Irrelevant Cheetah

When I was a child growing up in Slodovetskiwazaskatsia, my father had an unusual avocation. Not content with scratching a living from the arid earth that constitutes 87% of my homeland, he was always on the lookout for something different. He briefly made an attempt at selling real estate, but the concept of “flipping” property was lost on him, and my mother axed the idea the second time she had to help him set the house upright once again. “Jorgen,” he would say excitedly, smelling vaguely of artichokes and wumpus-breath, “there’s more to life than farming and picking up wumpus manure. There’s money to be made here, I just know it!”

Thus, he came up with the idea of wumpus-herding. I tried to explain to him that the reason nobody ever owned more than one wumpus was because the plural of the word looked really, really silly, but he refused to listen.

The conversation at the local Mill & Feed went something like this:

Dad: I’d like to buy some…

Clerk: Yes?

Dad: Some…

Clerk: Yes?

Dad: I need to buy more than one wumpus.

Clerk (hesitant): You mean…

Dad (almost screaming): Yes! I need to buy some wumpii!

The encounter just went downhill from there, and ended with my father being tied to a chair and dumped in the middle of the Wazaskatsian River. Of course, the Wazaskatsian’s average depth is about seven and a half inches, so it was more of a symbolic punishment than anything else. Once he managed to free himself, he politely returned the chair via the front window of the Mill & Feed and made haste to the supply store in the next village.  

It makes sense, when you think about it. If owning one wumpus is good, then owning more than one should be better. However, Slodovetskiwazaskatsians are notoriously picky when it comes to two things: food and plural possessives, and they feared that total anarchy would ensue the first time Dad tried to explain what all of the wumpus feed was for.  

Using a combination of clever disguises and a phony eBay account, my father finally managed to acquire five wumpii, including a breeding pair. Unfortunately, a month later we learned why wumpus-breeding is strictly controlled by the government in special soundproof buildings: The mating call of the male wumpus, we learned, has been likened to the sound of an elephant seal being anally violated by an oboe. Four days into the mating season, he was put on official notice by my mother that the wumpii were to vacate the premises post haste. After finding homes for two of them and releasing the others into the wild, he shame-facedly admitted to my mother that he had neglected the artichoke crop.

He told me later that he got used to sleeping in the barn after a week or two.

On the mental agenda today: The one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater.

This is what bugs me: Is it a people-eater that happens to be purple? Or is it some sort of monstrous beast that only eats purple people? Semantics, in this particular situation, could lead to the rise (or fall) of a species!

I was always under the impression that it was some sort of beast that only ate purple people, and I had a good, logical reason for believing this: OEOHFPPEs are extremely rare (at least, I’ve never seen one, despite several chemically-assisted attempts) and this could be accounted for by the fact that purple people are also extremely rare, and this scarcity of its natural prey could lead to a shortage in OEOHFPPEs. Call it a kink in the food chain, if you like.

Upon reading the field notes of the original OEOHFPPE sighting, I came across this line:

I said Mr. Purple People Eater what’s your line/He said eating purple people and it sure is fine

This tends to prove my earlier theory. Man, I love the scientific method. It also helps when the animal you are studying is capable of speech, and thus telling you its preferred diet, especially when the person taking the original field notes is horribly incomplete and inaccurate in his physical description of the creature. Mr. Sheb Wooley should have taken some lessons from Mr. Audubon, if you ask me.

I’ve been thinking a bit about this writer’s block I’ve been having, mainly because it’s annoying me pissing me off to no end. I’m tired of all of the half-baked ideas floating around my head and not knowing what to do with them. Some of them make great blog posts (see here, if you’ve forgotten) but they’re not much good for anything else. In fact, it seems blog posts are the only thing I can write lately.

Yesterday as I was driving home it finally hit me with all the subtlety of a brick wrapped in velvet: I don’t have any Plots. I can invent interesting characters, and I have some incredible concepts flowing freely, but what I don’t have is stories. What I don’t have is things to do with these incredibly awesome characters and settings and concepts. (You’ll just have to trust me that these concepts are so incredibly awesome that their awesomeness makes The Matrix and The DaVinci Code pale in comparison. Really.)

I know that stories must be character-driven, but only to a certain point. James Bond might be the coolest character in the Universe, but unless he’s starring in an awesome, globe-spanning plot involving terrorists, explosions and beautiful women, then he’s just going to the store for a box of condoms and some Cheez Whiz, isn’t he? Not the most compelling read. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that “every character must want something, even if it’s just a glass of water,” and none of my characters seem to be very needy. An admirable trait in a girlfriend, but not so much in a story character.

I also know that in order to make a story interesting, one of the easiest things to do is just start being horrid to your main character. Throw him into a pack of rabid hyenas, give him bird flu, make his girlfriend pregnant with someone else’s baby. However, when I start adding obstacles and drama, it just seems contrived somehow. It strikes me that this might mean that my characters are too one-dimensional, and thus I need better characters, but I don’t know. Which comes first? The plot or the characters?

I’d like to think I’m an intelligent fellow. I’d like to think that I’m not one of the dim bulbs in the box. Introspection is not foreign to me, after all, so when something is not working, especially in my creative pursuits, I’d prefer to believe that I can figure it out all by myself, even without the benefits of beer, should that prove necessary. But I’m having no luck here, so any writers that are reading this, please let me know: do you come up with the story first, or the people in it?

An aside: Thank you to all of you who offered your sympathies and well-wishings. It’s been difficult, but we’re getting through it slowly.

Warning: serious post ahead.

A close family member is in the final stages of lung cancer, and so posts may be sporadic for a time, as you can well imagine. Blogging is not high on the list of priorities at the moment.

That, however, is not my main point here, though it does have some bearing. Rather, consider this a personal ranting and raving against the tobacco companies. This is my blog, after all, and I reserve the right to get on a soap box every now and then.

I never thought I would jump on the anti-smoking bandwagon. I smoked for fifteen years, and finally managed to quit four years ago. It was incredibly stupid, but I take all of the blame for starting. I was the one who lit that first cigarette, and I was the one who kept smoking despite all of the evidence that it was killing me. Hopefully I quit before too much permanent damage was done. I always figured that if somebody smoked, that was their choice, and I wasn’t going to second-guess them.

Enter my father-in-law, stage left. He has smoked for over forty years. Even before he reached the final stages of cancer, he smoked at least half of a pack a day. To his credit, he tried to quit several times, but a forty-year habit is hard to quit. He was diagnosed with cancer last year, and has been steadily getting worse over the last month to the point that he is now bedridden and rarely coherent.

Up until the point he was physically incapable of getting up, he continued to smoke. Many times he would actually fall down during his smoking sessions (he only smoked outside) but an hour or two later he would make another attempt to go outside and smoke.

This is what bothers me: he was fully aware that the cigarettes were killing him, but he could not stop smoking them. And the tobacco companies still swear that cigarettes are non-addictive.

Even now, when he is unable to get up, and spends as much time hallucinating and dreaming as he does being aware, he makes “smoking” motions with his hands, and asks anyone nearby where the ashtray is. The damn things have that much of a hold on him. I don’t blame Big Tobacco for him starting to smoke, but I do blame them for his inability to quit. We all know that they add things to cigarettes to make them more addictive, and this is just another piece of evidence, if you ask me.

So no more ranting. I just think that I have had a slight paradigm shift. I am now more aware that if somebody smokes, they may be struggling like hell to give them up, but it’s a stacked deck, and that’s not fair.

And for what it’s worth, it makes me even more proud of my (and my wife’s) own successful effort to quit.

Her breath tickled the back of my neck, sending goose bumps down my spine. Ordinarily, a woman breathing on my neck drives me crazy, but in this case her determination to separate my head from the rest of me was detracting from the usual sensations. The sinking “oh-my-god-I’m-going-to-die” feeling in the pit of my stomach had failed to completely suppress the rising “I-wonder-if-I-brought-a-condom” feeling, however, leading to some unusual vibes making their way down to my nether regions.

As I stood there deep in introspection, examining the unusual combination of feelings I was experiencing, I felt something warm and wet drip onto my shoulder.

That was the last straw. I can stomach a lot of things, but vampire slobber is not one of them. I turned my head slightly in her direction, straining against her iron grip. “Look, either bite me and get it over with, or let me go, would ya? Don’t just stand there and drool on me.”

She answered me with an evil-sounding laugh. “Don’t rush me, Finn.”

Regular visitors to this blog may have noticed an appalling lack of updates recently. It seems wolf has been suffering from a horrible creative slump lately and is hard pressed to write anything worth reading. Some would argue that this has never stopped him from posting before, but I digress.

Not wanting to lose both of his devoted readers due to a lack of material, he has taken a cue from such online bastions of excellence as Ominous Comma and Mattress Police and asked me to write a guest post or three. Guest-posting, it seems, is all the rage lately.  

So who am I, you ask? Allow me to introduce myself. I am Jorgen the Wonder Burrito. ‘Tis a family name, but I shall not go further into detail here. Nay, my story requires a classier venue than some “blog” frequented by no less than two and no more than ten other denizens of the internet, also known as “netizens” among those in the know such as my esteemed self. I hope to publish my story at some point, but for the time being I remain shrouded in mystery and a tortilla.

I would like to say that I’m honored to be blogging here, but I’m afraid that would be a lie. However, I had some spare time, and wolf had $20 and some compromising pictures of me, a cantaloupe and Benito Mussolini, so here I am. I have nothing particularly exciting to write today – rather, I merely wanted to introduce myself and “set the stage,” if you will, for my further musings. Look for not only updates, but valuable updates, soon!

My boss said ‘yes’! I’m going to the North Slope!

Apparently there will be some training involved, and it’s impossible to get a flight on short notice, so look for some pictures and the story in late December.

I’m so psyched.

I emailed this to my boss today. I hope she says yes.

Jan,

Now that the backlog is gone and things should settle down a bit around here, I have a question for you: Would it be possible for me to make a visit to the North Slope? Just for a day or so?

No, there’s absolutely no professional reason for me to go up there, unless you count me wanting to see the tools I’ve been cursing for the past few months. No, it makes no business sense whatsoever, and my time would probably be better served learning MCNL edits and training ferrets to do the Macarena. But visiting the North Slope of Alaska (particularly the oilfields) is something that not many people in the world ever get to do, and I’d like to take my camera. Since I’m a writer, perhaps I could get an article out of it as well (minus any proprietary information, of course.)

I am aware that I would need an escort unless I take the training class. If there are no XXX* employees available for escort duty I would be willing to take that class - once again, not the most efficient use of XXX’s* dime, I know. However, I happen to know that XXX* has lots of dimes - far more than I do, as a matter of fact, and most of mine are earmarked for silly things like bills and whatnot.

I know, it’s a tall order, and if it’s totally impossible, I understand. But I wanted to ask. The worst that can happen is that you say no. (Actually, I suppose the worst that could happen is that you forward this email to one or more Big Cheeses in Houston and elsewhere, and you all have a big laugh, and then they tell you to get rid of “that damn dreamer who should be doing edits, not thinking about traveling and writing long emails.” But I don’t see that happening.)

Thanks for reading this, either way.

wolf

* This would be my company name, hidden here to protect the innocent. It has nothing to do with XXX movies. Pervs.