May | 2013 | The Electron Pencil

05/31/2013

Your Daily Hot Air

I Am The Lord, Thy God

Writing fiction is fun. It’s heady, too, inasmuch as I, the author, get to play god.

[And, to be quite frank, I think I do a better job at being god than god, whom most people refer to as God but I refuse to.]

An Amateur

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I’ve been god for a while now, creating a fictional world inhabited by the Dudek family on the Northwest Side of the city of Chicago in the the late 1960s and early ’70s. My serial e-novel, “Black Comedy,” is a mix of made-up stories framed within actual historical events. Some characters are real, Mayor Richard J. Daley, for instance, and Abbie Hoffman. Others are thinly veiled stand-ins for real people — Cook County State’s Attorney Eddie Halloran comes to mind.

The tale is also a way for me to make sense of a lot of terribly confusing events and relationships I experienced or witnessed and read about those four decades ago. I was just entering my teens back then. The world and my city, for all intents and purposes, were going crazy. My family was, too, and I delve into that bedlam as well.

All in all, writing “Black Comedy” is cheaper and more satisfying than weekly or even twice-weekly sessions with a shrink. Believe me, I’ve gone that route and, yes, progress was made, breakthroughs occurred, and tears — many, many tears — shed. But whatever mistaken perceptions I’ve carried in my heart all these years and then commit to electrons on an LCD screen are by no means as potentially catastrophic as those boners committed by skull jockeys. For instance, I went to one shrink some 20 years ago who, within a scant few minutes of meeting me, said, “Oh, you were sexually abused as a child, no doubt about it.”

It’s Obvious

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Eek. For the next few years I viewed my parents and older sibs through narrowed eyes until I finally came to the conclusion that I didn’t remember ever being sexually abused.

So, if I’m wrong about Eddie Halloran being a brawling drunkard, no one’s any the worse for wear because Eddie Halloran never existed except in my mind. But, trust me, Eddie Halloran was a brawling drunkard.

Anyway, I came upon a neat quote from New York Times book reviewer Bill Scheft, who was parsing Davy Rothbart’s My Heart Is an Idiot last fall. Scheft’s line can be used to describe what I do in “Black Comedy” quite nicely, thank you.

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He wrote of Rothbart’s genre, which some are having a hard time distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction:

It should be called something else, other than non-fiction. “Re-enactmention,” perhaps. Wherein a predominantly true story is made more complicated in the service of art.

Yep, that’s “Black Comedy,” except for the part about it being predominantly true. BC is predominantly false, a conceit, a fairy tale. But it’s all true as far as I’m concerned. Pretty much like all our memories.

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It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Lunatic Fringe

Maybe I, along with the rest of us, should just ignore the mentally ill.

No, I don’t mean those poor souls who roam our streets homeless and muttering to themselves. Which is what we’re doing already anyway. Ignoring them, that is, unless they get too pushy in asking us for spare change and then, all of a sudden, we pound our fists and demand something be done.

I’m talking about right wing talk radio hosts.

I know, I know, it’s like complaining that toddlers refuse to use the toilet facilities and shower and dress themselves everyday, the selfish little imps. I mean, whaddya expect from those who lack the mental capacity to do anything other than what they do?

Still, I ask you, how can I ignore this [via Wonkette] about some survivors of the Washington state bridge collapse last week:

Where this thing dropped seemed to me not to be very far, I mean easy to get over to the banks where you can get onto dry land. Some of them waited in their cars for an hour for help to arrive…. What has happened in our entire evolution of the past 30 years that we’ve gone from guys who were standing on the street jumping into ice water to save a woman and here we have people who are 25 feet from shore, if they weren’t injured, couldn’t make that swim or ten people couldn’t create a human chain. Or it took an hour to get some kind of boat.

The host, a man named Tony Katz who is syndicated on the All Patriots Media Network, had been spewing chunks about how pussified the American male is these days because people whose cars fell into the the Skagit River when the Interstate 5 bridge collapsed, did the sissy-girl thing and — ugh! — waited for help to arrive.

Honestly, is that where the right wing fringe is now?

You know, like JFK should have just picked up the pieces of his skull and brain and held them in place on his head while he walked to Parkland Hospital instead of just dying, the liberal queer.

Walk It Off, You Girl

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Natch, those who found themselves plopped into a chilly river must be the gonad-less progeny of the Barack-ification of this holy land.

Can’t these people just stick with phony scandal-mongering anymore?

I wonder, reader, can you find the iron will within to ignore these deep thinkers? I don’t know if I can.

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05/30/2013

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Fiction

Episode 30: Theater

BLACK COMEDY

By Michael G. Glab

© 2013

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— Thirty —

Neither Anna nor Anthony will have control over any of the things that will happen to their respective bodies over the next 72 hours, from Sunday evening through late Wednesday night.

Their bodies are mere props in performances whose casts include, in the case of Anthony, several thousand screaming, shrieking, taunting, surging, swinging, weeping, wretching, sobbing, aching, throbbing actors whose every tic, spasm, and reflexive paroxysm is being memorized, recorded, noted, and taped as it happens, will be the subject of a federal investigation, and will change the course of American political history.

Anna’s drama, equally emotive, wrenching, and with enough physical pain to nicely balance that experienced by Anthony and his stage-mates, is a one woman show. Whereas Anthony’s catharsis develops before the glaring lights of television videotape cameras, with the collective creative talents of countless diarists, lyricists, novelists, poets, historians, liars and other arbiters of live, unscripted spectacle interpreting the performance, Anna’s takes place in the utter privacy of her living room, her bathroom, her kitchen, the back seat of Al Dudek’s 1968 Buick Electra 225, and the delivery room of St. Anne’s hospital.

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Anthony and his co-actors are improvising, playing parts never before attempted on a stage defined by new technology, a war that is not a war, the vagaries of politics, culture, counter-culture, and the relationships between groups of humans with differently-hued skin and whose memberships are defined largely by their relative proximity to the ends of their lives. Anna’s part has been played billions of times before under the proscenium of human history. Nevertheless, she’d never attempted it before and so is also treading in uncharted territory.

Both productions, by the way, will play out under the aegis of Melpomene, the muse of Tragedy. The theme: loss. The denouement for Anthony will come this November, for Anna a few years after that.

Comedy’s Thalia is taking the week off.

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Sunday evening. Hundreds of freaks, pacifists, rebels, radicals, and hangers-on wait in the darkness of Lincoln Park, hard by the shore of Lake Michigan to the east, gazed upon by the curious gentry through their luxury highrise windows to the south, hemmed in by hundreds of crimson-eared, blue-helmeted Chicago policemen to the north and the west.

One woman sits on her sofa and feels the joints of her body seem to want to come apart, the result of a flood of the hormone relaxin, released by the corpus luteum of her ovary for the purpose of softening the cartilage holding her hips together so that she might more easily pass an infant’s head through her pelvic inlet. Anna Claudia Pontone [nee Dudek] feels like the rubber-limbed Ray Bolger, flipping and flopping down the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz.

Except the Scarecrow only ever had to fret about the absence of a brain, not the passage of a watermelon-sized creature through the cervix, pelvis, and vaginal canal he did not possess. Anna does possess those structures and they will be strained beyond her belief soon, very soon.

Her body is ready, no matter that she is not.

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Anna’s got her TV and she’s got eyes. She knows things are going on in the world even though now and again it feels as if all the world is nothing more than the medicine ball protruding from her abdomen.

She knows, for instance, that the Vietnam War this month has become the longest in American history. She knows Richard Nixon has been nominated by the Republicans to be their nominee for president. She knows Paris is only now getting back to normal after tens of thousands of French university students have battled police on the streets. She knows Russian tanks right now are rolling through the streets of Prague. She knows that the Chicago police have shot and killed a South Dakota Sioux teenager in town early for the protests.

Paris, 1968

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Here’s what she doesn’t know: in a couple of little straw hut villages in South Vietnam called My Lai and My Khe, U.S. Army soldiers have burned down every single structure and for good measure, they’ve lined up all the unlucky villagers who hadn’t run away before the troops came in, shot them all in the head, good and Nazi-style, and let their lifeless bodies tumble into mass graves. She doesn’t know that some five hundred people have in this way been murdered but not before many of them were gang raped, tortured, and mutilated. She doesn’t know that many of the bodies had the words “C Company” carved into their chests. She wouldn’t know that one of those American soldiers would later tell investigators, “I would say that most people in our company didn’t consider the Vietnamese human.” She wouldn’t learn about any of these things at least until November.

She also doesn’t know that the Army would stand on its head to cover up the massacre, that facts would be ignored, that the number of women and teenagers and little children killed would be falsified, that the investigation into it would be tightly controlled. She wouldn’t know that The Man has other things, more important things, to investigate. She wouldn’t know for years that J. Edgar Hoover thinks it of utmost importance to run a secret program to spy on, sabotage, and plant agents provocateurs in anti-war groups and civil rights organizations. Had she known any of this she would have felt even less optimistic than she did already about bringing this baby into this world.

As it is, Anna often rubs her bulging belly and feels progressively worse about the future. “I hate this place,” Anna says time and again. At these times, she wishes the little living person could stay safe inside her forever. Then again, on other occasions, she rubs her belly and whispers, “You’re gonna be beautiful. You’re gonna change the world.” At these times, she wishes her beautiful little world-changer would decide to emerge at this very moment, especially when her back throbs and her bladder can hardly hold a teaspoon of water.

Anna is now a war widow. Anthony hasn’t been home since since Monday, almost a week ago. She can use a little help around the house. The vacuuming hasn’t been done in weeks. No one’s scrubbed the bathtub and toilet since July. She gets to the pile of dishes in the sink every two or three days. Thank goodness for Daddy and his secret back alley visits. He brings salamis and cheeses, bread and tomatoes, along with his customary spare tens and twenties. Not that she has anyplace to spend the cash; Anna hasn’t left the house in fourteen days. She’s going to feel like an ass when she tells Daddy this tonight: she’s running out of toilet paper. Guaranteed, Daddy’s going to say for the dozenth time, “Where the hell is Anth?” The truth is, Anna couldn’t care less where he is, only that he’s not here..

The Smothers Brothers is going to start in a few minutes. That’s good, Anna thinks as she points the clicker at the Admiral and switches it to Channel 2. I need to laugh. She wants to see Pat Paulsen. Can you believe it? He’s running for president and he might be serious! It’s gonna feel good to laugh. Anna picks up a months-old TV Guide and fans herself with it. It’s already 9:05. The show has started. I hope, Anna thinks, I haven’t missed Pat Paulsen.

But what’s this? Cronkite? What’s he doing on now? Oh shit, don’t tell me it’s more bad news.

No, it’s only CBS’s pre-convention coverage. Blah, blah, blah, delegates, marchers, McCarthy, McGovern, Hubert Humphrey — Aw shit, it’s hot. Anna fans herself more vigorously with the old TV Guide, the exertion only making her feel more sweaty. Damn, damn, damn, come baby! Come out now! Let’s go!

Cronkite says some live footage is just coming in from this afternoon’s events at Grant Park, across Michigan Avenue from the Conrad Hilton. The delegates are staying at the Hilton. The MOBE staged a Meet the Delegates march, those rascals. And — wouldn’t you know it? — some of the delegates indeed did come down from their hotel rooms to mingle with the thousand or so protesters. Anna scans the screen carefully — There! Isn’t that Anthony? I think so…, no. No, it isn’t.

Practicing Self-Defense Moves In Lincoln Park

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Wait, there’s more film from Lincoln Park, taken later in the afternoon. Five thousand protesters there — That should make Anthony happy. The police blocked a flatbed truck from coming into the park. Apparently it was going to be used as a stage for the speakers and the music. There was a fight. The cops started swinging their billy clubs. Lots of blood. Oh God! Is that Anthony? No, it isn’t. Good…, I mean, I’m sorry for the person with the gash in his forehead, but I’d hate for it to be Anthony.

Anna clicks the TV off for a moment. She needs a break from it because she found herself thinking she’d rather club Anthony on the head than have some fat cop do it. At least she has a valid reason.

Now she clicks the Admiral back on. Cronkite says there’s hundreds of protesters in the park, just north of the St. Gaudens’ Lincoln statue where she and Anthony first made out a million years ago, last September. More film. The cops are lined up, shoulder to shoulder, their billy clubs at the ready. Wait, is that that jerk cop, Sal, from down the block? Yes! I think it is!

Cronkite says the cops have announced that the park must be cleared out by eleven. Behind the cops’ advance skirmish line is a row of them holding shotguns and tear gas launchers. Then there are squad cars with barbed-wire riot cages affixed to their front ends. And finally, the meat wagons. Please, please, just leave. Come home. They’ve got shotguns, you fool!

The cops look antsy. The protesters are huddled together in a clearing, a row of trees and Lake Shore Drive behind them, a fat blue line in front. Anna begins to cry. It’s too dark now for her to make out individual faces among the crowd. But she knows Anthony is there.

To be continued

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All fictional characters, descriptions, and situations are the property of the author.

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05/29/2013

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The Pencil Today

Your Daily Hot Air

Bye Bye, Bachmann

So, Michele Bachmann is quitting the House of Representatives after her current term expires in January, 2015.

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Which is a shame because now who are we going to gasp about and wring our hands over when we read the political news section of the Daily Screamer? Oh wait, there still are plenty of neo-Right hatters mad enough to make the sane among us feel smug and superior for the next few years. For instance, little Rickey Santorum still prowls the land sans straightjacket.

None of them is quite like Michele Bachmann, though. In fact, Bachmann is the poster chick for the delusional world the Tea Party-ists and their fellow basket-weavers inhabit.

Starting with her personal life, Bachmann illustrates as no one before or since the propensity of that certain segment of the pop. that longs for good old days that never existed and who, when confronted with facts and figgers, simply says Who needs facts and figgers?

She’s married, after all to a mincing, prancing, Jello mold of a man who chooses to spend much of his life in the company of gay men for the purported purpose of “transforming” them into rugged coxswains who become instantly tumescent over the latest Victoria’s Secret catalog. Marcus Bachmann is about as straight as the character John Belushi played in the early days of SNL, you know, the seaman who brought the young boy to his cabin to demonstrate to him the joys of being a manly man?

If Michele Bachmann believes that her hubby dreams of seeing her naked every night, she’ll believe anything. Death panels, for example.

Lovebirds

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Even more than Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann is the comic relief of the hijacked Republican party. And while her platform and philosophies and miscellaneous public utterances initially scare the bejesus out of anyone with a shred of psychological stability, it’s comforting to realize that the vast majority of people — even in this madcap holy land — recognize her as a circus clown.

Let’s take a look at some of the most whacked-out pronouncements, positions, and opinions Bachmann has gifted us with during her four terms as Congressbeing from Minnesota’s Sixth District:

◗ Alzheimers could be cured within 10 years if it weren’t for “overzealous regulators, excessive taxation and greedy litigators.”

◗ The human papilloma virus vaccine causes mental retardation

◗ 9/11 and the Banghazi consulate attack were acts of “judgment” on America, courtesy of god

◗ “[I]f you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. Personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.”

◗ Democratic presidents seem to be somehow responsible for various flu outbreaks

◗ Planned Parenthood is the “LensCrafters of big abortion.”

◗ The Affordable health Care Act must be repealed “before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens.”

◗ God has been throwing earthquakes and hurricanes at the USA because government spending is too high

◗ Glenn Beck could solve the national debt problem

◗ “Be submissive wives; you are to be submissive to your husbands.”

◗ “The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It’s all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.”

◗ Terry Schiavo “was healthy… she was not terminally ill.”

◗ Teachers soon may be able to tell their students that the man who wrote the music for “The Lion KIng” was gay and that people who are gay are better at what they do than straight people

◗ “Does the federal government really need to know our phone numbers?”

◗ The greenhouse effect is a hoax because “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is harmful.”

◗ Gay marriage “is probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years.”

◗ “I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service. And the real concern is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward….”

◗ The minimum wage causes all American unemployment

◗ “We’re running out of rich people in this country.”

◗ The Obama Administration is “turning our country into a nation of slaves.”

◗ “We now have a total gangster government.”

◗ Musician Melissa Etheridge may have contracted breast cancer because she is a lesbian

◗ The Founding fathers worked “tirelessly” to end slavery

◗ “I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us having a revolution every now and then is a good thing.”

◗ “… [I]f gay marriage goes through…, K-12 little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal, natural and perhaps they should try it.”

◗ She spied on a gay rights rally by hiding behind some bushes in 2005

BTW: Bachmann sits on the House Intelligence Committee. So don’t tell me Washington pols don’t have a sense of humor.

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Oh, and here’s her most beautiful oral gaffe: When she announced that she was running for prez in 2011, she boasted that she was originally from Waterloo, Iowa, the birthplace of John Wayne. Oops. Waterloo, Iowa is actually the birthplace of noted serial killer (and, interestingly enough, another compulsively secret homosexual) John Wayne Gacy.

Yup, I’m gonna miss her.

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05/28/2013

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Fiction