David Bowie died today at the age of 69. He had been fighting cancer–unknown to most–for about 18 months before finally succumbing. His latest and final album, Blackstar, was released just three days ago.
It’s currently #1 on the Canadian iTunes store. Five of his other albums are in the top ten.
Dying is always a great boost to a career.
I liked Bowie’s music. I only own two of his albums but have always appreciated his artistry and the way he forged his own unique musical identity. His legacy as a brilliant performer is assured.
At the same time I admit that I found some of his work, like that of Tin Machine, wholly unappealing. I was never a huge fan of grunge (I like a little edge in my music, but only a little) and Tin Machine was essentially grunge before it had a label.
But that’s just personal taste. Bowie never did anything wrong. He did what he wanted and what he wanted was to explore musical landscapes in ways that were always interesting and sometimes catchy as all get-out.
His death makes me feel sad in that he-was-a-good-guy-who-also-happened-to-be-a-celebrity way, but it also makes me realize that growing older is defined so much by what we lose–from the superficial, like the hair on our heads and the smooth skin of our faces, to the substantial–drifting apart from long-time friends, sometimes for reasons no one can say, to the loss of those we love to death. Our culture creates and celebrates pop icons and as the years pass I watch as death claims more and more of the ones I grew up with, people who did not seem immortal, exactly, but somehow eternal.
Bowie was like that. Seeing cancer claim him reminds me–us–that our time as physical bodies is limited.
This afternoon I quietly realized another thing I dislike about the Compass card system–the fare gates are biased toward right-handed people, as the spot to tap your card is on the right. I can’t really argue against the logic of the placement as something like 90% of the population is right-handed. Still, it’s another little thing that irks me about the system.
But never mind that, I was tapping in at the Lougheed Town Centre station and proceeded up to the platform to wait for the next train. A shortish young man with a thick beard was conversing with three SkyTrain attendants. I didn’t catch everything said but enough to gather that a bag was laying on the track. I looked and sure enough, a green Save on Foods grocery bag lay resplendent upon the middle rail. One of the attendants noted that it would need to be removed ASAP. Immediately another young man came up asking if the system was going to be brought to a standstill for half a day because of this. I’m paraphrasing but from his tone, I’ve captured the essence of his question, even if he didn’t use those exact words. The attendant assured him there were be no delays.
One of the other attendants radioed something to SkyTrain control. Probably something like, “Don’t let the next train run me over, thanks!” as he next clambered down onto the track, grabbed the bag, handed it to the third attendant, who then handed it to the shortish young man with the thick beard, as apparently the bag–which contained undisclosed items–belonged to him. I never heard his explanation for how the bag went from his hands to the track area. Only the security cameras will know for sure. He had a weird glint in his eye, though.
The next train arrived a few minutes later, there were no delays, and the young man got on the same car as me, gently holding the bag at his feet. He said nothing and did nothing before I got off two stops later. But that glint in his eyes never went away as he stared out the window.
Today I had my left foot examined by a certified pedorthist. I got an official report and am heading back on January 21 to get an orthotic device that I will use in my walking-around shoes and running shoes. This is basically a fancy insole specifically molded to the shape of my foot and designed to minimize pain in the gimpy parts of my foot.
Here are the highlights (?) of my assessment:
Postural Observations Bilateral: Medium MLA, Hindfoot Valgus
Balance weak when single leg stance bilaterally
[Insert joke about Hindfoot Valgus being my new punk band name here]
The second line about balance is a polite way of saying I really suck at standing on one leg. My sense of balance is not weak, it’s silly and nearly non-existent. I could be on a tightrope a meter wide and still find a way to fall off. I don’t know why this is, but it’s been this way as long as I can remember.
Gait Assessment Bilateral: Time Of Heel Lift Early
Mtt arch collapse / splay
The first line was interesting to me. When I first gave serious thought to running back in 2009 my reading on the subject left me with the impression that heel injuries were common and and that a good stance would greatly reduce or eliminate the chance of injury. And in over 3,000 km of running I have never hurt my heel. Unfortunately this may have lead to me indirectly causing other problems. When I am striding–walking or running–I lift off my heel early, which tends to result in landing on the front of my foot harder than I might otherwise. You can probably guess which part of my left foot hurts.
Significant Clinical Observations:
Mr. James [I always feel weird when people call me Mr. James, partly because it makes me think of my dad and partly because it sounds like I’m being addressed a a teacher] presents with pain under left metatarsal heads. He has medium arch height, limited ankle dorsiflexion, dropped metatarsal heads with callousing bilaterally [interpretation: I have ugly feet. I was also asked if I had some sort of fungal infection because my toenail are like ten little mini horror shows]. He has limited ankle dorsiflexion leading to early heel rise and more pressure at forefoot during gait. Orthotics recommended to aid in shock absorption and take pressure off metatarsal heads. Footwear with good cushioning and forefoot rocker recommended as well as home footwear. Calf stretches regularly strongly recommended in treatment plan as well [this was a big thing; basically I’m as flexible as a board and need to change that].
I went home with a pair of sandals designed to cushion the proper parts of my feet. I’m to wear them around home, which is something that makes me feel old man-ish but if they work, it beats not old man-ish with an aching foot. I was also persuaded to get a new pair of running shoes with the aforementioned forefoot rocker, specifically the Hoka Speedgoat trail runners. Yes, the name is absurd. Will I get the urge to chew on tin cans as I run? Perhaps. It features “Balanced Meta-Rocker Geometry” and this particular feature is startlingly noticeable when you walk around in the shoes. I’m curious to see how they feel when running. They look like this:
The testing/assessment took about an hour and consisted of me walking/running on a treadmill and having my feet poked, prodded and stretched to see where it hurt, as well as the standing-on-one-leg thing. Fortunately the balancing part was not critical. The biggest takeaway as far as what I can do, apart from getting the orthotic, is to stretch multiple times every day and especially before running. Ironically, I used to stretch before running but after hurting an Achilles tendon back in 2012 I became concerned (paranoid?) that the stretching was increasing the chance of me injuring myself by overdoing it. The pedorthist (a nice woman named Lynne) told me this would be pretty much impossible to do without engaging in a level of excessive stretching idiocy that a rational human would not be capable of. This mostly reassured me.
I may try the goat shoes as soon as tomorrow.
To paraphrase the first Star Trek movie, The Foot Adventure is Just Beginning…
Here’s a few story ideas off the top of my head. The intention is for these to be more useful than funny, unlike my writing prompts. I’m going to try using one of them if it speaks to me. You know, like, “GET OFF YOUR LAZY BUTT AND WRITE ME INSTEAD OF LOAFING AROUND AND DREAMING OF DONUTS!” And yes, in my mind the story prompt would yell at me like a bad stage actor.
Ideas:
the initial stage of the afterlife of someone (with possible non-stupid twist)
the world changes in subtle but disturbing ways for someone
strange messages start appearing on a phone or tablet
a giant alien mothership arrives and then nothing ever happens
two words: ghost jogger
and a few more that I will add later because it’s late, I’m tired and falling asleep
As I was coming out of the Waterfront SkyTrain station today I noticed a man off to my left standing near one of the fare gates and who seemed rather agitated. Apparently he was having problems getting the chosen gate to recognize his shiny new Compass card. He finally got through and angrily strode forward, holding the card out before him and shaking it angrily. “This card is taking too long to work!” he snarled to no one in particular. He then spotted a transit attendant standing nearby and marched to him, where he continued to rail against his slothful card.
This is the first instance of what I call Compass card rage I’ve witnessed, though I suspect it will not be the last.
Other Compass card hijinks I’ve seen:
people approaching the same game at the same time from opposite directions. As you may guess, only one person wins here but in reality both lose in the ensuing blockage/confusion
it is in fact possible to follow someone through a gate before it closes
people blithely following someone else through a gate, tapping their card, having it fail (because the gate needs to close before it will register the next tap) and continuing on their merry way, not realizing that they have just been charged for three zones instead of one or two
“Out of service” tape plastered over gates. Now imagine multiple gates going down in a station that only has a few and everyone at rush hour being funneled through one or two working gates. Happy times.
Also, whoever approved the astonishingly annoying tone that plays when you tap your card should be forced to listen to that sound all day every day until driven mad. This would likely take less than 24 hours.
You might say I’m not especially impressed with the Compass card system. In fact, I’ll say it: I am not especially impressed with the Compass card system.
If they could fix it to work flawlessly with my smart watch in, say, two months, I might be willing to upgrade my assessment from “not especially impressed” to “will grudgingly tolerate.” Translink has promised smart device support sometime. I’m going to speculate it will roll out in the year 3000.
Free of charge, here are three amazing tech support tips. Is your technology giving you grief? Read on!
Tech tip #1: Power cycle your device. This means turning off whatever is giving you trouble and then turning it back on. Trust me, this works way more often than you’d think, but people seldom try this before calling their favorite tech support helpline.
Tech tip #2: Don’t visit fishy websites. Your computer will end up riddled with adware, malware, trojans or other malicious software you probably don’t want on your computer. Addendum: Don’t install any programs you didn’t specifically intend to install. NO EXCEPTIONS. If you are unclear about either of these things, just set your computer on fire now.
Tech tip #3: When you fill your car up with gas, do you do so by taking the nozzle of the gas hose, shoving it through an open window of the car and spraying the interior with fuel? I bet you don’t and do you know why? Because you are smart and learned how to pump gas properly. Spend some time learning how to do the tasks you need to do on your computer. The IBM PC came out in 1981. This was over 30 years ago. Computers are not new-fangled things, they are not weird nor are they the domain of nerds or geeks. They are tools and even if they haven’t advanced as much as we might have hoped for in 2016, it doesn’t change the fact that like any tool you use, you should learn how to use it. Addendum: a search engine like Google will give you most of the answers you will need, provided you search intelligently. If you are having problems printing, don’t do a search on “raspberry pants” unless you actually use raspberry pants to print.
Bonus tip: Is it plugged in? Unless it runs on batteries it should be plugged in.
I find I write best on this blog when I tackle a topic early in the day or evening. If I wait until mid-evening, say, I’m already shutting off my brain for the night and planning non-thinking activities like sleep* or watching amusing/strange cat videos. But it is difficult for me to jump in early because when I get home from work I am almost always mentally tired (I work in technical support). I usually have dinner shortly after getting home and after that there is a small window between brain-still-active and brain-go-nap where I can start writing with some energy and enthusiasm but more often than not I find my brain simply doesn’t want to participate.
This concerns me because I think I have some talent when it comes to writing and could improve on it with practice. As Stephen King put it:
While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
I am competent for the most part, even if I often feel I get it right through dumb luck or some other process I can’t fully explain or even understand, but I realize that the hard work and dedication King speaks of are lacking. It’s easier to slouch back in my chair and passively let myself be entertained until it’s time for bed and then to dream I’m playing with Fleetwood Mac (see below).
I’ve read a few books on writing over the years, some of them focusing on the nuts and bolts of the craft, others more inspirational. King’s own book “On Writing” has left me fired up each time I’ve read it but the fire burns fast and hot and before long it’s embers and then ash. I need to find a way to keep the fire stoked.
And there is no book or magic trick or sure-fire technique for this. It’s just dedication and hard work. I need to find that within me or just move on to other hobbies, like This Couch is Very Comfortable or Tonight I’m Going to…Nah, This Couch is Too Comfortable.
I made the first step last August when I promised myself to write every day. With only a few exceptions due to unusual circumstances I’ve stuck to that and it has helped to instill some of the discipline I need. But it’s only a first step. The next step is to turn this discipline toward my fiction writing, which has been largely moribund for the past half year, a few days during NaNoWriMo excepted.
I’ll try this week and report the grisly details here. It may be fun. It may even be better than a comfortable couch.
* I recently had a dream where I was playing guitar with Fleetwood Mac. They had another guest performer on stage and he announced the next song would be “The Baboons” or something like that. I was concerned because I was not aware of any such Fleetwood Mac song. When the band started in I quickly recognized it as one of their familiar hits and jumped in, at which point the strap on my guitar broke. I awoke before finding out if I dropped the guitar on the stage, produced an unholy shriek of feedback and had Lindsey Buckingham exclaim, “I love it! Keep it!” because remember this is the man who wrote “Tusk.”
Hey, I thought, I already posted an amusing cat video yesterday and I can’t do it two days in a row. It would be like giving up on writing altogether, however adorable the resultant video might be. And it’s too early in the new year to give up on writing. That got me thinking…new year…writing…hey, why not a bunch of dumb writing prompts using a holiday theme? And here they are, in chronological order:
New Year’s: Baby New Year and Father Time meet up as they often do in the funny papers. In 1,000 words or less, write about their debate over the mistakes of the past and the futility of the future. Since Baby New Year is a baby he just poops his diaper and cries a lot.
Valentine’s Day: Write a story from the perspective of Cupid, except this year Cupid decides to shoot people with arrows that don’t make them fall in love with each other, instead the arrows just injure and kill. Why has Cupid become so hurtful? Has he become jaded and cynical over the commercialization of Valentine’s Day? Is he trying to re-enact the St. Valentine’s Day massacre? Is he cranky after attempting to have a conversation with Baby New Year? Follow your heart, in 500 words or less.
Easter: It’s the fight of the century! In one corner, the Easter Bunny, in the other corner, Jesus Christ. Write a light-hearted romp that pits these two lovable characters against each other. Who will be King of Easter? Only your muse knows!
Arbor Day: If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? Bonus: include a drawing of the tree.
Mother’s Day: On The Police’s 1983 album, Synchronicity, there is a song called “Mother.” It is the worst song ever in the history of everything. Rewrite this song so your mother would not immediately disown you if you presented it to her.
Father’s Day: Write a dirty limerick for your father. If you hate your father (perhaps he really likes that Police song) write a clean limerick instead. If your father is dead or missing, you may roll the dice again.
Halloween: Write a short story based on one of the following entertainment-themed scary ideas:
Seinfeld never gets canceled
Pink Floyd reunites to record “The Wall II” with special guests One Direction and Meatloaf
Aliens arrive and use advanced DRM to make all of your media inaccessible, then leave the planet, laughing as they go
Thanksgiving: Write a touching drama from the perspective of the turkey about to be eaten. Use the following words in your story: gobble, thwack, cry and delicious.
Christmas: Jolly Old St. Nick turns out to be an alcoholic and he’s on another bender with the holiday just around the corner. Write a story about how Christmas is saved by people realizing it’s not about the accumulation of material gifts, it’s about the birth of Christ. Just kidding. Write about the desperate attempts by the elves to sober up Santa and get him onto the sleigh without killing anyone. If kids don’t get their presents there’s going to be heck to pay! Bonus: Include Frosty the Snowman as a supporting character/comic relief.
The first 23 hours of 2016 have been okay. I got a Compass card for transit since they’re now mandatory. It worked fine at the fare gates at Sapperton. Metrotown station doesn’t have gates yet due to station upgrade work. Instead they have little fare post things. They were very fussy with the card and I hate them.
I weighed in at a whale-like 169.5 pounds this morning due to holiday excess. The good news is the holidays are all done now so the shoveling of unneeded food should end. Should.
It was cold and sunny, except here in New West where great banks of fog rolling off the Fraser blotted out the sky and gave the area a spooky look.
2015 is coming to and end and for me it was a year of transition, with little progress, so I’m looking forward to things improving in 2016.
I’m not making any resolutions for the new year but there are things I want to do, plan to do and will probably cry a little inside if I don’t do them. If I did have resolutions, they would look something like this:
get my weight back down to where it was during summer, before I hurt my leg (this would be around 150 pounds)
write every day (I’ve been very good with this since mid-August, though most of the writing has been inane posts on this blog)
finish at least one major writing project, likely my novel Road Closed, written for NaNoWriMo 2014
stay sane at work
run regularly again
get my left foot looked at and/or fixed (the looking-at part could happen in a little over a week)
try to stay positive, kind and creative
win millions of dollars in the lottery
seriously, I’ll give a whole bunch of it to charity if I win
Happy New Year to the bots, other non-humans scraping this site, and people accidentally arriving here because I used the word “nude” in some post back in 2007. May 2016 be fruitful and fun for you.
NOTE: This review contains spoilers. If you are spoiler-averse, skip this review. If you want a short take, here it is: there are better post-apocalypse books out there.
I bought the paperback of Swan Song when it first came out in 1987 after reading and enjoying McCammon’s science fiction/horror romp Stinger. For some reason I never got around to reading Swan Song, but nearly three decades later I finally got the ebook and jumped in. Unlike 1987 I did so with more trepidation, as I’d recently read McCammon’s short story collection Blue World, which I found rather uneven.
Swan Song is like a cartoon version of a post-apocalypse world. Or maybe it’s more a fantasy dreamed up by a high school kid extended to epic length. Either way, the book has most of the right ingredients but doesn’t know how to combine them effectively.
Set in the present day (at the time the mid-80s), Swan Song begins with political tensions ramping up and then someone–it’s purposely obfuscated who–starts launching nuclear attacks, and before you can say drop, roll and cover, the entire world has been blasted by nukes and the survivors are faced with years of nuclear winter.
As with most epic tales, the story chronicles different groups of survivors who ultimately converge and confront each other, to determine if good or evil will triumph. The characters range from pro wrestlers to ex-military, to religious fanatics and ex-military haunted by the ghosts of war. So far so good, yes?
Yes, more or less. The first part of the story chronicles the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attacks, with survivors scrabbling through destroyed cities, collapsed shelters and hellish landscapes filled with destruction and littered with corpses. This is all in service of laying the groundwork for the rest of the story, which jumps ahead seven years and picks up on all the characters’ lives as they slowly begin to converge for the final battle.
But before that seven year jump happens, the reader is tipped off to the sledgehammer subtlety to come. As the missiles fly at the novel’s beginning, the president is on a plane flying high above the nukes. As he tries to activate launch codes from a briefcase, the fiery apocalypse below spits up a bus filled with corpses that disables the plane and causes it to crash. This is Emmerich-level disaster here, presented straight-faced and without irony. The president later shows up as a crazy hermit who wants to destroy the world.
The premise of Swan Song is broadly similar to The Stand, perhaps the best-known post-apocalypse novel, and while there are similarities–a devastated world, supernatural elements, the meeting of good and evil to determine the future of the world–King focuses on the struggle to rebuild civilization while McCammon depicts a world where people turn savage and fight relentlessly and without remorse. Swan Song is filled with long, vividly-detailed battle scenes. There are a lot of really nasty people here–usually also insane because that’s what nukes do to you, I guess–and it’s all relentlessly grim.
I’m not saying this is a bad approach. In fact, it could have been compelling, but the problem is McCammon’s writing is so clunky. I keep trying to think of a better way to describe it, but that’s the word I keep coming back to. A lot of the prose here is fine, if unremarkable. McCammon keeps things moving, even if the story feels too long, but so much of the execution comes off as, well, clunky.
Here’s an example featuring the ex-military man, Colonel James Macklin, as he heads back into his Airstream trailer, which serves as the command post for the budding army he’s assembling:
He turned back toward the trailer. Sheila Fontana was standing in the doorway, and suddenly Macklin realized that all this excitement had given him an erection. It was a good erection, too. It promised to stay around awhile. He walked up the carved staircase with its banister of demon faces, entered the trailer and shut the door.
This is just bad. No one should ever use the phrase “it was a good erection” outside a clinical test report or soft porn. Mercifully, McCammon declines to depict the actual sex acts. The banister of demon faces is made by a crazy person, by the way. Did I mention there are a lot of crazy people in Swan Song?
Oh, and the military force that Macklin is assembling is called the Army of Excellence. Yes. Maybe Army of Total Awesomeness was already taken.
The titular character of Swan, who has the ability to rekindle life in plants and trees, rejects the advances of a potential paramour:
All she could think to say was, “Don’t bother me again!” Instantly she felt a pang of pain that sliced her open from head to toe.
That is one serious pang of pain. Fortunately, she magically stitches back together so the story can continue.
One last example, which is something that regularly pulled me out of the story. Analogies are dangerous things. I try to avoid them because they are almost always terrible and best used if played for laughs.
For a few seconds bullets had been whizzing past as thick as flies at a garbage men’s convention.
This is terrible writing. It doesn’t even make sense as an analogy. In a way I can’t really blame McCammon. An editor should have cut this. Given the length of the book, maybe the editor didn’t cut anything.
Another big issue with the story is the depiction of the big bad guy, given various names and identities throughout, such as Friend. Yes, when asked his name in one of the final scenes, he says, “You can call me Friend” and that is literally how he is referred to for the rest of the book by the author. Friend. Friend is not very friendly, and has a few spooky tricks up his sleeve. He can change his appearance, moulding his face to look like others, or sometimes he just gets all silly and puts on a face full of mouths if the mood strikes him. He also changes the colour of his eyes a lot, for no apparent reason. Maybe it’s a nervous tic. He sends out fly-like things from his mouth that act as drones, allowing him to spy on others. He can make his hands catch on fire.
With this bag of tricks he should be fairly intimidating, but his character comes off as flat and without menace, even as he goes about doing Bad Guy things. Why? Because McCammon, perhaps in trying to be coy and not come right out and say he’s THE DEVIL, instead creates a character who acts like a temperamental teen, who wants to bring about the end of humanity, but never offers a compelling reason for this (other than his juvenile cries of “It’s my party!”) and at the end of the story he just kind of goes away. Maybe there was going to be a sequel? Maybe something did get cut? He’s a one-dimensional villain who doesn’t really do anything. It’s actually kind of baffling. Maybe McCammon was saying the real bad guys are us. His depiction of most humans post-apocalypse is not exactly flattering, after all.
I wanted to like Swan Song, but the writing and many of the characterizations left me underwhelmed. I’d rate this one as a major disappointment.
