Drive in Quadrants

Another interesting one from the folks (folk?) at "Every Frame of Painting," in case you thought movies were made willy nilly, by arbitrarily pointing cameras at cool people doing cool stuff.

FICTION FRIDAY: "Red Gold"

Yesterday I vented about K-Cups and waste and trashing the environment, then posted it to Reddit—where it spiked to the top of the environmentalism subreddit and got me about a bajillion reads in an hour, until some Reddit admin deleted it because apparently I've been posting twenty percent of my own stuff on the site, instead of the requisite  maximum ten. 

Anyway...

In light of the enviro-interest that apparently exists out there in the world, for today's Fiction Friday offering I decided that instead of writing a new short story beginning, I would post the first bit from an eco-conscious story called "Red Gold" that I wrote a few years back and published in my short story collection, with the thought that maybe someone who hasn't read the story can take a guess at how the story ends, and leave that guess in the comments.  If anybody does guess, then next week I'll try to remember to reply with the answer.

Or, y'know... you could just go buy the book. :-)

Enjoy!

Kill the K-Cup

There was a time when I never thought at all about packaging. 

Single-wrap a glob of sugar in six layers of poly-whatever? Sure. Why not?
This was pre-internet. I was living in the Amazon. I'd never even heard of recycling. 

Then I freakin' grew up. 

I heard of recycling, and of other things, too. I heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I heard that they can only reclaim about fifteen percent of supposedly-recycleable plastics, which are toxic, nasty, and stupid-dumb, and won't break down until long after they've entered the food chain and cancer-killed us all. I heard about the one TRILLION plastic bags that get used/abused/vomited out onto God's green earth every year—handed out for free by the Apostles of Self-Destruction at grocery stores everywhere. About the fifty million plastic bottles that get thrown away every year in America, alone. Thrown away. Not even recycled, just... tossed. 

So I grew up. 

I changed. 

I took a tiny bit more responsibility for the world I live in, and started to be intentional about what sort of plastics I caused to exist by my consumer habits. If I had a choice, I bought food products that were packaged in glass, or paper. I stopped eating out, and if I did eat out, I tried to remember to bring my own container for any leftovers. I got cloth grocery bags, and if I forgot them, I forced myself to transport my groceries home sans bags, just the inconvenience would force me to remember, and build a new habit. I stopped eating yogurt.

OhdearLord, I stopped eating yogurt! 

grippe

I'm in the grip of the grippe, which is of course another word for "The Dread Mocus," which is of course the thing my dad used to tell us we had if we ever complained about feeling not-well.

As I recall, symptoms of The Dread Mocus include: breaking out in spots, skin turning purple and then green and then falling off, and a willingness to use your whiny little pretend-malady to get out of  things like chores, and writing on your blog.

So here... um... watch this Guy on a Buffalo clip, again. I'll seeya tomorrow.

Maybe.

TRAILER TUESDAY: BIG GAME

As everyone knows, RARE EXPORTS is pretty much the best Christmas movie ever made.

Now its writer/director Jalmari Helander has written and directed a movie that, from the trailer, looks like any other big, stupid Hollywood extravaganza. And maybe it is. But with the young RARE EXPORTS star Onni Tommila in the lead as a pubescent archer with guts of steel, and Samuel L. Jackson as his American President co-star... I say give this bad boy a chance.

Stupid-fun can still be fun, after all.

Enjoy the trailer:

risk

Every professional artist is an entrepreneur, and takes immense risk. Why? Because the alternative—a life spent grinding away at some "job," fulfilling someone else's dreams and accomplishing someone else's goals—seems an even scarier proposition.

So I've been working on this kickstarter campaign where I made a puzzle out of my re-painted Thomas Kinkade painting—the one with the demons in the shadows, and whatnot. At the bottom of the "story" portion of the campaign they have you fill out a section on the risks of the project. 

Here's what I wrote: 

exploding kickstarters

Yesterday my woman-friend and I were talking about the ridiculous Exploding Kittens kickstarter campaign, which as of this moment has collected over 3.8 million dollars in pledges. 

Three point eight MILLION dollars.

For a card game. 

My woman-friend says of course it has, because if you wanna make a lot of money online, you don't tell people you're sending relief to Ebola victims—you sell them poop in a box. She did not say this as an insult against Exploding Kittens, but rather in reference to the real-life poop-selling campaign that was recently run by the folks at Cards Against Humanity (Over thirty thousand poop-packages sold! Go capitalism!).

My knee-jerk reaction is to say that we should stop all the frivolity. We should feed all the starving and cure the curables and liberate the captives, and only then should we come back and spend six dollars on a box of cow plop. 

I wanna say that. I wanna write some screed against our stupid-dumb spending habits, but who knows? Maybe there's someone out there who's been really, really down, and Exploding Kitten Poop will cheer them into hugging a stranger, and maybe that stranger won't mow me down with an automatic weapon at the mall next year. As a general trend, it says something about our culture that we're throwing the crazy money at popular frivolities. But on a case by case basis, who knows? While our hearts should be breaking for the pain and suffering in the world, what sort of world would it be without any frivolity in it? Without art?

Then again, I might just be trying to get a head-start on my own guilt, in case the kickstarter campaign I've been working on for most of the day happens to actually work, or even go a bit nuts.

Like, three-point-eight-million dollars worth of nuts. 

[shakes dice. rolls]