by the station and I'll run the check myself. As long as you don't have any felonies, you're fine."

"Bill?" asked Roger.

Bill nodded. "Roger and I will provide the seed money for your inventory. This isn't charity: We're furthering our own objectives by doing this. We'll call it a 'long-term loan,' no interest. You can pay us back with the profits from the sale of firearms and ammunition."

Charlie's eyes became distant. "The Palm Vista boys are going to love this. I'll bet you they line up to be the first one on their block to fill their McMansions' wall safes with click-click-boom."

Roger clapped Charlie on the shoulder. "I can think of a few Juniper guys who will be glad of a place to buy shells without taking the freeway all the way into the city."

"What will you do about your extra staff members, Roger? You won't need them, now."

"I'll think of something. They're both part-timers, girls from Juniper High who needed something to do during the summer, and I kept 'em on all the way through their second years at State. I’ll just tell ‘em it was a short-term thing and now it’s over, and they should concentrate on their academics these days anyway."

"I like this, guys," said Bill. "Our country has been drifting into a sorry state for so long that I almost forgot what it was like to be free of those ankle weights. I can't wait to practice law my way and only my way. I'll do some taxes, take a few cases for Juniper folk, and see what sort of help I can be to old Father Leo at St. Chris."

Charlie shook his head. "I just hope it works. I can't wait until the first day I get to tell those worthless Hoffers to take their problems to the Big-Mart over in the city. Are we going to be okay with this, Mark? First phone call they're going to make is going to be you."

Mark's walkie-talkie squawked again, and he replied, "I'm on my way in five." He donned his wide-brimmed hat and nodded. "I've got you covered, boys. This plan of yours will be unpopular with the Hoffers, but it's legal, and my job is to enforce the law."

Roger's eyes met Bill's, Mark's and Charlie's. The men smiled, savoring the moment.

Roger exhaled. "Well, I'm excited. We need to think of a name, something snappy, something that tells people that Juniper is setting things right by making our town a place where a person is entitled to the sweat of his own brow. I'll talk to some of the other Main Street shops and see who we can get on board. I'm sure Walt and Eddie will join in, and beyond that, who knows."

"Think this kind of thing could ever catch on beyond Juniper?" asked Bill.

"Let's find out," said Mark, standing to leave. "Here's to whatever happens next." He held out his fist.

The other men bumped it in turn.

"All right, then," said Charlie. "How about if we switch to Omaha Hi-Lo for this round?"

"Works for me," said Bill.

Roger wiped beer from his moustache. "Shuffle up and deal, Chuckles! Your chips are as good as mine!"

Tourography: The Bumpus Hounds live at the Arizona State Hospital 2008-04-08

2008-04-08T18:41:00.007-07:00

The Bumpus Hounds completed a 25-minute set at the State Hospital lawn today amid cool breezes and the bright morning sun. Robert, the guitarist from the opening band, joined us on stage for our encore. Good times.

[YouTube video clip to be added]

Band: The Bumpus Hounds
Date: 2008-04-08
Venue: Arizona State Hospital Visitors' Park
Location: Phoenix, AZ

Vocals, Guitar, Tambourine: Mike Bahr
Lead guitar, Bass: Aaron Ketterer

Other act(s): the State Lab Band starring Robert Gladstein and Chuck Martin

Setlist:
1. Don't You (Forget About Me) (Simple Minds)
2. For What It's Worth (Buffalo Springfield)
3. You're the Best (Joe Esposito)

4. Join Together medley (The Who)

- Hungry Like the Wolf (Duran Duran)

- Phantom of the Opera (Andrew Lloyd Webber)

- Yoda ("Weird Al" Yankovic)

5. Wanted Dead or Alive (Bon Jovi)

We did not play any of my originals because this was not the audience or the time for it. The crowd seemed subdued during the songs, but cheered enthusiastically between them, which I suppose is to be expected during an employee picnic.

Nerves and errors were in abundance, but it was great to return to the stage. It's a rush better than any drug. Except heroin, that is. Yeah, heroin pretty much trumps everything.

Welcome, Alexandra!

2008-01-19T23:59:00.001-07:00

Alexandra Marian Bahr
born 2008-01-19 16:41
7 lb 6 oz 20 in

From 2007 to 2008

2007-12-30T21:46:00.003-07:00

The year 2007 lifted me to incredible heights. Unfortunately, the ride was disrupted by desolate lows. I am ever an optimist, and I shall cherish the good -- and overcome that which went for ill.

The year began in the wake of my graduating from law school. Whatever else may become of my law career, I surmised, at least they could never take that credential away. Juris Doctor. I am, I have, and I did. It was unfortunate that my "backup plan" became pertinent.

January wasn't even over before the greatest event of the year, and most probably of my life: I married Stephanie Jarczyk, now Stephanie Bahr, on January 27, 2007. The wedding was outstanding and we were very happy to see so many of our friends and loved ones there.

In February, I took the Arizona bar exam -- and passed on my first try. Only barely, but a pass is a pass.

In April, I began my current job with the state government. On balance, things have gone well with it. Bottom line: I am improving my craft. Many jobs aren't as rewarding.

Unfortunately, in July, the state bar denied me admission. That story has been told already, and I have no desire to spoil my year-end celebration by repeating it now. Suffice it to say that, in time, I will find a way to resolve that situation.

In August, Stephanie and I left the college-central apartment where I had spent the better part of four years and rented a house in the southern foothills of Phoenix. Any of you who have visited can easily attest to the improvement there.

The months since then have flown by. Work progresses, the days turned colder, and what do you know, the New England Patriots turned into my personal gambling ATM this year by going undefeated with my money riding on every game. The last time a team did that, I had not yet even been born. Not too many things in this world have failed to be done for so long a duration.

At last, with New Year's Eve upon us, Alexandra Marian Bahr is due to arrive any day now, whenever Steph should happen to go into labor. Perhaps it will happen while she and Christina are at the Insight Bowl tomorrow afternoon. Perhaps Ali will be a 2008 baby. The impending arrival of our first daughter, whether she is actually born "on time" for the end of the year or not, effectively adds up to the final event of an incredible year.

I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

I get knocked down, but I get up again. You're never going to keep me down.

Health, wealth, and happiness to you all.

The End Complete

2007-12-01T13:48:00.003-07:00

[Edited post: This post originally dealt with the aftermath of my being denied a law license by the Arizona State Bar; specifically, my petition for review being denied by the Arizona Supreme Court. My perspective on these events has changed somewhat as time has progressed since then. I have left most of this post in place to show that I am not evading the reality of what happened, but I think some of the substance of the post is no longer productive.]

The Supreme Court has denied review of my case. In fairness I must concede that this was the probable outcome regardless of the underlying issues -- the entire reason the character committee exists is so that the Court can defer to their decisions and get on with hearing murder appeals and the like. I wish the Court had decided differently, but other than that, I have no ongoing dispute with them.

Will I ever re-apply to the bar in Arizona? It's hard to say. Will I ever apply to the bar of another state? I could, but I would much rather stay. I have been an Arizonan for 33 years. This is my home, whatever its flaws. I choose to be optimistic and hope that nothing I have done is so terrible that the situation cannot be mended. I cannot rely on hope alone, of course, however optimistic I may be, so I will keep my eyes and ears open for other options. There are other state bars that might not have any problem with admitting me. I would rather not move, but the most important thing in my life is financial security for my family, not aesthetic preferences. In time, I will build toward a solution of one sort or another.

Whatever your particular pursuit in life, I hope you never encounter a situation like the one I have just experienced.

Respect

2007-11-30T09:00:00.002-07:00

[This is a fiction short story I penned in late 2007, with spot edits in 2008 and 2009. I have backdated this post to roughly the date I wrote the story. If printed, this story will probably be categorized as Juvenile or Young Adult fiction, though I wrote it to be accessible to all ages a la Harry Potter, and to be enjoyable by a mainstream audience that isn't necessarily familiar with or interested in science fiction.

My technique is still very unpolished here, but I am thrilled to see that I got so many of the essentials right: a strong, central protagonist, a clear conflict, realistic antagonists, transformation (rather credible and effective even), and a believable setting. The story needs more of a ticking clock and I need to show more and tell less. I have been working on making this into a novel-length narrative under the working title "Gordon/David/Rachael Story," with "Respect" as the prologue or first act, so there will be much polishing.]

Respect
by Michael Bahr

That frozen Monday morning in January was the first time I ever saw David Castillo. He staggered up the road, shivering and sniffling, dragging behind him an overfilled backpack. His breath steamed off to the sides of his face in the bitter cold as he trudged toward us in obvious agony. I would not learn his name until an hour later in eighth-grade homeroom, but I could tell from one look at David that he did not belong.

"Look what we have here!" smirked Robbie. Robbie was the biggest of us. He puffed up his chest and stared down the road at the hapless David.

"New kid, I'd say," said Steve, looking up from his busy attention to flicking icicles off the edge of the schoolyard wall. "Looks like a Mexican."

Derrick scowled and stared at the newcomer. "My dad says Mexicans steal jobs and money from Americans."

"Your dad says a lot of things," I replied. But I had heard the same things. Was David a Mexican? Was his family here to steal jobs and money? I wanted to know. I always wanted to know things. I wanted to understand who, how, and why. The other guys never did. I guess that's why I let them do most of the bullying. And if some poor wimp of a boy didn't have the guts to stand up for himself, that wasn't my problem, right? Why should it be my problem? I wasn't the person throwing the punches. Right?

"Yeah, well, I'm going to make him wish he was back in May-hee-coh," declared Derrick.

"Oh yeah? How?" asked Steve.

Derrick stepped out from the schoolyard wall and into the gate. If David wanted to make it onto school grounds, he had to come past us, unless he wanted to spend half an hour walking all the way around to the other side.

Every day for as long as I had known the guys, we had spent our mornings this way. Robbie or Derrick would see a boy approaching that was smaller than us, or different from us, or who came from a different part of the neighborhood than we did, and we would block the gate so the boy had to either fight us or go around. Most of the time, boys went around. In the previous grades, we had to step aside for the older, bigger kids. This year, in eighth grade, nobody was older or bigger than us.

Steve spoke little, but he was always there to join in the fun. He stood gangly and awkward, just like many of the boys that we bullied, and I always wondered why he thought he was any different from them. I guess he was just lucky to have known the larger, tougher Robbie and Derrick since first grade.

The four of us watched David suffering his way up the road toward the schoolyard. He continued straight toward us.

"Look at that loser. He doesn't even have a scarf and gloves!" said Robbie, stepping out to flank Derrick at the gate.

I smiled. "It looks like he's going to cry! Little baby can't take the cold!"

"Ain't no cold where he comes from, Gord-o," barked Derrick. "Nothing but sand and lizards and stuff!"

Steve just stared at David in silence, flicking his icicles.

David reached the gate and stopped in front of Robbie and Derrick. He stood at least a head shorter than either one of them, and he was as skinny as Steve.

"Excuse me, I need to get through," said David, speaking pristine English.

"Can't go through," said Derrick.

Robbie shook his head.

David glanced back and forth at the two. "It's almost time for class."

Derrick shrugged.

"Go around," said Robbie.

"Yeah," I said. "Go around."

David paused for a moment, then set his eyes forward and stepped directly into Robbie and Derrick, pushing between them.

"Whoa, whoa, what's this?" laughed Robbie. He pushed David away, and the weight of David's backpack pulled him off-balance until he fell side-down in the road. Muddy water and chunks of snow and dirt caked David's coat, pants, and face.

The four of us erupted in laughter. The sight of David sprawled out on the ground sent me into hysterics, though I could not quite say why.

Derrick leaned down at David and grabbed a handful of David's hair. "Mexicans aren't allowed here in Waukegan. That means you, kid." And he slugged David in the stomach.

David heaved and choked for air, doubling up his gut at Derrick's sudden attack. Derrick gave Robbie a high-five and we all laughed.

"I'm - not - a - Mexican," gasped David.

Robbie stepped up to David and offered his hand. "Oh, I'm sorry. I guess we were mistaken." But there was something wrong with the way he said it. I had heard that tone before.

David must have noticed it too, because he stared up at Robbie's hand, reluctant to so quickly trust a stranger after Derrick's surprise attack. David extended his hand toward Robbie's, and Robbie pulled the smaller boy up.

"You aren't just a Mexican. You're a liar!" sneered Robbie. Just then, Steve appeared behind David, pulled on the hood of David's coat, and dropped a handful of icicles and snow grime down David's back.

We howled with laughter now, watching the shocked and freezing David groping at the back of his coat and shirt to dislodge the icy sludge. Just as David forced a flurry of ice out from under his shirt, a clod of sludge slid down into the back of his pants. David yelped in pain and frantically tugged at his pant legs to force the grime out. I doubled over, laughing so hard my sides ached.

The bell rang. All four of us darted through the gate and ran for the main building, leaving David to struggle at the roadside.

An hour into class, the principal, Dr. Rogissart, walked into Mrs. Herbert's homeroom class with a newly-redressed David in tow.

"Oh, no!" whispered Robbie, "We're in trouble for sure!"

"If we get busted, I'm going to let him have it after school!" seethed Derrick.

"This is why I keep telling you guys not to take it so far," I whispered back. "If you just hit them once or twice, they can't prove anything!"

Steve, as usual, said nothing. He doodled silently in his notebook.

Robbie leaned over and slugged me in the bicep. "I'll hit who I want to hit, however many times I like." I looked to the front of the classroom, but Dr. Rogissart and Mrs. Herbert were talking to each other, and must not have seen Robbie's punch. They finally turned to address the class.

"Class," said Dr. Rogissart, "I have good news! We have a new student joining us today, and he just moved here to Illinois. This is David Castillo. Let's all welcome him to Elkdale Primary!"

"Hi, David!" came the chorus from most of the class. I said it, and even Robbie mouthed the words, but Derrick and Steve kept their mouths shut. My arm ached.

"Hi, everyone," said David.

Dr. Rogissart nodded. "Well, I'll just let you get settled, then. Have a good day, everybody!" The principal strolled out the door.

Mrs. Herbert smiled. "So where are you from, David?"

"Las Cruces, New Mexico. We moved here during Christmas break."

"Wow," said Mrs. Herbert, "Waukegan is pretty different for you, then! Yes, Robbie?"
Robbie had raised his hand. I scowled, convinced that Robbie was going to spill the beans somehow.

"So, does that mean he's a Mexican?"

Mrs. Herbert shook her head. "No, Robbie. David is not from Mexico. He is from New Mexico, the 47th state, which makes him an American. Anybody, without looking at the map, who can tell me where Las Cruces, New Mexico is and the primary features nearby?" Hands shot up, and Mrs. Herbert nodded to the class know-it-all, Rachael O'Reilly.

Rachael ticked off each answer on her fingers. "Las Cruces is located on the New Mexico border with Texas, across from El Paso. The Rio Grande runs directly through the city and eventually out to the Gulf of Mexico. To the north is Albuquerque and to the west is Tucson, Arizona."

"Impressive," nodded David.

"Correct, Rachael. Everyone take note of the features Rachael identified. You will need to know the layout of the states and major cities for your history exams this semester," said Mrs. Herbert. Rachael wore a self-satisfied smirk. I avoided Rachael's gaze, because one of her favorite games of the past few grades has been to bother me and pester me at every opportunity. Why she found it so fascinating to bother me, I will never know. I had to hand it to her this time, though: at least her little show turned David's attention away from Robbie.

"So, David, what does your family do?" asked the teacher.

David replied in that soft, matter-of-fact voice that we had first heard out by the gate. "My dad works on mirrors. All my life he has worked for the Army, ever since he served in the Middle-East War. Sometimes, he worked at Fort Bliss, near El Paso. Other times, he worked at White Sands on the other side of town. They sent him to Holloman for a year to work on mirrors for the Air Force, and when he came back, they said he was going to Chicago to do the same thing for the Navy."

"What does your father do with mirrors?" asked Mrs. Herbert.

David shrugged. "The military uses them for different things. Dad can only tell me about some of the work he does. The rest is secret. Mirrors are used in surveillance, communications, and even weapon targeting. Laser beams mark a target, and mirrors are used to focus and direct the beams. Once a target is marked, our soldiers know where to aim. I think for the Navy he is doing the same thing, except for missiles that they fire from ships. If you have enough mirrors, you can launch a missile from a hundred miles out at sea and still hit an enemy fortress way up in the mountains."

A hush fell over the classroom after David's explanation. Some of the other guys sat wide-eyed in wonder.

"That's very interesting, David!" said Mrs. Herbert. "You can have this desk over here. Have a seat and you can join in this morning's writing exercises."

I scowled in resentment, personally offended that this stranger could come walking into my school and classroom and immediately look so cool -- especially after taking such an easy beating from my friends out at the gate that morning. His father works on weapons targeting mirrors?! How could I ever compete with that? My father poured concrete for a living.

Thankfully, Robbie was not impressed either -- but more by accident than by design. He leaned over to me and whispered, "That's no big deal! I have a mirror at home in my bathroom, and I only ever use it when I brush my teeth!"

Recess was barely ten minutes old when the four of us cornered David again.

"You should use one of your daddy's mirrors," Derrick was saying, "so you can see how ugly you are, Mexican! Oh, I mean New Mexican!"

"Why don't you guys leave me alone?" asked David.

Robbie stood tall in front of David. "Why don't you make me?"

David paused, perhaps pondering his situation. I noticed Steve creeping up behind him. It was the classic one-two move, just like that morning in the road. Robbie distracts someone and Steve sets the trap.

Robbie forced the issue. "Well?" he spat, and then pushed David forward by the shoulders. David's momentum carried him over Steve's outstretched leg, and the new boy tripped and stumbled to the ground with a smack.

When David regained his feet, I noticed that a sliver of blood trailed from the side of his mouth. Maroon spatter coagulated on the concrete where he had lain. I turned away. I had seen enough.

The next voice I heard was Derrick's. "That's right, Mexican! Run away! We'll see you again after school!" I knew I should be enjoying it. I knew I should be shouting with Derrick. Instead, I just stared at a tree, watching the water drip from its needles. I fixed my focus on the pine needles, hoping not to see David for the rest of the day.

“It’s cold out here. I’m getting wet. I’m going inside,” I told the guys.

“Suit yourself, Gord-o,” replied Robbie, avoiding eye contact with me. Derrick shrugged. Steve stared off in the direction David had run and didn’t answer.

Tuesday morning came and went, and there was no sign of David. He was in class, so he must have gone around, we figured. The same thing happened after school, and then again Wednesday and Thursday. That was the fastest I had ever seen someone give up the fight against Robbie and Derrick. Usually, a boy would put up a struggle at least a couple more times.

I was stuck with David as a partner in sixth period science on Friday. The class had to fill in tables on the behavior of wild animals. I slogged through the canine species -- dogs, jackals, and wolves, while David covered the felines -- panthers, tigers, lions, and leopards and such. I supposed that his schools in New Mexico had to teach that stuff, in case a mountain lion ever attacked them. David tried to catch my eye, but I wouldn’t acknowledge him.

“The alpha wolf,” David said.

I didn’t look at him.

“The section you’re stuck on. A pack is led by the alpha wolf.” David pointed to the circle on my page. I was sitting with my pencil near the blank tag for the head of the unit, and I realized I had been sitting there staring at it for a few minutes.

I grunted and nodded, then filled it in. I dared not give David the satisfaction. I knew about animals. I was just preoccupied, that’s all. Just preoccupied.

“Why did you turn away?” asked David. He returned to his tables, noting that the female lions in a pride did the hunting, conceding to me the attempt at eye contact.

“I don’t remember inviting you into a conversation,” I huffed.

“I don’t remember asking your permission,” David shrugged.

His ploy worked. David’s clever reply prompted me to turn and look directly at him, and he stared back with – what? Not malice. Amusement. No, curiosity.

“So why did you turn away?” David persisted.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I lied.

"Monday at lunch. After I hit the ground, you turned away."

“What does it matter? You learned your lesson. Nobody gets the best of us.” I shrugged. I turned back to the canines.

“We had groups of guys like your friends back in Cruces,” David related, “and I recognized the others for what they were. Robbie is big, so he feels like he has to be tough all the time or people will think he is weak. Derrick talks like his father. And Steve is the guy who is always there, but never matters.”

“Hey, jerk,” I said, “those are my friends you’re talking about!”

“Are they?” asked David.

“Yes.”

“Why?” asked David.

That’s easy. Anyone knows why. What a stupid question. It’s ridiculous that David would even ask such a question.

And somehow I did not know the answer.

“Do you know Rachael?” asked David, pointing at the teacher’s pet.

“She thinks she’s so smart,” I mumbled to myself.

David blinked. “Well, it’s strange you should say that. I talked to her at lunch. She says you’re pretty smart too. She says you almost beat her in the spelling bee last year.”

Rachael still had not realized that I threw the contest. She missed "lethargy," and then I had a chance to spell "exuberance" for the win. I had no intention of winning a contest for dorks, so I misspelled it "e-x-u-b-e-r-e-n-c-e." She made her next word, and then I misspelled mine on purpose again.

“Rachael O’Reilly is the teacher’s pet, David. If you do anything fun, she will tell on you. If you get anything wrong, she will be there to point it out. If you want to think about anything but school, there she is, talking about school.”

“I guess,” said David. He sounded unconvinced.

I contemplated the conversation while finishing up the hyenas. I hadn’t noticed that David was reading my work over my shoulder until he spoke.

“I thought the hyena counted as a canine.”

“Technically they don't. They are more like the mongoose or the meerkat,” I explained.

“Huh. No fooling. I guess you’re right, Gord-o. You aren’t smart at all. Rachael is probably just pulling my chain.”

Did he really just call me that?

"Gord-o?!" I deadpanned.

“Well, you called me David, so I figured we were on a first-name basis now,” smirked the New Mexican.

“My name is not ‘Gord-o.’ My name is Gordon Callahan,” I said.

“David Castillo,” he replied. He shook my hand suddenly, and I didn’t think to pull it away. Just Monday morning I had taunted David while he laid freezing in the road. Why was he being nice to me? None of this made sense.

Wait a minute.

“You said what my friends were. Robbie is a bully, Derrick is ignorant, and Steve is spineless. Okay, I get that. I’m not sure what that proves. But what am I, then?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Gordon?” asked Rachael, joining our conversation. “You’re the mismatch. You don’t belong with those guys. I’ve been trying to tell you that for a while now.”

Why was she bothering me now, too? “Hey, brown-nose, don’t you have a science assignment to finish?”

Rachael waved off my question. “I finished my animal tables before you two even started talking. By the way, you left out the alpha female. In all the subspecies of gray wolves, there is an alpha male and an alpha female.”

“Just – just shut up a minute,” I snapped at her. I was in no mood to be corrected by Rachael -- not today. “Okay, so why am I a mismatch? A smart guy can’t enjoy hanging out with normal guys?”

“Smart has nothing to do with it, Gordon,” David calmly replied. He never raised his voice, not the entire time I had known him. I had no idea how he could stay so level-headed, especially after being pushed around like that. “You have a conscience,” David explained. “You know the difference between right and wrong. You pretend you don't care, but you do care.”

Rachael nodded. “It's really easy to tell.”

David smiled. “Those guys are cruel and petty because this is all they will ever have. I saw guys like that back in Cruces. Bigger than Robbie. Nastier than Derrick. The ones like Steve -- well, they were about the same, now that I think about it.”

“Not you, though, Gord-o,” blinked Rachael, twirling her pony-tail absent-mindedly. “You may not know it yet, but you’re one of us.”

That was enough. My vision narrowed. These two had insulted my friends, sneered at me with their fancy words and arrogant smiles, and now they were calling me a nerd in so many words. I had half a mind to punch David in the nose right then, but that would have meant detention on a Friday.

“Shut up, both of you,” I growled. “Leave me alone. I am nothing like you. I’m cool, and I hang out with the awesome guys, and you two can just go enjoy doing your times tables or whatever. But count me out.” I snatched my science paper off the table, dropped it in the “turn-in” bin, and then excused myself to the bathroom for the last ten minutes of the period.

Twice more the next week, we caught wimps and nerds walking to our gate before school, and twice more they suffered at the hands of Robbie and Derrick. Steve nodded along, playing his set-up role as appropriate, and each time I delivered taunts and stood about in a menacing manner, but could not bring myself to join in the beatings.

One Thursday, the guys were giving Eric Miller a "swirly" in the bathroom. The poor kid blubbered and wailed in agony as they dunked his head repeatedly in the toilet, and eventually I had heard enough.

"I'm going to make sure the coast is still clear," I lied, and I took my exit from the bathroom.

David was standing outside, by the wall.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Just waiting to use the bathroom," said David. "It seems like this might be a bad time to go in there. I don't know how much more Eric can take."

I shook my head and stared out at the yard.

"Why aren't you in there helping out, Gordon?" asked David.

I wanted to be angry at him for asking, but his question held no trace of sarcasm.

"They're going too far. They always go too far. I hate it when they get like this. They never listen to me. Someday, somebody is going to really get hurt." I had no idea why I was telling this to David, except that he kept standing there, listening. "Robbie is a thug, just like you said. And Derrick? Man, I don't even know anymore where he gets all his hatred. And Steve is always there, always giving those two an audience."

"What about you?" asked David.

"I let them do the bullying. If some wimp can't take it, that's not my problem."

"How do you figure?"

"Well, I'm not the person throwing the punches," I shrugged.

David furrowed his brow in thought. "That first Monday, when I hit the ground and busted my lip, you didn't punch me that day, right?"

I nodded.

"So, by your logic, you weren't responsible for what happened to me."

"That's right," I said.

"Then why did you turn away?"

I searched my mind, and realized that I had no answer.

The miserable days of January went on, and snow turned to hail and to sleet and eventually rain. Most days had all the school cooped up in the main building, and tempers flared in the frustration of our imprisonment.

The circumstances brought out the most sadistic in Derrick and Robbie, and they no longer cared about being within earshot of other students or even teachers. Twisty hallways, corners in the locker room, and the boys' bathroom became torture chambers for the nerdy, the different, and the weak among the male students. Even the girls became snippy and emotional, with Rachael crying in the corner almost every afternoon after some hearing second-hand some behind-the-back ridicule from the clique of "lipstick-girls" holding their court.

We called them "lipstick-girls" because they were the ones whose parents let them wear makeup, carry purses, and pierce their ears. The lipstick-girls relentlessly enforced the social pecking order among the females in each grade, based on some arcane, inscrutable hierarchy that made the physically brutal social circles of the boys seem friendly by comparison. This is how it had been ever since kindergarten, and the best information I had so far about high school made the lower grades seem downright friendly by comparison.

There was some connection between the behavior of the lipstick-girls and that of my friends, and I shook my head in frustration every time the key to that connection eluded me. David had asked a crucial question that day outside the boys' bathroom, and I was determined to find the answer. Why did I turn away? I had to know.

One Monday morning in February, the rain had stopped, the road had mostly dried up, and if we had any luck, we would get some winter sun before the day was through. The guys and I took up our customary positions at the edge of the schoolyard, and we were shocked and amazed to see David walking deliberately up the road and directly toward the gate.

Robbie and Derrick took their positions blocking the gate. Steve lounged by the wall. Something in David’s expression was off-putting, so I stepped back a few feet. I had a funny feeling that something might happen. But I never could have guessed, not in a million years, what would happen.

“Looks like Mexicans just never learn,” mused Derrick, cracking his knuckles.

“Yeah! They didn’t teach him down in school in New Mexico how to tell when he wasn't welcome,” taunted Robbie.

David just smiled.

“What’s his problem?” wondered Steve aloud.

“Stupid idiot doesn’t even realize he’s about to get beat up!” laughed Derrick.

This wasn’t right. Nothing in front of me made any sense. David just walked on toward us, smiling like the Mona Lisa. The guys were getting ready to jump David, and somehow all the reasons that it made perfect sense to do so turned to black and faded away into nothing. In that moment I felt a pang of fear that those reasons had never truly existed.

I had kept stepping away without realizing it, and Robbie’s voice snapped me back to the present.

“Hey, Gord, where you going, pal? You're going to miss it!”

"Yeah, Gord-o," said Derrick, "come on. Are you going soft on us?"

I stopped myself. The three guys all looked at me with accusation in their eyes. Could they see my uncertainty? All of a sudden, I thought back to my science lesson about the wolves. They say that wolves all obey the pack alpha because the alpha asserts himself and the rest defer. The pack alpha eats first. The pack alpha makes the decisions. The other wolves have to obey or they will be left behind.

I had to be the alpha. I had to make a move.

“Step aside, you two. I’m going to bust this Mexican right in his stupid, Mexican, smiling, moronic, loser face!”

“Yeah!” grinned Derrick and Robbie. Steve smiled toothily and nodded his head frantically.
I strode through the gate, past the guys, and stormed up to David as he was still about fifteen feet from the others. I grabbed hold of his shirt collar and raised my fist.

“Hey, jerk! This is what happens to guys like you in Waukegan!” I thundered, making sure the guys could hear. They roared in approval.

David just smiled and winked at me.

I hesitated. What was he doing? Why didn’t he say something? I shrugged at him, fist still high in the air, the question in my eyes.

David Castillo, the unflappable New Mexican, nodded and winked again.

“Come on, Gord-o! Pop him right on his stupid mouth!” shrieked Derrick. I could hear the hatred in Derrick’s voice. I could hear the contempt. I thought back to all the times Derrick just lost it and unloaded on some other kid, usually a new kid from somewhere else, just like David, or else the kid with the leg braces, or the kid with the thick glasses. All those times, those kids hadn’t done anything to Derrick – they just stumbled into his path, and that was sin enough for him to condemn them. And there I was, every time, helping him out.

Without even turning around, I could see Steve’s maniacal grin in my mind’s eye, and I thought back to all the times I stood by, watching Robbie and Derrick pummeling some kid while Steve just sat there smiling along. That's all Steve ever did, and yet I suddenly saw it for what it was. Steve represented the basest, least discriminating audience a person could have for their acts. In the presence of any audience, a person feels compelled to act. And no matter how reprehensible our act might be, we knew Steve would not disapprove.

Robbie was the worst of all. How many times did he just punch people, just deck them out of nowhere – myself included – because he thought something they said in passing was some kind of insult to his toughness? And I just kept taking it, always afraid to step up to Robbie and fight back, because I knew most of the time his next target would be somebody else.

At last I understood why I had never objected to the beatings: because as long as I was doing that, I was not the target of the beatings. All those victims of our quartet and all their pain, suffering, bleeding, and agony were on my hands as well, because I had sold those boys up the river to save my own skin.

I didn’t know what to do. I lowered my fist, but kept hold of David’s shirt. I shook my head in confusion.

“What are you doing, man? Don’t you see what’s about to happen?” I implored him.

David shrugged and pointed with his eyes back toward the other guys, and winked once more.

I let go of David. “I'm sorry for my part in this, David. That's why I turned away that day. I knew I was wrong, and I was ashamed of myself. But, seriously, though: You should go around. I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

David’s eyes brightened in exultation. He smiled widely, still not showing his teeth. Before I could warn him off more urgently, he strode right up to Robbie and Derrick.

“What?” bellowed Robbie. Derrick glowered belligerently. Neither of them blinked.

In retrospect, perhaps they should have.

David blasted a vivid spray from his mouth and caught Robbie and Derrick full in the faces, right across the eyes. The spray looked like water, and it looked normal enough when it hit them, but both Robbie and Derrick quickly dropped to the ground, shouting and shaking in pain. I trembled in sudden terror.

“It burns! Make it stop! Get it off! Aaaauuuugh!” whimpered Robbie.

“Burning! I can’t see! I’m blind!” shouted Derrick.

Both of them grasped sightlessly at the grimy, slushy snow at the roadside and frantically rubbed handfuls of the muck into their faces.

Steve, trembling and agape, backed up in a stagger, then turned and fled for the main building. "Mrs. Herbert!" he shrieked. “Mrs. Herbert! Call the nurse! Fast!” The other students in the yard turned to look, and saw Robbie and Derrick writhing blindly in the gutter when the bell rang.

I stared open-mouthed at David. He smiled with his chin held high and his feet planted astride the gate, triumphant, exulting in his victory. Did he not realize he just blinded two of my friends?! What kind of sick, twisted maniac was he? Had he spat poison? Or acid? How could he have spat acid?! I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know! I kept my distance from David as I circled back toward the school.

“Gordon! Wait, Gordon!” he called. I did not look back.

I stared at my sandwich in the lunchroom and found myself without an appetite. Robbie and Derrick were not in class all morning. Mrs. Herbert said she didn’t know where they were, but I think she knew. Dr. Rogissart had whispered something to her at the door, and I think his mouth pronounced “Robbie,” and she nodded. But I couldn’t be sure. Steve came to class about an hour late with a new pair of pants.

I hardly even noticed when David and Rachael sat down across the table from me.

“Boy, Gordon, who died and left you with the mess?” she quipped.

“Yeah, Rachael, have your fun. Your friends didn’t get blinded.”

The two paused, and then broke into gales of laughter.

“Blinded? They aren’t blinded, Gordon,” David chuckled. “Well, not permanently, anyway. They just won’t be able to see straight for a few hours. They’re at the nurse’s office, sitting in the dark room being treated with eye-wash.”

So they weren’t blinded, I mused in relief. I was surprised to realize then that, in some small measure, I had sort of hoped that they might be. Not to be cruel or anything, but because they deserved it – sort of, maybe a little. Not permanently, anyway.

"What did you spit on those guys, anyway?" I asked.

David held up a small, fruit-like pepper, and then popped it into his mouth.

“A jalapeño?” I asked.

“No,” David replied, chewing and swallowing. “This is a different kind of chilé. We ate these all the time back home in Las Cruces. I’m used to them. But to someone who has never had one, they’re a little hot.”

I turned to Rachael, and she nodded. “I tried one. It didn’t go well.”

“You have to be lying. There’s no way pepper juice would make those guys drop down in pain like that and think they were blind. I’ve eaten jalapeños on pizza and I was fine.”

David and Rachael shared a glance. “Oh, I don’t know, Gord-o. New Mexican chilé can be spicier than you might think.”

“I don’t believe you,” I shot back. It was too absurd to accept. There was no way a simple southwestern pepper had beaten Robbie and Derrick and sent Steve running for the hills.

David pulled another pepper out of his lunch bag. “Try it, if you want.”

I looked at Rachael. She shook her head and looked at the pepper askance. “Don’t look at me; I’m not touching that thing. I know better.”

Shrugging, I took the pepper from David and looked at it. It was cool to the touch and smelled vaguely like salsa.

“You going to study that chilé or eat it?” asked David.

Defiantly, I popped the pepper in my mouth and chewed vigorously. That, as it turned out, was a mistake.

It was like a nuclear bomb had exploded on my tongue.

Searing, scorching, stinging pain coated the inside of my mouth, and my eyes instantly welled up and burst forth in tears. My nose ran with agony as I kicked back my chair and dashed for the water fountain. David and Rachael pounded the table in laughter at my desperate plight.

I furiously lapped water as fast as the fountain would feed it. I held my hand under the second faucet for more water and greedily drank and rubbed my tongue with it. It was then that I made my second mistake. The tears were making it hard for me to see through my bleary eyes, so I rubbed them.

Once I returned from the nurse's office and rejoined David and Rachael in the lunch recess, David explained to me that water would not counter the heat of the peppers, and that I needed to drink milk to dampen the burn. I tried it, and it worked: both Rachael and I managed to eat a pepper without suffering in agony. He told us we were well on our way to being Southwesterners, and Rachael beamed with pride at the accomplishment. David told me when Rachael was out of earshot that her first time had gone even worse than mine.

Later that afternoon, I sat in the brilliant winter sun with David and Rachael after school. The chill breeze rustled the nearby pines, but the afternoon lit our faces with warmth and life.
We shared a laugh at the expense of the other guys when they emerged from the school building and scampered down the street, deliberately avoiding looking at us.

David raised his eyebrow. "Not feeling sympathy for your friends, Gordon?"

"I don’t know anymore. I've been hanging out with those guys for as long as I can remember. But I never had the sense that they liked me for who I really was. I always had to put on a show that I was a bully like them. I had to hide my intelligence. That's why I threw the spelling bee last year."

"You did not!" gasped Rachael.

"I'm afraid I did, Rachael. I could have beaten you on 'exuberance.'"

"I don't believe you!" She shook her head, mouth agape.

I smiled and shrugged. "I'll just have to beat you this year and then you'll know it was true."

David smiled. "Well, I have to go. My folks worry when I don't return home on time, since we're still new to the neighborhood."

"See you tomorrow, man," I said.

"Bye, David!" said Rachael.

She and I sat on the park bench and watched David depart, and I was struck with the sense of how much more David seemed to belong now than when I first saw him that Monday morning back in January. But was it David that belonged, or was I finally realizing that I belonged with David and Rachael? I stood on the precipice of a significant step -- from a big eighth-grade fish in the small pond of Elkdale Primary School to a high-school freshman in the fall at either Waukegan High or Lakeshore High, depending how the district drew the boundary lines this year that assigned people to one school or the other. I would be moving forth from all I held familiar and had mastered -- I desired no further social upheaval in addition to that. All of this was more than I was ready to contemplate, so I just enjoyed the cool breeze and the bright afternoon.

Rachael sat a little closer to me than I could remember her sitting before. “You know, Gordon, David told me what you did this morning.”

I was confused. “What do you mean?” I answered.

“You had a chance to join in the mob and attack David, but instead you turned away and let him go. Why did you do that?”

She brushed stray strands of hair out of her face, and I noticed for the first time that her face was less annoying and nerdy than I remembered it. In fact, there was a certain something about it – something I tried to grasp, but it slipped away.

“I don’t know,” I lied. The realization was still fresh in my mind; I didn't trust myself to discuss it just yet.

Rachael got up and slung her backpack across her shoulder.

"I think you do." And then, as quick as a flash, she leaned in and pecked my lips with the briefest of kisses – and I sat, stunned, living that instant for an eternity.

“Also, David said if you hadn’t let him go after that third wink, he was going to spit the pepper juice in your face. So it’s a lucky thing you figured it out on time. See you tomorrow, Gord-o!” smiled Rachael.

She turned and waved at me as she reached the gate and continued down the lane on her way home.

And then, I smiled.

The Darkest Hour

2007-07-27T05:35:00.002-07:00

[Edited post: I left this post mostly intact because of the significance of the event. I hope never to open such a letter again. My original post contained some bravado about appealing, but my petition was rejected and I decided that I would be better off ceasing my efforts at licensing for the time being (including the tremendous legal costs) and concentrating instead on doing better next time.]

Dear Mr. Bahr,

Following the formal hearing on July 20th, 2007, the Committee on Character and Fitness of the Supreme Court of Arizona carefully considered your file and the evidence that you provided. The Committee on Character and Fitness is recommending your admission be denied. etc... etc... what happens next. Sincerely, the Committee.

With that letter, I have been denied a license to practice law.

Dealing With This, Parts 1 Through 7

2007-05-22T05:47:00.003-07:00

[Deleted posts: This post and six more following after it originally dealt with the lead-up and aftermath of my being denied a law license by the Arizona State Bar. My perspective on these events has changed somewhat as time has progressed since then. I have left this post title and marker in place to show that I am not evading the reality of what happened, but I think that the substance of the posts is no longer productive.]

Arizona Bar Exam February 2007

2007-05-07T03:04:00.001-07:00

Dear Mr. Bahr,

There were a total of 377 applicants to the February 2007 Arizona bar examination with scores ranging from a low of 226.1 to a high of 501.6. The minimum passing score is 410 out of a total 600 possible points.

Total essay points (out of 72 possible) of 41 x 1.5
Converted to scaled score x 2 of 284.6
Plus MBE score of 129.2 = Total combined score of 413.8

Congratulations! You have achieved a passing score on the examination. However, you are not presently eligible for admission to the practice of law in Arizona because your character report is being reviewed by the Committee. The Committee on Character and Fitness will advise you, in writing, as soon as you are eligible for admission to the practice of law in Arizona.

(If you are one of those who got a questionnaire from the Supreme Court about me, please, pretty please, tell them I'm not a dirtbag. I thank you.)

Cinco de Mayo, here I come.

Smiling Time

2007-03-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

Yeah, Wednesday's mail was pretty good.

Mike & Steph's Wedding

2007-01-30T11:00:00.002-07:00

[Edited post: General cleanup.]

Saturday morning dawned clear and bright. No rain on this wedding, day, Alanis! I quickly donned the Must Uncomfortable Tuxedo Ever (tm) and jumped my ride to the church. Despite my worries, everything went off without a hitch. On our way out and down the aisle, I spotted a number of friends I wasn't even sure would have made it... Louis and Noriko, Eldon, Wade and Katie, and so on. Don't get me wrong, I was happy about everyone that made it, but some of these people I had not visited for months or years.

At the reception, once the bouquet toss, garter toss, and dollar dances got going, the party really picked up, even though were about an hour "ahead" of schedule, as it were. No problem with me, says I! At the announcement that the last three dances were on deck, the floor flooded with people. It was a strange party and went by so fast I was in a constant daze, but in the end it was all good!

Steph's hair was just incredible. You had to see it. And that was all her real hair, too, not some sort of extension. She had plenty for the stylist to utilize. This was the big payoff from Steph believing in me when I told her that women look best with very long hair. I concede that the women who chop their hair short may be enjoying some measure of convenience, but I maintain that it makes them look like they don't care about being beautiful. And if they look that way, what does that say about their husbands? It's not a universal rule, but where it applies, it really applies.

Steph's stepfather, Tom, stood in for her departed father and gave her away at the wedding. I could tell this meant a lot to both of them and I was glad to be a part of that. For Steph, it was the culmination of a lifetime of waiting for her turn to have that happen, and for Tom, who has sons but never had a daughter and for whom Steph was his only stepdaughter as well, it was one of those moments that dads hope they'll be lucky enough to enjoy.

My grandmother showed up wearing a seventy-five-year-old coat, the likes of which you just never see anymore... coupled with the rest of her similarly venerable ensemble, it was like having royalty at the wedding. A photograph just doesn't tell the story. You had to see her in person to understand the full effect. Plus, I'm pretty sure that coat was once a woodland animal of some sort.

Jay and Steve arrived in pimp threads the likes of which I imagine they might wear at the final table of a large televised poker tournament. Complete with ties matching the pocket handkerchief. I'm not sure which surprised me more: seeing them in full slick mode or seeing John wearing clothing that did not include khaki shorts.

Aaron was amazingly diligent about getting wedding greetings on camera from virtually everyone as he circulated about the room with my mini-DV in hand. One of my projects for later this year, once I've grabbed a new home computer which will likely be a Mac, is to combine this with the thousands of photos and the miniDV taken by some of the other attendees into a single wedding DVD to send to everyone who came to the event, with my compliments.

And that's the least I can do, considering how overwhelmingly generous everybody was. Stephanie and I were picking our jaws up off the floor upon opening all our gifts and cards... it was nothing short of amazing. We were stunned and humbled.

In the end, it was the kind of wedding we had hoped to have, with the kind of people we had hoped to share it with. Thank you all for being a part of it.

In the Bonfire's Afterglow

2007-01-29T13:57:00.001-07:00

Michael and Stephanie Bahr

wed 01-27-2007

Our deepest thanks to everyone who joined us, including many readers of this blog. More on this later as we rest and recuperate!

The Amazing 2007 Fiesta Bowl

2007-01-02T02:42:00.002-07:00

[Edited post: Phrasing and syntax.]

Local real-estate mogul Johnny the Lind came up with surprise Fiesta Bowl tickets at the eleventh hour. Little did either of us realize, even as late as the third quarter with Boise State holding an unexpected 28-10 lead over Oklahoma, that we were about to see the end of the best college football game ever. Yes, even better than the Cal-Stanford "The Band Is On The Field" miracle.

I wore my ASU colors and we sat among mostly Boise State faithful, punctuated in odd seats by a maroon-clad Sooner or two. As the second half dragged on, many of the Oklahoma fans gave up and began filing out. But then OU put together a quality drive, narrowed things to 28-17, and the game began to look like a contest.

OU torched their way down the field with under two minutes left to close to within 28-26, pending the two-point conversion. They miss it and that's game. Not once, not twice, not thrice, but FOUR times did the conversion play run, owing to penalties. At long last, they found their open man in the end zone, and Mr. Further Review in the media booth confirmed the play. This game, which had been a laugher one quarter earlier, was tied at 28.

The Broncos were not ones to go quietly into overtime, so they began to charge down the field with a minute on the clock. Unfortunately, an errant Bronco pass fell into the hands of an OU defender, who promptly returned it for a touchdown. The impossible was possible! OU led 35-28! The BSU crowd in our area was utterly deflated, defeat drawing down their blue-and-blaze-painted faces. The Sooners in the crowd began to grow so rowdy that the jumbotron played the public service announcement by Coach Stoops for them to celebrate responsibly and for God's sake don't rush the field, because we don't have enough cops to catch all of you.

But I implored the Mountain Westerners not to give up. I, who had boldly predicted right to their faces that OU would dismantle their weak-sauce WAC pretense of a team, had been won over to the Bronco Way after seeing how hard their boys played and how much they wanted it. I had entered the stadium as a disinterested third party; with ASU falling to Hawaii in a lesser bowl game, I had no dog in the day's hunt. But with less than a minute left in regulation, I stood up to be counted with Cinderella and her Dream. I cheered at top volume with the Outsiders, the Pariahs of the BCS, and they, too, began to believe.

The Broncos saw the clock ticking away, each play more critical than the last. All of a sudden, on a ridiculous hook-and-lateral play with seven seconds to go, Boise State tied the game with a touchdown! The stands burst forth in jubilation. It would be overtime after all. The game was, at that point, officially ridiculous.

Overtime was as strange as the game was incredible. OU scored a touchdown on one snap, striking the fear of God into the hearts of their adversaries with an Adrian Peterson romp that presages great things for that young man's NFL career. It took a fourth-down conversion and a direct halfback snap for Boise State to cling to the game, fingernails to cinder block, as the halfback threw complete for the touchdown to bring BSU to within one.

So, does BSU kick the point and go to overtime #2? If they do, they have to go first and they can't settle for a field goal. If they do, OU might well score again on one snap. After the game, the BSU coach said his guys were at the end of their ropes physically. BSU was perilously close to losing control of the outcome of the game by their own hands. Their coach made a brilliant call and their players believed in it. They were going for two. For the win. Or the loss. Boise State stood up to make their statement: Stop us now or that's it. And as we all know, the Football Gods reward courage and daring with good fortune.

The Statue-of-Liberty play which ensued was so absurd that I couldn't believe it was happening even as it was. As if in slow motion, I disbelieved that they had lined up heavy to the near hash, that the QB was slowrolling the ball on his leg, that he snuck it around the back to his halfback, that he perfectly mimed the forward pass to the right and the entire defense froze, and then that his halfback, Ian Johnson, ran untouched into the end zone. Amidst the insanity that erupted in the wake of his run and BSU's 43-42 victory, Mr. Johnson was emboldened enough to propose to the head cheerleader. As you might imagine, she succumbed to his manly countenance. I guess it beats kneeling with a ring at a chintzy restaurant.

So ended the best college football game there ever was. I can't wait to see the game that actually makes that last sentence obsolete!

Patterns in the Ivy

2006-01-17T00:45:00.002-07:00

[Edited post: Saved the main text and deleted some addenda.]

Monday marked the 14th anniversary of the passing of Stephanie's father. He died from the physical consequences of terminal cancer, and was survived by his wife and three children.

As has been Steph's habit in the years since, she visited his final resting place at a cemetery in Mesa. I accompanied her, since it seemed the sort of memorial visit at which my support would be meaningful.

I never knew the man, but I know his family now. I know beyond any doubt how much they cared about him and what kind of man he was. I can hear it in the timbre of their voices when they talk about him, and I can see it in the distance in their eyes as they picture him in their memories. If I knew nothing else about him, that would be enough.

2005 Epilogue

2005-12-30T17:51:00.002-07:00

[Edited post: Trimmed some chaff.]

This is my last post until Monday, so here's to 2005!

Since this is my narcissistic blog, I'm going to reflect on what has changed for me in these last twelve months.

Since January 2005...

I advanced from 1L to 2L in law school. Never a bad thing to accomplish. I have now completed 53 credits... pending that I pass everything currently ungraded. I did my first externship with a law firm. What's best is that I managed to do it all without going entirely broke.

I ended previous relationships and got together with Stephanie in early July. She lasted the remainder of the year and I see no reason to expect that things won't continue that way.

I came one hand away from playing in the World Series of Poker.

For some reason, I opened an eBay store in August, and it sufficed to keep me from needing any other employment in the months since then. The store has truly been a revelation, as so few job options are compatible with the grind of being a law student.

I did not make a single public musical performance in 2005! And this was after playing dozens of shows in 2004 as the SG lead vocalist and bassist. Law school just overwhelmed.

I did not finish any of the three novels I have been working on for the past several years. In fact, I scrapped one entirely because the concept had become dated, and started a new one that I won't finish in 2006. It really kills me not to be making progress on those because if I managed to get just one of them published, it could be a springboard to some very interesting possibilities. That, and I really like telling a good story for peoples' enjoyment. It ties into my musical performance, I suppose - I'm an entertainer in the purest sense, seeking the artisan-audience connection rather than the financial reward. Not that I'd mind some financial reward, of course. But if money is all I care about, I can earn that doing other things.

In November, I started a blog.

And with that, I will draw 2005 to a close. Health and prosperity to all.

Parents and the Passage of Time

2005-12-21T01:15:00.003-07:00

[Edited post: This was one of the few posts I made that, upon much later review, I thought stood up fairly well. I have edited out some less-relevant text, but the post remains essentially the same as when it was originally published.]

The ongoing revelation that our parents are no longer invincible and omniscient has been unsettling. It wasn't that nobody thought it would happen on a long enough timeline. It's just that with our technology-driven lives, later marriages, long lifespans, and seemingly eternal youth, the point in time at which their vincibility would manifest seemed like it was scheduled to happen in the indistinct and infinite future. You know, the eternal later, the blessed time in which chores get done, the drains get cleaned out, and we finally finish writing our novels.

It's cold comfort to imagine that a mere three generations ago, my parents would be dead by now, and I would have about fifteen years of remaining life expectancy, assuming peacetime conditions. I would also have spawn in their pre-teens, and if that isn't a thought which sends dread through your synapses, you haven't been paying attention.

Knowing that the moments I have with my folks have truly taken on the aspect of finiteness has made me wish I had done more with the thousands of days I squandered in my youth, engrossed in my distractions while my parents quietly looked on and watched me grasp and grow. I suppose there's nothing for it - my own children will no doubt treat me to a veritable concert of sighing and eye-rolling when I try to spend quality time with them. "Tide after tide will flow and recede, leaving life to go on as it was."

Review: "Knife of Dreams" by Robert Jordan

2005-11-15T01:46:00.004-07:00

[Edited post: I have been following the Wheel of Time fantasy series of books since the 5th or 6th installment back in the 1990s. When I purged most of my old blog posts, I decided that most of my review of Knife of Dreams could stay... mainly because it took another four years for the series to continue after the untimely death of Robert Jordan! I edited this post to remove some coarse verbiage and memetic mutation. This is a spoiler-free review.]

Four Steps to Writing Success:
1. Design a fantasy plot that's mostly cribbed from Lord of the Rings, Caligula, and Danielle Steel smut novels
2. Write it into a series of books that are 1000 pages each but have no plot advancement
3. ???
4. Profit!

I recently finished Knife of Dreams, the 11th installment of Robert Jordan's macroepic The Wheel of Time. After four books slogging through a tangled web of plot arcs, I am quite pleased to see Jordan right the ship and put things back on track for a conclusion.

Back in 2003, Book Ten, Crossroads of Twilight, was easily the worst in the series. And that's saying something; I'm looking at you, Book Eight, Path of Daggers. But there was effectively no plot advancement in book ten. No Forsaken died. No characters made major growth or accomplishments. No battles were decisively won or lost. A great many things were hung in the balance, as it were, but it was frolic without a payoff. Robert Jordan had created so many characters and plot threads it bordered on the pointless. No; it crossed that border soundly. Internet forumers demanded that Jordan kill off two characters before introducing any one newcomer. It took five chapters, five, for Elayne and Nynaeve to take a bath and get dressed. I am not making this up. Read it for yourself. (The sequence served as a narrative structure for Jordan to infodump status updates on several different plot subarcs via what were effectively talking heads.)

After the plotlessness of book eight, the savory morsels doled out all too infrequently in book nine, and the howling vacuum of book ten, I and everyone else I knew had our minds made up to give up on the series and read novels which, for all their flaws, actually feature plots with conclusions. Terry Goodkind and George R.R. Martin had come to our rescue, promising decisive action, conflict resolution, romantic consummation, and most importantly, death, death, death!!! Jordan had consigned the three protagonists, Rand, Mat, and Perrin, the characters about whom readers cared most, off into some forgotten corner of the story. The frustration was just too much.

Yet, for all our haughty claims of having dismissed Jordan's bloated magnum opus, we all came back, drawn like 18-year-old co-eds to the sloppy guitar stylings of Jack Johnson. It was like a train wreck: no matter how horrible, we just couldn't look away. And so I dove with fatalistic indifference into Book Eleven, the Knife of Dreams.

It's about time.

Halfway into the book I was ready to hurl it into a dumpster. Not only had nearly nothing taken place, but the few choice cutlets Jordan had chosen to dole out really weren't the ones which had an impact on the primary plotlines. Right when I was about to lose consciousness entirely, the entire world exploded. Long-forgotten plotlines roared to life. Magnificent battles erupted. Amazing deeds of derring-do were done. Romances flowered, hatred deepened, and revenge was exacted upon those who deserved it. Unknown friends were discovered among the cast; hidden enemies were revealed from the same. Loyalty was redeemed, and betrayal punished. Long-suffering heroes were exalted, while arrogant villains received far overdue comeuppance.

In short, while I wouldn't say Jordan made up for everything since Lord of Chaos, he at least is firmly back on track again, and if the final book [Ed: now being released as a trilogy of books, due to length] makes Tar'mon Gai'don anywhere near as cool as its opening salvoes are in the current book, there just might be hope for Robert Jordan and The Wheel of Time after all.

Jordan once quipped that he would be writing "until they nail my coffin shut." We can hope that it will be a long time yet to come before he is tested on that promise, because there is so very much story still left to tell. Will Rand ever halt his descent into madness? Will Aviendha accept her role as a Wise One in time to help Rand in the Last Battle? How will Cadsuane, Alivia, and Verin help Rand... or do the opposite? Will Egwene ever restore the White Tower? What will Mat do about the Seanchan after everything that happened with Tuon? Has Perrin truly thrown away his axe and picked up his hammer for good? Will Lan meet his destiny in battle? And what about the thousand other minor plots remaining?

Time will tell. In the meanwhile, Knife of Dreams is the best installment in the Wheel of Time series in years, and I suggest savoring it.

Opening the House of Exuberance

2005-11-03T19:51:00.002-07:00

[Deleted post]

This was my original first post on the blog. In the time since I posted it, I became more aware of my Asperger's syndrome tendencies and refined my writing habits to the point that I think most of the original post is best discarded from the ages.

The useful content from my first post was simply that I was a law student at ASU at the time, an on-again-off-again seller of trading cards, a poker player, and a musician.

Tourography: Sonogasm live at Cooperstown 2004-08-06

2004-08-06T23:22:00.004-07:00

I'll confine my commentary to after the tourography entry and media, because this was Sonogasm's best show and it is worth appreciating on its own, without any context as distraction. We were the second of three bands scheduled for the evening's entertainment following the "Pulse of Phoenix Arts Festival" and an Arizona Diamondbacks win over the Atlanta Braves by a score of four to two.

YouTube Link: Entire Show!
^The above link includes a "Track 0" of Ekosphere performing Evanescence's "Everybody's Fool" and a video of pre-show footage tacked on after our closer of "Working Man."

Band: Sonogasm
Date: 2004-08-06
Venue: Alice Cooperstown Restaurant
Location: Phoenix, AZ

Vocals, Bass: Mike Bahr
Guitars: Jeff Mink
Drums: Chuck Prime

Other act(s): Ekosphere, Feral

Setlist:
1. Shinespark
2. Blue Instant
3. Schism (Tool)
4. Luna
5. The Truth Will Set Me Free
6. After You Fell Asleep
7. The Safety Dance (Grim & Necro version) (Men Without Hats)
8. Winter Moon
9. 21 Months
10. Working Man (Rush)

At the time, this was the largest crowd for which I had ever performed. To put it simply, the crowd was awesome, the other bands were awesome, the sound was awesome, the venue took great care of us and was awesome, and everything was just... awesome.

The Super Friendz, Aaron, Mike, and Scott, had ditched Niki Kwik after her Ziggy's debacle in June and found a new frontwoman, Jenn Kujawski. The band renamed themselves Ekosphere and played an abbreviated set with two covers, an agonizing Letters to Cleo song and Evanescence's "Everybody's Fool." As it happened, I was there with camera in hand, and I documented that performance as well as Sonogasm's own show. (See link to entire show above.)

Can you believe this was Jenn's first ever performance? We were impressed. Feral played after us, and though they were a bit more of a thrash thing, they were tight and competent and we sure can't find fault with that.

Our performance? Despite some equipment issues, I'll take it as a finale and be thankful. Shinespark shone. Blue Instant was an instant classic. Schism was furious. Luna, played up-tempo, was the best we had ever played it. Truth was crisp. Asleep was okay, despite having aged poorly. The Necro Dance was great fun. Winter Moon came off brilliantly. We nailed 21 months. And finally, Working Man brought the house down and earned us a huge crowd response. We rode off into the sunset on that high note.

So why break up Sonogasm if things were so great?

In short, all our failures to execute and get along finally came to a head.

The problem with Sonogasm was that it was a unanimocracy. That meant we didn't do anything unless we all agreed to it. And that, in turn, meant that no single creative vision could push the band to be great, but any one of us could hold the band back by our personal or professional flaws.

Compositionally, I lacked focus. We started the band intending a classic metal sound with touches of prog, and our initial slate of songs was nicely aligned that way: Blue Instant, Truth, Luna, Winter Moon, and the experimental Unbinding. I then wrote modern metal (Threads), alt-grunge (After You Fell Asleep), and mosh rock (Crystal). The closest I ever returned to our focus was Shinespark, modern metal with a touch of prog. And it was about to get worse -- I was writing alt-rock and southern rock (Aurora and other unfinished pieces). No focus, no unified direction, no cohesion.

To make matters worse, Jeff and Chuck stopped writing music. Chuck's first piece, Smoking Gun, never made it out of the practice room. His second, Truth, was decent enough as a metal tune and had some authentic riffs. Unfortunately, it was nearly unsingable -- vocal composition was not Chuck's strength. Jeff wrote two songs, Luna and I Love You for Your Dirty Mind. The latter seemed fun, but Jeff wasn't happy with it and he scrapped it. Luna was technically superior, and in fact proggier than anything else we ever did, but it was so damned depressing I wanted to open a vein whenever I played it. I'm sorry, Jeff -- your song is good, but I'm just not emo enough to embrace it.

Let it not be said that I was unwilling to savage my own work when it was deserved. From among only the songs we actually performed live, I wrote:

Blue Instant -- Good, but could have used more structural development. I can't come down too hard on this one because it became a crowd favorite, so obviously I did something right.
Winter Moon -- Too heavily derivative of the Maridia theme, poor chord progressions. Unsingable lyrics in places. Horrible key transitions.
Unbinding -- Too inchoate. Scrapped, with some parts used years later in The Oblivion Path.
Threads -- Too derivative. Stupid lyrics. Ridiculous overall.
After You Fell Asleep -- Structure was finally getting somewhere, but insipid, whiny lyrics. Good theme, but poor execution. People who dug the song got tired of it, and it aged poorly.
Crystal -- Just terrible overall, never really coalesced, stupid theme, stupid lyrics, unsingable lyrics, banal melodies, tempo issues.
Shinespark -- This one I am happy with, and even still I'd like to develop a counterpoint theme and restructure the song to take advantage of the depth.

Did I miss any? Oh, but that's not all.

My vocals were just not very good. In 2010, when I was working with Aaron and Johan on Premium Blend, Johan said my vocals sounded good, better than before, but still had plenty of room for improvement. This was after six years of pretty regular singing on my part since he had last heard me perform as part of Sonogasm. So, essentially, Sonogasm featured my vocals roughly six years before they became good. I had years of experience on the bass, and could play close to perfectly when not singing, but when I sang, my basslines got sloppy. So there was a real skill issue there.

I won't criticize my bandmates too much here because they know their flaws well enough and this isn't a bashing session. Suffice it to say from my own perspective that Jeff was talented but woefully undisciplined, while Chuck was experienced but struggled with timing.

There were personality clashes on top of that. Chuck and Jeff didn't get along that well, and playing the peacemaker was starting to wear on my last nerve. The epilogue to that is that even though I have known Jeff since kindergarten and only met Chuck as we began Sonogasm, Jeff and I ended up parting ways to some extent, while I am still in touch with Chuck. Ah, unpredictable life.

There were other problems, but they just piled on. We had no truck or van, just three cars, so bringing our gear to shows was always troublesome. I lacked quality instruments and equipment, though Chuck and Jeff did okay in that regard. Chuck was dealing with intermittent employment, while I was staring the approach of law school right in the face. In the end, something had to give. And that something was our band.

Wow! If you made it reading this far into my narcissistic postmortem of the Sonogasm project, I am genuinely impressed. I hope that this recounting of my experiences helps you in your own projects, whether musical or otherwise.

Tourography: Sonogasm live at The Sets 2004-07-02

2004-07-02T23:07:00.001-07:00

We were excited about this show because The Sets was a newly renovated venue with a high capacity and supposedly strong attendance. It had been built out of the former Pink-E's Pool Hall on Southern and Mill in Tempe, and while the billiards room was packed as always, we discovered to our horror that the music hall was a ghost town. And then we discovered why. They were charging seven bucks a head to get in.

That may not sound like much to anyone reading now (I am typing this in 2010) but back then, our audiences were accustomed to getting into shows for a nominal cover charge or often no charge at all. Covers of two drinks, $3 up front, or even $5 if it was a Saturday night would fly, but $7 was over the threshold. We called our friends and told them to skip it. We used our guest-list slot so that Justin could run the camera. I am not kidding. This show was performed in front of no audience whatsoever.

Well, a band that has that experience can either shrivel up and die or be professional and play anyway. The soundman kept busting in between songs and shortening our set, but we still managed to push eight songs through their PA system before we were cut off. The venue might not have lived up to their end of the bargain, but we damned well delivered ours.

[YouTube video clip to be added]

Band: Sonogasm
Date: 2004-07-02
Venue: The Sets
Location: Tempe, AZ

Vocals, Bass: Mike Bahr
Guitars: Jeff Mink
Drums: Chuck Prime

Other act(s): A whole slew of 'em, just as audience-less as we were

Setlist:
1. After You Fell Asleep
2. Threads
3. The Safety Dance (Grim & Necro version) (Men Without Hats)
4. 21 Months
5. Working Man (Rush)
6. Schism (Tool)
7. Shinespark
8. Blue Instant

We were sandbagging Working Man until the closing show in August, but with the soundman busting our chops and our general frustration with the situation, we were like "The hell with it, we're playing Rush! Let's make this the best show nobody saw!" Our cameraman, stalwart Justin, was certainly surprised and pleased, being the Rush fanatic he is.

We had planned this as a big breakout show in front of what we were told was going to be a huge crowd. Our original planned setlist had about four more songs on it -- we would have played Truth, Luna, and Crystal, and we were planning to bring back Winter Moon for kicks -- and we would have held off on Working Man. (As circumstances would have it, 100% of the originals we played at this show were written by me.) Instead, we ended up giving Winter Moon its nostalgia slot at our next and final show.

Frustrations ran high after this show. The band was basically done. I knew I had law school on the horizon. Jeff and Chuck weren't getting along and I was tired of being the voice of moderation. We had functional problems. We went in figuring that if things went really well, that would cure a lot of what ailed us. Instead, it was a disaster. And that set the stage for what wound up being Sonogasm's best show , hands down, just five weeks later in downtown Phoenix...

Tourography: Sonogasm live at Priceless Inn 2004-06-25

2004-06-25T23:00:00.002-07:00

It was back to Boston's/Priceless Inn for a stealth show. I was getting over a cold and we had two shows left booked before the band was going to disintegrate due to general frustration, so I didn't even document this one. No video or audio, I'm sorry to report. Which was a shame, because we actually got a decent turnout for this one... the end-of-the-month clip was working out pretty well, and we didn't even really recognize it at the time.

[YouTube video clip to be added]

Band: Sonogasm
Date: 2004-06-25
Venue: Priceless Inn
Location: Tempe, AZ

Vocals, Bass: Mike Bahr
Guitars: Jeff Mink
Drums: Chuck Prime

Other act(s): Ashes of Eden, Slip Mickey

Setlist:
1. Shinespark
2. The Truth Will Set Me Free
3. Schism (Tool)
4. Luna
5. Crystal
6. After You Fell Asleep
7. 21 Months
8. The Safety Dance (Grim & Necro version) (Men Without Hats)
9. Threads

What we were thinking closing the set with Threads, I have no idea. This was just a strange, frustrating show, if memory serves... broken strings, no Blue Instant, time and staging issues... urgh. Worst of all, we had some peeps show up and we didn't play as well for them as I would have liked. The band's internal frustration might have been coloring my perception of the show, though. I'll confine that discussion to the tourography entry for the Cooperstown show in August.