Red’s Book Reviews: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

This is the third Robert Langdon adventure offered by Brown. I’ve also read Angels & Demons, but by chance, have not read the most controversial of the bunch, “The Da Vinci Code.” Generally, I steer clear of the spy-conspiracy theory genre (Langdon is basically a less cool Indiana Jones), but this was a nice change of pace. Things to remember about the Langdon stories is that they almost always occur within a 24-hour window, so the action of the story is fast. That produces the page-turning style that works with the masses. I enjoy the mixing of history and myth in his stories, and he does enough research and tells enough truths to make you wonder if the conspiracy aspects that drive the stories are plausible. I did suspect the “Scooby-Doo” style reveal well before the end, but having a predictable end doesn’t necessarily make a story bad. If you’ve built to something and the reader catches on before you get there, it is still logical to follow it to that conclusion. If the story is told well, the lack of surprise isn’t necessarily bad. A lot of stories are ruined by writers trying to catch the reader off guard with the result being a nonsensical ending.

The thing I wanted to point out, since I am a fellow working on his writing, is the style. Brown is great at matching his writing style to the pace of the story. It doesn’t make sense to write a thousand page book for a quick-paced story. He delivers short chapter (2-3 pages) after short chapter. The paragraphs are generally short, and likewise so are the sentences. When he does stray from that style, it is usually to provide the dense background information of the places, people, and myths and so on. Those denser sections are fed a spoonful at a time, which makes them easier to digest.

If you are simply looking to be entertained then this is a good book to pick up.

Up Next: While I Was Gone by Sue Miller

Red’s Book Reviews: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

This story follows the recently paroled and recently widowed Shadow Moon, as he is recruited into the service of the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday, who turns out to be the American version of the Norse deity Odin. The charm of the book is the marriage of the mythological with the setting of modern America. With this combination, Gaiman is able to create a fresh American myth borrowing from the folktales of the world. The underlying theme being that these Gods never survive in America because those that believe in them are eventually assimilated into the melting pot culture. The fantastic elements complement the haunted main character. I am struggling to pinpoint how much I actually liked this book, but having done a few Google searches on Odin and other “Old World” Gods like Loki, I am starting to appreciate the richness of the tale more. If I had a stronger background in that area, I’d probably have been even more amused by the book.

Up next: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Music: We Are Not Alone

Note: I wrote the below based on the prompt in the photo. I intend to enter this. I also intended this to be a nonfiction piece, but this just sort of came out.

 

 

 

Eleanor flattened the wrinkles from her maroon skirt with her fingertips before crossing her right leg over her left. Her dark loafer dangled a bit off her heel, but she didn’t expose any more of her foot, dreading that one of the others would see the run in her flesh-toned stocking. She wished she’d dyed her hair before coming, the flecks of gray were overcoming the dark mane she fashioned into a neat bun.

“If you must know, I suppose, it’s the loneliness,” she said. “It’s everywhere. Everyone is lonely.”

Mr. Cory nodded in agreement across the circle. She felt a kinship with him more than any of the others.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Wealth, fame, it’s meaningless. We’re ghosts and nothing more.” He sipped from the Styrofoam cup, his eyes shifting about.

“I was married once,” Eleanor said. A collective groan spread around the group.

“Marriage! That’s how they get you,” Jack rose from the metal chair and paced around the gymnasium, his shoes tapping off the hardwood. He still carried himself like an athlete, but his stomach protruded too far past his belt for the illusion to fool even the most casual observer.

“Here we go,” Diane lifted her arms in exasperation. “It’s all my fault!” The woman was a beauty once with aspirations of stardom, but those dreams were gone. She wore a sweatshirt that might have once been pink, but somewhere along the way transformed to a shade that Crayola could dub Faded Glory.

“Please, sit down, Jack.” The Listener implored. He was a thin, bespectacled man with a bald spot in the back and a comb over in the front. Eleanor and the rest only knew him as the Listener, and when he beckoned them to come, they met, as if hearing their complaints somehow saved him.

“We all struggle with our identities,” Lola said. She never added much to the conversation, but always chimed in with pointed statements.

Jeremy snorted from his corner. The brooding boy always pulled a chair from the group, preferring to reside on the fringe. Eleanor couldn’t deny a sense of relief that he didn’t speak. Her focus shifted from the boy to the ceiling as one of the overhead lights flickered in and out. From the rafters hung banners declaring long ago glories. A state title in the cross country for one. Third place in some sort of band contest on another. She lost interest, competing was never her bag.

Each meeting was at a different location, although lately, the theme seemed to be dreary, almost haunted, locales. Last time, they met in an abandoned factory, the silent hulking machines rotting in isolation, and another time in a barn with the smell of chaff strong in the air, but it was empty save for the titter of raccoons somewhere in the dark and ominous hay hooks dangling from the ceiling. Long ago, the places were brighter, cheerier. Around a campfire near a crystal clear lake at sunset, for one. Oh, and the cabin overlooking the wildflower pasture had been splendid. The conversations were better then, and the characters in the group more upbeat. Not that Eleanor ever shook the weight of loneliness from her heart.

Jack dropped in his seat, his discontent wrapped up in his crossed arms, but life went on.

“I must confess something,” the Listener startled everyone by rising from his chair. He was noticeably stooped over, and by gosh, he had aged. Dark bags were evident under his eyes and standing produced a noticeable tremble. “I’ve listened to your stories for years. Heck, some of you I have listened to since I was a boy. I’ve imagined your lives beyond that provided in the snippets and lyrics, and in some ways, your lives have grown along with mine.”

He coughed. Looking around the cavernous gym.

“I played here in high school. Shooting baskets and so on. My how time passes. No matter, what I want to say is that your songs have enriched mine. During the good times, you were the background noise. During the lonely times, you were my companions. We’ve met all these times for fellowship because being together is the secret. Are you listening, Eleanor? We are not all alone.”

Eleanor brushed back a tear, wanting more than anything to believe that.

“I must confess though that our time grows short, and my days near their end.” A stunned gasp echoed in the gym. “I fear we shall not meet again, so I wanted to thank you for the music you’ve brought to my soul.”

“But what will happen to us?” Eleanor rose, her fists clenched.

“My Eleanor,” the Listener said, his arms at his side, his palms turned toward her, “it is my song that is ending. Yours will continue to sound out. So will Richard Cory’s. So will Jeremy’s. So will Jack and Diane’s and so on. As long as there are ears to hear, your songs will be heard.” Tears welled in his eyes. Eleanor remained taut, her fingers tightly tucked against her palms. How could he do this?

A tall woman wearing blue jeans and a halter top emerged from the shadows. She had straight blonde hair that dropped to her bare, tanned shoulders. Entering the circle, a spotlight focused on her from above and around the gym tiny lights whirled, as if a disco ball was spinning. The woman stopped before the Listener, her fingers brushed his chin, forcing his eyes to meet hers.

“May I have this dance?”

The Listener produced a handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and managed a smile.

“Thank you, Mary Jane, I would like that.”

And so they danced, the Listener with one hand in Mary Jane’s and the other at her waist. Gradually, he lowered his ear to her chest, listening to the beat of her heart, and closed his eyes.

Red’s Book Reviews: Christine by Stephen King

I spent the first half of this book trying to decide if I had read this book before. The conclusion I came to is that I had, in fact, not read this book, but read ones pretty similar to it by King. I haven’t taken the time, and don’t really have the inclination to look into this, but I’d say the first dozen years of King’s career were books with pretty similar pacing, plot devices, and writing style. It wasn’t until maybe the mid-80s that he started to expand his toolbox.

That’s not to say it wasn’t entertaining. A possessed car. A bit of sex. A bit of childhood friendship gone bad. A taste of 1950s culture. Overall, pretty standard stuff and easily accessible to the reader.

I didn’t read this as fast as I should have, basically because I’ve been overwhelmed by a side project I’ve been working on and have forfeited one night a week to a return to journalism.

I think what King does best is tug on the average American’s heart with nostalgia. In this one, it’s the snapshots of young friendships. We can all relate to hanging out with the best friend, watching the tube, and eating junk food. Heck, I spent part of the book with my mind jogging back in time. This use of nostalgia puts us in the characters shoes. We understand their experiences. It’s an effective writing device.

Overall, this is an easy read, has some fun parts, and includes a song quote at the beginning of each chapter, which I know Snake would love.  For me, I am through a stack of King books now, so it’ll be nice to check out some other writers.

Up next: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

NYC Midnight: Austin Shrugged

Note: Again, my writing time got condensed from two days to about two hours (couldn't pass up going to see Counting Crows/Matchbox 20). I didn't receive any points for the first story, which I expected. I think this story has less going on, making it fit the format better. Also, the Atlas Shrugged stuff was purely accidental. I wanted a name for the lizard, and I thought about going political (first thought, Newt Gingrich), but then decided that I just didn't want to go that direction. Then I turned to fiction, and John Galt came to mind first. Happier with this effort, but don't really feel it'll be good enough. Maybe next year. Oh, the setup: Genre - Romantic Comedy; Location - Pharmacy; Item - A lizard. Thanks for Reading.

Brief Synopsis: Austin’s perspective changes while helping a pharmacy customer find her lost lizard named John Galt.

Three soft tones sounded out over the store followed by Sheryl’s garbled voice announcing the lucky winner of a filled prescription. Austin clutched a bottle of shampoo from the box on his cart, studied it briefly, and placed it next to its brethren on the shelf. In five years, he’d stocked this shelf hundreds of times, long ago memorizing location, number of bottles that fit, and that the folks of Lincoln needed twenty-three choices to clean their hair. The secret Austin had discovered was that people picked either the cheapest or the most expensive products, leaving the rest to rot on the shelf for him to eventually clear.

His mind drifted to Amanda, two aisles over perusing magazines like Glamour and Vanity Fair while waiting for her name to be called. He’d sneak over after she left, guessing which articles she glanced at and thinking about what prescription she picked up every few weeks

“I’ve lost John Galt.”

Austin jumped, startled by the voice. Before him was a girl of maybe twenty wearing a sundress patterned with orange flowers and hummingbirds, and her lips were painted a bright red without seeming to be tacky despite her pale skin.

“Who is John Galt?”

“Ha, that’s the question, isn’t it?” she twisted a finger into the curls of her blonde hair that flowed down to her pointed, freckled shoulder blades.

“I’m sorry, did you lose someone?”

“Not a someone, a lizard.”

“Here? You lost a lizard here?”

“Well, he’s a chameleon, really, and yes. Like, we were looking over some lady products, and he was sitting on my shoulder, like always, and then he wasn’t there. Oops.”

The scenario spiraled from there, as Austin set out with her in tow to find John Galt before someone else discovered it and sent the store into a panic.

“Here, lizard.” Austin said. “Here, lizard.”

“He’s not a cat, and he answers to John Galt, anyways.”

“Sorry, I’ve never tracked a chameleon before.  How’d you come up with a name like that?”

“Oh, I didn’t. My grandfather named him before giving him to me. He teaches literature at the community college, and every semester he gets a new pet and has his class vote on the name based off one of the characters they’ve met during the semester. He also has a potbelly pig named Mr. Darcy and a kitten named Kurtz.”

Austin sped past the aisle where Amanda was standing in a denim jacket and jean shorts. He had a math class with Amanda at the same college where this girl’s grandfather taught, but he doubted Amanda knew he was alive.

“Why didn’t we check that aisle?”

“He’s not down there.”

The girl paused, studying the shelves and the girl of nearly the same age gazing at magazines.

“Do you know her or something, Austin?”

“Or something, and how do you know my name?”

She touched the tag on his chest and smiled.

“Some things you can just tell by looking. Have you asked her out?”

“No.” He stalked off, looking for the damn thing that brought this flighty girl into his life.

The girl followed, floating around the store like a balloon at the mercy of the breezes, always a few feet away from him.

“Where would you take her on a date?”

“Nowhere. I’ll never ask.” Austin wasn’t about to tell her that he fantasized about being locked in the store with Amanda. He’d layout a table cloth from the housewares aisle and arrange some candles from Aisle 4. Maybe he’d dig out some batteries and get lucky enough to tune in something romantic on one of the clock radios. Maybe a bottle of wine. Some cheese. All they sold in that department was individual slices wrapped in plastic or cheese whiz, but they’d make due, and in his mind, she’d find it all charming.

“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all,” the girl said.

“Look, all I am trying to do is find your lizard so I can get back to work.”

A scream ended their conversation. It was a short burst, which was better than the frantic yelping he had been worried about, and he hoped most of the customers didn’t hear it. Grabbing the girl’s hand, he followed the direction of the scream. His luck being what it was, he found the lizard staring down his crush from the shiny tile floor, which now also had periodicals scattered all around.

“That thing just crawled up on my shoulder,” Amanda shouted, backed up against the shelves opposite of the magazine rack.

“John Galt,” the girl exclaimed, rushing over and snatching the chameleon off the floor. The creature might have been stunned from the fall from Amanda’s shoulder because it made no attempt to flee, and the girl lifted it to her face. “If you saw Atlas, what would you tell him?” She whispered.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” Austin stuttered out to Amanda. “She lost her lizard, and…”

“And I’ll never shop here again. Lord, what else is crawling around here?”

The girl placed John Galt on her shoulder, turning back in their direction.

“Oh, I can’t thank you enough for helping me,” she closed the gap between them and wrapped her arms around her neck. “My hero.” Then she planted a kiss on his lips, pressing her bright red lips firmly against his. He was sure his face matched that color before she withdrew. Amanda’s jaw dropped open. “Thank you, Austin.”

The girl twirled away, then started to meander toward the exit.

“Wait!”

The girl paused, tilting her ear back to him.

“What’s your name?”

“Dagny.” She started walking again. He watched another moment before another question came to him.

“Who is John Galt?”

Dagny made a graceful pirouette and shrugged the shoulder with the lizard on it toward him.

“Why don’t I tell you about him on Saturday night?”

Red’s Book Reviews: Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor

I have to admit that I felt disengaged to the text while reading much of this. I am not sure what it was, but I found myself re-reading passages because I went glassy-eyed through a page or two. Part of the problem was the start. The first hundred pages or so are a historical account of the founding of the fictional Lake Wobegon. Not having the background from listening to his radio program (Prairie Home Companion), the history just didn’t grab my attention. The second half of the book was more entertaining, presenting short clips of various characters (including a fictional version of Keillor) generally reacting to the mundane nature of everyday events. I am usually a sucker for such homespun fun, and don’t mind shifting of the point of view (heck, I tend to write that way), but I struggled with it here at times. Mostly, I didn’t figure out why different sections were supposed to lock together, and suspect that they all don’t as much as I would like. Keillor’s humor also was just lost on me. Perhaps it’s better on the radio where the inflection of his voice can insinuate things not as easily picked up on in print. Overall, I can’t help but feeling disappointed. A Keillor short story appeared in an anthology I read awhile back, and it was the highlight of the anthology. I guess that sort of built up the expectations for me, and it didn’t deliver.

 

Up Next: Christine by Stephen King

Fiction War: Nothing was Forever

Note: This is the second of back-to-back weekends with flash fiction writing contests. This one I had three days to write a 1,000 word story with the prompt of "Seven Years." It's pretty open-ended on how that prompt is used. I am happier with how this story turned out, but unlike NYC Midnight contest where you compete in heats and there are multiple rounds, this one you compete against everyone with the Top 15 getting published.

Forever in the form of the night sky stretched out beyond the glass of the observatory’s ceiling, and if it weren’t for the persistent pounding, Simon would have snickered at that thought. Forever. Simon had spent his entire life proving such notions as forever silly. Some men dreamt of the horizon, but Simon grabbed his measuring tape and figured out how far away it was.

Of course, his DNA was pre-engineered for scientific pursuits, just as the wretches pounding on the exterior walls were each pre-designed for specific menial tasks. The DNA engineering program was an unqualified success of the International Senate. The program measured how many laborers were needed to mine, to farm, to clean, to lift, and so on, and bred exactly that many. The precision and efficiency was admirable, but the DNA program paled to Simon’s accomplishment. His work was going to save the earth. Not for everyone, hence the pounding, but for those that mattered.

“Why must they do that?” Margaret, his assistant, asked. She adjusted her spectacles, before returning her attention to her tablet’s glowing screen.

“The wretches are inconsequential, and I am sure they will lose interest before long.”

“Perhaps we should have activated the system from Atlantis as the senate suggested. We’d be safe from these simpletons under the water.”

Simon shot her an irritated glance. A scientist didn’t conceive the most ambitious endeavor in human history and then hide when it launched.

“Margaret, we are safe. Once the system is activated, it’s going to be hopelessly dark out there, and the stupid wretches will disperse in panic. Once I am satisfied everything is operational, we’ll take the transport to Atlantis.”

Stars dotted the expanse beyond the glass, and Simon thought of his grandfather, who once handed Simon a sparkler on a hot summer night. He said it was the date of a once special day, one where people had celebrated with fireworks. They didn’t have fireworks, but his grandfather had an old box of sparklers. They were primitive sources of enjoyment, but Simon cherished the symbolism of the blazing wand, whose life was short and quickly choked out when the flame reached the end of the fuse. Simon remembered signing his name in the dark ether with the sparkler and his disappointment when the letters faded into nothing. 

The sparklers had been Simon’s inspiration when he stood before the senate and proposed extinguishing the sun for a period of seven years. Seven years being the measured time for the Earth to expel the man-made toxins from the atmosphere, and seven years being the time Simon had calculated would rejuvenate a dying sun’s fuel to continue its vital role for another million years. Some of the senate had laughed at him. They weren’t laughing now. No, they worshipped him, and those that had laughed, just happened to not be on the list of citizens assigned to Atlantis.

“How long, Margaret?”

“Two minutes.”

Simon admired the moon, shining blue and bright. In two minutes, it would go dark. The light it reflected strangled by Simon’s revolutionary technology orbiting the sun some 92.96 million miles away. Once his system took over, it would also get very cold, but Simon countered that with his machines, which transferred power from the sun to machines near the Earth’s core.  That would heat the planet enough to keep it from completely dying.

Something huge appeared on the glass of the observatory’s ceiling. The being was silhouetted in the moonlight, and Margaret screamed, having never seen a Gargola, the race engineered with ginormous features and extraordinary strength to carry out grueling manual labor. This one had immense forearms connected to bulbous hands. One hand clutched a gnarled tool that resembled a giant pickaxe.

“Get down from there, you brute,” Simon shouted. He couldn’t fathom what possessed these wretches to protest so much. They were programed to accept dire fates – long, punishing days of labor. The gift of the approaching death was a mercy. “We’ve work to complete. Go on home.”

“WE LIVE!” The Gargola’s voice boomed. More wretches appeared on the glass above, many engineered with DNA from other species to make them useful in various scientific and economic ventures. Reacting to the Gargola’s pronouncement, they shouted and howled and hooted and squawked in approval. “WE LIVE!”

Did they not know who he was? Compared to their simple minds and rudimentary skill sets, he was a god. Hell, compared to anyone else to have graced this planet, he was a god. The power of the sun was in his hands.

“How long?”

“One minute,” Margaret said, her voice trailing off. She was edging ever closer to the door that led to the transport.

Wham! The Gargola slammed the ax into the glass, which rumbled like a starving belly before a feast.

“You idiots!” Simon yelled. He had conquered the International Senate and squashed all that opposed him. He had even silenced his partner, his one-time friend, who had questioned Simon’s methods and his conclusions. That had been a brutal business, a primal reaction on Simon’s part, but he could not have his calculations questioned. His system worked.

Time and time again, the Gargola brought the axe down until the glass cracked, and three whacks after that, it shattered. Margaret fainted as the wretches plummeted dozens of feet to the floor.

Everything went dark then, except for the screen of Margaret’s tablet still gripped in her hand, and a sudden chill settled over the room, the sort of chill that pierced through the skin and buried itself deep into the bones.

There was breathing and grunts and eyes that glowed red. This was ridiculous. Did they not understand? The sun was extinguished. Soon they would all die. What was the point they were trying to make?

“I am God!” Simon screamed into the void – the endless void, and he did snicker at that absurdity. Nothing was endless. Nothing was forever.

“WE LIVE!” The wretches replied before the slaughter.

NYC Midnight: The Good with the Bad

Note: This is the first round entry for NYC Midnight Flash Fiction contest. I had the weekend to write a 1,000 word fiction story. I was placed in Group 12: Genre - Fantasy. Location - A dam. Item - A wool blanket. After scoring on one of two stories last year (5 points), I set the goal to score on both this year, and hopefully well enough to advance. Sadly, time goblins assaulted me this weekend, and this story isn't what I hoped it would be. Instead it's poorly paced, awkwardly worded, and flawed in many minor and major ways. Unless the rest of the group failed to submit, wrote in some sort of personalized Esperanto, and/or simply didn't understand what they were signing up for, this one will be a big zero for me.

 

Brief Synopsis: When Henry turns on Nora, he dooms a new world to repeat the struggle between good and evil of the old world. The difference is that Nora is the Dragon.

 

The muzzle pressed against the back of her neck, sending goosebumps down her spine and across her limbs like falling dominos. Nora’s concentration had been on the knife with the golden hilt, so she mistook the sensation for a nervous reaction to the idea of cutting herself. When Henry spoke, she understood that he had his revolver drawn on her.
 

"I have to stop you, Dragon.”
 

“Story as old as time! A sneaky honkey crossing a well-meaning negro. Burn that cracker!” Her Nana’s voice shouted, dominating all the other voices muttering in her head. Nana had been a proper lady, but she had always reverted to her poor southern roots when angry. Nana died before the devastation.
 

 “What are you doing, man?” Her father’s voice bounced off the walls of the subterranean cavern hidden below the dam. Nora remained kneeling on the wool blanket before the pool.
 

“This isn’t the way,” the witch added.
 

“Hush. Nora, let’s get you away from that water. We can’t have your blood dripping into it. The witch was right. We were all drawn here for a reason. My destiny was to stop you. This restless wanderer will finally have his peace.”
 

Nora’s face reflected in the pool. Her thinness startled her almost as much as seeing her bald head. They shaved all their heads days earlier due to the lice. The reflection changed to the haggard guise of the old man from her dreams. Part of him was her now.
 

“Use the blanket!” The reflection said for only her ears.
 

Placing her feet on either side of the blanket, she shoved back into Henry as she pulled the blanket forward. Henry grunted and lost his balance as the blanket was jerked from under his feet. Diving forward into the pool, her splash coincided with a blast that made her ears ring. She would have sworn the pool was only inches deep, but she plummeted downward with no bottom apparent. Using the witch’s knife, she opened a wide gash in her palm. Blood swirled in the still pool, turning a fiery orange before her eyes. Her blood – the Dragon’s blood – would bring life back to the dying world, as the witch had proclaimed.
 

Her father’s hand clasped onto her arm, yanking her up. She emerged to chaos tinted the strange green from the glowing orbs the witch had produced earlier. A blinding white flash warned of another blast, and when the flash receded, Nora was greeted by the witch, who now had a third bleeding eye centered on her forehead. Nora made to scream, but flames burst out of her mouth instead of sound. The walls shuddered, exposed to heat and light like never before. Then Nora passed out.

***

She woke in her father’s arms before the ladder at the top of the stone stairway. The wood rungs led hundreds of feet up to a secret hatch in the dam’s interior.
 

“Where’s Henry?”
 

“Up ahead somewhere. I think you scared him.” Her father laughed, but she could tell she had scared him, too. “We have to get moving. Can you climb?"

She nodded, but the first rung she grabbed squished like a sponge and then disintegrated.
 

"It’s rotted. How can that be?”
 

“Time moves differently down here, and the magic is leaving. I can feel it.”

***

She didn’t know if minutes or hours passed before they reached the open hatch at the top of the ladder, but she was grateful for the glow from the emergency lights of the dam when they got there.

The old machines were buzzing and lights were beeping in foreboding rhythms. Before she could consider those implications, a bullet screamed by her ear, burying itself in the concrete feet away. She rolled away, rose to her knees, and prepared to spew forth a death spiral of flames, but her father’s hand clasped over her mouth.
 

“The walls can’t take another blast, honey. Besides, he’s on the move and out of bullets. I’ve been keeping count.”

They ran toward the metal staircase. As they climbed, they heard Henry singing from above.
 

“Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name. But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.”

"What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
 

“He thinks he’s the devil’s tool.”
 

She also noticed a humming growing persistently louder.
 

“What is that?”
 

“Water. A lot of it.”
 

“That’s crazy. We’re in a desert.”
 

“It’s a different world now.”
 

When they burst into the sunshine, her father’s suspicions were confirmed. Water had burst through the dam wall below, and on the opposite side, a great river was nearing the top of the wall.
 

"Hurry, it’s coming down!”
 

The dam walls buckled, groaning like an old giant trying to stand after sitting for a century. The dam collapsed in a horrific rush of water and power, as they reached the safety of the surrounding cliff.

***

The red sandstone that had dominated the canyon when they arrived was gone, buried beneath lush greenery.
 

“You did this.” Her father had tears in his eyes. “The Dragon’s blood brought life back to this world.”
 

“Look.” She pointed to the opposite bank. Henry, in his ragged black suit with a white shirt and thin black tie, stood with his hands in his pockets.
 

“Ah, well. This world will just be like the last.” Her father put his arm around her. “It has its good and bad. Henry is the bad, but he can’t defeat the Dragon. The Dragon is good”
 

She smiled, wanting to believe him. The witch had said as much when Nora accepted the gift, but she was starting to believe the witch hadn’t told them everything. The voices in her head, many of them saying terrible things, reached a crescendo. Henry waved before turning away and disappearing into the brush.
 

It was a new world. There was good. There was bad. And there was the Dragon.
 

“Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad,” she whispered.

 

 

Red’s Book Review: Me, the Mob, and the Music by Tommy James (with Martin Fitzpatrick)

This was a quick 220-page read, written pretty much chronologically starting with Tommy’s musical roots at about 10-years of age while living in Monroe, Wis. The allure for me, as I’ve written before, is that Tommy James and the Shondells were probably my first favorite band. Starting as early as pre-school, I’d put his greatest hits album on our Fischer Price turntable and listen to it while playing pretty much every day.

Considering that early interest, I have to admit to knowing little or nothing about Tommy James or any of the Shondells before reading this book, other than some vague memories of seeing him be one of the pitch men on one of those late-night Time Life album infomercials several years back during my journalism/drinking days.

This is an interesting look at the 60s music scene through the eyes of a guy that I guess probably fits on the second-tier of stars from that era. It’s hard for me to judge that because I do have such fond nostalgia for his music, and I sensed he might be overstating the success of his songs some in the book. He’s not on the level of the Beatles, Stones, or Beach Boys. He’s below that, but I am not sure where he fits in the lexicon of popular music. Maybe Snake could assess that better.

Because Tommy was instrumental in almost all parts of his career, you get a good peek into the business aspects of the music industry during that era, and also the technical aspects of making a record. Looming over the story is Roulette Record’s kingpin Morris Levy, who ran the label like a crime family because, well, it was a crime family. It’s an interesting relationship between Tommy and Morris. It’s almost father-son like in many aspects, just that the father is skimming money from the son to the tune of about $40 million over a five-year period and the father has a history of having people killed. Just an FYI, Morris and other members of his “family” became the inspiration for key characters in the Sopranos.

If you dig that musical era, I’d recommend this one. It’s filled with interesting behind-the-scenes stories, and it has a very easy-to-read style.  

Red’s Book Review: Rose Madder by Stephen King

I figured I’d churn out short reviews of books as I finish them. I sped through the last 100 pages of this on Tuesday, and generally speaking, I doubt I’ll give it much more thought after writing this. It’s a Stephen King book. Not one of his best, and perhaps one of his worst in the sense that it seems like he is following a template, making sure to hit all the obligatory Stephen King plot points and gory details. He does that, so if you haven’t read anything else by King, it probably seems super original.

I did like the idea of entering a painting and interacting with the people within. As usual, there were slight references to his other books including the Dark Tower series and Misery. It satisfies on the surface level by punishing the bad guy, and rewards the good guy. It also includes the usual King epilogue where it seems the good guy has lingering issues and makes you wonder about the future, but that epilogue went on too long. This was one where I was ready for it to be over when the bad guy was vanquished.

I want to finish this off by taking a tangent. Lately I’ve been thinking about coincidences and connections. The root of which probably starts with the nonfiction piece I wrote “Simulating Success,” and continued with Snake’s comments and my response. Anyways, I always find it interesting when a book I am reading somehow connects to something I either just read or plan on reading. You know, like there's some magic in it speaking specifically to me.  In this book, there is a reference to the Tommy James and the Shondells song – Hanky Panky. Now, King almost always includes popular music references in his stories, and more often than not, he includes songs from the 50s and 60s, as those were the songs he most likely listened to growing up. It’s coincidental here because I knew that I was going to read, Me, the Mob, and the Music, next, which is the autobiography of Tommy James. Also coincidentally, James mentions early in his book that his family goes to live near his Aunt Gert (probably short for Gertrude) in Michigan. This was funny because there is a character in Rose Madder named Gertrude, who goes by the name of Gert. If the name had been Bill or Jenny, I probably wouldn't have made a connection, but Gert just isn't one you hear very often these days. Does any of this matter or mean anything? No, probably not, but it’s an interesting idea – maybe one for a story where someone discovers some sort of clues or solves some sort of problem by connecting seemingly meaningless dots in random pieces of literature.

Fiction War: On the Wings of Revenge

Note: I entered another contest. In this one, I had three days to write a fiction story (1,000 words max) that incorporated the prompt "Take Flight" in any way that I wanted. I chose to create a character who is on the brink of a tour of revenge, and finds his direction by stumbling upon a deck of cards. Longtime readers might recognize a couple character names.
 
By morning, Canton would be no more. Burned to tinder by the hand of the lunatic Bannon, who craved the flames, and with the law extinct, satiated his need by traversing the dying world and setting it ablaze. Only the plague trumped Bannon’s capacity for destruction, but Snake feared neither the disease nor the man.

 “You stole these cards from Bannon?” Snake shuffled through Red’s deck, sitting with his legs crossed on Rosie’s porch and watching smoke billow up from the west side of Canton. The figures on the cards were painted by a mystic woman back in the once-upon-time world, which is how Snake thought of life before the plague. A green serpent with golden fangs and a crown appeared on the back of each card, the design a joke by Red at Snake’s expense. With Red dead, Snake avoided thinking about the punch line.

 Rosie was slumped against the porch railing, her frazzled hair fighting to escape her braids. Her dress was once pink with black lace, but now was so faded and dirty that the colors were drained from the garment. She drank from a green bottle filled with her own concoction called Plague Juice. Once she finished, she smiled, revealing her toothless, rotted mouth. The plague touched everyone.

“Who cares?” She giggled. “We’re all burning one way or the other.”

“I care.” He slipped the deck into his breast pocket. The cards were like a needle in a compass, an arrow pointing him toward his revenge. Direction had been sorely lacking in Snake’s flight to catch Red’s murderers.

Snake placed his hand on his revolver, and Rosie trembled. She felt his finger caress the trigger, as if he were touching her in the overused spot between her legs and she was experiencing the exhilaration and fear of a virgin before her deflowering.

 “Yeah, he stopped for a romp before starting the fires.” She ogled the gun, wanting to please. The silver-plated six-shooter could enchant others. Snake knew this to be true.

 He left her then, his spurs clinking off the floorboards before reaching the dusty street. He turned at the bottom.

 “Leave here before the fire comes.”

“What for?” She wobbled to her feet, her enchantment broken, and stumbled toward the door.

***

He stalked through the streets of Canton, and the eyes of the plague-ridden leered from behind shuddered windows. They embraced the coming flames as a mercy, and he cared not to deny them that. His business was revenge.

The curiosity for them wasn’t this lanky stranger in a showy white leather jacket with black snakes slithering up both sleeves and a gun on his hip. The curiosity was that this man seemed determined. He had a purpose. A goal. In this world, the only goal was dying. Snake’s resistance to the inevitable injected cold fear into their guts.

 The forsaken shrank deeper into the shadows; only shame joined them.

 ***
A picket fence with a gate separated the church property from the street. Someone had left the gate open, and Snake had a hunch he knew who. He loaded one chamber of his revolver. Bullets were hard to find, and only these would fire from this gun. He had eighteen bullets left.

The pews were empty and an aisle lead to a flaming alter and a burning cross. Bannon knelt before both. A shock of white hair split the lunatic’s dark mane. He wore all black, grayed slightly by the falling ash, and he sneered when he heard Snake’s steps.

“Have you come to worship my flames?” The voice belonged to an insane man, who was enamored by his scorching creation.

“I’ve come for answers only. The fire is no concern of mine.”

“Ha, but the flames are the answer, my child. I am cleansing this place for the second coming. I must burn it all down.”

Snake hadn’t the time for this. Stepping quick and true, he took the aisle in four strides and lifted the man up by his greasy hair. Bannon was too crazy to register surprise. A pleased smile reflected in his pupils, as Snake pulled the deck of cards from his breast pocket, shoving them before the lunatic’s eyes.

 “Where did you get these?”

 Bannon actually cackled. A curdling laugh that harmonized with the crackling flames.

 “You’re the Serpent. I didn’t recognize you off your belly.” He laughed again, but it was cut short by Snake’s fist striking his jaw. Bannon collapsed to the floor.

“Where?”

 “Just a memento, Serpent. The answers you want are across the desert in Greendale and beyond. Mendez, in Greendale, knows more, but you seek Diablo.” Bannon raised both his arms as the church timbers crashed behind him. “I am cleansing this world, and Diablo will return it to glory!”

 The lunatic continued to ramble, and Snake had what he needed. His next destination: Greendale. He made to leave, reaching the doors before the lunatic shouted.

 “Serpent! When they finished with your friend, I burned him. I burn everything.” Bannon laughed. “Turns out he wasn’t dead yet. Screamed the whole time. It was magnificent.”

The last syllable floated in the super-heated air and was punctuated with a blast. Smoke puffed from the revolver’s barrel, the bullet zipped through the space between Snake and Bannon, and a gaping hole appeared in the lunatic’s forehead. Bannon laughed, of course he did, before stumbling backward onto the pyre that once was the alter. Snake holstered the revolver and left the church.

A horse ambled in the street, a fine beast even with the plague eating at its flesh near the hooves. It even wore a saddle. Snake supposed it belonged to the lunatic, and he gave thanks that pleasant surprises still existed.

 Snake rode toward the sunset, across the desert, pushing hard in hopes that the revenge burning in his heart could inspire the horse to grow wings.

By morning, Canton was no more than smoking tinder serving as a charred gravestone.

Nonfiction: Simulating Success

Note: I started writing this to enter in a contest, but I didn't finish it in time. Maybe I'll submit it somewhere, but not sure about that. Enjoy. - Editied 6-30-17
 
I’ve been considering simulating an entire 162 game Major League Baseball season. I am not talking about taking one team and simulating 162 games. We’re going bigger than that, like the entire league’s schedule bigger.  That’s 2,430 games, not including playoffs.

Why? You ask.

Why not?

 

The playoffs will happen, too. As Tolkien wrote, “There can be only one.”

Was that Tolkien or Mortal Combat? I’d look, but there’s no use in straying too far from the subject yet. The point is that if you’re going to play a full season then you have to see it to the conclusion of crowning a single champion. God knows, I won’t be the winner.

This urge – it’s not an obsession yet – started with the gradual migration of my childhood crap to the home I share with my wife. Buried in one of the plastic tubs were my baseball cards and the Baseball Card All-Star Game.

The gist of the game is this: You create two teams and their batting lineups from whatever conglomeration of baseball cards you want, and then you play. No batteries required.

My bad. “There can be only one,” is from Highlander. Like the board game, Highlander was made in the 1980s. It’s about a band of immortals that duel with swords with the goal of decapitating the opponent. The last man – I think they were all men in the original movie­ – won the prize of being immortal. I don’t remember the plot well enough to understand the full crux of why they were determined to cut each other’s heads off, so I am not sure why they couldn’t all agree to put the swords down and find a better way to pass the time. I guess once you get an idea in your head, it’s hard to shake. No matter how illogical, time-consuming, or all together pointless it is.

I can relate.

The gameplay is simple. There are ten columns on each side of a laminated piece of cardboard. One side (shaded gray) is for players with twenty or more home runs during the most recent season listed on the ball card, and the other side (shaded pink) is for everyone else. The column headers are batting average ranges, and there are eleven at-bat outcomes in each column. The outcomes are numbered two to twelve, and you achieve an outcome by rolling a pair of dice. Simple. Roll a seven, you strikeout. 

The game rules ignore pitchers, but for posterity’s sake, I include them. I choose rotations and develop bullpens. When the dice turn on a starter, I go to the pen and even take a look at which arm each reliever throws with to see if it provides an advantage against an upcoming batter. Perhaps I should enact a rule that I roll the dice with the hand that corresponds with the arm the pitcher uses. Details like that matter.

For instance, Highlander starts at a professional wrestling event where the Fabulous Freebirds were the main attraction. The Freebirds had a couple different incarnations, but the most successful combination was the trio of Michael “P.S.” Hayes, Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy, and Buddy “Jack” Roberts. The group terrorized the southern territories in the 1980s, waving the confederate flag while also portraying somewhat androgynous characters. Only in professional wrestling can “redneck” and “androgynous” get over in the south as a successful gimmick. In all other walks of life, those two terms, especially in the south, mix as well as oil and water. Watch enough 1980s wrestling broadcasts, and you’ll likely get hooked to such clichés as things mixing like oil and water. Another good one is the immovable object meeting the irresistible force. That means something, but after a million uses, it doesn’t mean anything to me other than something to do with Hulk Hogan charging into Andre the Giant.

Baseball cards and professional wrestling occupied much of my childhood. I have a tub of old wrestling magazines purchased from a local bookstore at a rate of three for a dollar on Thursdays when my mom would go grocery shopping. And if I were being completely honest, the day my dad brought home a VHS player after work probably still ranks as one of my best days. Not only could I watch important films like Highlander, but also I could start renting wrestling videos from the store. Remember when there were stores to rent movies?

For most, opening Highlander with a wrestling scene didn’t add much, but for me, it’s probably why a line like “There can be only one” is still floating around my subconscious. It doesn’t seem like much, but it mattered to me. Stuff like that always runs through my mind when I am writing. So does the baseball game.

While writing this, a bulb lit up above my head. It’s the best thought I’ve had today. The pitcher can bat despite the fact that most card sets do not include a pitcher’s hitting stats. See pitchers are like my writing career, very few hits. Ba-dum. We can assume every pitcher slugged under twenty home runs and had a batting average below the Mendoza line. This is a monumental thought in my desire to simulate a season. By employing this method, I can recreate the unique nature of both the National and American Leagues. Before this revelation, I employed a designated hitter in every lineup. Lame.

A note on the Mendoza line: The dubious honor for hitters with an average below .200 is named after former professional shortstop Mario Mendoza. For position players, sustaining a mark below .200 likely means their days on the roster are numbered. Mendoza accomplished the feat four times in five seasons in the late 1970s. It’s a fluke that he survived that long, and now his name is associated for failure in a game that he likely spent his entire life trying to perfect. Double lame.

I am an aspiring writer, but as of this paragraph, I am making Mendoza look like a hall of famer, unless you count publication in the sports section of the local newspaper. I’ve done that thousands of times, but I don’t count it. Before the sports reporters gather the pitchforks and torches, I am proud of my journalism career, it’s just not my current aspiration.

I don’t know if there is a writing equivalent to Mendoza. Someone who achieved their goal of publishing, but did so at such a mediocre level that it’s viewed by the industry as trite or meaningless or even detrimental – as Mendoza’s inability to hit undoubtedly hurt his team. Maybe Stephanie Meyer is that writer. Her Twilight books were panned by the industry despite selling like hotcakes. I guess I’ll try to avoid the Meyer Line. Except I’d love to get published, as Meyer accomplished, and boy, the money she made wouldn’t bother me either. I am a sellout, after all.

Christopher Lambert is a little bit like Mendoza, except that it feels like Lambert got cut after one bad season. Lambert played the leading role in Highlander and its subsequent sequels, but I can’t name another movie he starred in. Heck, I can’t name another movie he appeared in, much less was the lead. I also refuse to cheat and check on Google for his filmography. I suppose Highlander is trite and meaningless (although it does make you wonder if living forever would be all that wonderful), but I can’t say it’s any more or less detrimental to the film industry than the bevy of action movies from the 1980s. And nobody refers to an actor falling below the Lambert Line or a film below the Highlander Line.

The professional wrestling equivalent to Mendoza? The Honky Tonk Man. Or maybe X-Pac. I can’t decide. My mom once called me wishy-washy. She was right.

The inclusion of pitchers is controversial. With such a poor batting average, the likelihood of a hit would be low, and let’s face it, scoring runs is more fun. The argument persists in MLB, as well. Pitchers don’t practice hitting because the money in their ample paychecks is derived solely from their ability to throw pitches either at blistering speeds and/or with brutal movement. A few pitchers take pride in hitting, and occasionally one will get a hold of a ball and drive it over the wall. Fans love that. Americans love the underdog, and there might not be any bigger underdog in sports than a pitcher gripping a bat. Of course, America hasn’t been the underdog since the end of the Civil War. We’ve dominated the world theatre and throw fits when the slightest thing happens that doesn’t benefit us. We’re a strange folk. Selfish. Erratic. Comfortable. Endearing. Comical. Probably smelly.

The pundits – the new age pundits for the old-school guys detest change – call for the designated hitter to be adopted by the National League. The American League has utilized the designated hitter since the 1970s. We of the age of sabermetrics and reason and alternative facts have evolved beyond the momentary satisfaction of seeing a pitcher flail at a ball two feet out of the zone. Sometimes we are all just too damned smart for our own good.

I was never good enough to swing anything other than aluminum lumber that pinged when it made hard contact rather than making that crack that poets, musicians, and lazy sports writers romanticize. Maybe there is an App with the wood bat sound that I could play while simulating the season. The only sound the game offers now is the dice bouncing off the board – a square board with a field pictured and rectangles at each base to place a card when hitters become base runners after hits or walks. Hearing the dice rattle around for seconds takes me back to my youth, to quiet days in my bedroom playing the game. I probably fantasized about simulating an entire season at that point, too. The dice sound really doesn’t stir my poetic soul like the crack of a bat does for so many others. Better check the Google Play Store.

My abilities were so limited that I remember only two in-game at-bats. The first was early in my Little League career when I drew a walk, tossed my bat, and as my cleats squished down on first base, I gave a huge sigh of relief. My coach was incredulous at my reaction. Instead of standing at the plate fighting for a hit, I was satisfied to accept either a walk or a strikeout looking. I didn’t have the confidence yet to take true hacks and have faith that my bat could actually connect. Keep in mind, I am a guy who has thought about writing for most of his life, and at thirty-five is finally dedicating the time to do it and investigating opportunities for publication. I’ve never been quick to stick my neck out.

The second at-bat came during a tournament years later. I creamed a pitch – I mean I smashed that ball so hard that the seams receded into the rawhide – and it ended up one-hopping the fence in left field for a ground-rule double. My dad missed the hit while at the concession stand; I don’t know why I remember that. That was the closest I ever came to hitting a home run, and by God, there must not be a better feeling than hitting a dinger because that double felt amazing. It felt so good that I still think about it two decades later. I wonder what seeing my name in print will be like. Hopefully like standing on the second-base bag on a summer night with the moths swirling around the lights and the breeze whistling in my ears.

Frank Deford, a former Sports Illustrated writer, became a sports journalist after his college basketball coach told him he wrote about basketball better than he played it. I didn’t have anyone in my life quite so blunt, but I came to the same conclusion. After college, I caught on at the paper because I thought I could write a little, and they were willing to pay me to do it. Relishing in past glory never really entered the equation. Mostly it confirmed that most athletes were naturally better than I was. That’s okay, can they churn out roughly five thousand words on a board game? Take that, athletes.

I don’t cover sports anymore, or I don’t do it enough to consider myself a journalist. I took a gig with better hours and better pay about a year ago. See sellout reference above.

The extra time has led me to writing on my own, but it hasn’t been easy. You know, having ideas is one thing. Having talent is another. Heck, having a strong enough vocabulary concerns me. Many evenings with a blank screen before me is like standing at the plate way back in Little League, hoping that the pitcher doesn’t throw three strikes before ball four. Sigh.

So I linger on the feasibility of completing a season.

The first step is creating teams. I have thousands of baseball cards, all from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. It would probably be best to pick an entire set. I have one of those – a 1991 Donruss set I bought on the cheap at some point. These cards have either a green or blue border around the player photos, and I am not sure how they decided on who got what colors.  The cards came out before the 1991 season, and thus depict the stats and results from 1990.

The early 1990s were a different time. To be attached to a phone meant also being attached to the wall. Computers were used primarily for data processing and rudimentary games. It’d be the mid-90s before their true use as pornography hubs would be realized. Al Gore was a politician and not a tech whiz or a climate cop, and his wife, Tipper, had just lost a battle to censor popular music against the guy from Twisted Sister and John Denver. And when someone told a joke about Donald Trump being president, everyone laughed.

I was eight in 1990 and living on a farm in rural Illinois. My brother was eight years my senior, so you know, he didn’t want anything to do with me. My sister was four years older, and, you know, I didn’t want anything to do with her. In terms of entertainment, we had an Atari that we hooked up to a 13-inch TV in our kitchen in the evenings. That TV had rabbit ears and two dials to pull from two different kinds of aerial signals. The signals were acronyms. I think one was UHF, but that might just have been a Weird Al Yankovic movie.  We didn’t have cable or a satellite dish, which by today’s definition qualifies as child abuse. I am not complaining, but I probably did then. That life wasn’t so bad. It had its nuances and routines, and as I get older, I appreciate that. Without all the modern distractions, overthinking baseball board games was a definite option for me (when professional wrestling wasn’t on the tube).    

Each league had two divisions in 1990 rather than the three now. There were twelve teams in the N.L. and fourteen in the A.L. Two teams made the playoffs from each league, as opposed to the five that make it now. The Rockies, Marlins, Rays and Diamondbacks didn’t exist, and the Nationals were the Expos and played in Montreal rather than Washington D.C. Interleague play during the regular season was still a dream in Bud Selig’s mind, and the players could pass as my neighbor rather than powerlifters in uniform.

Not everything made sense in 1990. The Cincinnati Reds and Atlanta Braves were in the N.L. West, while the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals were in the N.L. East. Of course, the Braves had moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, so they simply occupied the former Braves’ spot in the geography-based divisions. Changing divisions basically needed unanimous congressional approval at that point. It’s happened a time or two since 1990, including the expansion to six divisions, but a lot of that happened after MLB broke its fans’ hearts with a strike that claimed the World Series in 1994. Expo and White Sox fans – the two teams most likely to make the World Series –  will never forget that strike. Most other fans didn’t forget it until Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire started hitting genetically enhanced dingers in 1998. Steroids were the Band-Aid the sport needed to heal most fans. Even when the homers came into question, most fans only half-heartedly cared. The purists raged, but the rest of us shrugged our shoulders and kept watching. The Bill Clinton sex scandal was pretty much the same way, at least until 2016 when twenty-year-old transgressions helped keep Hillary Clinton out of office. We’re a pious country again and will be until we’re tired of it. I give it three years.

The latest thought: Do I recreate the exact schedule from 1990? The Baseball Reference website provides results and box scores. A truly revolutionary idea is to research the lineups and pitchers from each game and play with those. The sticky wicket is that a baseball roster is constantly changing. Some guys are promoted from the minors for a game or two, but never receive a baseball card. The point being is that there would be variances, and once you have one, the whole experiment is tainted.

Although the variances are what frees this from being some humdrum replaying of a 27-year-old season. This freedom opens a door for my creativity. Within reason, I can do anything I want with the lineups, so long as I hold to a personal code that what I am doing is in the best interest of that team and adheres to basic baseball philosophy.  

I also have the prescience of knowing which young players become great and which turn into duds. John Kruk, for example, is in my 1991 set. It’s early in his career, and he almost appears svelte and is listed as an outfielder. I know that in the years to come, he gains weight, plays first base exclusively, and becomes a key cog for the Phillies as they vie for a world championship. Having this knowledge has me leaning to moving him to first base, replacing a mediocre Ricky Jordan, and seeing if Kruk’s talent bears through when dice are used rather than bats. This power is intoxicating.

The 1990 season, which started with a lockout that lasted a week, finished with the Reds beating the Athletics, the defending champions, in a four-game sweep in the World Series. The outcome was as surprising as it was dominating. It’s like when Christopher Lambert’s character slices the head off the hulking antagonist in Highlander. The antagonist was huge, and Lambert came across as sort of a prissy antique dealer. On paper, the bad dude was the clear favorite. I guess that’s why they have the sword fights.

I could only be so lucky to have such a surprising end to a simulation. Endings are important. We dwell on them. The end of movies and books. The end of games. The winners. The losers. All of it is a simulation of our lives, and our hopes that we end appropriately, dramatically, exceptionally, and so on. That’s part of the reason doomsday predictions are so prevalent. As if our lives are so important that our end will coincide with the destruction of the earth. Most people are going to be disappointed by their end. It’s likely going to be the clichéd old, lost in a deluge of pain relievers or dementia, and without any last-second deep thoughts spouted from our lips. And the rest of the world will keep moving.

But should we care so much about the end?

Growing up a professional wrestling fan, I inevitably was involved in discussions about the predetermined nature of the matches. Once I grew old enough to form a logical opinion, I didn’t see the reasoning for people to dismiss it solely based on the notion that one person was picked to win and the other picked to lose. The joy isn’t only in the result. It is in the performance. The drama. The athleticism. The story being told. It is entertainment. Christopher Lambert, after all, stood tall at the end of Highlander, because the script called for it to happen. Hulk Hogan did the same hundreds of times.

If this simulation comes to fruition and I complete it, I imagine I’ll feel a sense of vindication and relief. Maybe sadness? The same emotions are likely if I were to get published.

Before I dwell on the sadness, we should talk about stats. Simulating this season isn’t occupying my mind only to see if team records would align with the actual results. Although that is an interesting thought, my mind is on the stats.

With the game theoretically assigning higher probabilities of hits for those with a track record of doing so, it is my interest to find out if players would perform on par with the stats displayed on the card.

Keep in mind, we’ve eliminated all the variables of actual baseball: weather conditions, player health, umpire preferences, and so on. Also eliminated are defensive errors (breathe a sigh of relief all you players with stone hands), double plays (a pitcher’s best friend), and managerial idiosyncrasies concerning player management, base running, bullpen use, and bunting.

It’s baseball in a perfect world. Every ball in play is either a clean hit or an out.

There’s something completely 1990 about that and utterly un-2017 about it. We can look back at 1990 through rose-colored lenses and wistfully dream of being in such a simple era. I am not just talking about baseball here. Because it’s the past, we can aptly identify the good and bad outcomes in every situation. Heck, the bad stuff doesn’t seem that bad. We made it through it, didn’t we? Besides, doesn’t it feel like everything was more cut-and-dry?  Maybe that’s because I was eight in 1990, and the world fit contextually in the small set of truths I had developed and accepted.

Truth in 2017? A clean hit or an out? That’s too simple for a world so compelled to argue about everything, and so quick to damn reason if it doesn’t fit into the narrative being wrote by our team.

The fact is that the hardliner against professional wrestling wasn’t going to be convinced to appreciate it because it was “fake.” Today’s world has similar lines drawn on hundreds of issues, and so many can’t be persuaded to change their thoughts, even if you show them the smoke from coal plants eating a hole in the ozone layer while a windmill’s blades stand still a mile away.

And politics. God, politics. I can’t believe how much politics occupies my mind. In fact, this whole business about simulating a season is one of the few things that can consistently distract me from the insanity overcoming this country. I don’t even like politics. I’ve never followed it, but now I can’t escape it.

It pisses me off.

Future presidents will worry about approaching the Trump Line. There, I said it.

Okay, breathe in…breathe out.

I trust that rational people in positions of power exist. It’s all I can do. … and play the baseball card game.

The compiling of stats creates a two-fold problem. One, it complicates the actual gameplay and increases the time for each game. A conservative guess being that it adds ten minutes per game. Probably more.

Statistical tracking starts with creating a baseball scorebook using one of the dozen or so wire-ringed notebooks that also migrated over in the plastic tubs. It occurs to me that whole forests have died from notebooks that get used a little bit one school year and then get deposited in some closet or drawer in the summer, and then new ones are bought for the next school year. Most kids probably dump the notebooks on their way out of school on the last day. I couldn’t do that. The blank pages offered so many possibilities. It saddens me that so many pages remained blank when I discovered them years later. It’s like I had dreams, but none of them were worth writing down.

That’s a half truth. I didn’t fill the notebooks, but I did use many of the pages and then systematically ripped them out, lest risk facing the embarrassment of somebody finding them and reading my personal thoughts. Part of me is still paranoid of people reading things I write. Yes, I was published thousands of times in a newspaper. Yes, there were mornings when I woke up and hoped no one would notice the by-line. It’s a hard habit to kick.

Keeping score for a baseball game is nothing new for me, but the creating of the scorebook for each game takes time. I don’t keep quite as detailed notes as I did when covering games at the paper because I don’t have to worry about turning some of the action into a narrative later. It’s such a strange thing that I’d focus on something so obsessed with numbers and devoid of narrative. The last few years at the paper I was the sports editor, and my main emphasis was to get my reporters to worry less about the numbers and the games and focus on telling the story of the players.

Of course, I am not dealing with real people. At least not people that are real anymore. They are thin pieces of cardboard with dated images, stat lines, and the faint smell of bubble gum. My experiment is to see if the random nature of dice can recreate those numbers. It’s heartless, monotonous, and the perfect distraction from the dysfunction of the government and the lackluster realities of my writing abilities.

Keeping the stats is the first part. Tracking the stats is the second. Becoming a sellout has provided me with Microsoft Excel skills. I even created a spreadsheet to track upcoming writing contests with columns for the fees, the deadlines, the word-count restrictions, and hyperlinks to the contest websites. I’ve found I like creating spreadsheets more than I like updating them. Updating is work. That’s why God created everything in seven days and then wished us good luck. Creation is divine. Maintenance is the hard work.

Excel is a beautifully soulless program that through the manipulation of data cells is the logical way to chart things like statistics. The one thing that it won’t do though is enter the data for me, and there’s a lot of data entry just to set up 26 rosters, plus team results, and league standings. I’d really like to track league leaders, too. It’s too bad I don’t have it in the league budget to hire an assistant.

Once all the teams are set, some of this will go faster, but it’s still roughly thirty minutes per game and let’s say ten minutes of entering the results into the spreadsheet. That’s forty minutes multiplied by 2,430. That’s 97,200 minutes to play the entire season. Using an Excel formula, let’s make that number make more sense. All right, add a pair of parentheses, a slash, and a sixty, and the result is 1,620 hours. A couple more key strokes and that translates to 67.5 days. That’s faster than an actual baseball season, assuming I did nothing else, like eat, drink, sleep, and defecate.

That’s just the regular season. The playoffs would be another few hours, depending on if each series went seven games. It’d be swell if they did.

When it ends, whether dramatically or with an underwhelming thud, I’ll have to face the reality of this venture. That’s where the sadness enters. Whenever something ends, there’s some level of sadness because whatever joy derived during the journey transitions to the past. The sadness, in this case, will be multiplied by the reality that those hours could have been filled by writing. Also, how dorky is it that I had nothing better to do?

I have to admit that the numbers above are less daunting than I thought they would be, which ultimately has me second-guessing my math. When I was in seventh grade, I won math student of the year honors. My interest and ability in the subject declined thereafter. Too much, too soon, I suppose. Truthfully, stuff with numbers came rather easily to me. Writing was more of a challenge.

And I still don’t know if I am any good at it?

That’s the ego confrontation I am hiding from with this whole baseball season business. For all the years of tinkering, I have more vindication concerning my ability to do junior high math than I do of any discernible writing talent.

In writing, there are an incalculable number games to be played before achieving anything, and there’s no guarantee that achievement is even waiting. Baseball is an appropriate comparison. It’s the game of failure. A great player records an out seven out of ten times he steps up to the plate. A writer faces and receives rejection at a much higher clip, especially a new writer. 

It’s an emotional risk to set out to do something where the probable result is utter failure.

I loathe thinking about it like that, but it’s ever-present in my mind right next to thoughts about our oxygen being choked out of existence by carbon emissions and Donald Trump’s increasingly orange-tinted face.

It makes me reach toward distractions.

Maybe the immortals in Highlander needed the threat of losing their heads to distract them from the reality of living forever. I suppose you can only bury so many friends, family, and lovers before it numbs the heart. There is life found in death. That sort of explains why they spent centuries whittling their numbers down to one. It was a barbaric act of mercy. The one left was the cursed victor.

Baseball dwindles teams down to one each season. Even if every team returned the exact same players and played the same schedule as the season before, the results would be different. I guess I don’t really need to do a simulation to know things will turn out differently. The reality of varying results provides hope. As a fan of the Cubs, I spent most of my life clinging to that hope. Then 2016 happened and with it the reward for all those years of waiting.

Can the same happen to my writing career?

I hope so.